Full speech below:
It is a great honour to be invited to give this lecture. It might seem counter-intuitive, even provocative, to invite a British government official to give a lecture named after one of the founding fathers of the European Union. At a minimum, it suggests some openness of mind, or perhaps just a good sense of humour, on the part of the UCC authorities. Whatever the reason, it’s a great pleasure to be here. And I should say at the outset that what follows is a personal reflection, not necessarily an expression of British government policy.
When I think of Britain’s relations with Europe, and in particular with the EU, I recall a quote, I think, from Jean Monnet’s memoirs, which goes a long way, I think to explaining that particular aspect of our history – Britain was different, Monnet said, from other Europeans: she alone after the last War “had not had to exorcise the ghosts of her history”.
In other words, Britain, unlike all the other protagonists in the war, had not experienced Nazism, Fascism, collaboration or occupation. And from that distinctive experience, at least in Monnet’s view, flowed a different perspective on the idea of European construction.
Today our TV screens are full of European destruction, which, sadly, has to be my focus today. Scenes of horror, which, for me, have awful echoes of the former Yugoslavia, in particular of Bosnia.
As a young diplomat I visited Sarajevo during the Bosnian Serb siege of that city. I stayed in the Holiday Inn, which was in itself a surreal experience. On one side of the corridor were normal bedrooms, with CNN blaring out, on the other side, the walls were gone, shelled to pieces by the Bosnian Serb soldiers in the hills around the city.
I remember crossing the road called Sniper Alley with our young interpreter. Despite the ceasefire he was unable to walk at normal speed across the road – after a year of shelling and sniping he could only run with his head covered – and his mind no doubt full of terrible memories- to the temporary safety of the other side. The West’s apparent impunity in the face of the horrors of the Bosnian war led to many things, including the creation of a European Union security and defence policy and the adoption by the UN of the so-called Responsibility to Protect, in both of which I had the privilege to play a small part. But I never imagined that the war in Bosnia in the early 90s would be followed three decades later by a war in Ukraine. Historians in decades to come will evaluate the significance of the horrors of 2022. If journalism is the first draft of history, I can only agree with Tom Friedman’s assessment in the New York Times just before Easter that this year might be the most significant – and, assuredly, not in a good way – in European history since 1989 or even 1939.
For me personally, 1989, that great year of European hope, served as the bridge between my academic career, such as it was, and my public service career. I was in my final year at Glasgow University studying Politics. In my third year, autumn 1988 to spring 1989, I had laboriously completed a module on the Comparative Study of Communist States, meticulously examining the respective strengths and structures of the single party systems across Eastern Europe. By the time I sat my Finals in Spring 1990 those systems had been swept away and that paper of my Politics Finals could have been from the History school. The events of 1989 gave the whole of Europe new hope, indeed the hope that Europe could be whole and free again after 40 years of Cold War division.
I entered the civil service in the autumn of 1990. I remember vividly my first overseas trip as a young Ministry of Defence official to attend a seminar in Madrid in November 1990. It was the week Mrs. Thatcher resigned. And it was also the week of the CSCE summit in Paris, which she had been attending, which marked formally the end of the Cold War – and, as we hoped, would usher in a new era of cooperation across Europe and in the wider world. And indeed in the months that followed Russia cooperated with the West and others to reverse the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait with a UN-sanctioned military liberation operation.
Yet hardly had we savoured the optimism, indeed euphoria, of that moment than we saw old hatreds and new horrors emerging on the continent of Europe with the chaotic collapse of the former Yugoslavia. I joined the Foreign Office, transferring from the Ministry of Defence, in the autumn of 1993. My final trip as a Ministry of Defence official had been to Moscow earlier that year. I recall noting to Russian counterparts that our visit came 25 years after the Prague Spring had been crushed by Soviet tanks. We then looked forward to a new era of cooperation between Russia and the rest of Europe.
Little did I think that 30 years later the great and beautiful European cities of Ukraine would be crushed by Russian weapons. Fukuyama’s end of history has assuredly been replaced by endless, grisly history. My first job in the Foreign Office, from late ‘93 to early ‘95 was dealing with the conflict in Bosnia. I later worked on the Kosovo crisis. It seems to me in retrospect that the Western policy experience in the former Yugoslavia in those years was, to adopt a footballing metaphor, a game of two halves.
In my own personal view, Britain and France accepted perhaps too easily the Serbian and Russian contention that what was happening in Bosnia in 92-94 was essentially a civil war which the Western powers would do well to stay out of. This led to our sub-contracting our intervention to a well-intentioned but hopelessly under-resourced and poorly mandated UN peacekeeping force.
In my first job in the Foreign Office, as desk officer for Bosnia, I acted also as private secretary to Lord Owen, who was the European Union’s envoy for the crisis in the former Yugoslavia, who worked alongside Cyrus Vance as the UN representative. Their attempts, on behalf of the UN and EU, to secure a peace plan for Bosnia, failed. And they were succeeded in late 1994 by a Contact Group bringing together, initially, Britain, France, Germany, the United States and Russia to seek to coordinate their diplomacy to end the crisis in Bosnia. This was the West treating Russia as a fully equal partner in a multinational effort to end a European crisis. I took part in the early meetings of the Contact Group and recall well the disagreement, essentially between the US and the Germans on one side, and Britain France and Russia on the other about how interventionist we should be in the Bosnian conflict.
That debate was largely swept away by the terrible events of the summer of 1995 not least the massacre of thousands of innocent Muslims at Srebrenica. That led, finally, to significant NATO intervention and to the display of American power and diplomacy at the Dayton peace conference in the autumn of that year. By then I was in the British Embassy in Paris where I continued to work on the former Yugoslavia. Many Balkans experts were predicting that the Serbian leader Milosevic, having failed in his attempts to dismember Bosnia, would next turn his attention towards Kosovo. And indeed you didn’t need to be a clairvoyant to see that coming as he had come to prominence years before championing the cause of the Kosovo Serbs. And sure enough in the summer and autumn of 1998 the threat of massive ethnic cleansing by Serbia against the ethnic Albanian majority province of Kosovo reared its head. This time, unlike over Bosnia, the West was not prepared to be passive. That was good. But sadly, the Russians were not prepared to cooperate with the West. Indeed they made clear they would veto Security Council resolutions authorising the use of force to prevent ethnic cleansing in Kosovo. I went as part of the British delegation to the Kosovo peace talks at the chateau de Rambouillet outside Paris in early 1999. These were billed as a final chance to avert conflict in Kosovo. Britain and France co-chaired those talks, ironically, as it may now appear, in the chateau where Harold McMillan had in 1962 tried to persuade de Gaulle that the UK should join the European Community.
Only a few months before those crisis talks at Rambouillet, Britain and France had agreed the St Malo declaration, proposing that the European Union should be able to develop the capacity to conduct military crisis management operations in circumstances where NATO as a whole was not operating. Much can be said about the European Union Security and Defence policy. It has been an object of controversy, I know, at times, in your country as well as mine. With debate in Ireland evolving on your own future defence and security choices I will choose my words even more carefully on this sensitive issue.
What I would say, on a personal level, as one of the policy architects over a period of more than 10 years, was that it was a consistent British government objective to ensure, first, that there would be no such thing as a European army, something we wrote into the European Council conclusions of December 2000; secondly, that decisions on deploying national military forces would be for EU nation states only and individually, not for the institutions, thirdly, that the collective defence of NATO countries would be for NATO alone and, fourthly, that the particular character of the security policy of EU member states, be they in NATO or outside, would be respected as ESDP developed, a point to which Ireland attaches great importance.
It’s fair to say that there was never complete convergence between Britain and France, the original architects of the European defence project, as to reconciling that balance between EU autonomy, a concept the French favoured, and NATO primacy, a reality on which we insisted. As often in these cases, it was easier to agree on how these things would work out in practice than it was to describe the theory involved. As one French official was reputed to have said, it might work in practice but does it work in principle? We tried to focus on how it would work on the ground, for all sorts of reasons.
Almost 25 years on from the original St Malo declaration European defence remains, shall we say, a work in progress. In my view, and indeed in the view of Christoph Heusgen, talking to the IIEA on Wednesday, the tragic events of recent months in Ukraine in particular have reminded us about the salience of collective defence and the crucial importance of the transatlantic link. In that context one sees the importance of NATO defence commitments to the Baltic states and, from my own time in Stockholm, I’m not surprised that Sweden and Finland, given their history and geography, are contemplating submitting applications for NATO membership.
But to return to Rambouillet, It was a remarkable, almost surreal, experience to spend three weeks in that chateau outside Paris. The goal of the negotiations was to avoid a new conflict in Europe and to prevent a return to ethnic cleansing and war crimes barely three years after the end of the Bosnia conflict. In retrospect – and indeed at the time – it was clear the Serbian side had no intention of making peace. As dispiriting as it was to watch them get drunk on French official Brandy it was inspiring and moving to watch the emergence of a Kosovo national identity as their delegation, including members of the Kosovo Liberation Army who had been only weeks before fighting in the hills of Kosovo, came together to form their negotiating team and in effect their provisional government.
When the negotiations failed and it was clear that Russia would block any action in the Security Council NATO agreed to authorise military action to prevent genocide and ethnic cleansing in Kosovo even though there was no explicit Security Council endorsement. I had a role in articulating the UK’s justification for this on the basis that we were clear that military action without Security Council authorisation can be justified if it is in pursuit of objectives laid down in existing Security Council resolutions and to prevent an imminent and overwhelming humanitarian catastrophe as was the case in Kosovo.
Fast forward six years and I had the role, on behalf of the European Union during what turned out to be Britain’s final EU Presidency, of negotiating the articulation at the global level of what the international community had done in Kosovo when the UN World Summit in 2005 adopted the Responsibility to Protect. We will come back to that shortly. Notwithstanding the fact of NATO action, including 78 days of air strikes against Serbia’s military machine, there had been some uncertainty as to whether there would be NATO consensus for prolonged air strikes and indeed for the possibility of a ground intervention by the West had the air activity failed to deter Serbia.
Thus the EU continued to pursue the development of the European Union Security and Defence policy. As the head of the FCO’s European Defence team in 2000-2001 and then as head of our Security Policy department from late 2002 to late 2004 I was involved in finalising the EU institutional arrangements, including agreements between the EU and NATO. That NATO endorsement was for us essential before we could launch operational ESDP. So it was not until that deal was sealed that in the spring of 2003 the EU conducted its first military operation, in the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, as it was then still called, followed by the EU then taking over the stabilisation role in Bosnia, replacing a NATO operation there.
However, bigger security issues were coming to the fore. The political and institutional debates between Britain and France and within and between the EU and NATO over the architecture and plumbing of the European security structures looked like small beer in the Spring of 2003 when the UK the US and a number of other countries launched the invasion of Iraq. This followed some of the most profound and divisive debates that the Security Council had ever seen and in the teeth of opposition from France, Germany and Russia in particular. This is not the place for an examination of the causes and consequences of the Iraq crisis. Others more closely connected with it than I was would be better placed to offer judgement. What struck me at the time was how quickly after the end of Iraq war the French in the form of President Chirac came to Prime Minister Blair and said that we as Europeans needed to work together to heal the wounds of Iraq.
As a result, it was agreed that the E3 – Britain France and Germany – should work together, not just on European security but also on the emerging threat of Iran becoming a nuclear power. Fast forward again a dozen years or so and we had the E3 plus the US, Russia and China reaching a landmark agreement with Iran on the nuclear non-proliferation issue in 2015. Returning to European security, it must have been soon after the Iraq
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