Commissioners who are in this room must feel that they have been on a fascinating journey. After independence, in the 1940s and 1950s, and the issues we discussed this morning of the 1960s and 1970s, there were all the hang-ups and nuances of the post-imperial period. There was the marvellous ambiguity of attitude held by some of one’s closest friends in India. On the one hand they were extremely proud to get rid of the Brits, but on the other hand they wanted them back almost immediately to help—a state of mind that I totally understood and rather enjoyed. Then came the period we are now in with the beginnings of globalisation, and the mood of moving from ex-colonial, eximperial India, to India—a slightly awkward and not terribly friendly country in many ways and aspects of policy. That is the period you have dealt with of nonalignment and so on. Then came another period, and if I were the High Commissioner sitting in India, I would have begun to think that we needed to re-cast our stance somewhat as the supportive friend. Now, the next phase is just beginning, although I am not sure that it has permeated every pore and labyrinth of our international role in foreign policy, where suddenly the role is reversed. These are the bosses; these are the people with the money. Our Embassies and High Commissions are respectful outposts of this island in our interests, and some of those interests mean that far from it being them going cap in hand and talking about aid, it is the other way round. All the Sovereign wealth and accumulation of wealth, all the dynamism and a lot of the highest new technology—forget the old picture of, ‘We’ll produce the technology and they’ll produce the commodities’ because it is now the other way round—comes from the Commonwealth network and non-Commonwealth countries, the so-called ‘emerging economies.’ The other day someone—I think it was Bob Zoellick47—remarked that the emerging economies hate being called emerging economies. They really hate it, but yet we continue to use that term in our phraseology and we should probably stop. The world does not look like that from a so-called emerging economy. I can think of many places in this country where there are definitely signs of a need for things to emerge from their present state. We must watch our terminology, and our embassies and High Commissions have to watch their positioning and attitude as they build wonderful networks round the town, make friendships and engineer connections, socialise and intellectualise, dine with and organise at all kind of civil society levels the communities in which they have been placed. They need to maintain and promote our reputation so that it is adequate and strong, and keep the policy makers in London agile and well warned in advanced about what is going to happen next. That is very difficult because the world is full of black swans; something is going to happen next week that no one forecast. Last year we had the so-called Arab Spring—I call it the Arab uprising— which no one forecast. I did not see it in any e-grams in my first year in this office, and there was no sign of it until it happened. There is something wrong there; perhaps Embassies and High Commissions not networking quite enough, I don’t know. At the heart of it all is India in the new Commonwealth. The Commonwealth is a gigantic system of 2 billion people forming a huge new lattice pattern of trade and investment that the media have hardly become aware of. They are still writing about Africa as down, when Africa is now up. That completely transforms the whole atmosphere inside the Commonwealth network. These are very new developments to which High Commissioners must 47
Robert Zoellick, President of the World Bank, 2007—.
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