Whatever else Labour people disagree about, they all agree that this Labour government needs to focus like a laser beam on domestic policy. But the new conventional wisdom is both impossible and mistaken. Impossible because the French 'no', the G8 and EU presidencies, the situation in Iran, and the arms embargo on China and Kosovo will all command prime ministerial attention in the next few months. Mistaken because the wounds of Iraq cannot be healed in the domestic sphere alone.
In 1997, Labour set about crafting a coherent foreign policy strategy: shifting from 'Little Englandism' to rules-based internationalism; from beef wars to leading in Europe; and from a 'special relationship' to a new transatlanticism where the EU would engage America in a progressive global political project. Although each of these aims was advanced in important ways in the second term, the perception is that Iraq left them in a state of disrepair. As a result, the government enters the third term with a full agenda for foreign policy, but without a big idea that could galvanise the party and unite the country.
There is a big idea whose time has come: democracy. We know that democratic countries don't go to war with each other, or starve or massacre their people. They can cope better with disasters like the tsunami. That is why British foreign policy should have the single over-arching goal of enlarging the global community of democracies.
There are familiar arguments against this—but the government should have the confidence to face them down. Democracy is too important to be left to the neo-cons, and Labour people have long fought for these principles against conservative governments that claimed only to be interested in the national interest.
Others will say that democracy is something that is fought for within countries, not something that can be imposed from the outside. They are right, but the outside world has a responsibility at the very least not to get in the way by supporting autocratic regimes politically and militarily. We can also help to create incentives for change by treating reforming countries more generously.
Too often in the past, there has been an idealistic agenda set by NGOs and a real world agenda followed by governments, with very little attempt to link the two. By setting a goal of spreading democracy and the international rule of law, the government can bring coherence to its agenda, set a realistic bench-mark against which individual decisions can be judged, and help to create a progressive consensus which will make it harder for Tory governments to go back to the bad old days.
Once the government has an overarching strategy, it will be in a better position to define what it is trying to do in the world. This should have four elements: (a) a policy towards the EU; (b) towards the US; (c) towards rising powers like China, India, and Russia; and (d) in reforming global government.
With the defeat of the constitution there is a danger of drift on Europe. The best defence against Euroscepticism is having a progressive forward-looking agenda in Brussels, rather than defending 'red lines' and talking about how much more successful Britain is than the Eurozone. At its heart, our policy should be to help develop a new global agenda for the European Union—again based on democracy.
Within the EU we should be promoting ways of bringing the institutions closer to the priorities of Europe's citizens by focusing on the question of social Europe and ensuring that the economic reforms of Lisbon are paired up with renewed attempts to tackle poverty, deliver childcare and improve public services.
This must go hand in hand with a campaign to maintain Europe's outward focus: trying to have the same transformative impact on our new neighbours in the former Soviet Union and North Africa that we had on Central and Eastern Europe in the 1990s; turning the EU into a force for the elimination of third world poverty; and dealing with migration.
Even without an EU constitution, the government must make a positive case for a European foreign minister and an external action service which will allow Britain to achieve its goals on the world stage. Britain should also remind our European allies that we have a positive agenda for Europe by taking the lead in building up European Security and Defence Policy, as well as making suggestions for practical things to do on migration and climate change.
Britain should work within the European Union to seek a common agenda with the US: promoting democracy where possible—as we have done in Ukraine and Lebanon; developing a common response to Russian authoritarianism; and a common strategy on Iran. However, the government must also get better at urging the US to listen to UK and European concerns—in private as in the past, but also in public. The key lesson of the last few years is that Europe is most successful—and useful to America—when it works out what it wants to do in the world and puts its resources behind it rather than waiting to see what the US stand will be. The situation in Iran is a case in point and stands in stark contrast to the failed policy on Iraq where European leaders were more interested in managing their respective policies towards the US than understanding the situation in Baghdad. In future, Europeans will need to work out common approaches to big global questions such as global warming, the International Criminal Court, Nuclear Proliferation, and United Nations Reform on their own—and work to bring the United States in behind them rather than spending their whole time agonising about how to manage the superpower.
This generation's biggest challenge will be maintaining the momentum for the democratic and rule-based world order which seemed inevitable after the Berlin Wall fell in 1989. The goal should be to bind rising powers like China, India, Brazil, Russia and South Africa by developing a strategic dialogue with them on UN reform, intervention, regionalism and trade, and climate change. In order to do this, we must have a European strategy for managing Great Powers: embrace India, engage China, roll back Russia.
As the world's largest democracy, India is both a force to be reckoned with and a beacon to other developing countries around the world. In order to encourage the spread of democracy, it is vital that the rest of the world sees that democratic India is treated in a qualitatively different way from undemocratic China and autocratic Russia. Europeans need to go out of their way to reward India for its democratic freedom and to encourage other countries to think that the path to global power and acceptance is acquiring democracy rather than WMD. As a matter of priority, India should be invited to join the G8, preferential trading arrangements must be arrived at, and Europeans should be at the forefront of the campaign to give India a UN Security Council Seat. There must, however, be conditions attached to India's stance on nuclear issues.
China's rise onto the global stage could be the biggest single impetus for a rule-based world order. Both because China is embracing ideas of multilateralism on a global level, and regionalism within its neighbourhood. But China also presents the biggest threat to the spread of democracy around the world, both through its example of thriving economically without political liberalisation, and through its support of undemocratic regimes around the world. The challenge is to try to build a new global partnership with China that is centred around China becoming a responsible international citizen. Concessions such as lifting the EU Arms Embargo, market economy status, participation in the G8, and technology transfer must be tied to changes in China's global orientation on questions such as proliferation of WMD, intervention in countries like Sudan, and support for Iran.
In the early years after 1991, European policymakers treated Russia like a giant Poland and believed that it would come around to a European way of doing things through positive engagement and integration. Unfortunately, the disastrous results of European and American policies towards Russia in the early 1990s have led Russia in precisely the opposite direction, and Russia's democratic reversals have not been confined to its borders. The recent situation in Ukraine points to the poisonous influence Russia yields on its neighbours using ethnic tensions to foster instability in Transnistria, South Ossetia, Nagorno-Karabakh and Abkhazia. Instead of showing a supine attitude towards a deteriorating Russia, the European Union should aim to systematically surround and contain Russia by engaging its neighbouring states and giving them incentives to join the Eurosphere. At Gleneagles this year, Putin should be told clearly that this will be his last G8 if he continues to reverse democracy.
If Britain's over-arching goal is to enlarge the global community of democracies that respect international law, we must learn from the one method that has been successful in driving and anchoring democratic reform in the world: Club Membership. The most troubled areas in the world—Africa, South Asia, the Middle East—are the least integrated. They are bad neighbourhoods. We need to help them by giving them access to markets and cancelling debt. But the good things we are doing in these areas are dispersed so our influence will be blunted unless they are attached to club membership.
So we must maintain the momentum for expanding and reforming the European Union. The most important thing is to agree never to define the borders of the European Union, and to treat enlargement as a historic project for the European Union by selling the benefits of peace, stability, and economic dynamism to its citizens. This is of increased important after the 'no' vote in France, as European leaders will press to postpone negotiations with Turkey in order to show they are listening.
Second, the government must make European Neighbourhood Policy work. There are 80 countries around the European Union in sub-Saharan Africa, the Middle East and North Africa, the Western Balkans, and the European CIS. Through them, 20 per cent of the world's population is umbilically linked to the EU. The Association Agreements which institutionalise the trade, aid, credit and even currency linkages with these countries should be turned into much clearer Action Plans with at most six political priorities each year. All financial and trading relationships should have clear conditionality, and packages with meaningful benefits must be given to reforming countries to create a real sense of competition.
Third, the government should work to make membership of existing global clubs such as the United Nations Security Council, UN Human Rights Commission, IAEA, and G7 dependent on meeting strict standards on democracy, proliferation, and human rights.
Of course the main focus of the third term must be domestic policy, but an attempt to engage the party in a positive forward looking discussion about Britain and Europe's role in the world could play a role in healing some of the divisions created by the Iraq war.
Read more by Mark Leonard: www.cer.org.uk