by Alex Evans | Feb 19, 2010 | Europe and Central Asia, Influence and networks, UK
At the Chatham House seminar a couple of weeks ago on David and my paper on how the UK organises for influence – part of the Institute’s program on rethinking the UK’s international ambitions and choices – one of the members of Britain’s foreign policy making community put a blunt question on the table. Do we want to be a global player, or do we want to be Norway?
Pleasingly, this question was answered moments later by another participant who does a lot of consulting work for Chinese, Indian and Russian firms, who pointed out that as far as emerging economies are concerned, the UK is already Norway. (Well, actually it was slightly less good than that – specifically, they felt that the UK was irrelevant except as far as its indebtedness was concerned – but let’s not get stuck on details.)
Me, I feel we’re at risk of losing sight of a larger point: that being Norway would be awesome for British foreign policy. Consider:
– No-one trusts us because we’re Perfidious Albion and we keep invading people. Everyone trusts Norway, on the other hand, so they’re like the capital of peace mediation and get peace processes named after their capital city.
– Norway used their North Sea oil to set up a vast Sovereign Wealth Fund. It’s worth £259 billion. They’ve used this to become the mother of all socially responsible activist investors, and can just unilaterally decide to launch massive global policy initiatives to halt deforestation. Hey Gordon – where’s our North Sea Oil SWF? Huh? Huh?
– While we make a lot of noise about Official Development Assistance Spending, Norway gives nearly twice as much ODA as the UK as a proportion of GNI: 1% versus our 0.56% in 2010. Norway also does way better on policy coherence for development than the UK: in the 2009 CGD Commitment to Development Index, Norway scored 6.6, ranking 3rd overall among 22 rich countries. The UK only got 5.1, placing us 12th.
– Norway still has fish in its fisheries, because it successfully used the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea to tell the EU fishing fleet to go screw itself. (The EU duly subsidised its flotilla of mainly Spanish boats to clean out African waters instead. Heh heh – ever the enlightened ‘post-modern superpower’, eh readers?)
– Ummm… oh yeah, Norway’s not in the EU! They are, though, in the EEA – so they still get membership of the Single Market (though not the CAP or the CFP – result!) and still get access to fun x-Europe schemes like the European health insurance card, Erasmus university exchanges, etc. (Admittedly, I’m actually in favour of increased European harmonisation on foreign policy. But being a realist, I recognise that Europe’s heads of government are not with me on this one. This being so, colour me unconvinced on the argument that “being an EU member increases the UK’s influence on foreign policy”. Er – Copenhagen?)
Plus they have the Northern Lights, and the Hurtigruten, and they officially read more than anyone else in the world.
Case closed. Just figured out our project’s core recommendation. Time for lunch.
by Alex Evans | Feb 19, 2010 | Economics and development, UK
Ask not for whom the bell tolls: it tolls for the UK, as Jennifer Hughes has it…
A UK newspaper is said to have once run the headline “Fog over Channel, Continent Isolated”.
British attitudes may have changed since, but there will be some in London watching the eurozone wrangles over Greece and thanking the UK’s monetary isolation. But this would not reflect the market reality: while headlines have focused on Greece and the other weak eurozone members, investors have been steadily selling UK debt.
On Thursday this reached some milestones; 10-year gilt yields hit 15-month highs and the spread, or premium the UK pays over German borrowing costs, reached a full percentage point for the first time in four years. The UK now pays as much to borrow as Italy, considered one of the more vulnerable eurozone members and – at best – rated two notches below Britain.
by Alex Evans | Feb 19, 2010 | East Asia and Pacific, Europe and Central Asia, Global system, Influence and networks, North America
Yale’s Jeffrey Garten thinks America needs to face up to a key fact: it doesn’t have the leverage to deal with China on its own. So, he says, it needs to partner up with others:
It doesn’t take a genius to see that America needs more help in dealing with China. That’s why we must shift from what is primarily a bilateral and at times unilateral, pound-the-chest approach to one involving more support from other key countries, many of whom are also having big problems with China, including the European Union and India.
This enhanced multilateralism must be based on at least two premises that are hard to discern in U.S. policy today. The first is that China is not just bursting on the global stage, but rather is changing the world as it does so. Put another way, we can forget about trying to force China into conforming to Western rules and institutions without allowing the country a big voice in reshaping those arrangements to serve its own needs. Secondly, the U.S. and its partners are better off compromising with China on these arrangements so long as they have rules and enforcement mechanisms. The key goal must be to encourage China to obey laws and regulations that are agreed upon.
Not sure I’m wholly convinced that Van Rompuy and his travelling circus are the missing link in getting China to be a constructive world citizen – but hey, we can dream.
by Alex Evans | Feb 17, 2010 | Europe and Central Asia, Influence and networks, UK
If you’re a Brit working in or around the UN, you’ll be familiar with the fact that your nationality doesn’t exactly help you when it comes to applying for UN jobs – given the extent to which Brits are proportionately over-represented in the UN as it is. So you might have supposed that the same would hold true in Brussels too – right? Actually, no:
Though the UK represents 12 per cent of the EU population, its citizens make up only 6 per cent of Commission staff. Britain is now the least-well represented country in the Commission by head of population, with the exception of new-joiner Romania.
What’s going on? According to the FT, the problem has long-term roots: although a generation of UK heavy-hitters joined after Britain’s accession in 1973, they’re now coming up to retirement – and not much has been done to plan for what comes next.
“If you look at the most senior levels of the Commission, we are doing very well, there is no problem there,” said one diplomat. “But there are far, far fewer Brits at lower levels. It is still not clear where the next generation is going to come from.”
Officials point to several reasons for the declining British presence in Brussels. Fewer jobs are available, as the Commission in recent years looked to citizens from new member states for the bulk of its recruitment needs. Careers in Brussels became less appealing to graduates, many of whom opted for the City. A period of political disengagement with Europe also made civil servants doubt the wisdom of gaining experience in Brussels.
“We could have been more consistent with our encouragement,” one official admits. “Europe was perceived by some as a cul-de-sac, not the best way to further your career.”
