Libya

Lord Teverson Excerpts

Friday 1st April 2011 Lords Chamber

[Lord Teverson]

My Lords, the military intervention in Libya was one of the most difficult areas on which to decide—whether it would be a good thing, a bad thing or where it would end, and many of those questions still have to be answered. However, naturally and understandably we look at the difficulties and obstacles that we created in Iraq and the lessons that we have to learn from that. I shall come back to one or two of those later.

When I had to make my own mind up, as one does on these issues, I looked not so much to Iraq but back to Bosnia and the instance when we had major conflict on the European continent to which, as Europe, we were unable to respond. We saw the carnage, bloodshed and, indeed, the genocide that took place within the former Yugoslavia during those terrible civil wars. That was when many of us said that Europe could never allow violence of that scale to take place in our own backyard again, and it made me resolute that the intervention in Libya was correct. That part of north Africa may not be part of the classic European continent but it is part of our backyard. Maybe unlike my noble friend, with whom I agree on many things, I believe that Europe has performed not too badly in a number of areas—I shall come to when it has not performed so well—but Europe introduced sanctions much wider than the UN sanction regime early on, and was united in that.

The noble Baroness, Lady Ashton, our colleague and high representative in Europe, was one of the first to draw attention to the need for Europe to react to greater democratisation and the various new movements in north Africa and the Middle East. Indeed, France and the United Kingdom were leading the political movements to make sure that practical action to help the anti-Gaddafi forces could take place, not necessarily within a European Union context, but before Benghazi fell. The United States, understandably because of its recent history in Iraq and Afghanistan, was very unwilling to take a lead—rightly, because it is our neighbourhood and not that of the United States. The European Union in its emergency Council meeting on 11 March stated categorically—all 27 member states in unanimity—that the Gaddafi regime could no longer act as an intermediary and had to go in terms of a Government of Libya. Those are the positive points in how the European Union reacted.

It is clear that the abstention by Germany in the Security Council was a major blow to European unity. If it was a part of trying to save regional elections in Baden-Württemberg, that clearly did not work. Perhaps even more ironically, although I welcome it, Germany then came back at the subsequent Council and welcomed the UN peace resolution.

What we have shown here—almost going back to the St Malo agreement at the beginning of the previous Government—is that for European defence to work, it has to work practically and has to work between the two nations which account for some 50 per cent of defence expenditure, ourselves and France. As the noble Lord, Lord Anderson, said, this situation was never in the coalition agreement. Ironically, I doubt that this situation was even in the minds of the two Governments when they signed the two UK-French defence treaties at the end of last year—a time that would have been much closer to this situation. The circumstances would have been around all sorts of defence co-operation—aircraft carriers and nuclear—but would never have been seen to be about something more practical that could take place in Libya.

My noble friend Lord Trimble also mentioned the EU’s potential further use of a mission in Libya. We were quite amazed to see—our eyebrows were rather raised—that this was not going to be a civilian mission but a military mission, EU for Libya. I stress that all that the Council decision perhaps today does is to move forward to a planning stage, rather than to decide that action should be taken, and that such action should be humanitarian. There is a huge potential contradiction or conflict in that the only reason military assistance from Europe would be required would be for humanitarian assistance, which I am sure we would all applaud, and that would be only if humanitarian aid cannot be delivered without military help. It will be delivered with military help only if there is likely to be conflict in terms of its delivery. I welcome the pre-planning that is taking place and that the lessons from Iraq have been learnt. In the pre-planning of such a mission—should it ever be used and it is not necessarily intended that it should—I urge the Government to look at those contradictions very carefully. If it takes place, it needs to be successful rather than a failure.

In my final minute, I come back to the broader issue of the area and Europe. One of the contradictions of the European Union is that its power, its soft power and its whole raison d’être in a practical sense, is around an economic bloc, and around trade and commercial relationships within itself and the rest of the world. That is where its power really lies. It is about doing business with whoever in the rest of the world wants to do business. Unlike other international organisations, the EU has a very high ethical content in terms of membership, the Copenhagen criteria, the rule of law, democracy, human rights and the rights of minorities, et cetera. It is extremely difficult to reconcile those two different arms to the rest of the world when it has to make decisions.

On neighbourhood policy in the south and in the eastern Mediterranean, it is important to remember that, while trade relations will always continue and the EU will continue to use its leverage there, clearly now it cannot offer membership to democracies and those countries in north Africa which we hope will meet the Copenhagen criteria. But it should be able to offer a much closer political, as well as economic, relationship to those countries, which is only available to those countries that have similar standards to those in Europe. That is the way in which I believe European neighbourhood policy needs to proceed in a practical and an ethical way.