The British Legacy: Diplomatic Reflections

Edward P. Baclovinac, KH, Director, The Empire Club of Canada, Chairman of the Yearbook, The Empire Club Foundation and Member, The Royal Commonwealth Society of Canada; The Reverend Vic Reigel, Christ Church, Brampton; Victoria Sharpe, Grade 11 Student, Toronto French School, Multiple Award Winner, RCS Toronto Branch "Essay Contest"; Bill Laidlaw. President. Parkelaw Inc. and Immediate fast President, The Empire Club of Canada; Deryk King, Chairman and CEO, Centrica North America/Direct Energy; The Hon. Sinclair M. Stevens, PC, QC, Chairman, The Royal Commonwealth Society, Toronto Foundation; John C. Koopman, Vice-President, Spencer Stuart and 1st Vice-President and President-Elect, The Empire Club of Canada; Bill Sinclair, Director and CEO, West Toronto School of Excellence and Member, Committee for the International Royal Commonwealth Society Essay Competition; Allan P. O'Dette, Director, External Relations, GIaxoSmithKline; and The Rev. Canon Ebert Hobbs, Chair. Royal Commonwealth Society, Toronto Branch, Honorary Assistant, St. Paul's (Bloor Street) Church and Retired Chairman, DVA Navion Canada.

June 26. 2003

Introduction by Ann Curran

I now have the pleasure of introducing our very special guest--Sir Andrew Burns.

Sir (Robert) Andrew Burns took up his appointment as British High Commissioner to Canada in August 2000.

Born on July 21, 1943, he went to Highgate School and then read Classics at Trinity College, Cambridge. He joined the Diplomatic Service in 1965 and studied Urdu and Hindi at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London before taking up a Political Section post at the British High Commission in New Delhi in 1967.

Returning to London in 1971 as the desk officer for the Balkan countries, he then served as Secretary to the U.K. Delegation to the Conference on Security and Co-operation in Europe meeting in Helsinki and Geneva.

In 1976 he was appointed Head of Chancery at the British Embassy in Bucharest.

Back at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office in 1978, he worked on conventional arms control in Europe before being appointed in early 1979 as Private Secretary to the Permanent Under Secretary and Head of the Diplomatic Service--a post he held until the summer of 1982.

In 1982-83 he was a visiting Fellow at the Harvard University Centre for International Affairs, before being appointed Counsellor (Information) at the British Embassy in Washington and Head of British Information Services in New York.

Returning to London, he was first the Head of South Asian Department (1986-88), then the Head of News Department (1988-90) where as the official FCO spokesman he was also Press Secretary to three successive Foreign Secretaries (Sir Geoffrey Howe, Mr John Major and Mr Douglas Hurd).

Then, as the Assistant Under Secretary of State responsible for Asia (1990-92) he was particularly responsible for the later stages of negotiations over the transfer of sovereignty in Hong Kong.

In 1992 he was appointed British Ambassador to Israel, a posting which coincided with the second administration of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin. He returned to London in 1995 to be the Deputy Under Secretary of State responsible for the U.K.'s bilateral relations outside Europe and for the U.K.'s world-wide trade and investment promotion.

In November 1997 he was appointed the first British Consul-General to the Special Administrative Region of Hong Kong, following the transfer of sovereignty to the People's Republic of China and also to Macau.

Today Sir Andrew will discuss "The British Legacy: Diplomatic Reflections."

He will soon step down as British High Commissioner to Canada in July and retire from the British Diplomatic Service after 38 years in a variety of increasingly senior posts in London and around the world.

Sir Andrew will offer some reflections both on the course of his own diplomatic career and on the challenges that face the world in the 21st century and how Canada and the United Kingdom can work together in helping to make the world a safer place.

Ladies and gentlemen please welcome Sir Andrew Burns.

Andrew Burns

Madam President, distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen:

Thank you very much for that very warm welcome. It is a great pleasure to be invited to address the Empire Club in Toronto at this special Canada Day luncheon. And I am particularly pleased that so many young winners of the Royal Commonwealth Society's Essay Contest are here too.

As you have heard, I am close to retirement. This is my last visit to Toronto and indeed my last public engagement here before I finally step down in three weeks' time. I thought that if you would indulge me I might reflect on my diplomatic career. It began in India, a Commonwealth country, and over the last 35 years has taken me to all four quarters of the globe. But before doing so, may I first say a heartfelt thank you to Canada for making this final posting such an enjoyable, stimulating and rewarding three years. I have travelled extensively from coast to coast, and only last night got back from a week in the North visiting Nunavut, NWT and the Yukon.

The relationship between the United Kingdom and Canada goes a long way back and it goes very deep. The personal ties and the social, economic, cultural, business and political links that bind our two countries not only go deep, they mean a huge amount to our citizens on both sides of the Atlantic. I have never encountered a society where I have felt so at home and where I have sensed that the values and traditions that matter in life are so clearly ones that strike strong chords with anyone from Britain. The daily dialogue between us is intense.

In saying this I do not mean to endorse what the very first speaker said to your club 100 years ago--namely, "that the highest interests of the Dominion of Canada are identical with the interests of the British Empire." No, times have moved on. Though I think the purpose of the Rev. Prof. William Clark's speech on December 3, 1903 was to argue against annexation by your great neighbour to the south. Perhaps times have not changed as much as we might think!

A great part of my task here, it seems to me, has been to remind everyone of the contemporary importance of our bilateral relationship and to refresh its relevance for the younger generation. And in that context, how pleased I am that there are some youngsters here who have already benefited from the work of the Royal Commonwealth Society.

The trouble is that relations between us are so good that we tend to take them for granted. You agonise about your relationship with the United States, or the fine print of dealings between your federal and provincial governments. We in Britain agonise over our relationship with the European Union and debate the virtues of devolution.

But we should never forget that this is the oldest and most important of our overseas friendships. As the recent ceremonies on Juno Beach reminded us yet again, this is the alliance, the partnership, upon which we can most rely. This is the friend with whom we have most in common. This is the friend who has instinctively backed us in time of trouble or need--WW I, WW II and the peace process in Northern Ireland.

When it became clear for example that the international community could not stand by as the former Yugoslavia degenerated into murderous anarchy, Canada and the U.K. were amongst the first to intervene. Canadian soldiers have been there without a break ever since, maintaining a particularly close relationship with their British Army colleagues inside a multinational brigade in Bosnia. This is a relationship that routinely places British soldiers under a Canadian command. And vice versa.

When I look back on my career, I wonder at how often I have had to start by explaining what a diplomat is and what he does. He is not simply--indeed he is not at all--someone sent to lie abroad for his country. No, I believe it to be not merely a very honourable profession, but a profoundly important one. We try to oil the wheels of global affairs and we try to identify and fend off challenges to our security and prosperity which, if neglected, might cause damage far in excess of the horrors of the 20th century.

A high commissioner, that is to say an ambassador, or indeed any other kind of envoy must of course pay particular attention to the people whom he represents. Whether we are issuing passports, answering enquiries, promoting trade or issuing travel advice, a British mission nowadays is keenly aware of the standards the public expects and of the importance of providing prompt and accurate advice.

Never has this been so important, or sometimes so difficult to achieve, as when we are grappling with big public-health scares such as recently SARS or BSE--or indeed foot and mouth disease a year or two back.

There is a huge drive on in the British government to get us all to think in terms of a public-service ethos rather than a public-sector one. To think of the services we are delivering and the customers we are satisfying, rather than to keep ourselves inured behind high walls and a misguided assumption that in some way we can deal with

pure policy alone. That is a very welcome change from the Diplomatic Service I entered in 1965.

But there is no escaping the fact that the core function of an envoy abroad, the thing that makes him or her distinct and unique, is the ability to conduct a privileged conversation between two governments. The outside world can never know the full extent of this activity. But it deeply relies on the ability of governments to talk quietly behind the scenes about ways to handle the challenges that we all face in furthering the interests of our own people in a highly competitive world, one where economic or social disaster has often deeply fractured many societies.

For example, throughout my career the stability of the North Atlantic Alliance has been paramount. It remains so. A high point in my career was serving in the early 1970s on the British delegation to the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe--the three-year conference which triggered the disintegration of the Warsaw Pact. We worked very closely with our Canadian colleagues.

There was a moment at the end of the Cold War when people thought that the peace dividend might even include a dismantling of the alliance. We know better now. NATO has been the bedrock of Western stability and prosperity since the Second World War. It is now welcoming new members from Central and Eastern Europe. It is reaching out to the Russians and other erstwhile foes. And it is increasingly taking action outside its own area, as we have recently been doing in Afghanistan and now in Iraq. It is only NATO which carries the commitment of governments on both sides of the Atlantic and ensures that our individual European military capabilities are properly allied and coordinated with the enormous military resources existing on this side of the Atlantic.

But if NATO remains of dominant importance, so too does the European Union. European union has come a long way since the original community of six nations. We are currently 15-strong and about to expand to 25 by the end of this year. Such an enlargement of the European family means that virtually every city and culture of importance in Europe is being brought together under one cooperative umbrella. We have to find new ways of managing the decision-making process and of determining what subjects should be dealt with at a community level and what subjects should be handled still by the individual nation states.

The European union is a process, not a finalised state. A Convention on the Future of Europe is underway, trying to come up with a draft constitution which will explain to the 550 million citizens of this new enterprise quite simply what it is that they belong to and why and how it will work.

One of our key requirements is of course to ensure that while we reap the benefits of closer economic and social co-operation with our neighbours, we do not lose our own sense of identity and our own political, social and cultural individuality. That we do not lose the particular national ties that bind people to their nation and governments to their people.

It is against this background too that we in the U.K. have recently been debating yet again the wisdom of joining the European Monetary System, that is to say the common currency, the euro.

Building closer European unity is a massive and historic endeavour which has coloured my whole career as a British diplomat.

But of one thing we in the U.K. are convinced: that we should not develop a Europe which seeks to stand in contradistinction to our North American friends, a Europe which sees itself as an alternative pole of attraction. No, what we want is a really strong partnership between Europe and the United States, and Canada. If we allow ourselves to be divided or conclude that we are destined to go in separate directions, then we shall split the North

Atlantic Alliance, we shall weaken the voice, the authority and strength of the Western world, and we shall do our citizens and the peace of the world a grave disservice.

This is of course one of the reasons why the stakes have been so high recently in the context of Iraq. The British government rallied immediately and very strongly to the United States after the appalling attacks of 9/11. It is what the British people would have expected of any government. That mood reflected a very real sense in Britain that the attacks on the United States were an attack on us all. And it reflected a keen desire to come to the aid of a United States under attack and help develop a response to terrorism which would be both effective and respectful of the values we hold dear.

The action in Afghanistan had the wholly beneficial result of disrupting a very dangerous terror network. Working closely with Canada, the U.K. and allies from Europe and all over the world, we have made a real start at rebuilding the shattered economy and society of Afghanistan. This is a long, long road. We must persevere. We greatly value Canada's commitment to send troops there again this summer. A failure to create a viable, peaceful state in Afghanistan can only lead to further instability in an already unstable part of the world, and further unleashing of terror and drugs on the West.

When it came to Iraq there was of course a very wide-spread sense around the world that Saddam Hussein was a dictator who behaved appallingly towards his own people and was a menace to his neighbours. Ever since the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the Gulf War of 1991 we have been engaged with Canada, with the United States and with other allies in trying to keep a lid on the situation to prevent Saddam Hussein renewing his attacks against his neighbours, and to try to protect as best we could the minority groups within Iraq who were under such pressure. But overflights and no-fly zones, sanctions and the interdiction of shipping in the Gulf are not something that could have gone on interminably.

The British government has had two primary concerns in dealing with Iraq over the last nine months. We wanted to see the authority of the United Nations upheld, and we wanted to see an end to Saddam Hussein's weapons of mass destruction.

We tried very very hard to secure UN support. We achieved that in Resolution 1441. We thought it preferable to have a second resolution before any military action was undertaken. We regretted that that proved impossible, though we went several extra miles in an effort to secure agreement. When we took action we had no doubt that that action was legal, right and proper.

Nor did we have any doubt that action was required to demonstrate to Saddam Hussein and indeed to other recalcitrant governments around the world that the United Nations Security Council is not a paper tiger, but a force to be respected, whose orders and resolutions should be implemented. We judged that there would be far more danger in backing down than by taking the action which we eventually took with a coalition of countries that shared our view.

Now the task is to rebuild Iraq and allow its people to benefit from the rich resources of their country. In time we shall find more evidence than we have at the moment of what weapons of mass destruction Saddam Hussein actually had, and how he tried to conceal them.

The big challenge however is to make a reality of the new Road Map for a settlement of the Arab/Israel dispute on the basis of two states--a sovereign and viable Palestinian state next to an Israel which can be confident in secure borders.

As a former ambassador to Israel I know how deep the desire for peace is, and yet how traumatized the people of both societies are by the endless violence. Until we find a resolution to the Arab/Israel dispute, we shall continue to

face a public opinion in the Islamic world which is resentful, suspicious, hostile and frustrated. That is no basis upon which to build future security and stability. President Bush's success in bringing together the Prime Minister of Israel and the new Prime Minister of the Palestinian Administration holds out the prospect of new progress towards an elusive peace. There can be no greater prize at present.

Beyond the situation in the Middle East there are so many other global issues to be resolved. The spread of weapons of mass destruction in the Korean peninsula. The continuing dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir. The difficulty we continue to face in achieving genuine trade liberalization through the WTO negotiations. Our governments, when they meet in the G8, or at the United Nations, or in the OECD, or in so many other fora, have huge challenges to address together.

I believe that one of the strengths of British diplomacy and one of the more positive elements in world affairs is the Commonwealth--a body which belies frequent predictions that it is irrelevant by finding itself besieged by new applicants. The Commonwealth played a distinguished role in the long arguments over apartheid in South Africa. It continues to be a body where real progress can be achieved on some of the issues affecting Africa. It is a wonderful force for good in promoting professional and technical advancement. It is a body in which Canada and Britain both play a very important part.

Finally, let me turn to the world of culture and education. As you know, the cultural arm of the British government is the British Council. I have a very active and imaginative colleague here, and together we do our best to promote an understanding of Britain which is more up-to-date. We are a hugely mixed and varied country these days and this diversity gives us strength.

So what final conclusion do I draw as I look back over the last 40 years? The lesson is one which came home most forcibly to me in the context of the handover of sovereignty from Hong Kong to China. When first we negotiated the agreement with the Government of China in 1984 we were concerned to protect Hong Kong's way of life for as long as possible under the new dispensation. As a result we have this excellent concept of one country, two systems. Of Hong Kong as an autonomous region running its own affairs. And the Joint Declaration speaks of how the capitalist system in Hong Kong will be preserved for at least 50 years.

We thought then that it was the capitalism of Hong Kong that made the place so special and different. But over the years since then of course China, like so many other countries, has increasingly embraced the open market. As we spent hour upon tedious hour seeking to unravel Hong Kong's dependence on Britain so that it could stand on its own feet as an autonomous region within China, we discovered that the real guarantee, the real essence in Hong Kong, was the rule of law--an uncorrupt, predictable system of justice, a society where fair play ruled.

I think it is this issue of fair play which goes to the heart of people's expectations. We see this particularly strongly in the Commonwealth, where the countries are by and large ones that had a long exposure to British administrative practice. There are many legacies from an Empire of which Britain can be proud, and I daresay there are some of which we should be ashamed. But we did inculcate in all the societies with which we came into contact this sense that everyone was equal before the law, and that everyone was entitled, if not to be judged by his peers, then to be given his day in court and able to argue his or her view before judges who would act without fear or favour, without prejudice or arbitrariness. Those are very precious attributes. They are valued increasingly around the world.

Without that rule of law societies will never acquire the kind of investment needed to make their countries progress. It is the justices of courts, both supreme and ordinary around the world, that have most impressed me over my 38 years. I am no lawyer, but the good sense, the common sense, the practical judgement of the judges plays an absolutely critical part in the well-being of our societies. Sticking by the rule of law is what government is all about. Transparency, accountability and honesty all make up an attitude of mind without which societies will never be able to prosper.

How fortunate we are in Canada and Britain to live in societies where these values are so well-respected and widely observed.

The appreciation of the meeting was expressed by The Rev. Canon Ebert Hobbs, Chair, Royal Commonwealth Society, Toronto Branch, Honorary Assistant, St. Paul's (Bloor Street) Church and Retired Chairman, DVA Navion Canada.