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Imperial delusions
America is a threat to global order too
Leader
Friday March 29, 2002
The Guardian
When one of Tony Blair's advisers writes an article about global instability, his words would normally only command attention from specialists. However, when that adviser is a specialist on the future of Afghanistan and the international terrorist threat, those words naturally attract a wider audience. And when his article is published at a time of high domestic and international tension over Iraq, just days before Mr Blair meets the US president for a council of war, what the adviser says is liable to become the stuff of headlines.
Robert Cooper's article in a pamphlet titled Reordering the World, published this week by the Foreign Policy Centre, has certainly produced some headlines. "Britain can bring order to the world, says Blair adviser", said one. But it is the content of what Mr Cooper says that will stir debate. Three remarks stand out. First: "When dealing with the more old-fashioned kinds of state outside the postmodern continent of Europe, we need to revert to the rougher methods of an earlier era - force, pre-emptive attack, deception." Second: "The opportunities, perhaps even the need, for colonisation is as great as it ever was in the 19th century." Third: "What is needed, then, is a new kind of imperialism ... We can already discern its outline: an imperialism which, like all imperialism, aims to bring order and organisation but which rests today on the voluntary principle."
This is, to put it mildly, provocative stuff. For any public figure in this country to advocate policies of force, colonisation and imperialism is unusual and rightly hazardous. For a Labour prime ministerial adviser to do such things is unprecedented and inflammatory, and inevitably Mr Cooper has set a political fire burning. Tam Dalyell has called him a maniac. His fellow Labour MP Alan Simpson says it is as though Mr Cooper had advocated a policy of enlightened slavery. Others from all parties will agree that Mr Cooper's words are outrageous, including many who would not normally line up with the traditional left. But it is not Mr Cooper's words that matter. What the critics fear is that Mr Cooper speaks for Mr Blair on this issue and that the adviser's iconoclasm panders to the prime minister's Gladstonian tendency to place himself at the head of a new moral world order, by force if necessary.
One of the frustrating aspects of this story is that Mr Cooper is someone with things to say that deserve to be heard and not caricatured. Those who read Mr Cooper's article will discover that he is anything but a Colonel Blimp and that he does not have much in common with historical liberal imperialism either. His subtext - and sometimes his text itself - is that of a committed European who wants to extend the EU model, and its values, to the rest of Europe and who believes that global stability and liberty provide the best context for it. Many will agree with that. But the gaping weakness of Mr Cooper's argument is that he has nothing to say about the United States, whose current world view is that such interdependence is a one-way deal on US terms. There is everything to be said in principle in favour of a new moral world order. The problem that Mr Cooper ignores and that seems not even to trouble Mr Blair any more is that the only one currently on offer is for the rest of the globe to be remade in America's image and in the interests of the security of the US and its corporations. If there is any such thing as an acceptable postmodern imperialism, this most certainly is not it, which is one reason why the opposition to British support for the US on Iraq is so strong and so vigorous.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/bush/story/0,7369,675803,00.html |
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