Speech before the Los Angeles World Affairs Council on July 23, 2001:
The Rt. Hon.
Christopher Patten
Commissioner, European Commission and
Former Mayor of Hong Kong
Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. May I first of all thank you very warmly for that very courteous and kind and flattering introduction. Senator Dole in similar circumstances said on one occasion that his father would have enjoyed the introduction and his mother would have believed it and I felt much the same. There’s the story, doubtless apocryphal, about the new Labor Interior Minister after the 1997 election. The Interior Minister is responsible for the police and prison service and he asked if he go visit a prison for the first time and he went duly to one of the most notorious prison, Dartmore, and had an interesting discussion with the governor. He then asked the governor if he could possibly talk to the assembled inmates to give them a pep talk on reform and rehabilitation. The assembled inmates waited for him in the canteen, just as they were waiting for release in ten or fifteen or twenty years. On his way down to address them, the Minister wondered how he should begin his remarks. “Comrades” sounded, he thought, a bit like the old Labour Party, “Gentlemen” sounded a bit too much like the new Labour Party. So, in any event he began his talk to the convicts by saying, “I’m pleased to see so many of you here today.” I’m obviously very pleased to see so many of you here today and for those of you who are on parole, I’d like to wish you every success.
You mentioned in that introduction very kindly my work in Hong Kong and my departure from Hong Kong. I’ve always been struck, not to say surprised, by the number of people who shared those painful emotional moments with me and with my family. Everybody seemed to have seen it on television and for a short while I understood what Andy Warhold had said about everybody being famous for a quarter of an hour. I recall, for instance, a few months after I left Hong Kong being in New York and driving in a taxi, aware of the fact that the Bangladeshi taxi driver kept on looking in the rear view mirror to see who was in the back. Eventually, we were stopped at a light, he turned around to me and said, “Has anybody ever told you how like Chris Patten you look?”
Everybody saw that departure in the rain. They saw the bands and the pipers and the pomp and ceremony and the presidents and the prince, and so on. We, as some of you may know, sailed off into the midnight in the royal yacht, Britannia. We had a last glass of whisky up on the deck as we watched Hong Kong recede into the distance, the lights, and the fireworks. We went to bed in [what is] rather like a floating country house, aboard the Britannia. We got up the next morning and had a full English breakfast, which my children promptly threw up over the side. It was a pretty choppy day. And then we watched the most extraordinary spectacle. There was the largest British fleet which had been sent east of Suez since the closure of the base in Singapore. They had gathered for exercises in the area and they were accompanying Britannia. I think the two Chinese intelligence ships which were tailing us wondered whether we going to go back and retake Hong Kong. That wasn’t at the time one of our plans.
During the course of the morning, the fleet first of all formed a diamond behind Britannia and then a double file with about a hundred meters between the ships, at which point the Prince of Wales turned to me and said, “I think you’d better go and put your tie on,” which I duly did. One would, wouldn’t one? And came back and realized the point. We were on the Royal Deck as Britannia began for the very last time, both for Britannia and for any royal yacht to sail through the fleet--something which British monarchs have being doing since about the 15th century. As you sail up the channel between the vessels, and there were eighteen capital ships, nuclear submarines, an aircraft carrier, and so on, and as we passed each ship the crew who were assembled on deck in their best kit gave three cheers, taking their caps off.
We got to the front of the line and the aircraft carrier, Illustrious, came steaming up, and as it drew along side Britannia there was a fly-past of all the harriers. We sailed on with the fleet, with the flying fish, with the dolphins at the bow of Britannia for a couple of days until we got to Manila. In Manila we were greeted by, I think they’re called “elements of the Philippine navy,” which fired a twenty-one gun salute. We were subsequently told they were using life rounds. Then my wife, three daughters and I got into a plane and few back to Heathrow with our luggage and came out of Terminal 3 and tried to get a taxi. That’s how the British Empire really ended.
I think, if I may say so, that there are two great democracies. This one and the country from which I come, which do return you as soon as you leave public office into the real world. I think that’s an extremely good thing, and ensures a degree of humility in our public figures which others perhaps could copy. I recall not long after that traveling on a train in the normal carriage from Gatwick up to Victoria, and an American visitor-tourist leaned across and tapped me on the knee and said, “If you’re who I think you are, it’s remarkable, because here you are sitting in a normal carriage from Gatwick.” At the other end I was cueing just in front of Dick Cheney for an airline ticket.
I’ve been back to Hong Kong three times since I left and Hong Kong is still a free society. There have been one or two problems, principally relating to the rule of law and the independence of the courts. They’ve recently taken a decision, which I think people should find reassuring on that point. It’s a remarkable city which, in my view, combines many of the best qualities of American and European openness with many of the best qualities of Asia—China, in particular. One of the greatest cities in the world, and it was a huge privilege for me to be able to spend five years of my life there. I learned more about the principles of political economy in Hong Kong and I learned more about the importance of decency and courage in politics than I would ever have learned anywhere else. I will say that I have been back to China on a couple of occasions. I was back in China about a month ago for a meeting between Asian and European foreign ministers. I was invited to lunch by the Deputy Premier, Mr. Qian Qichen in the Hong Kong Hall of the Great Hall of the People and greeted as an old friend, which some in 1997 would have regarded as improbable. But I think it is an indication that the Chinese do, even if they don’t agree with you, respect you if you stand up for what you believe in.
Since then, I first of all did an intensely difficult job sharing the policing commission in Northern Ireland following the splendid work that George Mitchell had done in making possible the success of the Good Friday agreement there. The last time I was in Los Angeles was as part of a tour we did of police departments in the United States. I remember spending the day here in Los Angeles learning about riot control equipment. I then became a European Commissioner about two years ago, and perhaps I can just say a word or two about how things are moving in Europe and then, if you’d allow me and won’t regard it as an impertinence, say one or two things about the United States and how I think the United States should remain committed to multilateralism as the best way of securing America’s national interest and the continuing prosperity and peace of the whole world.
If you want to find out more about the European Union one of the best ways of doing that is through the information provided by Scripps College. It has an admirable European Union Center here. It’s one of the main focuses of our attempts in the United States to encourage more scholarship about the European Union and the spreading of more information about the European Union, so I’d like to give a vote of thanks and express my gratitude to Scripps College for the work which the European Union Center does there.
Looking back, you’ll recall that the two great shaping ideas of the 19th century, democracy and open markets, were overwhelmed in the early years of the last century by hatred, by extreme nationalism, by ideological warfare. Europe was torn apart in two great civil wars. We recovered partly thanks, of course, to the efforts and the sacrifices of the United States which encouraged us in the efforts in the second half of the last century to try to establish a reconciliation in Europe through the creation of the European Union. Initially working through economic means, the establishment of a coal and steel community, we tried to create institutions which would enable people to live at peace with a common destiny rather than fight one another.
That enterprise has been remarkably successful. The European Union integration has moved forward by leaps and bounds. We’ve seen the consolidation of democracy in Spain and Portugal and Greece after the years of dictatorship in those countries. We’ve seen the establishment of a single market, we’ve seen Europe emerge as one of the two great trading blocs in the world, we’ve seen Europe playing a role as the largest provider of development assistance and humanitarian assistance in the world. I think it’s also fair to say that the prospect of the enlargement of the European Union to take in the countries of Central and Eastern Europe has been one of the main reasons why the disintegration of the Soviet empire has been managed successfully and hasn’t led to a hard landing but has been managed with a soft landing. The European Union provides a political and economic haven for those countries escaping from fifty years or so of Soviet tyranny. So, it’s been a successful example, not just of regional cooperation, but of the pooling of sovereignty.
Pooling sovereignty doesn’t mean you give up your sense of what it means to be a nation-state; it doesn’t mean that you have to abandon patriotism. Nation-states will, in my view, continue until the end of time to be the principal political units, the main focus for people’s loyalty and enthusiasm, common language, common culture, common traditions, and so on. But I think that there is a growing recognition that nation-states need to work more closely together. That’s particularly been the case in Europe in order to cope with some of the challenges of the modern world and in order to avoid slipping back into some of the errors of the past. It’s an extraordinary paradox of Europe today that there are more nation-states in Europe than there have ever been. Literally. But nearly all of them are either already members of the European Union or wish to be members of the European Union. A fiercely proud country like Poland, whose Foreign Minister is going to address you shortly, a fiercely independent country like Poland doesn’t want to join the European Union in order to give up its independence, which it has fought so hard for over the years. But it does recognize that the European Union offers the best prospect of increasing the prosperity of the people of Poland and of consolidating their democracy on a Europe-wide basis.
Let me offer a few thoughts based on our experiences in Europe, a few thoughts about a debate which I know is taking place in the United States. Are there lessons for today’s only superpower in the way that yesterday’s big powers now see the world? Do similar questions arise here about the desirable limits of sovereignty? I read with interest a recent study done by the American Enterprise Institute, a study called “Why Sovereignty Matters” by Jeremy Rabkin whose thesis is that the extent to which the U.S. has been ready to submit domestic policy to international agreements and supranational institutions threatens to distort the American Constitutional system. He argued in that study that it’s been corrosive of federalism, of the separation of powers, even of property rights. That’s a view that I know draws a warm Congressional cheer.
There’s a strong current of thinking in Congress, there’s a strong current of thinking in some think tanks, that the United States should stand aloof from international undertakings, resisting the Lilliputian efforts of the international community to restrict Gulliver’s freedom of movement. It should exercise power unencumbered as far as possible by entanglements of international law. Certainly, the United States as the preeminent world power has the strength to maintain that position, but it’s not just a question of whether it can; there’s a persuasive, perhaps dominant school of thought, which argues that it should. Unilateralism in this view isn’t just a reflection of U.S. power but a positive virtue. America’s hegemony, the argument goes, is benevolent and such is the primacy of American values and institutions that it’s no bad thing if others must adapt themselves to U.S. preferences.
Now, I can see why that view is so attractive. There’s something peculiarly repellant about philanthropy and international do-goodery divorced from real human relations. Well-meaning and well-dressed peripatetic inter-nationalists talking interminably about poverty in a variety of the world’s more expensive capitals; the endless fudge, the dreary unreadable declarations, the maelstrom of self-interested humbug masquerading as high principle. Better, surely, the honest pursuit of profit and the national interest. Didn’t we learn anything from Adam Smith?
Well, I can see the attraction of that view, but I can’t share it. On the contrary, the instinct to return to a narrow definition of the national interest, to assert the primacy of U.S. concerns--and especially economic interests--over any outside authority constitutes, I think, a threat not just to the developing international order; but to the United States itself.
I want to note first of all that the United States almost above all nations has been internationalist, and a tremendous force for good in the world, as I was saying earlier. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which we fight for from China to Yugoslavia, was an American legacy. Men like George Marshall had no doubt that it was in America’s national interest to accept wider obligations. Listen to this from Dean Achenson writing about the post-war construction in his magisterial book, Present at the Creation. “The enormity of the task before all of them,” he wrote, “after the wars in Europe and Asia ended in 1945, only slowly revealed itself. As it did so, it began to appear just a bit less formidable than that described in the first chapter of Genesis. That was to create a world out of chaos. Ours is to create half a world, a free half, out of the same material without blowing the whole to bits in the process.”
There was a remarkable article earlier this year in Foreign Affairs by Tom Friedman in which he described two different perspectives, two ways of looking at the world. One, which he called “America on duty,” sees the world built around walls, walls of containment around enemies and outsiders, walls of defense around the United States itself. It means, he argued, being largely indifferent to what’s going on behind the walls of other countries as long as they’re not bothering the United States. The other perspective, which Friedman labeled “America on line,” sees America as the center of an increasingly integrated web, a web of trade, telecommunications and finance, a single global ecosystem. Foreign policy is about protecting, strengthening and expanding that web, and that requires active engagement. It means working with others to solve common problems; it means joining forces with others; to help, for example, when key strands of the web such as Mexico or Thailand, Turkey or Argentina, are threatened with financial crises that could infect the whole network.
I believe, as I say, that the great generation of U.S. statesmen after the Second World War were instinctive “on-liners.” Today, there are those in Congress whose instincts are for walls, for “America on duty.” I hasten to add that I’m not talking about this administration rather than President Clinton’s. The issue has been around for some time. There was already a live debate under President Clinton: over the international criminal court, over the comprehensive test ban treaty, over the land mine treaty of 1999, and so on. And I do recognize the suspicion in some American minds of multilateral obligations. I also recognize the temptation for the world’s greatest power to assert unilateral extraterritorial jurisdiction, telling European countries, for example, that they will be penalized if they’re so unwise as to trade with Iran, with Libya, or with Cuba on terms that haven’t been approved by U.S. lawmakers. Such reflexes will only be overcome if there’s widespread recognition, not least in Congress, that acceptance of U.S. obligations in a multilateral framework is in the interests even of the world’s biggest power.
Let me offer very briefly, rather telegrammatically, five reasons why I believe that to be the case. First, because the concept of a nation whole unto itself, a jewel set in a silver sea, has become increasingly anachronistic. I’ve already argued the case for nation-states but in the modern world the concept of national has become harder and harder to define. An essay entitled “Who is Us?” published in the Harvard Business Review more than a decade ago argued, for example, that efforts to protect national industry through subsidies, tariffs, anti-dumping actions, and so on were increasingly self-defeating, because national labels bore less and less relation to the underlying economic realities.
Second, multilaterialism is in the U.S interests because, big as you are, you cannot do everything yourselves. You need allies, and allies aren’t always comfortable. Winston Churchill once remarked, “In working with allies it sometimes happens that they develop opinions of their own, but they are necessary, opinions and all.” Third, and perhaps counter-intuitively, you need to work constructively with others precisely because you are the biggest. As the world’s only super-power the U.S. carries a particular responsibility to maintain moral authority for its values. If America has a neuralgic resistance to any external interference in her own affairs, how can she expect others to respect her authority? I need hardly say that as well as love for America around the world there’s also jealously and there’s also resentment. America, I think, needs to bend over backwards to show that she’s a beneficent and responsible influence, as I believe her to be. Resistance to multilateral engagement and its twin, the assertion of a U.S. unilateral right to control the behavior of others, erodes the legitimacy and the credibility of U.S. global leadership.
Fourth, what Friedman called the “on-line” approach to international affairs is more than ever necessary in today’s world as the phenomena of globalization gathers pace. As an ideological free trader and someone who’s read some history I welcome the revolution brought about by global telecommunications, by travel, by integrated financial markets and by international commerce of every description. Perhaps my experience in Asia and the extraordinary times in which I was there contributed to my enthusiasm. The combination of open trade, capitalism and technology creates unparalleled opportunities. But globalization has its dark side, too. I don’t need to read the litany of horrors: from drug trafficking, which has become globally today a bigger industry than iron and steel or motorcars to transnational crime to climate change and environmental degradation, with its implications for poverty and security; from the failure of international trade to bridge the divide between the billions who are benefiting and the billions who are left in squalor to illegal migration to the spread of AIDS and other communicable diseases.
These aren’t issues that can be ignored or left to resolve themselves. Yet individual countries, even countries as large as the United States, cannot tackle such problems on their own, nor can they be addressed by the mechanisms of classic international cooperation. We do have to work together to tackle these problems. That’s why I’m delighted that overnight it seems that we achieved a breakthrough, bringing most countries in the world together in support of the objectives of the Kyoto protocol. I’m sorry that the United States, so far, wishes to go in another direction, but I very much hope that we’ll be able to continue the dialogue with the United States and that we’ll be able to work jointly, albeit clearly using different means in order to meet an objective which we both understand is hugely important for the whole of humanity and hugely important for the future of humanity.
Fifth, it’s in the United States’ interests to engage because the Bretton Woods institutions that you helped to create are more than ever needed today if we’re to enjoy a free and prosperous world. We need, that is, a United Nations. We need an International Monetary Fund. We need a World Bank and a World Trade Organization. These are the institutions that provide a structure for the civilized resolution of global disputes and a civilized approach to the new global agenda. It’s in the U.S.national interest that they should be strengthened.
But the credibility and legitimacy of these institutions is under threat. Democratic legitimacy is a fragile commodity, slow to build and quick to destroy. At the international level, it’s especially problematic, because the concept of a world society isn’t one towards which people are naturally attracted by sentiment or by tradition. Nationally we have our flags, we have our anthems, we have our myths. At the international level, it’s much harder to build loyalty and legitimacy and more tempting, as we saw this weekend in Genoa, to throw brickbats or worse. If the United States and the European Union don’t support these institutions and try to give them deep democratic roots, they will lose their authority and the whole world will be the poorer for it. The muddled, the very muddled, but passionate movement against globalization shows the fragility of institutions which do not have democratic underpinnings. Yet have recent attitudes in Congress, for example, to the U.N. really helped to sustain the central international institutions?
One last thought. Too often, too often we focus on the issues which divide Europe and America—on the huge agricultural and other subsidies on both sides of the Atlantic, on steel protectionism, on foreign sales corporations, on closed--in our view in Europe--on closed U.S. transportation markets, on different approaches to food securities, on competition policies, on whatever the latest disputes may be. There are knee-jerk prejudices on both sides. Yet our biggest challenge is a common one: as democracies we believe in open markets and the rule of law and we have to fashion an effective multilateral response to the global challenges that we both confront.
My concern is that the United States which shaped the world to our huge benefit in Europe in the second half of the last century, the United States whose values are my values, the United States, which has done so much spectacular good in this world, is sometimes tempted to pull back, to demand untrammeled independence of action, to insist, for example, that its domestic energy or environmental policy are its own business and the world should keep out. Think how you have rightly and bravely criticized those countries that take a similar view on human rights.
It’s the duty of every government to look after the national interest, but it must be an enlightened national interest and, as I’ve tried to argue, America’s true national interest is in multilateral commitment. The challenges of the new global agenda will not be met without U.S. leadership. Let’s be absolutely clear about that. I feel that in every bone in my body, but they are, I humbly suggest, unlikely to be met without European help and understanding. Tiresome we may be, very tiresome we may be, but we want to work with you and we want you to lead.
Thank you.