Learning from History: Know How Fund
FCO
If one is to be successful in the development business in whatever country, in whatever context, there has to be the very explicit cohering of all these factors. I think that Kate understood that well, and I hope that lesson will not be forgotten. Patrick Salmon We will take a pause there and ask our three panellists to reflect on some of those questions. The one that Peter Marshall mentioned at the beginning was the European dimension, and that linked up with the point that Nigel Thorpe made about the East Europeans wanting to become part of larger international institutions. Another was the suggestion, again made by Peter, of „is this the beginning of soft power?‟ Finally, the one that Nigel mentioned was the question of criticism of some of the actions that we took in relation to privatisation. Lord Waldegrave, would you like to start responding, please? Lord Waldegrave Yes, thank you. Taken slightly out of order, adding a footnote about politics, there is one thing that is not covered in here. It is about the Know How Fund. There was another strand. Now, remember that all us young Conservatives of the day spent happy days at Cadenabbia in Adenauer‟s old house as guests of Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung. We were extremely jealous of the Stiftung in Germany, at their capacity to take action. In the end that led to another strand that still exists: The Westminster Foundation, to do explicit politics, to help people set up party political organisations and so on. That was valuable too. It should not be forgotten. Going fast, there was a comment that Adrian suffered constantly from the diaspora people ringing up. Some of them were a waste of time, others were not. I remember doing joint scholarship programmes with George Soros, for example, which was significant and valuable. In some respects, the diaspora could be helpful. The European transformation in general – to widen it, remember that going on in the background of this is the travails of the Prime Minister‟s slowly shifting scepticism about the European Union. At one of those seminars at Chequers – I was slightly involved in this – she began to see that one of the ways of helping her to dissolve her fear of the European Union was to widen it. We had the great widening or deepening debate. Pretty early on she became converted to the idea, which was not her original idea. Her original idea was that we should keep the European Union as small as possible. Then she thought, „Well, if we can get all these countries in, surely there would be more pluralism, and the whole thing would grind to a halt‟, which would be a jolly good thing as far as she was concerned. Taking it slightly lightly, the Union would become more like a trading area, and not get so involved in what she saw as nation building. That is an important part of the background. In terms of relations to these countries, as various people said, a vital part was their desire for the respectability of joining the institutions: Council of Europe first usually, then the European Union and NATO. Of course, then one was running up against the big diplomacy with Russia when one talked about NATO. My point about how transferable all this is was not to be pessimistic, let alone to decry the idea that one should try and work with people who want to establish free markets and liberal democracy and law in civil society around the world. I retired from politics years ago, I know nothing about what is going on in the Middle East, but I do think there was something a little different about the restoration of these countries to the family of European nations. It was not very long before that some of them had been normal players. It was not odd that the French all poured back into Romania. The French and the Romanians had been close allies before the Second World War, and so on and so forth. There were ancient links to restore and long traditions in liberal democracy. One other thing to remember, in which I was a small part of the conflict with the Prime Minister, was that she was locked in a dangerous battle, as I saw it, to try to slow down, or try to prevent the reunification of Germany. This wasted some of that great prestige, all across Europe, and certainly made the Americans think we had gone a little bit loopy. We were out of action at the
30 October 2013
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