"For the first time in more than 200 years we are moving into a world not wholly dominated by the West. If we want to influence this environment rather than be held to ransom by it, and if we want to take hold of some of the worrying features of globalisation, then real, practical multilateralism is a strategic necessity...."
Whether or not the desire of major Western powers and their governing class to hold onto, reclaim and expand global dominance can be seen by anyone else in the world as a necessity, the plan is decidedly strategic.
Unlike the maunderings of obscure academics redesigning the world and its national divisions in the safety of their own minds and plush chairs in university libraries, the pronouncement in The Times appeared there because its authors are anything but abstract theoreticians, historians or political philosophers.
They are major architects and ruthless implementers of the order they advocate, both tested in the post-Cold War or as they themselves may portray it post-modern laboratory that was the Balkans in the 1990s.
Lord George Robertson, former British Defense Secretary and still life-time peer and Baron of Port Ellen, was Secretary General of NATO from 1999-2004 succeeding Javier Solana, who has since gone on to become the High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy and the Secretary General of both the Council of the European Union and the Western European Union. In effect, the European Union's collective foreign minister.
Paddy Ashdown was international High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina from September 2002 to May 2006, ruling with a brazen arbitrariness, highhandedness and ferocity that earned him the informal title of a former age, viceroy, one he arguably came by legitimately both because his father had been an officer in the British colonial service in India and because Ashdown fils' mission and style were not only evocative of the past colonial era but were also emblematic of its current revival.
Nearly four years ago the International Commission on the Balkans, founded by among other institutions the German Marshall Fund of the United States, "issued a scathing critique of EU and UN policies in the Balkans.
"The commission asserts that democracy has been stifled in Bosnia 'by the coercive authority' of Paddy Ashdown, the EU's high representative.
"The international representatives, the commission says, 'dabble in social engineering but are not held accountable when their policies go wrong. If Europe's neocolonial rule becomes further entrenched, it will encourage economic discontent....'" (International Herald Tribune, April 29, 2005)
As though to reward him for the above, a year ago Ashdown was being touted as a successor to his father's former bosses on the Indian subcontinent, to wit what the press at the time referred to as "super envoy" to Afghanistan, and which one British newspaper described in these rhapsodic words:
"The proposed role would see Lord Ashdown being charged with uniting the efforts of both Nato and the UN in Afghanistan. Nato officials are understood to support his candidacy for a job with exceptional power."
(The Telegraph, December 6, 2007)
The Afghan government was less enthusiastic than Ashdown's claque in the Western press and the position was not given him, thereby demonstrating the 'pre-modern' make-up and temperament of the Afghan people, the adjective to be explained later.
What Ashdown epitomized to the Afghans, whether or not their government was aware of the antecedents, was the 'post-modern' position of former British diplomat and Cardinal Richelieu to Tony Blair's Louis XVIII in matters of foreign affairs, Robert Cooper.
The grey eminence in question is the author of two books, The Post-Modern State and the World Order (2000) and The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-First Century (2003), and contributed a version of the first to the collection Re-Ordering the World: The Long-Term Implications of September 11 (2002).
Cooper has been characterized as the father of the "new liberal imperialism" and was Tony Blair's Special Representative in Afghanistan after the invasion of 2001 for a brief period.
Like Robertson and Ashdown, he played a role in the enforcement as well the elaboration of rationalizations of imperial strategies and policies.
His first book, The Post-Modern State and the World Order, trifurcated the world's nations into pre-modern, modern and post-modern states; in no essential manner different in substance if superficially in style from those of his colonialist forebears in dividing the peoples of the world into civilized and uncivilized nations and cultures.
Variations of this worldview have resurfaced throughout the West after the end of the Cold War, and the new international order which followed permitted the major Western powers to dispense with halfhearted vows to respect the newly freed majority of humanity, often with genuine cultures far older and more venerable than those of their past colonial masters and the latter's North American allies.
