Soft Power and Conflict Prevention

Lord Cormack Excerpts

Friday 5th December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Cormack (Con)]

My Lords, I am delighted to follow the noble Lord, Lord Hylton, not least because he talked about Bosnia. I well remember in the early 1990s he and I were allies. I was almost the sole voice in the Conservative Benches in the other place, and we persisted. A very notable historian, Brendan Simms, wrote about what he called Britain’s “unfinest hour”. I sincerely hope that will never be repeated.

We are all enormously in the debt of the most reverend Primate not only for choosing this subject but for the manner in which he introduced this debate with a degree of compassion and precision combined with elegance of thought and language. Like the noble Lord, Lord Parekh, and others, I am one of those who is slightly uncomfortable with the word “soft”. I think it is probably a generational thing because I grew up at a time when to be called soft was to have the most pejorative of adjectives attached to one, and to be a softie was the worst thing imaginable. What we are talking about is of course benign influence and enlightened authority, encapsulated in the words “soft power”; we all know what we mean by that.

A Member of your Lordships’ House wrote those famous words:

“Beneath the rule of men entirely great

The pen is mightier than the sword”.

The second of the lines of that couplet is frequently quoted, but the first is more important; in other words, it says that true enlightenment fosters peaceful development and benign rule.

A paradox runs through our history, does it not? All the great faiths are devoted to peace and harmony, yet every one of them has fallen short through the centuries by being divided and by having always within it—we see it today—a group of people who so passionately believe that theirs is the only interpretation that they will brutally suppress all others. Cromwell, who was himself not exactly a hero in the island of Ireland, wrote those famous words to the Scottish Covenanters:

“I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible you may be mistaken”.

We all need to direct that counsel at each other from time to time.

When I go home today I will go back to the shadow of Lincoln Cathedral. When I enter that glorious building, as I do so often, and will, God willing, tomorrow, I walk in—probably very appropriately for a politician—through the Judgment Porch and see two things. First, all around are marks on the pavement where once monumental brasses rested, and just beneath the great east window is the shrine of St Hugh, which was a centre of pilgrimage throughout the Middle Ages. The brasses were ripped up and the shrine despoiled and defaced by those who believed that they were better Christians than those who had installed them. That says a lot.

When I was reflecting on this debate—what an interesting debate it has been—I recalled a sort of kaleidoscope of memories. I thought of a day in Bucharest shortly after the fall of those ghastly tyrants, the ceausescus, when I was privileged to be one of a small group that was asked to conduct some seminars in democracy. I well remember talking to a group of young people after one of those sessions, who talked to me in faultless English and with a burning desire to be part of a democratic structure. I said to them, “How did you keep the faith, and how do you speak this wonderful English when you’ve never left Romania?”. The answer came in two words, which have occurred often in this debate: “World Service”—the BBC World Service. They had listened to it at some peril, but it had been their line to civilisation and democracy and had inspired them. Perhaps things have not worked out in Romania as well as they might have done, but at least it is a democracy and part of international groupings to which we belong, and a country of rich history and real potential.

I also remember Epiphany of 1990, when I was a member of another small group that was staying in an hotel in Moscow—we had not been allowed to go previously—which had been reserved in the old, bad days for leaders of delegations from the Soviet bloc. The furniture was heavy and the décor was not inspiring; the food could have been better. However, there was something very miraculous—and I use that word deliberately in the presence of the most reverend Primate—because we were part of a group that was able to celebrate the mass and Epiphany. The celebrant was a somewhat unorthodox Roman Catholic priest, Father Ted Hesburgh, president of Notre Dame University in the United States and chairman of President Kennedy’s Civil Rights Commission. He gathered around him all of us who were there who were Christians. There was Rosalynn Carter, wife of President Jimmy Carter, Madame Giscard d’Estaing, a very notable Dutchman called Ernst van Eejhen, and me and one or two others. I helped to serve and read the epistle and Rosalynn Carter read something. As we celebrated that service, the sun came through over the Kremlin and, at the end of the service, we gave a symbolic Bible to one of our number, a man called Andrei Grachev, who was President Gorbachev’s chef de cabinet. It was an enormously moving and very symbolic occasion.

It is for that reason that I was so moved this morning, and taken by the remarks of the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Crosby. If we wish to exercise a benign influence and soft power, it is by lending from the British Museum and by treating the Russians as a nation whose stability is as important to us as it is to them. It is not by echoing the rhetoric of the Cold War and refusing to recognise that a great nation, often invaded, has legitimate interests on its own doorstep, even if it has exercised its power recently in a rather crass and unfortunate manner. We have to think of all these things.

One or two noble Lords have talked about students. I happen to have the privilege of being a senior member of St Antony’s, Oxford, a great postgraduate institution. All around the world there are St Antony’s graduates in positions of high authority and influence in their countries. If there were ever a demonstration of the effective exercise of soft power, it is that—that through our universities these young men and women have gone back to attain positions of high influence in their own countries. We must do everything that we can to encourage foreign students to come here and to take on the responsibility of public service when they go back to their native countries. There is no better ambassador for the values that we like to think that we embrace than somebody who has embraced them here, in one of our educational institutions.

In less than three weeks’ time, it will be Christmas Day, and many of us who have been moved by the sea of poppies in the moat of the Tower will be thinking and reading of the Christmas truce. There is a very good book that has recently been republished on the Christmas truce—an excellent stocking filler—but I am terribly sorry that I cannot remember the name of the author, or authors. The book refers to those moments in 1914 when, for a very short time, those who had been engaged in a great and terrible conflict were briefly united by their Christian faith and one of the great Christian festivals. My noble friend Lord Wei talked very movingly about the importance of the Christian faith in what we are seeking to achieve. I am slightly surprised that no one has yet quoted the supreme text on soft power—the Sermon on the Mount.

As we look back and read about the Christmas truce and reflect on a century of appalling conflict, I suggest that we do two things. First, those of us who are privileged to live in the affluent West and who recognise that the engine of economic progress is capitalism also have to recognise that, if capitalism is to survive, it must be responsible capitalism. Only last night I attended a ceremony in the Locarno Suite, where Mr William Hague, the First Secretary of State, distributed awards for responsible capitalism. I was much involved in that scheme, which was arranged under the auspices of the FIRST organisation. Our first chairman of judges was Lord Dahrendorf and the present chairman is the noble and learned Lord, Lord Woolf—our colleague and friend in this House. It is important that we do all we can to encourage, and recognise the crucial importance of, responsible capitalism.

I want to mention just one more thing very briefly that I mentioned last week. I hope that the most reverend Primate will forgive my doing so as he was not able to be present at our debate on religion and belief. I said that next year, when we commemorate the 800th anniversary of Magna Carta, it would be marvellous if, under the leadership of the most reverend Primate, the Church of England—the established church of this realm—were to bring together leading representatives of all the faiths to define a new great charter for the 21st century, encapsulating what most would consider to be true values to which all faiths at their best subscribe. If that could be done, there could be no better conclusion or legacy for this debate, which was so splendidly and brilliantly introduced by the most reverend Primate just three hours ago.