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On Morality, Self‐interest and Foreign Policy1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2014

Chris Brown
Chris Brown*
Affiliation:
London School of Economics and Political Science
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Extract

A Change Of Government In Britain Does Not Necessarily Imply a change in foreign policy, but when Robin Cook entered the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) in May 1997 it was with the ambition of bringing about a break with the past. The FCO was endowed for the first time with a ‘Mission Statement’, in which spreading the values of human rights, civil liberties and democracy (‘mutual respect’) was described as a benefit to be secured through foreign policy; the new Foreign Secretary elaborated this ambition at the launch of the Mission Statement, asserting: The Labour Government does not accept that political values can be left behind when we check in our passports to travel on diplomatic business. Our foreign policy must have an ethical dimension and must support the demands of other peoples for the democratic rights on which we insist for ourselves. We will put human rights at the heart of our foreign policy.

Type
Original Articles
Information
Government and Opposition , Volume 37 , Issue 2 , April 2002 , pp. 173 - 189
Copyright
Copyright © Government and Opposition Ltd 2002

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Footnotes

1

I am grateful to Christopher Hill and William Wallace for helpful comments; but, of course, responsibility remains entirely mine.

References

2 Foreign and Commonwealth Office, Mission Statement for the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (http://fco.gov.uk/aboutfco/mission/) and ‘British Foreign Policy’, Opening Statement by the Foreign Secretary, Mr Robin Cook, at a Press Conference on the FCO Mission Statement, London, 12 May 1997, Daily Bulletin.

3 The best sources for such commentary are two collections: Little, Richard and Wickham-Jones, Mark (eds), New Labour’s Foreign Policy: A New Moral Crusade?, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2000 Google Scholar, and, less focused on New Labour, Smith, Karen E. and Light, Margot (eds), Ethics and Foreign Policy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Tim Dunne and Nicholas Wheeler are probably the academic authors most sympathetic to the claims of New Labour and have essays in both collections, but the majority of the essays in these two collections that actually focus on Labour’s record in office are more hostile.

4 New Statesman, 3 April 2000 (cited from Igor Cusack ‘A Chronology of Labour’s Foreign Policy, 1983–2000’, R. Little and M. Wickham-Jones, op. cit., pp. 264–82).

5 See particularly his ‘Doctrine of the International Community’ address to the Chicago Chamber of Commerce, 22 April 1999, and his address to the Labour Party Conference, 2 October 2001 (http:/fco.gov.uk).

6 Chomskyan, of course, in honour of Noam Chomsky— see e.g. The New Military Humanism, London, Pluto Press, 1999. In Britain, ‘Pilgerist Realists’ would be an acceptable alternative — see, e.g. Pilger, John Hidden Agendas, London, Vintage, 1998.Google Scholar

7 Carr, E. H., The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919–1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations, London, Macmillan, 1939 Google Scholar — recently reissued in a fine new scholarly edition with an introduction by Michael Cox, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2001. Cox, Michael (ed), E. H. Carr: A Critical Re-appraisal, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2000 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, is the best introduction to the work of this important, but troubling, thinker.

8 Niebuhr, Reinhold, Moral Man and Immoral Society, New York, 1932.Google Scholar

9 Colin Gray’s evocatively titled essay on the Kosovo campaign of 1999, ‘No Good Deed Shall Go Unpunished’, in Ken Booth (ed.) The Kosovo Tragedy: The Human Rights Dimension, London, Frank Cass, 2001, exemplifies this attitude very well.

10 On Carr as a ‘Utopian realist’ see Booth, Ken, ‘Security in Anarchy: Utopian Realism in Theory and Practice’, International Affairs, 67:3 (1991), pp. 527–45.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Rosenthal, Joel, Righteous Realists, Baton Rouge, Louisiana, University of Louisiana Press, 1991 Google Scholar and Murray, Alastair, Reconstructing Realism, Edinburgh, University of Keele Press, 1996 Google Scholar, are excellent on the moral positions of the American realists.

11 Taylor, A. J. P., The Struggle for Mastery in Europe, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1954, p. xxiii.Google Scholar

12 Gauthier, David, Morals By Agreement, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1986.Google Scholar

13 See e.g. Smart, J. J.C. and Williams, Bernard, Utilitarianism: For and Against, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1973.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

14 A special issue of Ethics, ‘Duties beyond Borders’, 98:4 (1988), is a good source of ethical thinking on these matters.

15 Just one example: the house moralist of the Guardian’s Saturday Review, A.C. Grayling, in the course of a discussion on hypocrisy, 20 October 2001, opines that the ‘Gulf War was an oil war’. No qualification, no acknowledgement that there might be other factors involved. To adapt Lord Melbourne on Thomas Macaulay, I wish I was as cocksure about anything as A.C. Grayling is about everything.

16 John Pilger, ‘Under the influence: the real reason for the United Nations’ role in East Timor is to maintain Indonesian control’, Guardian, 21 September 1999. It might be argued that a reductio ad absurdum from Pilger does not really count, but this one is irresistible.

17 ‘Dirty hands’ concerns actions that may in themselves be morally dubious or even, from some perspectives, clearly wrong, but may be justified in order to bring about a greater good. See, e.g., Walzer, Michael, ‘Political Action: the Problem of Dirty Hands’, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 2:2 (1973), pp. 160–80.Google Scholar

18 N. Chomsky, op. cit., p. 156.

19 Speech by the Foreign Secretary, ‘Human Rights in a New Century’, FCO Daily Bulletin, 17 July 1997.

20 The phrase ‘good international citizen(ship)’ can be traced back to Gareth Evans, Australia’s External Affairs Minister in the late 1980s, but the leading British promoters of the notion are Tim Dunne and Nicholas Wheeler — see footnote 3 above.

21 Tony Blair, Speech to the Confederation of Indian Industry, Bangalore, India, 5 January 2002. (http://www.fco.gov.uk/news/speech.asp).

22 Hill, Christopher, ‘The Blair Effect: Foreign Policy OR Robin Cook, Mr Blair, Two Wars and the Other’, in Seldon, Anthony, The Blair Effect, London, Little Brown, 2001 Google Scholar, is the best review of the foreign policy record of the first Blair government.

23 Held, David et al., Global Transformations, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1999 Google Scholar, is the best general account of the theory and practice of globalization.

24 Archibugi, Daniele, Held, David and Kohier, Martin (eds), Re-imagining Political Community: Studies in Cosmopolitan Democracy, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1998 Google Scholar, addresses the former task; for a general defence of cosmopolitan ethics see Dower, Nigel, World Ethics, Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 1998.Google Scholar