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Speakers

Linda Melvern

Linda is the author of A People Betrayed. The Role of the West in Rwanda’s Genocide and Conspiracy to Murder The Rwandan Genocide. She is also a journalist.

Lord Clive Soley

Clive is an advocate of intervention and reform of the UN. He blogs as Lord of the Blogs.

Speaker from the Aegis Trust

The Aegis Trust is an NGO which calls for a duty to protect against genocide.

Chair

The meeting will be chaired by Phillip Spencer. Phil teaches at Kingston University and is a founder signatory of the Euston Manifesto.

A recent article critical of the Euston Manifesto is worth noticing for the principle of textual interpretation it makes use of: the principle, namely, that if the item before you — here, a document — doesn’t actually say what you need it to say for your critical purposes, never mind, invent something. The article is by David Clark and appears in the current issue of the New Statesman (where you’ll get one free hit). Clark starts off in not unfriendly terms:

There is… much in the manifesto with which to agree. Its belief in the intrinsic value of democracy reflects the left’s most enduring achievements. Its call for a humanitarian foreign policy is in the best traditions of internationalism. Even its scathing criticism of sections of the anti-war left for abandoning these values in favour of a vulgar anti-imperialism is substantially justified. Western guilt and the doctrine that my enemy’s enemy is my friend have produced some truly ugly sentiments.

So what’s the ‘but’. The ‘but’ is that like the early American neoconservatives we are leftists who condemn the stance of others on the left — ‘a journey that led most of them [the neocons] eventually to abandon the left for good’. And Clark goes on:

The question is whether supporters of the Euston Manifesto are destined to follow a similar trajectory. There are good reasons for suspecting that they might.

That’s the first step: our imagined future is a mark against us. The next step is the ‘irresistible logic’ underlying a defence of liberal principles (glossed, this, by Clark in war-of-civilizations terms, though these aren’t the terms of the manifesto itself). For that defence ‘sits uneasily with a tough critique of [the West’s] economic and social structures, and the tension is hard to sustain’.

The neoconservatives resolved this contradiction by dispensing with the critique, and there are clues in the Euston Manifesto that point the same way.

OK, you still with it? Our future is against us, us Eustonians, even though it hasn’t happened yet, and so is the logical tension Clark has proposed — though, strangely, the same tension is not held to threaten his own political future. Anyway, what are the clues that we Eustonians will go, in Clark’s imagined future, the way of the American neocons? These:

There are vague and slightly ritualistic expressions of concern about social injustice and global inequality, but nowhere are they confronted with the kind of passion that is devoted to attacking those considered guilty of appeasing terrorism by criticising western policy — nor is any attempt made to identify their cause.

The Euston Manifesto sees the inequality generated by globalisation as some sort of inexplicable mishap; genuine progressives are clear that its origins lie in the uneven distribution of global power that underpins the free-market policies of the Washington consensus. The manifesto’s failure to grapple with this problem, or even acknowledge that it exists, robs it of whatever radical potential it may have contained.

Got that? What we do say about social injustice and global inequality is ritualistic and it’s not passionate enough, according to David Clark, arbiter of passion levels. And what we don’t say, entirely passionless because we don’t say it — that global inequalities are ‘some sort of inexplicable mishap’ — this suffices for him to know where the manifesto and its supporters are going.

There’s only one small drawback to the whole production: that the people who produced the Euston Manifesto think inequality and the maldistribution of power, whether nationally or globally, are merely contingent and inexplicable, with no structural basis in the economic relations of contemporary societies, is a fiction of Clark’s making. It comes from the sucking it out of your thumb school of textual analysis. Not a great school.

Norman Geras is Professor Emeritus of Government at the University of Manchester

The answer in the discussion was that the Eustonians are not a political party and therefore they do not have to have a policy on everything. Nor do they have to fight for the political centre from within the system — though some of them spend a great deal of their time doing exactly that and are probably signed up to Compass. Others in the group are not Labour Party members or even supporters but they belong to the left, the ‘corpse’ that Martin identifies. I would suggest that while he is right to point out some holes in the document, he misunderstands our intentions as I understand them. Where he talks of a corpse and the importance of the centre, I would say rather that the nature of politics and political debate has changed. As he himself emphasizes, these are different times. The nature of that difference is that party politics and party programmes are only one way in which the national and international conversation about politics can take place at any time. The world is now full of conversations, often shouting matches, taking place virtually. Through these new media tribes of many kinds are formed and take collective actions. The Eustonians are a political representation of this kind of organic development.

Some of the Euston Manifesto Group may disagree with this, but there is also an argument to be made that the progressive consensus, to which I am committed, is not necessarily best served by a Labour Party in power, but rather by the winning of broader political arguments in the policy-making community and in the minds of the general public. Radical political change is made permanent by its incorporation into the operating consensus, whichever party is in power. It is the shape and content of that consensus which determines the quality of life in this country and the influence of this country abroad. Values of liberal internationalism informed by human rights and egalitarianism, the aspiration of eradicating social exclusion at home and fighting terrorism everywhere, can be held and articulated by people from different political backgrounds. The gradual shift from allegiance to a particular party to allegiance to certain core values that has characterized politics over the last few decades means that the nature of coalitions and the content of alliances that can now emerge may surprise us all. The Euston Manifesto represents a step along one of these new roads. For me it should be broad in its appeal.

Martin describes us as the pro-war left. Many of the group were and remain anti-war and have a range of views on the issues discussed in the Manifesto. What unites us is a belief that developments since 9/11 represent part of a broadly based assault on democracy and that this assault has to be challenged, fought and defeated. Things like the Euston Manifesto are small steps in this larger fight. To an extent the Eustonians have accomplished their mission. The volume of debate on the web and the stirrings of coverage in the mainstream media mean that this alternative left position will now resonate as a recognizable one that should be represented more prominently in future. But most of all people who agree with the broad thrust of what we are saying have a sense of being connected to others. Martin Kettle sums up very well what the message of the Euston Manifesto was for me when he writes:

There is a lot to relate to in what the manifesto says here. It is right about the core things — democracy, liberty, universality. But it is also right about the immoral excuses sometimes offered on behalf of reactionary terrorist actions under the “my enemy’s enemy must be my friend” rubric; right too about the disproportionate indignation about unjustifiable acts on the western side as compared with similar acts on the anti-western side; about the susceptibility towards anti-semitism in some discussion of Middle-Eastern issues; about the numbskull dishonesty of the left about its own crimes and failures; and about the need to champion, not scorn, the principle of international humanitarian intervention.

Perhaps, in closing, it is worth making the point that our ambitions and egos were not as grandiose as many of our critics seem to think. In getting together, producing a document and using the resources of the internet to publish it, we did not assume that we would change the world or that the document would be a blueprint for transforming society. We hoped we would provoke debate, create a space for like-minded people to meet virtually and in person, and have some influence on public discussion. In ‘The essay as form’, the usually unreadable Theodor Adorno makes the following point, which captures for me something of what the Euston project is about:

[The essay] starts not with Adam and Eve but with what it wants to talk about; it says what occurs to it in that context and stops when it feels finished rather than when there is nothing to say. Its concepts are not derived from first principles.

Maybe we should have called our manifesto an ‘essay’!

Brian Brivati is Professor of Contemporary History, Director MA Human Rights and Field Leader BA Human Rights at Kingston University, London.