Old Links and New Ties

Power and Persuasion in an Age of Networks

David Howell

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781780768151
• eBook ISBN: 9780857734556
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Economics
• Subtopic: 21st Century History
• Index: Economics

In an international landscape, where emerging newly empowered states are projecting economic and political challenges from Asia, Africa and Latin America, countries like Britain have to redefine roles for themselves in a new order that has reshaped the world. These new roles, as envisaged by David Howell, will rely far more on connectivities and fluid networks than on geographically defined blocs. How will Britain fare in this entirely new international landscape? With power and influence shifting to the developing world, and with a growing network of hyper-connections and communications between nations, Britain is already fundamentally repositioned. In this context, Howell presents a unique solution: engage with and re-energise the existing Commonwealth network of nations which is bound together by history and cultural connections. Emphasising the importance of soft power in the digital age, the author argues against the restrictions posed by traditional blocs and for the dynamism which Commonwealth linkages offer.
Challenging traditionally accepted economic and political theories, Howell presents a unique new perspective on international and diplomatic relations in the twenty-first century.

PART I

BRITAIN IN A NEW LANDSCAPE

I

RIDING TWO HORSES

It was a morning in June 2011. There had clearly been some mistake. Algeria wanted to join the Commonwealth. That is what I was being told at my desk in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office.

How on earth could this be? Surely down there in the Maghreb, Algeria belonged to the French sphere – although in past years it had had some strong Russian connections. And anyway, what was this about the Commonwealth?

Wasn’t that just a yesterday club, a scattered and nostalgic collection of countries across the globe who had had some connection with the old British Empire, and who liked to meet occasionally to talk about values and principles (but not always practise them), dine with the Queen and go on their separate ways?

Yet there it was in the Diptel,¹ in black and white. Algerian ministers were enquiring about possible association with, even membership of, the Commonwealth – a network stretching across 54 independent nations, embracing 16 realms and 38 republics or other monarchies and somewhere above 2 billion people, just about a third of the human race – and on paper at least an economic colossus with 20 per cent of the world’s trade and growth prospects that would make European eyes green with envy.

The Algerians, it seemed, wanted to be part of it.

Admittedly this was not my first surprise about would-be Commonwealth membership. The queue had already been forming long before that message. Mozambique and Rwanda – neither with any past British connections – had already joined. So had Cameroon, with only a tenuous British link. Then there had been South Sudan – a brand new (and struggling) nation. There had been Suriname, Burundi, Angola – a long string of ambassadors and visiting ministers calling to express interest. There had been the Kuwaitis, repeatedly asking about the Commonwealth. There had been little Somaliland, not even a fully hatched country, and Palestine, the same. A long list trailed away from the understandable to the improbable – a word from Dublin about Ireland’s increasing interest; a call from Yemen; a thought that Burma (Myanmar) could join in due course; a murmur from mountainous Bhutan; there was even said to be interest in Baghdad. From outside were coming continuous enquiries. Japan in particular had shown particular interest in links at local government level (through the highly active Commonwealth Local Government Forum and through the Commonwealth Parliamentary Association).

But why this club, this network? It seemed as though these aspirants were searching for something new in the way of international togetherness, something the great multilateral institutions inherited from the twentieth century were failing to provide. Had they all realised a point that had not been quite grasped in London? Were there now new and more complex trade routes emerging, new investment flows forming, new economic, cultural, commercial and political synergies taking shape, new markets, new growth patterns, new alliances and common interests that did not fit into the old Western worldview? Had the Commonwealth network, with its common (mostly) working language, its similar legal systems, its vast criss-cross trelliswork of linkages, mostly non-governmental and at every conceivable professional, business and cultural level, somehow acquired new relevance in the digital age of instant and total communication and hyper-connectivity?

Could it even be that the global statistics of income and output (if they could be believed) were beginning to signal a new story – for example, that 70 per cent of world gross domestic product (GDP) growth over the next two decades was going to be outside the Atlantic area and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), that the huge new megacities of Asia, Africa and Latin America were set to be the magnets of wealth creation, and the fountains of new thinking, innovation, technical and even social advance not seen for centuries past, that in the rather patronising terms of some commentators, the Rest was about to outpace, and even come to the rescue of, the West?² And was the pinning on of this apparently sought-after Commonwealth badge somehow becoming an entry ticket – not the only one, but a very useful one – to this new catallaxy³ of like-minded peoples and communities, all connected up with an instantaneity and intensity unparalleled in human history, a network combining both real and virtual cohesion, like no other?

If there was this new world emerging, a new constellation not just of economic entities but also of powers, poles, alliances and influences across the global scene, then some big changes of mindset were going to be needed up in Northern Europe and especially in Britain.

Forty years before, in 1972, we had been told the complete opposite. We had been told that Britain’s global role was over, that the lessons of Suez were crystal clear and that the nation’s markets, its destiny and its future prosperity lay in Europe and in wholehearted membership of the then European Economic Community. Britain could safely turn its back on the Commonwealth economies, which seemed to promise only slow growth and shrinking markets compared with glittering Europe. There might be a problem, of course, about the special relationship with the USA and there might be some awkward choices ahead. But Europe came first.

It seemed so obvious at the time – especially in non-socialist circles. Britain in the 1960s was mired in slothful corporatism, overbearing trade unionism, swollen state ownership – an innovation desert. Having won the war, so we believed, we had lost the peace. Surely the Common Market was the place to be – even the word ‘market’ had its allure. In the younger end of the Conservative Party, although most definitely not in the Labour Party, the mood turned strongly pro-European. This was where efficiency and competition lay, this was where the stimulus to slow-moving Britain would come from. And this was where modern-minded, brisk (and brusque) Edward Heath, the newly elected Conservative leader, would take us.

Led by the infallible Doctor Hindsight, opinion in some quarters now inclines to condemn the thinking of the 1960s era, condemn Heath and depict that move as a gigantic error, as well as a calculated deception, a conspiracy. But at the time it was not like that at all. To most of the younger generation it seemed entirely the right thing to do. The difference now is that we are more than four decades on. The difference is surely that we are now the other side of a colossal informational and digital revolution which has changed the world economy, changed the pattern of global power, created a vast and largely ungoverned cyberspace, shifted the world energy balance, altered the role of states and the reach of governments, changed even the kinds of statecraft needed to survive and prosper in utterly transformed world conditions.

With that query from Algiers, I was looking through a window. I was gaining just a glimpse of something completely new – a totally, radically altered international landscape. Half a century earlier, the world had scoffed at Hugh Gaitskell as he spoke of a thousand years of history being threatened by British entry into the (then) European Economic Community (EEC). To mainstream opinion he appeared ridiculously wrong and out of date. The facts seemed to contradict his predictions. Time would show, it was believed, that his political fears were overdone. Economic survival was the priority.

But 50 years later, the future is picking up the tracks from the past, although in ways that no one could have remotely foreseen, or did foresee. The global markets on which the British consciously turned their backs then are now the big new markets of the future. The wheel has turned full circle.

Of course the British are still and always Europeans, placed by history and fate in a fabled region. Nothing is going to change that. The new economic patterns, spaces and imperatives of a network age, now taking shape all around, cannot be seen as alternatives to trade with EU countries right next door – our neighbours, our village, our community. The health and prosperity of the European neighbourhood inevitably remains a central British concern. The growing divisions and bitterness in Europe, slicing down the middle of the eurozone, call for full British support for reunification and the healing of intra-European wounds (as so often in the past). The British love affair continues on and off with France, awe of German excellence remains, delight with Mediterranean Europe continues, romance with Central Europe and the great medieval fortresses and the soft autumn spas, the burning spirits of independence and freedom – all of it remains as strong as ever.

But – and it is all in that word ‘but’ – may not Britain’s prime interests be starting to lie as much beyond our Europe as within it?

If Europe seemed the spearhead then, all those years ago, are not the giant economies of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Rim, the dawning energy-rich African states, the prospering Antipodes, the reinvigorated Latin Americas, the spearheads now? In many respects, geography no longer matters very much at all. The history books teach us about capital and investment flowing from the ‘advanced’ industrial West to the developing world. But now it is becoming the other way round. Massive Asian and African savings are coming to finance the West’s tardy modernisation. Confident new networks, enlivened by instant connectivity, are springing up all around the world. In truth a vast global bouleversement seems to be taking place. Bewilderingly, the developing are fast becoming the developed. The poor are becoming the less indebted while the rich, the so-called ‘advanced’ nations, are mired deeper in debt than ever before in history. The savings of the East and the South are coming to the rescue of the North and the West. The so-called backward states turn out to be forward – in some cases, ahead of the West both technologically and educationally. The small are setting the pace for the big – as David Lloyd George (the Welsh Wizard) once claimed, they always have done so throughout history.⁴ The advanced are being advanced upon. Power is slipping away to the powerless. Vaclav Havel’s dazzling insight becomes the new reality.⁵

The modern Commonwealth network, a totally different construct from the past, is only a part of this entirely new and unfolding international scene, an international community of a new character and texture, conforming far less to any blueprint, shaped much more by principles of self-organisation. But for both Britain and all its current members, as well as for the aspiring ones, it must surely be a huge potential asset, a gateway and portal, on which others already look with envy – and, it must be said, with some puzzlement – that we don’t make much more of it. The more the new picture emerges, the more it seems pure folly, after the decades of relative disinterest, not to join in wholeheartedly with all the other members in further strengthening and developing the Commonwealth.

In the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, when being briefed to answer tricky House of Lords questions due from a daunting array of deeply informed expert peers about remoter parts of the world and their often tragic problems and misfortunes, and explain how Britain could somehow help, beyond mere hand-wringing (and expressing ‘deep concern’), I used regularly to ask officials, a bit crudely, just what was in it for us, the British?

Apply the same discipline to the modern Commonwealth. Just where are the benefits for Britain, for the British, for everyday life and future prospects? Questions like this – and their answers – need to be phrased with care, because if revived British enthusiasm for the new Commonwealth network seems to sound and feel like just another British promotion for British ambitions, a last gasp and belated attempt to stay at the top table of nations, that would be counterproductive and very coolly received by other member states. There is history to be lived down, baggage to be shed, new degrees of trust and mutual respect to be built up.

But didn’t James Maxton once say that if you can’t ride two horses at once then you had no right to be in the bloody circus. Or was it Denis Healey?⁶

It does not matter too much. Through all the decades since World War II, foreign policy experts have been saying the same thing about Britain.

All along, it was that Britain could not be both a good European and America’s closest ally. It could try to have it both ways. It could talk about being some sort of bridge across the Atlantic. But in the end it had to choose.

Those who now espouse the Commonwealth cause face the same kind of critique. A choice, it is insisted, has to be made. But does it? The Commonwealth Mark Three today is both Anglo-centric and not Anglo-centric. It is a filigree lacework of countess bilateral and multilateral connections criss-crossing the world, by no means always including Britain, which remains just a member among more than 50, and not always a very good one in the recent past. Britain is anyway not even currently a member of the inner guiding committee, the Commonwealth Ministers’ Action Group. Intra-Commonwealth linkages crisscross the continents in a maze of new connections – Canada with the Caribbean, Australia with Africa, India with Africa, South Africa with India, Bangladesh with its Asian neighbours, for example.

Yet the British monarch is the Commonwealth’s head, London is still undeniably a sort of Mecca, the Commonwealth Secretary resides in his palace in the Mall, Marlborough House, English is the working language, cricket is the game (mostly). British customs, culture, legal procedures, business standards and methods suffuse the system – and everyone likes afternoon tea on the lawn served in Worcester china. Even Robert Mugabe, who took Zimbabwe out of the Commonwealth before being asked to leave anyway, is said to be waiting for his invitation to take tea at the Palace. Alas it will never come.

We will seek to show in the chapters ahead how, in a changed world, Britain can indeed ride two horses, how it must do so to survive, how the old choices said to confront the UK (between Europe and America, between the West and the rising East and South) no longer exist, and how the ambiguities of a role in the modern world, a role in Europe and a role in the Commonwealth can at last be resolved.

The French are admired for their skill in putting both Europe first and France first, for being the best Europeans, and yet it all turns out to be for the glory of France.

Should not the same now apply for both Britain and Europe and Britain and the Commonwealth? Cannot the British be both the best supporters of the rapidly changing Commonwealth as a whole and yet use membership to their own immense advantage? Surely the two horses can be ridden at once. We have the training and the experience, the sensitivity and the skills, to do just that.

So that news from Algiers that morning was not really new. What was glimpsed through the window was not a new revelation. It was confirmation of a growing conviction, a finger-tip feeling, a journey in the imagination that was becoming an emerging reality – which we, like other nations, had to understand and be a part of to survive.

Like music half heard and coming from a distant room, it was an intimation that completely different forces were gathering on the world stage and that it was becoming time for Britain, too, to join the party.

2

THE SIXTH PHASE

History is a prison warder. It compartmentalises and confines to cells the events, the memories, the experiences of the past, and it conditions each step a nation takes as it stumbles about to find a meaningful, intelligible and consensually-supported way forward. Nowhere in recent times has Britain’s history from earliest times been traced and spelled out so well as in Norman Davies’s magisterial history of the British Isles.¹ At the end of it all, after traversing the battles, struggles, upheavals, triumphs and disasters of the millennia, Professor Davies’s judgment is that today the United Kingdom is heading for imminent break-up and that the European Union may offer some kind of alternative salvation. The raison d’être of the United Kingdom has been destroyed. The forces of history and events are proving too great. We must, in a phrase, chuck it in.

The conclusion here is the very opposite. It is that in this age of globalised contact and almost total communication, unmatched in human history and at every level, not just governmental and official, the future for the United Kingdom, indeed for the whole British Isles, could prove to be uniquely favourable, with the European Union playing a significantly lesser part in our affairs and our positioning and prospects in the wider world a much greater role.

The reasons for optimism are that the more one examines the staggering intensity of today’s network relationships, whether between governments or peoples, the more they appear to introduce an entirely different dimension into the foreign policy picture. Contacts and culture at non-governmental levels become infinitely more important and influential. International involvement becomes a better description of a nation’s overseas relationships than foreign policy. The latter implies that a nation or state can shape its relations with others, and with great global trends, by deliberate acts and stances of national policy, and do so with some latitude. Yet there is much less than commonly believed – and what scope there is can be lost entirely unless the new context is understood and the initiative regained within it.

In the British case, relations with its continental neighbours will of course be close and can ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the Author
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Introduction
• Part I: Britain In a New Landscape
• Part II: Lifting The Barriers
• Part III: Power And Persuasion
• Epilogue
• Annex A. A Departure Note
• Annex B. Authority Has to Learn New Tasks
• Annex C. The EU’s Climate and Energy Policy
• Annex D. Commonwealth Accredited Organisations
• Notes