From Kosovo to Georgia
David Miliband should remember the scorn heaped on those of us who protested against Blair's Chicago speech in 1999
George Galloway, Guardian.co.uk, Monday 1 September 2008

Some might call it a lesson in the law of unintended consequences. For others, however, the bitter aftertaste of Tony Blair's saccharine-coated "doctrine of the international community" was all too obvious when he outlined it nearly a decade ago.

The reheated cold warriors who've fulminated over events in the Caucasus this month would do well to go back to that speech at the Chicago Economics Club in 1999.

Nato bombs were raining on Belgrade, eviscerating TV make-up women and destroying civilian infrastructure. Shamelessly, Blair posed as the stoic British prime minister who had voyaged across the Atlantic to remind America of its world historic role at the hour of Europe's need.

"On its 50th birthday Nato must prevail," he said, "Success is the only exit strategy I am prepared to consider."

He went on to locate the Kosovo war in the context of the then fashionable cliches of globalising capitalism and the changing roles of states and international alliances. The war's salience lay in recognising that the advance of the global free market depended on the preparedness of an undefined "international community" to, as he would put it two years later, "reorder this world" by force when necessary.

Thus, according to Blair in his address to Chicago neo-liberals, "The most pressing foreign policy problem we face is to identify the circumstances in which we should get actively involved in other people's conflicts".

That meant riding roughshod over the doctrine of the sovereignty of nation states dating from the peace of Westphalia – clearly his urge to modernise outdated notions had burst beyond such trifles as the welfare state and the Labour party.

Those of us who protested were castigated and calumniated against as the real dyed in the wool conservatives who had not understood that the world had moved on. In fact, our concern was that the Kosovo intervention and its justification were taking the world back. The sovereignty of nations was never an inviolable and faultless principle – and none of us on the left had said otherwise. But Blair's humanitarian interventionism, his 21st century civilising mission, was no advance on it.

It was a throwback to the Gladstonian liberal imperialism of the 1880s, which also was born with ballyhoo about Balkan atrocities, at that time Bulgarian. Two consequences flowed at the end of the 19th century.

First, peoples across the globe rapidly came to suffer murder and mayhem far worse and more extensive than any visited by one Balkan nationality upon another. The carnage in Africa, Asia, the Americas and Australasia still evades the North American and European imaginations because, quite simply, the victims were not white and the perpetrators were.

Second, as other states decided that they too had a duty to civilise, the scramble for Africa, China and elsewhere brought the European powers first into diplomatic conflict and skirmish, and then, when conquests in neither the east nor the west had filled their maw, into a cataclysmic clash on their own continent.

It's worth recalling the scorn heaped on those of us who raised these points nine years ago, warning of the vicious circle interventionist wars would unleash, and then turning to events today in the Black Sea's own Balkans.

Perhaps the mandarins of King Charles Street have a manual on how to hold a straight face and keep talking when all around are gasping incredulously. Maybe there's an homage to Kipling along those lines. Or maybe it's just the way our current foreign secretary is eerily adopting the tics and mannerisms of our former prime minister. Either way, David Miliband's performance over Georgia has been a spectacle to behold.

There was the bluster about the territorial integrity of small nations – this from a government that had only months previously proclaimed its support for ripping out Kosovo from what is left of Yugoslavia. The recognition by Washington and London of Kosovo's secession prompted a warning from Moscow, which, thanks to many years of Russian weakness and US triumphalism, was predictably ignored.

There are other nations besides Kosovo that might want to secede elsewhere and with greater claim, said the Kremlin, and if you recognise Kosovo against our wishes, don't be surprised if we end up recognising other secessionists against yours.

The frothing from Miliband and Condoleezza Rice when Russia did just that exposes the hypocrisy at the heart of western policy as outlined by Blair. When it comes down to it, for all the talk of universal moral objectives in international affairs, the right to pursue them turns out not to be universal, but to be vested in particular powers, and, it seems, some nations' rights are more inviolable than others.

They call it the international community, but it is not even the community of the permanent members of the UN Security Council, still less the UN General Assembly. It is, as with Kosovo, a community that is coterminous with the biggest military alliance on the planet, the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation, which has strayed very far indeed from the Atlantic.

For more than a decade, successive British and US governments could get away with this sleight of hand. Russia was enfeebled, robbed blind by foreign-domiciled billionaires. China was just a manufactured-in stamp piled high in the pound shop.

Not now. The unipolar future turns out to have been a moment in the past. And that makes the hubris that led from Kosovo through Iraq to today's missile shields and Cold War rhetoric all the more dangerous. One of the "collateral casualties" of the Kosovo war was the Chinese embassy in Belgrade. The result of a similar air strike in "rogue" capitals today doesn't bear thinking about. Nor do the consequences that would have flowed had Georgia been a member of Nato with its mutual military obligations.

The Russian action in Georgia has underscored the limits of US power, but Anglo-US arrogance is unabated. For the US – despite the dying days of the Bush administration – there is a logic. It is a global power, still the only true global power. However dangerous the game, it's not difficult to see why the US establishment, and not merely the Bush regime, plays it.

But why should Britain? Maybe it was the gap between western bombast and Russian facts on the ground, but there was something truly ridiculous about Miliband travelling to Ukraine to shake his fist at the east. He preached extending Nato membership to a country where two thirds of the people are not in favour of it and which is already ruptured by east/west tensions and internal conflicts that make Georgia look like Switzerland.

The Labour government in London again managed to outflank to the right Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel and even Silvio Berlusconi – but for what? To share this time not in foolish, short-lived triumph in the Middle East, but in Bush's humiliation.

The world is at that most dangerous of places: where one way of ordering states and systems is giving way to another. That usually doesn't happen without some major rupture and frequently with attendant violence. The worst place to be in such circumstances is as some ersatz power, an imperial hangover not of yesterday, but of the last century, busy threatening rising or renewing powers with the armies belonging to an ailing one.

Georgia's hapless president, the New York lawyer Mikheil Saakashvili, has just learnt what it means to plunge into dangerous waters on the ebb tide. It's a lesson that Britain's political elite would do well to heed.