[A-List] Martin Jacques on the new geopolitics

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Check the reference to "this most bellicose of nations, which has for long
believed that the true test of its virility lies in going to war". If any
state deserves this attribute, it is surely Britain under Blair, whose own
war record is worth considering, says John Sturrock in the London Review of
Books, 6 November 2003:

"You might hope that we could in future save the odd billion and do without
aircraft-carriers altogether, except that we have in office a Prime Minister
hooked to an unholy degree on military action. 'It is some feat to go to war
five times in six years,' are the opening words of John Kampfner's Blair's
Wars (Free Press, £17.99). 'That statistic impelled me to write this book.'
It's good that Kampfner was impelled to write it because he has done an
excellent job in going back, Blair war by Blair war, over the political
history of how he, i.e. we, became involved in each of them and then went
about waging it. I for one couldn't put a time or a place right away to all
five, but along with the interventions in Kosovo, Afghanistan and Iraq,
Kampfner has rightly included the so-called Operation Desert Fox in Iraq in
1998, and the expedition to Sierra Leone in 2000. Some record for a Prime
Minister who seemed such a thoroughgoing civilian six short years ago."

See http://www.lrb.co.uk/v25/n21/stur01_.html

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Europe and the US are now adrift

Spain confirms the huge impact the Iraq war has had on our world

Martin Jacques
Wednesday March 17, 2004
The Guardian

The US and Britain now find themselves that bit more isolated. Spain's exit
from the ranks of supporters of the Iraq war may have been surprising, but
hardly unexpected. Its government, in its support of the invasion, defied
not simply half the population, as in the case of Britain, but the
overwhelming majority. Clearly there was a price to pay, which has been paid
by the Aznar government, though only following a horrific and tragic event.
Inevitably, it poses the question as to whether other governments which have
defied the will of the people in such a flagrant manner might pay a similar
price. There was barely a democratic country in the world where, at the time
of the invasion, the majority of the people supported it - barring the
obvious exception of the US.

It is hardly novel for governments to disregard public opinion. Democratic
governments ignore the will of the people on major issues all the time: that
is the difference between government by election and government by
referendum. But if the issue is big enough, persistent enough, extraordinary
enough, then one day the government may have to pick up the tab for its
defiance. Iraq is just that kind of issue. It is one of those rare
historical moments that change the world and leave nothing quite the same
afterwards.

Britain is a case in point. It was not unreasonable for Tony Blair to have
assumed that this most bellicose of nations, which has for long believed
that the true test of its virility lies in going to war, would support its
closest ally in bringing to book a recalcitrant and despicable despot. In
the event, it was a most serious miscalculation. The prime minister is now
desperately trying to concentrate the mind of the nation on domestic
matters. Yet Iraq will not go away. It will continue to haunt him until he
leaves office; and probably for the rest of his life.

The refusal of Britain - or half of us at least - to go along with the war
remains one of the most extraordinary political phenomena of the past 30
years. It points to a profound change in attitudes - concerning Britain and
its place in the world - that no one yet really understands.

The left has lost virtually every major political struggle of the past three
decades. Politics has been redefined on the terrain of neo-liberalism. Even
that last bastion of the collectivist ideal, the NHS, is on the defensive,
if not yet under siege. New Labour represented the final victory of
Thatcherism, the acquiescence of Labour in neo-liberalism, the triumph of a
profound pessimism, albeit dressed in an absurd New Labour hyperbole.

Yet on Iraq the left has, bizarrely, found itself in the majority. Bizarre,
because for the past half-century, the right has monopolised the ground of
foreign policy and military prowess, intimately associated as it is with our
imperial history. Who would have guessed that the left, vanquished on more
or less everything else, would find itself in a majority on the biggest
international issue for decades, with British troops committed and a Labour
prime minister leading the charge? The fact that public opinion could have
run so much against the historical grain suggests much deeper changes are
afoot. It is no longer safe to assume that the public will support American
foreign policy: nor that the involvement of British troops in a military
adventure will command automatic backing.

These shifts in opinion are partly bound up with a delayed reaction to the
end of the cold war. The affinity between the US and western Europe was, not
least, a product of the cold war. Once, after 9/11, the US decided to pursue
a unilateralist policy in support of its own interests as the world's sole
superpower, Europe found itself out in the cold. We are only at the
beginning of this period, and many surprises lie in wait - Spain is but one
example. British opinion has certainly shifted. It has moved away from the
US, though not - except by default - towards Europe.

There is another twist to the Spanish story. Without the bomb outrage,
perhaps the right would have won the election. Overwhelming popular
sentiment against the war coupled with the terrorist attacks proved to be a
lethal combination for the government. Generally, terrorist attacks tend to
strengthen the hand of the incumbent government, but not in this case.
Indeed, rarely has a terrorist attack proved so effective in persuading
public opinion to move in the perpetrators' desired direction. That is
another extraordinary feature of this episode. If it had been during the
cold war, the effect would have been the opposite. Now, though, we are in a
completely different magnetic field: even though no one is quite sure what
forces constitute the field.

Could it be that in the days before the next Italian election - another
government that supported the US even though the vast majority of the
population were against - Islamist terrorists (assuming they were
responsible for the Madrid bombings) might, emboldened by the Spanish
experience, try the same in Rome? And what of the next British election? The
arithmetic of public opinion might be different but the temptation could be
even stronger, given Blair's pro-war stance. According to a Sky News poll
yesterday, 20% of those who voted Labour in 2001 said, in the event of a
terror attack, they would switch from Labour - the majority to the Liberal
Democrats.

European politics is going somewhere very different from what we have been
familiar with for so long. Western European opinion is now adrift from, and
inimical towards, the US. It rightly abhors Israeli behaviour and is
therefore unsympathetic towards US policy on the Middle East, though its
hostility is constrained by memories of the Holocaust. The gulf that opened
up between European and US popular opinion over Iraq could end up as a chasm
over the Middle East too.

Europe has lost its old global moorings. Its newly discovered independence
of mind is born not of self-confidence, nor an expansive sense of its own
future, but a growing alienation from the US, combined with a heightened
feeling of insecurity about the world we live in and what Europe's place
might be in it. The question has many aspects, some of which have a dark
side: it is abundantly clear, for example, that the European public feels
deeply insecure about the growing multiracial character of its populations.

For over three centuries the world was hugely Euro-centric. The cold war may
have granted a 50-year extension on its lease, but 9/11 finally marked
closure. How does a relatively small continent, which has played such a
humungous global role for so long, adapt to tumultuous and troubling changes
that require it to assume a very different place in the world? That is now
the European story, and will be for a long time to come.