Nanovic Institute Event Brief: "Realism and International Cooperation"

“Realism and International Cooperation” Lord Patten of Barnes on Russia, China, and a new world order Barrett Family Lecture March 24, 2022

Barrett Family Lecture 2022 Realism and international cooperation: Lord Patten of Barnes on Russia, China, and a new world order

BY GRÁINNE MCEVOY

The Nanovic Institute for European Studies had the privilege of welcoming Lord Patten of Barnes to deliver the 2022 Barrett Family Lecture at the Notre Dame London Global Gateway.

Fr. Jim Lies, C.S.C., senior director for academic initiatives and partnerships at the Gateway, welcomed Lord Patten and Steve and Ruth Barrett whose generosity made the lecture possible.

Fr. Lies noted the “somber days” in which the lecture was taking place, and took a moment for prayer for a resolution to the dark and dire situation in Ukraine.

Clemens Sedmak, director of the Nanovic Institute and professor of social ethics in the Keough School of Global Affairs, introduced Lord Patten, describing the event as a true Nanovic Institute moment that exemplified the institute’s mission of building bridges between Europe and Notre Dame. Sedmak explained that an important pillar of the Nanovic Institute’s strategic plan is the facilitation of discussions about “big questions” and that Lord Patten’s lecture would explore one such big question: is there a new world order? This question, Sedmak said, had grown more pressing after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February.

Lord Patten has enjoyed a long and impressive career in politics, diplomacy, and foreign service, perhaps most notably as the last British governor of Hong Kong (1992-1997), a tenure that ended 25 years ago. “Many things change in 25 years,” Sedmak reflected “many things change in 25 days. Lord Patten will help us understand where we are and where we are going as a global community.”

Realism and International Cooperation

“A new and rather better world” For Lord Patten, the complexity and precarity of global affairs in recent years have made him realize his good fortune, and that of others his age, in being born in the final years of the Second World War. He was born in May 1944 on the day that the German army was driven out of Crimea by the Soviet Union’s Red Army. This global conflict caused the deaths of 80 million people, half of which were from Russia and China. For Lord Patten, the horror and tyranny of the 1930s and 1940s is reflected in lines from W.H. Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats” (1939): In the nightmare of the dark All the dogs of Europe bark, And the living nations wait, Each sequestered in its hate.

In the years that followed, Lord Patten explained, “not least thanks to American leadership, we’ve created a new and rather better world.” Notwithstanding some obvious deviations— particularly conflict and intervention in Vietnam and the Middle East—he said that with generous American leadership and European partnership “we have put in place a world order of rules and institutions which ensured, for most people, decades of peace and decades of increasing prosperity.”

This post-war period saw the creation of the Bretton Woods Institutions—including the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, now known as the World Trade Organization—and the United Nations, which Lord Patten described as “imperfect, but an admirable institutional aspiration.”

In Europe, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the European Union (EU) were established. Lord Patten explained that while Europeans like to think that the EU was their own idea and NATO was an American idea imposed upon them, “it’s almost the reverse of the truth.”

Europeans, he said, wanted to avoid a repeat of the weak post-1918 peace embodied in the League of

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Nations that arguably helped lead to renewed hostilities in the late 1930s, and pressed the Americans to establish what became NATO. The U.S., on the other hand, was only prepared to drive this if Europeans agreed to put behind the nationalist arguments that had produced the 1914-1918 war.

The EU was created to bind Europeans together with economic ties that would prevent the economic nationalist wars that had caused so much appalling damage in Europe and beyond. Internationally, Lord Patten added, peace and a reduction in barriers to trade helped ensure that countries in Asia also took advantage of the globalization of markets, and so-called tiger economies emerged in Japan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and, eventually, China.

Russia In the first stages of this post-World War II world order, Lord Patten continued, there were two “holdouts” from what was happening elsewhere. Firstly: the Soviet Union and “Russia’s empire in Eastern Europe” created by the Warsaw Pact. In the 1970s and 1980s, that empire became unsustainable for Russia, for economic and demographic reasons, and because of the Soviet Union’s intervention in Afghanistan. Lord Patten explained that “when the Russian empire in Europe went, it went very quickly.” Describing the speed at which the communist state collapsed in East Germany at the end of 1989, Lord Patten noted “all swept away into the ashcan of history, as usually happens with tyrannies, which look as though they’re there forever, until they’re not.”

In the decades since the fall of the Soviet Union, Lord Patten explained how Russia, emerging from the communist era with a very weak economy, was gradually taken over by “a gang of thieving businessmen and the KGB.” These oligarchs, he said, “raped the economy in their own interest, particularly the minerals and energy.” The Russia of 2022, he continued, is “a clapped out economy with appalling demographic problems,” including a high death rate among men and a low fertility rate that preoccupies President Putin. In terms of economic prosperity per capita, Britain, France, and Germany are significantly stronger.

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Despite these circumstances, Lord Patten warned, “Russia has nuclear weapons, oil and gas, and attitude.” He described his first meeting with Vladimir Putin, a memory that, for Lord Patten, exemplified the Russian leader’s duplicity and hubris. In 1999, Lord Patten was attending a EURussia summit in Finland, at which Putin, then acting prime minister, was the Russian delegate.

Lord Patten and others asked him about reports of explosions in Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, which was then in the hands of Chechen separatists. Putin claimed that Chechen leaders had been holding an arms bazaar when some weapons exploded and described the incident as an “own goal” for Russia. Other delegates at the summit had received news that Grozny had been attacked by Russian gunships. “Putin was lying,” Lord Patten explained, “but he also knew that we knew that he was lying.” He described the Russian president as “a pathological liar, and, as we can see today, that is still true.”

Despite this leadership and corruption, Lord Patten lamented, “Russia went on supplying us with oil and gas and we went on kidding ourselves that they were becoming more like us.” This attitude has persisted despite a litany of violations of the prevailing world order by Russia, including the flattening of Grozny and war against Chechen guerillas, the invasion of Georgia by Russian troops in 2008, and the takeover of Crimea in 2014, to name just a few. And now, the invasion of Ukraine. “How does it end?” Lord Patten asked. “How will we deal with Putin when it ends?”

China In contrast to Russia’s problems, Lord Patten explained, the People’s Republic of China— the other “holdout”—has experienced extraordinary growth in the last forty years. For Patten, this rejuvenation of China stands as one of the most significant transformations of his lifetime, one that has taken place since the death of Mao Zedong, the chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from 1943 to 1976. After Mao died and China rejoined the world economy, its economy “took off like a rocket.” Between 1979 and 2018, China’s GDP grew by 9.5% every year. It now

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leads the world in the manufacturing and exportation of goods and the importation of energy.

Lord Patten is quick to point out, however, that China’s engagement with the global economy rests entirely on self-serving objectives. “China talks about economic relations,” he explained, “as a winwin situation—we win, and then we win again.”

Careful to distinguish between the Chinese people and the CCP, Lord Patten explained that he views Chinese affairs through the prism of Hong Kong. In the immediate aftermath of Britain’s withdrawal in 1997, China largely kept to the agreement that had been reached by international treaty at the UN, which said that Hong Kong could go on with its own way of life for the next fifty years, following the principle of “one country, two systems.” For a time, this balance seemed to work, albeit imperfectly, and Hong Kong largely remained the same place as it had been during Lord Patten’s governorship: a great international trading city.

The presidency of Xi Jinping, which began in 2012, transformed this relationship with Hong Kong and reversed many of the democratic changes that had taken place in China during the postMao period. Lord Patten explained that Xi has restored the cult of personality, reverence for Mao, and the CCP’s goal of imposing authority in every part of society and every corner of the Chinese state. Lord Patten outlined a number of reasons for this embrace of authoritarianism, including the CCP’s concern about how globalization and mass migration from the Chinese countryside into the cities would affect their ability to control the population and how the internet and new technology might affect the surveillance state. One of the reasons the CCP is so tough on Hong Kong, Lord Patten argued, is that it represents all of these apparent weaknesses. As one example, he explained that Hong Kong is the only place in China where it is permissible to memorialize the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989—in an annual vigil and with sculptures in University Square, acts of remembrance that the CCP describes as “historical recidivism.”

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This shift in Hong Kong policy, for Lord Patten, reflects that China should not be trusted to keep international rules. It is one of a number of broken agreements. In response to China’s militarization of the South China Sea atolls, for example, Barack Obama said that the Chinese had “bent or broken the terms at every turn.” In terms of a reasonable policy toward China, Lord Patten said that China should be part of international agreements but must be called out when they breach them and be made to pay a price. He identified the same delusion on the part of the world’s democracies toward China as toward Russia, particularly around the idea that fostering economic and technological growth would produce unstoppable, eventual progress to democracy.

There is a fundamental incompatibility of views, Lord Patten argued, between China and Western liberal democracies, for example, on such issues as the trade in body parts, forced sterilizations and abortions in Xinjiang, press freedom, and the treatment of Tibet and Taiwan. He warned: “It’s delusional to think that political change will come to China as a result of us doing trade with them.”

Realism and cooperation Lord Patten reflected that his identification of incompatibilities lead some people to think that he is an old-style Cold War warrior. “But,” he said, “what I’m asking for is a bit of realism and international cooperation by liberal democracies either in dealing with Russia or in dealing with China.” He urged Western nations to refuse to accept the Russian and Chinese narrative that the West is in decline, and to bear in mind the massive challenges—demographic, environmental, and economic—facing those countries. Lord Patten’s view is that while there are problems in the West, there are much bigger problems in China and Russia and “we should stop being so nervous about how we deal with them.” He urged diplomacy and courtesy, but also that “we should be very firm about what we believe in.”

Lord Patten concluded with one cautionary note: while he hoped that Britain and its allies around the world were all invested in the claim that “democratic principles always ultimately

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triumph over any authoritarian or totalitarian state,” he has concerns about the present day Republican party in the U.S. Lord Patten described the ways in which some members of that party have questioned the validity of the 2020 presidential election and made charges of voter fraud. He warned that these strategies could expose the U.S. to accusations of hypocrisy for undermining liberal democracy at home while calling for its promotion and protection around the globe. Lord Patten said, “I owe the fact that I have lived in decades of peace and prosperity largely [to] the United States,” and expressed his fervent wish that his children and grandchildren will live in a world with the same decency and standards, embodied in “international cooperation” and “dealing with people on the basis of values and not greed.”

To conclude his lecture, Lord Patten quoted the Spanish poet Antonio Machado with a line cited by U.S. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger in Diplomacy (1994). Translated into English, Machado wrote “wanderer, there is no road, the road is made by walking.” In a democracy, Lord Patten urged, we all have a responsibility to forge these roads. He called on “those younger than somebody born in 1944” to take up their particular responsibility to make the road better than the one made by his own generation. “And that,” Lord Patten concluded, “is the way we’ll get a better world order.”

The Barrett Family Lecture Series was established through the generous support of R. Stephen and Ruth Barrett. The initiative brings prominent leaders in the areas of business, politics, and the arts to the Notre Dame Global Gateways in Dublin and London to share their views on issues of major importance to the understanding of contemporary Europe with Notre Dame students and the wider community.

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