News from the New Party

Tuesday, April 17, 2007

Universal values

Hilary Benn, the International Development Secretary, has made a speech in New York explicitly rejecting the use of the term "War on Terror", on the grounds that this actually encourages terrorists to believe they are part of a wider and noble cause. This echoes recent comments made by Democratic Party politicians in the United States, keen to distance themselves from the policies and preoccupations of the Bush administration. With apologies to Basil Fawlty, the new position is, put simply "Don't mention the war."

It is hard to view this shift on both sides of the Atlantic as an attempt to forget the past and return to the familiar, pre-9/11 certainties. In an interview with the Radio 4 PM programme on Monday, Hilary Benn was keen to claim that freedom, democracy and human rights are "universal values", rather than Western values, inexplicably citing India and Indonesia as examples. While India has been a shining example of a more-or-less stable democracy for nearly sixty years, Indonesia has had a much more chequered history; and while both countries have rich and ancient cultures of great value, neither can truly be said to have been conspicuously democratic until quite recent times.

Insofar as Hilary Benn is reflecting the socialist fantasy of universalism (and setting out his stall for the upcoming Labour Party Deputy Leadership campaign), we are provided here with a glimpse of the change of direction which the post-Blair Labour Party is likely to take in foreign affairs. It is safe to say that this glimpse does not offer much cause for encouragement.

There are, sadly, no universal values of democracy, freedom and human rights. While most countries pay lip-service to these concepts, the interpretation of what they actually mean differs markedly from one to another. If there are universal values at all, they are rather different in scope; we can safely say that the poor and oppressed of all nations adhere to a similar set of universal values (or at least, aspirations): they seek the basic means to survive, food and shelter, and they hope to be spared from disease, natural disaster and violence. Western concepts of freedom and democracy, and even human rights, are luxuries that they will do without if their fundamental needs are met. Furthermore, all tyrants know this.

The paradox is that the success of Western civilisation shows that only by granting freedom, democracy and the rule of law (from which respect for human rights will grow as a matter of course), in other words by the application of Western Enlightenment values, can these fundamental necessities of life be guaranteed to the mass of people. The values which the world needs are not universal values, they are Western values.

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