24
Examination of witnesses
Professor Indrajit Roy, Dr Anne-Marie Slaughter and Professor Ngaire Woods.
Q1 The Chair: Welcome to Professor Roy, Professor Woods and Dr Slaughter. Thank you very much indeed for making yourselves available to speak to the committee and offer your perspectives on the future of multilateralism. This is the first session of our new inquiry. We are taking oral evidence from this panel and a further one from professional diplomats to help us form the structure of the inquiry going forward. The session is being streamed live on the parliamentary website. A transcript of the session will be taken and we will send it to you so you can make modest corrections. You cannot revisit calamities, but you can make modest corrections to the transcript, if necessary. I am sure you will be word perfect.
I remind members here that, if they have any private commercial interests pertinent to their questions, they should declare them.
I start by allowing you all a couple of minutes to set the scene, introduce yourselves personally and what justifies your immaculate knowledge of this particular subject. Then we will get on to the formal questions. We have pre-considered eight. There may be a few dynamic questions. I know that Dr Slaughter has a hard time set of 10 o’clock to finish, and I know that Ngaire—if I have the pronunciation right—certainly needs to finish by 10.15. I do not know whether Professor Roy has a bit of time, but we will see how we get on.
Dr Slaughter, beaming in, can I ask you to go first and spend a couple of minutes talking about yourself to set the scene?
Dr Anne-Marie Slaughter: It is a pleasure and an honour to be here. I started my career as a law professor at Harvard Law School. I studied international law and global governance for 12 years. I was then dean of the School of Public and International Affairs at Princeton University, where I convened groups on global security and global governance. I served as the director of policy planning under Secretary Hillary Clinton in the Obama Administration. For the past 13 years, I have run a think and action tank in Washington called New America. Again, we have worked on global governance issues. I have been part of many groups. I am now the incoming dean of the School of Public Policy at the LSE. I am talking to you from Oxford, in Ngaire’s lovely Blavatnik School.
Professor Ngaire Woods: Good morning. It is a pleasure to be here. I am founding dean of the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford. I have been an academic for 30 years working on multilateral institutions and international co‑operation. Britain, as you might know, has conducted three different multilateral effectiveness reviews looking at which organisations best serve UK interests and how effective each of those institutions is. I was one of the lead advisers; I had a role in each of the three reviews that have taken place over the past 20 years. I variously worked with the heads of organisations and boards of the IMF, the World Bank, the UNDP, the African Development Bank, the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank and others.
My driving preoccupation with multilaterals is how it is that countries other than the superpowers can have influence and form coalitions to influence those organisations. As we will uncover today, that is one of the most important questions for the UK Government, particularly as they move to take over the G20 presidency in a few short months and because of their quite special role in multilateral organisations. I am very glad the committee is undertaking this inquiry.
Professor Indrajit Roy: Thank you for having me here and, more importantly, thank you all for the work you are doing. It is incredibly important for the reasons that have been outlined. I am a professor of global development politics at the University of York. I come to this from the perspective of development, especially global and international development, but also the close links between development, security and international relations more broadly.
A lot of my work focuses on what is called the global South and how the term originated, how the various members of the global South identify with one another, or not, and the role that global South countries could play and are playing in shaping the new world order. Much of my work looks at the interactions of domestic politics with international politics in a select number of global South countries. I think it is important to reflect on these linkages, as well as how they might shape the role that so-called superpowers and ex-superpowers could play. I have been an academic for about 14 years. Prior to that, I was a practitioner. I worked in the aid industry, and have been working off and on with colleagues at the FCDO looking at questions of the global South and its role in shaping ideas of multilateral co‑operation.
Q2 The Chair: Thank you very much indeed. I will claim the Chair’s privileges. I retrospectively offer the apologies of Lord Robertson. I should have said at the outset that, sadly, he cannot be here today and so he has deputed to me.
The first question that I put to Dr Slaughter—I will come to the others—is that in recent years a consensus has emerged that the multilateral system and, more specifically, international organisations are in some form of crisis. Do you agree with that characterisation? If so, what do you see as the main causes?
Dr Anne-Marie Slaughter: I agree with the characterisation that the system is in crisis and has been for a couple of decades at least. I think the main causes are that it is unrepresentative and ineffective. Let us start with “ineffective”. We have two major wars: the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the war between Israel and Gaza, and now the United States, Israel and Iran, which are all part of the same larger conflict. The United Nations has been absent, other than with some of its special sub-organisations on refugees. Effectively, the world looks at what is the global organisation to establish peace and security, and it is not establishing peace and security. I think the “ineffectiveness” point has been a subject for many national parliaments for a long time, and certainly for the US Congress. That is not to say it is ineffective everywhere, but largely in its main functions it is ineffective.
It is also unrepresentative. This is difficult to say in the British Parliament, but I would say it in my own country as well: you cannot run the world in 2045 with the victors of 1945. We have known this for quite some time. Secretary-General Kofi Annan tried very hard to reform the Security Council and it looked like we might get there, but we did not. When I say “we”, I am referring to the permanent members of the Security Council, but also the various global coalitions that tried. I do not think you can continue to have a global order that is based on that lack of representation. I am sure Professor Roy will have more to say about that.
Professor Indrajit Roy: I agree with the characterisation that the multilateral institutions are ineffective and unrepresentative, but they have been like this for a while now. I am not sure that we are in a special form of crisis today. In some ways, this has always been a problem with the way in which multilateralism has been organised. Right from 1945, it was the victors of the Second World War rather than the newly independent countries that had any role whatever to play in global governance. I think that what we are seeing now calls for cautious optimism. There is crisis but there is also an opportunity for many of the countries that were hitherto unrepresented now to start playing a role. Yes, perhaps we are in a crisis, but it is a long crisis and we are finally starting to see rays of hope and opportunity.
There is a great deal to be said about the multipolar competition that is tearing us apart, but there is also what has been called a multiplex integration; that is, a whole variety of different institutions, countries, states and non-state actors that are forced to work together with each other more than ever before. They are doing it not through the usual channels of formal institutions, but often through informal networks. There is crisis, yes, but opportunities perhaps more so.
Professor Ngaire Woods: I take a bit of a different view. International co‑operation and ensuring that international organisations help Governments to co‑operate is necessarily difficult. It always has been. You are a sovereign parliament; this is a sovereign Government. They have not been elected by British people in order to give away that sovereignty to others. Therefore, the task of international organisations attempting to bring more than 190 such sovereign Governments together is necessarily difficult, so in a way it has always been in crisis.
I would say something different. I will make three quick points. The system we have seen since 1990 and the end of the Cold War is an anomaly in international history. The idea that you have one power whose vision of its own interests drives a rules-based system in which all other countries participate is highly unusual. What we are seeing now is a normalisation of the system with the rise of China and revisionist powers, which are creating a new great power balance, if you like. In that great power balance what we see in every UN agency and international organisation is competition among the powerful who use three different levers to get control, or expand their leadership of those organisations. Obviously, the United States and China are first in the queue on this and are using control of the leadership, or their ability to coerce the head of an organisation, to do things. They are using funding: both the United States and China are refusing to pay dues to the United Nations to try to push it to do things. They are using coalitional politics, trying to get countries unconditionally to support their own position in any of these organisations. There is nothing new in that; that is what international co‑operation and international organisations are like.
What has changed and led people to think that we face a crisis right now is a redrawing of US interests to a much shorter time horizon. We talk about a rules-based system. It has never been a rules-based system; it has been a system driven by the interests of the powerful, the US, but US interests have always been drawn in quite a medium-term way. The long-term interests of the United States have been to create a world secure enough, through its security umbrellas, to sustain trade, investment and global supply chains for the United States. What President Trump has done is hugely to shorten that horizon. Sometimes, the time horizon is one day, one deal, one conversation. That is why unpredictability and unreliability have become an instrument of diplomacy, because it is such a short time horizon. I think that will pass, but I do not think that a world after President Trump will snap back to where it was beforehand; nor do I think that all the elements of the Trump presidency will stay with us. America will necessarily expand its time horizon back to a slightly longer term and will become more predictable and reliable, because that is what its businesses, people, communities and economy need. There are plenty of voices in the United States still pushing to sustain co‑operation to that end.
In short, I think we are seeing a normalisation in international organisations. What we need to look at closely, as I said in my introduction, is the role that Britain can play in sustaining those organisations. The biggest challenge for Britain is that it has, by default, a habit of always lining up with the United States in each international organisation. In my view, the United States needs Britain, together with other countries, to moderate and restrain the more excessive impulses of this moment in American politics for the interests of a wider range of Americans. That means Britain making some difficult choices not to prioritise but to double down on other mutual partnerships and coalitions. Last year, I completed a global impact review for the Foreign Secretary looking at how it is that Britain’s different departments are lining up foreign policy—we can talk about that—and what will be required for Britain to sharpen its foreign policy goals, but, even more importantly, effectively to implement them.
The Chair: That was an excellent start. Well done to our witnesses. You have not agreed with each other, but you have absolutely confirmed the wisdom of our choice on this particular study. You have very much whet our appetites.
Q3 Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon: I make a quick declaration of interests. I chair the advisory board of the International Communities Organisation on conflict prevention. To give some context before I ask my question, for a long time I served as Minister at the FCDO, as it became, looking after multilaterals: the UN, Commonwealth and NATO. The list continues. That is perhaps where the challenge also arose. Beyond the interjection at these meetings, in what was quite a staid and structured process, the whole multilateral system was very clear. I agree with the premise that, while there has been a difference of opinion, the multilateral system has been under strain and stress in terms of its traditional sense.
To continue with Professor Woods, which of those existing structures within the multilateral framework do you think are in need of most urgent attention in terms of focus, if I can put it that way? I would particularly home in on the point you made about the role of the United Kingdom in that respect.
Professor Ngaire Woods: The United States Administration—President Trump’s White House—have defined the organisations that they think are most important and stayed in them, in spite of everybody thinking they might withdraw: the IMF, the World Bank, the United Nations Security Council and the UNHCR, the humanitarian muscles of the international system. Those organisations are important, but it is of equal importance that they do not become pawns either of the United States or China. It is really important that a coalition of other countries steps up its efforts to support the heads of each of those organisations to take a more multilateral position, restrain and moderate the goals and ambitions of each of the superpowers, and take actions which increase the resilience of other countries.
The world is now facing three very urgent crises: the crisis in the Strait of Hormuz and the refineries that produce, for example, aviation fuel and diesel. We are living off rapidly declining stocks in that. Fatih Birol called it the biggest energy crisis the world has ever known in the offing. He is the head of the International Energy Agency. We face a crisis on AI-fuelled cyberattacks on critical infrastructure which will affect many more countries than one after they have occurred. We have an outbreak of Ebola starting in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which the United States has defined as a country of absolute strategic priority to it because of its cobalt that is required for semiconductors and other critical industries.
Those three crises are literally an opportunity to double down on both new and old kinds of co‑operation. Yes, we should look at those institutions which are the muscles, but we should also look at the fact that this is an opportunity for the United States to begin re-engaging with the World Health Organization, which will be required to manage the Ebola pandemic. It is an opportunity to think about how we deploy the international financial institutions to deal with the massive energy crisis, which will have consequences for the economies of all countries. Equally, there is Britain’s leadership of the G20 at a time when we need the G20 very rapidly to create an expert group to co‑ordinate when the first AI-fuelled cyberattack on critical infrastructure takes place. That has to happen in the next month or so, so that that group knows each other, trusts each other and can shift into action very quickly. These are opportunities for us to focus attention on multilateral co‑operation to deal with the crises upon us, using both old and new institutions. That is really important.
My concern for Britain would be that, if it does not have an active policy and use its diplomatic muscle to help build and reinforce coalitions which help to preserve Britain’s room for manoeuvre, the international organisations that we have can very quickly become the footballs of China and the United States. That will reduce Britain’s sovereignty, its choices and the choices of other countries. I also think it will reduce the time horizon of both China and the United States. It is even in their interests that we help to push that timeline out and sustain the co‑operation that is necessary, including for them, in dealing with the three crises I mentioned as well as others. I do not know whether that answers the question.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon: Thank you for that. Continuing on that theme, Dr Slaughter, we have heard about the existing systems and you raised earlier the issue of the UN being absent from the table. I share that view. Linked to that, has this been the reason why we have seen an expansion of these other new innovative multilateral groupings that are taking place? I would like your reflections in that regard. Specifically, what is the role of the UK within this? Do you think we have been a bystander, or are we part of these new processes? Perhaps the G20 presidency around the corner and on the horizon presents a new opportunity.
Dr Anne-Marie Slaughter: I should start by saying that I am also hopeful, for reasons I will explain, that new versions of an order are emerging. I think the UK has a very important role to play. I see the system differently. I do not think the traditional system was just the US imposing its will. The US and the UK created the United Nations. When it has worked—of course it was paralysed through much of the Cold War—it has been the US, the UK, France, Europe and other countries that have been able to act collectively. I do not think that we are now in a bipolar world; I do not think it is the US and China that are dictating. The US is not coming back any time soon, for reasons we can go into but I will not focus on now.
In part, the fragmentation is a function of global South countries saying, “Wait a minute, we are not represented and we need to have a say”. You are seeing the emergence of many different coalitions of the willing. That was not a popular term in multilateralism. It comes from George W Bush’s effort to circumvent the UN with respect to the Iraq war, but what it means is that different groups of nations coming together to try to address problems of immediate concern. If you look at the Strait of Hormuz, on the one hand you see Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Turkey and Egypt trying to broker negotiations. Those four countries do not often pull together, but they have common interests here. To come to the heart of your question, you see the UK being the first convenor of some 40 nations that include global South and global North nations to figure out how to safeguard the Strait of Hormuz and stabilise the situation once the immediate fighting has stopped. The moments are not there yet, but to me that is a critical role for the UK.
It is essential that we do not see this in traditional bipolar terms, where you have to play off the superpowers. Rather, there are different important powers for different issues. The UK is a convenor now between the EU, the US, China and others, and is a catalyst and co‑ordinator of action for as many powers as can be pulled together for specific crises.
On the Ebola crisis, I hope the US re-engages with the WHO but am not so positive. We are completely unpredictable. I do not think you can count on that. On the other hand, the WHO has a big role to play, but it will have to do that together with the national Governments and national health establishments of many African countries, and as many others as can be convened. In different regions you will work with different regional organisations, but that will not be enough. Given Prime Minister Carney’s original speech, obviously Canada wants to play a role. Also, with South Korea, Australia and BRICS countries—without China or Russia, but certainly Brazil and South Africa, thinking also about Mexico and the Gulf countries—there will be different configurations in many different situations. The ultimate shape of what is emerging is not clear, but there is a tremendous opportunity. I agree with Britain chairing the G20 to pull together a combination of large and important middle powers and then smaller regional powers issue by issue.
Lord Ahmad of Wimbledon: Professor Roy, is it broken? Can it be fixed?
Professor Indrajit Roy: I would be careful with narratives about the international system being broken because, for the reasons that have been outlined, some would say it has always been like this, while others would say it has now opened up new opportunities. There is something to be said about the fact that there are new and different players now playing a much more important role. Just to reiterate the point, it is very important that we do not speak the language of polarity—unipolar, bipolar or even multipolar—because inherent in the idea of polarity is that the world is divided into camps. It is not. The point was made earlier that there are issue-based conversations and alignments which criss-cross that thinking about camps. I think Britain should especially eschew the language of camps or polarities. Especially when you are part and parcel of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, which I am sure we will come to down the line, it is tempting to talk the language of camps and polarities but we should push back against it.
In addition to everything else that has been said, the role of regional banks, regional unions and associations could go a long way to push back against the language of camps. They can also speak about what might happen from a bottom-up perspective for Britain or, for that matter, international associations to better represent and be more responsive to what is happening on the ground. That is, what the real needs are, how countries that are dealing with some of the crises already are doing that, and how to support it, rather than floating in different kinds of solutions which may or may not be relevant.
It is broken, with all the caveats I said, but there are ways we can fix it which do not need a revolution. We can do it by working creatively through existing institutions. Of course, that sounds revolutionary to a lot of people, but it does not have to be.
The Chair: As I move to Lord Darroch, if we are to get through our questions, we will have to speed up or précis some of the answers. The rules of the game should be that the first speaker says the most, with complementary remarks from the other two.
Q4 Lord Darroch of Kew: This question goes back to the American angle. I hope it is slightly different from the ground you already covered. As Dr Slaughter said, the post-war international institutions were largely created by American leadership with a bit of British input. Since then, with some ups and downs, we have seen continued American engagement, stewardship and leadership at times, until the latest US Administration. Frankly, they look to be disinterested, even disdainful of much multilateralism and multinational institutions. They have reduced funding to the UN and do not seem to engage with the UN at all. “America first” looks like “America alone” quite a lot of the time. If you look at the G7 and G20, the US boycotted last year’s meeting of the G20 and left the G7 half way through, so it is a pretty dismissive attitude.
Do you agree with that characterisation? Do you think this is a blip or part of a long-term trend? Can we possibly have an international structure and system that is even remotely effective unless we have American leadership as part of it and full American engagement?
Dr Anne-Marie Slaughter: This is a long-term trend in the United States. As Professor Woods said, many people in the United States certainly want global engagement. I do not think the sense of the US as hegemon or one of the superpowers of the 20th century, and the responsibilities that the US took upon itself, is coming back for many reasons. One is simply the tremendous demographic change in the United States. Within 20 years, we will be 50% European American and 50% everybody else. That means tremendous ties to Africa, India and Latin America; 30% of Americans will be Latin American. You are already seeing that impact as we look much more south, because a large proportion of our populations come from our hemisphere in the south. That has lots of wonderful, potential long-term implications, but it means that the settled east coast foreign policy consensus that looked to NATO and the transatlantic relationship as the stabiliser then, and a block within many international organisations, is dissolving. It has been for some time. It is not just Republican versus Democrat; it is a much more inchoate search for a new role.
We will be engaged through business. I do not think that these tariffs will survive, although it is worth noting that the Biden Administration kept the tariffs on China, and there is much more support for protectionism of various kinds. I do not think we will play the role that we did. We will engage on specific issues that we care about. A Democratic Administration may come back, but it will not come back the way that President Biden said, “I’m back”. It will not come back in the 20th century way.
Can an order survive without the US? I agree with Professor Roy on the multiplex, multi-aligned or multi-something, but not just states. We have not even talked about non-state actors. There are overlapping groups that can do a great deal without the driving of the United States. On pure military issues and on many economic issues, obviously the United States still plays an absolutely critical role. If you take the EU, Britain, Canada, Switzerland, Norway, Japan, South Korea and Australia, that is 42% of global GDP. That is a lot. That is enough to do various things economically and a considerable middle military power as well, as the EU also builds its capacity.
Absolutely, we can see a global order emerging. It will be more complex. It will take time to have any formal shape. It will—and I will conclude here—also involve many other US actors. When the US opposed the International Criminal Court in the 1990s, the prosecutor for the court said to me that they could not have survived without US foundations and without the American Bar Association. Now you also have US states such as California and others playing an increasing role, and US mayors working with mayors around the world in ways that will be fundamental for climate, health and technology crises. The US is there, but not in the same way. An order will emerge. It will probably be more resilient, complex and global.
Professor Ngaire Woods: I really like the question. There is a long-standing idea that for international co-operation to work you need a hegemon, but it always focused just on the hegemon and not on why other countries want co-operation. If you focus instead on why other countries need to co-operate with one another, you find all kinds of ways in which they do in the absence of a hegemon. My first point is that international co-operation can continue.
The bigger point that you are alluding to is what is really changing. Quite apart from the noise and the son et lumière of President Trump’s Administration, globalisation is being rewritten. The shift from a focus on a global order that makes global supply chains as cheap, easy and efficient as they can be has been replaced. That started accelerating during Covid, with a vision of secure and resilient supply chains. The idea of cheapest production wherever you can do it is being replaced by a sovereign concern for jobs at home. These messages are not just in the United States; they are across Europe and most of the world. That has been presaged by reports that show us that, in so many countries, people have lost the belief that if they work really hard their children’s lives will be better than theirs. I remember McKinsey Global Institute did a report more than a decade ago, Poorer Than Their Parents?, highlighting that this would be a lightning rod for politics around the world.
We are seeing a rise of not just economic security but also industrial policy in a world that needs to build anew an infrastructure that can deliver cheap, abundant energy, and a realisation in western democracies that the 1980s forward trend of just leaving it all to the market is not going to work. You need serious planning and continuity to rise to some of these challenges. The deeper trend is that rewriting of globalisation, but it does not mean we are heading into a completely uncertain world. Let us not forget that the post-world order to which Dr Slaughter referred was an order of embedded liberalism. It was one in which there was a lot of sovereign control over currencies and economic planning in this country and others, and in which the international economic interactions were relatively controlled. What I see in a lot of the world is a yearning for not a return to that order but the possibility that Governments can do more to protect jobs, their citizens and the safety of products, and the renewability and abundance of their energy. That is what we are seeing re-emerge. It will redraw what we think of as global order.
Professor Indrajit Roy: Yes, it is absolutely possible to have an effective global order without the United States leading it, for the reasons that have been outlined and because you have the opportunity now for the so-called, self-styled middle powers to work together. If they work together, you will see a more effective global order. The idea of middle powers working together might be seen as very novel, but it is not, because you had these visions of the middle powers working together since at least the 1950s. If you think of the non-aligned movement, it was not simply about countries not aligning with the power blocks; it was about countries that work together to provide an alternative order. Those visions are now coming to fruition. To go back to an earlier question, it is for Britain to identify where it stands and how it works with the emerging power configuration. My answer is that it is very much possible to think about an effective global order without the United States leading it or as the hegemon, as has been said.
Lord Darroch of Kew: Thank you. Those were brilliantly thoughtful answers.
Q5 Lord Alderdice: Professor Roy, you just talked about the United States not playing necessarily the lead role, but we have in the last few days even seen China playing an increasingly lead role. What do you think China’s vision is for the multilateral order, whether it is working through international organisations, pressing its influence at the UN and WTO, or establishing new organisations such as the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank? What is China’s vision? Does it want to assume the leadership of whatever new global arrangement, if we do not want to use the word “order”? How do you think it sees things?
Professor Indrajit Roy: That is such a fascinating question, partly because it is China and partly because of the size of the country. In some ways, what China wants is often de-linked with what happens irrespective of what China wants, simply because of its size. It is a big country with a very strong civilisational identity. Some would talk about China not as a rising power but as a resurgent power. There is the idea that China is now finally overcoming, has overcome or is about to overcome what is commonly called within Chinese circles the “century of humiliation”. Historically, China has had ideas of how it is the Middle Kingdom, and there is no reason to believe that those historical memories have disappeared.
That said, there is some exaggeration about China’s vision, because even though it is a one-party state there are several competing visions within the Chinese Communist Party. It is possible that the present head of state may be able to push his views over that of the others, but there has historically been a great deal of competition within the Chinese Communist Party. A lot of academic work suggests that all these large infrastructure projects, such as the belt and road initiative, which are often exemplified as evidence of China’s “great game” or grand strategy, are in effect retrospectively cobbled together on the basis of what local bureaucrats did or could not do. They are often portrayed as blundering individuals who just have their own interests and no such grand vision. We need to recognise that ideas of Chinese great powerfulness exist, but what is more important is that whatever China does has an effect on the world whether or not others like it.
That does not mean that other countries should be paralysed by fear or feel that they are about to be taken over. Of course, there are limits to China’s ability to extend in so far as it may have any hegemonic vision, and the fact that its hegemonic vision is not necessarily shared by countries in its immediate neighbourhood. Vietnam, the Philippines, South Korea, Japan and India have long-standing contradictions with China’s vision of itself. Whether China has a vision—there surely is a vision in some circles of China of a grand strategy and of China resurging—do we need to be worried about it? I do not think so. Should we take that seriously? Yes, of course, as you would take the visions articulated by any large power, and work with them in a way that is realistic and reasonable.
Lord Alderdice: Dr Slaughter, what do you think?
Dr Anne-Marie Slaughter: I agree with Professor Roy’s diagnosis. I do not think we need to worry about China replacing the role of the United States as hegemon or its own vision. There are a couple of differences in the way China sees the world. The biggest one is it wants an international order based on absolute sovereignty. It has absolutely no interest in the parallel evolution of the human rights regime alongside the original concept of the United Nations. As Professor Woods said, that original conception was much more based on sovereignty, and that is what China wants.
Secondly, I do not think China has any desire to take over any kind of global policeman role. Indeed, it pushed back on the idea that it is going to replace the United States. It is too expensive and it has too much to do at home.
Finally, watching China in Africa and Latin America, as we might have watched the United States in the 1950s and earlier, the Chinese often generate their own antibodies on the ground. Where they are very active, often national Governments push back. That is to be expected. You see that when it is too assertive with a particular view of what the international order should be. It is a resurgent power, in my view. It demands respect and a role, but I do not think it is planning to replace the United States. I do not think anybody will, in that 20th century role.
Professor Ngaire Woods: As with all its policies, China sets out very clearly what its vision and goals are. In 2025, Xi Jinping set out his global governance initiative, which quite clearly outlines for us what his goal and the goal of China is in reshaping global governance. That is important to look at. It is the culmination of a decade of thinking in China as it has increasingly competed for the headships of organisations, and increased its funding and the earmarking of its funding. It is using exactly the same mechanisms other Governments have used to try to gain more influence over international organisations.
I agree very much with both Professor Roy and Dr Slaughter on the role that other coalitions can play, but at the same time we have to be realistic that there are three very important powers that both China and the United States have. The first is the control of access to resources and markets that really matter for other countries. Most countries are very dependent on one or the other for trade and investment. Secondly, there is its control of dominant technologies for not just the economy but for military use. Thirdly, there is its influence over the rules of the game. I am not saying China controls it. I agree with Dr Slaughter that this has always been a competition, and other countries play a role in that competition, but China’s role on those three things is indisputably dominant. That does not mean we have a totally bipolar system, but we have to be realistic about its competition for control of those things, and the role that multilateral organisations can play in moderating, restraining and shaping that. My view is that the United Kingdom working together with other parts of Europe can work to increase the extent to which each of these multilateral organisations provide an ecosystem for Britain and other countries to succeed. That is the important way to see it.
I will add one small thing to Lord Ahmad’s point about UN agencies. I want to underscore, in case there was any doubt about this, that, starting in the 1980s, many UN agencies had their core budgets cut and began to rely more and more on earmarked funding—on voluntary contributions. Most UN specialised agencies today rely for more than 90% of their funding on earmarked contributions. That has the unfortunate effect that they become guns for hire. They start looking for funding and do whatever people are willing to fund them to do. That means we have—I know people are uncomfortable voicing this—international organisations doing things that we do not need UN agencies to do. They do it because it is the only way they have been able to fill their coffers. This is a good moment for us to really think about what they are doing that they do not need to do and what it is that the world needs them uniquely to do because they are multilateral organisations, and then commit to funding that rather than using the begging-bowl model of funding whichever activities any particular individual country or small group of countries want to fund them to do.
The Chair: Forgive me, but can we momentarily go out of order, because we are going to lose Dr Slaughter at 10 o’clock? If Baroness Fraser could ask her question to Dr Slaughter, who is the lead responder, we will come back to you next.
Q6 Baroness Fraser of Craigmaddie: Thank you. This follows on nicely from the point that Professor Woods just made. There has been much talk and much written about the need to reform multilateral institutions, but this morning you all emphasised the opportunities for international relations and co-operation with newer flexible groupings, alliances and multiplexes rather than necessarily institutions. In this context and specifically following on from your point about restricted funding pots, can there be any meaningful reform of institutions? If so, given conditions such as the scepticism of the US, how? Will it require a catalysing event potentially such as a massive energy crisis, cyberattacks on critical national infrastructure or a health crisis such as Ebola?
Dr Anne-Marie Slaughter: To start, I very much agree with Professor Woods’s analysis of the US and Chinese control of markets, technology and the rules of the game. On the rules of the game maybe I agree a little less so, but the first two are important points. We really have not talked about technology enough. That goes directly to your question. There are 80 think tanks, universities and others creating a network of thinkers, scholars and practitioners coming up with a blueprint for reform of a lot of these institutions. There will have to be a major crisis—one hopes not a global war but an AI crisis or another pandemic that is worse, but something really major—to create the amount of political will necessary to reform the formal institutions. It is important, as the UK did starting in 1942, to think through what that reform could look like, and to try to build support. You have that plan on the shelf, as you do domestically, for when the moment is right. It probably will not be just one big crisis, but we will have that kind of crisis to change political will.
In the interim, you can work through some institutions. Professor Woods’s point about financing is important, but there are also institutions. You would not work on refugee issues without the UNHCR. The UNHCR and the humanitarian machinery also depend critically on the eight big humanitarian NGOs and various other kinds of non-state organisations. You might see a situation in which the General Assembly will be re-engineered to replace the Security Council. It does not have the same status of international law that Security Council resolutions do, but I am not sure that that is the binding constraint. You could imagine regional institutions and different global institutions being repurposed or used by a group of key states, and then those states working with many important non-state actors: again, with multinational corporations, philanthropists, NGOs and universities.
This is a very messy process and I do not think that we can begin to see the outcomes, but you can work, as I said, on two tracks and imagine real reform and new institutions, although a new international order will have to be more flexible than the one created. It will have to allow much more room for work with non-state actors. At the same time, depending on what the issues of the day are, you pull together the states and non-state actors that you need. Here again, I strongly endorse the role of the UK.
Since my time is limited, I will leave you with an image. In the Financial Times, I wrote about an armadillo order of many overlapping groups. Perhaps, moving from Texas to Britain, the original international order was more like a French garden: quite formal and clear about all the divisions and boundaries. What we are seeing is much closer to an English garden, with an enormous number of things growing and quite wild in some ways and very hard to see exactly what the final product will look like, but something to cultivate and engage. The United Kingdom has an important and special role to play.
Baroness Fraser of Craigmaddie: Thank you very much. I know that you have a hard stop, so thank you very much for being here with us this morning.
Dr Anne-Marie Slaughter: My pleasure.
Baroness Fraser of Craigmaddie: Professor Woods, would you like to comment?
Professor Ngaire Woods: My experience is that three things change international organisations for the better. The first is obviously crisis, where it can change existing organisations and lead to new ones. Think about the G7, born out of the collapse of the Bretton Woods system—a new crisis committee for the world. Then think about the way that was expanded after the east Asian financial crisis into the G20—again, a committee. People then say, “Well, we should institutionalise it, build a secretariat”. No, actually. What the world needed was a crisis committee, and those crisis committees, I think, function quite well.
The second thing that changes international organisations is competition. I say this having spent over a decade trying to persuade the IMF and World Bank on behalf of developing countries and emerging economies to begin to change their governance. The progress was glacial. During the east Asian financial crisis, when a Japanese official murmured that they thought it might be time to produce an Asian monetary fund to compete with the IMF, that was an electric lightning rod for reform. Suddenly, the G20 was formed and there was a far more active pursuit of how we open up the organisation and change its governance to be more inclusive of other countries.
Likewise, what we see today in things like China’s credit lines to countries is competition for both US credit lines and things like the IMF. Think about the way the Argentinian president campaigned on getting China out of Argentina but then quickly realised once he was elected that China’s $18 billion credit line to Argentina is vital and used, and that China is Argentina’s third-largest trade partner. Therefore, an immediate cut-off was not wise. Most countries have found that they cannot afford to choose between the United States and China; they need both. The question is how to use both, and international organisations can help them.
The third thing about international organisations is that leadership is really important. At the moment, countries compete to try to get their national to be the head of an organisation. The minute that person is installed, all countries get on with competing over who will get the headship of another organisation, and far too little attention is paid to how you hold that person to account. That is important because good leaders of international organisations can really bring about change. Think about the way the Secretary-General of the United Nations several decades ago, using his own special offices, created peacekeeping operations, which at the time played a critical role. That was the invention of a leader. I have seen heads of international organisations do their job extraordinarily well and quietly behind the scenes help countries come together to make their case collectively so that the organisation can be more responsive. Sadly, I could also give you a list of heads of international organisations who have been forced out because of corruption, terrible behaviour, incompetence and so on. If we want international organisations to work, we should pay more attention to their leadership. I can send the committee a report that we did with a scorecard of leaders across international organisations and a very simple list of seven things that countries should think about when they start nominating candidates. That is important because the world is heading towards selecting a new Secretary-General.
The Chair: We have three and a half questions, 13 minutes, and only two witnesses.
Q7 Lord Lamont of Lerwick: I have a very long question. Much has been made of the political paralysis of larger international institutions, for instance the UN and the WTO, and we hear talk of smaller new institutions appearing. People refer to BRICS. BRICS, of course, was a wonderful journalistic acronym invented by a Member of this House. I am not sure to what extent it actually is an organisation and has become institutionalised or has common objectives, although I know they hold regular meetings together. We are obviously going to have opportunistic regional groupings and people getting together on specific issues, but do you see new institutions that could seriously challenge the architecture of the so-called rules-based system? Could they really seriously challenge the architecture as opposed to just being ad hoc opportunistic groupings?
Professor Ngaire Woods: Let me give three examples of where BRICS+ has acted. First, let us note that BRICS has quite rapidly expanded. A number of countries say they want to be part of it, presumably because they see some advantage. The BRICS has created its own contingent credit lines, which are important, otherwise countries rely on swap lines from either the US or China. The BRICS has created its own development bank, the New Development Bank, that sits in Shanghai and is lending. In the wake of the US tariffs over the last year, the BRICS very rapidly moved to redirect agricultural exports to China in a co-ordinated way that gave it some leverage. It is not just an acronym. It is actually an example of a coalition of countries moving together.
Another thing is that we have learnt in the last 18 months how difficult it is for countries to hold together in a coalition if there is any defection risk. The particular way in which the White House is unfolding foreign policy makes countries very aware of the defection risk because, for example, they can be individually singled out for increased tariffs. That is why we see that it took much more than just tariffs against the countries of Europe and the United Kingdom to get a collective response. It took literally the rumour of a threat of force to take Greenland to get European countries to come together using some of the mechanisms of the Anti-Coercion Instrument to put a huge retaliatory package together, which changed the US’s statements and at least short-term intent. That is important. It tells us two things about coalitions. It says that for them to get over the defection risk they have to share a truly imminent threat and an equal perception of the intensity of that threat. Secondly, they need some pre-existing mechanism to collectivise their action. To your comment about BRICS, Lord Lamont, it has some apparatus now for taking collective action, and so does wider Europe—the European Union, with the United Kingdom, Norway, Switzerland and others. Having the institutions and then being able to face down an imminent threat is going to be pretty important.
Professor Indrajit Roy: The BRICS is an incredibly useful example of a group that seemed to be going nowhere when it started out and yet it has not only cohered but expanded. It is also a good example of what countries can do as a coalition, but not in a military alignment or alliance. Remember, the BRICS is made up of countries that are otherwise at each other’s throat—China and India, for instance. Even as they are fighting, and their troops face off against each other, they have agreements and discussions at the BRICS summits. Iran and the UAE both recently joined the expanded BRICS. They are also not on the best of terms; likewise, Egypt and Ethiopia. It is a very good example of an interest-based coalition that may look opportunistic, and indeed some people have called it a coalition of convenience or something. The point remains that it is interest based, and it is heavily so. It may not be principles based or values based, although there can be questions on that as well. Some would say it is values based because it is pushing back against a unipolar dominant order. The point remains that it is a coalition of countries that is trying to set up alternative institutions.
When I say alternative institutions, these are not necessarily competing or seeking to undermine existing institutions. In fact, if you look at the language of the New Development Bank that the BRICS countries put together, a lot of their guidance and justifications for supporting projects are drawn from the UN. In some ways, you could say the BRICS paradoxically strengthens the UN because it is a group outside the UN that still pushes for UN-supported ideas.
A third misconception is that there is a tendency to think of the BRICS as an extension of China’s outreach policy. Nothing can be further from the truth. If you look at how the BRICS came into being, it was preceded by a trilateral agreement between India, Brazil and South Africa—what used to be called IBSA—and then they realised that bringing in China and Russia would get them more attention, which, of course, it did. It is therefore important to think about the internal dynamics within the BRICS. To go back to the question that was asked, “What can the UK do?”, instead of being suspicious of the BRICS and thinking of it as a China-led intervention, it is useful to recognise the internal dynamics within the BRICS and work with it rather than against it. The BRICS is not a military alliance, and it does not intend to be for the reasons I mentioned. It is here to stay, but not in a way that is easily recognisable as coherent to others.
Q8 Lord Grocott: Quite a bit of this material on the global South you have talked about already. If I can put it in this context, I think Professor Woods mentioned early on about the numbers of states that there are now—190-odd. if you look at the broad picture, that is a colossal difference from the 50-odd that set up the UN in the first place. If you were taking a view, that is a terrific change. To me, it speaks to the enduring strength and popularity of the nation state, despite all the criticisms that I know are made about it, and a contrast to the received wisdom. I do not know how long this goes back, but the received wisdom has always been that globalism is inevitable. Tony Blair once said that moaning about it is a bit like moaning about winter coming or something; it will happen whether you like it or not. It seems to me that the reality on the ground is quite the reverse. There are lots of separatist movements around to point towards even more nation states.
I racked my brain to think of this. It is very difficult to think of any state mergers since the Second World War. I am talking about Tanganyika and Zanzibar, or Canada and Newfoundland. I think they tried one between Egypt and Syria. The trend is towards more and more nation states. What implication does that have for the subject of our inquiry—multilateralism? Does it make it more difficult or easier? To what extent does the word say anything useful any longer? As I say, the reality is different from the perception in many cases. I would like your thoughts on that. It is a bit broad, but it is relevant to our inquiry.
Professor Indrajit Roy: The number of states in the international system has increased. You see many of these increases in the global South. It is tempting to think of the global South as somewhat of a homogeneous entity. That is to be guarded against. There is a great deal of divergence within the global South. There is what a lot of us would call the poor South and the power South, as in southern countries that have rapidly increased their economic and technological advances, and others that have not done so as quickly. There are a lot of dynamics and contentions within the global South between the poor South and the power South. That makes multilateral co-operation that involves the global South as an entity a little tricky, and it is therefore tempting to say, “Oh, well, let’s just stick to the existing arrangements”. As I said, the fact that you have many more entities and many more sorts of tensions within and between the global South is actually an opportunity for learning from global South countries on how to work best together.
The BRICS is, again, a great example. You have opposing entities or, in examples that you could give, states that may have fought secessionist wars and emerged independently as independent nations, but they still have to work together. They have to be brought to the table. They could have their domestic or border issues or quarrels, as indeed China and India do, even though they did not emerge from the same system but you get the point, or as India and Pakistan, or other neighbouring countries with problems do. But that does not mean that they cannot be brought to the table. There is a lot of learning to be done from those countries that are in conflict with one another along certain issues but are willing to talk to each other and collaborate along other issues. Taking an issue-based approach is how these examples would really help us, and—as the point has been made—get us to not think about the world order as if it is organised in a way that it is not. That is how I would respond.
Lord Grocott: Were you going to add something, Professor Woods?
Professor Ngaire Woods: Yes, but did you have a further question?
Q9 Lord Grocott: Yes. I wonder if you can help us with our inquiry on the issue of definition. Most Select Committee inquiries end up mushrooming and getting wider and wider, and less and less focused, basically. Given that there are an awful lot of international organisations, for the reason I said in the earlier question that there are likely to be more and more of them, can you give us other categories of these organisations that are talked about in academic circles? Are there, say, four main types? I am trying to anticipate what we might do and how we might focus our inquiry now. It would be greatly helpful if we could think in terms of, “These are the four categories we are looking at, and these are their distinctive characteristics”. I am asking you to write the report, basically.
Professor Ngaire Woods: One of the first things that I would do if I were in your shoes is uncover the multilateral effectiveness reviews that were done by DfiD, because they do exactly that. They set out all the major international organisations. They say which ones are vital for the United Kingdom, how well they do, why, how and what. That work is done. It was done by what was then DfiD. It is worth dusting off that work. That would give you a good grounding on that.
Your question is a very deep one about sovereignty, why sovereignty matters, and how states use their sovereignty and strengthen it. Often, people think there is sovereignty and then there is international relations. Actually, the international relations of Governments can reinforce and strengthen their sovereignty. This is something this committee needs to look at, or could look at, when it thinks about the United Kingdom and multilaterals. One big surprise when I was doing the global impact review of the FCDO was how much foreign policy has mushroomed across every department of the British Government. It was a surprise to discover that there were some 600 people in the Cabinet Office doing foreign policy, that there was a whole unit in the Home Office doing foreign policy, and that there are many different parts of the UK doing foreign policy. Whether you are a small poor country, as Indrajit said, or a powerful country, your ability to influence multilaterals comes very much from how cohesively and in a unified way you push your case. One reason why Britain was always seen to punch above its weight in the past was that other countries saw it working very cohesively. They knew that, if one part of the British Government showed up at this organisation with this policy, it would be reinforced by other parts of the same British Government in other organisations and in heads of government meetings. It did not always feel like that in London, I am sure. But that was the perception and what was felt by other countries, and it saddens me that that has disappeared to some degree.
It is important for the G20 leadership by the United Kingdom Government to find a way to knit government back together. It is partly because it has been a, let us say, dynamic time politically. Over a period of four years in the last decade, there were 34 different Ministers in the Cabinet Office. We are on our eighth or ninth Foreign Secretary in just as many years. There has also been huge change among our civil servants on foreign policy. The Brexit debate led to a huge increase in staff; Covid led to another. All these things have to be worked through. A powerful push from your committee about what it will take to bat as one team and to do that powerfully across the multilateral organisations would be very useful.
The Chair: Can I stress test the witnesses? Lord Grocott’s question took seven of the available five minutes. Are you still all right for a few more minutes? Are you both all right to stay maybe as long as half past, and then we can get to the final two? That is very kind. Lord Bruce, you had a supplementary on this.
Q10 Lord Bruce of Bennachie: First, this has been a fantastic session and really helpful to the committee. I want to focus on the UK’s convening role in this changing world. What Dr Woods said about cross-government participation on foreign policy was very interesting. We are in the process of cutting one-third of the staff of our Foreign Office. In other words, we are dismantling our diplomatic capacity. We have slashed our aid budget. My concern is how the UK uses its influence across the world as a convenor to make things happen in a different, much more dynamic way when we have destroyed most of the levers that we previously used. A comment we had from the State Department, when on our previous inquiry we were in Washington, was that the UK’s imperial legacy meant that we had influence and reach across the world in ways and places that the United States did not always appreciate, and it valued our participation. How can we use our convening power? What role should we have in engaging particularly with African countries rather than just the bigger powers? They are the ones that tend to think that this debate is all about the big guys discussing their influence and they are just sitting on the outside looking in. How can we best use our convening power to change these things?
Professor Indrajit Roy: It is tragic that so many colleagues who knew the dynamics of a post-colonial world and studied or worked with colleagues in Africa, Asia and elsewhere are part of this reshuffling and rejigging that you mentioned. There is a great loss of institutional knowledge that you will suffer from. I do not think talking about imperial legacies helps anyone, to be honest, and to put that up front and bluntly. What helps is to re-emphasise the way in which Britain really wants to learn from as well as contribute to a changing world order. Britain should think of itself perhaps not as a legate of an imperial power but as an emerging middle power that has at heart the best interests of—you do not want to say former colonies—the countries that you have had historical relations with, at the very least.
Obviously, I cannot comment on the way in which the Government have restructured themselves, but what Britain does or could benefit from is the network of alumni that you have who emerged from British universities and have gone back to their own countries and taken up professional roles there. Perhaps this committee or others could convene some sort of input workshop or something that is able to reach out to policymakers from those countries with a specific view on how Britain might leverage its role in the G20. I do not think speaking about imperial legacies will help. What will help is to recognise and be up front about Britain being an emerging middle power and doing what it can to work with others—superpowers, middle powers and do not forget, as we have been saying, the ones that are neither superpowers or middle powers, the so-called poorer countries of the world as well. The G20 is a more limited forum, but you could use that to highlight Britain’s global role. Sorry, I hope that answers your question at least partially.
Lord Bruce of Bennachie: Sorry, the point about the imperial thing was not me; it was a comment that was made—
Professor Indrajit Roy: No, I know. I realised.
Professor Ngaire Woods: In the course of my global impact review interviewing a lot of Britain’s potential partners abroad, as Indrajit said, there was not a huge nostalgia for an imperial Britain, I have to say. The serious point that I found was that there was some perplexity felt by other countries as to what Britain actually wants. In the words of one Foreign Minister, “We know that Britain always wants to lead, to convene and to hold the pen, but we honestly don’t know why. We don’t know what Britain wants”. This leads countries to project on to Britain all kinds of different motives.
I think the case is that the United Kingdom today does not always know what it wants, so we need to ask the question: what does it take to know what you want in your international relations? It takes a carefully orchestrated and planned consultation, and the voice of your businesses and other interests across the country. It takes cohesion across government and a genuine plan. There is space for development, as we say when we teach, for the UK on that. It has not been helped by the merger of the FCO and DfiD. All mergers take very careful planning. When you bring two companies or agencies together, to get the best of each instead of defaulting to the worst of each takes real planning, organisation and serious change management. The FCO and DfiD were simply slammed together.
Finally, you mentioned the shedding of 30% of the workforce. It is worth understanding that, if you took the full staff of the FCO and the full staff of DfiD when they were merged, the staffing today of the FCDO is 30% more than the total staff of both. I do not think there is a single person in the FCDO who thinks that they have become 30% more effective, efficient and focused. So there is a job to be done. That is not the fault of the people who work in the FCDO, but it is a serious task to ensure Britain’s apparatus for taking forward its foreign policy, for defining what Britain wants and needs, and taking that forward needs very serious attention. Although it is certainly the FDCO it is not just the FCDO, but it also the other parts of government that have not exploded but greatly increased their foreign policy capabilities as well, but there is not a lot that is bringing them all together.
The Chair: That is brilliant. Some of it answers Baroness Blackstone’s question. Restate the question, and then we would like some pithy instructions to the committee about how we go forward and structure our review.
Q11 Baroness Blackstone: Thank you very much. It does indeed partly answer the question that I want to put. In fact, what you both said in the last one and a half hours touches on this question. What should this committee tell the Government to do in terms of their involvement in multilateral organisations around the world? I absolutely endorse what Professor Woods just said on the need to bring together different government departments. The advice that you would give would not just be to the Foreign Secretary, it has to be to a number of senior Ministers, nearly all of whom have quite a lot of work to do in relation to the wider world and multilateral organisations. Could you both succinctly give us some bullet points beyond your last bit of advice to Government, which was to get organised on how you determine what your foreign policy is across government because many departments are involved in it? What are the four or five key things that the UK Government should do?
Professor Ngaire Woods: It is hard not to fall into the usual things: get Government working together, clarify the strategic and operational goals of Britain foreign policy, look again at the multilateral effectiveness reviews, and define which ones Britain really both wants and can shape, because those are slightly canned recommendations. The question for Government is always how to do that, when there are so many different competing priorities and the Government themselves are in a state of some uncertainty and flux.
First, I would use the opportunity of leading the G20 to do two things. One is internal: get the British Government working as one together; secondly, use the preparatory process to reach out to other future partners, other countries, and engage them in the process as a way of strengthening Britain’s partnerships with other countries. Britain has not entirely shed its imperial legacy. It goes to other countries with a sense of, “This is what we’re going to offer you”, and not always a sense of, “This is actually what you could be offering us”. It needs in that sense to be more focused on practical, mutual partnerships and less on leadership and offering something to the rest of the world. So use the G20 to do those two things.
Secondly, take the issue of energy as an example of a high priority. We are heading towards what Fatih Birol[1] called the greatest energy crisis of all time. Britain has its own energy problem, which is a much higher energy price for industry than competitors. There is a need for cheap and abundant and renewable energy in this country, and several different government departments each have something to say about that. That is an example of where that needs to come together and you need a plan.
Planning is something that since the 1980s western democracies stopped doing. Governments became the facilitators of markets, and as a result there are very few planning muscles left. When I talked to the CEOs who got engaged in various attempts in the last decade of industrial strategy, they felt that huge amounts of their time were wasted on a process that was then casually dropped by whichever politician was in charge, and then the next would announce another. That use of the extremely scarce and valuable time of Britain’s business leaders is not good. But they do need to be engaged, as do other groups in Britain, in a serious strategy that is both economic and international for the country.
So, I think focusing on a couple of the issues, we have talked today about energy, technology and global health. Those are three areas that could really serve to illuminate some of what this country needs to do both internally and externally, and which multilateral organisations could help in that.
Thirdly, I cannot stress enough how important this is for a Britain that the rest of the world sees has defined the countries that it does not want close partnerships with post Brexit and so on, with the changing relationship with China, and now the need to be managing the relationship with the United States. It is not seen as a country that has clearly defined which countries it wants to be close to and partner with, and to what end. I think it is beginning to do that. Britain’s accession into the CPTPP, the trans-pacific trade partnership, although it is geographically a little perplexing to be part of the Pacific, and the Japan-Italy-UK defence agreement, are important steps, as are other partnerships that the FCDO and other parts of government are taking forward. It is to really start thinking what the mutuality is in this. What do we need? Do we need to learn better flood management from Pakistan? Probably, yes. What is it that Pakistan wants from us and what does that look like? Where is it that we need to work with our European partners? Other countries primarily want two things—security and access to markets and investment. How is it that we work with our European partners, perhaps to extend the umbrella of an expanded anti-coercion instrument so that there is a competitive offering to that from China and the United States? How do we work with them to get a bonanza kind of market and investment access that is predictable and reliable, and slightly less tough than some of the alternatives? Those are the things that I would focus on, but start with the multilateral effectiveness review. There are things on the nuts and bolts side where Britain could help improve international organisations and therefore international co-operation. Thank you all.
Professor Indrajit Roy: There is a great deal of room to recognise the opportunities rather than only focus on the crisis element. There is room for cautious optimism, and that has to reflect in the vocabulary and language we use.
Secondly, Britain needs to be willing to talk to its potential and actual partners in terms of what they are looking at in reforming the multilateral system. You have to talk to the Indias, the Turkeys, the Brazils, the Indonesias, and other countries that you are interested in developing your partnerships with. Be willing to build alliances beyond your traditional ones in the North Atlantic. Look out for alignments and work with a variety of different actors. There has been a lot of talk about the Indo-Pacific, but the Indo-Pacific strategy tends to latch on to what the US does rather than what Britain itself might bring to the table. I have to say this as a member of the university. Perhaps think about investing in higher education that generates the sort of knowledge that will ultimately feed back to you. See that as not a drain on resources but an investment that will help answer some of these questions. I am sorry I could not beat what Anne-Marie said, so I thought it would be useful to close on that. Thank you very much for this opportunity.
The Chair: Thank you very much. I wrote down for myself that it is a delight to be inspired by the prospect of a review rather than be thrown into a sense of imminent and prolonged despair, and this is what our witnesses today have absolutely done. I often say to some of my friends that the pleasure and the privilege of serving on this committee is that it is like a slow-moving MPhil in international relations and I come away much wiser. We can now embark on this with the prospect of a hugely enjoyable and informative review that we hope, thanks to you, will have the right impact on the recommendations that we subsequently make. In closing this particular session, we thank you very much indeed and wish you well.
