Armistice Day: Centenary

Lord Hannay of Chiswick Excerpts

Monday 5th November 2018 Lords Chamber

[Lord Hannay of Chiswick (CB)]

My Lords, perhaps one good way to mark the centenary of the end of the First World War is to identify the main lessons from that appalling catastrophe that still have relevance and resonance today, and to commit ourselves to a renewed effort to apply those lessons which, I fear—as my remarks will show, I hope—we are not doing all that successfully. So here is a short list, although by no means an exhaustive one.

It certainly was not the war to end all wars. We surely do now need to put more resources and more political backing into conflict prevention, principally though not exclusively through the United Nations. We should encourage the UN Secretary-General to make more use of Article 99 of the charter, which enables him, on his own initiative, to bring threats to peace and security before the Security Council. We should bolster his conflict-prevention capacity. We should also be more active ourselves in both conflict prevention and in trying to bring conflicts to an end—and there I would mention the case of Yemen, which is very much a case in point.

Secondly, 1918 saw a great surge in demand to hang the Kaiser—probably not the best way to proceed if, like me, you are opposed to capital punishment. It reminds us, however, of the need to have a genuinely effective means of bringing to account those who initiate wars of aggression and those who commit war crimes. That means standing up firmly against the quite disgraceful speech recently made by the US National Security Advisor, John Bolton, attacking the International Criminal Court. We need to do everything we can to make that court effective.

The third lesson is the responsibility of uncontrolled arms races in creating the conditions for war. Obviously, in the case of the First World War the clearest example was the naval arms race between Britain and Germany. That was of course an age before nuclear weapons and the intercontinental ballistic missiles to deliver them. But we need to recognise that we live today in an age when arms races do still pose a risk. Just look at the naval arms race that is going on in the Far East at the moment. This is a moment, too, when even the rather inadequate international agreements on arms control are beginning to atrophy; the most recent example, of course, being the US decision to announce its intention to withdraw from the INF. We surely need to try to reverse that trend.

Fourthly, it may be that in 1918 it was recognised that some categories of weapon were just too horrendous to tolerate. That led to the worldwide ban on the use of poison gas in 1925. But we have to realise now—and we do realise—that the provisions of the Chemical Weapons Convention, which was the implementation of that commitment in 1925, are being flouted in Syria and, of course, closer to home, in Salisbury.

Fifthly, perhaps the most important lesson to draw from 1918 was that the world could not afford to rely on informal co-operation between the great powers of the day, whoever they might be—the so-called Concert of Europe—to prevent conflicts breaking out. That realisation led to the foundation of the League of Nations, which of course proved unable to fulfil its purpose; and then, after the Second World War, it led to the foundation of the United Nations. Today we have a President of the United States, in contrast to Woodrow Wilson and Franklin Roosevelt, who can see no use for the UN and little benefit from the collective security it and NATO are set up to provide. That is a pretty sobering prospect, and so surely, as a nation which supports a rules-based international order, we need to get together with other like-minded countries to resist that trend. Of course, it is difficult to describe leaving the European Union, which has done so much to heal the wounds from 1918 and 1945, as a step in the right direction.

Finally, and sixthly, there was one lesson which perhaps we have done a bit more to learn. One hundred years ago marked the apogee of a world influenza pandemic, wrongly known as Spanish influenza, which killed more people worldwide than the war itself, many of them weakened by the privations of war. Since then we have got a little better at dealing with that sort of global pandemic—just a bit better, but remember that we did not do terribly well with Ebola the first time it broke out, and are we absolutely sure that we would do better if we were assailed by another pandemic?

So there are six either unlearned or at least imperfectly learned lessons, all of them originating from 1918—quite a challenge if the world is not to fall into some of the same horrors it fell into then.