The Future of Liberal Democracy: The 2020 Studies Lecture in Honour of Peter Sutherland

Abstract

The Future of Liberal Democracy1 The 2020 Studies Lecture in Honour of Peter Sutherland Chris Patten It is a pleasure and an honour to be invited to give this lecture by Studies, and with the hospitality of the Society of Jesus, in honour of a great Irishman, a great European and a great world statesman, Peter Sutherland. Described in John Walsh’s excellent biography The Globalist as possibly the most influential Irish person ever – take that Edmund Burke, James Joyce and W B Yeats! – we should pause and acknowledge that the compliment may well be true. After all, Peter led the world to the conclusion of the biggest trade agreement in history in 1993. The General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade was then transformed into the World Trade Organisation. There has been nothing like it since to change so many lives economically, mostly for the better; nor does there appear much likelihood of anything like it happening again any time soon. Nationalism pushes its way to the centre of the stage; protectionism slouches along in its wake. ‘Does anyone know what wisdom is?’ asks the owl in The Thousand and One Nights. Not at the moment, it seems. I first met Peter when he was Ireland’s Attorney General and I was a junior minister in Northern Ireland. As a Catholic of Irish heritage, I was thought more likely than most Conservatives to be a more or less acceptable spokesman for British government policy on the North in the United States, from Washington to Boston to Los Angeles. Garret Fitzgerald asked Peter and also Mary Robinson to play similar roles to explain Dublin’s policy. I think it sometimes surprised American audiences to discover that we seemed to have so much in common, which they also appeared to think to their surprise was true of Nationalist, Republican and Unionist politicians from the North. The most obvious differences between these politicians was the hours they kept. I used to muse that the best possible model for power-sharing in Belfast would be for Unionists to govern in the day and Republicans and Nationalists by night. Peter Sutherland was, of course, always entertaining company and, for me, maybe more to the point, there are few public figures for whose values Studies • volume 109 • number 434 119 and opinions I have ever felt more sympathy. I agreed with him about the efficacy of markets but also that they needed to be competitive, regulated and balanced in favour of equity and social responsibility. Like him, I believed that my country should embrace international cooperation and be a wholehearted member of the European Union. I disagreed with him about the pace and scope of European integration, a consequence in some ways of our countries of birth, but I had no doubt that there were practical and moral reasons for the development of Europe’s unique enterprise. Well, today for a British public figure, that was then. As Suetonius reports Caesar saying when crossing the Rubicon, Alea iacta est. The die is cast. The river is crossed; we are not stopping to go fishing; on we press, banners flying, promises enshrouded, into the unknown, but certainly not on to Rome. Our destination lies somewhere else; I hope neither Beijing nor Mar-a-Lago. Who knows? Peter was a public servant and more able than most whom I have known at translating big ideas into practical policy. That was true of his work on Europe’s single market, on competition policy and, as I have said, on trade. He launched the Erasmus programme designed to help European students to attend universities across the Union. He championed the rights of refugees and an understanding of demography and its impact on migration. I knew him at BP and at Oxford, where he lectured and helped one of our smaller colleges, the Benedictine foundation St Benet’s Hall, begin the task of securing its future, a generous act for the alumnus of a Jesuit school. Throughout those years he was, to borrow that school’s motto, semper et ubique fidelis: loyal to the values and principles of a liberal democrat, decent, moderate, Catholic, an Irish internationalist patriot. He was one...