Does national interest always come first in Foreign Affairs?
When Robin Cook announced a new ethical dimension to British foreign policy, there was widespread derision.
The Labour Government had been in power for precisely two weeks - after nearly 20 years on the opposition benches - and Cook's video wall presentation, a mission statement for the Foreign Office, was dismissed by sceptics as a gimmick.
"The Labour government will put human rights at the heart of our foreign policy."
Shortly afterwards, in a BBC documentary, the former Conservative Foreign Secretary, Lord Carrington, predicted the phrase would land Robin Cook in trouble: "We've always had an ethical foreign policy," he said, "but he will run into quite a lot of difficulty about exports and retaliation. It's much better to do these things without a great fanfare."
During Cook's four years as Foreign Secretary, the shorthand phrase, "ethical foreign policy" came back to haunt him - over Britain's decision to honour a contract supplying Hawk Jets to Indonesia, over military action in Kosovo, and over the Sandline affair in Sierra Leone, when mercenary soldiers who helped restore the elected government there claimed they'd had backing from the British government.
On each occasion, journalists asked: how does this square with an ethical foreign policy?
The aim was humanitarian - to get President Milosevic to stop the repression in Kosovo, so that the refugees could return. But the immediate effect was actually to increase the flow of refugees, threatening to destabilise neighbouring Balkan states.
When a cabinet reshuffle brought Jack Straw to the Foreign Office, in the summer of 2001, it was widely assumed that the phrase "ethical foreign policy" had been quietly buried.
"If Rwanda happened again today, as it did in 1993," he said "when a million people were slaughtered in cold blood, we would have a moral duty to act there also," he declared.
But is Foreign Policy really about morality?
One hundred and fifty years later, one of Palmerston's successors, the former Foreign Secretary Lord Owen, still believes the choices are often between shades of grey: sometimes unpalatable decisions have to be taken, in the national interest. In a BBC documentary, he described his own decision to refuse to let the Shah of Iran live in exile in Britain after the Iranian revolution as shabby, but essential to Britain's interests abroad.
"There's always been a moral dimension to foreign policy," says Victor Bulmer-Thomas, director of The Royal Institute of International Affairs. "Take, for instance, Gladstone and the Bulgarian Atrocities. And the Prime Minister has a strong moral streak, so it's not entirely cynical."
"We cannot wipe away the tear from every eye," the Conservative Foreign Affairs specialist David Howell once said.
But, in an age when the old certainties of the cold war have broken down - and with them, the over-riding fear that a small war could spark a super-power confrontation - there will be repeated requests for the international community to do just that.
The Conservative MP Andrew Tyrie wrote in the Guardian that he wished the Prime Minister had left the job of speechwriting to the Foreign Office, rather than doing it himself:
"International society," he wrote, "is a place where the doctrine of self help means that everyone is their own policeman, the legal and judicial system is very fragile and where the only additional support one can hope for will come from international neighbourhood watch schemes called coalitions" (Guardian November 6 2001).
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