Let us have a Europe which plays its full part in the wider world, which looks outward not inward, and which preserves that Atlantic community — that Europe on both sides of the Atlantic — which is our noblest inheritance and our greatest strength.
CHAPTER XIV
New World Disorder
Foreign policy and defence
EUPHORIA PUNCTURED
By contrast with European Community affairs, the overall path of events in foreign policy at the time I left office continued initially much as I would have wished. That may seem strange, even callous, in view of the fact that preparations were under way for a war in the Gulf whose exact course we could not predict. Yet I was convinced that the action taken was both right and necessary and that the West or, as we tactfully preferred to describe it, ‘the international community’, would prevail over Saddam Hussein and reverse Iraq’s aggression against Kuwait. Moreover, the crisis had led to a re-establishment of that vital ‘special relationship’ between the United States and Britain which I regarded as central to my approach.
Of greater long-term importance, however, was the end of the Cold War, or again more precisely if less tactfully, the defeat of Soviet communism in that great conflict, without which indeed the relatively smooth passage of events in the Gulf would have been impossible. I had unsuccessfully resisted the reunification of Germany. But the course of events which led to the landslide victory of Solidarity in the Polish elections of June 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall that November, the overthrow of the Ceausescus in Romania in December, the election of Vaclav Havel as President of a free Czechoslovakia in the same month, and the victory of non-communists in elections in Hungary in April 1990 — these I regarded as tangible and profoundly welcome results of the policies which Ronald Reagan and I had pursued unremittingly through the 1980s. And I had no doubt that the momentum was sufficient for the process to continue, for the time being at least. Where that would leave Central and Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union it was as yet impossible precisely to say. I knew enough of the complex history of these regions to understand that the risks of ethnic strife and possible attempts to change borders were real. At least the rejuvenated Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE), the result of the Helsinki process, could provide, we then thought, a useful diplomatic framework for resolving disputes. Events have, however, disappointed us.
I had seen for myself in Ukraine how strongly the nationalist tide was flowing against the old Soviet Union.[79] As I told Jacques Delors at the outset of that final European Council I attended, I did not believe that it was for West Europeans to pronounce upon the future shape of the Soviet Union or its successors — that was for the democratic choice of the peoples concerned.[80] But the fact that I did not believe we could see into the future, let alone be confident in shaping it, did not diminish my satisfaction at the changes which were taking place. Millions of subjects of the Soviet Empire and its client states who had been deprived of their basic rights were now living in free democracies. And these new democracies had abandoned their aggressive military alliance, armed with nuclear weapons, against the West. These were great human and security gains. Neither then nor later did I feel any nostalgia for the diplomatically simpler but deadly dangerous Cold War era.
The increasing preoccupation of a weakened, fitfully reforming Soviet Union with its own huge internal problems enabled other regional conflicts to be resolved. The ending of Soviet-backed subversion in Africa meant that reformers in South Africa had a new opportunity to reach agreement about that country’s future. In fact, whether it was in Africa or the Middle East, in Central or South America, in the Indian sub-continent or in Indo-China, the end of the Soviet pursuit of a long-term strategy of global dominance opened the way for progress. Suppressed desires for political and economic freedom were brought to bear on corrupt and oppressive regimes which could no longer argue for support from Moscow (or indeed from Washington) lest they go over to the other side.
An old world order — a bi-polar world divided between the Soviet Union and the West and their respective allies — had passed away. But had a new world order been born? Certainly, there was a temptation in the immediate aftermath of the collapse of communism to believe so. And statements welcoming it can be quoted from across the political spectrum. In retrospect, however, it can be seen that two quite different visions obtained. My own view of it was a Pax Americana in the camouflage of United Nations Resolutions. This would require strong US leadership, the staunch support of allies, and a clear strategic concept that distinguished between real threats to Western interests and international order on the one hand, and local disputes with limited consequences on the other. I still think that this prudent approach could have created a durable international order without open-ended obligations. Unfortunately, it became confused with a more messianic, and consequently less practical, concept of a world order based on universal action through multilateral agencies untainted by strategic self-interest. This is, of course, a more idealistic vision; but as Macaulay remarked: ‘An acre in Middlesex is worth a principality in Utopia.’
Even in the days after the Gulf War when euphoria about the possibilities of the New World Order was at its height, I was left feeling uneasy. I suspected that too much faith was being put in high-flown international declarations and too little attention paid to the means of enforcing them. Oddly enough, it was in preparing for my visit to South Africa in May 1991 that I started to read more deeply about the ill-starred League of Nations, one of whose principal architects was the South African Jan Smuts. The rhetoric of that time struck me as uncannily like that which I was now hearing. Similarly, Smuts’ own conclusion, when the League had failed to take action against the dictators and so prepared the way for the Second World War, struck me as equally damning of the kind of collective security upon which the future of post-Cold War stability and freedom was supposed to be based: ‘What was everybody’s business in the end proved to be nobody’s business. Each one looked to the other to take the lead, and the aggressors got away with it.’
Of course, it could be argued that the situation now was different. After all, Saddam Hussein had not ‘got away with it’ — though he did ‘get away’. But I thought it of vital importance to understand why this had been achieved. It was because, contrary to the experience of the League of Nations, America had asserted herself as the international superpower it was her destiny to be, and self-confident and well-armed nation states such as Britain and France had acted in support, that success was obtained in the Gulf. Yet there were all too many commentators and politicians prepared to deduce quite the opposite — namely that the United Nations should itself become a supra-national force, with the authority and the resources to intervene at will, and that nation states should accordingly abandon their sovereignty. The UN’s ambitions to become a world government would only, if encouraged, lead to world disorder. But with much subtlety and to considerable effect, left-liberal opinion in the West was able, with the naive collaboration of many conservatives, to turn the circumstances arising from the end of the Cold War to its own advantage.