Foreign Affairs: Global Role, Emerging Powers and New Markets

Lord Parekh Excerpts

Thursday 6th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Parekh]

My Lords, I thank the noble Lord, Lord Howell of Guildford, for securing this debate. It was really nice to see him shed the constraints of office and reflect creatively and independently on some of the larger issues of the world today. As he rightly pointed out, the international landscape is undergoing profound changes. It is undergoing profound changes at a superficial level in the sense that there are more economic, political and military players than there used to be—China, India, Brazil, possibly Indonesia and Turkey, and a few others. I would suggest that, although this is an important change, it is not a decisive one. A really decisive change is taking place at a different level; not just increasing the number of players in the game of international politics, but the way in which the game is going to be played. In other words, the real change is taking place not simply in terms of how many players there are, but how power is acquired and maintained and what is the nature of that power. I want to say something about it because the subject has been largely neglected.

All over the world there is a very profound change taking place in the sense that people are extremely suspicious of the political class and the way it has dominated and tried to monopolise political life. People want to make their own decisions and to assert themselves. The Arab spring is only a tiny footnote to history; there are lots of things like this, even in China. Through the Communist Party and through independent sources, hundreds of protests are taking place every week in China, with people wanting to assert themselves and questioning the official line on a number of issues. All this seems to indicate a groundswell of enormous, popular, raw political energy, wanting to take control of the world. They do not trust the political class, they are tired of the way in which the political class has made a complete mess of the world around them, they want to form their own opinions and, having formed their opinions, they want to make their impact felt. They have formed these opinions on the basis of a variety of sources, thanks to the internet, thanks to global connectedness, thanks to the fact that they are able to link up with powerful forces all over the world and form a global opinion within a local context. That is a profound change.

This means that if we really want to acquire power, we will have to influence how people think and how their opinions are formed. In other words, political power today does not lie in military weaponry, although that is important in times of crisis. If it were that important, Syria would not have got out of control and Iraq would have been brought under control a long time ago. Economic strength by itself does not take us very far either. I suggest that power is changing in a profound way because, once people begin to want to take control of themselves, power really consists in our ability to shape their thinking.

This is sometimes called soft power. The inventor of soft power, Joseph Nye, is a friend and I have debated this concept with him. I told him that I think it is a hazy concept. Soft power is simply a softer version of hard power and that is how it has sometimes been understood, the assumption being that what military weaponry has obtained, we will now obtain by softer means. Soft power is no longer soft, because once you are able to grip people’s imagination and shape their thinking, your hold is far firmer than military weaponry would give you. I would rather talk in the language of moral authority.

A country is able to shape other people’s thinking if it carries a measure of moral authority in the eyes of the world. Moral authority comes from two sources: the belief on the part of others that this country is forming its views independently; and that it is a country which is worth emulating and admiring. In other words, moral authority comes from intellectual and moral sources and that is what our foreign policy should be aiming at. Unfortunately, if we look at all the documents from the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, the emphasis is almost entirely on commerce and trade. Important as these are, I do not think that the Foreign Secretary was right to say that he should turn the FCO into “a commercially focused” organisation. I think the Economist rightly called it a form of zealous mercantilism. We should rather be thinking in terms of acquiring the kind of moral authority that I am talking about. We once had it, but we lost it—or at least weakened it—partly because of the second war on Iraq, partly because of the way we behaved in Libya, saying one thing and misrepresenting what the UN resolution was about, and partly because of actions such as abstention in the recent United Nations vote on the Palestinian demand for observer status.

If we really want to acquire moral authority and influence the way the world thinks about us we will need to do a number of things. I want to mention, in the minute I have left, four important points. First, our foreign policy will have to be principled and value driven. I am not talking about an “ethical foreign policy”—we know how we got into trouble—I am talking about a foreign policy which is seen by the world as giving voice to sanity and justice and representing independence and impartiality. Secondly, we need to be more hospitable to students coming from the rest of the world. These are the people who will go back to their country and shape their part of the world. Remember, this is how the United States acquires its power. It is very striking that 73 current and former prime ministers and presidents in the rest of the world were educated in American universities.

Thirdly, we will have to think of the BBC as a central vehicle through which our views are circulated. Although cuts might have been necessary, we need to be careful that it is not required to cut down its audience or its programmes. Finally, we need to play to our strength. We have succeeded in this country in building a fairly cohesive multicultural society. The rest of the world is moving in that direction and we have something to tell it. We appear to be very resentful about our multicultural society. We appear to be carping in our criticism. It is very important that we present a profile to the world such that we are seen as a society at ease with itself. This will mean more senior diplomatic staff drawn from ethnic minorities. As of now, I do not think that this numbers more than 1.5% to 2%. It also means that we should be saying more about how different religious and cultural groups can live together and what lessons can be drawn from our experience.