T6 International Flashcards
1
Q
Blair’s Europe Policy
A
- In 2008, on its official website, the Labour Party listed the government’s ‘top 50 achievements since being elected in 1997’.
- Surprisingly, Europe did not feature on that list.
- Yet it had been one of Tony Blair’s preoccupations. One of the first comments he made after becoming Labour Party leader in 1994 referred to Europe.
- He declared: ‘Under my leadership I will never allow this country to be isolated or left behind.’
- He showed no of the uncertainties that he himself and the Labour Party had had previously about Europe.
- On becoming Prime Minister three years later, he kept his promise by immediately instructing British officials to withdrawal the objections that the John Major government had raised with Europe on a number of unresolved issues.
- Amsterdam 1997: Britain abandoned its opt-out on European Employment and Social Policy.
- St Malo 1998: Britain withdrew its objections to a common European defence policy which would operate independently from NATO. The French under President Chirac were delighted since it had long been a French aim to have a European force separate from the USA.
2
Q
Blair’s Third Way towards Europe
A
- To appease those in Britain, including many in the Labour ranks, who might have thought he had gone too far, too soon, Blair in 2000 tried to perform a balancing act.
- In a speech in Warsaw, he said that attitudes towards Europe could be divided into two main types.
- On the one side were those still totally committed to the nation state and the free market, who wanted the EU to have the minimum amount of power (or at the extreme even to leave the EU).
- On the opposing side there were those committed to a federal United States of Europe or ‘superstaters’ who wanted the EU to be more powerful than any individual member nation state and for the EU to have a maximum amount of power over its member states.
- Blair argued for a ‘Third Way’.
- The ‘Third Way’ was a New Labour term meaning avoiding the extremes of right-wing Conservative and hard left-wing old Labour policies and instead choosing a moderate middle course.
- Blair spoke of an EU made up of friendly states, retaining their individual sovereignty, but collaborating on matters of common political and economic interest.
- The ‘Third Way’ notion was mainly intended for British home consumption; directed to and for the benefit British domestic public opinion.
- It certainly made little impression on EU ministers for whom there was no ‘third way’ within the EU.
- As an organisation the majority of its member states were passionately committed to greater integration. This was no longer really a matter of discussion.
- John Major’s talk of Britain ‘being at the heart of Europe’, which Blair repeated was unrealistic.
- Blair was made aware of this when he tried to push for a reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP). In exchange for reform of the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) he offered to accept EU majority voting and to drop the veto principle.
- Anticipating that he would do this, the French and German governments had previously got together to block any attempt to reform the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) whose purpose from the beginning had been to protect French agriculture and was not up for negotiation.
3
Q
The Euro (2002 - 2003)
A
- The advantages and disadvantages of Britain’s membership of the EU again became a matter for public debate in 2002 over the issue of whether the UK should give up the Pound Sterling (£) and instead join the Euro.
- On New Year’s Day, 2002, the Euro became the common currency of all but three of the EU member states (Denmark, Sweden and the UK).
- Whether and when Britain should join the European single currency (the Euro) were questions that divided Tony Blair from Gordon Brown who had control of social and economic policy under the Blair-Brown Pact.
- Blair was less concerned with the financial aspects of joining the Euro and more interested in the political advantaged of Britain eventually joining.
- He calculated that if Britain joined the Euro Zone it would help put Britain firmly in the heart of Europe and internationally raise his personal reputation as a European statesman.
- Blair even suggested a national referendum on the issue.
- Blair knew that public opinion polls showed the British people were currently to be against the Euro, but he believed that, as in the 1975 Referendum, the people could be educated on its merits into voting ‘Yes’ again.
- Claire Short, a Labour Cabinet Minister at the time, later even suggested that Blair at this point was even willing to step down as Prime Minister in favour of Gordon Brown, if Brown promised to commit Britain to joining the Euro.
- Gordon Brown’s contrary view about joining the Euro single currency was more sceptical and practical.
- He defined the question of joining the Euro Zone in the form of an economic question: Would joining the Euro, ‘serve the long-term national economic interest?’
- Brown publicly laid down five economic tests that the Euro would have to pass before it could be adopted by the UK.
- Brown’s five tests included judgements about its effects on jobs, inflation and trade.
- In June 2003 Brown declared that the Euro came nowhere near meeting his five economic tests and so there was no need for any referendum on the issue of the UK joining the Euro Zone.
- Brown had political and economic logic on his side: the economy was performing well under his leadership and so there was not point in putting it at possible risk by Britain adopting the Euro.
4
Q
The British Rebate Issue (2004 - 2005)
A
- In 1984 Thatcher had secured an annual rebate for Britain from Europe. But there were strong complaints among member states, including most prominently, France, which argued that the British rebates contradicted the various European treaties.
- In 2004 this issue forced itself to the foreground when the EU enlarged to include the former Communist states of Eastern Europe.
- Blair told Europe that Britain was prepared to pay its ‘fair share of the cost of enlargement’, but he added that it could not give up its rebate (negotiated by Thatcher) and that he would use Britain’s veto to block any EU attempt to force the UK to do so.
- When Europe closed ranks against Britain in 2005 and demanded it increase its budget contributions, Blair gave in and complied.
5
Q
The European Constitution (2004 - 2007)
A
- Running parallel with the debate over the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP) was the equally important and divisive issue of the adoption of the European constitution.
- In October 2004, the 27 EU members met in Rome to sign the ‘Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe’ (TCE).
- The Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe brought together all the existing EU treaties previously signed into one formal binding document.
- The treaty was scheduled to come into force in November 2006, provided it was ratified [voted for] by each of the member states.
- Blair’s government promised that, before the treaty was ratified by the UK, the question of whether the new constitution should be accepted would be put to the British electorate in a referendum.
- When, however, in 2005 in separate referendums in France and Denmark, their population rejected the new treaty, the British government declared that its ratification was now a dead issue, which made a British referendum, on the issue, no longer necessary.
- Eurosceptics asked argued that the British government was delighted with the turn of events as it knew the treaty would have been rejected in a British referendum according to opinion polls.
- The EU, undeterred by the failure to achieve ratification of the new constitution, then adjusted its approach and in June 2007 produced a replacement for the ‘Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe’.
- Technically, the new document was termed by a ‘reform treaty’, a linguistic subtlety, which meant that, although the new treaty was in every major respect precisely the same as the original ‘Treaty establishing a Constitution for Europe’, it was not formally a constitution.
- As a consequence, when the reform treaty was subsequently accepted and signed by the EU members in Lisbon in December 2007, the British government (now led by Gordon Brown as Prime Minister) declared there was no need for a referendum on it.
- Claiming that its promise to hold a referendum applied only to a new constitution and not a reform treaty that only required parliamentary approval.
- This was duly granted in March 2008, when the government used its majority, to push through ratification of the Lisbon reform treaty.
6
Q
The Blair Doctrine
A
- EU ministers and officials had warmed to him in personal meetings and the Clinton administration, 1992 – 2000, in the USA was impressed.
- The Democratic Party and New Labour were both governed by the very same Third Way ideology.
- Moreover, President Bill Clinton had a personal reason to be grateful to Tony Blair for offering moral support in 1999 when impeachment proceedings were initiated against President Clinton over alleged sexual misdemeanours with Monica Lewinsky.
- But at the close of the century the new government faced two particularly difficult problems in foreign affairs: the continuing fallout in the Balkans from the breakup of the former Yugoslavia and Iraq where Saddam Hussein was still firmly in control since the 1991 Gulf War.
7
Q
Ethical Foreign Policy
A
- Soon after becoming Foreign Secretary in Tony Blair’s government, Robin Cook had declared that New Labour would pursue an ‘ethical foreign policy’.
- There was, however, a continuity between Thatcherism and New Labour in foreign affairs, as well as, in domestic policy, which was a point emphasised by historian John Keegan:
- ‘It is [Thatcher’s] financial and industrial regime that prevails, and her mode of government also - centralist at home, Atlanticist [po-American] in strategic affairs, cautiously co-operative in its relations with the European Community.’ The British Century by John Keegan (1999)
8
Q
The Blair Doctrine: Liberal Interventionism
A
- Tony Blair, as a devout Christian, had an abiding sense of what was right and an unshakable confidence in his own judgement- even when, as was sometime the case in regard to war, it conflicted with that of Church leaders.
- For Blair, his deep personal religious faith, though usually publicly downplayed and kept hidden on the advice of his spin doctor Alistair Campbell, was all important.
- The attacks of 9/11 intensified Blair’s sense of mission, but did not create it.
- In a speech given in Chicago in 1999 the British Prime Minister had expressed what became known as The Blair Doctrine.
- His position was that of a determined anti-appeaser; he believed that the best way to defeat tyranny in the world was not simply by using diplomacy to persuade repressive regimes to behave better.
- Of course, diplomacy should be tried first, but, if this did not work, it was legitimate to use force to oblige aggressor states to internationally agreed standards of conduct.
- Blair further believed that international action of the type he proposed should be carried out by those powers which were best fitted by experience and military capability for the task.
- In the nature of things, this necessarily meant the USA and the UK.
- The two major allies, therefore had a special role and responsibility to fulfil in international affairs.
- Whenever possible they should act with the sanction of the United Nations (UN), since the UN was the ultimate international authority.
- But the hard reality was that there were times when the UN was simply too slow or too hamstrung by procedure to act effectively.
- Blair also held that NATO was entitled to act as an international peacekeeper.
- That had been the rationale [justification] for Britain’s involvement, as part of NATO, in the attacks against Serbia in 1999.
9
Q
The bombing of Iraq (1998)
A
- In 1998, as part of a programme to make the Iraqi leader, Saddam Hussein, comply with UN disarmament resolutions requiring him to open up his country to UN weapons inspectors, Blair’s government again joined the USA in bombing Iraq.
- The 1998 bombing of Iraq (code-named Operation Desert Fox) was a major four-day bombing campaign on Iraqi targets from 16 to 19 December 1998, by the United States and the United Kingdom.
- The bombing failed to achieve its objectives.
- So, the US and UK government insisted that Iraq remain under UN sanctions that had first been imposed during the 1991 Gulf War.
- International neutral observers and humanitarian organisations reported the effect of sanctions was not to hurt Saddam Hussein’s government, but to deprive and hurt ordinary Iraqis by denying them access to vital food and medical supplies.
- In 1999 UNICEF’s issued a report finding that 500,000 Iraqi children were killed as a direct result of UN-imposed sanctions on Iraq that had been championed by the US and UK governments.
- It was also charged that the frequent bombing raids that the allies conducted, allegedly to enforce the No-Fly-Zones over Iraq, were killing innocent civilians.
- Iraq was to become the single biggest problem for Tony Blair in all his ten years in office.
10
Q
NATO Bombing of Serbia (1999)
A
- Blair took an important initiative in the complex struggle that had broken out again in the former Yugoslavia.
- In 1999, Blair persuaded both NATO and President Clinton’s USA to intervene militarily by relaunching air strikes against the Serbian forces under Slobodan Milosevic.
- Blair’s justification was that the Serbs had been engaging in the genocide of the Albanian Muslim people of Kosovo.
- There were critics, however, who argued that that the NATO action had led the Serbs to intensify their mistreatment of the Kosovans.
- There were also voices raised against the manner in which NATO bombing raids, carried out principally USAAF and RAF, had been conducted. To minimise the chance of casualties amongst themselves, the bomber crews had flown above 15,000 feet.
- This meant that, even with the sophisticated guidance systems available, bombs might well strike wrongly identified non-military targets. The Serbs produced credible evidence to show that this, indeed, had happened.
- Initially, Blair had also wanted to send in ground troops as he knew bombing alone was failing to bring the genocide in Kosovo to a stop.
- In a speech in Chicago in 1999, where he announced his Blair Doctrine, he spoke of this as a necessary and just humanitarian liberal intervention.
- At one point, Blair even considered sending in nearly half of the entire British army to invade Serbia and liberate Kosovo, alone and independent of other NATO allies if need be.
- Nevertheless, the combined air strikes did eventually achieve their objective.
- Milosevic withdrew his forces from Kosovo, which a few years later, would become a new European independent republic.
- Later events were to show that this success in Kosovo had convinced Blair that it could be used as a precedent for legitimate intervention elsewhere.
11
Q
Sierra Leone Intervention (2000)
A
- In 2000 when rebel forces in the Sierra Leone Civil War (1991 - 2002) threatened to take over the capital city, Freetown, Tony Blair ordered the British armed forces to intervene.
- Sierra Leon had formerly been a colony of the British Empire before gaining independence in 1961.
- Initially, the British military intervention was to evacuate foreigners, but once British armed forces were there, they were directed by Blair to support the UN peacekeepers in securing the capital and helped bring about an end of the Sierra Leone Civil War a year later.
- This was very much in step with The Blair Doctrine of just humanitarian liberal intervention.
12
Q
Blair & The Special Relationship
A
- New Labour was keen on maintaining the ‘special relationship’ with the United States and emphasising the importance of the Atlantic Alliance as a force for good in the ‘New World Order’ following on from the end of the Cold War.
13
Q
Blair views on the importance of the ‘Special Relationship’
A
- Blair was utterly convinced that it was essential to keep the United States involved in European Affairs and to make full use of NATO to defend the ‘New World Order’ that had existed at the end of the Cold War.
- He believed that it was vitally important to maintain Britain’s ‘special relationship’ with the United States and that Britain had a key role to play in bringing the United States and the European Union closer together when it came to foreign policy.
14
Q
Blair and Bill Clinton
A
- When Blair was elected leader in 1997, Bill Clinton was the leader of the United States.
- There were several similarities between the two governments ideologically, with both being influenced by the ideas of the Third Way.
- New Labour figures had forged even closer links with US Democrats after the 1992 General Election to learn how a left-of-centre political party could be electorally successful.
15
Q
Blair and George W. Bush
A
- The US Democrats lost the presidential election of 2000; the new Republican President was George W. Bush.
- Although it might have appeared to be likely that Blair would have less in common with a Republican President George W. Bush, than the Democrat President Bill Clinton, the two men developed a close personal relationship.
- This would be especially true with regards to meeting the threats caused by 9/11 and the ‘war on terror’.
- This led, however, to the accusation that British foreign policy became too dominated by US priorities during Blair’s premiership.
16
Q
Criticism of Blair’s ‘Special Relationship’
A
- It became common for critics to describe Blair’s staunch support for America in the ‘war on terror’ and especially in the war against Iraq led to claims that Blair was nothing more than a mere “poodle” of George W. Bush.
- He was like a subservient servant ‘on a leash’ to the beck and call of his master in Washington.
- Blair seemed willing to pay any price for continued American friendship, even to the cost of his personal standing in Britain and Europe.
- Blair believed that, by staying close to Bush, especially after 9/11, that he could influence him, and if necessary, restrain him from policy excesses.
- Blair believed that disagreements between the two men should only ever be voiced privately and publicly Britain should always show full support for the US position.
- Many observers, however, doubted whether Blair would, in the last resort, really stand up to a US president. Robin Cook noted, Blair ‘is programmed to respect power and not to rebel against it’.
- The Blair-Bush partnership was, after all, not a partnership of two equals.
- Bush was certainly grateful for Blair’s support but was always inclined to do what he and his senior advisors wanted regardless of Britain’s stance.
17
Q
9/11
A
- On 11th September 2001, the USA was subjected to the deadliest act of terror it had ever experienced in its own homeland. Islamic terrorists hijacked four commercial aircraft.
- Two of the planes were flown into the twin towers of the World Trade Centre in New York, causing both to collapse.
- The third plane was piloted into the Pentagon building in Washington DC, while the fourth plane crashed near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as the passengers fought with the hijackers.
- The death toll was nearly 3,000, the victims being from nearly every race on Earth. The reaction of the United States was to begin what became known as the ‘war on terror’.
- Tony Blair immediately committed himself to that war.
- Blair announced that Britain, ‘stood shoulder to shoulder with our American friends’ in the struggle ‘between the free and democratic world and terrorism’.
- The attacks of 9/11 and their aftermath turned him into President George W. Bush’s closet and most dependable ally, a relationship that was to shape the remainder of Blair’s partnership.
- A month after 9/11, Blair sent British troops to support US forces in their attack upon al-Qaeda bases in Afghanistan.
18
Q
Iraq and Weapons of Mass Destruction (2002)
A
- It was in keeping with The Blair Doctrine after 9/11 that, in September 2002, addressing a specially convened House of Commons, the Prime Minister, the Prime Minister set out to explain why it was essential President Saddam Hussain, still leader of Iraq 11 years after being defeated in the Gulf War, be brought down.
- Blair quoted from a Dossier (later called in the press as the ‘dodgy dossier’ because it proved to be wrongly based on false information) passed to him by Britain’s Joint Intelligence Committee (JIC) which claimed to have evidence that ‘Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction [WMD] programme is active, detailed and growing’.
- It was this that would provide the justification for invading Iraq.
- However, at this stage Blair denied than an invasion was inevitable; he said the aim of the USA and Britain was to work through the UN to bring about regime change in Iraq.
- Anxious not to lose support at home, particularly among his own party, Blair was initially insistent that Bush should take no action until the UN had formally resolved to back the Western allies.
- There had already been a first UN Resolution (No. 1441, passed in November 2002) requiring Saddam Hussain to prove to UN weapons inspectors that he had abandoned all his weapons of mass destruction [WMD] as he was required to do by the peace settlement that followed the First Gulf War in 1991.
- UN Resolution 1441, however, did not authorise the armed invasion of Iraq; to achieve this there would have to be a second and new UN resolution.
- The possibility of gaining a second and new UN resolution to authorise an invasion of Iraq rapidly disappeared when Russia and China made it clear that they would block any attempt to push this through the UN Security Council by using their powers of Veto.
- President Bush, feeling that opposition from those two countries arose from mischievous power politics rather than being a principled objection, decided to go ahead with the invasion plan.
- At a third key meeting between President Bush and Prime Minister Blair, Bush, aware of the difficulty Blair would have in convincing his cabinet and the Labour Party, offered the Prime Minister the chance to withdraw.
- But Blair, describing the fight against tyranny as ‘the most fundamental issue of our time’, declined to back out of the invasion of Iraq.
- Blair tried to gain support from Europe but failed; most significantly, France and Germany found the grounds for military intervention unconvincing.
- If Britain and the USA went ahead, they would be acting alone without the support of the UN or international community.
19
Q
The Iraq War (2003)
A
- On 20th March 2003 American and British forces began the illegal invasion of Iraq without formal new UN sanction, international community support and, in Britain’s case, in the face of fierce opposition at home.
- Mass peace demonstrations were held in London, other UK cities and across the world.
- Robin Cook, the Former Foreign Secretary, who had advocated an ethical foreign policy, resigned from Tony Blair’s government in protest at the illegal invasion.
- Robin Cook declared in his House of Commons resignation speech that the war had ‘neither international agreement nor domestic support.’
- The military operation in Iraq proved highly and rapidly successful.
- By the middle of April 2003 Saddam Hussain’s forced were broken and the allies declared that the ‘major combat’ was over and that they could declare ‘mission accomplished’.
- It was then that the problems really started.
- In the rush to war, insufficient time had been devoted to planning what would follow the victory.
- The toppling of Saddam Hussain may have removed a vicious oppressor of his people but it did not lead to peace.
- Indeed, civil war followed, with rival Muslim and regional factions fighting each other.
- The final capture of the fugitive Saddam Hussain in December 2003 brought rejoicing amongst Iraqis who had been his victims of his brutal government, but it did not end the internal civil war and rebellion against foreign occupation.
- The victorious allied forced that had been intended to liberate Iraq were now obliged to become its occupiers.
20
Q
There were no Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD)
A
- The problems that the Iraq War created for Blair were intensified by the failure to discover any evidence of any weapons of mass destruction [WMD] in Iraq.
- The suicide in July 2003 of Dr David Kelly, a WMD expert working for the Ministry of Defence, depended the gloom and stimulated the furore relating to the illegal Iraq War.
- To months before his death, Dr David Kelly had confided to a BBC journalist his concerns that the government had exaggerated the findings in the JIC ‘Dodgy Dossier’ on which Blair had based his reasons for going to war.
- The journalist, Andrew Gilligan, then went public on radio and in the press, accusing the government of having ‘sexed up’ [exaggerated] the dossier largely at the prompting of Alistair Campbell, the Prime Minister’s Chief Spin Doctor.
- It was after being revealed as Gilligan’s source that Dr David Kelly had taken his own life.
- The government immediately set up an inquiry, which under the chairmanship of Lord Hutton, examined the circumstances of Dr David Kelly’s death. Among the 70 witnesses were the Prime Minister Tony Blair himself and Alistair Campbell his Chief Spin Doctor.
- When the inquiry published its findings in January 2004, it cleared the government of any direct involvement in Dr David Kelly’s tragic death.
- But what the Hutton Report did not, and could not, do was lift the thickening cloud of doubt about the legality and morality of the Blair government decision to illegally invade Iraq.
21
Q
7/7 - The 2005 London Bombings
A
- On 7th July 2005 the reality of the war on terror was brought home to Britain in a particularly fearful way, when four coordinated bomb explosions in London killed 56 people and injured 700.
- The dead included the suicide bombers, all of them young British Islamists.
- Two weeks later, a similar bomb plot was foiled at the last minute when police arrested the terrorists who again were Islamists.
- All Muslim leaders were quick to condemn the terrorists and to distance their faith from the criminals.
22
Q
Critics of the Bush and Blair alliance
A
- The removal of Saddam Hussain was not enough to justify the Iraq War. Britain and the USA had illegally invaded Iraq for wholly inadequate reasons. Rather than being a war on terror, the Britain and American actions in Iraq had spread worldwide terrorism. The West had lost the moral high ground.
- By declaring a war on terror and selecting particular targets to attack, as with Afghanistan and Iraq, the two leaders had in fact created or encouraged the very forces of the terrorism that they were trying to defeat.
- The Anglo-American hostility to the Islamic world which the war revealed let to retaliation by Muslim extremists who had become jihadist terrorists in order to defend their faith against the West.
23
Q
Sympathisers to the Bush-Blair alliance
A
- Jihadist terrorism, as in the case of 9/11, pre-dated the Iraq War.
- The Anglo-American military campaigns fought since the 1990s had been undertaken largely to protect Muslim people and interests like in Kuwait (1991), Bosnia (1995) and Kosovo (1999).
- By far the greater number of Muslim deaths were caused by other Muslims.
- Even though the Iraq had not developed WMD, its leader, Saddam Hussain, had had the money and will to produce such weapons. Had he not been brought down by the Anglo-American invasion in 2003, the world might at some point might well have to deal with a nuclear-armed Iraq.
