Russia, preoccupied with its internal economic and political problems, will nevertheless strive to remain a Pacific power. Given its nuclear armoury and mineral wealth, the Bear cannot be counted out. And it has quarrels with China over borders and resources that might yet be destabilizing.
India is large enough and, as long as present policies and trends continue, will in due course become wealthy enough to emerge as a major regional power. This is something the West should welcome and encourage: for example, if it is felt that the UN Security Council should be enlarged — and there is much to be said for leaving well alone — India is a strong candidate for inclusion. For all its religious and ethnic problems, India is a democracy with an established rule of law. In the old pattern determined by the Cold War, India was under the influence of the Soviet Union. This must not now blind us to the fact that she is the Asian power with which it will prove easiest to do business.
So, in the Asia-Pacific region, there will be a balance of power between three large nuclear states and one state enjoying the nuclear protection of the US. Any one of these powers is likely to meet opposition from the others if it attempts to expand its territory or sphere of influence. And in addition to providing nuclear security for Japan, the US is also available to throw its nuclear and conventional weight into the scales if any local power seems likely to upset this balance. The US already performs a similar balancing act conventionally on behalf of smaller Asian states like South Korea, Taiwan and the Philippines. This serves as a demonstration to the larger powers that they should not risk drawing America into a conflict between them. That is all the more reason why the US must now secure a favourable outcome in its dispute with North Korea over the North’s nuclear programme.
NATIONS, NATION STATES AND NATIONALISMS
The third tenet is that nationhood, nation states and national sovereignty are the best foundations for a stable international system. Superficially, that is a paradox. Is it not true that nationalism has disrupted European peace in two world wars? In fact, in most important senses the answer is ‘no’. The instability of multinational empires was the background to the First World War, and transnational secular religions like communism and Nazism gave rise to the Second. And in both wars only strong nation states were able to resist and to defeat aggression.
But in any case there is no point in arguing that a world without nations — and the loyalties, frictions and institutions they generate — would be desirable, since for the foreseeable future such a world is a plain impossibility. Politics, as conservatives recognize, is about making the best of the world which exists, not in vainly devising blueprints for what it cannot become. Admittedly, xenophobic prejudice can result in concentration camps, torture and ethnic cleansing. But such crimes are usually the result of suppressed and distorted nationalisms or, in our own day, of nationalisms hijacked by communists. They are no reason why we should not be proud of our own country nor why we should disapprove if others are proud of theirs. The Mafia is based on the institution of the family; but that does not mean that the family is a pernicious institution.
For the conservative, of course, the nation (like the family) has also a profound and positive social value; around its traditions and symbolism individuals with conflicting interests can be encouraged to cooperate and make sacrifices for the common good. Nationhood provides us with that most essential psychological anchor against the disorientating storms of change — an identity which gives us a sense of continuous existence. Consequently the man who shrugs off his nationality, like the man who discards his family background or (as G.K. Chesterton famously observed) who abandons his religious faith, is a potential danger to society for he is apt to become the victim of every half-baked ideology or passion he encounters.
Some nationalisms, it is true, are disagreeable and even dangerous because some nations have committed historic crimes. Even then it is questionable whether a nation which has deliberately turned its back on its entire past is any more reliable a neighbour than one which dwells on it. A more mature response is to discover in one’s history those noble episodes and themes on which a more decent and open sense of nationhood can be built. Otherwise, it is the unbalanced revolutionaries who are left to take up the national cause.
Even the artificial states, which take in different nations with different languages and traditions, pay a kind of involuntary tribute to the power of nationhood by seeking to forge a new national identity. This was tried in the Soviet Union and in Yugoslavia; it is now being attempted in the European Union. Such enterprises cannot work, and generally break down amid acrimony and mutual hatred. But their very artificiality often inspires the ideologues to extremes of doctrinaire chauvinism, alternately ruthless and ridiculous, from Stalin’s mass deportation of peoples to the promotion of a European version of Dallas.
It is therefore wrong to argue, as diplomats are still prone to do, that striving to keep large multinational, multicultural states together by all possible means makes for stability. It is, of course, quite possible that several distinct peoples will live within the frontiers of a single state for a variety of reasons — security, economic resources, geography, or lack of any alternative. Developing a liberal political and economic system is the best way to persuade them to do this, as Switzerland’s extraordinarily decentralized structure illustrates. But in the artificially constructed states — founded on an ideology (like the Soviet Union) or a mixture of diplomatic convenience and fear of greedy neighbours (like Yugoslavia) — it is all too likely that centralized power and the use of force will be relied upon to keep the unit together. And this — again as with the USSR and Yugoslavia — only increases national fervour and the aspiration to national independence on the part of the component peoples.
So while it is not inevitable that nation states should everywhere succeed multinational states — for example, the Kurds seem unlikely for many years to gain statehood because of the number of other states this would adversely affect — that is bound to be the trend. Or at least it will be the trend as long as the two other current trends, those towards democracy and open trading, themselves continue.
Both of these make for the emergence and viability of smaller units. Democracy is the political system that most comfortably fits the nation state. It requires a common language if it is to function really effectively — and this the nation state provides. Once established in a multinational state, moreover, democracy fosters the drive towards national self-determination. That helps explain why most multinational states are not democracies or, if they are, are perennially disturbed by linguistic and cultural disputes, as in Canada and Belgium. Similarly, free trade means that political boundaries need not be co-terminous with economic boundaries. We can thus combine political decentralization with economies of scale. As Adam Smith pointed out two hundred years ago: ‘Were all nations to follow the liberal system of free exportation and free importation, the different states into which a great continent was divided would so far resemble the different provinces of a great empire.’
There are two main practical arguments advanced against regarding the nation state as the basis of the international political system. The first is that the concept of the ‘nation’ is something which makes little or no sense outside Europe, because it is itself rooted in and a construct of a long and distinctive European history. This has some force. It is clear, for example, that nationhood has to be understood in a somewhat different way in the Middle East or Far East or Africa — or even in North and South America — from in Europe. In some cases religion, in other cases tribe, and in still others ‘culture’ (as Samuel Huntington has argued) will shape and mould identity. Moreover, nations can slowly emerge as, for example, in India. And they can equally disintegrate and die.
But the failure of attempts to ignore national identity when putting together diplomatically convenient artificial states or dividing a nation into several states on ideological grounds is a common feature of our times in every continent.
In Europe Yugoslavia was destined to fail, and even Czechoslovakia, where the tension between the constituent nations was not as great, has now been peacefully dissolved. In Africa, the Central African Federation was assembled from Northern Rhodesia, Southern Rhodesia and Nyasaland; the Sudan was put together ignoring the ethnic and religious differences between the majority Arab and Nubian population of the north and the Nilotic and Bantu people of the south; and Nigeria was created out of three constituent peoples, the Hausa, the I bo and the Yoruba. Each of these has been riven with difficulties. In the Middle East, attempts to create a unified Arab state based on an Arab nationalism that owed too much to socialism and not enough to Islam have always come to nothing. In the Far East the division of Vietnam was ultimately unsustainable as, in all probability, is the division of Korea. By contrast, in every continent it is the states which most closely correspond to national identities — and are thus able to mobilize them — which are likely to prove the most successful: that is true from Britain and France in Western Europe, to Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic in Central and Eastern Europe, to Egypt and Iran in the Middle East, to Japan in the Far East. Not that a sense of national identity is necessarily enough to ensure peace, prosperity and stability: but without it states will be faced with even more serious — and perhaps terminal — difficulties.
The second and perhaps the most frequent practical argument deployed against making nation states and nationalism the basis of our international political system is the problem of ethnic minorities. But in arguing for nation states I am not suggesting that it is possible, or even desirable, to seek to ensure that frontiers correspond exactly to boundaries of nationhood, let alone, of course, implying that national minorities or other groups should be shifted from one area to another to make politicians’ lives simpler. In a well governed, reasonably prosperous state in which individual rights and, where appropriate, local autonomies are respected, there is no reason why national minorities should suffer oppression or have a destabilizing effect. And international conventions and bodies like the Council of Europe could ensure this.
Western politicians are all too inclined to believe that the experience of the post-communist states of Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union demonstrates that nationalism is inherently dangerous. A closer investigation suggests the opposite. Yugoslavia is not the rule but the exception. For example, Hungary, apart from a small minority of extreme nationalists, has learned to accept the territorial losses of seventy years ago under which some two million Hungarians live in Romania, 600,000 in Slovakia, 400,000 in Yugoslavia and 200,000 in Ukraine. The Hungarians understandably insist on fair treatment for their diaspora. But they are a sufficiently mature democracy to understand that the principle of ‘all Hungarians in one state’ would lead to catastrophe.[86]
Similarly, although there are forces in Russia which would like to exploit the situation of the twenty-five million Russians living outside Russia in states which were once part of the Soviet Union, so far this has been a matter of rhetoric rather than reality. Although the Russian minorities certainly face some problems, it seems unlikely that most of them feel sufficiently threatened to wish to destroy the states of which they are now part: indeed, in many cases they voted for the independence of those states from the USSR.[87]
To what extent does the case of the breakaway Chechen Republic and the ensuing crisis cast doubt on the principle of nationhood as a sound basis for stable order? The Chechens certainly have solid claims to self-determination: they are a nation with their own language and religion and have long striven for independence since being forcibly absorbed within the Russian Empire in the last century. The argument that the West should overlook — or even support — the brutal military action taken to crush Chechnya in order to keep Russia together and Mr Yeltsin in the Kremlin is deeply flawed. It is not for us to determine the shape of Russia; states cannot ultimately be kept together by force, they have to create the conditions for national and regional minorities to stay within them; and when the West overlooks the abuses of human rights and breach of international (CSCE) treaty obligations which have occurred, we undermine the forces of democracy in Russia, not assist them. There is, of course, no neat democratic solution to the problems which plague the sprawling entity that is Russia. But its component peoples have the right to be treated with respect — even if, as is alleged of the Chechens, some of their members are involved in criminal activities. And if ultimately the Chechens wish to go their own way, Russia will gain nothing by seeking to prevent their doing so.
Of course, as with Chechnya, the history of past struggles influences the present. It is not my purpose to suggest that all nationalisms are good, let alone safe. But much is blamed on them which is attributable to other problems — in general, primitive political cultures retarded by communism and, in particular, lack of respect for human rights and democracy. Moreover, the record of supra-nationalisms is at least as mixed as that of nationalisms proper and their potential far more dangerous.
ADVANCING FREEDOM
This brings me to my fourth suggested tenet of a conservative foreign policy, which is that we should persistently seek to advance freedom, democracy and human rights across the world. The reasons why are, above all, practical. Democracies do not by and large make wars upon each other. Regimes which respect human rights at home are more likely to forswear aggression abroad. In practice, even the most cynical practitioner of realpolitik judges the threat from different quarters not only according to military technology but also according to the nature of the regime. It is, for example, at least as much because North Korea is a totalitarian dictatorship as because it apparently possesses a nuclear capability that its behaviour has rightly caused so much concern. The values of freedom give even culturally different countries a common understanding of the need for restraint, compromise and respect. That is why it is an essential part of foreign policy to encourage them.
The so-called Reagan doctrine, which Ronald Reagan developed in a speech to both Houses of Parliament in 1982, demonstrated just how potent a weapon in international politics human rights could be. His view was that we should fight the battle of ideas for freedom against communism throughout the world and refuse to accept the permanent exclusion of the captive nations from the benefits of freedom.[88]
This unashamedly philosophical approach and the armed strength supporting it transformed the political world. President Reagan undermined the Soviet Union at home by giving hope to its citizens, directly assisted rebellions against illegitimate communist regimes in Afghanistan and Nicaragua, and facilitated the peaceful transition to democracy in Latin American countries and the Philippines. Of course, previous American governments had extolled human rights, and President Carter had even declared that they were the ‘soul’ of US foreign policy. Where President Reagan went beyond these, however, was in making the Soviets the principal target of his human rights campaign, and in moving from rhetorical to material support for anti-communist guerrillas in countries where communist regimes had not securely established themselves. The result was a decisive advance for freedom in the world.
In this instance, human rights and wider American purposes were in complete harmony. But do human rights have an independent value in foreign policy? There are two classic attacks on the idea that they do. The conservative critique is that a human rights policy amounts to a dangerous intrusion on the sovereignty of other countries; and the liberal thesis is that it is flawed because based upon an inadequate conception of human rights.
Of the conservative view, one can say that it is a partial truth that we should take into account in formulating policy. Societies plainly differ in their social and economic development, their religious traditions, their political consciousness. Where a fledgling democratic movement really exists, we can foster and encourage it — and to a limited degree protect it against government suppression by protests, public diplomacy, and similar measures. Where there is no such popular movement local
ly (or where it is limited to a few Western-educated intellectuals in the capital), we cannot implant democracy from outside. However, although we must necessarily pick and choose the cases where Western influence can usefully accelerate a peaceful transition to democratic ways, some abuses of human rights, notably torture, are so flagrant, so egregious, and so offensive by any national or cultural standard, that we will always be justified in opposing and deterring them. The main question in such cases is how best to do so — by economic pressure, or by speeches and motions in international forums, or by quiet diplomacy. In any event, a conservative human rights policy, applied as it must be with prudence and discrimination, will always fall short of a crusade.
The liberal criticism is that Western human rights policy, by concentrating on such ‘procedural’ rights as freedom of speech or freedom from arbitrary arrest, neglects the more important ‘substantive’ rights such as freedom from hunger or the right to a decent education. The international documents to which appeal is generally made on questions of human rights themselves illustrate this drift of thinking. For example, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) not only affirms, as I would, that everyone has the right to life, liberty, equality before the law, property and so on: it also affirms the ‘right’ to an adequate standard of living and education and to social security — which are plainly in a quite different category. Other subsequent documents go even further. The International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (1966) includes the ‘right to work’, the right to the ‘continuous improvement of living conditions’, the right to be ‘free from hunger’ and ‘the right of everyone to the enjoyment of the highest attainable standard of physical and mental health’.
The Path to Power m-2 Page 60