Hearts, minds and interests; Britain's place in the world

Citation

Unwin, P. (1999), "Hearts, minds and interests; Britain's place in the world", European Business Review, Vol. 99 No. 1. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.1999.05499aab.006

Hearts, minds and interests; Britain's place in the world

Peter UnwinDirector of the David Davies Memorial Institute. He has been Ambassador in Budapest and Copenhagen and Deputy Secretary-General of the Commonwealth. He is author of the book Hearts, Minds and Interests

Keywords Attitudes, History, Politics

Ministers and diplomats famously believe that international relations should be governed by reason. So do academics who study these things. These are difficult waters, they argue, of little interest to the ordinary voter, often stormy, sometimes dangerous, potentially fatal. Emotions have no place in their navigation.

Yet history shows us that emotions have always trespassed on foreign affairs. Kings went to war when they were slighted, peoples when the trumpets sounded. Territory, oil, water supplies, a rival's dreadnought building programme have all aroused the passions of nations. So, still, do commercial rivalries. So, today, do the deeds of dictators when they abuse their captive peoples. And now we see so much more of the world than we used to do, with hunger in the Sudan more immediate to us on our television screens today than reports of famine across the Irish Sea were in our newspapers in the last century. Nowadays ordinary people presume to opinions of their own on foreign affairs, and emotion will be as powerful as reason in shaping them. Ministers and academics cannot exclude emotions from their calculations, and if they try to they will lose the attention and support of electorates and readers.

Emotions intrude even into the foreign relations of the British, who take such pride in their erroneous belief that they are calmly and empirically rational. Their history is punctuated by emotional occasions, each of them part of the treasury of collective memory. Henry V at Agincourt, Queen Elizabeth at Tilbury, "Kiss me Hardy", "We shall fight them on the beaches" ­ all these were expressions of Britain's engagement in the world before they passed into the history books and the dictionaries of quotations. Emotions today may run less high than at these moments of national crisis. Yet they still dictate what the British think about the USA, the European continent, their kith-and-kin or their old subject peoples. They even dictate what the British think about themselves.

In the last 30 years, for example, the British have convinced themselves that they are failures. They examine the documented facts of Britain's decline in power and prosperity relative to many of its neighbours, partners and rivals, and deduce from them an emotional conviction of failure as well as decline. The conviction comes in waves, and at the moment it is in recession, but it would be a bold man who asserted that a sense of failure had been removed from the national psyche for good. Emotional as it is, the conviction finds factual evidence to feed on. Even if it did not, it would nevertheless itself become a fact with which the policy-makers and analysts would have to reckon. Try as he may, Robin Cook cannot divorce foreign policy from the emotional pessimism of so many of the voters.

Yet there is a lot of factual evidence to put into the scales against this sense of failure. There are even facts to be stacked up against the conviction of decline. Britain remains for the moment an unchallenged member of Global United's First Eleven: no longer its star, nor its captain, but a reliable hard-working player. It is the world's fifth biggest international trader, its sixth biggest aid-giver. In terms of wealth per head it is the 22nd most prosperous country in a world of almost 200 nations. In terms of power and influence most observers would reckon it fourth, or fifth, or sixth; in terms of creativity perhaps second or third; enviably stable; fundamentally just; a good place to live and die.

But that is a still photograph. Does the movie tell a more depressing picture? For years the British have pointed to places that seemed more successful than their own little island, to Soviet power and Asian growth and American wealth and Scandinavian welfare and the Italian sorpasso. But where now are some of those societies which for so long were so effortlessly overhauling us? The Soviet Union, the old adversary superpower, is broken: its armies unpaid, its nuclear forces a threat only by accident or inadvertence. Japan, the miracle of industrial discipline, is adrift, its government politically unable to grapple with its economic woes. The Asian tigers, which a year ago were going to outgrow us and teach us better forms of social cohesion while they were about it, are crippled by the financial and economic failure which their leaders' corruption has provoked. The German economy is muscle-bound, the French sclerotic. The Scandinavians find it as hard as we do to pay their pension and welfare bills. Even the Americans, triumphalist in one mood, in another talk of social sickness at home and uncertainty of purpose abroad. Britain, though it may not acknowledge it, looks to many of them an enviable place by comparison.

Complacency does no one any good, but these points are worth making as a corrective to Britain's introspective gloom. For the country has a story to tell, to itself and abroad, more important than "New Labour" or "Cool Britannia". It serves as a balance to the conviction of decline and failure and as a basis for a British commitment to the globe. Historically and geographically, politically, socially and economically we are a relatively fortunate and successful people. We can afford to engage ourselves with the outside world, for our own good and for the good of international society.

Any good business plan builds on strengths. Britain's are manifest. We are well placed in the European and Atlantic worlds, central to neither but highly influential in both. Together they give us every chance of preserving peace, security and prosperity. If we engage in them we can influence their choices in our favour, for we bring to them both domestic assets and a position of power and influence in the world. We can, if we will, put ourselves at the heart of European developments. We can maintain our utility to the USA, and hence our influence over it. Our record with the United Nations is a good one; through our Security Council seat and our peacekeeping efforts we can help make the world organisation more valuable to its members. We have more connections than any other country in the world, the USA not excepted. British influence pervades the world's diplomacy, business, culture and society. Britons are at ease in the world as many of their rivals are not.

All this puts an excessively optimistic gloss on the thesis of Hearts, Minds and Interests. It is deliberately exaggerated, to counteract an equally exaggerated pessimism. But in Hearts, Minds and Interests I argue that, if the British get both their optimism and their pessimism under control and look realistically at the world around them, they will have at their disposal everything they need to construct a purposeful and effective role in it. With wholehearted commitment they can help build a satisfactory European Union which embraces yet more of the continent and holds the whole of it in order. Together, the members of that European Union will be able to look the USA and east Asia in the eye. The Atlantic Alliance gives them a tested structure within which to work with the Americans. As for Asia, the Europeans will have to speak clearly, and with one voice, if they are to be heard there as loudly as the Americans.

For the whole globe, and for the developing world in particular, the United Nations remains indispensable. It will not function adequately without a full-hearted commitment by the industrialised world. To secure that, there is a need for a strong European influence within it, to balance American arrogance and unpredictability. The Europeans, like the Americans, will have to devise ways to come to terms with an Islam with which throughout history they have been at odds. And in the developing world which they did so much to shape, they have both an obligation and an interest in helping the poor grow out of poverty, helping them also to cope with the new problems ­ environmental deterioration, drugs, terrorism and disease ­ which challenge globalised society.

The British can play a central role in all this, bringing to bear their experience, their connections and their skills. To play it well they have got to see themselves, and the world, in due proportion. Emotion will play as big a part as reason in forming accurate perceptions. But if they can harness emotion and reason together the British will see their situation right. They will see just how central to the world are British qualities, and how much they are needed in it.

But why should they expend their energies and wealth in meddling in the world's affairs? Is there any sensible reason for the globe's old nanny to go on laying about her with her parasol, perversely proud of punching above her weight? There are reasons, good and bad, with history and inherited obligation, guilt and pride, a sense of duty and a sense of self-importance included among them. But in the end a people's vocation, like an individual's, is the pursuit of happiness. To find happiness the British have to find fulfilment for their emotions, their reason and their material needs. They can only do that by playing the role in the world for which their past and present fit them. If they do it well they will bring benefit to the world. But they will also bring contentment to their hearts, their minds and their own interests as well.

Hearts, Minds and Interests: Britain's Place in the World is published by profile Books Ltd, London, ISBN 1-86197-078-1 (softback), £12. 99, 206 pp., 1998.