Not Quite the Diplomat: Home Truths About World Affairs [Paperback]

Interesting, incisive and often very witty, from 1st page to last. Chris Patten speaks with an insider's authority, and pulls no punches, on a wide range of areas - particularly the Conservative Party, Europe, the Middle East, Britains role in the world and American foreign policy under Bush, but with attention also to world poverty, Africa and Asia. A key and recurring theme is how US foreign policy has been high-jacked by the neo-cons with a world view which is damaging not only to the rest of the world but to the USA itself. On this, illuminating quotes from key players illuminate the analysis, and he is scathing about the Iraq War and how Blair followed the American lead without reference to Britain's true interests and without gaining any real influence in return. Patten proves himself a humane and intelligent guide to the world and its problems - the best such book I have read for a long time. It's well worth the money.

From 1999 to 2004 Chris Patten was a member of the European Commission with responsibility for its External Relations. The first half of this book deals with his views on Britain's relationship with the European Community. I am not an enthusiast for Brussels myself, but I found this a most eloquent critique of Euroscepticism. Some things come out very strongly: Lord Patten's admiration of post-war Germany and for Helmuth Kohl in particular, and his rightful contempt for the Germanophobia so widespread in Britain and so fanned by the popular press and television. He puts it down to the fact that the `British' victory over Germany is the last episode in British history of which Britons can be proud, so that they compulsively replay that reel over and over again. He is contemptuous of the Tory Party, which, having under Heath taken Britain into Europe, then became the home of what Patten considers illogical arguments about sovereignty (a concept he examines with masterful authority). He is equally scathing about the British illusion that there really is something like a Special Relationship with the United States. The USA actually wants Britain to have a closer relationship with the European Union, and makes no compromises with British interests whenever those diverge from those of the United States. And although Europe and the United States share many values and Europe owes much to the USA in politics and culture, this has, since the end of the First World War, always been counter-pointed with a strand of anti-Americanism in Europe. Patten examines the many ways in which Europe and America are very different, pointing, among other things, to the pervasive influence of religion in the US, to a nationalism which is more overt and assertive across the Atlantic than it is now in Western Europe, to a much more unrestrained capitalism, to national and individual attitudes to budget deficits, to gun-ownership and to capital punishment. On all these matters Patten much prefers the European way; and clearly the ascendancy of the gung-ho, unilateralist neo-cons - Patten has selected some choice quotations from Bush, Rumsfeld, and Bolton to this effect - has done nothing to make America more popular in Europe, - not to mention the USA opting out of Kyoto, insisting on immunity from the International Criminal Court, and flouting the Geneva Conventions at Guantánamo Bay. It is all such a far cry from the internationalist approach of Truman, Marshall and Eisenhower.

When he turns to discuss the European Union, Patten is duly critical of those ideologues who will not recognize that people rightfully value their national identity, and he points out that within the EU of course all the nations - even those, and perhaps particularly those who use the most European rhetoric - try to promote their own agenda. On the other hand, he writes that there is less corruption, waste and inefficiency in Brussels than in the administrations of most member states, and that since enlargement even the ideologues have realized that there must be a halt to the expansion of the powers of the Commission - a realization that, Patten says, was a key element of the recently rejected Constitution. And on the matter of enlargement, Patten makes an eloquent and multi-layered case for the eventual admission of Turkey to the EU.

While the first half of the book addresses issues that are in the forefront of Britain's relationship with the EU, in the second half we have Patten's views on wider issues with which the EU has to concern itself. He gives an account of the EU's involvement in the Balkans during the dreadful war there. He thinks that on the whole, after a humiliating start, EU policy there `worked pretty well' and he pays warm tribute to Lord Ashdown's work there as the UN's High Representative in Bosnia-Herzegovina.

In the Middle East Patten thinks the EU should be firmer with the Israelis and therefore more independent of US policy. He also believes it is possible to do more to promote democracy and modernization in the Arab world, in part through more economic cooperation (and encouraging Arab countries to cooperate economically with each other, which they hardly do at present), and certainly not through force of arms or the double standards which value the democratic process only if it produces results that suit the West: he tells us (though without showing why) that does not `buy the argument that encouraging democracy in the Arab world only creates trouble'.

He thinks the EU should also be much tougher with Russia over a whole range of issues, and he deplores the way Schröder, Chirac, Berlusconi and Aznar have cosied up to Putin, who, over an episode in Chechnya for instance, has indulged in the most blatant lying Patten had ever come across: `He knew that we knew he was lying. He did not give a damn, and we all let him get away with it - on that occasion, and again and again.'

Critical though he is of China's human rights record, he has much more respect for the Chinese leadership, and sees the economic growth of China, not as a threat to the prosperity of the West, but, on the contrary, as ultimately in its interest, not to speak of the achievement of raising millions of Chinese out of poverty.

Patten is an exceptionally open-minded and broad-minded conservative. Much of what he says in this book is wise; very frequently it is witty, and sometimes waspish. But even those who feel stung by his remarks will be aware that they are engaged with a lively, thoughtful and stimulating mind.

This is Chris Patten's round up on world affairs as he sees them, as he bows out of high-powered international politics.

He talks about the environment, the European Union, Tony Blair, Asia and there's lots on America, which he sees as a country which has done so much to improve the post-War world, but which is now in danger of making a mess of things.

He's a very engaging writer, and he writes loads of sensible stuff about the benefits of pooling sovereignty with the European Union. He's not afraid to show his scorn for the neo-cons and he analyses Tony Blair's rather bizarre relationship with conviction and truth. He can be quite caustic about the American people.

The reader appreciates his first-hand insights and wisdom. It's a book you can read on holiday and have no problem getting through it.