Last week the Daily Telegraph concluded its ‘Rebuilding Britain’ series with a lead article calling for a foreign policy for Britain’s future - one which would be based on a lightly regulated, trade hungry British economy…equipping our businesses to meet the commercial challenges of Shanghai and Bangalore. This, the leader argued, was vitally important because as Lord Powell pointed out in one of the series articles, the world system is renationalising.

In his article, Lord Powell continued, “The world system is going to re-nationalise. Multilateral institutions will be there as enablers. But the decisions will be in the hands of the major powers, such as Brazil, Russia, India and China, as well as the US, as we saw at the Copenhagen climate change summit. It will feel more like the 19th century than the late 20th century.”

He concluded by advising that the Foreign Office “will need to shift from its love affair with multilateral institutions and rediscover its historic skills at bilateral relations and forming shifting alliances or coalitions of the willing”.

Is this the correct analysis? How can we best deliver those conditions to ensure we have a vibrant, prosperous and stable economy? The vital question it raised is how leading powers resolve major global challenges, which are mostly global in nature, requiring decisions to be made at a global level? Do we consider that 21st Century problems should be resolved by 19th Century decision making processes? Or do we dare to think that new ways can be found - particularly through the internet - to proceed in a different way, enabling regional groupings to play an important role as building blocks in the global economy?

The principal flaw in Lord Powell’s analysis is that he treats America to be on the same basis of shifting alliances as such countries as China, India and Russia with which I fundamentally disagree. For what stands out from the NIC’s Global Trends 2025 report more than anything else is that most of these rising powers do not share the same commitment that Britain, the EU and US do to democracy, the rule of law and respect of human rights. The report says:

“Today wealth is moving not just from West to East but is concentrating more under state control….With some notable exceptions like India, the states that are beneficiaries of the massive shift of wealth—China, Russia, and Gulf states—are non-democratic and their economic policies blur distinctions between public and private. These states are not following the Western liberal model for self development but are using a different model—’state capitalism’”.

Surely what we must work to fight for and promote is to preserve and develop a transatlantic view of the global system which can only be done by developing a coherent and far-sighted transatlantic strategy to deal with global challenges. This will not only mean reshaping the NATO Strategic Concept (already underway); it will also involve deepening a bridge across the Atlantic on a wide range of economic and political issues important to our people like the digital agenda, research and innovation, energy security and climate change. Such an approach is set out in more detail in the document “Towards Strategic Thinking in the Transatlantic Partnership”, available here.

At the Transatlantic Week event I spoke about last week, Ziga Turk, Secretary General of the Reflection Group on the Future of the EU, gave an excellent presentation (available here) in which he said that while we in the West will not have the quantity and we will not be the only ones with quality, what we do have are culture, tradition, and values that empower: respect for the individual; freedom; democracy. These values empower, he said, especially in an information economy and economy of meaning.

This means that not only do we need to strengthen the transatlantic bonds to deal with global challenges but strengthening Britain’s links with Asia might well be more effective were we to do this together with our European partners rather than by ourselves.

Should this be the basis for our policy-making over the next decade or so, this will inevitably change the way we should look at domestic issues for ensuring we have a stable and prosperous Britain in the first half of the 21st Century. My next blog will deal with these issues in more detail.

Rebuilding Britain