Has David Cameron re-nationalised the national interest?

One of my bugbears is what I call the ‘internationalisation of the national interest’. It is the belief that the world has become so globalised and interconnected that every crisis is a threat to our health and well-being and that it is vital we are involved in sorting it out. The result of such a belief is an incoherent, uncoordinated, and overstretched foreign policy because it is limitless in its scope and impervious to words like ‘prioritisation’ and ‘resources’.

The internationalisation of the national interest has been a worldwide phenomenon, but it reached its intellectual, practical, and rhetorical apogee in this country during the Blair years. In his famous 1999 Chicago speech the then Prime Minister told his audience that globalisation…

…is not just economic – it is also a political and security phenomenon. We live in a world where isolationism has ceased to have a reason to exist. By necessity we have to co-operate with each other across nations…We are all internationalists now, whether we like it or not…We cannot turn our backs on conflicts and the violation of human rights within other countries if we want still to be secure.

Blair believed, in his typical morally certain way, that there were only two options in foreign policy: “isolationism” and “internationalism”. He also felt that the security of the British people was bound up with the suffering of others in lands about which we knew little. Simple strategic questions like who, what, where, and why were not so important.

British foreign policy lost its Blairite drive after Gordon Brown came to power, but it continued to be undermined by the internationalisation of the national interest. The great Hew Strachan has said of the 2008 National Security Strategy: “[It] essentially confronts us with a range of problems such as climate change, migration, the ills of the world in general and the threats that might face the world in future, as though those are specifically the issues of the United Kingdom in relation to its national interests.”

The national interest, a phrase which the Tory Party has always tried to monopolise, has been a key theme of David Cameron’s – especially since the creation of the coalition government in May 2010. He told Party members in October of that year:

It is a simple truth: at its best this party always puts country first. We’ll leave the vested interests to others. And no, we’re not about self-interest either. This is the party of the national interest and with this coalition that’s exactly what we’re showing today.

With regard to foreign policy, our new Prime Minister promised to reverse the drift of the Labour years by ‘re-nationalising’ the national interest. “Our foreign policy is more hard-headed”, Mr. Cameron asserted in his first Mansion House speech, as “it will focus like a laser on defending and advancing Britain’s national interest.”

Over the last year, there has been a welcome trend against the internationalisation of the national interest. Germany’s, and, to a lesser extent, America’s, position on Libya is an example of a country recognising that not all the world’s problems are its own and it does not have a direct responsibility in sorting them out. There are others with a bigger stake in the problem and who also have the will and resources to sort it out by themselves.

Last night, lying awake in bed, I asked myself whether David Cameron’s veto last Friday can be considered another example of this trend. It is possible. He told the BBC that day: “You’re in a room with twenty-six other people who’re saying, ‘Put aside your national interests. Go along with the crowd. Do what will make life easy and comfortable for you there in that room.’ But you say, no. It’s important that we get the things that Britain needs, and so I decided not to sign that treaty.”

Has he successfully re-nationalised the national interest as a result of his decision?

No.

The Prime Minister has begun to reverse the ‘Europeanization’ of the national interest, which is not necessarily the same thing as its internationalisation. Mr. Cameron had to reverse it because it is what his Party and the country wanted: both the former and the latter are uniformly Eurosceptic. When it comes to the wider world he has more of a freehand because neither the Conservative Party nor the country cares enough about foreign affairs to press him on his talk of re-nationalising the national interest.

In his first Mansion House speech, David Cameron talked the language of both re-nationalisation and internationalisation. He touched on the importance of prioritisation in foreign policy, which Labour had ignored. “In recent years, we’ve made too many commitments without the resources to back them up. And we failed to think properly, across Government, about what we were getting ourselves into and how we would see it through to success.” But he also repeated the views of Tony Blair without adding where our interests specifically are in the world, which of them need to be prioritised, and what our limits are in pursuing them. “Britain’s interests depend on the interests of others and…we need to maintain a global foreign policy, because our national interests are affected more than ever by events well beyond our shores.”

This same contradiction – simultaneously re-nationalisation and internationalisation – is repeated in the 2010 National Security Strategy, the response of the British government to the Arab Spring, and our involvement in Libya. David Cameron’s foreign policy is more Blairite than he acknowledges.

If the veto was part of the trend against the internationalisation of the national interest, then there is a lot further to go as far as the United Kingdom is concerned.

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Posted in: Arab Spring, BBC, Coalition, Conservative Party, David Cameron, Europe, Euroscepticism, Germany, Gordon Brown, Great Britain, Hew Strachan, Labour Party, liberal interventionism, Libya, NSS, Tony Blair, United States