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Britain:
still looking for that role?
Brian Barder’s article was first published in The Political Quarterly,
volume 72, no. 3 (July/September 2001) and is reproduced here with their
permission. Readers of Password magazine may have seen this in the
November 2001 edition.
If you would like to comment on Brian Barder's article, please email them
to the Editor of Password. Interesting and provocative comments will be
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their authors.
At my final interview in the Civil Service selection process, more than
forty years ago, the obligatory lady trade unionist member of the panel,
noticing that I had done my national military service in Hong Kong,
repeatedly asked me whether I had felt “the lure of the Orient”? My
answers, confirming that Hong Kong had indeed been interesting, even
fascinating, failed to satisfy my inquisitor; she presumably regarded them
as too banal to do justice to her vision of the “lure of the Orient”.
Eventually I had to be rescued by other members of the panel.
I was reminded of that exchange by Sir John Coles’s “Making Foreign
Policy”.1 The book helpfully and lucidly describes the process of making
foreign policy, as its title implies. But an alternative title for the
book might have been “Seeking Foreign Policy”; for its recurring theme is
the author’s regret at his (and others’) failure to identify anything that
could properly be described as “Britain’s foreign policy”. Trawling
through the texts for a “definition of the national interest”, a
“strategy”, a “mission statement”, “a single overarching concept or
design” (p44), a “certain idea of Britain” (the title of the culminating
chapter), even assessments of national assets, he remains dissatisfied:
“Beyond the assessment of interests and assets, and the arithmetic of
resources, something more is needed. It has to do with ‘vision’, a way of
describing objectives which by its clarity and force gives them all
meaning, not just for foreign policy practitioners but, even more
importantly, for the public at large and those foreign audiences who are
in some way on the receiving end of policy.” (p186)
Yet Coles’s concluding words “ “I doubt whether any comparable country
could credibly claim more success for its foreign policy in these years2
and I still believe that our own was broadly successful. But it could have
been, and still could be, better” (p206) “ suggest that such an assessment
of success or failure might be feasible despite the absence of a
definitive foreign policy statement.
After extended scrutiny of others’ abortive attempts at definitions,
Coles’s own best shot at a “certain idea of Britain” is somewhat of an
anti-climax:
“My own choice would be ‘a major European power with global interests and
responsibilities’, the last word deriving primarily but not exclusively
from our permanent membership of the UN Security Council and membership of
the G8 and our obligations towards our remaining overseas territories.”
(p180)
It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the Holy Grail which John Coles
pursues so earnestly doesn’t, and can’t, exist. Any “grand strategic
concept”, “single overarching concept or design”, all-inclusive statement
of foreign policy or definition of Britain’s international interests,
extrapolated as Coles proposes from the sum of individual policies towards
countries and issues and boiled down into a single, easily assimilated
soundbite, is bound to come out as a statement of the boringly obvious, or
a tautology, or both. The only answer to the question, “Do you feel the
lure of the Orient, Mr Barder?”, is that the question has no meaning and
therefore no satisfactory answer.
An overloaded Office
On several grounds I hesitate to question in this way what seems to be a
basic premise of this book. I succeeded John Coles in 1991 as British High
Commissioner to Australia (presumably London felt that it was time for
Coles to make way for an older man) where, as described in the book, he
had skilfully used his connections as a former private secretary to Mrs
Thatcher in Number Ten in order to activate greater interest on the part
of Westminster and Whitehall in the British-Australian relationship. After
handing over to me the Canberra Residence “ once described, unfairly, by
an earlier occupant as resembling a golf club house in the home counties
of England3 “ Coles returned to London as a deputy secretary in the FCO.
Shortly after my own grateful retirement from Australia and diplomacy in
1994, Coles was appointed permanent under-secretary of the Foreign and
Commonwealth Office and Head of the Diplomatic Service. In addition to his
time at Number Ten, Coles had served as British ambassador to Jordan, in
the Cabinet Office, and in Brussels, Cairo, Dubai and Khartoum. So he is
formidably well equipped to judge the strengths and weaknesses of the
British foreign policy machine and its performance over many years. How
far does Making Foreign Policy satisfy the high expectations aroused by
such wide experience?
Several of Coles’s themes echo the concerns of British diplomats, past and
present:
the problem of the gross overload of both ministers and officials,
leaving them wholly inadequate time to think about foreign policy in a
coherent and reasonably long-term perspective;
the demands of the cult of management, virtually out of control by the
time I left the service in 1994 and by all accounts even more
voraciously all-consuming now;
the indiscriminate application of delegation of responsibilities to FCO
departments and overseas posts, hugely increasing the management burden
on everybody and complicating essential monitoring and accountability at
the centre.
Overloading of both ministers and senior officials has been aggravated by
the information technology revolution which has made the mass production
of documents so easy that everybody is permanently chin-deep in paper. The
availability of fast and relatively cheap travel, and the proliferation of
meetings of international institutions (especially the EU), together mean
that ministers and officials spend almost as much time in airport
waiting-rooms as at their desks. The incessant demands of the media
contribute to this gross overload: refusal to give an interview to the
Today programme or The World at One or Newsnight or the Sun newspaper is
portrayed as evidence of secretiveness at best, at worst of guilt. The
mania for management has all but consumed the upper echelons of the
Foreign and Commonwealth Office: instead of being the Foreign Secretary’s
principal objective adviser on foreign policy, the permanent
under-secretary has become a managing director “ indeed, the deputy
secretaries under him are now actually called the “board of management”,
the assistant under-secretaries on the next rung have been weirdly renamed
“directors”, and the groups of departments which they supervise are now
“commands” “ terminologies borrowed from business and the army, neither of
which remotely resembles the FCO or the diplomatic service. “Directors”
and overseas posts have to manage their own mini-budgets: “delegation”,
along with motherhood and the principle of subsidiarity, is held to be
self-evidently desirable, not necessarily much enjoyed by its recipients,
but bracing and character-forming, like cold baths and cross-country runs.
All this leaves little time for thinking about or discussing broad policy
issues. The urgent constantly crowds out the important; management, the
media, travel and getting on top of the Himalayan piles of paper crowd out
both.
Coles recognises the impossibility of doing anything about most of these
problems. He proposes one practical solution “ to create a new post of
Diplomatic Service Manager who would be the FCO accounting officer
reporting, presumably, directly to the Foreign Secretary and to
Parliament, leaving the permanent secretary free to concentrate on policy.
This, though, prompts tricky questions. Would the new Manager have a
hierarchy of officials working for him or her, in addition to the existing
hierarchy of deputy secretaries and “directors”? If not, will the Coles
solution benefit anyone other than the permanent secretary? Would other
Whitehall permanent secretaries, and their senior colleagues, similarly be
relieved of their management responsibilities? What would it all cost?
Anyway, can policy ever be wholly divorced from decisions about priorities
in the allocation of resources, the essence of management? Still, even
stating the proposal focuses attention on the problem, which must be
better than continuing to ignore it.
Coles also acknowledges, usefully, that many junior officials both in the
FCO and in overseas posts are seriously overworked:
“The general problem of overload affects officials as well as ministers.
It is a matter of fact, though it is not well recognized publicly, that
many Foreign Office officials work unduly long hours and are under
considerable and constant pressure.” (p132)
Officers working ten, eleven or twelve hours a day, and then taking work
home in the evenings and at weekends, will for the most part be working
below par. There are implications for health and compliance with EU
directives, as well as for performance. But exhortations and regulations
cannot solve a problem which reflects the constant cuts (until very
recently, at the time of writing in February 2001) in resources of
manpower and money, contrasted with the continuing growth in FCO and
Diplomatic Service activities and responsibilities.
FCO officials are by no means alone in working undesirably long hours. But
the risk of disaster arising from poor decisions, or omissions, by tired
and harassed diplomats in London and overseas may perhaps be greater than
in most other walks of life. Sometimes the mistakes and lost opportunities
pass unnoticed. The constant overloading of officials in the FCO has, I
think, caused a gradual but perceptible coarsening of the department’s
output: a dumbing-down of its written communications, of its standards of
management, of its policy prescriptions and of its political
sensitivities. Other factors, perhaps including changing educational
standards, may also have contributed. But sheer overwork, and the haste
and fatigue that go with it, are surely among the culprits.
Sometimes the failures and mistakes come vividly to light. The report of
the House of Commons Select Committee on Foreign Affairs in early 1999 on
the Sierra Leone arms fiasco revealed a sorry tale of failures in the
FCO4, identifying as a principal cause the gross overloading of many of
the officers concerned, from the relevant head of department down to quite
junior levels. Deficiencies included:
failure to spot a developing situation with obvious potential for
political disaster, and to recommend action to avert it;
lack of communication between junior and senior officials, and between
officials and ministers;
failure to act on a documented warning from a junior official that a
head of mission overseas was acting contrary to official policy;
failure to circulate within the FCO and to overseas posts essential
information about the implications and scope of a UN Security Council
resolution or of the domestic legislation implementing it;
inaccurate and inadequate briefing of an FCO minister for a
parliamentary debate;
lack of liaison with other government departments;
failure to notice or check the veracity of a press report which should
have rung alarm bells; and
such delay in investigating an apparent breach of the UN resolution and
of UK law, in recommending action following the investigation, and in
warning ministers about its implications, that the story broke in a
letter addressed to ministers and released to the press before ministers
had had either warning or advice from their officials.5
Such a catalogue of failures over a single incident would seem beyond
belief, had it not been documented by an internal inquiry and subsequently
by the select committee. The fact that so many of the officials
responsible were grossly overworked was not the only cause of these
multiple failures: other systemic and human faults were also at work. But
both the FCO and the select committee agreed that overwork was a
significant contributory factor.
Does the world need Britain’s leadership?
One possible approach to the problems of overload is to ask the Treasury,
ministers and Parliament for more manpower and more money; the other is to
take steps to reduce the volume of work (an option considered below). The
former is the course recommended, without optimism, by Coles in Making
Foreign Policy. It is naturally the course favoured by those who wish
Britain to continue to “punch above its weight” in international affairs
(in Douglas Hurd’s familiar words6): to continue acting as a global
player, making its mark as a permanent member of the UN Security Council,
of the G8, of the EU, of the Commonwealth and of the (sometimes disavowed
but still prized) special relationship with Washington, and to make
maximum use of the acknowledged prowess of its armed forces and diplomacy,
of the BBC, the British Council, British academia and some outstanding
British NGOs. John Coles catalogues these British assets with justified
pride, recalls that Britain’s interests are global rather than regional,
and infers that Britain is consequently both entitled and obliged to
continue its activist role in world affairs, participating in everything
and taking the lead whenever possible.
This echoes a national preoccupation “ almost an obsession “ with
Britain’s “leadership role” and the strength it demands. Coles approvingly
cites Tony Blair, in November 1997: “‘We can be pivotal, we can be
powerful in our influence’ … we had many strengths: ‘strong armed forces …
we must be a leading player in Europe … we should be strong in Europe and
strong with the United States’ … Britain must be a key player on major
transnational issues” (pp1923, my emphasis). Robin Cook’s mission
statement for the FCO immediately after the 1997 election (also quoted
approvingly by Coles, pp18990) again emphasised the need for strength: we
would conduct a global foreign policy “to make the UK a leading player in
… Europe … to strengthen the Commonwealth … to use the status of the
United Kingdom at the United Nations to secure more effective
international action to keep the peace of the world and to combat poverty
… to strengthen our relationships in all the world’s regions” (my
emphasis). Addiction to a leadership role is seemingly shared by the
opposition in Parliament, by much of the media and by the Labour party,
whose ‘year 2000 consultation document’, Britain in the World, stressed
the need for Britain’s ‘leading role’ or ‘leadership’ no fewer than forty
times in forty-three pages.
So Dean Acheson’s celebrated dictum of 1962 that Britain had “lost an
empire but not yet found a role”7 is apparently contradicted by the
general current perception of Britain’s role as a (if not the) leader in
world affairs. This, however, prompts some awkward questions. Is Britain
willing to devote the resources required by an activist, leadership role
in world affairs to its diplomacy “ and to its armed forces, ravenous for
ever more expensive weapons and equipment? How realistic is Britain’s
title to global leadership, in relation to its past and present places in
the economic, social and cultural league tables? Do other nations share
the vision of British leadership, glad to follow where Britain leads? Have
recent British activities on the world stage been successes to be emulated
or, sometimes, regrettable failures? Does our preoccupation with
leadership indicate that we have still not come to terms with the
realities of long-term decline and our reduced place in the world?
Perhaps these questions, and suggested answers to them, lie outside the
intended scope of Sir John Coles’s book. At any rate, he doesn’t address
them, although they inevitably occur to those who cast a sceptical eye on
some of the book’s underlying assumptions. Answers to such questions need
to accommodate some inconvenient factors:
Several of Britain’s EU partners, and some others, have overtaken the
United Kingdom economically and socially since the Second World War and
are now perceptibly more prosperous, enjoying a higher standard of
living, and better and more equitable social services.
Britain’s political, judicial and constitutional systems are in many
ways archaic and ineffectual compared with those of its European and
other partners, and the present Labour government’s proposals for
reforming them are in several, though not all, respects inadequate and
timid.
England’s underclass hooligans (although the type is by no means unique
to England) are notorious throughout Europe, and not only at football
matches.
Britain has still not succeeded in solving its greatest national
problem, that of Northern Ireland.
It has gradually emerged that the West’s diplomacy at Rambouillet (in
which Britain, with the Americans, played a ‘leading role’), immediately
before the start of the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia in March 1999, was
deeply flawed; and that the resulting civilian deaths, destruction of
the Yugoslav economy, and much of the ethnic cleansing which followed
rather than preceded the bombing could have been avoided if USUK
diplomacy at Rambouillet had been more flexible, imaginative and
realistic.8 Rambouillet and the consequences that flowed from it
represented a major failure of British (and American) diplomacy, perhaps
the most costly diplomatic failure for Britain since the Argentine
invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982 and the Suez disaster in 1956.9
Britain has little realistic hope of playing a ‘leading role’ in Europe
while (1) it remains outside the single currency (and highly ambivalent
about the possibility of joining it);10 (2) hostility to the EU and its
institutions remains so widespread in Britain; (3) Britain adopts
attitudes to European issues based on belief in a national superiority
that is not at all evident to its partners; and (4) so few in Britain
share or even seem to understand the vision of a future Europe, united
in a quite new form of political and economic association, which
inspires millions of Europeans in mainland Europe.
Britain has been among the most vocal and enthusiastic proponents of
policies which are increasingly seen as flawed, e.g. the strategy for
dealing with Russia following the collapse of the USSR; the failure to
replace NATO by a new defence alliance geared to the new challenges of
the post-Cold War world; the eastward expansion of NATO, with its dire
consequences for relations with Moscow; the failure to pre-empt the
disintegration of Yugoslavia and the mistakes made over Bosnia; the
diplomatic blunders over Kosovo (see above); failure to act decisively
to move towards nuclear disarmament; sponsorship of seriously
misconceived IMF policies imposing structural adjustment programmes on
developing countries; compulsive efforts to sell to developing countries
arms which they don’t need, can’t afford and won’t pay for; neglect of
mounting problems throughout Africa once apartheid in South Africa
ended; automatic participation with the Americans in bombing Iraq and
insistence on continued sanctions long after either policy has ceased to
achieve any identifiable results.
Some of these failed or questionable policies have been corrected or
adjusted; they deserve to be balanced by many successes, especially in
recent economic management. But it seems incontrovertible that the record
has been decidedly patchy. On even the most generous reckoning, Britain is
simply not perceived by much of the world as playing (or as having earned)
a ‘leading role’ in their affairs, nor as being particularly successful in
managing its own. Perhaps it might behove Britain to display more modesty
in its national aspirations and claims, and less enthusiasm for offering
the rest of the world lessons in how to manage itself better.
Scaling down
Asking the Treasury and Parliament for more manpower and more money is not
the only way to correct the mismatch identified by John Coles between the
diplomatic workload and the resources supplied for its effective despatch.
Instead, the workload could “ arguably should “ be reduced by a deliberate
scaling-down of the role that Britain seeks to play.
What would be the implications of a different, more modest and less
activist role for Britain in international affairs? A necessary
starting-point would be a hard-headed appraisal of Britain’s priorities,
to identify:
which areas of international affairs are so central to Britain’s key
interests as to require active British participation;
which international issues impact directly on the well-being and
prosperity of the British people “ and are likely to be significantly
affected by British activity; and
which areas of traditional British activity really need our input, and
which have attracted us mainly for abstract reasons of national status
and to flatter the egos of our political leaders and their diplomatic
servants.
On the last point, we may take just two examples. (1) What tangible
benefits accrue to Britain from its permanent membership of the UN
Security Council? Do any such benefits outweigh the penalty of being
forced by that membership to take positions on international disputes and
conflicts which are none of our business, or actively to participate in
international measures to resolve them? Similarly, (2) what are the
tangible benefits of continuing to possess, and to be ready if necessary
to use, nuclear weapons? What protection do those weapons provide for
Britain, or even for Europe, that justifies their immense cost, both
financially and in the sense of giving us a false impression of our real
power and influence? In what conceivable and foreseeable circumstances
would any British government seriously contemplate using a nuclear weapon?
Specifically, how would our security be compromised by our abandoning
nuclear weapons and adopting a defence posture like Germany’s or Italy’s?
Can it seriously be argued that the prospects for eventual universal
nuclear disarmament, especially in the era of George W. Bush, would be
appreciably prejudiced by Britain participating in the future as a
non-nuclear rather than as a nuclear power? I do not suggest that there
are obvious answers to any of these, or other similar, questions: only
that they need to be addressed, and with open minds. No issues of such
importance ought to be declared off limits. They surely deserve
consideration in any treatment of the making of foreign policy by its
former practitioners. We must wait for John Coles’s next book with such
patience as we can muster.
Scaling down British diplomacy should not be driven mainly by the wish to
save money, however desirable a by-product that might be. The overriding
objective should be to adopt a level and spread of diplomatic activity
based on a realistic, illusion-free appreciation of British interests,
power of independent action, strengths and weaknesses (as perceived by
others in the world and not just by our own politicians and media), and
ability or willingness to provide the resources required to sustain
international activity at any given level.
The appraisal underlying such a new and more realistic policy would need
to question the justification for (e.g.) proactive British involvement,
through the UN, the Commonwealth, the G8, or even the EU, in international
disputes or measures (such as peacekeeping, monitoring, mediation, and so
forth) in areas of the world where British interests are not directly or
primarily involved. Similarly, there are many countries around the world
where there is no obvious need to maintain a full-scale British diplomatic
mission, attempting to perform with a minuscule staff the full and varied
functions of an embassy in a country where British interests are directly
engaged. Such small missions need to be liberated from endless
bureaucratic demands from all over Whitehall (including the FCO) which
prevent them from carrying out their minimal basic functions. Indeed, in
some countries where we now maintain diplomatic posts there is no need for
British representation at all, especially if our occasional interests can
be adequately looked after by the embassy of an EU or Commonwealth partner
with a greater stake locally.
But shrinking Britain’s diplomacy would require one overriding sea-change
at home “ the most difficult of all. Ministers from the Prime Minister
downwards, FCO and other Whitehall officials, Members of Parliament and
the media, all assume that information about what is happening at all
times, in all parts of the world, is instantly available in London. FCO
departments feel obliged to be ready to answer, at a moment’s notice,
detailed questions from any source about the countries they deal with.
Consequently, they expect from British overseas missions a flow of
information and assessments, for use in case of need. Posts in their turn
take it to be a primary function to provide an endless stream of reports
to London, sometimes including treatises on the most arcane aspects of the
host country’s affairs. As head of a busy geographical department in the
FCO, I once had to appeal to our biggest embassy in my area to reduce the
flow of their political reporting to London: our limited staff in the
department simply lacked the capacity for dealing with it. (The ambassador
concerned was clearly devastated, and I had to fly out to the country
concerned to explain myself to him and his assembled staff.) Such a heavy
flow of information from posts is unnecessary: very little of it is put to
practical use, some is modestly valuable as background, most is filed away
virtually unread.
There is an obvious paradox here. If our diplomats are too overworked to
cope with the volume of reporting from overseas posts, while those working
overseas have time to gather and transmit so much unnecessary information,
and if so little of it is actually used, why not simply cut the amount of
reporting commissioned and undertaken? That is certainly the logical and
right solution. Current attitudes and assumptions militate against it,
however. The FCO regularly appeals for brevity and rigorous selection. But
the effects are negligible. Ministers expect such an elaborate and
well-oiled machine as the FCO and its posts overseas to provide them with
the information they need, if necessary at short notice. Their officials
do not want to be found trouserless (or skirtless) when asked to produce
an instant brief on some issue suddenly erupting on the other side of the
world; overseas posts wish to demonstrate that they are earning their keep
by supplying continuous information; parliamentarians and the media expect
Foreign Office ministers to answer immediately any question about any
event anywhere in the world, whether or not British interests are
involved, just as they expect the Secretary of State for Health to respond
at short notice to any question about the National Health Service. The
whole political culture conspires to oblige all concerned to maintain a
comprehensive, rolling database of up-to-date information as an insurance
policy, in case any of it should be needed, to protect ministers at
whatever cost against any charge of culpable ignorance of facts which they
ought to possess, of failure to have a considered policy on every
conceivable problem arising anywhere, or of complacency and indolence in
not proposing to do anything about it.
In truth, the habit of assuming that the government in London possesses an
encyclopaedic knowledge of everything that happens anywhere in the world,
and a policy for dealing with it, dates back to an era, long gone, in
which Britain was a world power and the centre of a global empire; when
such knowledge was a practical necessity for those who had to take urgent
decisions intimately affecting countries and territories across the globe.
But this has not been the case for well over half a century. It is surely
time for Britain to move, with dignity and deliberation, towards a
situation in which the Foreign & Commonwealth Secretary, when asked in
Parliament what are the prospects for a peaceful settlement of the general
strike taking place in Tsetseland, and what action Her Majesty’s
Government intends to take to promote such a settlement, feels able “ and
safe “ to reply: “Her Majesty’s Government has no knowledge of the general
strike referred to by the Honourable Gentleman, and no plans for taking
any action to resolve it.”
If such a reply becomes a real possibility in my or my children’s
lifetimes, I (and they) will be pleasantly surprised.
Notes
John Coles, Making Foreign Policy, London, John Murray, 2000. Page
references to this work are given in the text at the site of quotation.
(Return to text.)
Apparently referring to the period in which Sir John Coles was head of
the Diplomatic Service, August 1994 to November 1997. (Return to text.)
Lord Carrington, Reflect on Things Past: The Memoirs of Lord Carrington,
London, Collins, 1988, p122. (Return to text.)
Occurring some time after Sir John Coles had retired from his permanent
secretary appointment. (Return to text.)
For a fuller account of this catalogue of failures, see (e.g.) the
present writer’s analysis. (Return to text.)
e.g. at Chatham House, reported in Financial Times, 4 February 1993.
(Return to text.)
Speech at the Military Academy, West Point, 5 December 1962. (Return to
text.)
NATO demanded at Rambouillet that the Serbs swallow a number of patently
unacceptable demands and threatened military action against Belgrade if
they refused to accept them; the specific demands to which the Serbs
objected most strongly were also unacceptable to the Russians, and
NATO’s inflexible insistence on them forfeited Russian collaboration and
thus any hope of UN endorsement of NATO’s subsequent action; yet every
one of those demands was dropped, with the apparently enthusiastic
agreement of the NATO leaders, from the terms of the settlement
eventually accepted by the Serbs after pressure on them by the Russians.
The point is elaborated and documented more fully in the present
writer’s article on the World Wide Web. (Return to text.)
It should be pointed out, though, that it was the political leaders
rather than the professional diplomats who were mainly responsible for
the Falklands and Suez disasters, whereas it seems likely that the
diplomats have to share with the politicians much of the blame for what
happened (or did not happen) at Rambouillet. (Return to text.)
Interestingly, Sir John Coles is reportedly among the group of public
figures opposed to British membership of the single currency but in
favour of active EU membership. (Return to text.)
©The Political Quarterly
Sir Brian Barder is a former British Ambassador to Ethiopia, Poland and
Benin and High Commissioner to Nigeria and Australia, now retired. The
views expressed in this article are purely his own.
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