New Labour: doing good in Africa
Introduction
This book is about fantasy and idealisation, about how international relationships provide opportunities to create and pursue them, and why they are essential for political communities. In its transcendence of the domestic, political realm, the field of international relations (IR) provides fantasy and idealisation in a variety of ways: for realists, it depicts a place of anarchy and free-flowing aggression; for liberal-utopians, it is potentially a place of harmony and idealism. In both cases, the international realm is thin enough (empty, even) to enable an escape from the moral complexity and banality of the normal, allowing the projection of extremes.
Of course this is a crude depiction. Many attempts have been made to qualify or reconcile the classic dichotomies of IR theory, to find ways forward in describing a thicker conception of an ethics of the international (see in particular, Cochran, 1999; Linklater, 1998). But still, for theorists and practitioners, some areas of IR remain a potentially rarefied realm, into which ideas can be projected in purer forms than would be allowed in a messier domestic context.
Britain’s policy in Africa can be viewed in such terms. By practitioners themselves, it can be seen as distinct from ‘politics as usual’, an example of an ethical approach to politics, in which self-interest and power have little share. It is described in terms of certain and universal conceptions of what it means to be ‘good’, enabling a sense of the transcendence of a grubbier conception of politics. And, although much of the analysis of the policy has questioned this depiction, it too, in different ways, has attempted to understand it within a flattened context which focuses exclusively on power and self-interest to the exclusion of an ethical or humanitarian dimension. Coming from a more pragmatic, social democratic perspective, which accepts as inevitable the complexities, the lack of conclusions and the chaotic quality of politics, I start out with the question of what role such idealisations play in political communities. To what degree is the creation of an ideal space, apart from ‘politics as usual’, a necessity; in what ways might the international realm provide one; and how can we begin to understand the ways such a space underpins the health of the political community?
I begin from a constructivist position. This roots ideas, actions and
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Britain and Africa under Blair
motivations within wider society, meaning that any examination of the way political communities approach foreign policy assumes that policies emanate from the ideas and culture of the community, and are not imposed by a distinct stratum of political elites. Instead, under investigation is a complex web of state actors who are reflecting and attempting to shape wider community ideas. It is meaningless, within this paradigm, to examine the motivations of politicians in isolation, as for example Grainger does (Grainger, 2005).1 Instead my approach is to assume that Tony Blair’s interest in Africa, his conception of what it is and what Britain does for it, are entwined with British approaches and conceptions, taking in historical experiences of Britain’s role there, and responding to contemporary political pressures and ideas.
The political community mediates and concentrates such ideas upon the state itself; state actors, as the chief protectors and representatives of the state, embody a distillation of the ways in which these processes can be related to the state in much the same way that the formal state itself can be thought of as a distillation of the wider state defined by Hegel as ‘the community as a whole with all its institutions’ – including the family and civil society as well as the political institutions (Hegel, 1991: xxv). Community at the state level carries a particular significance and is at once vital and problematic. First, in a Hegelian sense, the political state as the highest organising authority confers an essential part of identity and source of wellbeing. This is realised both in the degree to which the state embodies society’s ideas and values, and in how well the state projects itself internationally. Second, in its wider meaning, the state is the community we all belong to and, aside from the small numbers of people who emigrate, membership is involuntary. The degree of involvement also varies, but overt support does not necessarily entail more involvement than resistance: both recognise the importance of the state. I agree with David Miller’s description of the origins and complexity of national identity. ‘One is forced to bear a national identity regardless of choice, simply by virtue of participating in this way of life’ (Miller, 1995: 42). The virtue in this is that, like a family, despite periods of frustration and unhappiness, we remain engaged with the state. This iterative, unending and often painful process has been described by Michael Walzer as constituting a ‘thick’ ethical dimension (Walzer, 1994). Within states, people must develop ways of distributing goods. Walzer says they can do this, more or less well, because they share deep cultural and moral norms by virtue of their having lived together for so long. Walzer I think tends to over-simplify cultural homogeneity and glosses over the multiple and diverse types of community which under- and overlay the state community. We must allow for the fact that members of the state community bring complex identities to their membership (Adler, 2005) – a fact that makes sorting out distribution even messier, but no less thick. Because membership is inescapable, we have to resolve, or reconcile, or find a way to live with our differences to make the state work. However, the extra complexity makes the Hegelian notion
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of the ‘good state’, which successfully embodies society’s norms and then reflects them out to the wider world a deeply difficult process.
Beyond the state lies the state-system, a collection, in classic IR terms, of self-contained entities which interact independently of any higher authority. From the orthodox communitarian perspective, there is little shared between different state communities. Relations between states are voluntary, or at least fluid, shared norms are at best weak or, in Walzer’s terms, ‘thin’, because they are basic, fundamental and ideal.2 They can allow us to identify intensely at times with people from other parts of the world who are struggling to achieve goals we share – self-determination or freedom from oppression, for example – but they cannot be the basis for sorting out complicated distributive issues because they are idealised and not rooted in thick community norms.
What interests me is the relationship between the two spheres – the state and the international; the thick and the thin – and the importance of the ideal in the state’s ability to inspire wellbeing. If domestic issues are clogged up with thick, complicated and messy negotiations, what happens to ideals, to the sense we all share of reaching for something grander, more profound?
Emile Durkheim’s work on the role of religion in the creation and nurturing of community is helpful here. Durkheim argues that individuals together conceive of an ideal society by way of shared religious belief and practice. ‘It is a simple idea that consciously expresses our more or less obscure aspirations towards the good, the beautiful, the ideal. Now these aspirations have their roots in us; they come from the very depths of our being’ (Durkheim, 2001: 315). In a discussion of modern secular society’s search for a replacement for religion, Durkheim dismisses science as a possibility, giving a clear insight into the particular role religion has played. Faith, he argues, includes ‘an impulse to act’, in which speculation is essential. ‘Science is fragmentary, incomplete; it progresses slowly and can never finish: life cannot wait’ (Ibid: 325). In the religious life of the community, ‘the obscure intuitions of sensation and sentiment often take the place of logic’ (Ibid: 326). In the end, science will not do because it is an expression of collective opinion and not outside social life at all. Durkheim then suggests a number of ways in which people collectively imagine an ideal society, including the need for speculation, the importance of sensation and sentiment, an impulse to act and the search for something beyond our social life.
This search for an ideal community is, Durkheim maintains, ‘not a kind of luxury that man might do without but a condition of his existence’ (Ibid: 318) and, as such, a necessary part of a community’s health. If a state community’s imagination of itself must have a strong ideal element, isn’t this most easily achieved in relation to the wider world? Can we transcend – by escaping or enhancing – our messy, thick domestic social life by reaching up to the thin and pure international realm?
The classic way for a state community to reinforce itself is through war, and war has been the preoccupation of many IR theorists (Waltz, 1959; Bull,
3 New Labour: doing good in Africa
Britain and Africa under Blair 1995; Kagan, 2003). Hegel writes that war is necessary for states to prevent the stagnation that he argues perpetual peace would bring: ‘The state is an individual, and negation is an essential component of individuality … Not only do peoples emerge from wars with added strength, but nations troubled by civil dissension gain internal peace as a result of wars with their external enemies’ (Hegel, 1991: 362). War as an ‘ethical moment’ confers and reinforces subjectivity; it is part of the way in which states are aware of each other as different, but also related. It is through mutual recognition that states become subjects.
Mutual recognition and doing good in Africa
New Labour’s was an era of the language of idealism in foreign policy, beginning with Robin Cook’s ‘ethical element’, and continuing through Blair’s ‘humanitarian wars’. It is at best questionable how far British subjectivity under New Labour was enhanced by war. Blair’s wars – among them interventions in Kosovo, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and Iraq – had a mixed record in terms of creating the ‘Dunkirk Spirit’ effect that Chris Brown suggests is the essence of Hegel’s ‘cleansing feature of war’ (Brown, 1992: 70). Blair’s approach to Africa, however, grounded in utopian and cosmopolitan ideas and highly idealised, in a different way offered a grand, heroic identity for Britain. It embodied Durkheim’s ‘more or less obscure aspirations towards the good, the beautiful and the ideal’ and was firmly predicated on the ‘impulse to act’. Moreover, in a very concrete way, it offered escape into a realm ‘beyond social life’. My argument is that the idea of Africa and Britain’s help for Africa has worked as a way to create the sense of an ideal society in Britain, and most particularly to affirm the ‘good state’.
To understand Britain’s approach to Africa, I want to find a place for it within international relations theories on state-systems. I will look at two IR debates. The first is the traditional utopianism/realism debate which held sway through most of the twentieth century. Although this debate no longer dominates IR discourse, it is useful here because the utopian approach which characterised late nineteenth-century colonial policy – Britain’s era of ‘do-good’ imperialism3 – has strongly influenced the Labour Party’s foreign policy and echoes strongly through current ethical approaches to foreign policy. Moreover, in the tradition of unearthing latent interests, examining current policy on Africa within the utopian/realist paradigm helps towards a richer conception of how British interests are defined and sheds light on the benefits of the policy for Britain.
However, although the realist/utopian discussion helps us think about the way a state looks out at the world, it is less useful in explaining how foreign policy reflects back within a state, a key objective of this book. Therefore, I want to look at a second theoretical framework, contemporary IR theory on cosmopolitanism and communitarianism. As Brown suggests, a communitarian approach helps us see how the way we look out at the world underpins wellbeing within the state: foreign policy is no longer seen as
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purely externally focused but as a positive good that a state can offer its citizens (Brown, 1992). Second, New Labour rhetoric is strongly cosmopolitan: an examination of the cosmopolitan approach should help towards an understanding of the way the Government – and I will argue Britain more widely – sees itself in relation to Africa.
But none of this allows a sufficient development of ideas about what it means for its members that the state is ‘good’. They set off the idea of a relationship between individuals and the ‘good state’, but conventional IR approaches constrain further exploration along this path in two ways. First, they have traditionally sidelined the personal and the emotional; and second, where they have examined ideas of projection, have tended to privilege the destructive and the negative elements, particularly in their focus on war. In my attempt to explore how state engagement in ‘good’ internationally underwrites the emotional as well as physical wellbeing of the community, I will draw on the psychoanalytic work of Melanie Klein. Klein deals with the development of individual subjectivity through relationships. Most compelling is her analysis of the way in which thin, far-off relationships can be used to support and mend more fraught, thick, close relationships, something she argues is done through the splitting and projection of aggression and idealisation. Against a background of European political thought about the nature of ‘good’, of where it is imagined to be, and of the essential importance of making a connection to it, Klein’s work helps locate the immanent need for good, its source and corruption within relationships, and the ways in which individuals attempt to recreate, recapture and use it to resolve the difficulties of human ambiguity.
The rest of this chapter is divided into three sections. The first outlines the basis of the book, giving an account of how New Labour’s interest in Africa grew between 1997 and 2007. The second explores the book’s argument in more depth and outlines the theoretical context. Finally, there is a brief discussion of its methodology.
New Labour, ethical foreign policy and Africa
There were three main elements to New Labour’s interest in helping Africa and these can be boiled down to ideology, issues of power and contingency. First, the Government inherited old Labour traditions and ideology, mostly developed during the Party’s periods in opposition. Rooted in ideas of internationalism and often antithetical to notions of British power, these explicitly focused on how foreign policy could serve to improve the world, rather than narrowly defined British interests (Gordon, 1969; Vickers, 2003; Callaghan, 2007; Phythian, 2007). From the Party’s beginnings in the early twentieth century, ideas on a new role for Britain were developed in an attempt to move beyond Britain’s imperial past, and the Party has grappled with them ever since. These developed during the long opposition years of the 1980s in the Party’s hostile attitude towards the arms trade and its desire
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Britain and Africa under Blair
to promote human rights. Of particular significance to this discussion is the Party’s policy on nuclear unilateralism, painfully abandoned in the late 1980s, and for many a deep hole in what had been a highly ethical stance on defence. Could development and the ethical approach to foreign policy help fill it? The personalities, ideas and ambitions of key New Labour figures also drove foreign policy towards both political and morally based objectives. The ambitious Robin Cook wanted to make foreign policy count at home; Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, searching for a moral cause, found it more easily abroad than at home.
Second, the Government wanted to make sure that Britain was a major world player – an ambition sometimes at odds with the old Labour ambivalence towards power. It did this in the context of the British preoccupation with decline and the search for an international role. How could Britain be made to count in the world once again, without recourse to the realist approach of previous governments? Luckily, the international conditions in the late 1990s, post-Cold War, promoted a development discourse which suited both New Labour’s ideological direction and the search for a role. This was rooted in the idealised power of the liberal values of human rights, democracy and better governance in effecting material change in the lives of people in the Third World. By wholeheartedly pursuing these values New Labour could become an influential member of the international community – perhaps even a leader in a new moral crusade. Blair’s desire to be closely identified with the US reinforced this tendency too, particularly after 9/11, when his ideas on international community and intervention hardened into a far more aggressive manifestation of the ethical foreign policy.
Third was the role of contingency in the shaping of policy. Events in Sierra Leone and Kosovo, and then 9/11, allowed Blair to articulate and begin to effect his ideas on international community and the doctrine of intervention. He successfully used his moments in the world’s spotlight to demonstrate his moral commitment to Africa.
An ethical beginning
Tony Blair’s Labour Party was preoccupied by domestic policy while in opposition,4 but when the Party came to power in May 1997, two early initiatives set the scene for the Government’s approach to foreign policy and these were to take on increasing importance. The first was the establishment of the Department for International Development (DfID), now a department in its own right with a cabinet post, filled by the energetic and engaging Clare Short.5 The second was Foreign Secretary Robin Cook’s presentation on 12 May of a foreign policy mission statement with an ‘ethical dimension’ (Cook, 1997a), immediately labelled ‘the ethical foreign policy’ by the media.
The new Development Secretary was determined to make development a key government priority. She quickly committed the Government to the UN development aid target of 0.7 per cent of Gross National Index (GNI),6
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and published two white papers – in 1997 and 2000 – iterating the ethical dimension of development.
It is our duty to care about other people, in particular those less well off than ourselves. We have a moral duty to reach out to the poor and needy. But we also owe it to our children and our grandchildren to address these issues as a matter of urgency. If we do not do so there is a real danger that, by the middle of the next century, the world will simply not be sustainable … In this area we could give a lead which would make us all very proud of our country and also secure a safe and decent future for us all.
(DfID, 1997)
This theme – morality working in tandem with enlightened self-interest –was to become a defining feature of the Government’s approach to foreign policy.
Cook, ambitious and highly political, was anxious to maintain his domestic profile as he entered the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO). He was driven by the need both to cement his left-wing credentials within the Party and to keep up with his rival Gordon Brown who had grabbed the limelight by granting independence to the Bank of England as his first action as Chancellor (Wickham-Jones, 2000: 107). The ethical dimension was the last of four foreign policy objectives, designed to ‘secure the respect of other nations for Britain’s contribution to keeping the peace of the world and promoting democracy around the world’. 7 Two months later Cook explained that the foundations of the ethical dimension were based on the doctrine of universal human rights, and mapped out twelve policies which would demonstrate the Government’s approach. These included condemnation of governments which ‘grotesquely violate human rights’, support for sanctions applied by the international community, a ban on military exports to human rights-abusing regimes, support for a new international criminal court, practical assistance to free media working in repressive regimes, human rights training for foreign armed forces and an annual report on government efforts to promote human rights abroad (Cook, 1997b).
The main flavour of Cook’s ethical dimension was the curtailment of British interests where they interfered with the ending of egregious human rights abuses elsewhere. Like Short, Cook was keen to stress moral responsibility: ‘The Labour Government does not accept that political values can be left behind when we check in our passports to travel on diplomatic business. Our foreign policy must have an ethical dimension and must support the demands of other peoples for the democratic rights on which we insist for ourselves’ (Cook, 1997a). The policy was understood to mean that sometimes Britain would be prepared to act at some cost to itself in the interests of wider principle. Cook’s recipe for principled action looks rather cautious now, followed as it was by the more assertive international interventions of the Labour Government: he was anxious to work within international legal frameworks, and at this early stage there did not appear to be wider govern-
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ment commitment to the ethical dimension to justify anything grander than tough words alongside political and economic sanctions.
If pressed, Cook would argue, like Short, that there was a harmony between British interests and the promotion of ‘our values’. For example:
I am constantly being lectured that the work of the Foreign Office should only be about the national interest. Actually, I agree with that. But I also believe that promoting our values, taking pride in our principles is in the national interest. We will be better able to trade with countries that are stable and free. We will be more secure the more democracy replaces dictatorship. (Cook, 1998)
Africa featured for both DfID and the FCO, but in neither was it singled out for special treatment at this stage. For DfID, African countries made up the majority of the world’s poorest, and, as former colonial possessions, many already had close development assistance relationships in place. For the FCO, several African states fitted immediately into Cook’s ethical element – notably Nigeria under Sani Abacha’s military regime, mentioned specifically in the July speech,8 Sierra Leone, suspended by the Commonwealth the same month after a coup to oust the elected Ahmad Tejan Kabbah’s government and Kenya, where elections which returned Daniel Arap Moi to power were widely criticised as flawed. But Africa has never been a high priority for the FCO, which tends to see the continent in a development rather than diplomatic framework. Cook was more immediately, dramatically and problematically occupied by human rights issues in Indonesia, Burma, Pakistan and Iraq.
Despite New Labour’s claims to newness, both the ethical dimension and the enhanced importance of international development can be traced back to older Labour approaches to foreign policy. Development had had a higher profile in the Labour governments in the 1960s and 1970s, particularly under two influential development ministers, both from the left of the Party, Barbara Castle, created Minister for Overseas Development in 1964, and Judith Hart, who filled the position twice in the 1970s. At the same time, Cook’s ethical dimension – although ‘new’ in its terminology –was rooted in two long-held Labour Party ideas: the limiting of arms sales to unsavoury regimes and the promotion of human rights internationally.9 Both were pursued throughout the 1980s, were included in the Party’s 1983 general election manifesto and continued to be a preoccupation thereafter. Neil Kinnock in his introduction to the general election manifesto in 1992 said: ‘In this increasingly interdependent world there are no distant crises. The Labour Government will therefore, as a matter of moral obligation and in the material interests of our country, foster the development and trade relationships necessary for the advance of economic security, political democracy and respect for human rights’ (quoted in Little and WickhamJones, 2000: 96).
Cook and Short could more credibly claim newness in comparison with
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the previous Thatcher and Major governments. By 1997, development aid had been whittled down to just 0.26 per cent of GNI and, in line with the approved Cold War approach, development aid was often used to buy political support rather than in support of developmental or human rightsrespecting governments (Cumming, 2001). Aid, moreover, had often been linked to promoting British trade, a practice that had become publicly discredited after the Pergau Dam scandal, and was ended by New Labour.10 Finally, John Major’s government had been scarred by secret arms sales to Iraq during Saddam Hussein’s repression of the Iraqi Kurds.11 The ethical foreign policy and focus on poverty reduction in the Third World were a conscious attempt to show that New Labour offered something different from the sleaze and selfishness of its Conservative predecessors. However, Labour came to power at a time when international approaches, in particular to the Third World, were already being overhauled. Political conditionalities based on human rights and democracy were routinely attached to both multilateral and bilateral aid, part of a strong post-Cold War push to promote liberal ideology in the Third World. Mark Duffield discusses the growing hegemony of ‘liberal peace’ as an ideological system shared through a network of international non-governmental organisations (INGOs), governments and international financial institutions (IFIs) which seeks to transform societies by concentrating on principles – economic liberalism, democracy, human rights – rather than previous efforts to support more prosaic development projects: ‘Effecting social transformation is itself now a direct and explicit policy aim’ (Duffield, 2002: 39), part of the post-Cold War sense of the end of history and the triumph of western values. The idea was that state–society relations needed to be reformed, in order to make development flow, an approach that has had particular traction in Africa (Young, 1995). The ethical dimension fitted well within these emerging international norms, and the New Labour Government eagerly began to participate in a congenial aid regime.
Blair gets interested
Both development and the ethical dimension came to be extremely important to New Labour in the way it dealt with foreign policy. This can be seen clearly through Blair’s interest in foreign policy, which, during his first year in office, was limited. He made only one speech on the subject – at the annual Lord Mayor’s banquet, an occasion traditionally devoted to foreign policy – in which he described his domestic policy agenda in relation to the promotion of Britain overseas (Blair, 1997). His main areas of concern focused on how to keep Britain firmly within Europe and in close partnership with the USA, a theme he returned to in his two foreign policy speeches of 1998 (Blair, 1998a; 1998b).
However, foreign policy was increasingly shaped for Blair by events early on in his first term. In 1997, a British firm, Sandline, was found to have been breaking UN sanctions by supplying arms to Sierra Leone’s exiled govern-
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ment, with the knowledge of Foreign Office officials including the High Commissioner to Sierra Leone, Peter Penfold. There was a scandal – which was embarrassing for Cook who was unaware of what had been going on – but Blair shrugged off suggestions of impropriety, arguing that it was morally right to help reinstate the democratically elected Kabbah regime.12 The British Government went on to demonstrate a significant commitment to Sierra Leone by later sending troops and then large amounts of aid to prop up Kabbah’s besieged government (Kargbo, 2006; Williams, 2001). A second event was the military action in Kosovo in 1999, where NATOled forces countered Serbian-inspired violence against Kosovan Muslims by aggressive aerial bombardment. Britain contributed forces and Blair energetically and successfully drew in international support, including that of the US.
Sierra Leone and Kosovo became for New Labour supreme examples of an ethical approach to foreign policy. Blair, on British action in Sierra Leone, said:
I know there are those, of course, who believe that we should do nothing beyond offer some words of sympathy and condemnation. But that would be to turn our back in effect on those poor defenceless people in Sierra Leone, when we could do something to help them. It’s one of the reasons why Britain counts in the world. Britain is seen to have values and be prepared to back them up. (Blair, 2000)
Cook said of the Kosovo action: ‘The place where human rights, democracy and freedom have been challenged over this past year has been in Kosovo and we’ve asserted these values’ (New Statesman interview, 1999). Both were presented as clear successes, the triumph of ‘our values’; both conferred international status. They provided Blair success in a way that messier domestic policy, subject to closer media scrutiny, could not.
Foreign policy came alive for Blair and he increasingly took charge. Cook had been politically weakened by a series of arms scandals and diplomatic blunders (most notably, arms sales to Indonesia, the Sandline affair and gaffes over Israel and Palestine), as well as by the public and humiliating break-up of his marriage. Never a popular figure in the parliamentary Labour Party, these left him dependent on Blair’s patronage – which is why, as Wickham-Jones suggests, he began to introduce Blair’s pet ‘third way’ theme into foreign policy speeches from 1998 (Wickham-Jones, 2000: 17). He exerted uneasy authority over the Foreign Office brief, failing to win the trust of his officials, and was demoted after the 2001 election. His successor, Jack Straw, uncomfortable with the Foreign Office brief from the first, proved even less able to wrest control of foreign policy from Blair.
The events in Kosovo informed Blair’s most significant statement of foreign policy, his ‘doctrine of the international community’, made in Chicago in 1999 (Ibid: 17). In it, Blair discussed how the world’s states increasingly face similar problems, caused by globalisation and environmen-
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tal change, and extended a favourite domestic theme – community – to the international sphere.
Today we are more than ever before mutually dependent … national interest is to a significant extent governed by international collaboration … Just as within domestic politics, the notion of community – the belief that partnership and cooperation are essential to advance self-interest – is coming into its own; so it needs to find its own international echo. (Blair, 1999)
Blair argued that the international community, faced with common problems and motivated by ‘enlightened self-interest’, must intervene where necessary to promote its shared values because ‘the spread of our values makes us safer’. Blair was by this time proposing a far more aggressive ‘ethical policy’ than that suggested by Cook’s more cautious 1997 plan.
The themes of Blair’s Chicago speech – mutual interests between states, the importance of the spread of values, the need on occasion for intervention – were dramatically reinforced for him by the attacks by al-Qaeda on Washington and New York in 2001. 9/11 was a seminal moment for Blair, not because it caused him to change his ideas or foreign policy direction but because it demonstrated compellingly to him that his existing ideas were right. The 2001 speech to the Labour Party conference, days after 9/11, was billed as a return to the Chicago speech. In it he spoke of ‘our values’ as ‘the right values for our age’, and developed his theme of the moral responsibility of the West to promote and extend them, through war if necessary, but through help for the less fortunate too. For Blair, the war on terror and development in Africa were elements of the same programme. In the conference speech he insisted that the international community, working together, could and should tackle the world’s problems, including terrorism, climate change and poverty: ‘A partnership for Africa, between the developed and the developing world based around the New African Initiative, is there to be done if we find the will … The state of Africa is a scar on the conscience of the world. But if the world as a community focused on it, we could heal it. And if we don’t, it will become deeper and angrier’ (Blair, 2001).
Africa becomes ‘a passion’
During his first term, Africa had not been a key issue for Blair. His speeches occasionally referred to the importance of tackling Third World debt and ending trade protection in the West, but these were not principal concerns and Africa did not feature strongly. However, Blair made a commitment to take an interest in the continent during his second term and Africa was certainly on the agenda by the end of 2001, its development and future firmly tied into Blair’s wider world community agenda. The roots of Blair’s interest in Africa are discussed by, among others, John Kampfner and Anthony Seldon, both of whom emphasise its religious aspect. Seldon, drawing on interviews with Blair’s colleagues and senior civil servants, suggests that Blair liked to see Africa in moral terms – a place where Britain could do
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Labour: doing
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good things (Seldon, 2004: 529). Alongside the moral imperative, it could not have been lost on Blair that making Africa a priority would give him an attractive international point of differentiation, an idea suggested to him by Bill Clinton (Kampfner, 2004: 73). Blair might also have looked abroad for alternative approaches to Africa.13
Blair made constant references to Africa in his foreign policy speeches from this point: ‘Africa for me is a passion,’ he said in a speech to the World Summit on Sustainable Development in 2002 (Blair, 2002b), arguing on another occasion that ‘because it is morally right and because ultimately it must be in our own interest, it is clear that the spotlight of attention of the whole of the international community should be focused on Africa’ (Blair, 2004). In practical terms, DfID’s budget continued to rise, with a significant proportion going to African countries.14 Gordon Brown was another government minister with a history of interest in development. According to his biographer Tom Bower, ‘helping the Third World had been a special interest for Brown since childhood’ (Bower, 2004: 206). He took significant steps to cut bilateral and multilateral debt to the world’s poorest countries, the majority of which are African. Efforts culminated, in 2005, with a ‘year for Africa’, during which Brown announced a ‘Marshall Plan for Africa’, including more debt forgiveness and a new aid initiative (Brown, 2005), Blair presided over a Commission for Africa, set up to find the answers to Africa’s problems, and made Africa and the environment the subjects of the Group of Eight (G8) meeting under the UK presidency.
The Government’s approach to Africa comprised four elements. First, there were greater commitments to aid and debt relief for impoverished countries. The Government responded to crises during Malawi’s floods (2000), famines in Sudan (2001), and southern Africa (2002), and pumped large amounts of development aid into Ethiopia, Sierra Leone and Mozambique, among others. Second, there was a greater willingness to criticise corruption and mismanagement, both of African governments and British companies that colluded with them. Nigeria was the defining example for Cook in 1997; later others were singled out. For example, in July 2004, the British High Commissioner in Kenya, Edward Clay, became so incensed with Kenyan corruption that he spoke publicly of corrupt ministers ‘eating like gluttons’ and ‘vomiting on the shoes of donors’ (BBC, 2004). Third, greater efforts were made to work within international bodies to isolate countries subject to conflict and chaos (military action – according to Blair’s Chicago speech – could be an option here, was floated as an idea for Sudan in 2004, but only tried in Sierra Leone). And fourth, Blair’s government took steps to work in partnership with ‘sound’ African leaders to develop an overarching strategy. Blair started this in 2001 with a meeting held in the UK with the presidents of Nigeria, Ghana, Botswana, Senegal and Mozambique to discuss priorities for development in Africa, and a similar approach was used in the Africa Commission and support for the New Africa Partnership for Development (NEPAD). On the whole this played well in Britain, judging by
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the media coverage for anything Africa-related. One significant irritant was Zimbabwe, which regularly disrupted this smooth representation of Africa, its problems and their solutions. Robert Mugabe refused to fit a category, and British attempts to persuade or pressure him into conformity met with failure and embarrassment. Other African leaders wouldn’t condemn or put pressure on him over controversial land reform, his intimidation of opposition activists or his worsening human rights record; the Commonwealth for a long time was split by the issue; Mugabe made the British look foolish through personal attacks on ministers and references to colonialism and broken promises on compensation for land reform (Taylor and Williams, 2002; Chan, 2003b).
Zimbabwe aside, Blair’s score-sheet on Africa has been perceived as relatively clean. For Blair, Africa was intrinsic to the doctrine of international community, part of his wider plan to make the world better: it was, according to one political rival, Blair’s ‘badge of morality, moral honour [Africa came] to embody the ethical dimension of foreign policy’.15 For many who were critical of the war on terror, it was the great exception to it. While one million people marched through London in protest against the proposed Iraq war in 2003, similar numbers (many of them the same people) were involved in the Make Poverty History campaign pushing Blair to deliver on his commitment to solve Africa’s crisis in 2005. While Blair saw a coherent foreign policy, for his critics it had splintered into two.16 War, which Hegel suggests should help to bolster the state, became deeply divisive and made his government unpopular. Help for Africa – which might strengthen it in a Durkheimian sense – was popular and unifying.
The arguments
Analysis of New Labour’s interest in Africa has tended to develop in one of two ways. In the first, the intention to ‘do good’ is taken at face value and policies are assessed in terms of how effectively they help African states to develop politically and economically. Critics ask, for example, whether more aid is the answer; or, more sophisticatedly, whether conditionalities can induce African regimes to change their behaviour (Dixon and Williams, 2001; Mistry, 2005; Porteous, 2005; Taylor, 2005, Ware, 2006; Williams, 2005). In picking through New Labour’s choice of policies, such questions can illustrate the paucity of its analysis of Africa’s problems, suggesting that underneath the earnestness lies a careless interest in the wellbeing of the continent. The second approach looks behind or beyond the avowed intention for latent interests or unexpected outcomes. David Chandler, for example, argues that the ethical foreign policy was a grander, more ideologically attractive policy used by the Government to counteract negative feelings engendered in the Labour Party by its cautious, conservative domestic policy (Chandler, 2003). Here the ethical policy is used deliberately as a domestic tool to shore up the Government, almost as an ethical as opposed to
13 New Labour: doing good in Africa
Britain and Africa under Blair
bellicose version of Waltz’s ‘second image’. David Slater and Morag Bell, in an analysis of the DfID white papers of 1997 and 2000, look at how existing power relations between the UK and countries on the receiving end of its ethical and development policies are reinforced by the ways in which the aid discourse is framed (Slater and Bell, 2002). They argue that British aid policy worked to maintain a dependency relationship between the UK and poorer powers (often former colonies). Paul Cammack, in similar vein, argues that the Commission for Africa was organised around the objective of creating capitalist markets and extending and entrenching capitalist power-relations (Cammack, 2006). Rita Abrahamsen and Paul Williams suggest that the key outcome of the UK’s ethical foreign policy has been to give it a higher profile internationally, although the policy’s effects on poverty in the developing world have been minimal (Abrahamsen and Williams, 2001). Whatever the motivation, the effect has been to enhance Britain’s international reputation. Whether these objectives are pursued explicitly (as Chandler argues of his), unconsciously or ‘mistakishly’, here are suggestions that attempts to do good in Africa serve British interests: prestige, internal political stability, continuing dominance of international relationships. Perhaps the ethical foreign policy amounted to little more than an attempt to spin a more comfortable interpretation from the realist view of foreign policy as power? Was the ethical element simply attractive window-dressing for politics as usual in a more squeamish age?
Interests in harmony
The realist argument that reduces all international politics to a pursuit of power makes a parody of a profession pursued for all sorts of reasons. For example, Hans Morgenthau, writing at the height of Cold War realism, says: ‘We assume that statesmen think and act in terms of interest defined as power, and the evidence of history bears that assumption out A realist theory of international politics, then, will guard against two popular fallacies: the concern with motives and the concern with ideological preferences’ (Morgenthau, 1993: 5). But, as Andrew Williams argues, few would remove morality entirely from politics. ‘Policy-makers … are motivated by instincts other than national interest. To assume otherwise is to assume that policy makers are not moral beings, a curious position to take, or that national interest does not have a moral component’ (Williams, 2006: 12).
More subtle realist arguments point out debilitating flaws in utopian thinking and uncover some of the less tangible interests pursued through foreign policy. E. H. Carr’s characterisation of nineteenth-century utopianism as rooted in the assumption of a harmony of interests resonates strikingly with New Labour’s approach. As it came to office in 1997, New Labour displayed several characteristics of utopian thinking.17 There was the assumption that difference and argument were to be overcome, rather than accepted as an inevitable and endless part of politics. David Marquand argues that this assumption underpinned New Labour’s absorption of a
14
wide range of different interests – not just traditional labour, but big business and financial interests – and the belief that it could develop a set of policies to suit all. Older forms of Labourism – trade unionism, libertarian leftism, even social democracy – spoke in terms of struggle and of conflicting interests between labour and capital (Marquand, 1999). New Labour, by contrast, suggested it could transcend political argument by the power of argument and reason. Explicitly, there was a break with old left ideas that fairer wealth distribution could only be pursued at the expense of capital, replaced by the idea that it was possible to create a climate where promoting wealth creation would deliver social justice: a perfect harmony of interests.
The notion of harmonious interests proved difficult to sustain in domestic policy but worked in the thinner international atmosphere. Here Blair appeared better able to exert the power of reason and persuasion to solve disagreements. He tended to reduce unavoidable conflict to a dichotomy of ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’.18 The bad guys (Saddam Hussein, the Taliban, Robert Mugabe) – beyond rationality – were to be written off, got rid of. ‘Some regimes,’ as Robin Cook explained, ‘such as Iraq, may simply be beyond rational persuasion’ (Cook, 1997b). The good guys, evidently, were either already persuaded or capable of responding to reason. There was no room in the world for different perspectives on the way forward.
The New Labour Government found a ready-made consensus in international political and development discourse into which it could fit: its self-evidential universal norms were already being pursued by like-minded donor countries and international bodies such as the United Nations (UN), the IFIs and the European Union (EU). They were expressed in terms of human rights, democracy and free trade, and their pursuit for the benefit of all. In development circles, there was a high level of agreement: that the key solutions to underdevelopment were more aid, fair trade and less debt; good governance, universal human rights and democracy; and development to remove the causes of conflict. This consensus extended increasingly between the international development agencies and the IFIs. Although the development agencies tended to be critical of World Bank and International Monetary Fund (IMF) economic policies in the developing world, particularly of the ways in which economic liberalisation had undermined welfare provision and hurt the poor, by the late 1990s this approach was changing. The conditions for agreement were already favourable in the sense that the IFIs had long favoured the use of the private/NGO sector rather than governments as service providers, a policy that had seen a substantial increased in the NGO sector in the Third World (Chabbott, 1999). But by the late 1990s, the IFIs had largely abandoned the extreme market liberalisation policies they had promoted in the 1980s and were more interested in the types of political reform – democratisation, human rights and the development of civil society – favoured by the development agencies. The large-scale Make Poverty History campaign in 2005 was an example of the consensus on international development: INGOs, religious groups and
15 New Labour: doing good in Africa
political organisations such as trade unions joined forces in an attempt to ensure that the Government delivered on its great year of initiative on Africa. The approach of the international development lobby was attractive both for its internal consensus about the nature of the problems to be tackled and the ways in which to do it, and because, as Duffield suggests, it tended to be technocratic and ostensibly apolitical, echoing a nineteenthcentury rationalism and belief in scientific progress (Duffield, 2002). Both these characteristics appealed to the utopian side of New Labour.
Carr criticises utopians for the damage they cause by clinging to the idea of an ‘invisible hand’ dispensing rational international order. The notion that, by reason and a natural harmony of interests, different parties can be brought to agree, leads to a situation in which international affairs are determined by the strong on behalf of the weak. ‘The clash of interests is real and inevitable; and the whole nature of the problem is distorted by an attempt to disguise it’ (Carr, 2001: 57). What results is the promotion of the values and interests of the powerful nations and the preservation of the status quo (Duffield’s description of ‘liberal peace’). ‘The bankruptcy of utopianism resides, not in its failure to live up to its principles, but in the exposure of its inability to provide any absolute and disinterested standard for the conduct of international affairs’ (Ibid: 80). Carr suggests that when world leaders gloss over immanent conflicts of interests, replacing them, magically, with an assumption that ‘our interests’ are ‘your interests’, they ultimately serve self-interest far more closely than the interests of intended beneficiaries. Under this interpretation, utopians fail to escape the inevitability of realism, though they may delude themselves and others in the attempt. What interests are being served? Following Carr, and power-based arguments, these could be the extension of Western or liberal hegemony, the status quo in which Britain is a significant world power, the reinforcement of values that make us safe. However, a substantial ‘interest’, I believe, comes from the fact of being utopian in itself. Frank Manuel, in discussing the important psychological role utopianism plays, identifies it as a ‘kind of dream writ large, where a dream derives its content from a need denied or a wish suppressed … the utopia may well be a sensitive indicator of where the sharpest anguish of an age lies’ (Manuel, 1973: 70). For the Labour Party explicitly, a return to utopianism was important to its recovery of self. Adam Utam, in a discussion of socialism, suggests that utopian ideas based on rationalism have been key to the left’s portrayal of its ideals. Writing in the 1960s, he suggests that ‘the decline of utopian thinking … has seriously damaged the capacity of socialism to stir up emotions of fear or hope’ (Utam, 1967: 117). After eighteen years of opposition, during which much cherished ideology was jettisoned, the Party may well have needed a utopian standard around which to collect itself. Wickham-Jones, in a discussion of the role of unilateralism in the Labour Party during the 1980s, and the effect on the Party when it was abandoned, suggests that in the ethical foreign policy the Party found a kind of redemption: in it they had a means to
16 Britain
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and Africa
Blair
restore their own sense of value as a force for good in the world, and, particularly pleasing, a popular initiative with which they could bring the rest of Britain with them (Wickham-Jones, 2000).
Does utopianism serve Britain too? Utopias are far away places – in space or in time – ideal and perfect; inevitably unreal. Thomas More’s ironical Utopia fashions a world of self-conscious fantasy. Utopias are mirages of perfection: an ideal society of the imagination. Because they are far away, they exist in a purer realm; they are populated by thinner norms; their foundations are universal. They create in our minds a conception of the ideal of our own society. Blair’s enormous appeal in opposition lay in his ability to present himself as a potential leader of a ‘young country’, to project the concept of a reborn Britain, to capture the longing for an end to hard-headed realism, sleaze and cynicism. A little bit of this idealism continued in his interest in Africa – his ‘one moral cause’ – which gave Britain its better, cleaner, ethical sense of itself.
Beyond billiard balls
The older utopian/realism theoretical framework couches international relations in terms of how states look out at each other, without attempting to understand how this relates to domestic policy. Although I have already suggested how utopianism does reflect back on British society by helping it conceive of itself as ideal, current IR debates which centre around the dichotomy of cosmopolitanism and communitarianism can add depth to an analysis of the ways in which foreign policy helps secure domestic wellbeing. I will look at the communitarian approach later. I begin here with a discussion of cosmopolitan ideas and how these have influenced New Labour.
A cosmopolitan approach to human relations is based on ideas of shared humanity transcending ethnic, cultural, religious or other differences. Group – even family – allegiances are not more important than others, and therefore the state demands no particular loyalty; neither should it give preference to its own members. Chris Brown traces cosmopolitan thought from the Greek Stoic definition of citizenship based on the cosmos rather than the polis, through Kant with his advocacy of universal moral law and perpetual peace between nations, utilitarian ideas about the promotion of happiness as widely as possible, irrespective of identity, to Marxist arguments for an international workers’ solidarity (Brown, 1992).
The Labour Party’s ideas on foreign policy have been heavily influenced by cosmopolitanism, which flows from several ideological roots of the Party. These have held sway particularly in periods in opposition when Labour politicians and activists have enjoyed a more romantic vision of international relationships. The Party’s foreign policy thrust in government – typified by two of its most significant Foreign and Defence Secretaries, Ernest Bevin and Denis Healey – has been unashamedly realist (see Bullock’s 1983 biography of Bevin, and Healey’s 1991 collection of essays on international relations). One cosmopolitan influence on the Labour Party came from Marxist ideas
17 New Labour: doing good in Africa
of international solidarity. The concept of extending solidarity throughout the international movement has had particular resonance with the trade union movement. This angle on cosmopolitanism shares some characteristics with the Christian socialist view of the world – a second significant influence within the Labour Party – which promotes universal moral principles and concepts of shared humanity. The Marxist and Christian forms of cosmopolitanism – like those of the philosophers of the Enlightenment – look for a higher universalism under a common set of values, be they the interests of the proletariat, divine morality or pure reason.
Third, cosmopolitanism has influenced the libertarian wing of the Party, keen to disrupt loyalty to organisations, ideas of nationalism or patriotism, and generally concerned with overcoming sources of authority, particularly – in the twentieth century – the state. As Julia Kristeva suggests, the extreme libertarian view ‘emerges from the core of a global movement that makes a clean sweep of laws, differences, and prohibitions by defying the polis and its jurisdiction [it] implicitly challenges the founding prohibitions of established society’ (Kristeva, 1991: 60).
These forms of cosmopolitanism have tended to inform those from the idealist left of the Party. However, the mainstream also absorbed a cosmopolitan outlook, one that grew in part out of attempts to reform utopianism as the Labour Party developed its critical stance on both domestic and foreign policy in the early twentieth century and could be described as particularly interested in international institutionalism. The work of Leonard Woolf is an example of this. Writing for the Labour Party and the Fabian Society in the first part of the twentieth century, Woolf attempted to reform or reclaim nineteenth-century utopianism from the imperialists whom he saw as exploiting Africa in the pursuit of British economic interests (Woolf, 1998). Although in many ways a utopian – Woolf argued that humans could reshape the world and overcome power politics – his break with classic utopianism (as defined by Carr) came with the rejection of the idea of harmony of interests. Woolf believed that it was possible for people to work together for common interests, but not easily to do so within the constraints of nation-states. According to Peter Wilson: ‘Throughout the nineteenth century, Woolf contended, international interests had been gathering strength at the expense of traditionally conceived national interests. By this he meant that the interests of individuals and groups within the state increasingly corresponded to the interests of similar individuals and groups in other states’ (Wilson, 2003: 33). Concluding that Africa needed help, but that Britain wasn’t giving it disinterestedly, Woolf advocated that the job should be taken on by new forms of world authority which, free from the distorting dogma of national interests and ideology, could act with international welfare in mind.
Thus cosmopolitanism within the Labour Party ranges from the search for an authority higher than the state – the search for universal principles and possibly universal forms of government – to an anarchic end to all
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Britain and Africa under Blair
authority which, although emanating from the edges of the Party, exerted a powerful suggestiveness of the unease felt by many in the Party with the aggressive power of the state.
Cook’s foreign policy was dominated from the beginning by the cosmopolitan desire to promote universal principles, particularly through international institutions and law. His first key speech on human rights spelt this out.
My starting point is that in the modern world all nations belong to the same international community … If every country is a member of an international community, then it is reasonable to require every government to abide by the rules of membership. They are set out in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights … These are rights which we claim for ourselves and which we therefore have a duty to demand for those who do not yet enjoy them … The right to enjoy our freedoms comes with the obligation to support the human rights of others. (Cook, 1997b)
New Labour’s close relationship with the development agencies reinforced its universalistic approach to international relationships. Since the 1980s, INGOs had become increasingly focused on a cosmopolitan ‘rights-based approach’ to development, using the UN Declaration of Human Rights as an organising rationale for their work. If a government does not or cannot fulfil those rights – to healthcare, or education, for example – it falls on donors to do so.19 The two assumptions of this approach – shared apparently by Cook – are that, first, the definition of goods is universal and uncontested and, second, that it matters less who provides the goods than that they are provided.
The Government also found the idea of globalisation supportive of its cosmopolitan approach. Peter Hain, a junior Foreign Office minister, described his ideas of a global community (in ways strongly echoing Blair’s doctrine of international community) as based less on common humanity than on common problems – specifically environmental degradation, AIDS and poverty. Explaining his views in a book called The End of Foreign Policy? he explicitly dismisses a realist approach, calling for political leaders to ‘align the way their nations see their own interests with the new global imperative. Before asking “How can we use our diplomatic tools to secure maximum national benefit?” they should ask “How can our nation best contribute to the attainment of the global goals we all share?”’ (Hain, 2001: 7). Further on he refers to ‘the beginnings of a global culture’ and discusses the opportunities afforded by ‘the interconnected world’ (Ibid: 19). These themes are echoed in DfID’s 2000 white paper, which was devoted exclusively to globalisation. Blair’s introduction said:
Globalisation created unprecedented new opportunities and risks. If the poorest countries can be drawn into the global economy and get increasing access to modern knowledge and technology, it could lead to a rapid reduction in global poverty – as well as bringing new trade and investment
19 New Labour: doing good in Africa
Britain and Africa under Blair
opportunities for all. But if this is not done, the poorest countries will become more marginalised, and suffering and division will grow. And we will all be affected by the consequences. (DfID, 2000)
They extend the ideas of mutual interests and responsibility for action: everyone is now involved in everyone else’s problems. Hain’s cosmopolitanism overrides the notion of discrete nation-states bouncing off each other like billiard balls and the foreign and the domestic become inseparable; hence ‘the end of foreign policy’.
New Labour’s borrowing from development NGOs further reinforced this sense of the transcendence of politics. Hugo Slim, drawing on Weber in his discussion of the work of NGOs involved in disaster relief, has described the ‘prophet’ role many adopted in the 1980s and compares it to the ‘priestly’ approach traditionally used by governments (Slim, 1998). ‘Prophets’ are attractive, heroic figures who see past worldly political perspectives straight to the problem, while ‘priests’ are deeply embroiled in politics. The priestly approach became discredited when both recipient and donor governments were seen to be using aid for their own purposes – recipient governments to line their pockets; donors to buy diplomatic or economic advantage. This is why development agencies have liked to portray themselves as apolitical, basing their work on moral authority which they see as more straightforward. The prophet approach – so successfully used by Bob Geldof in his fundraising efforts for Ethiopia in the 1980s – clearly has greater appeal than the more bureaucratic and politically suspect ‘priestly’ approach.
Because they see politics as (at best) an irrelevance, prophets are inherently cosmopolitan in their outlook. They favour a direct approach, bypassing governments when they can. They see need in universal terms, irrespective of time and place, typified in their interest in universal human rights. It is easy to see why New Labour might be drawn to this approach.20 It is at once heroic and technocratic. Its heroic quality comes from its putting the self at the centre of the action, both as one who knows what has to be done and as the one to do it. It is technocratic in its transcendence of politics and its closeness to Enlightenment approaches, which assume that there is a right way to do things, which is beyond discussion.
Cosmopolitanism is thus a useful way to escape a messy domestic scene. Escape enables transcendence to a rarefied arena of more certain, ‘thinner’ ideals where problems and solutions appear more straightforward. The escape is part of the overthrowing of authority; the projection of ourselves into this purer context allows new possibilities of self-idealisation, and perhaps the establishment of a new, controllable and universal authority.
Africa as a refused place
The projected self is idealised in two ways. First, as discussed above, because of the ‘mess’ of the domestic scene it leaves behind as it situates itself within a purer sphere. But there is a second source of idealisation to do with the displacement of internal messiness. Kristeva identifies a tendency to export
20
