The Global Change We Need: Campaigning Diplomacy
Fabian Society Conference,
London
October 7th, 2009
I was in Belgrade when I switched on the TV and president elect Obama (as he was then) was addressing the crowds in Chicago. And I think that this is a good moment not only to think about the lessons of the Obama campaign but President Obama’s first year in office. It’s a good chance to think about at domestic politics but also a good chance to think about foreign policy.
As I sat down to think about what I wanted to talk about today, there was a temptation, which is to take some of the big foreign policy areas where the Obama administration is trying to challenge some of the big taboos of international policy, whether in respect of Iran, the Middle East, nuclear proliferation or non-proliferation, while I could do that, that’s not what I want to talk about today, because rather than a particular issue or a particular theory or a particular policy. I want to talk about, not the ‘what’ of foreign policy, but the ‘how’ of foreign policy, which I think is rather more in tune with Sunder’s aim for the conference.
I think that as happened, one of the defining themes of the Obama campaign and the Obama Presidency has been that the solution of the problems that we face in the world does not just depend on the decision of Government, it depends on forging a new relationship between states and government, and that was true in his campaign and I think it’s true in U.S domestic policy, which is a vibrant melting pot.
But I think it’s true of politics, in which it is much less discussed. I think it’s important that our concept in Britain, to recognise that this theme of how you bridge the gap between government and people in domestic policy and foreign policy is particularly important because right across the advanced democracies, and perhaps, in some ways, especially in this country, there has been a in a familiar lament over the last decade about the disconnect between politics and politicians.
There have been many predictions that the future of politics is either a descent into managerialism or a dangerous populism, and I think that the triumph of the Obama campaign was a good antidote to that fearmongering really, and it was a riposte that inspired millions of people, not just in America but round the world. It gave America a new start and a new message that was first of all defiantly optimistic, and secondly international in its scope and thirdly unifying in its reach.
And although the cynics are in full cry, although they’re pointing in a sort of childish way that the waters have not yet been parted by the Obama administration, which happens to be true, that does not mean that this is a time to become pessimistic about the agenda that’s been set, which I think is fresh and radical. Or about the start has been made.
My starting point is that we should recognise quite how ambitious is the agenda the Obama administration has set in foreign policy and we should encourage or embrace the idea that it befits the times.
We face the deepest global recession since the 1930s, the window closing on our chance to halt global warming, the biggest challenge to the Non Proliferation Treaty in the shape of the Iranian nuclear programme for a generation, the danger of dashed hopes in the Middle East and a war in Afghanistan to name but five of the big issues. And that is before you even touch on the domestic challenges in the U.S, or of this country.
Now, these problems reflect two things in my view. First of all, and critically, and I think this is the first administration to acknowledge this publically, the shifting sands of economic power between West and East, and that is a fundamental change, so it is the idea of a multipolar world, that’s maybe well known to academics but hasn’t been an important part of political debate is now recognised - no one country can bring the world to heel on its own.
Now secondly, there are dangerous legacies from the previous era. Not just chronic problems that haven’t been resolved but divisions where there needs to be common purpose. So the change we need is easy to find. It is to build new coalitions of common purpose and supersession of past divisions.
My opposite number Hillary Clinton has talked about the challenge of the Obama administration – the pulling together or so called ‘hard power’ and ‘soft power’ into ‘smart power’. I just want to focus today on soft power, or what I call campaigning diplomacy, and I want to do so because I think we often underestimate the impact of soft power in the long term and we overestimate the impact of hard power in the short term, and so I just want to address the balance a bit.
Let me just start by making the case that we underestimate the power of soft power at our peril, and do so with, I think, an interesting example. For many years, governments in Britain and in America have been discussing with governments in Pakistan, the need for the Pakistani authorities to take on the multiple insurgencies that threaten their country. In the case of the U.S billions of dollars of U.S military assistance have been given to the previous Pakistani governments, but frankly there was very little change in behaviour. There was a see-saw of military offensive and then peace deals with militants in the border areas.
But today something fundamentally different has changed in Pakistan, and it’s not actually the new administration, although that has been an important part of it – the new administration pledging significantly more money for Pakistan. What has changed, to create a massive surge of public support in Pakistan for very dangerous attacks on the insurgencies in the West of the country, is a shift in Pakistani public opinion.
Why has that happened? Because following the peace deal in February that ushered in a hybrid of traditional and Islamic law in parts of the Swat valley, the media showed girls’ schools being burnt down, mobile phone footage of a 17 year old woman being flogged in the Swat valley, and Sufi Mohammed, the leader of the militant organisation in the Swat valley, declaring that he did not recognise the writ of the Pakistani state. That has done more to change
Pakistani public opinion than many, many years of traditional diplomacy. Those graphic media images have fuelled a big shift in Pakistani public opinion and that has liberated the government to take a very different attitude towards its own borders.
It’s also worth recognising that our own enemies in Afghanistan in the shape of the Taliban insurgency also recognise the importance of soft power. They are the first to try to exaggerate and exploit civilian casualties for their own ends, and I think that this is a really important change and what it speaks to is not the end of traditional diplomacy in which governments, ministers and civil servants negotiate with each other. What it speaks to is that rulers are more constrained than ever before, even in countries that are not democracies, by the power of public opinion and by the pressure of a more literate, more informed public.
One of the most moving things in my two and a half years in office was the site of monks marching through the streets of Rangoon in Burma getting to the British embassy and clapping because they knew we were standing up for the rights of democratic opposition in Burma.
One of the most powerful symbols of the new power of citizens was the fact that in the Zimbabwean elections eighteen months ago, it was mobile phone photographs of the results of the elections in each of the 9,000 polling stations that exposed the fraud that was being perpetrated and attempted.
Now, this is not the end of traditional diplomacy but it is important to understand its power. I mentioned Afghanistan and that’s an appropriate test for understanding both the necessity of traditional diplomacy, the importance of hard power but also the necessity of a new approach to soft power – to persuasion.
It’s interesting that the military understand this, in some ways, better than anyone else. General McChrystal has said "The measure of effectiveness will not be enemy killed; it will be the number of Afghans shielded from violence".
In other words, the loyalty of the Afghan population is the key in a military counter insurgency campaign. Success will come when people start switching sides, when ordinary Afghans decide to stop hedging their bets and to support their own government, which is supported by us, but they will only do so when they see that Afghan security forces can actually protect them better than the Taleban. Afghan governers at provincial and district level are able to deliver justice that is genuinely fair rather than retributional (sic) and third when they see the economic development is actually delivering something for themselves and for their children, and fourth when they see that there is a genuine political settlement that divides the insurgency by bringing those who are willing to live within the political system to share power within it.
Now, if in fact soft power is important in somewhere as dangerous as Afghanistan it is evident it’s going to be important in many other campaigns. It’s important in the Middle East, where the biggest gap today is not between the leaders (although there is a gap there), it’s actually from the peoples of Israel and Palestine, who are both of them sick of peace processes and also deeply cynical about the ability of the other side to compromise – that gap is a fundamental blockage on change.
On climate change – which I will talk about later - on soft power and the ability of businesses and citizens to have their voices heard in governments, and for governments not to be afraid of public opinion but actually to be leading the climate change issue is the difference between success and failure at Copenhagen.
At Turkey where I have just been, someone used a very powerful phrase and part of the theme of my visit was to understand what modernisation was going on its new international role, and someone said to me: “the most important modernisation in Turkey is the modernisation of the mind” and in a way, if you’re looking for a definition of soft power, the modernisation of the mind’s not bad run for it.
I want to focus the second half of what I’m talking about today on what I think are three very big challenges for us in the West if we are to properly make the most of this insight that soft power is having its value underestimated, its power underexploited and I think we need to be honest about these three difficulties, because I think they speak to the lessons of the last year.
First, I want to put this quite bluntly - it concerns values. Soft power, without values, is now power at all. Soft power without values that are consistently applied in a principled way won’t work.
So although soft power is more important in the world today, our soft power – the soft power of the West - is also more fragile because our values are contested and doubted; so we have to rebuild support for them and for our ability to represent them.
The West’s economic, political and moral authority is more contested now than at any time in the last two decades: economically, there’s been challenge by global recession which is often blamed on the West. Politically, by the emergence of successful authoritarian state capitalist regimes, and morally it’s been challenged by the war on terror and charges of hypocrisy and double standards, charges of double standards in respect of Guantanamo, and charges of hypocrisy in our espousal of democracy in respect of our own expenses crisis.
There’s a temptation in that context to slip into the purest of case-by-case pragmatism – to return to a world of value-free foreign policy. For some people, the fact that there are grey areas in foreign policy means that you are inevitably bound to slip back into case-by-case pragmatism. But I don’t think that is right, some of the most popular tunes of progressives were seized by the neoconservatives in the nineties – they used tunes of freedom and democracy – the espousal of universal values for a politics that came from the right of centre rather than the left, but I don’t think that should scare us off.
My view is that progressives should not be scared of universal values just because neo-cons have confused the traditional dividing lines. Our task is to respect different values, different ways of life and points of view, while holding firm to our own view of the good life. To ensure our policies are consistent with a commitment to social justice, human rights and democracy. Where there are charges of double standards and hypocrisy, they must be faced head on.
We do support greater political liberty and freedom of speech across the Arab world. We do not contest that Hamas won parliamentary elections. But we do not embrace Hamas as a political partner for a two state solution because they do not accept the other state in the solution, even in the manner of the Arab Peace Initiative, and because their terrorist actions belie the democratic values we support.
But it’s important to take examples like that, because when I speak about double standards in many parts of the world, our espousal of liberal democracy is often rebutted, or attempted to be rebutted by the praying lane of the previous example, although you can have an argument about it, it does not, in my view, expose our views as hypocritical.
When it comes to our counter-terrorism work, we can and should be robust in establishing the right red lines for our policies and actions, and defending both. Prime Minister Gordon Brown and President Obama have been absolutely clear that our own values are actually the most important defence of our own security apart from being intention, they are actually supportive of each other. The Government and all its agencies are determined to live up to the laws to which we are subject. But the fact that there is a legal system that allows redress for those who believe their rights have been contravened – that is not an exposure of the fact of double standards, it’s actually showing that we are true to our own values, because we are willing to expose our own action to legal challenge in our own courts.
Second, the most powerful way of spreading those values is through shared institutions such as the EU or NATO which have strong values at their heart. Since the Second World War, the most powerful vehicles for propagation of soft power have been institutions, the biggest democracy building programme the world has ever seen is called the European Union, because our group is a magnet for countries to the East, in Central and Eastern Europe. As Vaclav Havel has said, "the vision of becoming part of the EU was…the engine that drove the democratisation and transformation of" of Central and Eastern Europe”.
However, the truth is that the soft power of the EU is under threat. In the UK, from an opposition that believes that European Foreign Policy – the use of the EU economic clout to further our values and our interests – is a threat to UK interests rather than a way of magnifying them and it’s under threat from outside the UK, by those who wish to close off further enlargement of the EU.
Both those positions, it seems to me, are dangerous for positive soft power. I want to give you an example of why that matters from somewhere I just came from. Bosnia is where 100,000 people were killed in the nineteen nineties, now what’s happening in the Western Balkans is actually quite remarkable the prospect of full EU membership, is driving economic and political reform in Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, Croatia, and Macedonia. They are all at different stages on the EU journey. In Bosnia where nationalist divisions and ethnic tensions still shape politics, progress is much more difficult. Yet the persistence of these divisions only reinforces the need and the importance of Bosnia’s eventual EU integration.
Third challenge is about how we mobilize citizens, because I think for our politics, one of the remarkable things about the Obama campaign was, that in a traditionally weaker party system than ours, it mobilized hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people into political activism. Now we need that sort of activism in foreign policy debate, and I just want to use climate change as an example.
We are 35 days or so from the Copenhagen conference, and in the run up to that conference there is a lot of debate in hand between politicians and government officials, but if citizens aren’t part of the debate, we’re not going to get the positive outcome. There’s three points that need reform:
• There still many, many people who don’t believe the dangers of catastrophic climate change. That’s why the Foreign office has just published a map of what we call the four degrees world. We commissioned 27 of the UK’s leading academic institutions to map out a ‘business as usual’ scenario, and it shows how different parts of the world will be affected by migration, water level rises and increasing temperatures. We need to turn that sense not of catastrophism (sic) but of reality, into a campaign tool.
• We need to prove to our own businesses as well as our own citizens that there is a personal advantage and a significance for the climate change act in this country, which sets out a reduction of carbon emissions between now and 2050.
• We need to engage the ethics of climate change, fundamentally climate change is not a scientific issue, or a technological issue but an ethical issue about how different people in different parts of the world can bear the burden of mitigating and then adapting to climate change. The Prime Minister’s proposals on climate change finance have gained support from across the EU that 100 billion euros annually is required by 2020 to support developing countries making the transition to low-carbon energy and adapting to climate change. Those proposals are critical to unlocking action among poorer countries by addressing the need for fairness in a deal.
Soft power produces less dramatic or immediate changes than hard power. It is easy to underestimate its importance. But as we commemorate the fall of communism 20 years ago, we should remember that the soft power of values is as vital as the hard power of armies when it comes to advancing our goals and defending our societies. We should remember too that it is only through promoting shared values and shared institutions – progressive means as well as progressive ends – that we can renew and strengthen our soft power.
A year on from President Obama’s election, people are already questioning why he has not already solved the world’s problems. But the whole point of Obama’s campaign was that the power and responsibility to change the world is distributed. And it is only through working together – citizens, business and government, emerging and existing powers – that we can overcome problems too big for any single leader or any single nation. We all have to play a role. That is the real change we need.
Fabian Society Conference,
London
October 7th, 2009
I was in Belgrade when I switched on the TV and president elect Obama (as he was then) was addressing the crowds in Chicago. And I think that this is a good moment not only to think about the lessons of the Obama campaign but President Obama’s first year in office. It’s a good chance to think about at domestic politics but also a good chance to think about foreign policy.
As I sat down to think about what I wanted to talk about today, there was a temptation, which is to take some of the big foreign policy areas where the Obama administration is trying to challenge some of the big taboos of international policy, whether in respect of Iran, the Middle East, nuclear proliferation or non-proliferation, while I could do that, that’s not what I want to talk about today, because rather than a particular issue or a particular theory or a particular policy. I want to talk about, not the ‘what’ of foreign policy, but the ‘how’ of foreign policy, which I think is rather more in tune with Sunder’s aim for the conference.
I think that as happened, one of the defining themes of the Obama campaign and the Obama Presidency has been that the solution of the problems that we face in the world does not just depend on the decision of Government, it depends on forging a new relationship between states and government, and that was true in his campaign and I think it’s true in U.S domestic policy, which is a vibrant melting pot.
But I think it’s true of politics, in which it is much less discussed. I think it’s important that our concept in Britain, to recognise that this theme of how you bridge the gap between government and people in domestic policy and foreign policy is particularly important because right across the advanced democracies, and perhaps, in some ways, especially in this country, there has been a in a familiar lament over the last decade about the disconnect between politics and politicians.
There have been many predictions that the future of politics is either a descent into managerialism or a dangerous populism, and I think that the triumph of the Obama campaign was a good antidote to that fearmongering really, and it was a riposte that inspired millions of people, not just in America but round the world. It gave America a new start and a new message that was first of all defiantly optimistic, and secondly international in its scope and thirdly unifying in its reach.
And although the cynics are in full cry, although they’re pointing in a sort of childish way that the waters have not yet been parted by the Obama administration, which happens to be true, that does not mean that this is a time to become pessimistic about the agenda that’s been set, which I think is fresh and radical. Or about the start has been made.
My starting point is that we should recognise quite how ambitious is the agenda the Obama administration has set in foreign policy and we should encourage or embrace the idea that it befits the times.
We face the deepest global recession since the 1930s, the window closing on our chance to halt global warming, the biggest challenge to the Non Proliferation Treaty in the shape of the Iranian nuclear programme for a generation, the danger of dashed hopes in the Middle East and a war in Afghanistan to name but five of the big issues. And that is before you even touch on the domestic challenges in the U.S, or of this country.
Now, these problems reflect two things in my view. First of all, and critically, and I think this is the first administration to acknowledge this publically, the shifting sands of economic power between West and East, and that is a fundamental change, so it is the idea of a multipolar world, that’s maybe well known to academics but hasn’t been an important part of political debate is now recognised - no one country can bring the world to heel on its own.
Now secondly, there are dangerous legacies from the previous era. Not just chronic problems that haven’t been resolved but divisions where there needs to be common purpose. So the change we need is easy to find. It is to build new coalitions of common purpose and supersession of past divisions.
My opposite number Hillary Clinton has talked about the challenge of the Obama administration – the pulling together or so called ‘hard power’ and ‘soft power’ into ‘smart power’. I just want to focus today on soft power, or what I call campaigning diplomacy, and I want to do so because I think we often underestimate the impact of soft power in the long term and we overestimate the impact of hard power in the short term, and so I just want to address the balance a bit.
Let me just start by making the case that we underestimate the power of soft power at our peril, and do so with, I think, an interesting example. For many years, governments in Britain and in America have been discussing with governments in Pakistan, the need for the Pakistani authorities to take on the multiple insurgencies that threaten their country. In the case of the U.S billions of dollars of U.S military assistance have been given to the previous Pakistani governments, but frankly there was very little change in behaviour. There was a see-saw of military offensive and then peace deals with militants in the border areas.
But today something fundamentally different has changed in Pakistan, and it’s not actually the new administration, although that has been an important part of it – the new administration pledging significantly more money for Pakistan. What has changed, to create a massive surge of public support in Pakistan for very dangerous attacks on the insurgencies in the West of the country, is a shift in Pakistani public opinion.
Why has that happened? Because following the peace deal in February that ushered in a hybrid of traditional and Islamic law in parts of the Swat valley, the media showed girls’ schools being burnt down, mobile phone footage of a 17 year old woman being flogged in the Swat valley, and Sufi Mohammed, the leader of the militant organisation in the Swat valley, declaring that he did not recognise the writ of the Pakistani state. That has done more to change
Pakistani public opinion than many, many years of traditional diplomacy. Those graphic media images have fuelled a big shift in Pakistani public opinion and that has liberated the government to take a very different attitude towards its own borders.
It’s also worth recognising that our own enemies in Afghanistan in the shape of the Taliban insurgency also recognise the importance of soft power. They are the first to try to exaggerate and exploit civilian casualties for their own ends, and I think that this is a really important change and what it speaks to is not the end of traditional diplomacy in which governments, ministers and civil servants negotiate with each other. What it speaks to is that rulers are more constrained than ever before, even in countries that are not democracies, by the power of public opinion and by the pressure of a more literate, more informed public.
One of the most moving things in my two and a half years in office was the site of monks marching through the streets of Rangoon in Burma getting to the British embassy and clapping because they knew we were standing up for the rights of democratic opposition in Burma.
One of the most powerful symbols of the new power of citizens was the fact that in the Zimbabwean elections eighteen months ago, it was mobile phone photographs of the results of the elections in each of the 9,000 polling stations that exposed the fraud that was being perpetrated and attempted.
Now, this is not the end of traditional diplomacy but it is important to understand its power. I mentioned Afghanistan and that’s an appropriate test for understanding both the necessity of traditional diplomacy, the importance of hard power but also the necessity of a new approach to soft power – to persuasion.
It’s interesting that the military understand this, in some ways, better than anyone else. General McChrystal has said "The measure of effectiveness will not be enemy killed; it will be the number of Afghans shielded from violence".
In other words, the loyalty of the Afghan population is the key in a military counter insurgency campaign. Success will come when people start switching sides, when ordinary Afghans decide to stop hedging their bets and to support their own government, which is supported by us, but they will only do so when they see that Afghan security forces can actually protect them better than the Taleban. Afghan governers at provincial and district level are able to deliver justice that is genuinely fair rather than retributional (sic) and third when they see the economic development is actually delivering something for themselves and for their children, and fourth when they see that there is a genuine political settlement that divides the insurgency by bringing those who are willing to live within the political system to share power within it.
Now, if in fact soft power is important in somewhere as dangerous as Afghanistan it is evident it’s going to be important in many other campaigns. It’s important in the Middle East, where the biggest gap today is not between the leaders (although there is a gap there), it’s actually from the peoples of Israel and Palestine, who are both of them sick of peace processes and also deeply cynical about the ability of the other side to compromise – that gap is a fundamental blockage on change.
On climate change – which I will talk about later - on soft power and the ability of businesses and citizens to have their voices heard in governments, and for governments not to be afraid of public opinion but actually to be leading the climate change issue is the difference between success and failure at Copenhagen.
At Turkey where I have just been, someone used a very powerful phrase and part of the theme of my visit was to understand what modernisation was going on its new international role, and someone said to me: “the most important modernisation in Turkey is the modernisation of the mind” and in a way, if you’re looking for a definition of soft power, the modernisation of the mind’s not bad run for it.
I want to focus the second half of what I’m talking about today on what I think are three very big challenges for us in the West if we are to properly make the most of this insight that soft power is having its value underestimated, its power underexploited and I think we need to be honest about these three difficulties, because I think they speak to the lessons of the last year.
First, I want to put this quite bluntly - it concerns values. Soft power, without values, is now power at all. Soft power without values that are consistently applied in a principled way won’t work.
So although soft power is more important in the world today, our soft power – the soft power of the West - is also more fragile because our values are contested and doubted; so we have to rebuild support for them and for our ability to represent them.
The West’s economic, political and moral authority is more contested now than at any time in the last two decades: economically, there’s been challenge by global recession which is often blamed on the West. Politically, by the emergence of successful authoritarian state capitalist regimes, and morally it’s been challenged by the war on terror and charges of hypocrisy and double standards, charges of double standards in respect of Guantanamo, and charges of hypocrisy in our espousal of democracy in respect of our own expenses crisis.
There’s a temptation in that context to slip into the purest of case-by-case pragmatism – to return to a world of value-free foreign policy. For some people, the fact that there are grey areas in foreign policy means that you are inevitably bound to slip back into case-by-case pragmatism. But I don’t think that is right, some of the most popular tunes of progressives were seized by the neoconservatives in the nineties – they used tunes of freedom and democracy – the espousal of universal values for a politics that came from the right of centre rather than the left, but I don’t think that should scare us off.
My view is that progressives should not be scared of universal values just because neo-cons have confused the traditional dividing lines. Our task is to respect different values, different ways of life and points of view, while holding firm to our own view of the good life. To ensure our policies are consistent with a commitment to social justice, human rights and democracy. Where there are charges of double standards and hypocrisy, they must be faced head on.
We do support greater political liberty and freedom of speech across the Arab world. We do not contest that Hamas won parliamentary elections. But we do not embrace Hamas as a political partner for a two state solution because they do not accept the other state in the solution, even in the manner of the Arab Peace Initiative, and because their terrorist actions belie the democratic values we support.
But it’s important to take examples like that, because when I speak about double standards in many parts of the world, our espousal of liberal democracy is often rebutted, or attempted to be rebutted by the praying lane of the previous example, although you can have an argument about it, it does not, in my view, expose our views as hypocritical.
When it comes to our counter-terrorism work, we can and should be robust in establishing the right red lines for our policies and actions, and defending both. Prime Minister Gordon Brown and President Obama have been absolutely clear that our own values are actually the most important defence of our own security apart from being intention, they are actually supportive of each other. The Government and all its agencies are determined to live up to the laws to which we are subject. But the fact that there is a legal system that allows redress for those who believe their rights have been contravened – that is not an exposure of the fact of double standards, it’s actually showing that we are true to our own values, because we are willing to expose our own action to legal challenge in our own courts.
Second, the most powerful way of spreading those values is through shared institutions such as the EU or NATO which have strong values at their heart. Since the Second World War, the most powerful vehicles for propagation of soft power have been institutions, the biggest democracy building programme the world has ever seen is called the European Union, because our group is a magnet for countries to the East, in Central and Eastern Europe. As Vaclav Havel has said, "the vision of becoming part of the EU was…the engine that drove the democratisation and transformation of" of Central and Eastern Europe”.
However, the truth is that the soft power of the EU is under threat. In the UK, from an opposition that believes that European Foreign Policy – the use of the EU economic clout to further our values and our interests – is a threat to UK interests rather than a way of magnifying them and it’s under threat from outside the UK, by those who wish to close off further enlargement of the EU.
Both those positions, it seems to me, are dangerous for positive soft power. I want to give you an example of why that matters from somewhere I just came from. Bosnia is where 100,000 people were killed in the nineteen nineties, now what’s happening in the Western Balkans is actually quite remarkable the prospect of full EU membership, is driving economic and political reform in Serbia, Montenegro, Albania, Croatia, and Macedonia. They are all at different stages on the EU journey. In Bosnia where nationalist divisions and ethnic tensions still shape politics, progress is much more difficult. Yet the persistence of these divisions only reinforces the need and the importance of Bosnia’s eventual EU integration.
Third challenge is about how we mobilize citizens, because I think for our politics, one of the remarkable things about the Obama campaign was, that in a traditionally weaker party system than ours, it mobilized hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people into political activism. Now we need that sort of activism in foreign policy debate, and I just want to use climate change as an example.
We are 35 days or so from the Copenhagen conference, and in the run up to that conference there is a lot of debate in hand between politicians and government officials, but if citizens aren’t part of the debate, we’re not going to get the positive outcome. There’s three points that need reform:
• There still many, many people who don’t believe the dangers of catastrophic climate change. That’s why the Foreign office has just published a map of what we call the four degrees world. We commissioned 27 of the UK’s leading academic institutions to map out a ‘business as usual’ scenario, and it shows how different parts of the world will be affected by migration, water level rises and increasing temperatures. We need to turn that sense not of catastrophism (sic) but of reality, into a campaign tool.
• We need to prove to our own businesses as well as our own citizens that there is a personal advantage and a significance for the climate change act in this country, which sets out a reduction of carbon emissions between now and 2050.
• We need to engage the ethics of climate change, fundamentally climate change is not a scientific issue, or a technological issue but an ethical issue about how different people in different parts of the world can bear the burden of mitigating and then adapting to climate change. The Prime Minister’s proposals on climate change finance have gained support from across the EU that 100 billion euros annually is required by 2020 to support developing countries making the transition to low-carbon energy and adapting to climate change. Those proposals are critical to unlocking action among poorer countries by addressing the need for fairness in a deal.
Soft power produces less dramatic or immediate changes than hard power. It is easy to underestimate its importance. But as we commemorate the fall of communism 20 years ago, we should remember that the soft power of values is as vital as the hard power of armies when it comes to advancing our goals and defending our societies. We should remember too that it is only through promoting shared values and shared institutions – progressive means as well as progressive ends – that we can renew and strengthen our soft power.
A year on from President Obama’s election, people are already questioning why he has not already solved the world’s problems. But the whole point of Obama’s campaign was that the power and responsibility to change the world is distributed. And it is only through working together – citizens, business and government, emerging and existing powers – that we can overcome problems too big for any single leader or any single nation. We all have to play a role. That is the real change we need.
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