What is a failed state? Not so long ago, when I was Britain’s Overseas Development Minister, and later European Commissioner for External Affairs, I would probably have tried to answer the question by pointing to specific examples, including several countries in Latin America and Africa.
I would have highlighted tribal conflicts, military coups, economic failure, extremes of poverty, and high mortality rates. I might have referred to the failure of more prosperous societies to ensure that globalization helped everyone and did not leave some communities trapped in deprivation. In addition, I would certainly have mentioned systems of government that had ceased to deliver what they were intended to do, and certainly what outside well-wishers hoped and assumed they would do.
By these latter criteria, one no longer needs to travel to Latin America or Africa to discover failure. Indeed, many of us in Britain worry that failure is increasingly evident within our own borders – which are soon to be clogged after Brexit – and particularly in the way the country is governed.
Britain’s system of government, much praised in the past, is based on parliamentary democracy and the institutions of pluralism that one would associate with an open society.
Voters elect individual members of parliament, who owe their constituents their best judgment about how to negotiate the predicaments of politics. MPs are not required to do what they are told by an alleged popular will – a system much favored by despots and demagogues. Instead, they are part of a system that owes much to the conservative political philosopher Edmund Burke, not to the French writer Jean-Jacques Rousseau. We have always preferred caution, compromise, and evolution to disruption and appeals to fleeting public passions.
The parties to which most MPs belong represent different strands of opinion. Yet by and large, debates have usually assumed a strong relationship between evidence and assertion. Facts might be interpreted in different ways, but they were not simply denied because they contradicted an ideological assertion. Dogmatism is a bad bedfellow to democracy. Experts can be challenged, of course, but until now, expertise was never seen as something the ruling establishment would use to bamboozle and obfuscate in pursuit of its aims.
In Britain, historically, government has been accountable to parliament, whose opinions it must respect and whose conventions it should follow. And a separate and independent judiciary guarantees the rule of law to which all, including ministers, are subject.
That is how Britain has run its national affairs: avoiding political extremism, achieving a self-adjusting balance between left and right, managing change over decades in peace and war, and making the transition from imperial power to middle-sized European country. By doing this without surrendering or diluting our values, we have won approval and praise around the world.
Sadly, things look very different today.
As a proportion of its electorate, Britain has fewer political activists than most other European countries. Yet these activists and other political partisans have recently acquired growing control over their parties’ policy direction and choice of leader.