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CIPR GAG Annual Lecture by Lord Paddy Ashdown on
Nation-building after war - winning the battle for public opinion
"Carrying public opinion is crucial to the success of nation building in war zones such as Bosnia, Iraq and Afghanistan" - Lord Paddy Ashdown
George Crozier, Paddy Ashdown's former speechwriter, reports on the inaugural CIPR GAG annual lecture and analyses on the former Lib Dem leader's time as 'viceroy of Bosnia'
As Liberal Democrat Leader the closest Paddy Ashdown came to power was the occasional chinwag round the cabinet table as part of the short-lived joint committee on constitutional reform. So how did he end up three years later running a country twice the size of Wales, unelected, with supreme power and the right - which he used - to sack judges, (elected) ministers and anyone else obstructing his reforms?
Even more curiously, how did he, a politician from another country, half a continent away, with no democratic mandate, end up more popular, according to at least one opinion poll, than any of the country's democratic institutions?
These were two of the questions intriguing guests at the first CIPR Government Affairs Group annual lecture, given by Lord Ashdown on October 17th on the theme, "Nation building after war – winning the battle for public opinion".
But with the day’s newspapers full, once again, of the latest setbacks in Iraq and Afghanistan, there was a rather bigger question hanging in the air too – quite what does it take to create a functioning nation state out of a faction and strife-riven war zone?
With Bosnia a notable example of a state where the international community’s intervention can be regarded as a success – and where not a single peace keeper has died from hostile actions – Ashdown’s speech was eagerly listened to by the 140 guests (a record attendance for a GAG speaker meeting) at the Lewis Media Centre in Millbank Tower, for his thoughts on this question.
Ashdown began his lecture by noting the increasing regularity of military intervention in what, until relatively recently, would have been viewed as other countries' affairs. He was generally approving of this, although he noted that the more broad based the intervention the more likely it was to succeed. 65% of UN-led interventions had proved to be successful he said, compared to around half that proportion of US-led interventions.
According to Ashdown UN interventions have led to a 40% drop in armed conflicts in the world, and an 80% drop in serious armed conflicts. Intervention is, he said, becoming not only more normal, but actually rather successful.
Ashdown defended the principle of intervening – in some circumstances – in other countries’ civil wars and in humanitarian disaster zones. But it had to be followed through. War, he said, is the greatest creator of poverty in the world today – and development the greatest anti-war strategy.
However, he warned, the international community was showing a remarkable capacity for forgetting the lessons of successful interventions, almost as soon as they have been learned. “It's not that we don't know how to do it, it's that we forget what has worked in the past,” he said.
The most commonly forgotten lesson was, he said, that almost invariably more troops are needed in the period immediately after the intervention to keep the peace than are needed during the intervention itself.
Ashdown argued that intervention should be seen as a 'seamless garment', with three phases – a prevention phase, conflict and reconstruction. He said this would be a theme he would developed in a book he was working on, which is set for publication next spring.
And, he said, crucial to all of these was the marshalling of public opinion.
He cited the view set out by General Sir Rupert Smith in his book ‘The Utility of Force’ (published last year). In the book the General puts forward the theory that “industrial war”, the ‘fight to the last man’ conflicts that were prominent in the 20th century, is a thing of the past. Instead, modern warfare is fought “among the people”. The key battleground is the fight for public opinion – losing that is the beginning of losing the war that follows.
Lord Ashdown agreed with General Smith that this applies to war, but said that it applies even more to reconstructing a state.
There were, he said, three kinds of public opinion.
First, the opinion of the international community. This heavily influences whether the intervention is seen as legitimate.
Second, public opinion in the domestic arena of the intervening states.
Normally, said Ashdown, neither of these is crucial to success.
However the third - public opinion in the state in which you are intervening – is.
(In the questions after the lecture, Ashdown gloomily reflected on the turnaround in public opinion in Iraq. In Basra, he said 60-65 per cent of the population had been for the presence of coalition forces when we arrived, now 95 per cent were against our presence. It was, he said, “very difficult to see how to recover a position there. If 95% of the population are against you you cannot win.”)
During his time as High Representative Ashdown used opinion polling extensively to ensure he knew what the people of the country wanted. Indeed, he argued that it enabled him to know what they wanted better than the elected politicians who claimed to speak for them.
This polling gave him the confidence to move faster with reforms, and to face down critics among Bosnia’s politicians, when they argued that the people they represented would not stand for such and such a reform.
Referring to his own experiences, Ashdown stressed the importance of setting a desirable end state or goal to aim for, in order to persuade people to make the sacrifices necessary to rebuild the state. For Bosnia-Hercegovina this was putting the country on the road to European Union membership.
During his lecture Ashdown remarked, only half-jokingly, that his time in Bosnia had finally given him the chance to implement the Liberal Democrats’ 1992 manifesto, and the prominent pro-Europeanism of that platform was surely one of the elements he was thinking of.
Support for joining the EU is remarkably high throughout Bosnia. The Bosnian people have come to see EU membership as an ultimate badge of acceptance into 21st century Europe, and an indelible symbol that they will have put their fractured past behind them. Ashdown’s regular refrain, that the choice was between joining Europe or being “left behind in the stagnant pool of the Balkans” struck a very firm chord.
During his time as High Representative Ashdown used this fact relentlessly. When he arrived in Bosnia the two entities which make up the country – the Republika Srpska (the mostly Serb part of the country) and the Federation which brought together the Muslim and Croat communities – were largely acting as semi-independent states. Ashdown made it a priority to strengthen Bosnia’s central institutions.
In this he faced strong resistance from, in particular, the politicians of the Republika Srpska, who were wary of yielding powers to the centre. But polling showed that, even in the Republika Srpska, such was the keenness to get into the EU, that a majority of the population was willing to give their support to reforms such as setting up centralising police reforms (which they would otherwise have opposed), if that was what it took to get ‘from Dayton (the US city where the Bosnian peace accords were signed in 1995) to Brussels’.
By this route Ashdown achieved a number of reforms to strengthen Bosnia’s central administration, including setting up specialist police bodies at a national level, bringing the state’s two separate armies together under a single civilian command, and unifying the previously separate tax systems, giving the central government a greater and more reliable source of income. These reforms were, he argued – and accurately – necessary to build the stable and sturdy nation state that would be needed to gain entry to the EU club.
Ashdown was keen to draw a distinction between the need to take public opinion with you in making reforms and the priority which should be attached to installing democracy. His argument was that, however laudable and admirable democracy may be, when you are trying to turn a country from a warzone into a stable, functioning state, putting in place a working, relatively corruption-free judicial system – rather than tolerating gangsterism - and giving people jobs and incomes to occupy and sustain them respectively, are far more important as early priorities.
Despite his unelected status, Ashdown was clear that he regarded himself as having been accountable to the people of Bosnia-Hercegovina, not just to the international community.
Ashdown was by no means universally popular in Bosnia. A poll in September 2005 found that only 44% of respondents supported the work of the Office of the High Representative. However, compared to 41% casting a favourable judgment on the presidency of Bosnia, 42% on the Parliament and 43% on the country’s Council of Ministers, all organs with the head start of being both (a) made up of Bosnians and (b) democratically constituted, this is undeniably a pretty impressive achievement. (It compares pretty favourably too, with ratings obtained by governments in more developed countries - the latest MORI rating on the UK government, for example, shows just 27% of the British population saying they were doing a good job.)
Ashdown was not afraid to use western European campaigning techniques in his efforts to win people round. An article in The Guardian last year, quoted by GAG Chairman Robert Khan in his introduction to Ashdown's lecture, described the whirlwind that was the Ashdown persuasion offensive -
"Nothing - not Marshall Tito nor five years of war - has prepared the people of Bosnia-Herzegovina for the Ashdown campaign machine. A mix of confidence, charisma and sheer momentum, it stuns voters who have never heard of a spin doctor or soundbite. "Why do you keep repeating the same thing?" asks one local journalist who hasn't yet come to terms with what it means to be on message."
It was clear that, for Ashdown, the monitoring, utilising and shaping of public opinion was of vital importance in the battle to construct and develop a viable nation state in Bosnia. It was not simply a way to assuage his liberal guilt over his viceroy-like status – however understandable that might have been – but was an essential part of achieving success in the country, by dragging it out of the “stagnant pool” and into the mainstream of modern Europe.
Lecture details in full -
CIPR Government Affairs Group inaugural annual lecture
Rt Hon Lord Ashdown of Norton-sub-Hamdon
“Nation building after war – winning the battle for public opinion”
Tuesday 17 October, 6.30pm for 7pm
Lewis Media Centre, Ground Floor, Millbank Tower, SW1P 4RS
Paddy Ashdown was born in New Delhi on 27 February 1941, the eldest of 7 children. When he was 4 years old, his family returned to Britain to buy a farm in Ulster. Between 1959 and 1972 he served as a Royal Marines Officer and saw active service as a Commando Officer in Borneo and the Persian Gulf. After Special Forces Training in England in 1965, he commanded a Special Boat Section in the Far East. In 1972 Paddy left the Royal Marines and joined the Foreign Office. He was posted to the British Mission to the United Nations in Geneva where he was responsible for Britain's relations with a number of United Nations organisations and took part in the negotiation of several international treaties and agreements between 1974 and 1976.
Shortly after entering Parliament in the 1983 General Election, Paddy was appointed as the Liberal spokesman on Trade and Industry Affairs within the Liberal/SDP Alliance team in the House of Commons. He became Education spokesman in January 1987. He was elected Leader of the Liberal Democrats in July 1988.
Lord Ashdown was the High Representative for Bosnia and Herzegovina and the European Union Special Representative in Bosnia and Herzegovina from the 27th May 2002 until the 31st January 2006.
Lord Ashdown spoke on “Nation building after war - winning the battle for public opinion?”
A drinks and canapé reception followed the lecture.