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WORLD CITIZEN LETTER: 544
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WCL 544 January 2007
Pernicious nonsense
In the news summaries of the British prime minister’s latest excursion into foreign policy theory and futurology, the most striking fact for world citizens was his omissions. He had nothing to say about international law and nothing about the European Union. Nor anything substantial about the United Nations or even about the states and powers that today determine events and policy is the non-Western world. In short, it was an exercise in shaped nostalgia, masquerading as a serious consideration of future British needs and policy.
Tony Blair, who has become increasingly authoritarian and irresponsible over the years, came out with a pronouncement on Britain in the world which is really preposterous. His speech about what Britain’s place should be rivals the dreams of the pre-Suez Anthony Eden and a host of colonialists whose atlases across a quarter of the world were coloured red. He managed to sound like a man who fell to sleep in 1907 and woke a century later.
In 1945 the victorious leaders of the world’s governments signed a document which offered the chance of turning the world into a peaceful place. The UN Charter, had it been put into effect, could have been the starting-point for a world of law and peace. Before the war ended it was ignored with the dropping of the second atom bomb and was soon disregarded by all the leading powers. By not creating a working Military Staff Committee they failed to establish a the necessary framework for a control of force by the UN.
America and Russia soon launched into a Cold War, with over 40 years of determined hostility, only ended when new generations began to think differently. But not only did they not return to the original U.N. aim of a world without war, the principal leaders ignored the positive moves that during the Cold War had offered alternatives to hostility and afforded scope for moves back to the U.N. track or its equivalent. We are not seeing the results.
Those possibilities came from the several places: one was the creation of the greatest peaceful economic union in the world – the European Union. Another was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the example - again from Europe – of a court to uphold those rights. A further example of progress was the agreement on bringing up to date the Geneva Conventions, to restrict freedom of military operations and to restate international law. With moves to restrict and control, first the testing and use of nuclear weapons, the world moved towards a safer and more peaceful future. And finally, international law received its greatest boost with the setting-up of the International Criminal Court and subsequent start on the trials of war criminals.
Tony Blair has done his best to betray all these hopeful moves towards a peaceful world. By talking about being ‘at the heart of Europe’ but ignoring European leaders and opinion in his foreign policy; by permitting ‘extraordinary rendition’ to U.S. torture camps; by failing to condemn the American treatment of prisoners in Guantanamo and elsewhere; by failing to ensure negotiation of disarmament “in good faith” but instead proceeding with a replacement for the British Trident nuclear weapons system. Only on the International Criminal Court has there so far been no evidence of betrayal of the human yearning for peace through global co-operation.
The choice is very clear. No nonsense about fighting the abstract “terrorism”, exposed as that was by the terrorist attack on Baghdad entitled “Shock and Awe” to begin the illegal war on Iraq ordered by George W. Bush with toadying Tony Blair. Instead there needs to be the upholding of international law, not the deliberate breaking it - strengthening and reforming it, not perverting it for national ends. No hypocrisy about the need to reform the world’s evils with a foreign policy that is made in Washington and rubber-stamped in no. 10 Downing Street.
Britain should make itself the peace-keeper in a true sense, not the lackey of an American imperialist. There are a wide range of possibilities for reforming the world’s political structure but that needs to be done by leaders with a world citizen outlook, not by trying to resurrect Victorian ideas of the white man’s burden’. It is not and cannot be the business of the leader of a medium-sized state on the edge of Europe to tell the other ten billion people to run the world as he sees fit even if his party has allowed him to do that in his country for the past ten years.
John Roberts
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