So here we are at the Fabians’ foreign policy conference, and we’ve just heard from Foreign Secretary David Miliband. Here, brutally distilled, is the gist of his speech:
– Globalisation and growing interdependence imply shifts in the balance of power “from west to east, from national to international, and between governments and people”. On one hand there’s a ‘civilian surge’: empowered individuals who blog, who campaign, who protest stolen elections in Kenyan slums. But on the other hand, there’s the reality of growing insecurity at all levels from local to global.
– No political ideology has yet found the language or substance to address all this. The right is conflicted between its desires for order, and for economic freedom. The left has a different problem: it wants a just distribution of resources, effected by the state, but also favours a ‘radical liberalism, a pluralism that exists outside of the state. The trick the left must pull off is to synthesise the two.
– These questions are a big deal internationally. Suppression of individual rights by states is a big issue in the ‘civilian surge’. And we have to ask big questions about distribution of goods and entitlements: e.g. who gets access to nuke technology, how to build a fair global climate regime.
– And they raise profound questions of governance – where there are four themes. 1) ‘Faltering states’, where the international community has a responsibility to intervene – not only militarily, but also through soft power and influence. 2) States that are too strong – e.g. Burma, Pakistan, Kenya. Here too, the international community must defend universal values – which are real, and popular. 3) Regional institutions like the EU have a crucial role in projecting their values beyond their borders. 4) Global institutions, where we need a Fukuyama-esque ‘multi-multilateralism’.
– Britain’s role in all this: a ‘hub’ in the global network (rather than a ‘bridge’ between US and EU).
