Ethics As Foreign Policy

Britain, The EU and the Other

Dan Bulley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• eBook ISBN: 9781134014590
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: City Planning & Urban Development
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Ethical foreign policy has often been considered utopian, unrealistic and potentially very dangerous. Dan Bulley argues for a reconceptualisation of ethics as foreign policy, as both look to how we can, and ought to, relate to others.

Inspired by the deconstructive thought of Jacques Derrida, Bulley studies the ethical claims of British (1997-2007) and EU (1999-2004) foreign policy. These claims are read against themselves to illustrate their deep ambiguity. A textual analysis of speeches, statements and interviews given by foreign policy makers shows that a responsibility to save 'Africa', to protect Iraqis, and to hospitably welcome the Balkans into the EU are also irresponsible, inhospitable and unethical.

The author contends that foreign policies making a claim to morality are ethical and unethical, in their own terms, suggesting that while a truly ethical foreign policy remains ultimately unachievable, it does not justify abandoning a responsible relation to others. Rather, a negotiation of ethics as foreign policy suggests potential individual, context-bound decisions which remain open to contestation and permanent critique. Bulley argues that the goal of ethical foreign policy must be maintained as a productive hope of what is neither completely impossible, nor entirely possible.

1 Introduction

On 12 May 1997, an ethical foreign policy suddenly appeared possible. British Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, announced that British foreign policy was to have an ‘ethical dimension’ under his leadership.¹ The new Labour government had promised many things since being elected with an enormous parliamentary majority just 11 days earlier, but few were as energising or unexpected as Cook’s announcement. This was what prompted my early interest in the possibility of ethical foreign policy. Was that all it took? Did one need to only declare that an ‘ethical dimension’ to foreign policy was now possible? If so, why did it seem that no one, including the previous Conservative government, had done it before?

The idea of an ethical foreign policy had precursors in the form of Jimmy Carter’s ultimately doomed promotion of human rights in the 1970s and the Australian foreign policy in the late 1980s and early 1990s under Bob Hawk and Paul Keating.² Talk of ethics, morality and values in foreign policy increased exponentially in world politics after the cold war. Whatever the particular policy area, from the arms trade to debt relief, from humanitarian intervention to supranational cooperation and trade sanctions, morality appeared to be playing a role. For some, an ethical foreign policy simply became ‘more affordable’³ from the 1990s onwards. Freed from the strictures of superpower rivalry, Western states were suddenly capable of flexing their principles, which generally revolved around the promotion of democracy, human rights and liberal economics.

Labour’s declaration nevertheless struck a chord with many, as, despite the fall of the Berlin Wall, the 1990s had not seen the new ethical order that had initially seemed achievable. The United States had been slow to respond to ethnic cleansing as Yugoslavia fell apart from 1993 onwards. Meanwhile, Britain and France actively obstructed attempts to save Bosnian victims.⁴ There was similar inaction and obfuscation when, in 1994, genocide in Rwanda led to the deaths of around 800,000 Tutsis at the hands of rival Hutus. Was a traditionally narrow focus on the ‘national interest’ really acceptable in such an international context? Were there not more ethical ways to react to such extreme and unnecessary violence, suffering and death? To those, such as myself, who felt that something more was necessary (without necessarily knowing what), the ‘ethical dimension’ was a sign of great hope.

Although disagreement will remain as to the nature of Cook’s announcement, and many doubted its motives⁵ and wisdom,⁶ the temptations of ethical foreign policy are unlikely to disappear, especially in the two examples I explore in this book. Although the initial high tide of moralism may have passed in British foreign policy following Prime Minister Tony Blair’s departure from government, the first post-Blair foreign secretary, David Miliband, signalled that the ‘moral impulse’ was still motivating Britain’s external relations.⁷ In fact, following the loud proclamations of ethical commitments since 1997, it is difficult to see any future British government escaping the scrutiny of its international morals.⁸

Similarly, moralism is going nowhere in the European Union (EU). After Romano Prodi’s presidency of the EU Commission (1999–2004), in which he stressed the ‘ethical dimension to politics’ upon which the EU and its foreign policy was built,⁹ greater attention has been focused on the values that the EU promotes through its foreign policy.¹⁰ Despite the EU’s failed attempts to further formalise its foreign policy in the Constitutional (2004) and Lisbon (2007) Treaties, morality, values and norms are ever present in the speeches and interviews of key EU foreign-policy makers such as Jose Manuel Barroso and Javier Solana.¹¹

Given the rise of ethical foreign policy and the controversy that still surrounds it, the inevitable query emerges: is a genuinely ethical foreign policy really possible? This is the central question I explore in this book. Concentrating on the worst consequences of the so-called ‘War on Terror’, we might be tempted to respond negatively to this question. Especially since 2001, though also beforehand, Blair’s foreign policy took on a Manichean moralism, with the world divided into good and evil, right and wrong, humane and inhumane. It has resulted in the military invasions of territories in Europe (Kosovo), Africa (Sierra Leone) and the Middle East (Afghanistan and Iraq). Similarly, after eight years of morally charged US foreign policy under George W. Bush, with the atrocities of Abu Ghraib, detention of suspects in Guantanamo Bay and the spectre of rendition flights and torture, a genuinely ethical foreign policy may look further away than ever. At best, Bush’s moralism is seen by many as a public cover for more base intentions. This is reflected in Peter Singer’s story that, when he told friends he was writing a book about ‘Bush’s ethics’, two responses were common: either the phrase was an oxymoron or his book would be very short indeed.¹²

For others, in contrast, Blair and Bush’s actions demonstrate that ethical foreign policy is not only possible but becoming normal. After all, values and principles had perhaps never been so clearly articulated in foreign policy. These principles seemed more ethical than those that went before: the human rights of those suffering had long been sacrificed to the pre-eminence of state sovereignty; the invasion of Iraq demonstrated that sovereignty no longer held such a moral sway.¹³ Responsibility for the rights and well-being of our fellow humans no longer stopped at the borders of a state. This duty to promote human rights now appeared genuinely universal, even if it involved the violation of a potentially dangerous state’s sovereignty. The invasion of Iraq was, therefore, presented by Fernando Tesón as an ethically unifying force, a legitimate moral action demonstrating that, whether ‘[c]onservative, liberal, or progressive, we should not protect tyrants under the guise of defending peace’.¹⁴

Both these positions oversimplify and are ultimately unsatisfactory. Part of the problem responding to the question posed is the apparent necessity of doing so within the dichotomy it implies: ethical foreign policy is either possible or impossible. After all, it is not as if we could decide that our foreign policy would no longer contain ethics. Moral values can neither be left out from the beginning nor expunged once a policy has been initiated. Rather, as Mervyn Frost argues, foreign policy ‘necessarily has an ethical dimension.… We are ethically constrained in everything we do’.¹⁵ Through participating in the practices of foreign policy (such as diplomacy, treaties, international summits and so on), the state or organisation is constructed as an international actor. Part of this social constitution means that the actor accepts the principles and values fundamental to the process: the necessary ethical dimension of foreign policy.

I would argue, however, that the link between ethics and foreign policy goes even deeper than this. Questions of ethics and morality¹⁶ are essentially about how we ought to conduct ourselves in relation to others, to strangers, to those who are different and to otherness in general. Such an ethics will depend entirely upon a context. As I will show throughout this book, morality emerges from who the ‘we’, as a collective subject, considers itself to be; who or what we construct as other, as different, to this ‘self’; and how we conceive of our duty to such an other. Therefore, there cannot be a singular, general other, definable outside of a context. Otherness, and ethical action towards it, is constructed within a specific situation, along with the subject. To speak of ethics then is to speak of how a subject should act in relation to an other, when the self and the other are both produced within a particular context.

In his reading of foreign policy as a politics of identity, David Campbell draws a distinction between two understandings of foreign policy: what he calls ‘foreign policy’ and Foreign Policy.¹⁷ The broader practice of ‘foreign policy’ refers to discursive ‘practices of differentiation or modes of exclusion (possibly figured as relationships of otherness) that constitute their object as “foreign” in the process of dealing with them’.¹⁸ This is foreign policy seen as a general practice of constituting ‘sameness’ and ‘otherness’ through their representation—of differentiating and excluding the ‘foreign’ from the ‘domestic’, the ‘inside’ from the ‘outside’, the ‘other’ from the ‘self’. Foreign Policy, on the other hand, is how the disciplines of international relations (IR)¹⁹ and foreign policy analysis (FPA) generally conceive foreign policy: as a state-based practice towards that which is beyond the state’s borders,²⁰ that which is ‘foreign’ and not ‘domestic’ or part of the collective ‘self’. The capitalised Foreign Policy is, therefore, a particular and highly circumscribed instance of the ‘foreign policy’²¹ that everyone takes part in, both individually and collectively, from moment to moment.

This refiguration of foreign policy means that not only does it have a necessary ethical dimension but the two are in fact concerned with precisely the same matter. Both ethics and foreign policy consider how we constitute and relate to otherness. This flies in the face of traditional assumptions. FPA as a discipline was founded on the complete marginalisation of ethical issues from the study of foreign policy. James Rosenau, in trying to produce a rigorous academic study of foreign policy, condemned the ‘bewildered simplicity and moral fervor’ marking much early commentary.²² The discussion of foreign policy ‘seems to invite the abandonment of scholarly inclinations’, and this led him to plead for a ‘scientific’ consciousness without moral debate.²³

Any attempt to fully and finally separate the fields of ethics and foreign policy is futile, however, as both tackle identical issues. The subject of ethics is foreign policy: it examines how we ought to relate to otherness. And if foreign policy is a practice of constructing otherness and relating to it, the question of foreign policy must be how we ought to do this: a question of ethics.²⁴ Indeed, far from disconnected areas joined by an ‘and’ or an ‘of’,²⁵ it is much better to see ethics as foreign policy. Even if questions of ‘ought’ are not posed in foreign policy, assumptions are made that presuppose a certain production of and relation to otherness, a certain ‘self’ and a certain ‘other’ and the way they ought to relate. Thus, even in the ‘scientific’ early works of FPA, ethics is folded into theories of foreign policy without ever being acknowledged.

An excellent example of this is Rosenau’s hugely influential essay, ‘Pre-Theories and Theories of Foreign Policy’.²⁶ Here, Rosenau notes several theoretical shortcomings with FPA, one of which is the outdated tendency to maintain a firm separation of national and international political systems.²⁷ To tackle this, he offers the concept of a ‘penetrated political system’.²⁸ Such a system is marked not only by ‘the presence of non- members who participate directly in a society’s politics’ but also ‘by a shortage of capabilities on the part of the penetrated society’.²⁹ The non-members try to compensate for or take advantage of this shortage. Some penetration is ‘thoroughgoing’, whereas others, such as that of Britain, are limited to certain issue areas, such as defence.³⁰

Penetrated systems are thereby constituted by a lack, a deficiency that somehow makes them not a ‘whole’ or full ‘national system’. The examples he gives are nations defeated in war (Japan and Germany post–Second World War), communist countries run, to an extent, from Moscow (Cuba and Vietnam), hopelessly poor states (Congo) or former great empires (Britain).³¹ Although it is acknowledged that the United States is penetrated, this is a very different matter. The United States is penetrated by those seeking aid and support; it is penetrated for the opposite reason—a ‘relative abundance’ of capabilities.³²

What results then is an apparently innocent separation of penetrated systems and national systems that works to impose a hierarchy on the world: at the top is the United States, marked by ‘abundance’, then come ‘normal’ national systems and finally ‘deficient’ penetrated systems, marked by ‘lack’. Such separations are treated as existent in the material world, hence they remain unquestioned, but, being constructed, this seemingly objective hierarchy conceals an ethics, a way of relating to otherness, and has major ethical implications. It can justify any type of intervention (after all, a penetrated system’s ‘lack’ leads to non-member participation anyway) from sanctions and blockades to counterinsurgency and regime change. In this way, while ‘purging’ all moral reasoning from FPA, Rosenau conceals a profound notion of how relations with others ought to be conducted. He is discussing ethics as foreign policy without recognising it.

If we consider ethics as foreign policy, this means we can no longer answer within the dichotomy imposed by the question: is a genuinely ethical foreign policy possible? Every foreign policy contains an ethics, a conception of otherness and how a ‘we’ ought to act in relation to it. In this sense, every foreign policy is an ethical foreign policy. My aim in this book, therefore, is to draw out the conception of ethics as foreign policy in a British...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 The subject of ethical foreign policy: ‘Britain’, the ‘EU’ and others
• 3 Responsibility: Protecting and saving the other in British and EU foreign policy
• 4 Hospitality: Welcoming the other in EU foreign policy
• 5 Negotiating undecidability: Ethics, politics and the perhaps
• 6 Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography