The road to “civilisation”?
01 November 2003
Robert Cooper, is Director-General for External Affairs in the General Secretariat of the Council of the European Union in Brussels. He previously worked in the UK government's Cabinet Office as an adviser to Tony Blair, the Prime Minister. In April 2002 he wrote a controversial article, "Why we still need empires" in the Observer newspaper symbolically espousing the "barbarism" versus "civilisation" perspective.
In his new post in Brussels he returned to the fray in October with another article entitled "Civilise or die" in the Guardian (23.10.03). Nick Dearden, from War on Want, commented in a letter to the paper:
Should we not expect from an adviser to the EU's foreign policy chief Javier Solana a vision of a global economy that would overcome centuries of imperialism and lift the third world out of the poverty cycle?
In a later article, in the Brussels-based weekly European Voice (11.12.03), Cooper downplays the importance of solving world poverty. He says that "eliminating poverty and injustice will not eliminate terrorism" and that "of the two injustice may be the more important". To Cooper the problem is unstable states where "war breeds extremism, and out of extremism comes terrorism".
Any attack on "the state" is a terrorist attack on "legitimate authority" and "in this sense is an attack on civilisation". The idea that a people might seek to liberate themselves from an oppressive and authoritarian state is not on the agenda. "Terrorism must be fought by all means" including deception, pre-emptive actions, surveillance and eavesdropping.
"At times military force will be effective, as in Afghanistan", he writes. However, as Paul Flewers wrote to the Guardian from King's College, London, he "overlooks the fact that the US invasion failed to reconstruct the Afghan state". On Northern Ireland Cooper says that "terrorism has been reduced, perhaps even halted by using force within the limits of the law and by political negotiations". Such a view flies in the face of history, thirty years of conflict in Ireland were not resolved by force but - on the contrary - by a political settlement.
Of the struggles in Palestine and Sri Lanka he says that fanaticism and terrorism have "come out of hopeless wars" and such "unresolved conflicts are a source of danger to us, no matter where we live".
What makes "men (sic) free" is the imposition of "good laws and good armies (to quote Machiavelli)" an example of which is the European Union. The EU "can in some respects be likened to an empire" and the expansion to encompass central and eastern European countries "is a kind of regime change, but is it chosen, legitimate" representing the "spread of civilisation".
Could this, he asks, be a model for the Middle East with the USA/NATO imposing order and the EU providing aid and access to EU markets "traded against guarantees of good governance"?
Dominick Eustace, writing again to the Guardian, observed:
He has no conception of the terror felt by the powerless people who are bombarded. He sees no connection between "terrorism" and economic, physicla and cultural subjugation... Cooper refers to "Islamic extremism", but does not make any mention of other extremism in the area, or indeed, of the US righwing capitalist and Christian version.