The Path to Power

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.

I spoke out against these trends in a speech to UN Ambassadors in New York in September 1991. I defended the ‘new nationalism’ which was apparent among the constituent peoples of the Soviet Union and Central and Eastern Europe. This was itself, I argued, a reaction against the tyranny of communism; most of those who embraced it were convinced democrats; and, to the extent that there was a risk of excesses, these should be seen as proof that attempts to suppress national identity were both bound to fail and would result in even stronger national passions when they eventually did fail. That had important implications for the future of the UN.

True internationalism will always consist of cooperation between nations: that’s what the word means. And similarly, the United Nations, which embodies the highest aspirations of internationalism, reminds us by its very name of its true purpose. The starting-point for all your deliberations is that you represent nations. Your often elusive goal is that they should be united in some common purpose. But unity of purpose — not union — is the objective.

In fact, by the time I spoke in New York it was already becoming apparent that all was not well with the New World Order. I was deeply concerned about the West’s failure to see what was at stake in the former Yugoslavia, where Slovenia’s and Croatia’s bids for freedom from the oppressive impoverishment of communism were being challenged by armed force. For me, rights of national self-determination and self-defence (indeed human rights more generally) lay at the heart of any just international order — and, at least as important, of any stable international order. Stability is a conservative value in foreign policy: anyone who doubts that should be given a one-way ticket to Mogadishu. But stability should not be used as an excuse for upholding a status quo that is itself inherently unstable because it suppresses social forces that cannot ultimately be contained.

It is perhaps significant that on each of the three occasions when I felt compelled, since leaving office, to intervene publicly on the subject of foreign affairs (other than as regards Europe), it has been my conviction that both moral and practical considerations required a change of approach. The first was when in April 1991 I was moved by what I heard from Kurdish women, who came to beg me to speak out in order to gain relief for their compatriots bearing the brunt of Saddam Hussein’s merciless attacks. Parliament was in recess and there was no minister available to see them. I am glad to say that — doubtless coincidentally — action was subsequently taken at least to set up safe havens.

The second occasion was when, on the occasion of the coup in the Soviet Union in August 1991,1 was dismayed by the willingness of some Western leaders apparently to ‘wait and see’ whether the coup leaders were successful, rather than give full moral support to the resistance gathered around Boris Yeltsin at the Russian White House. So, as soon as I had checked what had happened, I held a press conference outside my Great College Street office and went on to give a succession of interviews.

I said that it was quite clear that what had happened in Moscow was unconstitutional and that the Russian people should now take their lead from Boris Yeltsin as the leading democratically elected politician. In this new and dangerous situation our own planned defence cuts must not now go ahead. But I warned against assuming that the coup would be successful. The Soviet people had now developed a taste for democracy and would be reluctant to lose it. They should protect democracy by acting as the peoples of Central and Eastern Europe had done — by taking to the streets and making their views known.

The following morning it was already starting to become clear that my optimism that the coup would not succeed was being borne out by events. The news was of huge protest rallies in Leningrad and Moscow. I thought it was worth trying to speak directly by telephone to Mr Gorbachev who, according to the coup leaders, had had to step down ‘for reasons of health’. But I was hardly surprised when the Soviet Ambassador told me this was impossible. I had assumed that telephone contact would have been cut off by the KGB — though in this I soon learned I had overestimated the coup leaders’ competence. Later in the day the Conservative MEP Lord Bethell, a great expert on Russian matters, contacted my office to say that he had with him Mrs Galina Staravoitova, an adviser to Mr Yeltsin on a visit to London. I immediately asked them to come in and brief me. I related how I had failed to make contact with President Gorbachev. Mrs Staravoitova then asked me whether I would like to speak to Mr Yeltsin instead. After searching through her handbag, she came up with the number for the direct line to his office in the Parliament building and after several failed attempts — to my astonishment — I was put through.

Mr Yeltsin and I spoke for some time, with Lord Bethell translating. It was clear that the outlook from the besieged White House was grim but also that Mr Yeltsin and his supporters were in good heart. He asked me if I would chair a commission of doctors to investigate the truth about Mr Gorbachev’s allegedly poor health, which had every appearance of a classic Soviet diplomatic illness. Of course I agreed, and the rest of the day was spent in cooperation with the Foreign Office and the Department of Health trying to compile a suitable list of