Sound sense on deaf ears

Book Review
Not Quite the Diplomat
by Chris Patten
Pengiun, £20.

At one point in Not Quite the Diplomat, Chris Patten interrupts another denunciation of George Bush’s administration to exclaim, ‘What an old-fashioned Conservative I have clearly become!’ He has, and this is an old-fashioned book. But never a reactionary or nostalgic one.

Patten, a former Tory party chairman, was EU commissioner for external relations from 1999 to 2004. This book purports to be the product of the wisdom acquired during those years. There is wisdom aplenty here, but more than a little wishful thinking too.

After a messy opening during which he gives us his tuppence-worth about the poll tax, the fall of Thatcher and the rise of New Labour, Patten offers a cogent and principled defence of the EU and its impact on world affairs. As he rightly argues, the EU has been a much more effective agent of “regime change” than American tanks, although it doubtful whether dangling the carrot of EU membership would have had much effect on Saddam. He makes an unapologetic defence of the now-defunct constitutional treaty and a scathing attack on euroscepticism – the ‘ruinous fantasy’ that has imprisoned Conservatives in a ‘sentimental delusion about a our pluperfect system of self-rule.’

But this book is as much about America as Europe, and this is where the wishful thinking starts. Put simply, Patten urges America to return to its rightful course, as ‘the world’s leader, acting through working institutions of global governance, the world’s moral and political exemplar at home and abroad’. Europe’s job, as ‘allies with minds of our own’ is to ‘help’ American recover this role. It is an utterly persuasive case – to anyone except the present occupants of the White House.

As the flies in his ointment, Patten pours visceral scorn on American “neocons” (Dick Cheney is a particular bête noir). ‘As is often the case, “neo” means not “new but simply “not”’, he writes. They are reactionaries bent on ‘permanent revolution or at least permanent war. This is Mao, not Madison.’ Protecting the American right to own guns is an argument that ‘begins stupid and ends in small coffins’. Bush’s refusal to sign the Kyoto protocol is ‘like the Pope denouncing Galileo’. It all threatens to end in ‘a Hobbesian world in which capitalist democracy defends its wealth and values from the random violence of the angry and the poor – like the “gated communities” in rich suburbs’.

There is more wishful thinking (and a whiff of double standards) when Patten turns to China. Everywhere else, in Russia, Serbia or the Maghreb for example, access to Western markets should be conditional on democratic reforms. Maybe Patten is beguiled by China’s soaraway economic growth or bowled over by the fact that Chinese leaders, unlike Russian ones, are always smiling. Either way, China is off the hook. ‘I doubt whether you can sustain a modern economy for long without democracy and its principle fixtures and fittings – pluralism and the rule of law,’ Patten muses. He may be right, but there is no sign that Beijing has noticed. In a less principled politician this could be excused as realpolitik. For Patten, it won’t do.

This is a decent book by a decent man. Ironically, it will appeal more to those on the left than on the right. Like it’s counterpart, the social democracy of Denis Healy and Roy Hattersley, Patten’s brand of moderate, internationalist conservatism been squeezed from the political landscape. And that’s his problem, and our loss.

© Craig Ryan 2005

First published in Public Service Magazine, Nov-Dec 2005