Power and values in European foreign policy

In democratic societies, we often like to think that we use our power for a higher purpose—like making the world a better place. Indeed, this has been an overriding principle of foreign policy for many of the most powerful western societies since the early nineteenth century. Policies aimed at fighting piracy, ending slavery, frustrating the schemes of dictatorships, and supporting democratic leaders, have a long and noble history. American presidents Woodrow Wilson, Harry Truman, Jonh F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, to varying degrees, all subscribed to the idea. British leaders, like George Canning, Viscount Palmserston, William Gladstone, Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher also thought the idea of an enlightened foreign policy was worth more than a pinch of salt. Tony Blair, the erstwhile British prime minister, possibly took the idea to its logical conclusion. As he told the U.S. Congress:

The spread of freedom is the best security for the free. It is our last line of defence and our first line of attack.

A values-based foreign policy has also been at the core of the enterprise of European unification. As early as 1941, one of the grand architects of European integration, Altiero Spinelli, argued in the Ventotene Declaration that a state cannot ignore the political constitution of its neighbours. And the more recent European Security Strategy even uses the phrase ‘A Secure Europe in a better world’ in its subtitle, as if the two automatically run together.

There is certainly a lot of evidence to support the so-called ‘democratic peace theory’. It is the closest thing that we have to an ‘iron law’ in the study of international relations. That is to say, democracies tend not to go to war with one another; no mature democratic state has ever attacked another; and lesser political conflict between democracies is less frequent. In short, the assumption follows that in order to make the world safe for our way of life, we must assertively spread our values as far and wide as we can.

But is this necessarily the case? Can a political community only be safer if the world itself is a better, liberal and more democratic place? Nicholas Spykman, one of my favourite geostrategists, suggests that this liberal approach is wrong. According to him, democracy and moral values do not ultimately matter when statesmen craft and execute foreign policy. Instead, what really matters is power—relative power. This is what he had to say in his magnum opus, America’s Strategy in World Politics, back in 1941:

The statesman who conducts foreign policy can concern himself with values of justice, fairness, and tolerance only to the extent that they contribute to or do not interfere with the power objective. They can be used instrumentally as moral justification for the power quest, but they must be discarded the moment their application brings weakness. The search for power is not made for the achievement of moral values; moral values are used to facilitate the attainment of power.

Let us be clear: Prof. Spykman is not arguing that statesmen should no longer try and make the international system less volatile. He is also not saying that democratic countries should not try to spread their advanced way of life abroad. Nor is he suggesting that governments should not provide aid or military assistance to other countries during times of conflict, tension or natural disaster or manmade difficulty. What he is saying, however, is that statesmen should pursue certain values and principles only if they do not damage the power and position of their own respective political community. States should therefore seek to acquire more power over other states, rather than attempting to diffuse their values overseas. This is because values, unless undergirded with power—like a strong military—cannot be protected if an adversary seeks to usurp them.

We Europeans would do well to bear this in mind today. Some of us are often too keen to forget how important military power actually is—and will remain for the foreseeable future. The current financial crisis may encourage many European governments to cut military spending even further, with the active support of the European people. But what will we do if a predatory regime emerges over the horizon? Point to ‘European values’ and issue a statement—and ask the nasty regime to be nice? In such an instance, as many societies have discovered previously, relying only on one’s values could turn out to be a house of cards.