Adrian Hamilton: The growing threat of new nationalism

I feel sorry for David Miliband, the new Foreign Secretary, as he rings round Europe in an effort to garner support for our confrontation with Russia. Like so many of his predecessors, Prime Ministers included, you start off in the job by thinking that you can make a fresh start and barely before you've taken the first paper from your red box you're the victim of events.

Russia, Iraq, Aghanistan, the frisson in our relations with America, the speed and energy with which President Sarkozy has seized the European agenda - not one of these are problems of Miliband's own making, or ones which he would have wished as his priorities at his new desk. Yet there they are, all crises which deprive a British Foreign Secretary of his ability to control events.

But then that, in an important sense, is the problem of British foreign policy - we have lost control of the agenda, and even any clear sense of our policy purposes. On all the key issues, from Europe to relations with Washington to the Middle East, we are at the mercy of events and others. We can talk the talk of an independent policy in Iraq or Afghanistan, but the fact is that we are in both countries as a junior partner with forces too few to enable us to take full command even of the areas for which we are responsible.

Nor is it any different when it comes to the current spat with Russia. In theory this is a diplomatic row in which we are taking a robust view of our own interests. In practice, the decision to expel Russian diplomats was an escalation which the Foreign Office felt forced to embark on as the least it could do after the murder of one of its citizens - egged on, one suspects, by the security forces talking of dark involvement by the Russian state.

And after this, what? We are simply no longer strong enough to keep escalating further without some support from our allies, which is why the new Foreign Secretary is looking to Europe.

This is not a simple comment on the limits of British power. UK governments have had to come to terms with that a generation or more ago, although every new Foreign Secretary (including David Miliband) has to claim as our aim in life an influence in world affairs greater than our size. It is rather to say that, when Miliband returns from his next visits to Paris and Washington with expressions of goodwill but not much else, he needs to sit down and ponder less on what our policy should be than what is going wrong to leave us so bereft of any ability to form a coherent approach in which we have some control of our destiny.

You can blame Tony Blair for a lot of the problems, of course. It will take a generation or more to recover from the damage wrought by tying us so closely to a US president bent on reshaping the world. But we are where we are, and one of the most futile debates is that set off this week about whether we should start distancing ourselves from the White House.

Of course we should. But we don't have to make an issue of it. America as a whole is distancing itself from the White House. So is Congress and half the Republican party. We gain nothing by making a public declaration of our cooling relations with the current occupant of the White House when we are better biding our time for the next.

Nor does it make much sense at this moment to start talking of a new relationship with Europe as if it were the substitute for our past closeness to the US. It may send a signal of change in approach, but it hardly fits a position where Europe itself is deeply divided on its future. With whom or what are we allying ourselves with when it comes to enlargement or globalisation? Certainly not the new President of France, who opposes us on both.

The challenge of creating a fresh foreign policy goes much deeper than this. It is that the world at large is experiencing a powerful resurgence of nationalism, while Britain has based most if its policies on alliances and internationalism.

President Bush is the most obvious example of this. Even before 9/11, he was following an approach of America First. After it, he became even more so, only with a global outreach. As Iraq exposed the limits of US power, however, the other players who have moved to the fore have proved equally nationalistic, if not more so.

Russia under President Putin, China as the new economic superpower, India as the emerging one, Japan under its new prime minister, France under Nicolas Sarkozy - all are countries with a strong sense of national self-interest and a determination to define it abroad. It's not to say they are necessarily a destructive force in world politics, but, as we have seen with China in Africa and Russia over its gas exports, when it comes to their self-interest, they simply do not accept the constraints of wider communal obligation.

Against that tide, most multi-lateral institutions have declined in authority and effectiveness. The UN has been neutered by Washington's antagonism and a US-promoted candidate for the secretary generalship, Ban Ki-Moon, chosen precisely because he wouldn't do anything other than house cleaning. All the plans for a radical reshaping of the UN have been put on ice.

The changes at the top of the World Bank and the IMF, far from being used as an opportunity to reform and broaden their structures, have actually been used to reinforce the old system of choosing the bosses of world institutions on a national basis. Iraq and Washington's escalating confrontation with Iran have put back to the cause of regional groupings in the Middle East. Nato, the most effective multi-lateral organisation of the post-war era, is now close to breaking under the pressures of Afghanistan - a field of conflict it should never have been involved in. The irony of the world today is that it is driven by globalisation economically, but politically it is retreating to the 19th-century nation states.

So where does Britain's interest and policy lie in this? Gordon Brown is something of a nationalist himself, as his early statements on assuming power showed. But by instinct and experience he is also a globalist, and this is surely the right path for a Britain now heavily dependent for its wealth on the financial and services industries and mired in quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan, for which it needs international cover to help it out.

The big countries may be becoming more nationalist, but for most of the world (and for America after Bush), the crying need is for more multilateralism. Our fight with Russia is not a good start. Indeed it's a positively bad one since it leads nowhere. But we are in a position to push for a different world and to seek the reform of the institutions that might remake it. It just needs the courage to start afresh.

a.hamilton@independent.co.uk

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