Soft Power and Conflict Prevention

Lord Ramsbotham Excerpts

Friday 5th December 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Ramsbotham (CB)]

My Lords, I join other noble Lords who have thanked the most reverend Primate for this very important debate. I also congratulate him on his very thoughtful and masterly introductory speech.

I declare an interest as a very chastened member of the soft power Select Committee, so ably chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Howell. As the son of a bishop, I have been taken to task, quite rightly, twice today—by my wife and by the most reverend Primate—for the fact that the church is not included.

One memory that I have of that committee is the evidence given to us by the high commissioner for Mozambique, who explained why Mozambique applied to join the Commonwealth and laid out very clearly the values which many noble Lords have expressed as being particularly British. However, I do not intend to say more about soft power at the moment; I intend to concentrate on a sentence in a letter that the most reverend Primate sent to me on 21 November. It said that the relationship between overseas conflict and the radicalisation of communities in the United Kingdom, and what we can do to limit that link, is also an issue for him and his colleagues on the Bishops’ Benches.

At the time, I was reflecting on the re-emergence on the world scene of one of the giants of the ending of the Cold War, Mikhail Gorbachev, and what he said in public on the occasion of the anniversary of the falling of the Berlin Wall. I very much agreed with the noble Baroness, Lady Williams of Crosby, when she said that it is essential that we increase our understanding of Russia. Gorbachev said that the world was on the brink of a new cold war and that trust should be restored through dialogue with Russia. He said that America was still intoxicated by its Cold War “triumph”—whatever that meant—pushing everyone to take an anti-Russian position and that triumphalism was the reason why the global powers were unable to cope with the conflicts in Yugoslavia, the Middle East and, now, Ukraine. However, he ended by saying that it was too late to ratchet down the confrontation and that we must go back to the starting line from which we began building a new world both in Europe and elsewhere.

That caused me to go back in my own memories. During the Cold War, I was a soldier. In 1985 I was commanding an armoured division in Germany based on the side of the Möhnesee, which many people will have heard of. It was an extraordinary year. It was 40 years after the end of the war and the Germans have an extraordinary belief that two generations absolves you from any connection with what went on two generations before. The very remarkable mayor of Dortmund, which was a large town very near us, asked whether I would take part in a ceremony where all the political parties would mark 40 years of peace. I did so and said that we had made our contribution. I then asked him whether there was anything that he particularly felt the British should be thanked for. He said that it was interesting that immediately after the war we, the British, as opposed to the Americans, made the Germans responsible for the administration of Dortmund. By giving them something to do, it gave them back their pride, and pride is important in the development of a nation.

I never forgot that. In 1990 I happened to be in Hungary watching a Russian division being taken back to Russia by train. In the first part of the train were coaches of soldiers and then came all the equipment. The back part of the train consisted of trucks on which there were drainpipes, bits of wood, windows and doors. They knew that when they got back to Russia there would be nothing for them. It was quite clear that the pride had gone out of them. In 1993, I was asked by the head of the Russian army to go to Russia and advise on setting up a contract as opposed to a conscript army. I was taken to a place called Tver, which is halfway between St Petersburg and Moscow. I was taken to see a division which had been kicked out of Poland at 24 hours’ notice. The soldiers had been removed to this place and all their equipment had gone missing. They were living alongside families in rooms separated by blankets—there were four families living to a room. They asked what I would do if I were in a division living in Russia. I told them how we would live and how we would assimilate with the community. It was the most extraordinary day because we then went to see the mayor and asked whether he could arrange that. At the end, the general threw his arms around me and said, “Thank you so much helping the Russian army”, and I reflected that I was teaching it how to live in its own country. The tragic thing was that pride had gone. It is very important that we do not do anything to triumphalise over what the Russians are going through. We should remember that they see these sanctions as war.

I was also involved at that time with the United Nations, which picks up on what the noble Lord, Lord Alderdice, was saying. I was co-opted by Kofi Annan into a committee trying to revive the old military committee to give some co-ordination to the peacekeeping operations that were developing all over the world. What was interesting was that we discovered that although peacekeeping operations were going on and contingence was being made, there was no co-ordination of the post-conflict reconstruction or humanitarian effort at all. One of our recommendations was that when a special representative was appointed he should have two deputies—a force commander and a humanitarian commander—and they must be equals. The military was trying to develop wider conflict prevention somewhere else by stopping someone in a country or assisting in the post-conflict reconstruction, because there could be no reconstruction and redevelopment until whatever opposed them had been removed.

I also declare an interest as a member of the Joint Committee on the National Security Strategy. I was very pleased to hear the most reverend Primate say that soft power must be included in hard power when we are looking at what the national security strategy is. I could not agree with him more. I hope that it does not just develop into a scrap between the MoD and the Treasury, as the MoD is merely one of the players in this. It is desperately important that all the other players should have their say.

I have been thinking about the youth of this country. I took from my bookshelf a very remarkable book written by a godmother of mine, Amy Buller. It is called Darkness Over Germany and it was written during the war. It explains the almost religious grip that Nazism had over the youth of Germany. In it she said:

“If every Nazi were slain tomorrow, we should be left with the deeper and more terrible phenomenon of a German youth in desperate need of a faith … That need must be met primarily by Germans themselves, for it is obvious that, in such a situation, healing must come from within ... That these Germans will need and indeed seek the co-operation of other nations is clear, but the United Nations must show signs that they, in their several countries, know how to meet the needs of their own youth”.

She went on to describe a conversation with one of her students, who asked her:

“‘Didn’t you say that, however well the Nazis had organised, they would never have called forth that dynamic energy and passionate devotion of youth, unless they had somehow given answers, however false, to the more fundamental spiritual needs of youth?’”.

To which Amy replied by saying:

“‘Recognising that these things would not call forth the fanatical allegiance of the youth of this country, we may fail to realise the significance of the spiritual bankruptcy and real destitution underlying it all, for that is something which is evident to the whole of Western civilisation, though in more insidious forms and subtle dress. The real tragedy of the Nazi betrayal, not only of Germany but of Europe, is that it claimed to have given a radical answer to some of the most fundamental problems of our age. It is of the utmost importance that we should understand the problems that they were trying to solve, and then analyse, closely, the fallacious and heretical character of their answers. To a generation without faith, the Nazis gave a brutal philosophy, and millions of lives have been sacrificed to free the world of this false answer to real need, but let us not fail to understand that it was caused by real need. We are now faced with the greater task of bringing healing to the nations including our own. I am convinced this cannot be done without a faith in God adequate to the tremendous task of reconstruction’”.

Of course, we are dealing with different fundamental spiritual needs, but if we are to play our part in trying to provide the answers that our youth require to today’s problems, it is vital that we understand and repair our national strengths and weaknesses with regard to the protection and projection of the values that we as a country maintain. That includes our political masters, who I hope will read, mark and learn from what so many noble Lords have contributed to today’s debate, for which they and the whole House must thank the most reverend Primate.