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MR. MARTIN WALKER
Chief International
Correspondent, UPI
LUNCHEON SPEAKER
Saturday, September 28, 2002
I am here in the role of the chap who comes along at the end of the circus parade carrying the bucket and the shovel to close the events and to clear up after the elephants have gone by. This is a grand old tradition of journalism. After all, it’s not widely known, but journalists share a patron saint with court jesters, those medieval fellows who used to get dressed up in bangles, beads, and funny robes and had a license to tell power, to tell the kings and monarchs, uncomfortable truths, so long as it was wrapped up in a certain entertaining context. In that sense I guess we journalists are also like that old slave who was always put behind the emperor in the chariots of Roman generals and emperors and dignitaries as they were given a formal triumph parade through the streets of Rome. It was the job of this slave to whisper into the ear of the emperor, “Remember, you are only a man.” That, in a sense, is what our job is still today. To remind power that along with it comes responsibility and that responsibility should come with a sense of humility.
After all, there is this absolutely symbiotic relationship between journalists and power. Sometimes it takes curious forms. One of the classic ways I came across was as I was reading a history of Napoleon’s hundred days, when Napoleon broke loose from the island of Elba, where he was in exile, and came back to France, toppled the monarchy again and for 100 days, until the Battle of Waterloo, threatened once again to rule the whole of Europe. I would like to read you the headlines from the official French newspaper of the day, Le Moniteur.
On March 21, just as the news came that Napoleon had escaped from his exile in Elba, the headline read, “The Beast Is Out of Its Cage.” March 24: “The Corsican Bandit Has Landed in France.” March 26: “The Usurper Is Pursued by Loyal Forces,” and the sub-headline was “Marshal May Vows to Bring the Usurper Back in a Cage.” March 29: “Rebel Troops Take Lille.” April 2: “Napoleon Marches on Paris.” April 4: “The Emperor at Versailles.” April 9: “His Imperial Majesty Will Enter Paris Today.” Well, that was, I think, a rather gifted sub-editor drafting those headlines, and we know for a fact he survived and continued at his job after Napoleon was defeated.
But it’s a fact that power and journalism have always been uneasy bedfellows. The relationship is symbiotic. Governments, the powerful, the wealthy, the rich, the gifted need the media to tell the world what they want to know, to portray the image they want to present. And we need them because they, their decisions, their concerns are the very warp and woof of journalism. But both journalists and the powerful—the celebrities, the rich, the famous—we’re all trapped in the context of our times. If there has been one thing that has struck me very forcibly over the last 20, 30 years of my career in journalism, it is the speed with which that context can change. Most of us in this room grew up within a very clear context of the Cold War. Those who were in journalism had to learn a certain kind of vocabulary to deal with it. We had to learn about arms control. We had to learn about throw weights. We had to learn about missiles. We had to learn about the international summits. That structure of the Cold War very much defined the world from 1945 until the fall of the Soviet Union.
For the past 10 years we have lived in a rather amorphous period that we could only call the post–Cold War era. I suppose its characteristics were that we moved away from a concern with the geopolitics that had dominated the Cold War to a new concern with geo-economics, as the world went through this phenomenal boom in the 1990s and as the United States launched upon an extraordinary, headlong period of growth. It was a period of free trade, free markets, a period of an apparently ever-spreading democracy in Latin America, in the former Soviet states, an extraordinary hopeful period. It’s a period that’s now come to an end. I think it came to an end on September 11 of last year. The tectonic plates of history have moved. We are now in a new era.
It’s very hard to define what that new era is. For President Bush it is the era of the war on terrorism. For some of our Arab colleagues it is the era of the new crusades, as indeed one of the editorials said in Al Hayat only last week. It is certainly an era in which we in the media have learned that we have to take religion, and the forces behind a religion, a great deal more seriously than we had in the past. I know that my friend and colleague Arnaud de Borchgrave was expanding on this theme yesterday and making the point that one of the great stories that we had missed, almost all of us, was the surge in radical Islam over the last 10 years.
I myself have written in a number of foreign policy quarterlies; indeed, in the current issue of the World Policy Journal, there is an essay suggesting that this new era is perhaps best defined as the era of the American virtual empire, because I, for one, cannot swallow the idea that we can actually call America a real empire. The contrast between the role of Augustus Caesar, the Rome of Nero, and the temporary chief magistrate of the United States, elected for a maximum of eight years and ruling within the constraints of a Constitution, a legal system, and an elected Congress that has control over the budget, means this is not Rome; it’s something different. Moreover, unlike the British Empire, America does not believe in rule. If there was one defining statement about the nature of the British Empire it was from Lord Palmerston, one of its most distinguished prime ministers, who said that the British Empire is about trade without rule where possible and trade with rule when necessary.
America to its credit, despite its power, has not been about rule. Indeed, half of the weight of America in the world is of “soft power,” in Joseph Nye’s phrase. Soft power makes other people want the things that you want. I recall very well from my time in Moscow as a correspondent in the 1980s that the real currency in the black markets of Moscow was Levi jeans. It was cassette tapes of American rock ‘n’ roll, videotapes of Dynasty and Dallas, and even Jane Fonda exercise tapes. This was the soft power of America: bringing up the dreams that other people found they wanted to share.
But if there is one clear aspect of this new world we find ourselves in, it’s that it’s a world within which traditional concepts of national sovereignty are becoming increasingly problematic. In a sense, this has been happening since the end of World War II, when a number of nation-states, including the U.S., found themselves prepared to share one of the characteristic definitions of sovereignty, the right to declare war and peace, with a number of allies within the NATO alliance.
It is also a world where America has learned increasingly to realize that it does not have untrammeled sovereignty over global financial affairs. It struck me as remarkable that the warm body of global financial governors that we have, the International Monetary Fund, was set up as a body in which Americans were not only in a minority but could be outvoted by the Europeans. But this kind of occlusion of traditional national sovereignty is gathering pace. We see it in the way that now over a hundred countries have joined the World Trade Organization, including China. That is a place where America has subordinated some of its national sovereignty and agreed to submit to the arbitration of WTO organizations. America, however, is reluctant for a whole number of reasons to share any of its sovereignty in many other areas, in particular in the field of international law. This has, I think, come to be one of the great defining issues of what our new era is going to be: the degree to which traditional proud nation- states are going in the future to be prepared to share that sovereignty, to pool that sovereignty for wider purposes.
One of the cleverest men in the British diplomat service, a chap called Robert Cooper, wrote an essay a few years ago in which he tried to define the nature of the New World Order. He said that there are really now three kinds of states in the world. There are pre-modern states, like Iraq, perhaps like Saudi Arabia, like Afghanistan. States that had not yet really got, not just the organization of a nation-state and a government, but also were in some way short of the broad popular legitimacy that has underpinned the nation-state.
Then there were modern states, in the sense that they followed that definition of the nation-state that Europeans have devised over the last three centuries. Cooper has defined Israel and the United States as two of the classic modern states. They have national sovereignty, they have broad political legitimacy within themselves, and they were highly, highly reluctant to share much of that sovereignty with others.
He found that the most intriguing aspect of the New World Order was the number of states which he defined as post-modern: states that were prepared to move on beyond traditional concepts of their sovereignty to share influence, power, and authority. Classically the European Union is one of those states. I am a citizen of Britain, which is one of the current 15 members of the European Union, which is about to enlarge to become 23, 24, and 25 in what’s going to be, I think, one of the most dramatic stories of the coming decade.
But that distinction between the pre-modern state, the modern state, and the post-modern state surely lies at the very heart of the current crisis that we all face, that is, the crisis of Iraq, the crisis of the war on terrorism, and the crisis of what some Arab colleagues call the “new crusades.” As you know, several of the European countries have voiced considerable concerns about American policy. Britain, perhaps more of a nation-state than most, has stood square beside the United States. The enemies appear to be the pre-modern states. So in this pre-modern, modern, and post-modern state order I think we do see some defining contours of the kind of world we inhabit and of the kind of world that we in the media are going to have to cover.
Because if there is one thing, beyond anything else, that defines our work, it is the context in which it takes place. It’s our job not just to report the news but to explain it, to put it into a context. Not just to report but to analyze and also to become the forum of and for informed debate. Now the context in which we are working has already, since 9/11, changed quite dramatically. As I was coming here today I was scribbling down some of the things that have changed already. For example, we now have for the first time a genuine global financial-monitoring system. Whether that system was set up initially to control terrorist funds or to monitor potentially terrorist money transfers doesn’t matter. We now have in place a global system in which financial privacy for people is going to become almost impossible to maintain.
We have also got an entirely new context, particularly in this country, for civil liberties. The Washington Post in an editorial 10 days ago suggested that three of the six items of the Bill of Rights were now in jeopardy as a result of some of the security measures that had been taken. We have also seen since 9/11 some fundamental changes on the international scene. For example, we have seen Russia make what I think is a historic and strategic choice to throw in its lot with the West. Putin is no longer objecting to NATO’s enlargement, no longer objecting to national missile defense, no longer objecting to an American military presence in Central Asia. Indeed, in many ways Russia is supporting and has now become an associate member of the NATO alliance. This, for somebody like me, who spent some years in the old Soviet Union, is an extraordinary transformation.
But then, so is the emergence of what looks to be a long-standing American military presence in Central Asia. I have written for UPI that it is already clear that the real result of the Gulf War of 1991 was to establish a permanent U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf. A presence which in itself has had consequences, since it has been that military presence that has been most cited by Osama bin Laden as the springboard for his actions. Now we see the American military presence expanding into Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Pakistan. We see at the Pakistani air base, Jacobabad, Pentagon purchasing missions, buying up 40,000 tons of cement for building new permanent barracks with centralized air conditioning, which suggests an American presence will be there for a considerable time.
We have also seen the emergence of an increasingly close American-Indian alliance. Indeed as we speak, in the Indian Ocean the biggest ever joint Indian-American naval exercise is getting underway. It seems to me that with the long-standing tensions and rivalries between China and India, what we are now seeing is the beginnings of a kind of a new balance-of-power struggle in Asia, with India deciding to line up alongside the Americans and the Americans deciding that China’s growth perhaps needs a certain amount of light containment to constrain it or keep it along acceptable lines.
Equally in Europe, and I have just come back from spending a month in Germany covering their elections, we now see Germany’s opposition to the Bush administration’s policy in Iraq throwing into some question the future of the Atlantic alliance. We also see another great question mark emerging over America’s traditional alliances in the Middle East, not least in Saudi Arabia. Five years ago, even three years ago, most of us writing about Saudi Arabia would have focused upon the fact that it contains the world’s largest supply of oil reserves. Increasingly, we are going to focus on the fact that 20 years ago there were 7 million Saudis with a per capita income of $25,000 a year. Today there are 16 million Saudis with a per capita income of $8,000 a year. That in itself implies essential transformation, if not a revolution.
These new priorities upon our media agenda are all things that have leapt into prominence, leapt into new dramatic clear shape as a result of 9/11. There will be many more of them to come. It is going to be our job and our privilege to try and write about them and to try and explain them to our readers, to our customers and also, like that Roman slave, to try and tell truth to power.
One final point: we in the media are extraordinarily fortunate. We’ve got a highly challenging job, but I think it is the most rewarding job in the world. I wouldn’t be anything else than a journalist. And frankly, as a journalist, I wouldn’t be anywhere else right now but here in Washington, D.C., having a ringside seat at the building of what’s going to be, for better or worse, a new world order.
There is one final thought I would leave you with. There will be many in the coming years who will be trying to make journalists take sides, who will be trying to make journalists say, “You are either with us, or against us.” Trying to make journalists say, “You must support one side or the other of this debate. You must take up arms on one side or the other of this new crusade.” I disagree with them. That’s not our job. Our job is to be as objective as we can, as to be as fair as we can to our ultimate, ultimate arbiter, that is, to the reader. But there is one thing upon which we can make no compromise. There is one area where we as journalists can’t be neutral. We need and we live by a free press. A free press is not just the right to publish what we want and report what we want in our newspapers. A free press is also the ability to travel freely, to interview freely, the ability to listen to many different points of view, to find as many different sources as we can. A free press in that sense is the spearhead of a much broader kind of freedom. A free press is fundamentally about respect for the opinions of others. Respect for the opinions of others requires a much broader set of freedoms, and on that, I for one, will not compromise, and I don’t think any of us in this business can afford to.
I’ll close by simply saying that I want to record my own personal debt to other journalists around the world who have always helped me in my own work and my sense of awe and respect for many journalists who have been working in the most trying and difficult of circumstances: working inside authoritarian regimes, working inside quasi-feudal states, working inside systems where a free press simply doesn’t exist. There has always been great journalistic talent there, and it is our job to support it. Bear in mind that many of our colleagues, last year 37 of them, have been killed in the course of duty. It is a great profession we are in. It’s a noble profession. It is also one facing one of its biggest ever challenges. I hope that we do a better job than that headline writer of Le Monteur back in France in 1815.
Thank you very much.
