Building Stability Overseas Strategy

Lord Desai Excerpts

Thursday 6th October 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Desai]

My Lords, we are grateful to the noble Baroness, Lady Falkner, for introducing the debate. I compliment her on her speech, and say all this because I will be quite critical of the document we are discussing. I find it intellectually inadequate and do not think that it can be a basis on which to frame any sort of policy. I shall go into some detail about why I think that.

It is economically deterministic and takes a rather naive view that in any conflict there are bound to be economic causes, and only economic causes. In proposing a solution, it has the defect of all the UN documents that I have had to read over the years of being far too idealistic in the requirements that it imposes on what kind of a perfect solution there has to be. Everything has to be democratic, transparent, accountable, gender-friendly, environmentally sustainable and what-not. I once headed something called the Centre for the Study of Global Governance at the London School of Economics and, on one of the first discussion papers we published, a brilliant Canadian scholar pointed out that people sitting in New York ask their UNDP branches out in Kenya and so on to add new things that they have suddenly thought of that we must have in conflict resolution. We do not have to do it but people out there have to satisfy so many constraints. At the end of it, whatever we do will be inadequate.

I start by saying why I think that the document is analytically defective. Then I will say something about the solution. First, the document is analytically defective because the notion of a fragile state is not an adequate notion. Most things that are called fragile states are not states. They are not even nations. Because of various things, either colonial developments, or something else, they have been designated as states by some constitutional accident but then have followed a long struggle to find out whose nation it is. Consider Afghanistan, where we have had trouble for 40 years. It was a kingdom once upon a time, and as kingdoms go it was stable. In a kingdom you can command the loyalty of different tribes who may not agree with each other. Then there was the communist revolution and other things later on, and we are still trying to establish a nation state there. A nation state is very different from a kingdom. In a nation state, numbers count and different tribes have to quarrel to take command of resources. The notion that everything is a state is inadequate for analysis of fragility.

I even say, at the opposite end, that we should consider Sri Lanka. Virtually everything that people want—gender friendliness, good health, education, a fantastic welfare state, high literacy, high ranking of human development—was reported over the years. What happened? Almost horrendous genocide takes place there in a 25 year-old civil war. The notion of a fragile state does not help us to analyse Sri Lanka or Zimbabwe. Until the late 1990s Zimbabwe was thought to be an ideal combination of social development and economic growth. I was part of the UNICEF project. In an article somebody listed Zimbabwe as one of the 10 most successful countries combining social development and economic growth. Why did Zimbabwe fall apart? This document will not help us to explain that. We have to be much more critical.

What are we being asked to intervene in? We may be asked to intervene in situations not because states are fragile. None of the states in the Arab spring revolutions was at all fragile—not Egypt, Tunisia, Libya—but all were subjected to considerable change and had to respond to it. I urge Ministers to look again and to have a more robust doctrine on why we have to have early warning and on what we can do. We were able to do nothing about Sri Lanka despite it being a member of the Commonwealth. We were not able to expel it, like Zimbabwe, or even Pakistan. It not only continues to be a member but will host the CHOGM in 2013. We need a slightly better concept of not just fragile states, but rogue states and maybe states that are perfectly well functioning but which because of that can be perfectly efficient at oppressing their people. Iraq, for example, under Saddam Hussein, was not a frail state at all—not even a fragile state. It was a very powerful state but it was oppressive to its own people.

The doctrine of liberal interventionism, of which I think I am the last friend, says that if you live in a global village and see a neighbour beating his wife you will intervene. You do not regard it as his affair. If a country—especially a non-western country, if I may say so—has a dictator who is eliminating some part of the population through genocide and so on, we do not say, “No. Their values are different, so we cannot intervene”. I think that it is quite right to intervene. It was right to intervene in Iraq. I have no problem with that. Iraq today is a democracy. Not only that, I believe—although I cannot prove it—that some of the inspiration for the Arab spring must have come from the fact that Iraq was seen as a functioning democracy. It is such a stable functioning democracy that after the elections it did not have a Government for six months but still nothing happened that could upset the political balance.

That is an achievement and that kind of liberal interventionism was successful in Bosnia and Kosovo and very effective in Sierra Leone. We have to learn positive lessons from that. We cannot just rely on the doctrine of fragility. Maybe we should have “fragile states”; we should have “rogue states”; we should have states that are perfectly all right but suddenly undergo a conversion—in all these different situations we may be required to intervene and what kind of intervention we make will be important.

Time is running out so let me say a few things on the ideal solution. It is very important, especially in fragile states, states that are breaking down, or even states in which we are intervening, that we prioritise what kind of intervention is needed. Before all the democracy and accountability and transparency—all those good things of life—are achieved, we have to restore law and order. The restoration of law and order and the security of property and people is absolutely the top priority. In doing that you may not achieve all the good bits that you want to achieve. Very often, especially after a civil war, it would be very difficult for even the domestic security forces, let alone somebody from outside, to really be able to give proper, perfect equal justice to people who were previously the masters and committing the genocide—just think of how it was in Rwanda. First should be some sort of security of property and life on an equal basis, and later one can go on to look at institution-building and things like that.

How many years did we stand by and wring our hands over Darfur and all the time the crisis was happening? Was Sudan a fragile state? Was Sudan a state at all? Now coming out is what we knew all the time: that Sudan had very deep divisions, north and south, on the basis of religion. At that time we were not able to operate on the idea that perhaps Sudan should not be a single country. My own private view is that the Democratic Republic of Congo should not be a single country and is not viable as a single country, but that is for another day.

As far as Her Majesty’s Government are concerned, if you are going to set up an early warning system, please have a much more robust analytical model on the variety of different situations in which we will have to intervene and not just this notion of a fragile state and that it is fragile because it is economically weak. That will not do; that is not a proposition which would pass any examination. Therefore, we should be deeper in our analysis and economise on the objectives we pursue when we intervene—and once we intervene, get out fast.