by Chris Patten
In the Balkans as in Northern Ireland the legacy and abuse of identity, historical or imagined, has been a terrible killer. Dealing with it has required extraordinary amounts of diplomacy, commitment and applied force. In W. H. Auden’s poem ‘Embassy’, gardeners and chauffeurs are watching as their ‘highly trained’ bosses take a break from their negotiations.
Far off, no matter what good they intended,
The armies waited for a verbal error
With all the instruments for causing pain:
And on the issue of their charm depended
A land laid waste, with all its young men slain,
The women weeping, and its towns in terror.
That is true from Derry to Dubrovnik, from Pristina to Portadown. We should raise a glass, more often than we do, to those who help to clear up the mess that we make when we take the idea of who we are, or who we think we are, a long way too far.
The Middle East, complete with its much discussed but mostly truant peace process, is a reminder of the importance of diplomacy consisting of deliverables and not just communiqués. Roll together all the statements by foreign ministers and others about security, the West Bank, settlements, two states, Jerusalem and so on and I guess you would have a document of Old Testament proportions about the future of the not very large Holy Land. As a European Commissioner, I became quite heavily involved in trying to make a reality of some of this writ. The Israelis had and have legitimate security interests which must be addressed if ever there is to be a lasting peace and Palestine is not to become a sort of Bantustan. The horror of events elsewhere in the region has distracted attention from the relentless pursuit of a sustainable peace. Meanwhile, the so called ‘facts on the ground’ – the building of new colonies (settlements as the Israelis prefer to call them), and the oppressive security presence exemplified by the Wall – make it ever more difficult to build peace on the basis of accommodating legitimate Israeli and Palestinian requirements. As ever, there is right and wrong on both sides. But a refusal in Israel and some parts of the United States to accept even this pretty minimal proposition makes the future look bleak.
The fragments of a possible future Palestinian state still exist just about, thanks largely to the money spent over the years in order to keep some sort of governance going in Palestine. The subsidies come mainly from Europe and are regularly criticized publicly by the Israeli government and by some American politicians, while Brussels is privately urged to keep them flowing. The carefully monitored support for the Palestinians at least keeps in being a notional partner for Israel. Javier and I had to visit Palestine and Israel with depressingly ineffective frequency to keep this partnership in place. We were also members of the alleged peace-brokering machinery called ‘the Quartet’, based on the UN, the USA, Russia and Europe. The cynical and witty former Egyptian foreign minister, Amr Moussa, used to call it ‘the Quartet sans trois’, reflecting the general and accurate view that it was essentially an American enterprise which gave Washington a cover for doing very little.
The last time I visited Israel and Palestine was as the president of an excellent small medical charity called Medical Aid for Palestine. During the visit I went to the Gaza Strip, a finger of land along the coast, forty-one kilometres long and between six and twelve wide. Governed by Hamas, its population of just under two million has been regarded by Israel, with some justification, as a threat. As a result of this, from time to time the Israel Defence Force has smashed much of Gaza’s infrastructure and a lot of its housing to rubble, killing men, women and children, the probably guilty and the certainly innocent in the process. This is called collateral damage. I was there to try to ensure that necessary medical supplies were occasionally getting through to hospitals and doctors.
Mr Blair once told me that during his days as the Middle East Peace Envoy – the representative of the Quartet – he had been unable to visit Gaza more than once because of the security threats to his bodyguards. To get into the Strip with a visa you have to go through security checks under surveillance cameras and along wire or concrete corridors. You eventually emerge into a no-man’s-land, where a scattering of men with barrows attached to their donkeys or motor-bicycles are combing through the rubble and the rubbish to see whether there is anything worth trying to sell. It is like stepping into a post-apocalyptic novel, but this dystopian scene is for real. When liberal Jews criticize scenes like this, when they suggest better ways of trying to build a peaceful future, when they occasionally criticize aspects of Israeli government policy, they are described by fundamentalists and others as self-hating Jews. My own friends in Israeli politics – good and brave men like Yossi Beilin and Shlomo Ben-Ami – have been driven out of politics. This does more to discredit a noble dream than some more obvious manifestations of self-defeating policy on the ground. One day surely sanity and decency will break out and provide more effective bulwarks for the national interests of both Israel and Palestine. There is no sign of this yet. Mr Blair’s activities notwithstanding, there is no peace process. There is only just a Palestinian Authority. The grim ‘facts on the ground’ that will make any settlement far more difficult to engineer in the future stack up remorselessly. President Trump, in the meantime, helps things to move all too perceptibly from bad to worse.
Like President George W. Bush, I have looked into President Putin’s hard, cold, blue eyes, but unlike him have not been vouchsafed a sense of Putin’s soul. Indeed, I noted that when Vice-President Biden met Mr Putin and questioned whether he had a soul at all, the Russian replied, ‘We understand one another.’ President Bush had gone further, not simply recognizing the spiritual side of Putin but identifying him as straightforward, trustworthy and frank. I met Putin on perhaps twenty occasions, mostly at Russia–EU Summits, but I also visited his office and was once invited to his dacha (I suspect it was only for show) with a group of commissioners at a time when he was trying to butter us up over the Russian wish to join the WTO. I dealt with him principally on access to Kaliningrad (after EU enlargement had surrounded the famous ‘oblast’ within EU territory), the extension of the existing EU trade and co-operation agreements with Russia to the new member states (like Poland and the Baltics), and the treatment of humanitarian agencies during the dirty war in Chechnya. These encounters and Russian behaviour in the Ukraine and Syria have encouraged me to take a different view from President Bush: that President Putin is a natural fit for a country where at present, in the title of a recent book by Peter Pomerantsev, Nothing is True and Everything is Possible. Putin’s regime, in which a virtual reality is fostered in the media by the state, is built on lies, like the Soviet system before it. Putin’s regard for the truth, visible from the Crimea, which he invaded and stole illegally, to Kremlin disclaimers about cyber-warfare, to the po-faced statements of injured innocence whenever a critic is murdered (in London as well as Moscow), does not make him a very obvious partner for Washington, let alone Europe, in creating a more peaceful and stable world. He presides over a rotten, petro-economy, with a modernized military, and a thoroughly corrupt political system. His ambition is plainly to create a Europe carved out into spheres of influence with the former parts of the Soviet Empire once again showing their loyalty to Moscow. The more irresolute that European countries have been in resisting this, the more Moscow has pushed and probed for advantage. President Putin was and is the most dangerous political and security threat to Europe, which will need to show more collective resolution than in the past if it is to deal with him more effectively. Washington and Brussels have not always handled the relationship with Russia with enough understanding of Russian nationalism and ‘amour propre’; an even bigger mistake has been that we have not been tough enough when we needed to be.
During my five years in Brussels, in my own area of responsibility and indeed right across the board, I saw areas of public policy which were far more successfully managed because they were the preserve of a successful and not particularly expensive partnership. Coming back to L
ondon, most of our biggest problems plainly had nothing to do with Europe – from low productivity, to planning laws which throttled new house-building, to an often unsatisfactory secondary education system, to an underfunded and badly managed health and welfare system. Europe was not the problem, and again and again understandably people declined to award it in opinion polls the salience of other issues. But the whole European discussion became associated (and not just in Britain) with aggravating, not solving, the problems that crowded in on us all. Why should the public think that warming over old rhetoric about integration was the answer to new and sometimes frightening problems? The EU was stretching far too tight the thread between what it was doing and popular acceptability. Sooner or later, the cord was going to snap. And when it threatened to do so, it was not only the euro crisis but a crisis of migration in our neighbourhood and an enormous financial crisis, all coinciding, which made the challenges faced by Europe exceptionally daunting. So it became more difficult for a Britain which had always preferred psychologically to run on its own to comprehend that to play things in our national interest might mean continuing to stay a member of the pack, however difficult the terrain over which we had to travel with our fellow Europeans. Loneliness is not a very desirable condition in a world increasingly dominated by big countries and harassed by big problems. My experiences in the EU made me an even stronger believer in the importance of international co-operation, an especially important issue for smaller and middle-sized countries. But, in assembling these partnerships, it is crucial to manage national opinion so that the public do not believe that their loyalties are being rolled over. It should be relatively straightforward for political leaders to prevent national pride turning into aggressive xenophobia. The chant of the Millwall Football Club fans, ‘No one likes us; we don’t care’, should be avoided at all costs. Patriotism in Britain and in other European countries is an inspiring notion. We have a century of experience to prove that narrow, bigoted nationalism is the path to trouble.
10
Atlantic Crossing
‘Hang on a minute, lads. I’ve got a great idea.’
Michael Caine’s last line in The Italian Job
‘Resentment is no excuse for bald-faced stupidity.’
Garrison Keillor, 2016
It may be about 3,500 miles wide, but the Atlantic has never been a barrier to the transmission of cults, fashions, entertainments, threats and ideas. Martini married Italian vermouth to London dry gin to create something which H. L. Mencken thought was as perfect as a sonnet, and which was soon cheerfully consumed from the Waldorf to the Savoy. Levi jeans became the world’s workpants to the great benefit of the University of Berkeley, which shared in their commercial success. The sounds of Liverpool and Detroit blasted east to west and back again. Even soccer, as it’s called in the States, caught on, to general amazement, with part of the American middle class, most successfully with women. And of course the western seaboard of the Atlantic could not repel the threats which are a consequence of living on the same planet as fanatical terrorists and flu germs. As long ago as 1918, the Spanish flu pandemic cut down families in New York (including President Trump’s grandfather) and the children skipped merrily to the ditty:
I had a little bird
His name was Enza
I opened the window
And in flew Enza.
One belief which gained nearly as many adherents in Britain as in the United States was spiritualism, after Kate and Margaret Fox reported making contact with a spirit which knocked to attract their attention. They later confessed to making this up. I once tried to find the village in which this had purportedly happened, near Rochester, New York, where I was giving a lecture, but the hamlet had disappeared without a knock. Arthur Conan Doyle, the author of the Sherlock Holmes stories, himself became a spiritualist, but it is not his interest in the paranormal which makes him an ideal introducer to a discussion of the transatlantic migration of nationalism in 2016. What struck me as especially apposite was his wise observation that ‘it is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly, one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.’
The Brexit vote in the UK and the election of President Trump in the USA have together threatened to destroy the foundations of the world order to which my political life, both at home and abroad, has been devoted. The question of whether there was some umbilical relationship between Brexit and Trump has caused big differences of opinion on either side of the Atlantic, with theories on the whole preferred to facts. President Trump saw Brexit as an outpouring of nationalist sentiment, which would soon be followed by similar upheavals elsewhere, leading to the apparently desirable disintegration of the whole supranational EU project. For him, it was a grave sin against the natural Westphalian order. Trump buttressed his analysis by putting Europe’s ills down, above all, to Angela Merkel’s welcome to refugees. Germany helped above anything else to trigger the Brexit triumph, he suggested: from ‘Britain First’ to ‘America First’. Then he predicted it would be ‘France First’ (with Marine Le Pen) and ‘Everywhere Else First’. Moreover, Trump used Brexit to give his presidential campaign a leg-up. Nigel Farage, not hitherto a household name in America, was flown in to assist the Republican campaign as a sort of intellectual character witness for ‘The Donald’ and all the trumpery that went with him. Every villain in the American’s playbook was also in Farage’s sights: experts, elites, bankers (especially from Goldman Sachs), media organizations that disagreed with him, Muslims, foreigners (except Mr Putin), immigrants and, I am sure, anyone who belonged to a tree-hugging or bleeding-hearts organization. Membership of the UN Association would of course be tantamount to a criminal offence.
Turn the telescope around, and how did America look to Brexiteers? Was there some commonality that would make it easier to understand what had happened in the EU referendum campaign and what might happen in due course in France and other countries in Europe? There was no problem in getting United Kingdom Independence Party (UKIP) supporters to sign up to this proposition. They saw in America what they saw in Europe. They pointed out a groundswell of opposition to the economic policies that preceded and followed the 2008–9 crash, to the self-serving behaviour of elites, to globalization and above all (though this should not perhaps be said too loudly) to mass migration which threatened rapid cultural change and the nation’s sense of its own identity. Europe had received the largest share of international migrants in the last few years, and there were bound to be political consequences.
UKIP was perfectly happy to sign up to this analysis. It went down less well with more fastidious Brexiteers. They did not want their lofty arguments to be sullied by any comparison with the white resentment which had, as much as any other factor, got Mr Trump into the White House. Perish the thought, some of them said within hours of their victory, that it had anything to do with race or fears about immigration. They were not, we should understand, against immigration; they simply wanted to be able to say that they controlled it. This was after all at the heart of their argument: sovereignty. Nation states should run their own affairs. The European Union was a fundamentally undemocratic institution. We wanted our country back, just as President Trump wanted to make America great again. Back and great; great and back. If, in order to achieve that we had to dirty our hands with the sort of populist mendacity which also proved successful in America – the unreliability of experts, the dishonesty of the government, and so on – well, so be it; that is just part of the detritus of a democratic campaign. Anyway, if the mendacity was simply one aspect of the general buffoonery of a politician like Boris Johnson no one should get too judgemental about it. ‘But you didn’t actually take him seriously, did you?’ Some said similar things about Trump.
There was a certain awkwardness in the outcome of these electoral upsets. No one really knew what ‘The Donald’ would turn out to be, but if what emerged from the chrysalis was anything like the candidate in his pupal stage
, then (as the Romans would have said), ‘cave’, world beware. What that sort of Mr Trump would represent was not so much a butterfly as a wrecking ball swung hard if indiscriminately against the values and institutions which have been associated for over fifty years with the West and the global order it created. So will a Brexit Britain (what we are asked to call a ‘global Britain’ as we turn our backs on our largest markets in Europe) be required increasingly to distance itself from its neighbours and get as intimate as possible with the wrecking ball? Will Britain have to second the motion ‘America First’, with its corollaries ‘Buy American, Employ American’?
Before trying to distinguish in Britain and Europe between theories and facts, we should consider one other proposition. Some say that what has happened in Britain and America is not so profound. In America, for instance, Mr Trump actually lost the popular vote by almost three million, despite the active help of Mr Putin. But even if Mr Trump had lost out in the electoral college as well as in the popular vote, it would have been a cause for real shock that this vulgar, abusive, ignorant man should attract as much support as he did. We would still have to scratch our heads and ask ourselves serious questions. Moreover, if Brexit had, to borrow from one of the campaigners, simply blown the doors off the van as was intended, not produced a ‘quit’ result, would we have been much more comfortable, waiting for the next assault? First the doors, then the passengers.