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No. 13

The Growth of Multilateral Diplomacy

FOREWORD

On i May 1996 Sir David Hannay delivered the third of the FCO's Annual History lectures. His choice of subject, `The Growth of Multilateral Diplomacy', was particularly pertinent since this year marks the fiftieth aniversary of the first meetings, in London, of the General Assembly and Security Council of the United Nations. The new world organisation did not begin its work in the most auspicious of circumstances. Divisions among the major powers and the drift towards Cold War impeded its development as an effective instrument of collective security. But it soon became, and has since remained, a primary forum for the conduct of much of the multilateral diplomacy of an expanding international community.

Few speakers could be better qualified to examine the recent history of multilateralism than Sir David. During his diplomatic career he served on the UK negotiating team with the European Communities in the early 1970s, was Chef de Cabinet to Sir Christopher Soames when the latter was Vice-President of the EC Commission, and became Head of the FCO's Energy, Science and Space Department with all its wide-ranging responsibilities. He later became British Minister at Washington, Ambassador and Permanent Representative to the European Communities

at Brussels. He concluded his career as British Permanent Representative

to the United Nations in the years 1990-1995.

Soon after giving this lecture, he emerged from retirement to take up a new appointment as the UK's Special Representative for Cyprus, working with all concerned in the search for a negotiated settlement to the long-standing

problem of a divided Cyprus.

We are pleased to publish Sir David's lecture as the latest in the FCO's

series of Occasional Papers.

Sir John Coles September 1996

Foreign & Commonwealth Office

HISTORIANS

Occasional Papers

No. 13 September 1996

THE 1996 FCO ANNUAL LECTURE

THE GROWTH OF MULTILATERAL DIPLOMACY

by

Sir David Hannay

Copies of this pamphlet will be deposited with the National Libraries

FCO Historians Library & Records Department

Clive House, Petty France, London SWiH 9HD

Crown Copyright

ISBN 0 903359 65 0

THE GROWTH OF MULTILATERAL DIPLOMACY

A Lecture delivered at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office

i May 1996

When the PUS asked me to give the 1996 FCO History Lecture, my first

reaction was one of pleasure at being invited, mingled with a strong dash of nervousness at the prospect of standing up before an audience of my former

peers and holding forth on something as portentous as history. Thirty-six

years of dealing with the day to day ephemera of diplomacy is one thing, launching a fragile bark on to the river of history quite another. And I

recalled a somewhat bruising moment of my undergraduate career when I had been unwise enough to refer to myself as a historian and was told very firmly by the distinguished professor to whom I was reading my essay that,

while he was certainly a historian, I was merely a student of history. It is as such that I address you today, the intervening period having not left me the time or the opportunity to progress across that great divide.

When I read Sir Michael Howard's magisterial 1995 contribution to this

series with his lecture `Fifty Years of European Peace', I was even more awe-struck. But then I recalled the character in the Moliere play who discovered that all those years he had actually been speaking and writing something which was called prose. Diplomats spend their lives in the midst of something that subsequently is called history, so they had better try to

understand it. Moreover their daily work, wherever they may be, is part of a historical continuum, some understanding of the previous phases of which is really essential if they are properly to interpret the here and now, let

alone the whither and why. My own career having been spent on multilateral diplomacy to an extent which can only stand as a blot on the

escutcheon of my managers, I have chosen to speak about the exponential growth since the Second World War of that form of our trade, to set it in a historical perspective and to analyse the phenomenon and some of the

problems and opportunities it creates. I do so in a rather broad-brush and non-technical, non-quantitative way which perhaps betrays the difficulty in

making the transition from practitioner to scholar.

Henry Kissinger began his recent study of diplomacy with Richelieu. I will spare you that, and start in the 19th century. This was a period when a modern practitioner of multilateral diplomacy would be hard pressed to find

any recognisable trace at all of his craft, whether in the fields of international peace and security, of arms control, of trade policy and

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investment or of any other of the many forms it now takes. But while most diplomacy was bilateral, there were brief manifestations of multilateralism. The great alliance formed to resist the Napoleonic bid for hegemony met in Vienna to shape the peace following his downfall; the Great Powers concerted together to resist revolutionary tendencies from time to time thereafter; the Congress of Berlin in 1878 struck a series of multilateral deals over the Balkans and the fate of the Ottoman Empire; the European

powers collectively carved up Africa; a series of increasingly despairing

collective attempts were made in the years leading up to the First World War to handle the tensions caused largely by the erratic nature of the Kaiser's diplomacy. But none of these occasions created any standing machinery for dealing with crises. People spoke much about the Concert of Europe but it tended to be a singularly unsubstantial concept, not necessarily available when it was needed, for instance when Gladstone

would have liked to make use of it to head off the Franco-Prussian War. And its useability was gradually undermined by a growing series of bilateral,

sometimes secret, alliances which proliferated as the century ended and the international community drifted towards the abyss of 1914.

Over the same period technological advances and long bursts of sustained economic growth in most of the main states both greatly increased the destructive capacity of armed forces and the resources available to support them. By the end of the century a full-blown arms race was under way involving not only land armies on the European continent but a highly destabilising naval arms race between Britain and Germany. Some lip-

service was paid to the futility and the risks of just allowing the arms race to run on, with continual leapfrogging both quantitatively and qualitatively between the main players but no serious progress was made in limiting the competition, less still in finding some multilateral framework within which tensions could be lowered and the pressures for higher armaments resisted. What subsequently has become the International Court of Justice in The Hague, established just at the turn of the century, stands as a lonely

monument to the multilateral disciplines of international law against the forces of Realpolitik and balance of power manoeuvring but that remained for long a forlorn and largely unfulfilled aspiration.

In the economic field too there was as yet no sign of effective multilateral diplomacy, although here the consequences of this lack were more positive. The fact that Britain, the world's leading industrial and trading power, opted by the middle of the century for free trade and was prepared to put its muscle behind such an approach, had a powerful influence world-wide. The gold standard stood as the nearest thing the world has yet seen to a single currency. But by the end of the century clouds were beginning to

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gather over the world economy too. Protectionist forces in some of the main industrialised countries, like the United States, Germany and France were beginning to build up and, as Britain's predominance ebbed, so too did its advocacy of free trade, with the plan for imperial preference making progress.

Did the absence of any multilateral rules and disciplines in international relations in the hundred year period leading up to the First World War matter a great deal? Were any serious opportunities missed to follow a different course in which multilateral diplomacy could have begun to play an important moderating and regulating role well before it in fact did so? It is not easy to answer either question affirmatively with any sense of realism. The supremacy and sovereignty of the nation state in international affairs was at its apogee and in its most triumphalist phase. Governments were simply not prepared to trammel their freedom of action. Nor did they see a compelling need to do so. The wars of the 19th century were of relatively short duration and of limited geographical scope, the most qualitatively destructive amongst them ironically being the American Civil War which, even in the loth century would not have been considered a suitable case for internationalisation. The forces of nationalism which had brought about the unification of Germany and Italy and which continued to power the imperial drive of Britain and France had in many respects proved a liberating and constructive influence. The fundamental contradictions between the crumbling multi-national Habsburg and Ottoman empires and the rising tide of nationalism were temporarily held at bay. While the working of the business cycle brought periods of bankruptcy and recession, these were followed by up-turns which tended to carry the world economy to a higher level than it had hitherto reached. So, when the lights went out all over Europe in August 1914, it was not over a Europe which believed there was something fundamentally wrong with the conduct of international

relations which needed to be remedied but rather one which was blissfully

unaware that nothing would ever be quite the same again.

A little over four years later, when the lights came on again, they illuminated a very different and desolate world. The Habsburg, Ottoman, Tsarist and Hohenzollern empires had been swept away. Rightly or wrongly the survivors tended to regard excessive armaments, the absence of collective security and balance of power diplomacy as fundamental causes of the appalling experiences through which they had just passed. A new and powerful player had come on to the scene in the form of the United States,

with a quite different agenda from the old players, an agenda in which moral factors were given more weight than Realpolitik and under which collective security was to be achieved through a multilateral institution

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known as the League of Nations. Attempts were made to lower the level of armaments, both through the forcible disarmament of Germany, the most powerful state in continental Europe, and through negotiations to limit

naval armaments between the three principal naval powers-Britain, the US and Japan. Only in the economic field was little real effort made to construct a multilateral approach, the main multilateral activity being the various attempts to squeeze war reparations out of a prostrate Germany

and subsequently to mitigate the destabilising effects of that misguided policy.

The new multilateralism got off to the shakiest of starts when the only true believer, President Wilson's United States, failed to ratify the League's Charter and withdrew into a long period of isolationism. Left to their own devices Britain and France proved unable and sometimes unwilling to back

up the machinery of the League with the muscle of their power. The other principal powers, the Soviet Union, Germany, Italy and Japan, provided a moving cast of actors in the League, joining and supporting it when it suited their purposes and flouncing out if it ever looked like seriously limiting their freedom of action. The League was as much damaged by its failure to do

anything about Japan's aggression in Manchuria in the early 193os as it was by its failed attempt to do something about Italy's aggression in Abyssinia later in the decade; and by the time of the Munich crisis of 1938 it had

simply disappeared from view. Public support for it fluctuated wildly, with great surges of enthusiasm, for example at the time of the Peace Ballot in Britain and the imposition of economic sanctions against Italy, evaporating as rapidly when the going got rough and the League was seen to have no magic wand.

The economic scene was, if anything, even worse than the political. The boom of the ig2os, already disfigured by the collapse of the German

currency in 1923, ended in the crash of 1929. Thereafter protectionism and tit-for-tat devaluations ran riot. The infamous Smoot/Hawley Act in the US, which led to massive tariff increases, was matched elsewhere. Production shrank; unemployment soared; rural impoverishment was widespread; and the political consequences of the slump reinforced totalitarianism and weakened the democracies.

It was perhaps not surprising that this first serious attempt at multilateral diplomacy fared so poorly. No-one had any operating experience in the field. Too often it looked like an uneven contest between the hopelessly

amateur idealists who backed multilateralism and the seasoned professionals of Realpolitik who purveyed strong doses of scepticism. Moreover the circumstances under which such an ambitious project was launched could

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hardly have been less propitious. The great motor of nationalism had fallen into the hands of evil, populist dictators who were able to harness it to their own megalomaniac designs. The utter failure of classical economic remedies left many people ready to try almost any quack prescription which promised a return to work and prosperity. Honourable but unavailing attempts at appeasement did little but delay the inevitable for a few months; any attempt to control the level of armaments had long since been replaced by

competitive gearing up for a war economy. What was perhaps surprising was that so many of the leaders of the Anglo-American alliance, which was to emerge victorious from the Second World War, drew from the experience of the 192os and 1930s the conclusion, not that multilateralism was no good and did not work, but rather that it needed to be strengthened and given teeth and above all that the world's foremost power, the United States,

needed to be fully engaged in it in a leadership role. It was only this firm determination to strengthen multilateralism after the war, enshrined in the Atlantic Charter of 1943, which overcame the reluctance of the third great victor of the war, the Soviet Union, whose appetite for applying the rule of law and for accepting international disciplines was distinctly limited.

So, when the post-war settlement began to take shape, multilateral institutions were at the heart of it and multilateral disciplines were the glue that was intended to hold it together.

The United Nations whose charter was signed in San Francisco in June

1945 and whose main institutions, the Security Council and the General Assembly, began to meet regularly soon afterwards and have continued to do so ever since, was a very different animal from the League of Nations. For one thing it was universal and has remained so. Every independent

state belongs to it; every government aspiring to statehood strives to belong to it; no state has willingly left it, although South Africa and Serbia were suspended from the General Assembly for gross violations of international law. The Security Council, a body restricted to a small proportion of the membership, first eleven then fifteen, soon perhaps rather more, has wide- ranging powers which it exercises by majority voting tempered by the veto of the five Permanent Members. It can impose mandatory economic sanctions, it can authorise the use of force to back them up and it can authorise the waging of war to reverse aggressions and other threats to international

peace and security. Over time it has also developed a complex array of peacekeeping functions which it has applied with varying success in every continent of the world. Of course the system of collective security reflected in the United Nations has not worked perfectly or achieved a coo per cent record of success; for 45 years it was hobbled by the Cold War and tit-for- tat vetoes by the super powers; many conflicts simply had to be regarded as

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off limits-Vietnam, Iran-Iraq, Biafra, to mention only a few; sometimes its

merits have had to be described in the terms Churchill used about democracy, not brilliant but better than the alternatives. But aggressions against South Korea and Kuwait were reversed; successful peacekeeping operations were mounted in the Sinai after Suez in 1956, in the Congo, Namibia, Cambodia, El Salvador and Mozambique; cease-fires have been

monitored and sustained over many years in Cyprus, in the Western Sahara

and on the Golan Heights. These are no mean achievements if you look back at the events of the half century that preceded them.

In parallel with the establishment of the UN, but separate from it, there was set up a group of multilateral institutions known as the Bretton Woods

or International Financial Institutions, the International Monetary Fund,

the World Bank and, for long the neglected child of the family, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, recently transformed into the World Trade Organisation it was always intended to be. As with the work of the UN, the record of these multilateral financial and trade organisations has

not been uniformly successful. There have been periods of considerable turbulence, particularly in the 1970s when the dollar crisis and the explosion of oil prices after the Yom Kippur war looked as if they might destroy much of the carefully woven fabric of stability and multilateral support which had been so painstakingly built up. But the structure held, the will of the main financial and trading powers to sustain it did not weaken and the protectionist pressures that inevitably surface in hard times were resisted. Interestingly enough the orphan of the family, GATT, which in 1948 had failed to receive the institutional backbone it needed to deal with trade disputes and which was left for 45 years as a purely inter-governmental body relying on consensus, achieved quite remarkable results in rolling back

gradually the great tide of protectionism which had caused such havoc in

the 1930s. A series of trade liberalisation rounds - Dillon, Kennedy, Tokyo

and Uruguay - painfully but successfully opened up world trade again (again because we are now not much further advanced than we were at the end of the 19th century). As a result, world trade growth has consistently outperformed and sustained world economic growth. And now the new WTO has at last been given the teeth to deal with trade disputes which should enable it to face up far better than in the past to recidivist tendencies in its member states.

For many years these international financial and trade organisations were regarded as rich mens' clubs, suspected by developing countries as being irrelevant to their problems and regarded by the Communist world as being

part of a capitalist conspiracy. The collapse or transformation of the

command economies has changed all that. The membership of these

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organisations either is, or is set to become universal. And their activities are expanding into hitherto little touched fields such as stabilising the effects of capital flows, liberalising trade in the service industries and reducing barriers

to international investment. Multilateral diplomacy in the financial,

economic and trade fields, has moved from the total neglect of the 1930S to a highly sophisticated network which underpins the working of the world economy.

It did not take long however after the end of the Second World War for it to become apparent that the burgeoning cold war was going to ensure that these universal institutions, which had been set up in such hope, were not going to be sufficient to sustain the collective security of the free world. As the Communist threat increased and the ruined countries of Western Europe struggled to cope, the response, under US leadership, was again a multilateral one. NATO was established to provide for the defence of its members, with an integrated military command and the deterrent effect of the US nuclear capability. The Marshall Plan, which put Europe back on its feet, was implemented through the multilateral machinery of the OEEC. The contrast with the confused and largely bilateral fumbling of the 1920S and 1930S was stark. External crises, over Berlin for example, were surmounted; and economically Europe went from being a basket case to becoming one of the chief motors of the world economy, providing trade and aid to developing countries on a far larger scale than its erstwhile patron, the United States. When the Soviet Union collapsed in i gg i and the countries of Central and Eastern Europe regained their liberty, a bloodless

victory of huge significance had been won.

The post-war world was a lot less successful at dealing with the dangers of excessive armaments and the emerging risks from the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Indeed for many years an absolute priority was given to the strengthening of defences against a massive Soviet threat; and a full scale arms race, which spread out around the world, as the proxies of both East and West joined in and made the most of their leverage over their protectors, ran on unchecked. Gradually the dangers of this approach became apparent, the lists of potential nuclear weapons states grew longer and the damage to the global environment from nuclear testing became less acceptable. So multilateral disarmament negotiations gradually moved from being perhaps the most sterile and artificial manifestations of multilateral diplomacy, a mere paying of lip-service to public pressure and a forum for scoring propaganda points, to much more practical and action-oriented results. There now exists a Non-Proliferation Treaty prolonged indefinitely, international conventions prohibiting biological and chemical weapons and shortly, one hopes, a comprehensive

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nuclear test ban treaty. The challenge now is not the negotiation of texts but their implementation and verification through multilateral machinery of great complexity. The examples of Iraq, South Africa, and North Korea

show just how hard this is going to be. Meanwhile the need for a more effective multilateral approach to the transfers of conventional weapons, particularly to areas of high or potential tension is as obvious as it is largely ignored. Arms races of the sort now developing in East Asia are inherently destabilising and represent a major threat to international peace and security.

The growth of regional multilateral diplomacy has been, if anything, an even more remarkable feature of our epoch than that of the universal institutions to which I have devoted most attention so far. Clearly the development of the European Union is the outstanding example and the one which attracts most of our attention in this country. But there are others, and sub-regional organisations such as ASEAN in South East Asia and SADC in Southern Africa may gradually be moving down a similar path for a similar mixture of political and economic reasons. The European Union has carried multilateral diplomacy on to a different plane from those largely inter-governmental organisation I have hitherto mentioned. The spread of its responsibilities, the scale of its operations and their nature, with the supra-national elements of its institutions, the Commission, the Court of Justice and the Parliament, put it in a completely different category. It continues to be, as it has been from its outset, a remarkable success story, with the queue of applicants for membership lengthening, the pressure for it to develop towards a common foreign and security policy strengthening, the crucial role of the single market in achieving the prosperity of its members ever clearer. But it is also sailing into choppy waters, with the project for a single currency clearly a high risk one and the tensions between a federal vision and one based on a union of nation states rising.

So far I have concentrated on a mainly descriptive approach to the growth of multilateral diplomacy, its origins and where it has got to. And even with this approach I have missed out almost as much as I have included, making no mention of the many UN agencies, dealing with refugees, nuclear energy, agriculture and many other things. Nor have I dealt with the many regional organisations, in Africa, Latin America and Europe whose activities have, on the whole, so far been less significant than the ones I have

mentioned. Overall the picture is of a huge expansion in multilateral diplomacy over the last 50 years which has transformed the structure of the diplomatic career and shifted the balance between classical bilateral diplomatic activities, some, but not all, of which are now of lesser

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importance, and those related to multilateral diplomacy, some, but not all, of which are crucial to the successful pursuit of any nation's diplomacy. The time has now come to look at one or two more qualitative aspects of multilateral diplomacy.

The audience up to now might be forgiven for thinking that I regard multilateral diplomacy, to use the unforgettable classification of io66 and all that, as quite simply `a good thing'. To a certain extent I do. The contrast between the first and second halves of the 2oth century remains a striking and salutary one. The role of multilateral diplomacy and the international

structures and disciplines it has created and operated must receive much of the credit for it, reluctant though some of the principal practitioners of power politics like Kissinger are to admit it. But would be unwise to regard multilateral diplomacy as a panacea, a cure-all. For one thing its structure and disciplines remain relatively weak and public support fragile and episodic; as Geoffrey Howe recently said, so perceptively, not many people are ready to say `dulce et decorum

. est pro patria mori' about an international entity. Moreover, it does not always work. The American

attempt in the 195os and 196os to build up regional security alliances in Asia

and the Middle East, SEATO and CENTO, was misconceived and ended in failure. The response to the oil crises of the 1970s of trying to smooth the rise and fall of the price of oil and other commodities rightly failed to gain support and is now seen by most economists as flawed, along with the activities of OPEC and other attempted cartels of primary producers. Some

of the United Nations' agencies, UNIDO for example and probably also UNCTAD, have never had a very clear justification and certainly do not have one now. In the European Union, the Commission and the Parliament are reluctant to recognise the validity of the doctrine of subsidiarity and to eschew attempts to work out multilateral solutions for

problems best handled at the national or regional level.

Many critics of multilateralism, and there are plenty of them around, in the United States in particular, would go much further and would speak at length about waste, duplication and corruption, proposing extensive deconstruction of the network so laboriously built up over the last century. There is no doubt at all that multilateral diplomacy and multilateral organisations are not cheap and nor are they particularly efficient. It is not difficult to demonstrate that national governments do many things more efficiently than international organisations do. But that is not the real test, because in the modern world national governments are simply unable on their own to carry out many of the classic tasks of government, from the most basic, defence of the realm, through protection of the environment to an extensive range of economic and trade policy functions. International

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peace and security cannot be left to the world's one remaining super-power, which is in any case not prepared to carry the burden, but nor can it be left to the law of the jungle which would lead in due course to extensive political and economic dislocation, affecting all those who depend on stability and open, growing markets for their prosperity. So the solution to the inherent inefficiency of multilateral organisations has, in my view, to be found in reform and not in deconstruction.

But there lies the rub; because multilateral organisations are remarkably resistant to reform, far more so than national institutions. The inertia resisting reform is strong, not just in bureaucratic terms but also because most policy decisions reached multilaterally represent a compromise between the competing priorities of the member states concerned, so any adjustment of such decisions will require new compromises and a willingness to give and take. But reform there has to be because international organisations are no more immune from the Darwinian requirement to adapt or die than the rest of us. It is easy to reach the conclusion that it is just too difficult to reform the UN, or NATO, or the Common Agricultural Policy of the EU, but to do so would be immensely damaging to the future prospects of those organisations.

One aspect of reform which will need a higher priority than it has hitherto received is for multilateral organisations to get better at performing the tasks they have been given, rather than, as now, putting much of their effort and their best administrative resources into acquiring new responsibilities which they are sometimes not well placed to exercise. This has become particularly urgent for the European Union but it applies also in the UN and in the field of trade and of arms control and disarmament. In most areas where it is needed the basic multilateral framework for handling problems at a global or regional level now exists, but making it effective, fleshing out the framework with day-to-day policy decisions, ensuring the international disciplines once in place are respected and that commitments are honoured, that is slow, uphill work for many years which still gets too low a priority. Of course new global challenges will arise and will require new global responses but you only have to extrapolate the growth of multilateral diplomacy on a graph to see that it is inconceivable that the trend will not bend as trends always do. The important thing is to ensure it does not break.

This rather conservative analysis is strengthened by the growing signs of stress and conflict between the proponents of the nation state as the focus of most, if not all, effort and policy-making and those who are looking to supra-national, federalist solutions. The tension is most evident in the

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European Union, but it exists elsewhere, for example in the attitude of right wing Republicans in the US towards the UN, and in almost any country in the world which finds itself overruled by an international tribunal. It seems to me extremely dangerous for the future of the multilateral structure I have described, if it comes to be thought that we are caught up in a titanic struggle between the nation state and world or regional federalism. That was not what the great post-Second World War surge in

multilateral diplomacy set out to achieve. The aim was not to abolish the nation state but to construct a framework of international machinery and disciplines within which its more destructive tendencies could be contained and controlled and within which collective solutions could be worked out for those problems and areas of policy where solutions at a national level were no longer available or fully effective. Naturally there will be a continuing tension between those who draw the various lines or boundaries I have described in one place and those who draw them in another; it should be

possible to live with that tension if the current tendency to go back to first

principles can be resisted.

Where has Britain stood in all this? What role has she played in the growth of multilateral diplomacy? The short answer is that she has stood at the heart of it, at least since the late 1950s when in a short space of time two fairly disastrous decisions were taken to engage in the Suez expedition and to stand aside from the foundation of the European Community. As a middle-ranking power whose capacity on its own to defend and further its

extensive international interests has waned, we have learned to recognise that most of what we want done has to be done in concert with others and that it pays us to harness the multilateral machinery that has been created, to that task. Middle-ranking powers are absolutely crucial to international

organisations. Their smaller Member States are almost invariably

enthusiastic multilateralists but the clout and resources they bring to the table are modest. The large powers are at best reluctant multilateralists, except in times of crisis; they are easily tempted to believe that they can get along perfectly well without the clamour and constraints and compromises of multilateral negotiation. So it is upon those in the middle that multilateral organisations most depend and it is those in the middle who have the biggest vested interest in their success and the greatest opportunity to shape their direction. Britain, with its membership of NATO, the EU and the Commonwealth, and its permanent seat on the Security Council, is as well placed as any country to play an effective role in

multilateral diplomacy and often it has done so. It does seem to me that that is the arena in which, for better or for worse, we are going to have to conduct much of our diplomatic business for the foreseeable future. Since I

never was entirely convinced that it mattered more how you played the

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game than if you won or lost, I hope we will bring to it the qualities of determination, ingenuity and perseverance which are required of those who remain on the field of multilateral diplomacy I recently left.

I apologise if I have drifted away a bit from history and into policy. But I understand that history nowadays is construed as pretty well anything that happened up until the day before yesterday. History has certainly travelled with me through 36 years of multilateral diplomacy. It has helped me greatly to understand where those with whom I had to negotiate and to cut the deals were coming from, just as understanding and being able to explain our own history is a crucial diplomatic tool in persuading others of where our sticking points are. If the loth century has provided a series of object lessons in the dangers of pure bilateralism and in the strength and weaknesses of a multilateral approach, the 21st century will show whether we can build on those strengths and remedy those weaknesses or whether the will and the resources to achieve collective solutions to the main global problems are wanting, with the damaging consequences for all of us which I believe that would entail.

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Sir David Hannay

Joined the Foreign Office in 1959 and served at Tehran and Kabul from ig6o-1963. Appointed 2nd (later ist) Secretary on UK Delegation to the European Communities, Brussels, 1965-1970, subsequently ist Secretary, UK Negotiating Team with European Communities, 1970-1972. Chef de Cabinet to Sir Christopher Soames, Vice-President of the EEC, 1973-1977; Head of Energy, Science and Space Dept, FCO, 1977-1979; Head of Middle East Dept, FCO, 1979; Assistant Under-Secretary of State (European Community), FCO, 1979-1984. Served as Minister, British Embassy, Washington, 1984-1985; Ambassador and UK Permanent Representative to the European Communities, Brussels, 1985-1990; British Permanent Representative to the United Nations, 1990-1994. Appointed British Special Representative for Cyprus on 23 May 1996.

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In preparation

Free lists of Titles (state subject/s) are available from Her Majesty's Stationery Office, HMSO Books, 5i Nine Elms Lane, London SW8 5DR.

United Kingdom United Nations and divided world 1946

No. II

1945-1995: Fifty Years of European Peace

No. i2 Nationality and Nationalism in East-Central Europe since the i8th

Century

Foreign and Commonwealth Office ISBN o 903359 65 0