Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe

Lord Wallace of Saltaire Excerpts

Thursday 30th March 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Wallace of Saltaire (LD)]

My Lords, it was very kind of the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, to remind me of past speeches. I should declare a couple of interests: I am a member of the European Leadership Network and I am very sorry that the note from Ms Shetty came round so late today. Nevertheless, I hope your Lordships find it useful. I was also the British secretary of the British-Soviet Round Table from 1979 to 1989. When it was launched, it was a very difficult process. When I was there from Chatham House to provide the secretariat, we found ourselves talking to hard-nosed Russians who had a different view of what reality was, let alone truth. We were roundly attacked by the Sunday Times and others for being soft on communism but we persevered and found it useful to maintain a dialogue, even under difficult circumstances. It got easier over the years.

The CSCE, as it was then, was also set up to build a dialogue between the Soviet Union and the West, with the great advantage that the younger generation of reformers in the Soviet Union wanted to be recognised and accepted as part of a wider Europe. They were therefore willing to make concessions on things such as human rights in order to be accepted. After the Cold War, the West took its eye off the ball and we found that Russia was not evolving in quite the way that we had recommended. The aggressive enlargement of NATO, first in the late 1990s and then most disastrously with the insistence of the George W Bush Administration that we should offer membership to Georgia and Ukraine in Bucharest in 2008, made matters worse. However, one always has to remember that those countries wanted to join NATO. They applied pressure, because they wanted to get out from under Russian control.

The Russian system of government, meanwhile, has gone backwards towards crony capitalism, a corrupt elite and now the closing down of civil society. We face a Russian regime that has been there for some time and is becoming increasingly hostile to the West, including the European Union. We have the old frozen conflicts: Georgia is the one that I know best, and it has been deeply frustrating over the years. There have been attempts to interfere in the Baltic states, even though they are members of NATO and the EU. There is subversion—as already mentioned—in various states across south-eastern Europe. Russia Today is trying to produce its own versions of reality in our own national debates. We have Russian support—possibly including financial support—for hard-right parties across Europe, and perhaps even interference in American elections.

We have, therefore, a very difficult Russian regime to deal with. There is systemic corruption, continuing killings of journalists and prominent critics of the regime and an underlying weak economy—I learnt this morning that the oil price is expected to go down to $40 or even $30 in the next year or two, which will make the Russian situation even more difficult. In addition, we see cybercrime mixed with cyber interference, military adventurism and defence spending as a distraction from its domestic difficulties—including in the Middle East—and this extraordinary identification of the legitimacy of the Putin regime with tsarism, traditional Russia and orthodoxy, so that in remembering World War 1 they want to commemorate not the Russian revolution but the sacrifice of the honest Russian peasants and the role of the tsar in looking after them. Above all, Russia claims the status of a great power, alongside the USA and superior to the rest of Europe.

The OSCE is the only body we currently have for multilateral dialogue; it is ineffective but necessary. It is hard work—I am sure that the noble Lord, Lord Bowness, feels that it is in many ways deeply unrewarding—but we do need to keep talking and have conversations around the table. The younger generation that you occasionally meet are people through whom one can at least begin to convey messages and do business with for the future.

I hope, therefore, that the noble Baroness, Lady Goldie, will say that the British Government will maintain their strongest support for the OSCE and nominate strong candidates for the posts where those in office are stepping down. I stress that we need to know more about the British approach to this. I have read most of our new Foreign Secretary’s speeches. In his November speech at Chatham House, he said that it was the first of a series of strategic speeches on British foreign policy. I have not yet found anything strategic in what he has said on British foreign policy or about Russia, although I recognise that he was due to be in Russia this week and has been unable, for various reasons, to go.

FCO expertise on Russia was run down in the 1990s. Is it being rebuilt, given that we now realise that we again have a very difficult Russian regime with a very uncertain future? There is money laundering by Russians in London; there is a substantial population of Russian oligarchs in London. What response are we making to the extent to which influential Russians close to Putin use London as one of their vacation spots in the West? Lastly, how do the British Government see the need for continuing European co-operation in managing the Russian regime in all its uncertainties and in assisting the states in Russia’s neighbourhood—which is also Europe’s neighbourhood—given that we have now accepted, it seems, that Germany is the leader of the West on this and our future relationship with Germany and our other European partners seems unclear?