Diplomacy

Lord Chartres Excerpts

Thursday 11th November 2010 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of London]

It is a great privilege to follow the maiden speech of the noble Lord, Lord Monks, on which I congratulate him. I also congratulate him on his—in the American phrase—non-remunerated endorsement of UKRep and its excellence in Brussels. As he reminded us, he speaks with a lifetime’s experience of industrial relations in this country and throughout Europe, not least in his service with ACAS, so he speaks about diplomacy as a practitioner. Offering the possibility of reflecting on the Stürm und Drang of professional life in the relative tranquillity of the British senate is one of the ways in which your Lordships’ House plays a unique and valuable role in our constitution. The speech of the noble Lord, Lord Monks, was a notable contribution to this tradition and I know that the whole House hopes that his voice will be more frequently heard in the future.

I am grateful to the noble Lord, Lord Hannay, for introducing this debate and for doing so in a way that acknowledged the alliance between the traditional actors in diplomacy and others who represent a multitrack approach. The dissolution of the Soviet Union brought to a close the period in which a single international conflict dominated the international system. Instead, we have seen intra-state rather than inter-state conflicts, ethnic conflicts, secessions and struggles often, alas, fortified by religious rhetoric and symbols become the norm. As we speak, the turbulence and the suffering in Iraq continue, not least on the part of the ancient Christian community, which has suffered grievously in recent days.

During the Cold War, international relations were largely the preserve of the professionals, the diplomats and the politicians. I think that we should pay tribute to a number of pioneers in the US and Europe who saw the potential of applying approaches that were being developed in the setting of industrial relations. These have played an enormously important part in the development of a multitrack approach and in community mediation work through their application to conflict in general, including civil and international conflict.

At this point the question arises as to whether, in addition to being part of the problem, the faith communities may have a contribution to make in the field of conflict prevention. It is a question that has aroused some academic interest in the Anglo-American world ever since the publication, well before 9/11, of Professor Samuel Huntingdon’s book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. It is evident that many of the violent conflicts in the modern world are rooted in threats to identity. Religion in many parts of the world is crucial to social cohesion and is therefore likely to be co-opted in any struggle that centres on identity. Folk wisdom easily understands how the highest ideals are bent to the most malign purposes. Jonathan Swift, that Irish dean and the author of Gulliver’s Travels, lamented:

“We have just enough religion to make us hate, but not enough to make us love one another”.

However, are there positive resources within the traditions and institutions of the world’s faith communities capable of making a contribution to conflict prevention and peacemaking? Is it possible that, as the title of an influential book from the Washington-based Center for Strategic and International Studies suggests, religion is a missing dimension of statecraft? It seems obvious now that US monitoring of Iranian politics ought always to have included the religious dimension, but a report from CSIS reveals:

“The one recorded attempt to do just that within the CIA, before the revolution, was vetoed on the grounds that it would amount to mere sociology, a term apparently used in intelligence circles to mean the time-wasting study of factors deemed politically irrelevant”.

No one, so far as I am aware, is calling for the call-up of platoons of clerics and mullahs to shuttle between capitals like ersatz diplomats, but we must try to be practical.

Here I must declare an interest as the founder and current chairman of St Ethelburga’s Centre for Reconciliation and Peace. St Ethelburga’s is a little church that survived the great fire of 1666 and the blitz but not the effects of an IRA bomb in 1993. That bomb, from a conflict that has a religious dimension, made us determined, encouraged by the late Cardinal Hume, to rebuild the church as a centre for reconciliation and peace. Over the past two years, 20,000 people have participated in our programmes.

I make a plea that, as we enter the dangerous second decade of the 21st century, where even the editor of the Economist has written a book suggesting that God is back, we should look to develop our active and well resourced diplomacy by making deeper alliances with the new resources for conflict prevention that the faith communities, not only the Christian ones, have developed.