27 August 2015
Tianjin: It Tolls For Thee
By John Watson
Children with a taste for philosophy used to ask each other a difficult question. “Which would you prefer,” they would say, “the death of someone close to you or the deaths of 1 million foreigners?” That was of course a trap. Any child would be far more affected by the loss of one of its parents than by the demise of large numbers of people it had never met. But the sacrifice of all those foreigners does seem a little heartless when you think of heroes who sacrifice their lives for a few strangers.
Remoteness and the emotional response
The way someone reacts to a disaster depends on how remote they are from it. That is not just a matter of distance but other things too: whether it represents a threat to them and whether they have sufficient in common with the victims to create sympathy. All sorts of different links may be relevant. If you are a Christian, the slaughter of fellow Christians in the Middle East will (other things being equal) seem more important than the slaughter of Muslims. If you are a sailor you may be particularly stirred by a maritime disaster. And so on.
It is tempting to try to reduce this to a mathematical rule, so that the level of concern is connected with remoteness through some sort of reciprocal equation. Perhaps a square law, so that if you double the remoteness you reduce the impact by four, treble it and you reduce the impact by nine. Or perhaps a cube law or an exponential function – or even something more exotic still. No doubt all sorts of bizarre relationships could be constructed, but in the end none of them will mean much because you cannot measure the various factors in a meaningful way. “More remote means less concern” is about as close as you can get.
Tianjin
No doubt it is because of its remoteness that the terrible explosion at Tianjin has faded so quickly from the British press. Yes, it was very big as non-nuclear explosions go, with corresponding damage and loss of life; but most of us, after a glance at the photographs and maybe a pause to admire the heroism of the firefighters, will have turned the pages of the newspaper and moved on. The explosion was very sad but not really anything to do with us. Actually, it should have made us think.
The explosion took place in a large facility for the storing of dangerous chemicals, and rules governing how far they should have been kept from residential property seem to have been broken. No doubt an enquiry will establish other failures too and someone will get it in the neck. We will read the criticisms, the suggestions of corruption, the apologies, the punishments and tut slightly. Well, after all, it is China and they do things differently there. High on our scale of remoteness, however we choose to define it. OK, end of story, turn to the cricket. But what if the accident had been nuclear like the one in Fukushima where the cleanup will take years? Then we would have been much more concerned, not because the accident would affect us directly but because it would drum home the message that if something similar were to occur in the Europe the fallout could do immense damage to all the nearby member states. A sort of proximity by analogy, if you like. It would certainly give pause for thought about how high safety standards are in the more casual European States and in particular in their nuclear installations. Perhaps the sports pages would have to wait a little longer for attention.
No respecters of borders
The trouble is that clouds of radioactive dust are not respecters of international borders. Chernobyl in 1986 set off radiation alarms 1000 km away in Sweden; and if a disaster was much worse (perhaps the detonation of a nuclear warhead) damage could be sustained by a wide range of countries whose only mistake was to be in the wrong place. Nuclear incidents are not just a problem for the country in which they occur. There are an international problem with a huge capacity to hurt others.
It isn’t just nuclear incident, either. Easy travel means that the displacement of a community causes ripples of migration which can be felt thousands of miles away. Isis genocide causes problems in Calais. Burmese refugees put pressure on Australia. Or what about the environment? Over-consumption in the developed world contributes to global warming and famine in Africa. African attempts to emulate Western living standards while using more primitive technology creates more global warming still.
What should we do about these global problems? There isn’t much point in urging countries to show more restraint when they see that others do not do the same. How could you sell that to your electorate? Why should a country disarm while those it distrusts have the bomb? Why should it constrain its growth by limiting emissions when it is not itself much affected by global warming and is desperately trying to catch up economically? A politician who pursues international solutions at the expense of his own electorate will quickly find himself out of office, an easy victim for his opportunistic rivals. Is democracy simply not up to the challenge or is it simply being used in the wrong way?
Applying democracy
It is almost impossible to listen to a politician these days without hearing an assertion that local decisions should be made at local level. In the Treaty of Maastricht the EU paid lip service to the principle of subsidiarity. The present UK government is keen to push decisions down to a local level, partly through a system of elected mayors. There are limits to it all, however. The government has just decided to call in decisions on whether to allow fracking for oil because it does not want an activity which it regards as important to the national economy to be impeded by local nimbyism. There the decisions affect the country at large so they must be made nationally. Go up the scale and apply the same logic to international problems and you end up with international bodies above the nation state and, what is more, they must be bodies who have the power to make their decisions stick in a nation state whether it agrees with them or not.
There are, of course, bodies of this sort already in existence. There is the UN itself. Then there are international courts, international agencies and bodies created by particular treaties. Still, it is very hard to intervene in the affairs of a nation state even where they impact heavily on its neighbours. Although sanctions against Iran may be credited with having brought it to the table to agree restrictions on its nuclear programme, that is a very long and indirect road which will not always work. Something more direct is needed. Where genocide or the displacement of communities is concerned it is probably boots on the ground or nothing.
No one likes interfering in the affairs of another state. It breaks with a concept of sovereignty which has been enshrined in international law since the Treaty of Westphalia ended the 30 Years War in 1648. It smells of neo-colonialism. It can all too easily go wrong. Those who interfere one day might be the subject of interference the next. Still, when the risks of not interfering become too great, public opinion will change. A couple of really serious nuclear accidents could mean a new body with control over armaments and civil projects. There will come a time when the effects of global warming mean that emissions really do have to be contained. The displacement of communities will have to be stopped at a time when migration levels threaten remote and powerful civilisations. These times will come and pan-national institutions will have to develop to meet the needs. Perhaps they will be based on the UN. Perhaps they will not. We will just have to hope that in the case of the environment and nuclear security they will not be too late.
Meanwhile
Until that happens we have to make shift with ad hoc arrangements. Countries may need to be forcibly disarmed through coalitions of the willing. At some stage European armies may be needed in Africa to set up safe havens and to prevent further displacement of communities. It is likely to be a long and torrid phase of disaster-management but it is a period that has to be gone through until we achieve a more internationalist approach to global problems. It is for this period that Britain has to prepare itself and as our armed forces shrink we need to keep an eye on whether we can service the needs for intervention that are likely to arise. That capacity to intervene, to police and where necessary to occupy, in cooperation with other countries whose interests coincide with our own, should be at the centre of our strategic thinking. As the government begins this year’s Strategic Defence and Security Review it is a need that must be kept centre stage.
