BLAIR’S BRITAIN, 1997–2007
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safeguards the national interest. It is, rather, a simple failure to recognise
genuine national interests.
A second set of related principles involved a holistic conception of how
power should be exercised in the pursuit of values. Traditional foreign
policy had tended to make a clear distinction between elements of ‘hard’
and ‘soft’ power. It was administratively easier to do that. But it was more
effective, though more difficult, to integrate them into a single approach.
Over the decade this went from the rhetoric of more ‘joined up government’ to the articulation of a ‘comprehensive approach’ and the creation
of a number of agencies to try to promote it. The Strategic Defence
Review of 1998 was based on a major Foreign and Commonwealth Office
paper which sought to unite all the instrumentalities of power. And the
FCO’s first ever official strategy White Paper in 2003 tried to do much the
same.18 It was published simultaneously with a 2003 Defence White
Paper, and was intended to be read ‘in conjunction’ with it.19 The use of
hard power was intrinsically more controversial than soft power, but that
should not be allowed to deter states from using it, or confine them to
impotent displays of soft power only.20 Thus British use of its military
forces, for fighting, policing, training and diplomacy could be as much a
policy instrument in the developing world as foreign aid, which became
17 Ibid.
18 The Strategic Defence Review: Supporting Essays (London: TSO, 1998), pp. 2.1–2.2. United
Kingdom International Priorities: A Strategy for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office,
Cm. 6052 (London: TSO, 2003).
19 Defence White Paper: Delivering Security in a Changing World, Cm. 6041–I (London: TSO,
2003). Statement by Secretary of State for Defence, Hansard, House of Commons,
11 December 2003, col.1209.
20 Blair, ‘Our Nation’s Future’.
increasingly conditional on economic liberalisation, transparency and
governance milestones. It was all part of the same thing.
A third set of principles revolved round the perception of just what
was at stake in these foreign policy choices that must be made. In
November 1997 Tony Blair outlined a vision for a proactive Britain that
would use its power and influence to make an impression on the world on
the basis of the key values we shared with the United States and the
Commonwealth.21 International institutions had not proved adaptable
enough to cope with the new challenges. Collective national power
needed to be harnessed to drive the necessary adaptation. Ten years later
the message remained consistent though in a more refined and assertive
form. ‘Our values’, Blair wrote, ‘represent humanity’s progress throughout the ages. At each point we have had to fight for them . . . As a new age
beckons, it is time to fight for them again.’22 This was echoed in his last
message to British troops in Iraq, who were doing something that was, ‘of
importance to the future of not just Iraq but the rest of the world.’23 In
Blairite foreign policy the stakes of this battle for values could not be
higher. It went further than any traditional attempt to affect the international environment in ways favourable to one’s own society. Instead, he
perceived a genuine and deepening struggle in the post-Cold War environment between progressive forces and those of reaction and autocracy.
The jihadi terrorist threat to Western societies was only the most evident
facet of it.24
The mechanisms by which these various principles should be enacted
were no less assertive. An activist policy of ‘liberal interventionism’ was
built in from the beginning and articulated eloquently in Blair’s Chicago
Speech of April 1999.25 It was a more reflective version of the soundbite
that had accompanied the Strategic Defence Review, that ‘we must be
prepared to go to the crisis, rather than have the crisis come to us’.26 By
2007 this had even become an aspiration to define an agenda for ‘progressive pre-emption’, based on a need ‘to think sooner and act quicker’.27 It
was heady stuff and relied on a willingness, and an ability, to deploy
forces, diplomacy, aid and training around the world, possibly well away
21 John Kampfner, Blair’s Wars (London: The Free Press, 2003), pp. 16–17.
22 Blair, A Global Alliance for Global Values, p. 6.
23 BBC News Reports, 19 May 2007.
24 Tony Blair, ‘What I’ve Learned’.
25 Prime Minister’s Speech: ‘Doctrine of the International Community’, at the Economic
Club, Chicago, 24 April 1999, 10 Downing Street, Press Office, Text.
26 The Strategic Defence Review, Cm. 3999 (London, The Stationery Office, 1998), p. 2.
27 Blair, A Global Alliance for Global Values, p. 34.
from Britain’s old Cold War ‘area of concentration’ in Europe, the
Mediterranean and parts of the Middle East.
Above all, these principles could only be enacted through explicit leadership and through positioning. Leadership in world politics came with
the political strength of substantial domestic majorities and growing
experience in foreign affairs. It came, too, with success in the Kosovo and
Sierra Leone operations and in the forums provided by the G8 summits,
the United Nations and through more intensive bilateral diplomacy than
the Western world had seen for some years. ‘Positioning’, for the Blair
government, was the concomitant to leadership and was a more subtle
affair. It was more fundamental than ‘grand strategy’ and was based on a
long-term perspective of world politics, in which Britain should be positioned in such a way as to help mobilise the Western world’s resources to
meet the challenge. In practice this meant staying intrinsically close to the
United States whilst also shaping a new European agenda. The Blair government felt well able to do this by simply rising above the reactive constraints that had hobbled its predecessor. It began immediately with
Downing Street meetings with President Bill Clinton at the end of May,
and then at the Amsterdam EU Summit in June 1997.
It could rise above erstwhile domestic suspicions over the destination
of the ‘European project’ by embracing them in the service of the greater
issues at stake across the continent. Of course, entry into the Eurozone
and the movement to conclude a European constitution would have to be
handled carefully. But these were seen essentially as issues of timing
rather than of principle. The Conservatives had claimed – implausibly –
to put themselves ‘at the heart of Europe’. New Labour aimed to make
that a reality by concentrating on the bigger issues; enthusiasm for
enlargement, wholehearted support for a common foreign and security
policy, new initiatives in European defence, and a renewed push for
greater trade liberalisation across the whole continent. A great deal of
faith was invested by Downing Street in Gerhard Schroeder’s assumption
of power in 1998, and in a new European defence relationship with
President Chirac around the Saint-Malo summit of the same year.
By
these means Britain could achieve that integration between Atlanticism
and Europeanism which had been repeatedly asserted since 1960 but
never attained; leadership among Europeans in more equal and collective
partnership with the United States. If Blair’s Britain was to be a transatlantic bridge, it could be so in a way that was ever-shortening, as Europe
and America became more united in values, means, and responses to
globalisation.
There was no hesitation in putting relations with the United States at
the top of the immediate positioning agenda. President Clinton had
already articulated the old Kennedy maxim that British influence in
Washington would largely depend on its influence across Europe, and
Tony Blair instinctively agreed.28 But Clinton was also persuasively aspirational, in the same way that Kennedy had been, and that sense during his
final years in office of a mission for the Western alliance chimed exactly
with what Blair increasingly believed. ‘Positioning’ meant that the US was
fundamental to anything the Western powers wanted to achieve. Nonengagement with the US, almost regardless of its policy direction, was
simply not a feasible political option for the Europeans. When the going
became really tough in the aftermath of the Iraq War in 2003, the line of
argument was consistently repeated. The US will remain the global leader,
Jack Straw told Parliament – how ever ‘US domestic policies evolve’, he
added euphemistically.29 But the job was becoming harder. In a speech to
FCO diplomats the Prime Minister only thinly veiled the reality: ‘We
should remain the closest ally of the US, and as allies influence them to
continue broadening their agenda.’30 The Foreign Office strategy paper
was explicit to the point of unaccustomed gloom: ‘Building a shared
agenda’ between the US and Europe remained vital to both parties in an
interdependent world, despite ‘the emergence of new US strategic priorities outside Europe’ and ‘the erosion, since the Cold War, of a clearly
understood sense of common purpose’, or ‘divergence between US and
European attitudes towards the use of power’.31 ‘Positioning’, it was clear,
was for the long term. And during the neo-conservative ascendancy in
Washington, it was certainly not for the faint-hearted.
Nevertheless, the Labour government took on during the decade a
powerful series of old and new ‘isms’: a new transatlanticism, humanitarian interventionism, foreign policy idealism, and a holistic response to
globalism. And it confronted with them growing instability across the
Middle East, new security and economic problems in Africa, failing
states in central and southern Asia, a terrorist offensive against Western
powers and an increasingly politicised environmental agenda. The ‘ism’
28 Kampfner, Blair’s Wars, pp. 12–13.
29 Jack Straw, Written Statement to Parliament, in ‘United Kingdom International Priorities:
A Strategy for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office’, p. 2.
30 Tony Blair, ‘Britain’s Place in the World’, Prime Minister’s Speech to FCO Leadership
Conference, 7 January 2003, 10 Downing Street, Press Office, Text.
31 United Kingdom International Priorities: A Strategy for the Foreign and Commonwealth
Office, p. 26.
that was least articulated but increasingly relevant over the period was –
inevitably – pragmatism.
The perception of success
It is unusual for the general reputation of a government, or a prime minister, to rest so much on a matter of foreign policy, still more one that
involved a military operation that was initially so successful. But all
assessments of the foreign policy of the Blair government must be predicated on the distinction between pre-and post-Iraq; effectively the five
years before and the five years after the fateful decisions of summer 2002.
The very principles on which Blairite foreign policy was founded make it
impossible to divorce this one crucial foreign policy issue from all the
others. Tony Blair himself repeatedly insisted they were all of a piece, all
derived from a coherent view of global politics.
In the first five years a foreign policy of new ‘isms’ was seen to have
some effect, at least in initiating fresh approaches. A concentration on
the politics of Europe was the most immediately evident. The emphasis
was on results and outputs, not on institutions. In EU negotiations
Blair displayed a greater sense of give-and-take than his predecessors. He
was playing for bigger stakes than detailed negotiating points, in seeking
to reconcile social protection with dynamic market economies, in building a credible defence capability for the Europeans – whether through
NATO or the EU, really did not matter too much – and in pressing
for enlargement. The idea of Turkish membership of the EU was
relaunched, largely thanks to Britain, at the Helsinki summit in 1999.
Certainly, there was some sense of momentum after the disappointments
at the way the Bosnia crisis had been handled. That momentum was
tested, but maintained, in the Kosovo crisis of 1999, ironically by the very
controversy that surrounded it.32 Lacking a sufficient UN resolution,
NATO’s own resolutions, backed up by the EU, were deemed appropriate
to legitimise tough, indeed coercive, military action against Serbian
behaviour in its most sensitive province. From both a political and military point of view it was a close call. But it worked, pragmatically and
messily, creating a dynamic that saw the fall of Milosevic in Serbia, his
delivery to the International Criminal Tribunal in the Hague, and Kosovo
to the brink of independence. Humanitarian interventionism looked like
32 Benjamin S. Lambeth, NATO’s Air War for Kosovo (Santa Monica, Calif.: RAND, 2001),
pp. 219–47.
a muscular and moral response to the problem of tyranny. As genuine
partners to the US – despite the evident strains – the Europeans proved
that Kosovo was within their competence, deploying a range of ‘soft
power’ assets, with enough ‘hard power’ muscle to make them count. It
was a good demonstration to incoming Russian President Putin that
involvement with the American/European partnership was worth having.
Above all, it offered an indication – equivocal to be sure – to the US that a
rejuvenated and muscular partnership could solve the ‘crisis of liberal
internationalism’ that so worried US analysts and policymakers. This was
what the new transatlanticism should be all about. True, the Desert Fox
bombing campaign against Iraq the previous year had been more controversial for the relationship; Washington and London had again gone
ahead without explicit UN authorisation, and the results were not then
judged a success, but at that time the Middle East entanglement could be
confined to a discrete area of US-led policy. It had met with tepid support
from Germany, nothing from Italy, and outright hostility from France. If
anything, it had proved that proper European leadership wa
s required.
Kosovo had offered all the participants both hard lessons and realistic
hopes. In Sierra Leone in 2000 Britain undertook another humanitarian
intervention that might have been a textbook demonstration of the art
form. A limited and effective military operation restored the authority of
the legitimate government, tyrannical rebels were put to flight, and a relatively ‘joined-up’ aid and assistance operation swung into action that
restored stability. No matter that official assistance to the Sandline private
security company operating in Sierra Leone had already embarrassed the
FCO in 1998. That was ignored as a pragmatic reaction to try to restore
the legitimate government in Freetown – the same government that had
to be rescued in 2000. No matter, too, that the humanitarian intervention
hardly had the effect of transforming Sierra Leone’s dislocated economy.
The pragmatic result was better than all the likely alternatives had the
intervention not occurred.33
It was on this general wave of optimism and opportunity that the
government confronted the implications of the 9/11 terrorist attack in
2001 and the subsequent war in Afghanistan. Most commentators felt
that 9/11 would be a world-changing event on the basis of the likely US
reaction to it.34 Tony Blair, however, seems instinctively to have felt that
33 Bruce Baker, ‘The African Post-conflict Policing Agenda in Sierra Leone’, Conflict, Security
and Development, 6.1, 2006: 25–49.
34 Caroline Kennedy-Pipe and Nicholas Rengger, ‘Apocalypse Now? Continuity or disjunctions in world politics after 9/11’, International Affairs, 82.3, 2006: 540.
it was world-changing in itself; an intrinsic challenge to the democratic
free-market global order. His personal shock at the attacks was at least
as great as that of President Bush and he was determined to offer both
partnership and leadership in responding to it. ‘We are in this for the
long haul’, he told MPs at the beginning of the joint bombing campaign
in Afghanistan. ‘Even when al-Qaeda is dealt with, the job is not
done.’35 In fact, he had some difficulty maintaining a meaningful partnership with the US in the operations in Afghanistan. Despite a significant British force on manoeuvres in Oman the US moved quickly, and