INT RELS: Where is Tim Spicer when you need him?
A role for the state
ERO’s editorial comment
Cartoonishly black
Many people on hearing that some mercenaries have been arrested in Zimbabwe will have sighed to themselves, ‘if only, if only’. For Robert Mugabe is not a popular man in Britain. Indeed, he’s so widely and safely disliked that even Michael Ancram (a notable docile Conservative member of parliament, you will recall, when this country inflicted Comrade Bob on the unfortunate people of Rhodesia) will venture some disobliging things about him. Why Zimbabwe is singled out for this moral scrutiny, and the measures suggested to deal with her delinquency, comprise an unedifying tale of moral caprice and political show-boating. The ‘solution’ to this problem lies not in mercenaries — who were anyway, it would seem, on their way to work in Equatorial Guinea — but in British soldiers. Or bloody indifference. Assuredly the answer does not lie in the shadow foreign secretary telling the Today programme were the Government ought, and ought not, to allow men to play games.
It’s useful to bear in mind, however, that villain of villains as President Mugabe might appear to us, elsewhere he is, as a matter of commanding moral outrage, largely either ignored, or at their most base, embraced opportunistically by countries such as France and Red China. Stylistically it would be pleasing to claim that British public opinion regards Robert Mugabe as an especially troubling figure because of an entirely deserved national feeling of guilt, but somehow we suspect that this is not quite the case. No, Mr Mugabe qualifies as a popular preoccupation partly because he looks the part, mostly, scenically, because what he’s doing involves white people, and, to a degree more substantial than clever people would like to admit, because the brute public suspect we could do something about this. And indeed we could, and probably should, but whatever is discussed as policy, for however long Muagbe’s life and tyranny continues, this option won’t be pursued by the British government. In the context of the war-a-year Tony Blair seems privately committed to, this is actually a remarkable occurrence. Why fight shy of this crusade? It would be popular, it would do more for the third world than even John Bercow’s ceaseless advocacy can, and yes, it would be the right thing to do. Other than a lingering superstition for the Gods long ago expelled from new Labour’s pantheon, there is no plausible explanation for this neglect.
Perhaps the dead hand of the Foreign Office has finally checked the Prime Minister’s seven years of vigour? Maybe this explains the ‘rest’ we have given ourselves from our global civilising mission. As likely an explanation is that deep down Mr Blair realizes that if Norman Crumb is on one side of an argument, the other side is liable to be the better one. Take just the asinine Tory campaign to bounce the Government into banning the England cricket team from touring Zimbabwe later in the year, regardless of merit, or, for what it’s worth, the financial cost to English cricket. We’ve pronounced on this before, but the Big Book of Thatcherism has many chapters — see, ‘the (bad) invasion of Afghanistan and the Moscow Olympics’ or the ‘moral of South Africa and constructive engagement’ for instance — of relevance. In the end, they teach the same thing: moral decisions are best made by private individuals and not taken for them by the government. If the England cricket team shouldn’t play cricket in Zimbabwe, then English cricket should take this decision, and not wait to have it made for it by ministers, and them having acted only under the ferocious lash of milorm Ancram.
The right to fight
One of the most vexing things about the fuss over English cricket’s supposed climactic role in Zimbabwean politics, other than the fact that the only people who will truly suffer from a tour there being banned are Zimbabwean cricket fans, is the witless escapism of it all. Was there ever a more blatant substitute for action? Could a policy course, if pursued, ever hope to achieve less? Some will remember Mrs Thatcher’s narrowing thumb and forefinger, as she graphically showed how little a Commonwealth-induced ban on the import of gold Krugerands would matter to anyone. Well the same thing applies in spades to banning England from playing cricket either in or against Zimbabwe. This is supposed to make what difference to the regime? If we’re satisfied with doing merely this in the face of the wrong we know is being done in Zimbabwe, then decadence is barely the word.
To return to our mercenaries though is to hopefully realise something else: our attention has been refocused on Comrade Bob solely because he has started doing stuff to white people. We didn’t care when he did stuff (a lot of stuff, tens upon thousands of terminal things in fact) to, for example, the Matebe; nor do we, as measured at any rate by the attention of the press, seem to care for what’s happening to black South Africans today in anything like the measure we used to when white people were involved. Yet had those mercenaries been coming Muagbe’s way the dismal thing about Africa is not merely could they have contrived to have been worse than the benign (for which read, non-white bothering) dictatorship of Zimbabwe’s first decade, but that they, and such regime as they might feasibly have produced, could of course have easily surpassed in brutality everything Mugabe has done or will do. This simple ethical practicality is part of the reason why there is a sliding scale upwards from the private military companies of the King’s Road all the way to the British army, but is not the central reason for what talk of Zimbabwe which is anything other than callous or bored should lead to.
If we will insist on being showily ‘morally concerned’ about a wretched state like Zimbabwe, then simple Christian decency really ought to compel us to become morally responsible too. Such a course after all being the path of the world, as opposed to that of the cave. It is, to be fair to both, what George Bush and Tony Blair have done and increasingly preached. That it has, as a matter of statecraft, a name so dreadful it can never be spoken (colonialism) is neither here nor there, what remains a pity is that it is not seemingly liable to be extended to anywhere deserving in Southern Africa. We care, but not that much.
Freedom of choice
If there seems to be a contradiction at play here (private individuals should make their own moral judgments, something like Zimbabwe best requires state action) it exists only if means and intent are confused. Governments shouldn’t, on the whole, tell us our manners or our morals. But equally, there isn’t much point to the state if we don’t by times tell it what ours are, and how they should be applied to political conditions. And in a very roundabout way, this brings us to the youth of Tipton. We, obviously, do not know what the lucky quintet who have just returned home were up to abroad, other than displaying an extended inability to choose gap years wisely. That said, their freedom does seem to point that neither our own nor the American government are overly sure either. Whatever these individuals have done, we can at least be sure that they were making, in one sphere or another, informed moral choices.
Some Western Muslims have taken their choice as far as to engage in other country’s wars (albeit self-evidently acting morally all the while within the umma). This hardly common occurrence amongst British Muslims has, inevitably, set off the vapours in all the usual locations. We would hesitatingly argue that if British subjects feel minded to go and fight overseas in wars in which Britain is not involved, that’s very much their business: we won’t stop them, and if they get in trouble, the help they’ll get should be requisite to the culpability their predicament suggests. Being practical about such a stance means accepting that, should Britain herself enter an especially militant phase, people could get stranded on the wrong side of a front line, and allowances have to be made for that. But the principle remains the same — you fight if you want, but don’t find yourself fighting us.
Clearly common sense says that there are wars and then there are wars. Were someone to announce their intention to proceed directly from Heathrow to Palestine to explode themselves and Israeli children for the sake of Hamas, then the British government ought to act just as much as it would were such a madman to declare his imminent preference for detonation on the far side of Heathrow’s cab rank. Inescapably though, this remains a remote and discrete proposition compared to say the one wherein someone silently leaves this country in order to get embroiled in, oh, a sort of a war in Somalia or Yemen or Mali. Invariably the people such an individual will end up harming or being harmed by are fellow Muslims; and so just as with the sufferings of Zimbabwe, it’s not the anachronistic Briton, with his head full of alien and essentially proto-modern Westernised takes on, in this case, Islam, who causes the problem — rather, it is the fact that First World neglect or indifference has allowed such an environment to come into being, where such a person could indulge himself, that is, ultimately, lamentable.
Like with like
Few people in this country were overly exercised when, during the Balkan wars of the early and mid 90s, 2nd and 3rd generation Anglo-Serbs and Anglo-Croats (and bored, post Central Plain Paras) sought out the fun and rapine to be had in any of those squalid civil wars. Indeed, to some extent the emotions (and in some cases, sincere and well thought out political urges) that motivated such behaviour received an at least nuanced understanding from our Liberal masters of communication and explanation. A lingering Fitzroy Malcean-informed Titophilia probably accounted for that, although the absence of a plausible threat of blowback to Britain is equally likely to have explained the odd tolerance that prevailed at the time. Here then are the states of action we will consider: in some cases we will allow some of us, in a private and voluntary capacity, to fight in other country’s wars; at another stage, we will expect the nation itself to act, but not when that might mean incurring responsibilities which make us feel either uncomfortable, or alternatively would require from us something other than self-indulgent feel-goodery; and most typical of all, the situation where the last thing we will do is act, but the worst thing that could happen is that the situation should be resolved, for where then could we harmlessly demonstrate our own virtue.
It is dismally typical of Conservative foreign policy, as it has been conducted since John Major became party leader, that today the Tory party is most naturally at home in that last category cited above: being ineffectual but sanctimonious. Neither the new testament of Thatcherism nor the old one of Salisbury encompasses this, but then sadly nor does the current Conservative party appear to encompass them.
ERO, March 11, 2004 06:30 AM