the end of Foreign Policy?
It's become fashionable since Labour came to power in 1997, to contemplate The End of Foreign Policy, in much the same way that a few years ago, an eminent American academic concluded that History had ended with the resolution of the Cold War.
According to the new theory, traditional divisions between Domestic and Foreign Policy, are no longer valid. They've been rendered obsolete by globalisation - the growth of economic, cultural and technological connections across state borders.
The global challenges which Peter Hain had in mind in that speech were a very mixed bag. They included BSE, the soaring numbers of British people contracting AIDS abroad, and the intractable nature of international drugs trade.
Climate change, for instance, can only be tackled by concerted action in the developed world. And - as the events of September 11 2001 demonstrate - terrorism, too has become an international phenomenon: violence can be exported around the world as easily as drugs or diamonds.
"As with so many problems on the new global agenda," Mr Hain said, "the villain turns out in the end not to be a corrupt government, careless corporation, faceless bureaucrat, or greedy gangster - but the millions of daily choices made by individuals."
Whether or not Foreign Policy is any more dead than history, the challenges of globalisation are very real.
It's been estimated that by the mid 1990s, nearly 40,000 multi-national companies accounted for one fifth of the total global economy.
There is a sense that giant corporations such as Microsoft or Shell are beyond the control of any individual state.
Here, you can forget the so-called special relationship between Britain and America: the two disagree fundamentally on how to tackle global warming.
Britain has been at the forefront of climate change negotiations held under the auspices of the UN, while the United States, the world's biggest producer of greenhouse gases, has refused to implement the reductions required by the Kyoto protocol.
As if to underline the point, Britain's place at the climate change negotiations has been filled not by its Foreign Office team, but by its environment ministers. At one memorable meeting in November 2000, a last minute deal hammered out by the environment secretary and Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott fell apart - he said, because the French environment minister was too tired to sign.
In Kyoto, December 1997 the UN brokered the world's first treaty to tackle global warming. Signatories pledged to cut their greenhouse gas emissions in the next decade by just over five per cent from 1990 levels.
But the USA has dragged its feet on implementing the Kyoto protocol and in March 2001, the new president, George W Bush abandoned the Kyoto treaty altogether, saying it is against his country's economic interests.
The traditional autonomy of Foreign Policy has also been challenged by the rise of what are known as non-governmental organisations - often referred to in shorthand as NGOs.
Where once, there were a few hundred, now there are thousands working across the world. Good examples are aid organisations, such as Oxfam or Save the Children, or the human rights organisation Amnesty International.
While individual governments cannot control what these organisations do, their opinions can carry considerable weight.
When Amnesty questions a country's human rights policy, its voice is heard around the world. That's not always convenient for foreign policy. Take, for instance, the recent military campaign in Afghanistan. Amnesty was the first to raise questions about events in Mazar I Sharif, where hundreds of foreign Taleban prisoners were killed by the West's allies in the Northern Aliance.
In reality, if only for purely administrative reasons, there will probably always be a division between governments' domestic and foreign agendas.
But the trend of the past few years has been to play down that distinction - the Us and Them, if you like. It began within weeks of Labour taking office, with Robin Cook's ethical foreign policy - a pledge to apply the same standards abroad as at home.
The challenge is whether rhetoric can or should live up to reality in foreign affairs. The acid test is whose national interest will prevail, when nations' interests differ.
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