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Keep the Federalist Flag Flying - Keynote Address to the 2008 AWF AGM
by Keith Best

On 10 December 2006 I delivered my address to you at that year’s AGM about the lessons of the war in Iraq and the need for such actions to have international sanction as well as the reality of there being different forms of democracy and that the West should not always seek to impose its own hegemonic experience. We have yet to reap the full whirlwind of the conflict in Iraq and how the legacy of history teaches us that armed intervention can often leave its own vacuum and become a recipe for further strife. That, sadly, has been the lesson of Afghanistan for one hundred and fifty years.

The importance, therefore, of having the legitimacy of the international community behind such actions is that necessarily they must be regarded as long-term involvement and it is likely that it is only the international community that will have the staying power. Faced with its own recession and with a probable change in direction in international affairs and a move towards disengagement, whoever becomes the next President, the United States will be forced to look at the daily cost of such adventures and realise that domestic priorities may become more important for that expenditure. The UK, too, is facing a difficult economic future with its defence expenditure already stretched yet with the prospect of a further ten years or more in Afghanistan and the recognition that if a withdrawal from Iraq left that region totally destabilised with a neighbouring Iran flexing its muscles then there would likely have to be a further engagement.

These pressures and uncertainties have arisen precisely because the international community is not fully committed. The greatest failure of Anglo-American foreign policy has been not to share the burden more evenly across the international community. That must change. Increasingly, the world must rely on concepts such as the responsibility of states to protect their own citizens and capacity building measures to give those states the ability to do so. Internal solutions are always better than those imposed externally.

During much of the last more than twenty years that I have been actively involved in world federalism there has been the debate between whether we should seek global solutions to the exclusion of others as against promoting regional solutions as a stepping stone towards a global one. Those of us who have accepted the latter incremental and, what we believe, more realistic and opportunistic approach have never closed our eyes to the danger of regional solutions creating their own potential conflicts. The way in which the world is developing gives us little chance to choose: we have to see how we can exploit the regional development as a power for global good. As American hegemony diminishes (and the inevitable withdrawal from Iraq on a timetable that will not be of America’s preferred choice will have a similar effect as did Vietnam on the military standing of the US and as Afghanistan did on that of the then Soviet Union), there will be a foreign policy vacuum which will be a threat as well as an opportunity.

The threat is that the world’s only effective policeman will no longer have the means to go out on the beat. That could enable local states or agents within those states to attempt to seize power and destabilise their region. If those states have nuclear, chemical or biological weapons then that will pose a danger to the rest of the community. The opportunity is for actors who have not shown much solidarity in the past to assume more of the mantle of honest broker: it is to be hoped that the EU, now and potentially in the foreseeable future, straddling many cultures and religions within its borders and with a greater understanding of the world through its collective history of empire and global involvement, will see it as an important role. The other opportunity, of course, which we must promote enthusiastically, is for the UN and civil society to become more involved in different ways.

Alongside such measures the world must turn its attention more to developing the concept of a United Nations Emergency Peace Service which is being promoted by WFM. As the website states “Responding to humanitarian crises and violent conflicts requires more than the political will to intervene. It also requires capacity to deploy quickly and effectively. WFM supports the creation of a UN-based response force which would be capable of deploying in a matter of days. Such a service would act as a fire department with the goal of filling the gap between the weeks and sometimes months that it currently takes to deploy military and police personnel to an outbreaking crisis. If such a service were in place, it could have saved tens of thousands of lives and untold costs in crises such as East Timor, Rwanda, Haiti and the Sudan.

Yet those of us who believe in these issues must not leave it only to governments to take action. There has always been a need for civil society’s commitment. That has now become no longer a question of encouragement from the sidelines but mainstream involvement.

Two years ago Ian Hackett wrote ‘Transcending Terror’ which looks at the history of the world’s major religions, the influence of politics, and how conflicts between those faiths might be resolved. It is not just because of the current controversy created by the address of the Archbishop of Canterbury that I raise the issue of world religions today. His speech was courageous if it were not somewhat naïve of him to think that a considered message which requires reading of the whole text were not likely to be misquoted and misunderstood by the media and other commentators. The reality is that if the world’s major religions do not seek an accommodation then they will be destined to destroy each other. I believe that religions are no different from cultures in their capacity to adopt and adapt from each other certain tenets through an osmotic process of contact, tolerance and understanding. The fact that most major religions are monotheistic is an important start; that Islam recognises Christ as a prophet an encouragement that there is more that can unite those two religions than divide them if only that minority which seeks to cause dissention for its own, mostly secular, reasons can be tamed by the majority.

All of you in your own way keep the world federalist flag flying and I commend and thank you for that. As world federalists we do not have a monopoly of ideas or wisdom on these issues but we do have the ability to see them through the magnifying glass of a global vision and how they can contribute to a better world in a structured way. We must not lose sight of that global vision. It is our legacy to succeeding generations. They may not recognise the changes because mostly they will come slowly and incrementally but they will mean that a realisation of that old adage will have come to fruition that those who cannot live together will perish together. Ours is a philosophy of hope and for many in this troubled world, afflicted by conflict, hunger and deprivation that is all that they can cling to.

From the keynote speech of Keith Best, Chair of Council, to the AWF Annual General Meeting, 10 February 2008.

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