The following keynote address was delivered by The Rt Hon Lord Patten of Barnes at the Gareth Evans Lecture on the Responsibility to Protect on 15 April 2010.

Theodore von Laue was a German, a Quaker, a pacifist and a very fine historian who wrote principally about Europe but also about global affairs. Born in the middle of the First World War, the son of a Nobel prize winning physicist (a friend of Einstein), he was sent by his father to study in America in 1937, so that he would avoid being brought up (as his father said) in a country run by gangsters. He stayed in America for the rest of his life. Given his background, his experience and the times through which he lived it is not surprising that he believed passionately in international co-operation. He was a multilateralist, whose views were strongly reinforced by insights into the cultural and technological trends that would drive interdependence. In his last great book “The World Revolution of Westernisation,” he uses a homely metaphor to describe how much more conscious we should be about this. We can ascend to the top of a skyscraper and see our city laid out far below; we fly and see countries and continents below our aeroplane; from the moon and outer space we can see the whole globe. He concludes the metaphor with this thought: “Obviously, an all-inclusive global awareness transforming the patternless and blurred mosaic of the world’s many cultures into a meaningful image inspiring world-wide co-operation does not exist, though the survival of humanity depends on it.”

Von Laue wrote this book just two years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, the end of the Cold War, the “end of history” indeed. It is easy to see why he should talk in terms both so aspirational and so apocalyptic. And what would he think and write today? What would he make of what some international relations theorists – spare me from much of that impenetrable abstraction – call the post-modern world? Let me rather presumptuously date the post-modern world from the end of history. Those twenty-one years have seen the greatest surge in global prosperity brought to a grinding halt by recklessness and greed. They have seen the end of proxy wars for the Cold War’s ideological struggle but they have also brought genocide and the re-appearance of concentration camps in Europe. They have seen preventive diplomacy ending conflict and at least one war of choice that killed, to use the words of that passage in the Old Testament’s Book of Samuel, by the ten thousand. They have witnessed more people escaping from poverty than at any other period in history, and they have also brought greater inequity even in those countries where so many have got away from extreme indigence. They have brought as an epoch a pretty mixed bag of results. Beginning with hope from Berlin to Beijing, the great historian Tony Judt believes that especially in Europe and the US they were years that were consumed by the locusts, years during which our affairs were managed by political pigmies. But look on the bright side, terrorism brought a dilution of civil liberties but – despite Mr Cheney’s best efforts – not their wholesale dismantling; freedom was enhanced in some places even while it was elsewhere in retreat; and we did not blow ourselves to smithereens. So let’s look on the bright side for a rare moment.

What can we also celebrate? Well, perhaps partly because of the ability to see more of the world, its possibilities and its problems, to which Professor von Laue alluded, and partly as well because of the perceived consequences of the hapless unilateralism of the recent Republican administration in Washington, there is surely a better informed and more securely rooted sense of the multilateral imperative. While our primary collective loyalties as citizens are directed towards our national states, which remain by and large the principal building blocks in international society, more of us understand now that the borders of our national communities have been rendered more porous by economics, culture, technology and demography and that not even the mightiest states can cope on their own with the problems that shape, challenge and sometimes deform national agendas. Moreover, after so many years when it seemed that the notion of sovereignty as simply the untrammelled exercise of power within a defined space would repel the idea that sovereignty was in fact invested in people, there has been a marked come-back for the arguments of the Dutch Jurist Hugo Grotius in the 1620s that we are all joined together whatever frontiers separate us by a shared humanity. Sovereignty is not simply whatever the government of a nation state wishes to do however much of an affront it may be to our common values.

This is, of course, where the man whom we honour today enters – stage left. It is a privilege to be invited to deliver this lecture which marks the role that Gareth Evans has played as one of the parents of a simple principle, the Responsibility to Protect, that challenges with decency and reason the idea that the world is nothing more than a Hobbesian horror show, a barbaric Darwinian battlefield, whose gruesomeness we can witness more clearly than ever before but cannot prevent. In Gareth Evans’ book “The Responsibility to Protect,” which is much the best written, most authoritative, and practical account of the subject, Gareth begins by recalling his travels through Asia as a young man on his way to study at a university which today has cause to celebrate the achievements of such a distinguished alumnus. The friends he met in Cambodia then, he was never again to see, all butchered in their country’s killing fields. Did the world really have to be like that? Was there nothing that could be done to avoid such wicked inhumanity? I remember having a similar though not precisely equivalent experience in the 1980s when I was Britain’s Development Minister visiting those suffering from hunger and disease in too many countries and thinking how extraordinary, perverse even, it was that we were so much more effective in dealing with the results of humanitarian disasters than we were at preventing them happening in the first place.

Gareth Evans is an unusual man in international public service. He is not only interested in ideas but he likes to make things happen. That requires both being prepared to make trouble and to settle for what you can reasonably get – though not at the expense of the principles you hold dear and not without making every effort to get everything in the bag. Gareth has a  well-honed instinct for knowing when to pick up the winnings on the table – but not too soon.

I do not intend to give you an account of the history of R2P as it has come to be called. There is no shortage of well-informed literature on this subject. Indeed, Gareth has helped create a cottage industry of academic study of this subject. What I would rather do is to consider why R2P has come as far as it has; why it is, to use Ban Ki-moon’s phrase, “an idea whose time has come.” Second, I will look at some of the reasons why it still encounters foot-dragging and resistance. Third, I will consider some practical things that the international partner that I know best – the European Union – could do to advance some of the ideas incorporated in R2P.

I have already touched on some of the factors that have been helping to create a greater sense of the importance of international co-operation in dealing with problems common to humanity. My own country – perhaps it has something to do with being an island community – has had an almost mystical attachment to the notion of sovereignty, which has complicated our relationship with the rest of Europe for example. But even in the UK we have come to recognise that sovereignty is a pretty slippery concept. Changes in global geo-politics, economic reality and technology have buffeted any idea that we can go it on our own, ourselves alone. The election of President Obama, a committed multilateralist who recognises that even the world’s only superpower needs partners, is presumably an indication of a similar perception in the United States. At the same time, we have seen in the years since history ended, the growth in a global conscience and global sense of outrage. This has surely been increased by world-wide media coverage of events on every continent for 24 hours a day. To make the world a witness to horror may not be new – Michael Buerk and the BBC showed us famine in Africa a quarter of a century ago – but the evidence is more comprehensive and more frequently available today. There has been an accumulation of “never again” moments, beginning of course in the 1990s with Rwanda and the Balkans, especially Bosnia. The notion that the world did not have to be like this, that we could do more than shake our heads in sad disbelief and put a coin in the collecting tin, gradually took hold. It grew with some difficulty in the terrain between our original aspirations for the UN and what we had allowed the institution to become; between the two incompatible principles to which the UN was originally committed – sovereign equality on the one hand and the inalienability of human rights on the other; between claims of legality and assertions of legitimacy. As ever, it became an idea over which diplomats could argue and exchange the casuistries of their trade. But we should not deride that too much. Diplomats really can and sometimes do make the difference between life and death. As WH Auden wrote in his poem “Embassy” about a meeting of foreign ministry officials –

And on the issue of their charm depended

A land laid waste, with all its young men slain,

Its women weeping, and its towns in terror.

So why the resistance to the idea that the international community should act more decisively to prevent atrocity, to make a reality of “never again” sentiment? There are plainly several reasons. First, the Westphalian notion of sovereignty lives on even in a world where the argument “keep your nose out of our business” is often deployed by countries whose statehood could never have existed when a Westphalian balance was guaranteed principally by strength and power. Resistance to any notion of common humanity overwhelming national sovereignty is seen across the board from governance to human rights to the environment. It is powerfully fuelled by the sense that it is simply a device by the old, rich often formerly imperial powers to dominate the world and impose their own ways, values and policies on others. That was partly where Bernard Kouchner and Tony Blair came a cropper. Such hostile sentiments were exacerbated by the illegal invasion of Iraq which flew in the face of every one of the five tests justifying humanitarian intervention set out in Mr Blair’s famous Chicago speech on this subject in 1999. Was Iraq invaded to rein in the tyranny of Sadam Hussein? The history of double standards by the transatlantic partners in their approaches to governance and the internal behaviour of other governments did not help either. Were we in favour of protecting everyone’s human rights, or only those of people when it was convenient? Were we in favour of democracy everywhere, except where we wanted a military foot-print or an oil concession? Were elections something to be fought for in Iraq but ignored in Palestine?

The redrafting of the principles and main elements of R2P between the 2001 Report of the International Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty and the document agreed by the UN General Assembly at the 2005 World Summit helped to ensure that much of the criticism of R2P melted away at least for a time, and we should recognise the strong support given by many world leaders for R2P and the vote in its favour by the UN last year. But we cannot ignore the continuing resistance and sniping. There are for a start definitional issues. There were those who wanted to act in Burma after the natural disaster there. Russia sought to justify its intervention in Georgia on R2P grounds. Could these cases really be covered by the UN General Assembly’s condemnation of “genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity?” So long as some are disposed to question in any actual instances the application of R2P principles, will they not usually be able to find some reason for arguing that what others would regard as a mass atrocity is no such thing, or at least not the sort of atrocity referred to in the 2005 summit document? While everyone wishes, quite understandably, to emphasise that the use of hard power is the very last resort in any R2P action, have we allowed nervousness about opposition to the possibility of any military intervention to constrain planning for such an eventuality. In any event, in practice will not many of the same sovereignty arguments that would be used against any military intervention, be summoned to oppose any non-military preventive intervention?

But what most concerns me is the public reactions and perceptions to the non-use of R2P measures when television screams and newspaper front pages around the world bring news of acts of inhumanity. In many cases, these will not be cases where R2P would be appropriate. The precise diplomatic and legal definitions of what are appropriate international interventions may not be widely understood. What is often publically demanded is that “something must be done,” and to be told constantly that this or that case is not what R2P was meant to cope with may make it more difficult to retain faith and confidence in this instrument of policy just as faith and confidence can be easily lost in the UN itself. We debate these matters. We argue about the exact meaning of these concepts? But what do they all mean in Gaza or in the Northern Caucuses or in Sudan? What good did this debate do for the wretched Tamils in Sri Lanka as the campaign to finish off the LTTE rolled to its military conclusion, leaving civilian deaths and misery in its wake and a suppression of civil liberties which continued after the fighting ended. We will need to battle away to prevent the discrediting of a fine idea by its non-use.

What can we do to prevent this? I do not wish to engage fruitlessly in “wouldn’t it be nice” speculation. Yes, I would like to see a reformed and politically, legally and morally strengthened UN. We run the danger today, as the 19^th century English political writer Walter Bagehot said of both Rome and of his own country, of failing to comprehend the great institution we created here in New York and the reasons for its establishment. We should not require disaster to impel reform. I want, however, to focus on what is do-able and in doing so perhaps seem less ambitious than some Europeans sound when staking a claim for the EU’s role as a global partner for peace and stability. My modest realism is based on the experience of five years labouring to push the boulder of a Common EU Foreign and Security Policy up the forbidding hill in Europe of bureaucracy, introversion and national interest.

Europe is not set to become a super-power or super-state. It has achieved a remarkable degree of economic integration accompanied by some of the political integration which that makes necessary. It has a bigger economy than America’s; it is responsible for a greater share of world trade; it contributes more to global environment policy than any other group of countries; it is the world’s biggest aid donor. But it has only limited ability to cut a dash on the world stage commensurate with its economic strength when the biggest foreign and security issues are raised. Given its history, it believes not surprisingly in multilateralism. Its ability, however, to deploy hard power in support of multi-lateral peace initiatives is limited by both its modest expenditure on armaments and by the nervousness of some of its member states about being drawn into conflict. It has a good-ish record on peace-keeping though requires more equipment to deploy and support peace-keepers from Europe and elsewhere. It has encouraged stability and democratic consolidation around its frontier through example and through enlarging its membership, though that process has started to run out of steam. While its members know that they make a bigger impact when they act together, they have great difficulty shaping coherent policies to deal with the largest strategic powers like India and China, to cope with their biggest neighbour Russia, and to contribute more to solving the most intractable international issues like the Middle East. My own view is that it should focus rather more on what it can do, and restrain its rhetorical ambitions until it can give a rather better account of some solid achievements.

The various elements that go to make up R2P should provide a rich agenda for co-operative action by EU member states. Naturally, the EU should give the maximum political support to R2P here at the UN and in its dealings with other regional organisations like the African Union. I want, however, to focus today principally on what are called the tool boxes – both for prevention and for rebuilding a community after a successful mission to protect. One reason why these should be good areas for the EU to build credibility is that as part of the changes that are supposed to follow from the implementation of the Lisbon Treaty, the EU is creating an external action service under one senior official that brings together both its political priorities and its existing community instruments. It should be able to relate development assistance to its aims for good governance, the implementation of sanctions to the control of the small arms trade. It gives the EU a stronger capacity to put together precisely those instruments that would make preventive and post-intervention work easier to manage. Let me give you four examples from the preventive tool box and two from the rebuilding tool box.

First, on prevention, there is much disagreement about what constitutes good governance and whether external agencies should insist on their own standards. As a major donor of development assistance, I do not think that the EU can or should avoid an explicit policy on this. We do not believe in a Western agenda on values and governance.  Values are universal and bad government has the same effects everywhere. Corruption for example is an unfair tax on development wherever it is found. On governance, the EU should be explicit about what it means. Torture is wrong; suppression of free speech is wrong. Due process is right; transparency is right – not least in negotiations of commodity deals. We should be adamantly insistent on adherence to the Extractive Industries Transparency Initiative on the part of those to whom we give aid. I am strongly in favour of using conditionality increasingly as an add-on factor not a subtraction that rarely happens. The EU should agree programmes of change, on gender or the rule of law for example, and reward performance by additional assistance.

What is vital is to be consistent. This is where the EU has to look very hard at its relations with its Mediterranean neighbours with whom we have close contractual agreements. The Arab League countries as a whole have a pretty dismal record of economic growth despite their energy resources. The reasons for this were set out almost a decade ago in two UNDP reports written by Arab policy makers, academics and journalists. They were identified as attitudes to gender, education and governance. These countries have the highest birth rates in the world. 40 per cent of the population is below the age of 14. The jobless figures are high and rising. High unemployment among young people, and political authoritarianism, spell trouble and instability in the future. The EU and others should not regard the Middle East – Western Asia and North Africa as a whole – as the only part of the world to which it should make an exception when trying to promote good governance, pluralism and the rule of law. Arguably to avoid future turbulence with a threat of the sort of results with which R2P concerns itself, this is the region where this policy should be pursued with the greatest vigour.

Preventive diplomacy should suit the EU as well, especially when it can also offer carrots as well as words. This is exactly what we did in Macedonia before and after the Lake Ohrid agreement in 2001. Javier Solana and I from the EU, and George Robertson from NATO, visited Skopje and Tetovo repeatedly to discourage conflict (not wholly successfully) and to encourage peace-building initiatives across the community. It was exhausting and time-consuming work, supported by our ability to offer Macedonia the prospect of eventual accession to the EU. I hope that process won’t be delayed for too long by tit for tat arguments with Greece about the country’s name.

Turning to measures to nudge or pressure countries in the direction of better behaviour towards their own citizens or the international community, I want to mention one to which we often resort though too rarely implement or monitor with sufficient rigour: sanctions. The resort to sanctions can too easily become the knee-jerk reaction to behaviour which we dislike but which we do not think justifies the use of hard power. Sanctions have been used incontinently by the US which may have discredited them. But they can work when they are properly targeted and competently managed. We should use transparency and monitoring to enhance the effectiveness of sanctions, reporting regularly – in the case of the EU – to the European Parliament. More successful management of sanctions by Europe should give the EU the clout to insist on the same standards at the UN.

We know that most conflict today involves the use of small arms and light weapons. We have made some progress at the UN to police and control this lethal trade. The EU should be in the vanguard of pressure for more progress, and should put its code of conduct on arms sales on a statutory basis and establish a unit to monitor compliance. We should also give more support in our development programmes for post-conflict disarmament, demobilisation and reintegration programmes, including weapons buy-back schemes. As part of these programmes, we should make more effort to trace the origins of the weapons that are bought up, and to publicise the results of these surveys.

This brings me on naturally to the rebuilding tool box on which I want to make one managerial point that may sound a bit bureaucratic, and one point about an area where we continue to fall down.

The managerial point is this. The principal donors of post-conflict assistance still on the whole provide what is promised too slowly, when that is they give it at all. It is always salutary to compare the arithmetic of donors’ conferences with the actual record of aid dispersal. I hope that Haiti is not about to discover this gap. Well-publicised follow-up meetings is at least one way of embarrassing the tardy into making the payments promised. But there is an additional point that is very often responsible for delay and on which the EU should seek to find some solutions. Different donors have different rules and regulations about aid dispersal – about contracting, open bidding and conditions of employment for instance. I experienced this myself in Kosovo and elsewhere working with the UN. We should try to get some general parity between the way that different donors behave. In my experience, international organisations seem to have the greatest difficulty in showing flexibility in this area.

The other issue I want to emphasise is the difficulty of rebuilding systems of criminal justice. This is a subject on which Paddy Ashdown had much to say after his experiences in Bosnia Herzegovina. It is easier to deploy soldiers than judges, prison warders and police officers. We have to do better in building capacity in these areas. The EU should take a lead. It does not require rocket science to know how to put together a criminal justice system which leads seamlessly from neighbourhood policing, to criminal investigation, to arrest, to trial, to imprisonment. Putting together the links in the chain is however quite another matter. Finding the police trainers, the prison governors, the judges, the legal draftsmen, and the officials who can establish and run witness protection schemes – all these functions are crucial but difficult to fill. We know how important they are to nation building if we are to avoid seeding organised crime, criminalising politics and destroying any prospect of sustainable state institutions.

I have tried to give a few practical ideas on how the international actor that I know best can help breath more life into the concept of R2P and some of the broader approaches to international politics that it represents. Is any progress too much to hope for? We know from Barbara Tuchman’s marvellous book that from Troy to Vietnam “The March to Folly” has led humanity, suppressing evidence and reason to embrace disaster. We know, what is more, that political leadership has invariably been thought deficient. Writing about the Congress of Vienna, Metterich’s aide Friedrich Von Gentz, a diplomat who had studied in Konigsberg under Kant no less, asserted, “I was overcome as never before by the futility of all human endeavours and the foibles of those who hold the world in their hands….” Perhaps nothing changes – although the stakes seem to get ever higher.

The Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, Britain’s astronomer royal, wrote a book in 2003, which was called in the UK, “Our Final Century.” When he wrote the book, he inserted a question mark after the title. His British publishers removed the question mark. His American publishers went one better and retitled the book “Our Final Hour.” Rees is a very clever and wise man, whose thesis was that we had a fifty-fifty chance of surviving the 21^st century. At my most optimistic, I cannot believe that. The odds are surely better than that. I assume that as ever before in the face of imminent disaster, we will somehow muddle through as previous generations did. But all praise to those who want us to do better than muddle through and who make the prospect of a decent future for humanity more likely. All praise then to Gareth Evans, a good man who makes the sort of trouble from which our children and grand-children will surely one day benefit.