Applied Liberalism: Political Challenges for Liberalism in the New Century
Speech by Graham Watson, member of the European Parliament at the workshop of the Council of Asian Liberals and Democrats (CALD), Penang, Malaysia, 27 August 2004

A) Applied Liberalism

I have been asked to say a little about political challenges for liberalism at the national, regional and international level in this new century. This is a fairly challenging brief for a fifteen-minute speech but I thought that I could introduce our discussion by making a few remarks about what I see as the key battlegrounds for liberalism in the twenty-first century. Inevitably, as a European politician I am strongest offering a European perspective, but I have deliberately chosen to speak about the challenges that I think liberals face everywhere they are in government or aspire to be.

I see the political challenge for liberalism everywhere as being one of what we might call 'applied liberalism'. More has been written about the political theory of liberalism than any other political philosophy. This morning we did some work on defining what we think liberalism is and is not and we returned to a set of broad ideas which would be echoed by liberals in most times and most places: the freedom of the individual, civil and political rights protected by law, open markets, tolerance of diversity secular government protection for the weak and the dispossessed. But these are abstractions, not political actions. And politics is about political action. Applied liberalism means transforming these ideals into workable politics.

Towards the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, Liberalism became a concrete political program in Europe and elsewhere. People began electing liberal politicians rather than just reading liberal philosophers. Liberalism was forced to become applied liberalism. Its ideals of human freedom were reshaped by the real world. For the first time it dealt with the poor, and the freedom of the poor. It dealt with the rights and the freedom of women. It looked at the people of the European colonies and had to answer for their freedom, or lack of it. Liberalism came to understand that where human potential is denied, through poverty, or poor education, or fear, there is only a caricature of freedom. Applied liberalism quickly came to see freedom - as Amartya Sen would put it - as development. As the freeing of human potential.

B) A Formula, not a Blueprint

One of the lessons I have learnt from working alongside liberal colleagues in Europe and meeting liberal colleagues throughout Asia and North America is that liberalism is a formula, not a blueprint. Liberals are always trying to balance freedom and fairness, emancipation and empowerment, to achieve the greatest measure of freedom and opportunity for each individual, and this can mean different things in different places. Scandinavian liberals, with their lumbering social democratic states, are likely to be tax-cutters, whereas British or Canadian liberals are just as likely to be defending greater investment in public services.

Liberals everywhere are trying to work out the best way to make government tolerant of social or religious diversity, but there is no one single way of achieving that.

Free markets are important tools when they work well, but they can fail in any one of a thousand ways, and effective liberal government means recognising and adapting to those failures, many of which are often due to local differences or preferences that must be respected. Again, there is no blueprint. Just the formula of freedom and fairness. That is the challenge of applied liberalism.

I think we can strip applied liberalism down to a few basics. The first has to do with the need to make political power accountable, the second has to do with breaking a long habit in modern politics and learning to see people rather than states.

C) Accountable Power

Liberalism began in the defence of the individual from the power of the state, or the majority, or simply other powerful individuals. Liberalism has always tried to make power accountable, first by ensuring that power rests in laws and constitutions and institutions, not individual people. Then, in the twentieth century, by making those institutions subject to democratic control.

A world of law and common values and multilateral institutions is the only effective way of ensuring that power respects the weak. It is easy to mock the failures of the United Nations - until you consider the alternative. Whatever you think of current US policy in the Middle East, the snub dealt to the United Nations by two of the world's most powerful democracies undermined not just the UN but the idea that we live in a world of rules at all.

Another example: last year in Europe, the credibility of the eurozone suffered a heavy blow when France and Germany decided they would break the eurozone's rules on fiscal discipline and maintain steep public deficits. These were rules they had made themselves - in fact Germany was their chief architect. As large states and political heavyweights there was nothing to stop them, just as there was nothing to stop the United States invading Iraq. But the broken rules are not easily mended, and the precedent has been set.

This applies also in areas like free trade. Rich states often speak as if free trade were a deeply held principle. But they do so in one breath and defend their agricultural subsidies and tariff barriers in the next, and we are left with the same sense that the rules are for the weak, but not for the strong. The fact that the Doha round has now been relaunched on the back of serious European and US commitments to end this hypocrisy is to be welcomed. But the poor need action not words.

In a world of strangers we rely on common values. Even the strongest states must ultimately fear a world without rules. The US neo-conservatives believed that American power was its own justification and its own sustenance. They were wrong. Whoever wakes up as President of the United States on November 3, we have to hope that the lessons of unilateralism have been learnt. We can't reshape the world with power alone. Even if we believe we are using power for the right reasons, the smaller our coalition of the willing, the greater by definition the coalition of the aggrieved we leave behind us.

Containing and influencing the large and powerful is a challenge for liberals everywhere. While strategies may no be the same in every case, Liberals know that success depends on vigilance, courage and peer pressure. In Canada, former Liberal Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau described living alongside the United States as being like “sleeping with elephant”. In Western Europe Liberals were long divided over how to deal wit the Moscow-based Communism which dominated the eastern half of our continent: it was the skill and the courage – and the patience – of former Liberal German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher which created the conditions for peaceful regime change. Here in Asia, Liberals in Taiwan or Hong Kong may not always see eye to eye with Liberals elsewhere on how to sow and nurture democracy in the PRC. But firm principles, courage and peer pressure will no doubt be lements in any successful strategy.

On the global level, maintaining these networks of common values and common expectations is a crucial challenge for liberals. We should be leading attempts to reform the United Nations so that it can respond better to the developing principle of humanitarian intervention. Some people are already suggesting that the crisis in Darfur in the Sudan may require a Kosovo-style intervention outside of UN auspices. It is hard to see how the UN can remain relevant if its political structure ensures that it cannot act in situations such as this. Strong and coherent regional voices from Europe and Asia are also needed to balance a wilful friend like the United States.

Liberals should also be pressing for democratic reform of the WTO and pressuring the governments of Europe and the United States to take the promise of free trade seriously.

We should be building a strong moral consensus around the ambitions of the Kyoto Protocol and pushing beyond them to stricter limits on carbon emissions.

We must give credibility and strength to the International Criminal Court so that national sovereignty can no longer guard the breakers of international humanitarian law.

Everywhere where power is exercised there need to be clear limits to its reach, and it is liberals who should be defining them. The war against terror has given governments a new and dangerous rationale for encroaching on civil liberties and limiting personal privacy - often in the name of our own safety. This year the European Parliament was forced to take European governments to the European Court of Justice when they authorised an agreement with the United States to share confidential data on European airline passengers travelling across the Atlantic. As in the US, many European governments have used the war on terror to fast-track untested biometric technology. If these things make us marginally safer - and there is not a lot of evidence that they do - they do so at a real cost in reduced privacy and liberty.

The war against terror leaves us afraid, and fearful people will listen to governments who tell them they can only be safer when government is more powerful. Benjamin Franklin said that the man who would surrender liberty for a little safety deserves neither. As liberals we need to be on our guard against claims that we can be more secure by being less free.

Even in our daily political lives, liberals should always be asking if institutions could be more open, and more accountable. I am a firm believer in the European Union, but I have spent my entire European political career working to make the institutions of the European Union more open and more democratic. The developing powers of the European Parliament mean that Europe now has a functioning and strong transnational democracy, but that Parliament could still connect to citizens better, as could the other institutions of the EU. Freedom of information is crucial in this regard. From the IMF and the World Bank down to our local village councils people should see and understand the decisions that influence their lives, and the people who make those decisions should be accountable for them.

D) People rather than States

The second insight of applied liberalism relates to people and states. Liberals do not accept that individuals in one country are fundamentally different from individuals in another. One of the consequences of seeing the world as a planet of individuals and families and local political communities is that national states begin to look very different. Our national identities seem a lot more arbitrary.

This is why liberals are both committed localists and instinctive internationalists. I serve in the world's first international democratic parliament, which is part of the world's most ambitious experiment in international government. I would argue that where the European Union is succeeding is where it sees people, not states. Pollution doesn't stop at national borders. Fundamental human rights cannot be different in France and Belgium. Spain cannot be secure against international terrorism if Portugal is not. A genuine free market in Europe means the rules we make for business cannot be different in Poland and Germany.

The state is still the key administrative unit in human affairs, but the time has come to detach it once and for all from the politics of identity. Liberals are right to be deeply suspicious of the conservative language of 'civilisations' or 'cultures'. Liberals believe strongly in self-determination but they know enough history to know that the language of nationalism and self-determination can be abused by national groups to remove the freedom of individuals and to justify aggression towards neighbours. We know that open and pluralistic societies are historically richer and more pacific. We know that economic nationalism is a gamble that can have terrible consequences for prosperity and peace.

The challenge for liberal politics is to see - as much as possible - people rather than states. We need a mature attitude to international migration that recognises the value that economic migrants bring rather than flattering the fears and prejudices those who will not welcome them.

We need to accept and shoulder our responsibilities to the global poor by investing in aid and development.

We need to build regional, and ultimately, international partnerships in the war against terror, because there is no more safety in national sovereignty. We cannot offer a state's defence against a stateless enemy like Al Qaeda.

Every bit as important, we need to build similar alliances in the desperate struggle to reduce and reverse the damage we are doing to our shared natural environment.

States can be a tool in this work, but they can also be an obstacle to it. National governments still tend to look inward rather than outwards. The success of the European Union can be attributed to the simple fact that it allows European states to reclaim some of their power over the forces of global change. It enables them to do together what they could not do alone. When the EU leaves local government to local people and concentrates on serving their 'aggregate interests' at the European level it is probably the most practical vision of effective international government in the world. It can and should be a model for liberals everywhere.

E) Conclusion

Colleagues, testing our liberal principles in the world of practical politics shows us that there are many ways to a liberal society: as many as there are free people in charge of their own political futures. This applied liberalism may not have the abstract simplicity of a treatise by Locke or a pamphlet by Mill but it is a programme for a practical and truly democratic politics.

What I have tried to suggest this afternoon is that there are a number of threads that should run through our work. The first is a consistent and unwavering defence of the irreducible liberty of the individual in the face of power of all kinds. Liberals have always believed that power is dangerous, and must be contained by rules and systems of shared values. Liberals designed and built the United Nations and European Union to do just that. When power invokes the war against terror to remove our freedoms, it will be liberals who will stand in its way.

The second thread is the need to see people and the political challenges that bring them together, rather than the states that keep them apart. I have named global warming, international terrorism and the global gap between the rich and the poor, but there are many others.

Liberals in Asia face challenges of their own: societies and communities in which liberal solutions must be built for local problems. Here in Malaysia the challenges of a pluralistic and racially diverse society and a rapidly developing open economy call for liberal and secular government, but the liberal formula will produce a Malaysian liberalism subtly shaped to this unique culture and society.

This is a time of renewal for the Council of Asian Liberals and Democrats. By setting objectives here you will be giving impetus and direction to the work of liberal democrats throughout the region. As a colleague and friend, and on behalf of the European liberal family, I am privileged to be able to share with you some of my humble ideas.