Background Briefing

Europe, as a union of nations, could emerge as an important force in world affairs. Chris Patten, now Lord Patten of Barnes, is one of the most influential men in Europe and the UK. A leading political analyst, he has 'maintained morality clarity in murky times'.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

TRANSCRIPT

MC: Good afternoon everyone. It gives me great pleasure to welcome our chancellor Lord Patten of Barnes on behalf of Newcastle University and the Jean Monnet Centre. The Jean Monnet Centre is a university-wide centre which acts as a focal point for promoting the understanding of Europe in the university and region. Lord Patten is a very distinguished politician and diplomat who has a wide experience of international matters. As MP, minister, chair of the Patten Commission on Northern Ireland, governor of Hong Kong and European commissioner for external relations and, since 2005, a member of the House of Lords, through the posts he has held and holds he has both an insight into and a considerable influence on world affairs.

He has also written and spoken extensively on European issues, trans-Atlantic relations and wider international issues. Lord Patten is not only a successful diplomat, but also a man of great moral and political integrity and humanity. There are many examples of this. For instance, the support he gave to the Vietnamese boat people while governor of Hong Kong, and his concern for the Balkans in the aftermath of the conflicts there. Lord Patten recently appeared in the Independent newspapers Good List of the 50 people whose work was making Britain a better place to live. The chair of the selection panel commented that he, along with Shirley Williams, shows that it is possible to maintain some moral clarity in the murky world of politics.

A defining characteristic of the people on this Good List is that they force the rest of us to re-imagine the world in a different way. What better introduction to our lecture tonight, looking at the future of Europe's foreign policy. So I'd now like you to welcome Lord Patten, who will talk for about 40 minutes and then answer questions. Thank you.

Chris Patten: Vice-chancellor Professor Ritchie, ladies and gentlemen, first of all I hope you'll excuse me as the evening wears on and my voice alternates between squeaks and croaks but I'm halfway (at least I hope it's halfway) through a unseasonal cold, but I hope you'll bear with me.

Woody Allen, you may have heard me say before, once did a speed-reading course and claimed to have read War and Peace in 20 minutes. 'It's about Russia,' he said. There's a danger of me being equally glib in trying to summarise what I think is happening in Europe at the moment and has happened to the development of foreign policy in the past. But I will try at least to skate over the main points.

The first really impressive political speech I ever heard was delivered by Harold Macmillan in 1964. It was the year after he'd been obliged by prostate problems to step down as prime minister. As you may have noticed, prime ministers never think it's quite time for them to step down and Mr Macmillan, as he then was, was no exception. He came to speak at his old college where I was in my second year as an undergraduate, Balliol, and he gave a speech which I have to say I heard on many subsequent occasions; no reason why politicians shouldn't repeat themselves from time to time. Pavarotti sings Nessun Dorma again and again. If you've got a good speech, why not deliver it more than once?

But it was a remarkable and emotional speech about the long, hot summer of 1914, the generation of young men (it was young men in those days) who went straight from bowling on the Balliol lawn, drinking in the buttery, punting on the river, to the Gethsemane of Picardy and Flanders. He went down the portraits in the hall of some of the members of that Edwardian generation, told us what they'd read, gave us their name, told us the battle that they died in. The lost generation.

The extraordinary thing is that the war memorial in my college tells an extraordinary story. Eight hundred people went from my college to fight in the First World War, 220 died. Among those whose deaths are recorded on the war memorial there are three Victoria Crosses and two Iron Crosses. And the point that Macmillan was making that night and the point made by that war memorial is that the First World War was a European civil war, so was the Second.

My wife's father was a great Cambridge athlete in the generation after Chariots of Fire. He ran in the 1936 Olympics, the high hurdles, and came, I think, fourth or fifth behind Jesse Owens in Berlin. And he, with the Seaforth Highlanders, fought all the way through the Middle East, fought all the way up Italy and back to the UK, was in the second wave after D-Day and was killed in the battle of the Falaise Gap a month before my wife was born. Again, if you look at the war memorial in his college at Pembroke in Cambridge, it tells the same story; British names, American names, dominion names, as we used to call those who were from South Africa and Australia and New Zealand and Canada, and German names, the second civil war.

And for both Macmillan and for a subsequent generation of men and women and political leaders, there was a terrible obscenity about bringing young people together to the greatest European universities to study the humanities, to read the same great works of classical literature, and then to send them home where they were taught to kill one another. Two civil wars in the first 45 years of the last century, and we talk about the superiority of European values.

Well, we've done rather better for the last 50 years, and we've done rather better to a great extent thanks to the United States of America, a point worth remembering at a time in our affairs when the behaviour of one president and his close colleagues sometimes raises concerns about the transatlantic partnership...I put the point very diplomatically.

After the First World War, Woodrow Wilson, whose great hero was William Gladstone, that believer in humanitarian intervention, in a law which was more important than the law of any individual nation state, particularly if it was made at Westminster...Woodrow Wilson tried after the First World War to turn Europe and the rest of the international community away from the 19th century nationalism, the xenophobia, the dog-eat-dog approach to economics which had created that First World War and which had sucked in a generation of young Americans, and his efforts founded with the feebleness of the League of Nations (that is, the feebleness of the members of the League of Nations) in standing up for what it purported to represent, an approach which withered and died when we declined to take a robust line on Japan's intervention in Manchuria and Italy's intervention in Ethiopia.

After the Second World War, a new president, President Roosevelt, and his successor Harry Truman went back to Woodrow Wilson's approach to international governance. And it was, at the end of the war, an explicit objective of American policy to promote the political integration of Europe through its economic integration. That was one reason why the project was so unpopular in the United Kingdom because we thought it was all part of the American plot to get us to wind up the British Empire. But Roosevelt and Truman and Marshall and Aitchison, that extraordinary diplomatic generation which helped to put in place the Pax Americana from which we all benefited from for the following 50 years, they regraded it as essential to promote integration in Europe so that their young men wouldn't have to come back to Europe once again to save us from ourselves.

More than that, they explicitly wanted to share in global political and economic leadership with Europe. Not surprising that anybody wants to share the burdens of leadership. They weren't always perhaps quite as good about it as they might have been. Occasionally when we in Europe did try to do rather more for ourselves, particularly in the security field, Americans got a little bit cross that perhaps we were inclined to be a little uppity, began to think that perhaps doing more for ourselves in the security field would lead to divisions in NATO. But by and large that was rarely the problem because on the whole Europe hasn't, for 50 years, done as much as we should have done for our own security.

What we did do was to make a huge success of rebuilding from the rubble of the Second World War with the assistance of Marshall Aid. If you go to Paris, you'll see just opposite the Luxembourg...I only noticed it this spring when I was there, a plaque which commemorates the great Harvard commencement address that George C Marshall made in 1947, and it includes that terrific quote...I haven't got it quite right but I'm more or less accurate...defining Marshall Aid in the way, Marshall said, 'We're not offering this assistance against any country or creed, we're offering it against need and desperation and want. Difficult,' he also said, 'to expect people to take lectures on democracy and human rights when they've got empty stomachs.'

Well, America helped to fill our stomach. Actually what Marshall Aid helped us to do was to avoid the really difficult choices about priorities which democracies often have to make. We were able both to invest in our own social welfare, in the social solidarity which has always been prized in this country and in Europe, while at the same time investing in our rejuvenated industrial strength as well. We enjoyed what the French called les trentes glorieuses, called after a book written by a French economist, sociologist, in which he described a French village at the end of the war in 1945 and then described a French village in 1975, and you only realise as the book wears on that he's talking about the same village.

We created, as I say, with American encouragement, the Common Market, which became the European community which became the European Union, a unique though far from perfect enterprise in sovereignty sharing. I don't think we should underestimate what was achieved in creating a single market, a single trade policy, a single environmental policy, but of course there have been difficulties. The institutional relationships are often ramshackle, the rhetoric is often way ahead of the reality, particularly for commonsensical, pragmatic British ears. And there is a consistent weakness that we build decision-making structures without a real European demos or electorate to haul them to account.

But what I think is most remarkable when you look at the nascent attempts of others to do anything similar, it is not what went wrong but how much we've actually managed to achieve, and there's a real sense in which the sovereignty sharing that we've practised has enhanced the individual sovereignty of nation states and provided a sort of model for how to deal with the dark as well as the beneficial side of globalisation. Not forgetting that we live in a world today in which the real danger is not what one state is likely to do to another but how one state can cope with the global problems that crowd in on it and what some states do to their own citizens.

While the European Union was being put together bit by bit, an area in which we made little or no progress was that of foreign policy. We did have an attempt in the 80s and 90s to create a foreign policy, it was called European political cooperation, and as I said in a book that I wrote recently, it really amounted to foreign policy by communiqué, it was a policy full of extremely strong adjectives and nouns and extremely weak verbs. Three things change that. First there was the sense that Europe was an economic giant but a political pygmy. Not strictly true because some member states...France, Britain, the permanent members of the Security Council at the UN, nuclear powers, Germany has a global reach, other countries matter particularly in some parts of the world, Spain in Latin America, Belgium in Central Africa. But it's true that the clout of a European trade commissioner in, for example, trade negotiations, was never equalled by the clout of any European official when it came to political or security issues.

Second, the collapse of the Soviet Union and its empire showed that the world has moved beyond the balance of terror in politics. It was clear that there would be a bigger political role in the new situation for Western Europe's economic block. And third, and I think most decisive, there was the humiliation of the Balkan war when we and Europe couldn't make up our minds whether we wanted to delay or prevent the dismemberment of the Balkans or manage the dismemberment of Yugoslavia and the Balkans or simply keep our distance on the grounds that the Balkans was pretty dangerous territory. So we postured, we frothed, while in Bosnia about 220,000 people were murdered, while concentration camps (which don't forget we in the UK had invented for the Boer War)...while concentration camps were returned to Europe and ethnic cleansing returned to Europe as well.

Perhaps the most humiliating thing when you look back on the Balkans, on which as Professor Ritchie said I've spent a good deal of my life, perhaps the most humiliating thing of all was this, that in the early 1990s, late 80s, it mattered much more what the Americans declined to do than what the Europeans were prepared to do, and that in Europe to a country, a dismembered country that you can drive to, a country on who's beaches we used to bronze ourselves. So beginning at Maastricht, continuing with the treaty negotiations in Amsterdam, we set out explicitly our ambitions to create a common foreign and security policy with its own institutions and personnel.

A few years ago, Henry Kissinger, when he was secretary of state in the United States, asked a rather silly question about Europe. He said, 'If I want to know what Europe's foreign policy is on this or that subject, who should I phone?' Well, leave aside the fact that I spent a good deal of my five years as European commissioner wondering who to phone in Washington to find out what policy was...should one phone Dr Rice, or should one phone Secretary Powell or should one try to find out from nice Mr Rumsfeld or Ambassador Bolton? Leave aside that there will always be more than one telephone call to make, we did try in Europe to at least ensure that if Henry Kissinger or his successor phoned up, there would be somebody else on the end of the line.

And we established an elaborate process for trying to nudge and coax European foreign ministries into finding common positions which we could express in common, and through expressing them in common, magnify the influence that we could bring to bear. We created a High Representative, as he was called, for the Common Foreign and Security Policy, though it has to be said that in truth, because of the difficulties of herding cats, or herding foreign ministers to be more precise, sometimes he fetched up being the High Representative of the lowest common denominator.

What are the biggest impediments to creating a common foreign and security policy and what are the greatest constraints on its development? Here I say something which should warm the cockles of any hearts which don't beat as one with Europe. The impediments are obvious. First, foreign and security policy goes right to the heart of what it means to be a nation state. It's why we talk about a common foreign policy not a single foreign policy. It's very different from the currency, you'll observe. So I don't believe that in my lifetime there will be a single foreign minister, a single foreign ministry for Europe, a single foreign policy. People may fight 'bra wars' for a European commissioner but I think they're very unlikely to fight real shooting wars at the behest of a European commissioner.

The extent to which the nation state is still in the driving seat in foreign policy does of course sometimes inhibit discussion of the toughest issues in any Brussels forum. Nowadays, prime ministers tend to do foreign policy, partly because they think erroneously that foreign policy is about being nice to foreigners, and partly because they think that foreign policy is easier than dealing with traffic problems in London or social security problems in the West Midlands.

But issues of importance tend, when the nation state is in the driving seat, to be kept away from Brussels, even at the heart of debate. Throughout the Iraq crisis in 2002, 2003, and I took part in every important European meeting during that period, and we never really discussed Iraq in the foreign affairs council of the European Union or in the council which brings prime minsters together. It was discussed in Paris, London, New York, Washington, Berlin and everywhere, but in Brussels it was the elephant in the room which you tiptoed nervously about but tried not to refer to.

The second impediment to the creation of a common foreign and security policy is a little more sensitive to express, and I mean no disrespect to other member states in making this point, but on any really big issue, it's not possible to reach a common position unless Britain, France and Germany agree. There are several reasons for this. In the case of France and Britain, for example, one should not underestimate the fact...which is rather difficult to express but true, that both countries, more than most others, are prepared to deploy force and to take casualties.

The third impediment is the gap between our European rhetoric and reality. And it's particularly clear when it comes to the need to use force to sustain even the international rule of law. We produced a document on European security policy after 9/11 and it whistled through the foreign minister's council and the heads of government and state, largely because it avoided that very difficult issue of the circumstances in which Europeans are prepared to use and deploy force for a multilateral objective.

Let me pass by some of the institutional issues which caused us difficulties as well and come beyond the impediments to the construction of a common foreign and security policy and talk about some of the constraints on its development. I'll make three points, which don't together comprise an exclusive list. First, you'll recall that Ernie Bevin after the Second World War, one of the greatest of all British post-war foreign ministers, that Ernie Bevin used to note that if Britain was more prosperous, and he used to put this point in terms of our production, our extraction of coal, then his views would carry more weight in the world. The same is plainly true of Europe today. Our stuttering economic performance undermines our global political standing.

I don't want to exaggerate our problems. We're not doing as badly in relation to the United States as is sometimes suggested. The principal difference between the American growth rate and the European growth rate is a factor of demographics. The principal difference between productivity levels in the United States and in Europe is mainly a function of the Wal-Mart factor, of developments in the retail and distribution sector in the United States with the creation of great shed-like developments out of urban areas.

We shouldn't also underestimate the distinct differences between the economic performance of European countries. The Nordic countries and Ireland are doing rather better than France and Germany and Italy, and the new member states, partly because of catch up economics, are doing much better than the older member states. Nevertheless, even allowing for some of the improvements that are coming through in Germany, it looks suspiciously as though Europe has arrived at a situation in which our non-inflationary rate of growth in the heartland of the European Union is not much above 2%. Set aside an economic growth rate of that sort of level, set that alongside a falling and aging population and a falling share of world trade and a falling share of world output, and you're not obviously describing the circumstances of an aspirant superpower.

I'm much more worried about those issues than I am by arguments about institutional stalemate, though we do certainly face it in Europe. I don't believe, in fact, that we face in Europe an institutional crisis. I do think we face institutional reality. I suspect that we've pushed economic and political integration for the time being about as far as the market will bear, and I can't think of a single significant political party in any of the major member states which would campaign, let alone campaign successfully, promising to work in the European Union for a single tax regime, a single social security regime or a single labour market. The task is to make what we've already agreed to do together work better, and that is certainly true in foreign and security policy.

The other inhibiter to development is the lack of clarity and consistency in dealing with some of our biggest bilateral partners or, in the case of Russia, neighbours. In China we had, last year and the year before, the debacle of whether or not we were prepared to lift the arms embargo which had been put in place after Tiananmen. In Russia we seem to have found it impossible to develop a clear policy on Russia, purportedly because of our concerns about our dependence on Russian gas. The truth is, that Gazprom and the Russian government have to sell their gas to someone, and in fact increasingly need western investment to get their energy out of the ground.

We overlook the fact, though we're reminded of it plenty often enough (for example, in the last few days) that Russia has a different view of its neighbourhood to our view. We want to have strong and prosperous democratic neighbours. Russia wants a sphere of influence, which is why, in Georgia, Russia continues to poke away at South Ossetia and Abkhazia, which is why in the Ukraine Russia uses Gazprom to drive politics, which is why in Moldova Russia connives at the quasi-independence of Transnistria.

Where we have done well in common foreign and security policy is in the whole policy of enlargement, enlargement which has helped to stabilise our continent by ensuring that at each stage of change beginning with Spain, Portugal and Greece, and there escape from fascist authoritarianism, and then the escape of Central and Eastern Europe from Russia's European empire. But at each stage we've offered those countries, as they become democratic, membership of the European Union, as the best way of consolidating democracy and economic reform in those countries. It's been a remarkably successful way of stabilising our own neighbourhood. I hope we don't now lose appetite for a policy which has been so successful, because it seems to me that to abandon that approach in relation to the countries of the Balkans, in relation to Ukraine and Moldova or in relation to Turkey, would risk destabilising our neighbours and would certainly mean that we could say goodbye to playing a significant role in international affairs.

Let me finally say a word about the two biggest challenges on Europe's plate today, in both of which this country has a significant part to play. The first is Afghanistan. Afghanistan is probably the classic example of how today the greatest threats that we face don't come from conquering states but from failed and failing states. I don't dispute the fact that the job that we've started doing in Afghanistan should have been started in 2001 after the Taliban were driven out of Kabul. It was at that point that we needed more boots on the ground, and we didn't put more boots on the ground because of Washington's total preoccupation with preparing for the invasion of Iraq. We kidded ourselves that we had bought the warlords when in fact we'd only rented them for the season.

So we now face a situation in which the authority of President Karzai's government hardly extends beyond Kabul, a situation in which most of the country is now earning its living from the production of poppies and heroin, a situation in which every part of the country is dominated by warlords, a situation in which probably 90% or 95% of the heroin on London's streets tonight or Newcastle's streets was sourced in Afghanistan. Do the difficulties of the job mean that we should turn our back on it? I have to say I don't believe that. It is very tough. I think some ministers were less than honest in explaining how tough it would be, but I don't see any serious alternative, given the dangers that I've referred to as failed and failing states, of trying to commit ourselves to the long term while of course securing, I hope, more support from other NATO countries. And the Middle East.

The Middle East was probably an issue which took more of my time when I was a European commissioner than any other. We found ourselves endlessly debating the situation in the Middle East with one another, with our Arab friends, with our Israeli friends, and with our American friends as well. We in Europe put together a policy called the Road Map, a road map to peace. The idea was that instead of one side waiting for the other to move on certain agreed confidence building measures (what's called sequentialism), both sides should move at the same time, parallelism. The problem wasn't in the approach, wasn't in the strategy, the problem was actually ensuring that the United States lived up to its alleged commitment to the Road Map while Mr Sharon was still in charge in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, and while President Arafat was still alive in Ramallah.

Where do we go from here? We have an American administration which won't talk to Syria, Iran, Hamas or Hezbollah, which has only recently spent most of its diplomatic energy explaining to the government in the Lebanon that bombing might be painful but that it would be good for Beirut in the long term. I think we have to return to basics and Europe has to try to take a lead in this. There are four struggles going on in the Middle East. There is a Palestinian Arab struggle to wipe Israel off the face of the region. There is a Palestinian Arab struggle to create a viable and contiguous Palestinian state. There is an Israeli struggle to find a solution to decades of problems and trouble which will guarantee Israel's peace and security behind frontiers agreed with its neighbour. And there's an Israeli struggle to create a greater Israel, incorporating much of the West Bank.

I think two of those struggles-the second and the third-are wholly admirable and sensible and deserve the support of Europe and America. The trouble is that Europe has been a bit too weak in expressing and promoting its support for the second and third of those options, and America, while it allegedly supports the second and third of those options, has covertly sometimes gone along with the fourth. I think we do need to be tougher on the issue, I think the international community needs to be much more explicit in its involvement in getting peace talks going again, I think there is a very strong case for promoting an international conference to try to start the process of peace making over again because the alternative, the option, is more years of bloodshed and bombs, suicide bombing and all the other hideous atrocities which have divided those countries of what we laughingly still sometimes call the Holy Land.

I hope that Europe can be prepared to be more assertive. I don't think we should define our policy in the Middle East by whether or not the present American administration likes it. I think American unilateralism and the neo-conservative experiment have been terrible failures which have made our world a more dangerous place than it otherwise would have been. But to encourage the next American administration to turn to a more traditional American attitude to global leadership, to persuade the next administration to return to multilateralism, Europe is going to have to demonstrate that we too can carry some of the burden of global leadership and economic and political responsibility. And unfortunately in Europe we're sometimes better at grandstanding than getting out on the pitch and getting our shirts muddy.

One final point; even as I say this about the importance of promoting multilateralism, I'm aware of the extent to which the dynamics of global leadership are changing. For the last 50 years we've assumed that America and Europe could set the global agenda and others would timidly follow. No longer. There isn't a single serious problem today that we can face in the world without the involvement of China and India. So we do need to rather change our approach to responsibility in global leadership. But that is perhaps a subject for a lecture on another occasion. Thank you very much.

MC: Okay, can I open it up for questions? At the back?

Audience member 1: Do you think that serious attempts to address the demographic deficit in the European Union has carried with it a mandate to actually create foreign policy for European Union?

Chris Patten: No, not entirely. I think that the first and most important way in which we should try to develop greater accountability in the European Union is by involving national parliaments much more, both in the legislative process in Europe and in the control of what's called in Euro-speak subsidiarity. That is, the attempt to ensure that decisions are taken at the appropriate level. But I'm not sure that even with changes like that you would find for the foreseeable future that the French were always likely to see eye-to-eye with us on foreign policy, to take one obvious example.

I think gradually we can develop the experience of working together and see how when we do work together we're more likely to achieve what we want. Iraq was a very good example of the sort of thing that happens when Europe isn't able to work together. Maybe the Americans would have gone blasting ahead on their own anyway, but the fact that Europe was all over the place wasn't much of a constraint on Mr Rumsfeld and Vice President Cheney and the others. So I hope we can develop the practice of working together but I think that the final decisions and arbitration of foreign policy is going to continue to be a matter for nation states.

Audience member 2: Can I ask you about Darfur and what you think Europe ought to be doing in the context of that?

Chris Patten: There's a wonderful book written by an American who got the Pulitzer Prize for it, a woman called Samantha Power, about genocide and ethnic cleansing in which she goes through all the examples of the last century or so, beginning with Armenia. And after each example, holocaust...more recently Srebrenica, Rwanda...the international community says never again, we must never allow that to happen again. Not just Rwanda. I was reading some material about the Democratic...ha, ha, ha...Republic of the Congo the other day and the issue of blood diamonds in Africa. How many people have died in the Congo in fighting between tribes? Over four million. Maybe not all of them as a result of genocide but certainly terrible tribal extremism.

So, never again, never again after Rwanda. Until Darfur. Or what happens next? And why hasn't the international community taken a tougher line on Sudan Darfur? Partly because you can't get a tough resolution through the Security Council. And do you know the main reason why you can't get a tough resolution through the Security Council? Because China gets 10% of its oil from the Sudan. Add to that the fact that the Americans think they get a certain amount of intelligence on Islamic Jihadism from the Sudanese government, and add the fact that the African union has been pretty feeble in what it has been prepared to do in Sudan Darfur, and add to that the fact that the international community has demonstrated, not least in Sudan, over the years that we're far better at humanitarian intervention than in making the humanitarian intervention unnecessary in the first place.

I was development minister from 1986 to '89, there was a war in Sudan then. So I fear that again we're going to find ourselves saying, when we count the dead in Sudan and prepare for the next atrocity, we must never let anything like that happen again. What should happen? I'm not suggesting that we should send in white faces and a NATO force to fight our way into Sudan. But we could apply serious economic sanctions to the Sudanese regime and particularly to its leaders. We could impose a no flight zone over the whole of Sudan. We could, though the Americans unfortunately don't believe in it, go to the international criminal court and ask the international criminal court to take up the cases of Sudan's leadership. There are things we could do which might at least change the trajectory of what is happening in Sudan at the moment, but I guess that what will actually happen is we'll wring our hands and hope that too many television cameras don't get in to make us feel ashamed of ourselves.

Audience member 3: You've talked a lot, Lord Patten, about what I would call hard European foreign policy. What's your overview of the softer foreign policy issues, such as climate change or energy, similar kinds of areas?

Chris Patten: I think I have to say that probably the best example of soft policy, or at least a policy that changes regimes without using precision guided munitions, is the whole policy of enlargement. What should our policy be on environmental issues? Well, we should first of all implement the agreements that we made under Kyoto. We should secondly try to persuade the Indians and Chinese to do what they did with chlorofluorocarbons and halons in the 1990s with the toughening up of the Montreal Protocol. I chaired the conference in 1990 which dealt with that issue of ozone depleting substances, and there, with America very much in the lead and a Republican administration, we argued that India and China should be part of the deal but should be allowed to join later than others and that they should receive support and technology transfer in order to allow them to meet the same obligations that the rest of us were meeting.

And I think we should take a similar attitude to India and China in the context of carbon emissions. At the moment they're encouraged by America and disgracefully by Australia (which didn't take this attitude when it came to ozone depleting substances) to think that we can deal with emissions through technology fixes and without having targets, and I simply don't believe it's true. I think it would make much more sense at this stage to work directly with the Indians and Chinese rather than try to persuade this American administration to go back on what it has so far been doing or not doing on Kyoto.

I'm actually, in the medium to long term, rather more optimistic about the United States because I do think that a combination of political pressures particularly in the sea board states in the east and west, I think that the educational effect of the oil price and other things are starting to push the environmental argument in the United States. And once the Americans get an idea like environmental improvement in a big way, they usually deliver on it with some technological efficiency and quite a lot of money. So I don't despair of them in the long term, but for the short term I think we in Europe should focus on India and China.

Audience member 4: What should European foreign policy be towards Iran, first of all, and do you think that we should, as the European community, intervene in America's need for oil and the purchase of oil, and can that happen and should it happen?

Chris Patten: No, we shouldn't, I think, try to intervene in America's attempts to purchase oil around the world. I did once hear an American congressman saying, 'The darndest thing,' he said, 'is that our oil is under their sand.' Iran is a great pre-Islamic civilization, and one of the paradoxical consequences of American policy in Iraq and in the region in the last few years has been to increase the political strength and clout of the religious fundamentalists in Iran and, I think, to encourage them to tweak the international community's tail on the nuclear issue. I think there it is lamentable that America has been so slow to develop a dialogue with Iran, despite some, I think, serious efforts by the Iranians. The Iranians are far from perfect but they did, I think, in the early years of Khatami try to develop such a relationship. The question now is whether we can stop them becoming a military nuclear power and what the consequences are for us if they do become a nuclear military power. I've got no doubt that the world would be better of if they didn't become a military nuclear power. I think the consequences in Saudi Arabia, in Turkey, elsewhere in the region would be considerable, and it would obviously be very understandably alarming for Israel.

But we should I think at least try to see what it looks like from the Iranian point of view. The existing nuclear treaties allow you to complete the fuel cycle and to produce enriched uranium provided you don't go on from that to produce nuclear weapons. And there are plenty of countries like Brazil and South Africa and others who have the capacity to complete the fuel cycle or who have completed the fuel cycle but have committed themselves not to produce a nuclear weapon. At the same time there are also countries which have refused to sign up to nuclear agreements, the nuclear non-proliferation treaty, but have then covertly produced a nuclear weapon, like India and Pakistan. And in the case of Pakistan, while we were rabbiting on about Iraq and proliferation from Iraq of weapons which it didn't have, western intelligence knew perfectly well that AQ Kahn (the father, as he's called, of the Pakistan bomb) was busy trying to flog it to the Libyans and Syrians and others. White men speak with forked tongue.

It's also worth recalling that it was the west which started Iran on the nuclear road which became associated by Iranians, not least back in the Shah's day, with an expression of national technological expertise. And how today do we actually stop Iran if Iran wants to go ahead? Will China and Russia and India support an economic blockade of Iran? What would be the effect on the oil price? You may remember that Mr Murdoch, the well known newspaper proprietor, predicted that the invasion of Iraq would bring the oil price down to $20 a barrel. Didn't quite work out like that but you can imagine what would happen in Iran.

And what would be the effect of a military intervention on the region, not least Iran's relationship with Hezbollah and others? So I find it difficult to see what sanctions we can apply. I therefore come to a very unpopular point of view which hardly dare speak its name, but I bet is where we fetch up. I think we probably have to concede the Iranians' right to complete the fuel cycle. I think we have to delay it as long as we can, I think we have to put in place a much more intrusive inspection regime so that it is clearer if the Iranians are going beyond producing their own uranium to actually developing a military capacity. In other words, I suspect we have to apply the existing nuclear non-proliferation treaty to Iran. But that wouldn't get you much of a hearing in Washington just at the moment, although there are some people who I think are starting to understand that, and I think that there are more Europeans, even in our own foreign office, who probably recognise that that's the way things are likely to turn out at the end.

Above all, in my view, we should start talking to the Iranians again. I can't for the life of me understand why...and they don't...I mean, they talk to Europeans but they really want to talk to America, and just because of the awful embarrassments all those years ago of the hostages crisis doesn't mean that America couldn't talk to Iran today. America has talked to all sorts of extremely disagreeable regimes in the past.

Audience member 5: [largely inaudible] I wondered whether you could reflect on some of the industrial interests, this new house of trade which maybe make it much harder to implement some of the vision or the common foreign and security policy. I'm thinking of arms trade and military technology which is traded, and also some of the trade interests with and Burma biggest trading partners. Are these some of those industrial interests..?

Chris Patten: I don't honestly think that Britain's trade with Burma is measurable. I mean, the main trading partner of Burma...well, the main trading partners of Burma's neighbours, including India and China. China last year signed 24 political and economic agreements with Burma which is probably about 24 too many, but I don't think that trade is an issue in our relations with Burma. After all, we apply very tough financial sanctions to Burma. You wouldn't make much money, I can tell you, out of the Burmese market. Burma is an example, however, of the argument I was making of one of the threats in the world being the way nation states treat their own citizens.

What do you do in the case of Burma? I've taken a very strong line on the imprisonment...the house arrest, sorry, of Aung San Suu Kyi over the years. I made some films about Asia a few years ago and we smuggled in a camera to interview Aung San Suu Kyi. When I was governor in Hong Kong one of my assistants used to take her books and videos and so on in order to try and keep her in touch with what was going on outside in the world, so I have a big personal commitment to the return of democracy in Burma. One of my private secretaries was the British ambassador in Burma until a few months ago.

I have great difficulty in knowing how we move from that sort of concern and the level of sanctions which stops the regime in any sense prospering to a policy which actually shifts the regime, unless Burma's neighbours are prepared to play along with us. And it's exactly the same in a way when you talk about Zimbabwe; unless South Africa will work with you and other of Zimbabwe's neighbours, it's very difficult to see how you can apply the sort of pressure which would bring down that mad and bad dictator.

The overall question you asked about how much trade and particularly trade in weapons affected the development of common foreign and security policy, is I think they affect it a bit but not a huge amount. What I am in favour of is complete transparency about the export of military technology and not so military technology but the sort of things which can be used for internal policing.

One of the great disappointments of my period as a European commissioner was the failure of the attempt to put in place a UN convention on the sale of small arms, preventing the sale of small arms to non-governmental bodies, particularly in Africa but elsewhere too. And it was a convention which came very close to agreement until right at the end, the American delegate, the ubiquitous Mr John Bolton, announced that America would not be able to sign the agreement because it infringed on Americans' constitutional right to bear arms...the sort of constitutional right that we've seen at work in one or two American schools tragically in the last few days.

So it's a very simple but quite important development on the international arms front because people sometimes forget that hand guns and rifles kill almost certainly more people every year than precision guided munitions.

Audience member 6: [largely inaudible] Thank you so much for. I wondered if I could end this in a slightly more forward-looking and possibly a little more optimistic tone. Share with us your thoughts how in the future, given that our friends across the Atlantic seem to be either things are in disarray. How can we reinvent Europe's role in global government, show some new leadership and address some crucial negative like endemic global poverty and global pandemics, freedom and security.

Chris Patten: Yes, well...read my next book. Just let me respond briefly with two points. First of all, as I said in my speech, if we want America to return to a more traditional approach to multilateralism, and I do, then we have to demonstrate in Europe that we're prepared to support multilateral endeavours even when they're painful, even when they're expensive and even when they involve providing armed forces to, for example, support the international rule of law. The problem we have with much American opinion is that they tend to regard us as being Monday morning quarterbacks who are always prepared to be wise after the event and critical after the event but aren't prepared to play our part in securing the global objectives that we say are so important.

So I think Europe has an important role in persuading America to return to an approach to global leadership which was spectacularly successful. There were some problems, there was a tendency in the 1960s and 70s in particular to see the world in Manichean terms; if you were on the Soviet Union side you were bad, if you were on our side you were good, even when you were actually quite bad. There were disagreements about Vietnam, a terrible example of the abuse of metaphor in foreign policy. There were disagreements about Central America, but by and large it was a hugely successful period in which we saw a six-fold increase in world output, a 20-fold increase in world trade, and as President Clinton used to remind us periodically as the century came to its end, most people in the world living in democracies of one sort or another. Persuading the Americans of that was actually rather a sensible way of running affairs. Persuading America that there is a huge amount to be said for America accepting the rules just like the rest of us, persuading America that that helps to protect America from the world's envy and dread, that's the challenge we have with the next US administration and I hope that we can rise to it.

The second point I want to make, it's even more important to rise to that challenge and to re-establish the machinery of global governance, even more important to do that in the next few years, although I'm not at the moment overwhelmingly convinced of the capacity of the likely next UN Secretary General to give the leadership in all this...even more important because of some of the issues that you touched on as you sat down. How do you cope with epidemic disease, with environmental disaster, with the drugs trade, with human trafficking, with the next SARS or a future avian flu without the sort of international cooperation which is comprehensive and more profound than anything we've seen before? Because even though people's principal loyalty and affection is directed towards their nation state, nation states can't cope with those problems on their own anymore.

Globalisation means that we can buy Chinese DVD players for next to nothing, means that we can flog insurance to Bolivians, but also means that if you've got, as it were, avian flu and get on an aeroplane in Peking, you only have to sneeze once between Peking and Bangkok to have spread avian flu to half a dozen continents. Globalisation has demolished frontiers which in many respects has helped to lift 400 million Chinese from poverty...fantastic...lift a couple of million Indians out of poverty, but also means that the threats we face are much more difficult to deal with, and unless individual nation states understand that and understand the importance of working better together, this century is going to be pretty rocky. Which is an optimistic way of finishing.

MC: Could we all warmly think Lord Patten for his wide ranging, incisive and, as the last questioner said, wise presentation. Thank you.

Presenter

Kirsten Garrett

Producer

Kirsten Garrett