Populism and Nationalism

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Thursday 19th January 2017 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, it is hard to credit that anyone who follows international affairs can now be in doubt that the rules-based international order, so painstakingly built up over the 70 years since the disasters of two world wars, is currently under greater challenge than it has ever been; or that the response so far of countries such as ours, which has done so much to contribute to that rules-based order, and which still regarded its maintenance as a national interest—look at last year’s security review—has been quite inadequate in the face of those challenges. The noble Lord, Lord Bruce, has done us a favour by bringing this matter forward for debate today, although effective collective action to those challenges is needed, not just debate.

Why is this situation so serious? I suggest it is because the challenges reach across such a wide area, encompassing peace and security, human rights, trade policy and climate change, to mention a few. Because the political will to face up to these challenges still seems to be ebbing rather than strengthening. The horrors of the siege of Aleppo, which is merely the most recent event in the abject failure of the international community to exercise its responsibility to protect the Syrian people, is fresh in all our minds, but the actions of President Putin to overturn the post-Cold War European order by seizing Crimea and destabilising Ukraine, are still open wounds. The trampling by Islamic State of every one of the rights in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is an appalling reminder that those rights are not secure. Add to that the challenge of trade protectionism, which did so much in the 1930s to create the conditions for a global disaster, and the threat from nuclear proliferation, only temporarily held in check by the P5 plus one’s agreement with Iran.

That is a daunting yet incomplete list. What can be done to reverse those damaging trends? I suggest that there are four traps that we need to avoid. The first is to attribute all the damage being done to the rules-based international system to the surge in support for protest movements. That surge certainly makes finding solutions more difficult and could, if left to grow unchecked, make our predicament even worse. But we must not dismiss these large protest votes in this country and in the US last year, and perhaps elsewhere in Europe within months, as simply aberrant reactions that can be ignored. As the noble Lord, Lord Tugendhat, said, populism is as much a symptom as it is a cause. Where we can find some policy responses to the root causes of those negative protest reactions, we will really need to deploy them.

The second trap is to believe that we are engaged in some titanic struggle between nation states and multilateral organisations. The nation state is not under threat, nor is it the root of all evil, nor is it about to disappear. It is in fact an essential building block for that international co-operation which is required if we are to handle successfully all those policy areas where action by individual states is no longer adequate to the task.

The third trap is to do nothing apart from wringing our hands. Intervention in Iraq and Afghanistan may have been the misguided or inadequate but non-intervention is a policy choice too, fraught with consequences, as we have seen in Syria. Allowing world trade liberalisation, which has brought so many millions of people out of poverty in recent years, to founder in tit-for-tat retaliation would simply lead to impoverishment and destabilisation, as it did in the 1930s.

The fourth trap is to believe in all that loose talk about living in a post-truth world. We may indeed live in a world where it is easier than before to plant plain lies on the public consciousness, but we do not live in a post-reality world, so sooner rather than later we will find current trends, if unchecked, leading to real, serious damage to our prosperity and security.

If we are to avoid these traps, we will certainly need to make a better job than we have done in the past of setting out a compelling case for the benefits of a rules-based international order. That case will need to cover the whole range of our international commitments and obligations in the UN, NATO and the World Trade Organization. It will require making common cause with other like-minded countries—often our former partners in the European Union. Where will the United States stand in all this? That is not a question that can or should be answered with confidence one day before President Trump is inaugurated. But neither systematic compliance with US policies nor systematic opposition to them would seem a sensible approach. That means we—and, above all, our Government—will face some difficult choices in the months and years ahead.