Global Security: 5 years after 9/11, is it here to stay?

Speech by Paddy Ashdown delivered to BBC World Service Fringe at the Liberal Democrat Autumn Conference on Tue 19th Sep 2006

9/11 is not the cause of our malaise. It is only the symptom of it.

Our problem is deeper. It is that we live in a time when our models for governing the world no longer conform to the realities we have to deal with;

when our structures for governance don't seem to work

and when the gentle creeds of tolerance and humanity that used to bind us are everywhere being swamped by fanaticism and mutually reinforcing ignorance.

In twenty minutes, there isn't time to talk about all of these things today.

But there is to talk about the central force which has unbalanced the structures of our time and terrified us by spawning new threats that we don't know how to deal with.

The issue is the globalisation of power.

And the challenge for our age, which liberals ought to be best placed to deal with, is how to construct a system of global governance to control global power.

Here is a test.

List all those institutions which are growing in power, size and influence; the multi national companies; the currency speculators, the commodity traders, the satellites broadcasters, the trans-national corporations, the drug traffickers, the internet operators, the global terrorists, the international criminals. Note, how all of them operate in ways which pay no attention to the rules of states or to the borders and frontiers that states use to define their existence.

Now list those institutions which are under threat. Monarchies, police forces, the political classes, the old churches, the establishments of power - perhaps even democracy itself. And note how all of these depend for their existence on the notion of the nation state.

The revolution of the Nineteenth Century, which Liberals led, was to bring governance to the new centres of power created by the Industrial Revolution.. But in the global revolution, power has now migrated beyond the structures of the nation state.

And this migration of power from the nation state to the global arena, where the structures of regulation are few or ineffective, is one of the most destabilising factors of our age.

History teaches us that where power is uncontrolled, chaos and conflict always follows. And so it has.

And that is why governance has to follow power.

So, if power now increasingly lies on the global stage, then we have to find the means to create governance on the global stage too. And that will require constructing, albeit slowly, stumblingly and painfully an effective system of international law to combat the threat of global lawlessness

We have understood for some time that lawlessness in one state can affect the peace of states and peoples, not just in the region, but across the globe. Our failure to finish the job and establish stability in Afghanistan after the Soviets left, was paid for in blood and terror on the streets of New York just over a decade later.

What we have not so far fully realised is that the challenge of lawlessness does not just apply to states, but to the global space, too.

We may not yet understand this.

But Al Qaeda do.

They use the global space as their space. Satellite broadcasting, the internet, international financial institutions, the networks of international travel - these are their chosen logistical structures. It has been calculated that nearly 60% of the estimated $4 million required to fund 9/11, actually passed at one time or another, through the twin towers.

What makes Al Qaeda so difficult to counter is that it no longer has physical bases in the military sense of the word.

It has little or no structure, and only a tiny tangible physical presence. It has deliberately given up most of the attributes of physical form.

Its most powerful weapon is its ability to remain an idea, an ethereal concept, floating in the global space, where it can morph, draw recruits, plan operations and execute preparations without any of the cumbersome and vulnerable paraphernalia of a conventional military structure.

It materialises in the moment of the attack and vanishes again into the global space the moment after.

We cannot follow it there, because this space is as trackless and as lacking in effective governance by the rule of law, as any desert in Africa or mountain fastness in Afghanistan

While many of the aspects of global power are benign and beneficial (global free access to information, global trade, global travel etc), some, such as international crime, global terrorism, global drugs networks, the global effect of the actions of rogue states are anything but benign.

And malign global forces now have the power to destabilise and capture weak states (like Afghanistan) and deal heavy blows to strong ones (like the US on 9/11). We have learnt to our painful cost that we cannot leave lawless spaces without risking our own stability and security - and that applies to the global spaces, too.

The great French philosopher and mathematician Blaise Pascale, regarding space, said "La silence de ces espaces infinie, me frais" - the silence of these eternal spaces frightens me. The lawlessness of today's global spaces, frightens me - and it ought to frighten you, too.

Paradoxically, our failure to bring justice to the global space also presents us with an equal and opposite threat - the possibility that globalisation will fail, leading to a plunge back into protectionism and regional competition.

The collapse of the Doha trade liberalisation talks, the fact that the international rules governing intellectual property rights and currency relationships are increasingly contested and the rise in protectionist sentiment in countries ranging from Europe to Latin America are all indicators that, for some at least, the struggle for the future is not how to liberalise global relationships for the benefit of all, but how to raise walls high enough to protect yourself.

Interdependent world

What makes this even more dangerous is that we now live in a world which is not just increasingly global, but also increasingly interdependent.

We cannot ignore the actions which one state takes, if the result is to threaten the stability of its neighbours or the wider peace of the international community. Most wars are no longer between states but within them or across their borders.

And so, finally, we are being forced to confront the fact that, contrary to all the sunny predictions at the time, the end of the cold war did not usher in a more stable world. It has brought us a more unstable one.

Far from being "The End of History" as described in that comforting idyll by Francis Fukuyama, history is alive and kicking - and kicking rather hard at the moment.

Far from being more tranquil, our global village is looking increasingly more troubled. Among the issues that have come to haunt us, or come back to haunt us, are some very old geo-strategic cultural antagonisms, like the ancient struggle between Christendom and Islam, and some very new challenges such as globalization and resource competition. These were either completely invisible or on the very margins of debate a decade ago. Today they are full blooded, front and centre and demand our attention.

A perfect storm.

There are huge and powerful forces stirring in our world. We have very difficult decisions to take if we are to preserve our fragile living space, share out diminishing resources and cope with rising aspirations in the developing world.

These decisions would be tough enough in stable times. But we are going to have to take them against the backdrop of fierce resource competition, a massive shift of global power away from the nations and economies of the West and rising radicalism in the world of faith.

Meanwhile we in the West are facing a crisis of confidence in our own institutions and a lack of belief in the mores and creeds which used to act as a reliable and understood framework for the way we live our lives. Our leaders seem to lack both conviction and vision.

What we are involved in here is not a "war on terror" - still less a "clash of civilisations". But a campaign FOR civilisation - a struggle for the values of tolerance and humanity that lie at the heart of all the great religions - all civilisations -, against a new medievalism, whose proposals are those of darkness and ignorance.

Our problem is that we have chosen the wrong battlefield, the wrong weapons and the wrong strategies to win this campaign.

We have chosen to fight an idea, primarily with force.

We seek to control territory; they seek is to capture minds.

We have presumed that predominant force gives us the opportunity to impose our systems on others , when the only justification for the use of force is to assert justice and establish freedom, so that people can have the chance to choose their systems for themselves.

We have embarked on a battle with a self declared global jihad, by seeking to assert a self declared global hegemony - the hegemony of Western models - as though there were no others.

We have adopted methods, or connived at their adoption, which undermine the moral force of our ideas.

And so, in a battle of concepts, we have strengthened the concepts of our enemies and weakened our own and elected to fight on a battlefield of their choosing, where they are strongest and we are weakest.

Force has a part to play in this struggle - regrettably it nearly always does. But this is, at its heart, a battle of ideas and values, and unless we realise that and can win on that agenda, then no amount of force can deliver victory.

And so far, we are not winning that battle. In those regions of the world where this struggle is fiercest, civilisation is losing and medievalism is winning.

Modern war is fought amongst the people - and we are losing their support.

There is, in short, a perfect storm gathering out there.

We should not allow ourselves to be deluded into believing that, because most of our recent conflicts have been intra-state, therefore inter state conflicts are a thing of the past. Indeed, unless we can find a new way of thinking, I am very pessimistic about our ability to avoid large scale war involving the use of weapons of mass destruction in the Middle East in the next five years and in the Far East in the next twenty.

But our chances of avoiding such a major conflict will be much greater if we can find better ways to control the minor conflicts which are likely to be its precursor; if we can assemble a structure of international law able to bring order to the global space and if we can learn better how to tackle the ingredients of instability.

Holocaust survivor Ursula Franklin once wrote that peace is not the absence of war, but the presence of justice. As a liberal I agree with that and find no difficulty in applying it to the international space as much as to national ones.

Gladstone once said

"…remember that the sanctity of life in the hill villages of Afghanistan among the winter snows, is as inviolable in the eye of Almighty God as can ever be your own. Remember that He who has united you together as human beings in the same flesh and blood, has bound you by the law of mutual love, that that mutual love is not limited by the shores of this island, is not limited by the boundaries of Christian civilization, that it passes over the whole surface of the earth, and embraces the meanest along with the greatest in its wide scope."

William Gladstone, Midlothian Campaign, November 26th 1879

As a Liberal, he was leading a crusade for a concept of global morality. That was right for his age.

As Liberal Democrats, we should be leading the thinking for global governance. It is what is needed in ours.