Britain and Africa under Blair: In pursuit of the good state

177 Pages·2013·0.73 MB·English

by  Julia Gallagher

BRITAIN AND AFRICA UNDER BLAIR
This book is dedicated to the students
at Nyamhondoro Secondary School
BRITAIN AND AFRICA
UNDER BLAIR
In pursuit of
the good state
Julia Gallagher
Manchester University Press
Manchester and New York
distributed in the United States exclusively by Palgrave Macmillan
Copyright © Julia Gallagher 2011
The right of Julia Gallagher to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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ISBN 978 0 7190 8500 0 hardback
First published 2011
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Contents
List of abbreviations Page vi
Preface vii
1 New Labour: doing good in Africa 1
2 Ideas of the good and the political 27
3 How the British found utopia in Africa 40
4 The good, the bad and the ambiguous 63
5 Healing the scar? 78
6 Idealisation in Africa 102
7 The good state 125
8 Conclusion 145
Bibliography 152
Index 163
List of abbreviations
APPG All-Party Parliamentary Group
DfID Department for International Development
EU European Union
FCO Foreign and Commonwealth Office
G8 Group of Eight (industrialised nations)
GNI Gross National Index
IFI International financial institution
ILP Independent Labour Party
IMF International Monetary Fund
INGO International non-governmental organisation
IPPR Institute for Public Policy Research
IR International Relations
MDG Millennium Development Goal
NEPAD New Partnership for African Development
NGO Non-Governmental Organisation
NLC Nigerian Labour Congress
OECD Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development
UN United Nations
Preface
When Princess Diana died in August 1997, Sierra Leone’s elected Govern-
ment was holed up in a disused Chinese restaurant in Guinea. The British
High Commissioner, Peter Penfold, who had gone into exile with President
Kabbah and his ministers, and was advising them to act as much as pos-
sible like a government, suggested that the Foreign Minister write a letter
of condolence to the Queen. He hoped that this would project a picture of
a government in control, even though in reality it had been pushed out of
Freetown by a ragged and disorganised rebel movement, leaving Sierra Le-
one in chaos. At the same moment, Tony Blair was making one of his most
famous and statesman-like speeches. Speaking movingly of the ‘people’s
princess’, he managed to embody British reaction to and emotion at Diana’s
death, and at the same time represented a focus of containment and reassur-
ance. This brief and relatively slight moment in Blair’s prime ministership is
nevertheless one of the best examples of his ability to express a sense of the
capacity of his government to embody Britain. It occurred in the days before
Britons had learned to distrust him, when his newness and ambition to unite
the country still appeared credible.
This book is about the idea of state capacity – in particular, state capacity
to embody and represent good. It looks at the ways in which New Labour
harnessed a broader British imagination of Africa in order to do this, pursu-
ing it through Blair’s attempts to ‘do good’ in Africa. At the time this story
begins, the state of Sierra Leone barely existed. It had collapsed, unable to
meet any basic functions; the Government had fled, and was being sup-
ported in exile by the British. It represented utter failure, its feeble attempts
to demonstrate capacity under the direction of a British official. In contrast,
Britain under Blair appeared to have a new moral strength: New Labour
had breathed it back into the idea of the British state. There was a reinvig-
oration of morality in public life; the New Labour Government appeared
able to encapsulate a sense of British brilliance and assertiveness; the state
itself was at the heart of a far happier British national story. The significance
of the idea of the moral strength of the state, the difficulties of maintain-
ing it, and the way in which the stories of Britain and Sierra Leone became
entwined, lie at the heart of this book. In particular, it explores the way in
which people in Britain – and particularly the political elites that represent
viii Preface
them – collectively imagine Africa and project an idealised Britain onto it, in
order to conceive a sense of their own ‘good state’.
The idea for this book came about through my own observation of New
Labour in power when I worked at the Foreign Office in the early 2000s and
saw the way in which Africa policy was set apart from the rest of foreign
policy. I became fascinated by the idea of Africa as a ‘good project’ and
what this might mean. This built on a lifelong interest around the ques-
tion of ‘doing good’ in Africa, which began with questions to my exiled
South African mother about white, or non-African, involvement in the anti-
apartheid struggle, and then in my own time working in a rural secondary
school in Zimbabwe in the early 1990s. It continues today, when I hear
from my children that they are being taught in school about starvation and
poverty in Africa, and from my students that their ambition is to work for
a non- governmental organisation (NGO) and solve Africa’s development
problems. I, and they, and many other millions of British people, grow up
believing that Africa is somehow special and apart, particularly desperate
and needy, and that we can and should help. Why and how did a continent
come to occupy this particular place in the collective imagination; and why
and how is this preoccupation expressed through politics?
I was fortunate to have the support of many people to help me realise
this project. Donal Cruise-O’Brien was the first to encourage me to pursue
my ideas academically. I am particularly grateful to Stephen Chan, my
super visor at SOAS, for setting an example in adventurous scholarship and
encouraging me to persist with ideas and approaches that strayed from the
conventional. Other members of the SOAS politics department offered sup-
port and many helpful comments, particularly Tom Young, Laleh Khalili,
Rochana Bajpai, Matt Nelson, Stephen Hopgood, Marie Gibert, Henrik
Aspengren, Hannes Baumann, Sambaiah Gundimeda, Dan Large, Dave
Harris, Polly Pallister-Wilkins, Manjeet Ramgotra and Dan Neep. Thanks
too to Kimberly Hutchings, Andrew Williams, Radha Upadhyaya, Susan
Newman and Crispin Branfoot for suggestions and advice; and to the friends
I made in Sierra Leone and Nigeria, particularly Maude, Prince and James.
I am very grateful to the British MPs and officials and Nigerian and Sierra
Leoneans who agreed to be interviewed. This project has been helped in dif-
ferent ways by my whole family; my parents who first excited in me many
of the ideas that propel it; Sophie who helped me understand Melanie Klein;
and Christina who became my ‘big sister’. Finally, thank you to Shona and
Connie who came home from school and made me stop, and Shaun without
whom I never would have begun.
Early drafts of Chapters 4, 5 and 6 appeared as articles in Millennium:
Journal of International Politics and African Affairs in 2009.
1
New Labour: doing good in Africa
Introduction
This book is about fantasy and idealisation, about how international rela-
tionships provide opportunities to create and pursue them, and why they
are essential for political communities. In its transcendence of the domestic,
political realm, the field of international relations (IR) provides fantasy and
idealisation in a variety of ways: for realists, it depicts a place of anarchy
and free-flowing aggression; for liberal-utopians, it is potentially a place of
harmony and idealism. In both cases, the international realm is thin enough
(empty, even) to enable an escape from the moral complexity and banality
of the normal, allowing the projection of extremes.
Of course this is a crude depiction. Many attempts have been made to
qualify or reconcile the classic dichotomies of IR theory, to find ways for-
ward in describing a thicker conception of an ethics of the international
(see in particular, Cochran, 1999; Linklater, 1998). But still, for theorists
and practitioners, some areas of IR remain a potentially rarefied realm, into
which ideas can be projected in purer forms than would be allowed in a
messier domestic context.
Britain’s policy in Africa can be viewed in such terms. By practitioners
themselves, it can be seen as distinct from ‘politics as usual’, an example of
an ethical approach to politics, in which self-interest and power have little
share. It is described in terms of certain and universal conceptions of what
it means to be ‘good’, enabling a sense of the transcendence of a grubbier
conception of politics. And, although much of the analysis of the policy
has questioned this depiction, it too, in different ways, has attempted to
understand it within a flattened context which focuses exclusively on power
and self-interest to the exclusion of an ethical or humanitarian dimension.
Coming from a more pragmatic, social democratic perspective, which
accepts as inevitable the complexities, the lack of conclusions and the
chaotic quality of politics, I start out with the question of what role such
idealisations play in political communities. To what degree is the creation of
an ideal space, apart from ‘politics as usual’, a necessity; in what ways might
the international realm provide one; and how can we begin to understand
the ways such a space underpins the health of the political community?
I begin from a constructivist position. This roots ideas, actions and