Global Policy Forum

By Hywel Williams

And so he stands before us, finally revealed. All ambiguities are dissolved in the halo of liberal self-assurance. Smell the air and allow the lungs to inhale that odour of sanctity. And then pause to whiff the acrid smell of the moral gunboat. Liberals are often the best imperialists of all.

Tony Blair's conference speech is easily the most hubristic delivered by any British prime minister elected in the 20th century. There are no equivocations in this vision of humanity transfigured. It is as rooted in fundamentalism as the Taliban. We have been warned: "Let there be no moral ambiguity."

Political leaders' conference speeches are exercises in well-rehearsed histrionics and platitudes. But this time there was a dislocating sincerity - the un-mistakable cadences of the Panglossian with a plan and a gun. Now that Blairism has gone global, nothing less than the language of the moral absolute will do. We don't have to seek the essence of our prime minister any more - for his existence is everywhere. He's the categorical imperative in the flesh - flying everywhere on mission possible.

He is often borne aloft by that happily eliding first person plural. "We were there in Sierra Leone," and: "I tell you, if Rwanda happened again, we would have a moral duty to act there also." He is all-involving and all-consuming. He holds out hope for Congo by creating "a partnership for Africa". And he promises the Afghans that he won't be going away. After all: "The values we believe in should shine through what we do in Afghanistan." Having presumably bombed the country and remodelled the government ("broad-based" and including "all ethnic groups"), this singular global presence will then be on hand to offer "some way out of the miserable poverty that is your present existence".

All antinomies can be reconciled when suffering humanity is wheeled into the Blair operating theatre of the morally absurd. Like Marxists of old he can dismiss the contradictions and wish them away by a beneficent will and an invocation of faith.

And so the world community "must show as much its capacity for compassion as for force". That, apparently, is what the politics of globalism is all about. The usual categories of thought are suspended for the high-sounding duration, since "the power of community is asserting itself". It is presumably meant as a source of comfort that "I have long believed this interdependence defines the new world we live in."

This is the language of convenience trumpeted as the language of morality. The prose as well as the pose is one of relentless uplift. Here is a national leader who is so unused to criticism within his party, so accustomed to the conventional cringe awarded him at international gatherings, so incapable of self-criticism that he is a stranger to scepticism. And the identification between himself and the moral cause he espouses is so complete that it appears both as a beatification and an incarnation.

Out there lies the world in all its necessary ambiguity. Its leaders act out of mixed motives, pride and compassion, self-interest as well as imagined national interest. Let such complexity be avoided. The third-way junk food consumed and uncertainly digested in Britain must now be recycled to lesser breeds. And hazy "community" is the hard magic bullet which will do the job.

Spinning the globe, it seems there's a limitless opportunity for global good. From his high moral altitude Mr Blair looks down and sees the wretched of the earth: "From the deserts of Northern Africa to the slums of Gaza - they too are our cause." For so Christian an attitudiniser, Tony Blair has a strikingly weak sense of sin as a force in human affairs. This is the speech of an insane optimism of the will allied to an unnerving simplicity of the intellect: "Let us reorder the world around us." But reordering here means imposing.

A former colleague wrote that the prime minister "can persuade most people of most things, and above all he can persuade himself of almost anything". The object of WE Forster's accurate jibe was William Gladstone - surely the most effective and self- serving moralist to occupy 10 Downing Street before the present tenant. Gladstone, no less than his pupil Blair, illustrates the congenital derangement of the liberal mind when it turns to foreign policy.

It's a nice and convenient myth that liberals are the peace-makers and conservatives the war-mongerers. But the imperialism of the liberal may be more dangerous because of its open-ended nature - its conviction that it represents a superior form of life.

For a time, Gladstone sounded strong liberal notes and campaigned for the right of nations to self-determination. But he was surrounded in his cabinet by liberals of a different kind - imperial-ists and the interventionists, such as Joseph Chamberlain. And his ministers also included Charles Dilke, with his belief in "the grandeur of our race, already girdling the earth, which it is destined perhaps eventually to over-spread". When it came to Egypt - and the nationalist rebellion which broke out there in 1881 - Gladstone gave in to these siren voices. The prime minister who once believed in "Egypt for the Egyptians" started to describe riots in Alexan dria as "an international atrocity". And so an army was sent in to achieve one of the most devastating British military victories of the 19th century. Egypt became effectively a protectorate. Lord Randolph Churchill for the Tory opposition called it a bond-holders war, for the true Gladstonian interest now was British shipping in the Suez canal.

The Blairite claim is that post- September 11 we live in a new age of danger - whose imperatives require the application of a new moral world order. The means of destruction have changed. But the temperaments which lead to carnage have not. Thucydides is still the best writer on international aggression executed with a clinical hate. The Blair innocence ignores the continuities of hate in human history. Such innocence is a destabiliser. It prophesies war in the service of a peace which can never arrive because the vision it pursues is chimerical. It excoriates "the violence and the savagery of the fanatic". But it forgets that liberalism can itself be a form of self-righteous fanaticism, because, so proud of its own form of enlightened advance, it imagines that other parts of the world can be wrenched from their own forms of life.

The hypocrisy of this speech is to suppose that a superior morality is self-justifying. But force, either real or threatened, is a necessary feature of all relations between states. Behind the high morality of Brighton there stands the reality of intellectual colonialism, as well as of imminent military intervention. Sanctification by appeal to an inter-dependent world order is itself a form of moral barbarism. Never was mysticism so deluded.

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