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CHRIS PATTEN INTERVIEW
Recorded 4/09/03 in Brussels
Dealing with that period in the spring when the Security Council was so divided before the war, everyone you talk to seems to have their own interpretations - if you're French you show that the world could demonstrate when it didn't want a war to happen, if you're American you say it shows the UN at its worst and what's wrong with it. What's your verdict on that period?
First of all I see it very much from a European perspective and it was very sad that with 4 members of the European Union at the time on the Security Council and one soon to be country Bulgaria on the Security Council we couldn't actually get our act together. And it reminds one of a fundamental truth that unless in particular Britain and France agree there isn't a coherent European position. So I saw it very much through that perspective and saw it also as the very reverse of what people agreed to do in Maastricht where they agreed to work very hard to try to coordinate positions in the UN. I also saw it, that period, in a sense as the working experiment of neo conservative views about how global governance should work or shouldn't work. I'd been encouraged by President Bush's decision a year after the appalling events, the twin towers, to go to the UN to work through the UN but clearly there were a lot of his right wing supporters who found that difficult to accept and saw the UN as simply there to put an imprimatur on whatever the United States did. So in a sense what's happened since the debates in the Security Council and in Iraq has been a painful learning experience in the successes and failures of neo conservatism.
Well on that level, do you think that it was a general American attempt to seek the legitimacy that the UN can confer or simply a way of looking for political cover for both America and indeed for Britain?
I don't think it would be impossible for it to have been both. I think that the UK and particularly Britain would have very much liked to have had the stamp of authority of a second Security Council resolution. It mattered far more to Britain particularly because of what the prime minister and the foreign sec retary had said. I think during that rather difficult week for British diplomacy when we were trying to drum up support for another security council resolution the Americans watched with interest - I am sure they tried to help as well but I think they saw it as principally as a British initiative and a British problem.
What about the European attitudes. I'm talking about the non British Europeans. To what extent do you think that was driven by a broader ambitions to try and find some sort of counterbalance to American power.
I think it's very mistaken for Europeans to see the development of our positions in the Union simply in terms of whether or not we're not as you put it counterbalancing the Americans . I think that's a pretty self destructive way of looking at the world but there were serious arguments - heavens above in Britain as well as in the rest of Europe about how one should deal with the problem of Iraq, the problem of weapons of mass destruction, the terms under which it's legitimate for one or more states to intervene militarily in another state. There were big and strong arguments about those things and I don't think it is unreasonable for governments in those circumstances to reflect that public opion which the French and the Germans were doing. You may criticise the ways they conducted their diplomacy. You may criticise, for example, the way Colin Powell felt that he'd been ambushed at an earlier Security Council resolution. There are all sorts of diplomatic mistakes which everybody committed along the road. But I don't think it was unreasonable for governments of European countries acting in New York in a way which reflected the very strong opinion on the street in Europe.
How much damage was done to relations between Europe and the United States?
I think what happened did a lot of damage but I don't think one should become hysterical about it. I don't think it's terminal and I don't think it is for the first time. Look. Last weekend I was at a meeting which we call the Gimnitch weekend, which takes place twice a year and it's an informal meeting of European foreign ministers, called after the German Council where the first of these meetings was held in 1974. Why was the first meeting held - in order to discuss the terrible deterioration in transatlantic relations. That was in 1974. We've had all sorts of rows over the years. I think there is a certain ironic symmetry in the fact that the first really big row was when two European countries were trying to intervene in the Middle East in Egypt over Suez, and America, using the UN, stepped in to stop us. We had rows over Vietnam, we had rows over the deployment of Pershing missiles when a German Chancellor's party in effect deserted him, so it is not the first time and it won't be the last. Nor is it the first time that the argument about American unilateralism, as opposed to multi-lateralism, has come to the surface. But what is important is not to allow this particular row to poison the well and not to allow it to distract us from all the things that we have in common, political and economic. Look there have been some profoundly silly aspects to all this - the idea that you should encourage Americans not to drink French claret being one of them. You know part of the quote "punishment of France" - this isn't the way serious superpowers behave diplomatically - but the day that I first read a report of the claret issue in the Financial Times, there was a report in the same edition of the paper announcing that the American Air carrier Jet Blue had just ordered 65 airbus. Now which is reality because you need to drink an awful lot of claret to get to 65 airbus. I don't think that things have been fatally damaged but we do have to recognise in Europe that in order to be taken seriously we've got to be able to deliver effectively in a partnership which will allow us from time to time to criticise with more purpose and with more effect than we've perhaps had recently and from the American point of view they have to recognise that partners have opinions and are entitled to have opinions.
What about damage within Europe, damage to the ambition that you spoke about to speak with one voice particularly within the Security Council?
I think that interestingly creating a common foreign and security policy is much more difficult than creating a common currency and actually we've created at least in 12 of the members states a single currency. Nobody has talked about single foreign policy because foreign policy is so much a reflection of national sovereignty and the way countries look at the world. In many respects I guess it's surprising that we've moved things on as far as we have in the last few years. In the 90s we were bickering about the Balkans while the Balkans was going up in smoke. We've moved on from that. But there is no question that Iraq was a big blow to the attempts to create a common policy though I guess that just reflects which Europhobes should sometimes recognise, that we're not a super state. That it is 15 sovereign countries with strong opinions. I believe that you can only have an effective European position internationally - and this isn't any disrespect to Spaniards or Italians or others - when France and Britain in particular but Germany as well agree. France and Britain are permanent members of the Security Council, they're the only nuclear powers in the European Union, they're in effect the biggest spenders on effective forces, they have a global reach, they have a global diplomacy and they have global aspirations. Where France and Britain can agree we make progress as has happened in the Balkans and to some extent in the Middle East. Where we don't it's more difficult.
You expressed concerns in the past in the aftermath of September 11th that the war on Terrorism would suck up people's energy - war in Afghanistan firstly and more recently the war in Iraq. Do you think that has happened distracted international attention. That within the UN, for example that's got all these other problems on its plate, people have become so fixed on problems associated with Iraq that they have forgotten some of these other things?
I do believe that Iraq has inevitably distracted Attention from other issues I think it's been surprising even though the process in the Middle East has gone off the rails - if it was ever on them - that it's surprising that there has been much attention paid to the Middle East though not enough. But Iraq has sucked up a huge a mount of political energy and it's distracted us from the jobs that we started and havn't yet completed like Afghanistan. Afghanistan is - to put it at its most euphemistic - work in progress. We haven't nearly cracked the problem of security in Afghanistan which is absolutely crucial to building a nation. What have we discovered in the last couple of years, surprise surprise: regime change is more difficult than nation building. Regime change is best legitimised by the UN and nation building is in such an obvious sense at the core of UN activity and operations.
You said that the European Union would only give money towards the reconstruction of Iraq if it was only put on a proper UN footing. What was your strategy in doing that. Was that a way of pressurising the United States to come back within the UN fold?
When I said that firs tof all it was regarded as rather provocative that this was in days - and I don' wish to pick over old arguments - when it was somehow suggested that those who hadn't supported the military intervention in Iraq should be shut out of the post war Iraq because they wouldn't be allowed to pick the low hanging fruit that would be cropped by others. Well I wasn't being provocative even though I provoked. What I was stating was a political reality. That the money that we spend in Afghanistan or the Middle East or Iraq doesn't come from my bank balance. I had to go and ask for it from Parliament and from the European Parliament and from member states who are answerable to their own parliaments and it always seemed to me that in order to take part in reconstruction in Iraq we would have to have a multi lateral umbrella, we would have to have a UN instrument, World Bank instruments to work through. Otherwise I would find myself in a position where I was in effect not able to give the sort of answers which parliamentarians will require about whether their money was simply going to bank role contracts for American companies. I mean that is the sort of suspicion that there would have been and I think it's become increasingly clear that the international involvement which is required in order to help stabilise the security situation in Iraq and in order to help begin creating a pluralist society in Iraq inevitably involves more UN engagement. Countries need that in order to legitimise their own contributions and they need that in order to feel that their contributions are going to be more effective. Sooner or later that was going to be borne in on American opinion and I have to say that I never had any difficulty with that argument with Colin Powell who I remember saying much the same thing in evidence to a Senate committee a month or so after I had first raised the point in Washington .
The big argument that was dramatised at the UN, has been dramatised at the UN over the past year, but has really been going on since September the 11th is the degree to which America is now determined to use its might to act alone, to ignore the United Nations if it feels that it's right to do so. How do you see that argument evolving from here?
I think that argument is a dead duck but it's not to say that it won't quack from time to time. Two points. First: the present system of international governance, of global governance is very largely an American creation, UN, Bretton Woods institutions,. It has been a spectacular success. It has been a spectacular success for the world because we've had an unparalleled period of prosperity and, though there have been some horrors, on the whole we have avoided the sort of wars that tore apart the first half of the century. It's also been a fantastic success for America. When Sergio Vierra de Mello was killed the other day Richard Holbrooke rightly said - addressing his American compatriots - this isn't just a guy who has served the world. This is somebody who served America and America's interests. Because if you're the only big guy on the block, in order to avoid resentment from everybody else, in order to give greater legitimacy to your leadership you need a multi lateral organisation, you need the UN. Secondly: there's been an argument that somehow multilateral institutions, even international NGOs constrain the exercise of American sovereignty and constrain an American government's ability to protect the security and prosperity of its own citizens. It's bilge. You can't have prosperity and security even for the citizens of the richest country in the world, the only superpower in the world unless you have international agreements and it makes sense however the institutions that you create may because they're human lack perfection, you need to institutionalise that cooperation. So I think those who've seen the UN as somehow a dagger at the eagle's neck have demonstrably been shown by events to be sadly wrong.
What impact do you think that bomb is going to have, the bomb that killed Sergio de Mello, on the UN's willingness apart from anything else, to play its role in Iraq?
I think it's quite difficult to persuade anybody who works for the UN that they should accept a role which is, combines great vulnerability without much political authority. And I think inevitably the UN will be and should be at the centre of the stage. It's going to happen. We will move I am sure towards a situation in which there is a security force both military and police under UN authority under American command. I think the UN will take an increasingly active role in the oversight political evolution in Iraq. There will still be a very important role for the coalition and I think that there will be considerable enthusiasm for handing over real power to Iraqis sooner rather than later. What we mustn't do, even while accepting that objective is to rush things so that we set up Jim Crack institutions which don't survive. It is very important to build democracy in Iraq from the ground up, local elections, municipal elections, regional elections, functional elections in unions and professions. But I am absolutely certain that we are going to see a shift in that direction and the UN will be at the heart of it.
Thank you very much
ENDS
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