Why
Should Tony Blair Act as though He Were World President?
Since September 11,
Tony Blair and Labour government ministers have spent many days visiting other
heads of government throughout the world. Calls to and from US President Bush,
as well as other government leaders have kept the phone lines hot. Tony Blair
has been acting with messianic zeal in his efforts to weld together a stable
coalition in support of the "war on terrorism".
Aside from the injustice
of the ways and means with which this "war on terrorism" is being
prosecuted, attention must be drawn to the question of what authority Tony Blair
has to act in this way. Why should Tony Blair act as though he were president
of the world?
Clearly Tony Blair regards
it as self-evident that he has this God-given mission. Though he has, to our
knowledge, never openly declared that his "war on terrorism" has divine
authority, nevertheless the language he - and, following him, the government
- has used since day one has been of the "new evil of our times",
that the terrorist atrocities of September 11 were "acts of wickedness",
and so on. He has condemned the terrorists as having no regard to the "sanctity
of human life". In other words, he has been using the language of Christian
fundamentalism to justify his mission to build and set in motion the coalition.
No one would argue that
Tony Blair should not exercise his right to conscience and hold firm to his
conviction of the immorality of these acts. However, it is a very backward step
for him to mix his religious convictions with his conduct as a national and
international political figure. His course of action may be self-evident to
his own mind, but he cannot violate the right of conscience of others who have
other moral and religious convictions. As a government leader his mandate must
come from the people. Matters are not helped, of course, by the British political
system, in which the authority of parliament still retains its medieval constitutional
source, namely the sovereign and its ultimately divine authority. Though Tony
Blair has wished to be known as a "moderniser", he has resisted touching
this relic of pre-17th century government which enlightenment has passed by,
and with good reason, as far as his political conduct is concerned. It is this
relic which gives parliament its absolutism, and allows Tony Blair and his War
Cabinet to act untouched by considerations of accountability to the popular
will.
However firmly, though
retrogressively, this mixture of the divine and the political, this association
of the state and matters pertaining to religion, is entrenched in British political
life, internationally the Prime Minister can claim no such authority. Where
is the international body that allows Tony Blair to pursue the prosecution of
a war and build a coalition behind Britain and the United States to this end?
It is true that Tony Blair argues that the United Nations has sanctioned the
"war against terrorism". But this is not where Tony Blair's authority
comes from. The Anglo-US plans and global diplomacy were in place long before
the United Nations' discussion on terrorism took place, and the British representative's
contribution that if something smells like terrorism then it is terrorism and
the general disdain with which he treated the debate were less then helpful.
Nor was it the UN that debated the question of the appropriate action to be
taken against terrorism, the use of force and the danger of war, and with the
norm of equality between nations set the course for the international community.
In other words, the UN has been quite incidental to the Anglo-US "war on
terrorism". Tony Blair has used its discussion and its resolutions quite
irresponsibly and inappropriately to try and shore up his case for aggression
against Afghanistan.
Therefore, for all Tony
Blair's protestations that the war must not be seen as a struggle between "Western"
countries versus Islam, it is an inescapable conclusion that Anglo-American
values and/or Anglo-US economic, political and strategic aims are being foisted
on the conduct of international relations, with disastrous and extremely dangerous
and retrogressive consequences. The more Tony Blair protests against the analysis
of a clash of civilisations in this way, the more exposed it becomes that there
is a case to answer in this respect. These "Western" values are being
elevated to the status of "decent civilised values" which people "everywhere"
support, or should support if they are not to be classed as being with the terrorists.
Tony Blair does not offer the choice that one may condemn terrorism and reject
the "decent civilised values" that Tony Blair is a proponent of. Furthermore,
he tries to impose these values on Islam itself by dismissing anything else,
as the expert he is, as un-Islamic or evil.
And here is where his
role as acting as though he were president of the world fits in. There has been
no break with the imperialistic ways of thinking and courses of action with
which Britain built its colonies and its empire in the 19th and 20th centuries.
It is a thinking in which the British parliament is the mother of democracies,
in which Britain was faced with a "civilising mission" against barbaric
and savage races in the far-flung corners of the globe. It was also a thinking
which was given rise to by economic and strategic imperatives as Britain took
up its role as the "workshop of the world" and contended with other
usurping emergent colonial and imperialist powers in a race to carve up the
world.
It is these motives springing
from the arrogance of a "superior" civilisation that are shaping the
British government's unjust and unjustifiable actions in being the leading force
in establishing the coalition for the "war on terrorism" and furnishing
it with its ideology. Tony Blair appears in his element in integrating the programme
to "Make Britain Great" again with stamping out terrorism in what
is, after all, his own definition of it.
Tony Blair should reflect that history has condemned time and again the genocide
that has been committed in the name of Christianising so-called unenlightened
peoples. It has condemned collective punishment meted out when desperate acts
have been committed, often fomented or organised by the oppressors themselves,
against "guilty" peoples, and has branded this method as Hitlerite.
The working class and democratic people must ensure that this time is the last
time these crimes are committed in their name, and that they aim their struggles
at this old imperialist conscience which is pervading Tony Blair's conduct,
as well as demanding an end to the war of aggression and that international
affairs be conducted on a democratic basis.