POLITICS

What the G8 needs is a kick from Old Nick

BRUCE ANDERSON

G8 meetings have rarely been produc- tive affairs, for obvious reasons. The lead- ers of the world's foremost economic pow- ers usually have conflicting interests, so it is almost inevitable that their discussions will conclude with sonorous platitudes. But up to now, there had been a pretence of a workmanlike agenda. Not any more; or at least, not when Mr Blair is in charge. Last weekend in Birmingham, it was impossible to tell the difference between the spouses' programme and their husbands' supposedly serious business. The cabaret was in contin- uous session.

Earlier this week, some art students got into trouble for spending bursary money on a spree abroad. But their jaunt had as much to do with art as Birmingham had with statesmanship. It was also rather less expensive.

The whole affair reached its climax on Monday: a game of golf between President Clinton and Mr Blair, with Mr Clinton as the instructor. 'I told him, you hold the ball — I mean the club,' said the President; per- haps there had been a momentary confusion between golf and one of his other sports. The questioner was Michael Brunson, of ITN, who recently spoke at the Cambridge Union, opposing the motion that 'this House would anaesthetise the spin doctors'. When Mike Brunson asks the President about golf and ITN choose the item to lead their political coverage, it is the spin doctors who have anaesthetised the reporter.

We are told that the current crop of min- isters have no time for classical music and are only interested in pop, but that under- states their radicalism. They do not merely want pop music to dominate the airwaves and concert halls; they want it to take over politics as well. The Birmingham G8 was the first ever pop summit.

Up the road in Manchester, meanwhile, another conference was taking place, with a less exalted cast list, but vastly more serious intentions. The theme was Machiavelli; the participants were mainly academics, but also included some of Machiavelli's descendants. The contrast between Birmingham and Manchester last weekend was one of illusion versus reality. There is a similar contrast between the popular version of Machiavelli and the man's real thoughts.

Within a few decades of Machiavelli's death, he had acquired an appalling reputa- tion and even provided the Devil with a new nickname: 'Old Nick'. As Macaulay put it: 'We doubt whether any name in lit- erary history be so generally odious.' In Britain today, most of those who have heard of Machiavelli assume that he was a Florentine version of Peter Mandelson.

This is both unfair and too complimenta- ry to Mr Mandelson. It is easy to under- stand how a superficial reading of The Prince could lead to such a conclusion, for it appears to be an explicitly amoral work. Machiavelli is advising rulers, or aspirant rulers, how to acquire and then retain power. While he does not discount the pos- sibility that a prince could win the affection of his subjects, he would not advise monar- chs to rely on anything as fickle as popular support. He places great stress on the three Fs: force, fraud and fear, and if Renais- sance technology had made it possible, he would have favoured the use of spin doc- tors: 'A prince . . . need not necessarily have . . great qualities . . . but he should certainly appear to have them.' The Prince takes a bleak view of human nature: 'The gulf between how one should live and how one does live is so wide that a man who . . .

wants to act virtuously . necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous.'

But it would be wholly wrong to assume from this that Machiavelli was revelling in cynicism. On the contrary: when he described the virtuous man coming to grief, he could have been speaking of himself. The Italy of his youth was not only much the most civilised portion of the globe, but far the richest. By the time he grew to man- hood, however, all that wealth and culture had served merely to entice invaders. France and then Spain tried to seize control of Italy, which became a principal playing- field for the superpower conflict of the day.

Machiavelli was not a monarchist, but a republican, in the sense of the Roman republic. But by the time he wrote The Prince, he had despaired of that form of civic virtue; he himself had once been tor- tured, after ending up on the losing side in a Florentine conflict. After 20 years of invasion and chaos, Machiavelli concluded that only a strong man could unite Italy and drive out the barbarians. Like Hobbes later, he was so aware of the destructive consequences of disorder that he was pre- pared to pay almost any price to restore order. He exalted power, but only as a means of achieving security.

So he would not have been impressed by the G8, for all the spin-doctoring success. Had his shade been permitted to speak in Birmingham, he might well have drawn another contrast, between 16th-century Flo- rence and the West today. He and many of his fellow Florentines longed to be strong, but because they were weak, they were help- less. The West has more strength than any empire in history and yet in the midst of that strength it seems helpless.

`While you gentlemen have been on the razzle in Birmingham,' Machiavelli might have continued, 'Indonesia has been falling apart, just like the Middle East peace pro- cess, and India has been testing nuclear weapons. We could argue as to whether or not India should have such weapons, but there seems to be precious little you can do about it. More to the point, how do you propose to prevent Iran and Iraq from acquiring weapons of mass destruction?

`Your problem is that you are too squeamish to take up the civilised man's burden. You are inescapably an empire; most of the rest of the world sees you as one: many of them hate you for it and will punish you if they get half a chance. Do not delude yourself that your reluctance to assume imperial responsibilities will save you from the fate of empires in decline. If you permit terrorism and chaos to flourish beyond your borders, it will be no time before terrorists are causing chaos in your own capital cities. With the end of the Cold War, one of your leaders was foolish enough to speak of a new world order. Instead, you have a new world disorder, and it will grow steadily more disordered unless and until you evolve a new system of collective security. But some of you 110 doubt believe that collective security is the name of a rock band.'

Machiavelli would never have been per- mitted to disturb the complacency of the G8's proceedings: the spin doctors would not have allowed it. Even so, and having milked Birmingham for all it was worth with the help of some deplorably sub- servient journalism — those spin doctors would be well advised to encourage the whole affair to be forgotten. When appear- ance and reality diverge to the extent that they did last week in Birmingham, reality has an awkward habit of reasserting itself, in unpleasant ways.