Lecture by Peter de Waard for Institute Clingendael 11/10/2007

Anyone who attempts to divine trends in British international relations risks inviting ridicule. There is always a danger that predictions which seemed sensible at this moment will come back to haunt them. Neville Chamberlain’s epitaph will forever be his promise of 'peace for our time.'
 So when we deliver speeches on themes such as 'The Future of British Foreign Policy, I should prepare myself for a sceptical audience.

 One week ago every analyst should predict that there would be parliamentary elections on the 1^st of November. But last Saturday prime minister Gordon Brown announced that there will be no elections this autumn or this winter and perhaps not even next year. He made a fool of the whole of the Westminster-lobby – so as the political journalists are called in London – and also of himself.

 Political landscapes change very fast. Ten days ago Labour had a comfortable lead on the Tories in the opinion polls. Now the opposition has a lead on Labour. Gordon Browns honeymoon is over.

 Especially at this moment there are also many more reasons to be sceptical about predictions. In the first place there has been a major shift of power in Downing Street this year.

 The new Prime Minister Gordon Brown took over from the flamboyant Tony Blair in May. After ten years we knew where Blairs was standing for. But his successor Brown is still a foreign policy void thus far. He may be awaiting events – how are things developing in Iraq, who will be the next US president en when will there be elections in Britain now.

 After more than hundred days of Gordon Brown we have not seen a real new policy.

 Even his announcement first to withdraw one thousand British man from Iraq and than to halve the troops to 2500 men next year were more or less decisions made by Tony Blair although Gordon Brown tried to cut a dash with it. But Blair has decided that British forces should hand over the combat role to Iraqi troops. It is also possible because the number of attacks is dramatically reduced. The question is what Brown will do when the security situation in Iraq will worsening.

 There is the brilliant British rhetoric – a second wave of foreign policy – but nobody knows what it means. Brown said the American alliance we have, the European cooperation we welcome and will strengthen and our role in the Commonswealth we will build upon. It sounds as vague as it sounds Blairite.

 Brown is much more ambivalent to face a world with global, complex, overlapping insecurities and not a world the power politics of the Cold War. One of the reasons that for him the world is not as simple as it was for Tony Blair.

 At this moment it doesn't fill me with any great confidence that Brown has thought his foreign policy through. If he has, and is keeping it quiet, because his party won't like it, Great-Britain should have kept Blair in the first place. At least HE could articulate a policy! Blair had high profile thanks to the courage of his convictions, whether we liked them or not.

 For Blair the world was easy – a struggle between the good and the bad. For Brown it is more difficult. He is a more complex thinker who looks at many other aspects – especially what is important for the global economy in general and the British economy in particular. Brown is a total supporter of big business and neo-liberal economics. He thinks that the best way to solve every problem is free trade – even the problems of the poor in Africa

 Before he became PM Gordon Brown has been ten years the chancellor of the exchequer – the second most powerful man in the UK. But he nearly spoke about foreign relations. The only things we knew from him was his determination to work for aid to Africa en his famous five tests who need to be passed before Britain could introduce the euro – a thing nobody is talking over anymore.

 The big question is whether Brown will take more care than Tony Blair did. Will he is his foreign policy more thinking about ‘winning hearts and minds of the Brits' – something at the end was beyond Blair.

 Brown is less the guy to take risks than Blair was. Perhaps he is more afraid of losing the ethnic vote than Blair, as well as the support of the press and civil libertarians. He worries more about social cohesion & civil unrest. That’s why he don’t want to say much about foreign policy because it can only damage him.

 In the second place scepticism derives partly from the critique of British foreign policy which has been around for many years. It goes something like this: Britain is a country which has failed to make the transition from global power to also-ran; until the country can make this adjustment, its vision will forever be clouded by nostalgia.

 This critique may have had some validity in the immediate post-war period, with the combined effect of Suez and the  decision to stand aside from the European Community. When the former US Secretary of State, Dean Acheson, remarked forty years ago that Britain had lost an Empire and failed to find a role, this observation was all the more cutting because it was accurate.
 Today, however, Britain has a clear and self-confident role – thanks to Margaret Thatcher en Tony Blair. Not running an Empire, nor as a super power, but as one of the world’s most influential nations. Britain is an important and sometimes even a leading member of the enlarged EU. It is off course a leading member of the Commonwealth. Britain enjoys a cultural influence wholly disproportionate to its size, thanks to the English language, cool London with its theatres, popstars and world beating broadcasting by the most admired BBC.

 Let’s not forget Britain is also a Permanent Member of the world’s supreme decision-making body, the United Nations Security Council. It is a member of the G8 and has the world’s fourth largest economy – still. It has an active development aid programme, not large but very effective armed forces and more investments overseas than any country other than America. The country needs in that way an ambitious foreign policy with global reach.
 The aim of this speech is to look at look at the future of British foreign politics, in historic perspective, and to  to examine some of the global trends that foreign policy makers of Gordon Brown will need to take into account in the coming years. Which impact may these trends have on the UK’s foreign policy. And at the end I will talk a little bit about dealing with the Brits.

Relation with Europe

Europe is the biggest obsession and frustration for British politicians after the war.

 The paradox is that Europe or the European Union a British invention is, although a French-German creation. Winston Churchill was the first to call in 1945 for a ‘United States of Europe," a federation of European states to promote harmonious relations between nations, economic cooperation, and a sense of European identity. A Brit surprisingly can be regarded as the father of European unity. While in opposition, Churchill argued forcefully at home and abroad that a united Europe was the best means to heal residual hatred from the Second World War.

 At the Congress of the European Movement here at The Hague from the 7^th till 10th May 1948 Churchill's European unity strategy paid rich dividends. He made several highly publicized speeches and in his keynote address Churchill sketched out his vision of a united Europe and Britain's place in it, emphasizing that it was "impossible to separate economic and defence from the political structure." He called for a European Assembly and spoke of three world pillars in the United Nations--the USSR, the United States and a Council of Europe that included Britain linked to its Empire and Commonwealth." He hoped to reach a time when people would be proud to say, "I am a European," and would think of themselves as much European as of their native land.

 But when Churchill returned as prime minister in 1951 he didn’t know how to do something with his ideas. The decolonisation, the end of the empire, the relation with the new American president Dwight Eisenhower and his old age took all his energy.

 Churchill's rhetoric could not be reconciled with his ambivalence regarding Britain's role in his proposed federation after he returned to power in October 1951.

 When the European Economic Community was founded in 1957 Britain stayed out. The Labour Party was at that moment even more anti-Europe than the Conservatives. When Willy Brandt visited one of the Labour-party conferences at the end of the fifties, he was surprised how naïf the Brits were on Europe. He said he thought that any minute queen Victoria could storm into the conference room and feeling not amused about all the foreigners overthere.

 Everything changed in the sixties when the British economy went into decline. Harold Wilson would like to become a member of the EEC, but was refused by General de Gaulle who didn’t want an ally of the US in. When De Gaulle resigned Wilsons successor Edward Heath took his chance. Britain became a member of the EEC in 1971 although a referendum two years was only nearly won under a new Labour-governement.

 The referendum divided Labour so much that ten years later the party divided between the Old Labour of Michael Foot and the New Social Democratic Pary under pro-Europe Labour-politicians as Roy Jenkins. It was not the last time that Europe destroyed one of the big party’s

 Margaret Thatcher, who became a PM in 1979, was at first a pro-European. But it changed already very soon. Valery Giscard D’Estaing en Helmut Schmidt – the French president and German bundeskanzler – didn’t want British interference. Already soon it created mistrust and Thatcher opposed many of their new plans at that of their successors – Mitterand and Kohl – for further European integration. It divided also the Tory-party. When Thatcher resigned in 1990 the Conservatives were torn apart by quarrels over the New Treaty of Maastricht.

 Tony Blair decided to change everything when he came to power. Britain should be in the hearth of Europe. In his first year as a prime minister – 1997 – Britain was a keen supporter of Europe. Blair signed the Treaty of Amsterdam. But things changed very soon. Blair was hindered by Brown who was more grumpier about Europe. Brown frustrated his attempts to introduce the euro, based largely on his guardianship of the so-called five economic tests and his determination not to give up the British rebate – the billions of euro’s the UK receives from Brussels as a compensation for low agriculture subsidies.

 The tabloidnewspapers – whose American owners don’t favour Europe – and 9/11 did the rest. Blair could never place Britain in the heart of Europe as he intended.

 Brown is an American schooled economic who prefers his holiday in the US. He is much more Euroceptic than Blair. He distrusts the old European economies with the big influence of trade unions, the independence of the European Central Bank and the French/German tete a tetes.

 But will he show it and will the Brown-policy really change British attitude towards Europe? Not at all. Not only has Brown appointed a Blairite Foreign Secretary – David Miliband – he has already promised not to hold a referendum on the new European Treaty on the constitution – a promise Blair made also but broke.

 Europe is an achillisheel for every British politicians as long as the tabloidnewspapers of Rupert Murdoch don’t want anything to do with it. Gordon Brown knows it. He will be an active participant, but he will not try to change it as Tony Blair has done. He will be more on the sideline.

Middle East

Tony Blair surprised everyone in the last few years with his plans for the middle east. After 9/11 he said everytime that the war against terrorism could only be won with a new peacedeal between Israel en the Palestines.

 Every partyconference he announced a new peace initiative for the middle east of which sometimes Israel, the Arab world, the US or even his closest allies of the Foreign Office knew anything.

 Peace in the Middle East should be the most important contribution in the war against terrorism. Traditional Britain has been an ally of the Arabic world since Lawrence of Arabia the sympathised with the Arabic kings and sultans.

 The relations with Israel were bad from the beginning of the creation of this state. During Israels independence fight in 1946 the Irgun blew up the King David Hotel in Jeruzalem, the British Headquarters in the British Mandate. After that relations never went very smoothly. Still many people of the foreign office are recruited from Arabic studies in Oxford and Cambridge and sympathise with the Palestinians.

 Despite of the Israel support during the Suez Crisis relations between Great-Britain and Israel stayed very cool, especially during the six days war in 1967 and the Yom-Kippur war in 1973. The USA not Britain was the ally of Israel. Britain want to keep his good relations with the old colonies in the Arabic World. Tony Blair was the first who changed that policy. He was more close to Israel then all his predecessors. He supported Israel even during the raid in Libanon in 2006 – some say that this cost him his job.

 Gordon Brown will also in this way be more careful. He will try to create some more distance from Israel. His foreign secretary David Miliband ,was a sceptic of Israel's war in Lebanon. John Denham, who resigned from Blair's government over Iraq, was in May brought into the cabinet. Most tantalisingly for foreign-policy analists, Mark Malloch Brown became minister for Africa, Asia and the UN.

 Lord Malloch Brown's last job was as the UN's deputy secretary-general, which would itself be enough to alienate a certain class of American unilateralist. Last year he made some critical remarks about America that had some of them reaching for their guns; and in a recent interview with a British newspaper, he was at it again. Anticipating a more “impartial” foreign policy, Lord Malloch Brown said he was happy to be described as an “anti-neocon”. More smoke signals appeared to emanate from Douglas Alexander, a close ally of Mr Brown who is now the international development secretary. During a speech in Washington, DC, Mr Alexander extolled the virtues of multilateralism, “soft power” and international rules. Both Mr Miliband and Mr Brown mobilised to affirm the importance of Anglo-American co-operation; but, as with the apparent reluctance of Mr Brown's ministers to use the phrase “war on terror”, the sharpest analists might have heard implicit deprecation of George Bush even in Mr Brown's warm words, which emphasised shared values (liberty, opportunity, etc) rather than specific policies. And though both he and Mr Miliband are to cross the Atlantic soon—and both admire and have spent time in America—Mr Brown has already paid calls on assorted Europeans.

 It is not unthinkable that not the Brits but the French will be the most faithfull ally of the US in a new conflict about for example Iran. In foreign policy the French president Sarkozy is a better successor of Tony Blair than Gordon Brown.

 Browns Foreign Secretary David Miliband said on the Labour-partyconference that the government needed to stop and think why the well-intentioned interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan had alienated millions of Moslims. He admitted that it was hard to win peace in these countries. Gordon Brown has already learned his lessons and in his foreign policy there shall be a greater reliance on stronger multilateral institutions like the United Nations and Nato. That is not only in the Middle East the case but also in other parts of the world (Zimbabwe, Dafur, Columbia and Burma). Military victories may not be military solutions. Good intentions alone, like Tony Blair, is not enough, even shared values are not enough, first the West had the moslim world to embody in shared institutions. One of the ways is to make Turkey a member of the European Union.

 British foreign politics will be more dull under Gordon Brown, although Miliband intends to employ actress Angelie Jolie – human rights ambassador for the UN- as a special campaign for more interest in foreign policy.

Russia and China

The first thing Gordon Brown en his new foreign secretary David Miliband did was the expelling of four Russian diplomats over the Litvinenko affair.This lead to the worst crisis in Russian-British relations since the cold war. It not happened from one moment to an other. The relations.

have been on a downward trajectory for years.

The continuing crisis is not simply a bilateral one. Moscow's relations with the US and Europe have been affected by Vladimir Putin's increasingly authoritarian rule at home and vigorous assertion of Russian interests abroad. But British ties have perhaps fared worst of all.

The last time Britain and Russia conducted tit-for-tat expulsions, in 1996, the incident represented a blip amid a rapport that had been improving since John Major became the first western leader to invite his Russian counterpart to a G7 meeting five years earlier.

 This time round, all the indicators on the state of the relationship are negative. British companies have been shouldered out of joint ventures in Russia. Embassy and British Council staff have been harassed by a pro-Putin youth movement, Britain has emerged as a haven for wealthy Russian dissidents, and the Litvinenko affair, involving a horrific assassination and the dispersal of lethally radioactive material around London, is in itself far more than a spy scandal.

 That the relations are so bad was not expected when Putin took office in 2000. Tony Blair was the first leader to visit Putin, even before he was really elected as a president. Blair thought to have find in him a new ally and Putin made even the first official state visit to London since the last czar.

 The downturn begun four years later when the president felt strong enough to take on his most powerful rivals, the business oligarchs. One of them, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, was jailed after attempting to play kingmaker in Russian politics, while another, Boris Berezovsky, was granted asylum in Britain.

British courts ruled that Russia failed to make its case for extradition, but in Moscow's eyes the judgment represented British backing for an enemy of the state. Berezovsky himself encouraged Moscow's perception that he is plotting

The civil war inside the Russian state had spread to Britain.

The Litvinenko affair was just one battle in the war against the oligarchs. The former Russian spy claimed he had been commissioned by the FSB security service to assassinate Mr Berezovsky, and came under his wing when he took refuge in Britain himself.

The emergence of Britain as apparent headquarters for President Putin's enemies contributed to an anti-British backlash across Russian society, from economics to culture.

Last year, the Anglo-Dutch company Royal Dutch Shell was obliged to hand over its controlling share in the huge Sakhalin II oil and gas field to the state-owned energy group Gazprom. TNK-BP, BP's Russian subsidiary, was also pressured into selling its interest in the Kovykta gas field. It was also swallowed by Gazprom.

Moscow has foiled European attempts to build alternative routes for the transmission of oil and gas to Europe from central Asia, ensuring that all pipelines lead to Russia.

 Britain's least-favoured-nation status in Moscow also reflects its closeness with the US. The conflicts in Serbia and Iraq, both Russian clients, were seen as hostile acts. So too was the proposed extension of the US missile defence system to Poland and the Czech Republic, with apparently enthusiastic British support. Russia's formal withdrawal over the weekend from the post-cold war treaty restricting the deployment of forces in Europe was a response to the missile scheme.

 When Alexander Litvinenko met Andrei Lugovoi and another former KGB agent, Dmitri Kovtun, for tea at Mayfair's Millennium Hotel last November, the political backdrop to the encounter was already poisoned.

As the case gathered momentum with the British extradition request for Mr Lugovoi and its rejection last week by Russia, UK officials in Moscow have borne the brunt of a deteriorating relationship.

 The pro-Kremlin youth group Nashi has waged a campaign of intimidation against the British ambassador, Tony Brenton, while the British Council offices were raided by tax police dressed in balaclavas. With a steady flow of invective emerging from the Kremlin against British "stupidity and arrogance", British diplomats in Russia are braced for worse.

 When Margaret Thatcher declared that she could "do business" with Mr Gorbachev, it seemed to mark a breakthrough in Anglo-Russian relations. More than 20 years later, there is a growing impression the relationship has come full circle.

 Sometimes the relations with the Chinese government – real dictators – seems sometimes easier. Britain thinks that the road to peace in several countries – Dafur en Burma – can only be reached with the help of China.

Special Relations, the US

Like Tony Blair and George Bush Gordon Brown is a Christian, even a son of a vicar, but he seems to see the world more through the economic prism of GDP and jobs than the religious lens of good and evil. The opacity, plus the smoke signals, offer succour to those who would prefer to see Mr Brown as the heir to Clement Attlee—who rushed to Washington to see Harry Truman after loose talk of using nukes in Korea—than to Mr Blair. A cartoon in another paper, which replaced the Blair poodle with a Brown bulldog, peeing on Mr Bush's foot, captured their hopes.

 Also this seems an illusion. Since the second world war the special relation with the US is always as strong as ever. There have been many incidents on which both parties had a different view – the British invasions in Suez in 1956 and the Falklands in 1984 – and the American war in Vietnam – but their vision on the world is always the same. The couples of Thathcher/Reagan, Major/Bush sr and Blair/Clinton and Bush jr. were strong. And also the special relation from Gordon Brown or David Cameron with whom will be the next president will be strong.

 Especially the Brits realise how powerfull the Americans are. The United States is so huge and special, so full of its own problems and opportunities, that to many of its citizens, including its legislators, the world outside has seemed secondary. Not only secondary but dangerous. George Washington’s warning was that the European powers had their own agenda of old fashioned rivalry in which the United States should not become entangled. However, the second element is equally traditional; its most powerful exponent was Woodrow Wilson at the end of the Great War. For him the United States was a beacon of light with a duty to radiate the messages of freedom and democracy into all dark corners of the world. That vision of the United States as a missionary has been repeated in just about every inaugural speech by Presidents both Democrat and Republican, Reagan as well as Kennedy, Bush as well as Clinton.

 Gordon Brown will be the special friend of the next American president. But he will not do military adventures with him or her without more support. ‘Four times we’ve sent young men and women to fight for our values. Rightly in my view. But while we have won the war it’s been harder to win the peace’, said Foreign Secretary David Miliband.

 The new British government will choose for soft power (aid budgets, diplomacy) instead of hard power (economic sanctions and military intervention) in countries which regimes they want to change. Bush is more convinced than Blair that economic aid can prevent terrorism although the perpetrators of 9/11 were rich Saudi’s

 But the Brits want their position back as the bridge between the US and Europe after Tony Blair have blown it up with the war against Iraq.

 A crucial element is now our position as a European power – not only a member of the European Union, but the member which alongside France takes a natural lead in diplomatic and military activity outside our own Continent. When the British Prime Minister goes to a European Summit all those with whom he deals there recognise, albeit reluctantly, that he speaks with a greater knowledge and understanding of American policy than anyone else round the table. In the eyes of General de Gaulle this intimacy made us so suspect that he was determined to exclude us from the European Community. But European Gaullism is now a shadow of its former self. All the governments of Europe, including those now negotiating to enter the EU, understand clearly, though sometimes again with reluctance, that the United States is crucial to European security and prosperity.

 Brown and especially Miliband are however masters of spin. Off course it is electoral interesting to take more distance of the US – Brown doesn’t want to lose the support of the old left who wanted him as a PM, but with not praising Blair politics he is not burying it. He sees Britain still a major role in the world.

9/11

Everything changed on 9/11. Since the attack on the World Trade Centre, politicians and commentators have not been short of theories. A widely held view is that the world has entered an unstable, new era. In his book, The Shield of Achilles, Philip Bobbitt presents this case in apocalyptic terms. He argues that, 'for five centuries it has taken the resources of a state to destroy another state. This is no longer true.'
 The Britis PM Tony Blair was one of the first statesmen to realise the treat from international terrorism. Already one day after 9/11 he warned for the danger of terrorist using weapons of mass destruction. It became such an obsession for Blair that he invented or his intelligence services weapons of mass destruction in Iraq who weren’t there.

 Nobody will dispute that we live in an unstable world, but you can argue that the forces of chaos have been with us for a lot longer than the past 6 years since 9/11. That eleventh September was the tragic confirmation of a trend in international affairs, which has been with us since the end of the Cold War.
For those  who lived through the Cold War, perhaps our abiding memory will be of a time when nuclear deterrence kept the peace. Order – albeit based on a balance of terror – prevailed.
 Order of a different kind now exists in Europe. The fall of the Iron Curtain has been the catalyst for a burst of wealth creation and the spread of democratic values across much of the continent. But in other parts of the world, the end of the Cold War has had less benign consequences. The East-West confrontation brought a superficial stability to many countries, particularly in Africa. Many fell under Eastern or Western spheres of influence. As client states, they were dependent on infusions of financial and other forms of assistance from the major powers.

 With the fall of the Iron Curtain, this arrangement unravelled. States used to a steady flow of support found the taps turned off, exposing internal weaknesses in many of their governments. This brought to the fore structural problems, in many cases the legacies of a colonial era when arbitrary borders took no account of ethnic and linguistic cohesion.

 The genocide in Rwanda and the internal collapse of states like Zaire and Afghanistan – following the Soviet withdrawal in 1989 - were perhaps the first indicators of a new, chaotic era in international affairs.

 The formidable task for policy makers is to make sense of this chaos – to identify the forces, which are causing global change. The first indicator of change is people. In the coming years, the populations of the developed countries will be static and, in some cases, decline. The populations of the developing world, particularly in North Africa, the Middle East, Asia and Latin America will continue to grow and to become younger. In the developed world, countries will need to find answers to labour shortages and a growing crisis in funding for pensions. To satisfy the demands of a growing population, the developing world will need to establish and strengthen the institutions, which can deliver economic growth. At the same time, the developed world will need to work together more effectively to meet both the challenges and the undoubted economic opportunities posed by mass migration.

 The second indicator is economics. It is safe to assume that the US will remain the largest national economy for the next few decades at least, with the EU collectively not far behind. Japan will remain a major economic player. But with sustained growth in China and India it is likely that by 2020 the world’s three of the five largest national economies will be in Asia and three will be on the Pacific Rim. Europe will in the foreseeable future much more on the peripherie of economic power. The Pacific and the Indian Ocean will be econonmically more powerful than the Atlantic.

 The economic prospects for the developing world are less rosy. Relatively, Africa has been going backwards over the past 30 years. In 1972 the continent accounted for 4.7% of global trade. By 2004 this figure had fallen to 2.7%. Today, almost 50% of the population of Africa lives on less than $1 per day.
 Efforts to combat poverty and promote sustainable development in Africa are important, but they are unlikely in themselves to trigger the kind of economic miracle we have seen in south-east and east Asia over the past three decades. AIDS will continue to blight growth prospects in the sub-Sahara, shatter communities and inflict misery on the lives of millions. Without more open and effective forms of government, some parts of the Arab World also risk failing to reap the benefits of globalisation.
 The third indicator is on climate change and global energy supplies. The world has sufficient reserves of oil to meet growing global demand. But the trend in the coming years will surely be towards action to limit the risks that arise from dependence on the Middle East, and to reduce our dependence on oil as our principal transport fuel.
 This will not just be dictated by domestic and foreign policy objectives, particularly those on air quality and climate change. It will be driven by the need for Governments to ensure security of energy supplies. Paid predominantly by the US, the costs of protecting our Middle East oil supplies are huge. While we will never be able to eliminate our dependence on the Middle East, we should seek to broaden our sources of supply.
 The fourth indicator is state failure. In the past, the primary source of conflict was rivalry between nation states. Today, the most likely source of conflict comes from within states that are unable to sustain themselves. State failure is a growing phenomenon. In the 1990s, almost all of the world’s conflicts took place within states rather than between them. According to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, last year only 1 of 24 conflicts worldwide was between states.
 Over the past decade it is estimated that wars in and amongst failed states have killed about 8 million people, most of them civilians, and displaced another 4 million.
 The world is now beginning to wake up to the threat. International intervention in the Balkans, Sierra Leone, Afghanistan and last but not least Iraq. Goal is replacing chaos and the law of the jungle with order, democracy and respect for the rule of law.
 The West have realised that they have paid the eternal cost for turning a blind eye to the collapse of the state in Afghanistan in the eighties and ninenties. Al Qa’ida found shelter under a regime, which shared its belief that one of the world’s great monotheistic faiths could be invoked to foment hatred of the West.

 This brings us to the final indicator of change in the coming years: the debate on political ideas and religion.  Since the end of the Cold War, the universal principles of the UN Charter – respect for human rights, democracy and the rule of law - have spread inexorably around the world. Of course there are exceptions. But the values of western democracy are slowly adopted by more and more countries. The clash of political ideologies, which defined the twentieth century, has become a thing of the past. But just as the threat of political extremism has waned, so the dangers of religious fundamentalism have grown. It is patently clear that many people in the Muslim world feel that western values and secularism threatens their faith and their way of life.

Who will Gordon Brown act in this world?

Not so much different from his predecessor Tony Blair. His Foreign Secretary – David Miliband – often praised as the brightest lad on the Labourbenches and in the past leader of Blairs Policy Unit on Downing Street – will not make any big shifts.

 First: Britain will support concerted international action to tackle the twin threats of terrorism and weapons of mass destruction (WMD). I don’t think that Britain will take the initiative or a leading role what they did in the months before the invasion in Iraq. When there will be military action against for example Iran, perhaps this time it will be the new French president Sarkozy who will cooperate most closely with the USA. Britain will always take part in such a coalition. Miliband has already said that Britain will stand firm on Iran. If the mullahs persist in acquiring nuclear weapons, Britain will not distancing itself from George Bush. But this time only with other countries.

 Forty years ago, President Kennedy voiced the fears of millions when he said that up to 25 states might eventually possess nuclear weapons. This nightmare scenario has not yet materialised, thanks largely to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) and the associated inspections regime of the International Atomic Energy Agency. But the number of countries has grown. The consensus to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons is jeopardised by countries like Iran.

 Britains objective is to work with the international community to strengthen the consensus against the spread of WMD, in particular through the introduction of effective, intrusive inspection regimes. They will encourage all countries to apply the strictest possible export controls to ensure that sensitive technologies do not fall into the hands of rogue regimes and terrorist groups. And their diplomats will have to address the underlying security concerns which fuel proliferation, particularly in North Africa and the Middle East, South Asia and the Far East.

 Often is asked if Britain cannot give a good example and get rid of his own nucleair deterrent. But Tony Blair has already decided in the beginning of this year that Britain will replace his own nucleair submarines. Gordon Brown will not change that, nor will a future Tory-governement.

 A second priority for Britain’s foreign policy is the creation of a secure neighbourhood for Europe. The imminent expansions of NATO and the EU mean the task is already halfway complete. But this is no excuse for complacency. We must ensure that the reunification of the continent does not simply create new dividing lines, alienating countries which stand at the new Europe’s borders. This must mean a strengthened strategic relationship with Russia,

Turkey

Great Britain is one of the big supporters of enlargements of the European Union, after Romania and Bulgaria also Turkey should become a member.

 One of the reasons is that Britain sees the membership of Turkey as a way to bridge the gap between the Christian and the Muslim world. The great divergence in wealth and economic performance between Europe and the Euroasia continent can lead to new tensions. Convergence between East and West – especially with the economic development in India and China – is necessary. There is no more pivotal country than Turkey. It is in the crossroad of East and West. The Turkey are on the front of the battle against religious extremism.

 There is also a more cynical reason. How larger the EU how more weakened the as Berlin-Paris and how more powerful the UK. Tony Blair knew it, Gordon Brown knows it.

UN

A third priority for Britain should be the maintenance of an effective, international rules-based system to regulate the conduct of relations between states. The institutions established at the end of the Second World War have ensured that the past 50 years has been one of the most stable periods in history.
 No institution has made a greater contribution than the United Nations. The UN has not resolved all conflicts by peaceful means; nor could it. But its remarkable achievement has been to make the fine language of its Charter a force for good beyond the power of words; by this the UN has raised the bar against the illegitimate use of violence, by States and now by terrorists. In doing so, it has saved lives by the million, and saved millions more from fear, poverty and tyranny.
 Without the UN there could have been no salvation for the people of East Timor, no prospect of lasting peace in Sierra Leone, no-one to help rebuild Afghanistan. But Britain is also disappointed in the way the UN frustrated to deal with Iraq and Saddam Hussein.

 A fourth priority – and one of which Gordon Brown will even be more focused than Tony Blair - is global economic inequality. The developed world’s response to this problem will be one of the critical themes of the coming years. Experience tells us that infusions of aid may mitigate some of the symptoms of poverty, but they will not tackle the underlying problems. Further market liberalisation and the removal of trade barriers to the developing world are perhaps the single greatest contribution the developed world can make to third world growth prospects.

 One of the single largest obstacles to the advance of global prosperity is the developed world’s attachment to inflated subsidies in the agriculture sector. The EU is one of the worst offenders with 35% of farm income derived from subsidies, a figure second only to Japan, compared with 21% in the United States.
 The UK will try to get rid of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) sooner than 2013. The Cap is in British eyes something of a different age, one of post-war food shortages. In many ways it did its job. But shortages are a thing of the past. The world has moved on. Right across Europe, people want different things from the CAP: safer, better quality food; greater concern from the environmental impact of farming; more effective ways to revitalise rural communities. Most important of all, they want to end the burden the CAP places on developing countries.

 Brown realises even more than Blair that Britain as a  single country cannot tackle the four priorities. Terrorism and the proliferation of WMD, collective security in Europe, the strengthening of the multilateral system, and global prosperity require the combined efforts of many nations. And in Whitehall, it will require a co-ordinated approach from all Departments.
 In the past, international affairs were very much the exclusive preserve of the Foreign Office: not any longer. Tony Blair has shifted the foreign policy from Whitehall to Downing Street. He had his own advisers rather than the secretaries on the Foreign Office.

 That will not change with Brown. So is there is a new chapter in the history of international relations, there is also a new era in the way Whitehall delivers the Government’s objectives. The foreign and domestic agendas are increasingly fused. Drug production in Afghanistan and Colombia fuels crime on British streets. Instability in any part of the world can bring asylum seekers to British shores.
 One of the Foreign Office’s most important roles today is to co-ordinate Whitehall’s approach to such issues. A major strategic review of the FCO’s organisation and activities – to be completed by next summer – will give Whitehall and the general public a clearer impression of how Brown intend to deliver Britain’s international objectives over the next few years.
 This review will make fundamental recommendations about the future allocation of Foreign Office their resources both at home and overseas. The outcome should be an organisation, which takes a more strategic approach to foreign policy, better able to predict emerging threats before they damage British interests.
 Foreign Policy is seen much more anticipating in an equally dynamic environment. That makes it a challenging time for Gordon Brown. But he can draw strength from the fact that previous generations of diplomats had to operate in an equally dynamic environment.
 In his autobiography, 'Present at the Creation', Dean Acheson examined the challenges of building a world order from the rubble of the Second World War. The late 1940s were a seminal period for international relations, as the world accepted a rules-based global system underpinned by the UN and the Bretton Woods institutions. Acheson rightly described the establishment of this order as 'an imaginative effort unique in history.'
 With British foreign ambitions it will take a similar 'imaginative effort' to build a secure neighbourhood for Europe, tackle global economic injustice and eradicate the threats posed by terrorism and the proliferation of WMD. These are the great strategic challenges of the next ten years. Is Gordon Brown ready for it? We don´t know. Has he the ability to deal with it? Just as any other British PM in the past. Blair was in 1997 a new kid on the block who was determined to find a new direction in British foreign politics and succeeded alrealy in his first three months.  But at the end his foreign policy – the first wave so as Blair called it – was shaped by events nobody could foresee like Kosovo and 9/11.

 That the same for the second wave of Gordon Brown. Brown is a experienced politician. But the paradox is that we don´t know the way he chooses and which events that wille decide. It is the easy answer but so I don´t be a laughing stock over a year period.

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