Who are "we"?

The question to ask before you take big decisions

One of the best parts of an Ambassador’s job is having the opportunity to get to know a very wide range of people in the country you’re posted to, if you take the trouble to seek them out. As you meet people with all sorts of different occupations, backgrounds and interests, your job is to take a strategic approach to integrating the insights you hear, remembering “where you sit is where you stand”: what people tell you will depend on the influences of their professional or other background and where their interests lie, so you need to take time to find out about them too. I’m fortunate that I’m still exposed in my working life to a great diversity of professions and mindsets, from tech entrepreneurs to corporate executives, from public servants to foreign policy academics to name but a few. In fact, we probaby all have more diverse networks than we imagine. We should take advantage of this: it’s important to look critically and “outside in” at what we’re learning, mindful that others may see the world very differently.

It’s natural to regard own perspective on the world - professional, geographical or whatever - as especially important. If we’re surrounded by people like us, we may even forget that others may not share the same perspective, may know little about our speciality and may not rate its preoccupations as highly as we do. We can be led astray by the hidden assumptions of our own world and forget that others may not assume them at all. We can be like the fish [that] don’t see water. Failing to recognise our private shared assumptions can lead to disastrous groupthink: if everyone in the room is in violent agreement, you should probably (all) get out of the room. Groupthink is probably the most dangerous weakness of any organisation, government or business, in that it will tend to multiply all the other strategic weaknesses or cognitive biases we’re all susceptible to.

Groupthink isn’t just an unfortunate failing we slip into, it’s a particular problem if we have ambitious goals and would rather not be derailed by too many awkward questions. There’s nothing wrong pursuing our goals with determination, but this needs to be combined with an “outside in” approach to understanding the wider world, as that’s where our enterprise with ultimately succeed or fail. A key element of “outside in” thinking is to stop and ask ourselves “who are we?”.

The first point to remember is that “we” are the “doers”, rather than the “done to”. Here’s a quick test. When describing a public problem that needs a solution, from potholes or a shortage of skilled engineers to the threat from Russia, do you say “we must …” or “they must”? If they implies that it’s a job for the authorities to address, then we in some sense self-identify as “the authorities”. Most people, most of the time, don’t have the power to deal with engineering skills, potholes or the threat from Russia. Some people do - and a larger group like to think of themselves as having agency or participating in the decision-making. It’s good to be active and engaged, but it’s worth remembering that most people probably aren’t that engaged and certainly don’t believe that they have any agency. I confess that my hackles rise when I hear an expert saying that “we must” do something-or-other and then talk about “the public” (ie those, unlike the speaker, who don’t have much agency and are just expected to tag along). In this case, I suspect that the expert is hoping we’ll defer quietly and not ask too many questions. But if the enterprise is a big one, it can’t at the same time be the private preserve of the authorities.

Geopolitically, this may be one of those moments. With the conflict between Russia and Ukraine unresolved and the Trump Administration’s commitment to European security uncertain, European countries including the UK are rushing to re-arm themselves after (in most cases) several decades of relative neglect. They are moving quickly to earmark new funds, though the devil is still very much in the detail: the real test will be in the numbers.

Next, in order to decide what to spend the money on, governments will need to determine the balance between two conceptually distinct objectives: to demonstrate that the Europeans are committed to their own defence in order that the US accepts the case for continuing to support the Atlantic Alliance; and to provide sufficiently for European security in the event that the Trump Administration (or a successor) withdraws that support. While both are about “more defence”, specific decisions about capabilities, interoperability, independence and therefore procurement will in depend significantly on which strategic direction Europeans take. There will be plenty of politics in these judgements, both in terms of trying to anticipate US decisions but also in terms of European preferences. For example, the UK would in almost any case prefer to remain as close to the US as possible and so will not want to burn its bridges as far as interoperability - and so buying US-made equipment - is concerned, while France, for example, will be much more attracted to greater European autonomy, with French forces - and French industry - in the lead.

But even finding the money and then deciding on what to buy with it won’t be enough. More defence means investing in rebuilding industrial capacity which in turns means training a larger skilled workforce at a time when engineering and tech skills are already at a premium. To rearm at speed would require a significant reprioritisation of the economies of European countries that take the need seriously. This - as opposed to some of the more lurid comparisons with the 1930s or the Cold War - seems to be a reasonable conclusion about the scale of the problem. I’m not enough of an expert to put a number on it, but it certainly means further diversion of public spending into defence (aka “cuts” in other areas with strong public support and articulate professional lobbies), increased borrowing and/or taxation (however cleverly engineered), some parts of industry pivoting to support national defence and, in human terms, a lot of people working in the armed forces and related industries who had never expected to so.

Discussions of this kind on what some are calling a “national mission” are going on actively in the UK (I’ve been at a few) and across Europe. But they’re not the kind of conversations you’re hearing on the street and they’re not in people’s minds when they tell pollsters they support higher defence spending - not to mention the fact that among under-35s they don’t. My impression is that those who are closely involved in the defence debate, public and private, are beginning to take rearmament and all that goes with it as a given. This poses the question as to whether they have asked - or indeed care - what “the public” thinks of this radical reprioritisation. Do they believe that they are on the same page and prepared for sacrifices? Do they have a clever communications strategy to persuade them either that the cost is worth paying or to convince them that we don’t have to make tradeoffs? During the COVID pandemic a lot of Government effort was put into communications campaigns, some (in my view) quite shameful for a democratic country. But can “protect the NHS” be quite so easily turned into “defend the nation”? Can you pull off the same communications trick twice in such quick succession?

With fewer and fewer people remembering life before the “peace dividend”, these are big asks. When the British public strongly supports helping Ukraine, it feels to me less like a return to a Cold War-era acceptance of national defence than a very post-Cold War sentiment in favour of helping a (fairly) distant victim of aggression. To the defence community, of course, it looks very different. First, if you’re closely involved in defence, you’ve studied the issues in detail, you read the intelligence and think a lot about the risks. Psychologically, like all of us, you’ll believe that what you work on is of particular importance. Secondly, people in defence tend to be patriotic and have a strong innate sense of what they’re defending. As a former diplomat, it’s something I very much recognise and appreciate. While diplomats don’t always agree with everything their country does - I’ve written before about those who’ve taken the difficult decision to resign rather than compromise their beliefs - on a day-to-day basis you cannot but identify strongly with the country that you’re representing. So, for us, defence may be a given, but that doesn’t mean we have made the case.

If we are to take national defence much more seriously and make sacrifices for it, we need to have a strong, if not necessarily sharply defined, sense of what the nation is, who “we” are, and what the threat is. Some people, and not just those who work in defence and diplomacy, have such a sense. But does the country as a whole? I’d argue that we just don’t know how public sentiment will evolve, which is why I’m glad that the British Foreign Policy Group, which I work with, looks in detail at these important questions on a regular basis. I certainly don’t think we can take it for granted. Countries which perceive a clear present threat and have been built on a long history of vulnerability - Poland and the Baltic States come to mind, but also countries like Greece - have no problem prioritising defence. Small homogeous and potentially vulnerable countries tend to have a strong sense of national identity. But equally, the highly diverse United States has succeeded in cultivating a sense of patriotism which can still seem alien in parts of Europe. In autocratic regimes, though compliance may be forced, we should remember that patriotism can still be sincere. Just because you resent the regime you live under doesn’t necessarily mean you won’t fight for your country.

During the Cold War, the Soviet Union was generally (though never universally) perceived as both a direct military threat and a political system hostile to our values. Does the majority perceive the same direct military threat today? If not, is the very real threat of, say, cyber attack seen as a justification for rearmament? Since the end of the Cold War, British/European foreign policy has substantially focused on “values” rather than direct national threats and interests. In recent decades, there have been some rather artificial and belaboured attempts to define “British values”. The problem is that “values” have been largely defined top-down by elites, derived at least in part from complex international agreements and often change faster than public opinion. This makes them, as a cause around which a country will rally and make sacrifices, a poor substitute for clear national interest.

I’m not disputing the need for Europe (including the UK) taking more responsibility for its own defence. In fact, the case has been there for many years, in part quietly ignored, in part weakened by association with a series of failed expeditionary wars, the result of a disastrous alliance of liberal internationalism and neo-conservatism. The challenge is that those who advocate for defence, even if they don’t realise it, are in a weak position to convince voters of the need for a “national mission”. If the country wants to ensure support for rearmament and the associated “national mission” it’s got a lot of catching up to do in articulating why it’s necessary, and therefore what the nation is.

The lesson here for all of us is that we shouldn’t allow ourselves to be misled by the groupthink of a shared professional interest. Those who are - temperamentally, ideologically or professionally - committed to a particular course of action can’t take for granted that everyone else is on the same page. When you say that “we” must do something, especially if it involves sacrifice, it’s important to know who the “we” are and to make sure that “they” agree. And that’s as true of a family or a company, every bit as much as for a country.