Robin McAlpine – Another way to exist in the world

Non-alignment is an option for European nations. Just look at Ireland.

Robin McAlpine is Head of Strategic Development at the Common Weal think-tank in Scotland.

Cross-posted from Common Weal

What do you do in a world that feels like it is falling apart? What do you do if you’re a nation that wants to do the right thing but is finding it increasingly difficult to gauge what exactly the right thing is? And what do you do if your allies keep doing the wrong thing, dragging you with them?

What if the right answer is ‘do no harm, do good when you can, stay independent, look after your own interests, mind your own business’? Why would that be a bad way to go about things? And why is such a geopolitical stance not open to more nations?

In this article I want to argue that (a) it is very definitely not a bad way to go about things, (b) it absolutely is a long-standing geopolitical option which is the subject of massive propaganda efforts to disguise it and (c) you should probably start paying more attention to the places which are already doing well out of this approach (if you’re not already).

First, I’m sure the problem doesn’t need much framing for you but here you go anyway. For basically as long as most of us can remember, Britain keeps ending up in wars it doesn’t need and making enemies it could easily avoid making. We sacrifice our interests to some larger ideal of ‘The West’ which does not obviously give us much in return. And it seldom really ends well.

This is the nature of ‘alignment’. We have been conditioned to believe that the only way to exist in the world is to join a gang bigger than our own and use that gang to impose our will on others. So embedded is this idea in our heads that we struggle to escape it. We need to invade Iraq and bomb Syria and keep arming Isreal because, someday we’ll need help in return.

Except what help, and on what day exactly? Are we back on about Britain being invaded by Russia or China or something? Are we really saying ‘well, for 30 years we’ve bombed anything the US told us to bomb so that in another decade’s time, when the Chinese come, the US will help us out’?

How do they get by, all those nations which didn’t invade Iraq and Afghanistan, facilitate torture flights, bomb Kosovo, Syria and Libya, turn a blind eye to war crimes by ‘our people’? They must be getting invaded by China every second day. It must be hell there. Thank goodness we killed all those people in the Middle East.

In fact, a very large part of our security concerns aren’t allayed by our geopolitical stance but caused by it. Our military security threats are negligible and very largely rooted in our hosting of a massive nuclear arsenal. Most nations don’t exist like this. The idea that this is our only option for peace is puerile.

I ask people this all the time; Ireland isn’t in Nato, so why is it not being invaded? Why are Irish citizens not constantly living in fear of their inevitable demise at the hands of [insert baddie du jour]? If they keep spending their national wealth on things like public infrastructure rather than lots of weapons, how can they expect not to be invaded any minute now?

Clearly they are a small nation with no power or impact, and if they deviate from the geopolitics of the western world and act independently, they’re finished. For example, if they participate in a legal action against US’s sociopathic best friend Isreal it’s all over, right? The sky will actually fall in on them, won’t it?

Yet peace, security and stability endure despite every bit of your British-trained mind telling you such things aren’t possible. Ireland has done a very good job of looking after its own interests (it is Europe’s in-house tax haven, to everyone else’s expense), it does good things when it can and doesn’t face catastrophic consequences, it doesn’t feel the need to join every gang going and it manages quite comfortably to stay out of other nation’s business most of the time.

But it isn’t our near neighbours I want you to look at but Latin America. It is here that we see the alternative to our pathetic British neediness in its most well-formed basis. Latin America has been through waves of leftist government in recent decades, often swinging back to the right (sometimes the far right) in between.

But for a long time a lot of those regimes were rooted in the culture created in Latin America by the abuses of the US. The US would overthrow democracy at the drop of a hat if a leftist administration was elected and its go-to alternative was dictatorial regimes. In Latin America there was an enduring view prevalent among the left that only dissent-free authoritarianism could protect the nation from some sort of US-backed coup.

That didn’t really work, or not completely. Yes, some nations did manage to insulate themselves from direct US overthrow through authoritarianism, but the authoritarianism carried other problems into every part of their society and so things remained fundamentally unstable. And the US didn’t stop its anti-democratic shenanigans, operating coups at will – failed in Venezuela in 2002, successful in Bolivia in 2019 (though the left regained power democratically, only to see another minor failed coup this year).

But there is now a new generation of Latin American leftist leaders, effectively ‘led’ by Lula De Silva in Brazil, and they’re taking a quite different approach. They are adopting almost exactly the strategy I outlined at the start of this article.

They cooperate at a continent-level through various multinational forums but they remain non-aligned. They have taken strong moral stances on a range of geopolitical issues and have used direct leverage where they can (their position on Palestine has been among the most morally unambiguous in the world).

They judge every action based primarily on self-interest. The Latin American left is doing the absolute opposite of cutting China and Chinese goods out of their economy to pacify the US, they are constantly building relationships with China. But that doesn’t mean they won’t be critical of China, just that they will continue to work together where their mutual interest coincides.

But what is really interesting about this moment is that this group of solidly leftist governments have not backed Maduro in Venezuela over the recent disputed election. Why? Because they do not believe that regional security or their best interests are tied up with laundering the reputation of a nation whose democratic processes are fraying.

(The situation in Venezuela is complicated and it is perhaps the nation which has faced the most intense direct economic and diplomatic attacks from the US other than Cuba, Russia and Iran. The US behaviour has been absolutely disgraceful and misinformation is rife, but there is non-distorted credible evidence that all is not well with the election results. If there has been eroding of democracy or systematising fraud and dishonesty, the past can’t justify it.)

And what do you know, this approach is working. These Latin American countries have more sway in the world than they ever did, are shaping international relationships in ways that work for them and have avoided being dragged into conflict and escalation. Oh, and they have widespread respect around the world.

This is a respected model of geopolitical position-taking, with an established name, and established set of practices and a major organisation backing them. It’s called non-alignment, and the Non-Alignment Movement has 122 member nations and 27 observers – one of the biggest international coalitions outside the UN.

Britain could transform its international relationships overnight if it decided to take a non-aligned stance, yet ‘Great’ Britain needs to align itself umbilically to a genuinely ‘Great Power’ if it wants to maintain its imperial pretence. Britain will be the last non-aligned nation in the world.

But non-alignment offers a wonderful opportunity for Scotland (once independent). We would collaborate equally and collegiately in intelligence-sharing but wouldn’t need as much of it because we’d get rid of nuclear weapons and stay out of Nato (a fundamental condition for non-alignment). We’d be no-one’s enemy.

We need good relationships with China to decarbonise our economy – it is not in Scotland’s interests to greatly inflate the price of electric vehicles by cutting out Chinese competition to aid other nations’ car industries (as the EU has just chosen to do). Yet other protectionisms which are prohibited by alignment policy would seriously help Scotland.

I need to bring this article to a close. I could go on and on with examples of how non-alignment has worked well for nations in practice. It is easy to proliferate examples of how being aligned has dragged us into situations that were absolutely against our own interests. It is even easier to show how it has made us a morally bankrupt nation over our entire Middle East track record.

But if I have been able to do anything in this short piece I hope it is a simple thing. It is to make you aware that non-alignment is an option. You may not have been aware it is a successful geopolitical stance. You may not have been aware that it is one an independent Scotland could adopt (as Ireland has). And you may have no idea of the benefits that emerge from it.

Why? Because for all your lives you’ve been fed the propaganda that the only way to survive in the world is to pick a gang and join it, doing whatever it takes to keep you in the good graces of the gang. You’ve been fed this propaganda with the constant fear of ‘the other’ (China or Russia or whatever) and been persuaded that it is that other which is responsible for all your problems. Sound familiar this week?

It is not our only choice. It is not our best choice. We desperately need to choose differently.

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