[MUSIC PLAYING]
CARNE ROSS: I think I'm
going to try and talk
for 20, 30 minutes.
And then maybe we
have a discussion
about some of the
things I've talked about
or anything, really.
What I'm going to try and
do is tell you the story--
a little bit of which is in this
book-- but the story of what
happened to me as a British
diplomat, what it showed me
about diplomacy, and indeed,
about government, which I hope
will be interesting.
There's also, I should add,
if you want the full story,
there's a movie that's just
been broadcast on BBC Four
last Sunday on
"Storyville," which
you can watch on iPlayer,
which is the full movie
version of this talk.
Anyway, it's not a terribly
common thing to be a diplomat.
I always wanted to
be one, I think,
partly because it was
venerated in my family.
My grandfather worked
as a codebreaker
at Bletchley Park
with Alan Turing.
That was, in fact, a
foreign office institution.
And I was celebrated
in my family
as the stupidest, because
evidence of which is I'm
a twin.
And my twin brother was put
in the year ahead of me.
So the manifestation of my
inferiority was very public.
So nobody expected me
to succeed in passing
the exams to become a
British diplomat, which
were quite competitive.
In the year I got in, 20 people
got out of 5,000 applicants,
so a bit like coming
to work for Google now.
And this surprised everybody,
not least of all me.
But I was very pleased.
Because I was fascinated
by international relations.
I'd always read the newspaper
from a very early age
from cover to cover
reading about Afghanistan,
the Soviet invasion,
nuclear deterrence.
I was particularly
fascinated by nuclear weapons
theory, mutually assured
destruction, stuff like that.
And so I became a diplomat in
1989, which as Jan particularly
would testify, was an
extraordinary year in world
history, the collapse
of the Soviet Union,
and the Warsaw Pact
dispensation, a real sense
of triumph in the West
of the ultimate victory
of Western values, of Western
democracy, of what you
might call neoliberal
economics market.
Economics has many
terms for it, but a sort
of modulated capitalism
like what we have now.
And indeed, British diplomats
were sent particularly
to Eastern Europe to
share the know-how of how
we ran democracy and
capitalism in the West
to help other countries
live like we did.
Francis Fukuyama was often
misquoted as calling it
the end of history.
But a sense of us
having reached some kind
of apogee irreversibly in
the human project very much
suffused the air in places
like the Foreign Office.
And indeed, I was a believer.
I very much believed
in that system.
I believed that sensible
people in government,
like me, had the ability, the
competence, the knowledge,
and indeed, the authority
to make decisions
on behalf of the whole.
For that is the premise of
representative government,
that small numbers of
people take decisions
on behalf of large
numbers of people.
And in my field, I was
making decisions along
with my colleagues
about foreign policy,
where really remarkably
small numbers of people
make decisions of
extraordinary importance.
I worked on various
different issues.
I was sent to Bonn--
Jan's hometown, so we've been
comparing street addresses
this morning--
which was then the
British Embassy
before it moved to Berlin
after reunification.
I worked on the global
environment, the first world
summit on the environment
in Rio in 1992,
the so-called Earth Summit, when
we talked about climate change
as a danger to humanity
300 years from now,
and I think all the
precautionary principle
that we should act now to
make it easier for humanity
in 300 years time.
I worked on the Middle
East peace process,
as it was then known
in better days.
I don't think you could
call it a peace process now.
I worked on
international terrorism.
I was, for a while, speechwriter
for two foreign secretaries,
for a conservative and then
for a labor foreign secretary,
Robin Cook, who promptly fired
me as his speech writer--
again, a very public humiliation
in the Foreign Office.
So humiliation I
am familiar with.
Because you're not really
fired in the British government
or in the civil service.
You're just moved
on to another job.
And a minister actually
firing his speech writer
is quite a public act.
And everybody responded
with great glee
to this public dismissal.
And I was rather upset.
Because I saw myself as
a sympathizer with labor
foreign policy and [INAUDIBLE]
with Robin Cook himself,
with whom, of course, I
was working closely with,
so I thought.
And with that, I was sent
to the British Mission
to the United
Nations in New York
as a kind of consolation prize.
Because it's a very,
very good posting.
It's sort of really
high-level diplomacy.
Of course, it's a very
nice place get posted to.
And I was given responsibility
for the Middle East
in the British Delegation
to the United Nations, which
was an amazing, amazing job.
I was responsible for dealing
with Middle East issues
at the UN Security Council
negotiating resolutions,
statements.
And in those days, the
UN Security Council
was an incredible cockpit
of world diplomacy,
of world affairs.
And we were dealing with
extraordinarily important
issues, from Israel Palestine,
to the occupation of Western
Sahara, to the Libya
Lockerbie issue,
and, above all, Iraq and its
weapons of mass destruction.
And I was responsible for
that issue in the British
Delegation.
And I was the main
British liaison
with the weapons inspectors.
So I got to know,
in great detail,
all about weapons
of mass destruction.
I could tell you the
residual chemicals
left by the nerve gas,
VX, after it has been
left in a desert for 10 years.
I could tell you the
names of the officers
in charge of Saddam Hussein's
special weapons regiments.
I could tell you how exactly to
adapt a imported scud missile
to make it a longer
range Al Hussein
missile, as it was called.
I knew the exact
number of missiles
that the inspectors
were looking for.
You can tell where
this is heading.
And it was an amazing job.
One felt very important.
I was chased around the UN
by CNN film crews and scores
of diplomats.
Britain is, of course,
a permanent member
of the UN Security
Council, and, thus,
of considerable importance--
not as important as one or two
others, but very important.
And we drafted all other
resolutions on Iraq
during my time there.
I spent a year negotiating
a resolution that set up
the weapons inspection
body that was eventually
headed by Hans Blix, UNMOVIC--
which is an acronym
that I came up with,
my small footnote in history--
a combination of the letters
M-O-V, Monitoring Observation
Verification
Inspection Commission.
And that's the only way you
can turn those-- anyway,
Scrabble friends
might be interested.
So all of this
started to unravel
with 9/11, which was the
most spectacular shock to all
of us dealing with the Middle
East, although, in some ways,
not a surprise.
Because we knew immediately
who was responsible.
The US turned into something
else after that date.
And the Bush
Administration decided
to pursue war with Iraq.
And in order to provide
a veil of legitimacy,
the British tried
to get a resolution
through the UN Security Council
to authorize that use of force.
And of course, those resolutions
or that particular resolution
was not agreed by the
UN Security Council.
By that time, I was
actually on sabbatical
from the Foreign Office.
I was sitting in the New York
Library scratching my head,
trying to work out what might be
a better political and economic
system than the one we had.
Because 9/11, like
for most people,
it kind of flipped
a switch in my head.
But also, living
in New York City,
you have to be an
idiot not to be
aware of the profound
economic injustice manifested
in America, the fact that
children are literally
going without meals four
miles away from where
people are stuffing high-grade
sushi down their throats.
It's pretty blatant there.
The dynamics of climate
change were becoming clear.
And I was starting to
doubt the sorts of words
I had written for my foreign
secretary about how governments
had things under control.
Because I began to
see that they didn't.
And I began to see that those
words were kind of fake.
And so I took a year off.
And whilst I was
sitting in that library,
Britain tried to get these
resolutions through the UN
Security Council.
I was very, very conscious
of what was going on.
I was in touch
with Blix, who was
trying to understand
the resolution that I
had negotiated on the
weapons inspections.
I was in touch with my
colleagues, weapons inspectors
amongst them, David Kelly,
the biological weapons expert,
who later to commit
suicide after being outed
by the British government
as the source of a story
that the British
government had exaggerated
the evidence on WMD.
Anyway in 2004, those of
us who'd worked on Iraq
were invited to testify to
the first official inquiry
into the war, the
Butler Inquiry.
And I decided to testify.
I wrote a long document
explaining my views
that the threat from
Iraq had been grossly
exaggerated by the
British government,
that the war was illegal
according to the resolutions I,
myself, had negotiated,
and the British government
had ignored alternatives
to war, which
is a complicated
story about sanctions
and economic restrictions.
It's never talked about,
because everybody focuses on,
did they lie or not?
But in fact, it's, in many
ways, much more important,
because there were
peaceful alternatives
to undermining Saddam regime.
I read papers about them.
And I know for a fact
that these were not
considered before Britain
went to war in 2003.
Anyway, when I wrote that
testimony, I had a crisis.
I thought, I can't
send this testimony in
and remain a British diplomat.
You can't ride two
horses at once.
I negotiated that my
testimony would be secret,
because I wanted to remain
in the Foreign Office.
I wanted to have it both ways.
I'd just been promoted to the
senior ranks of the Foreign
Office.
Everything was tickety-boo.
I was well on my way to being
an ambassador somewhere, maybe
Belarus.
But things were pretty
good with my career.
And I thought I could tell
the truth to this Inquiry
but still have my career.
And the act of--
literally, I remember very
clearly pressing the button
on the computer where I was, the
Send button or Return button.
And I realized when I
pressed that button,
I couldn't do this.
I couldn't go back and
work with my colleagues.
I couldn't sit
with ministers who
I knew had done this
terrible, terrible thing.
And so this was the end
for me as a diplomat.
And I had no idea what
I was going to do next.
I'm just going to
get a drop of water.
And thankfully, I was married
to an incredible woman, who
kept me going, but
also gave me the idea
that I should
become a consultant.
And at the time, I
was living in Kosovo,
on succumbent to
the United Nations.
And Kosovo, at that time, was
subject to a diplomatic process
about the future of Kosovo that
concerned six countries that
were secretly negotiating
about whether Kosovo
should become a state or not.
The UN Security Council would
have meetings about Kosovo,
where 15 members of the
Security Council could speak.
And indeed, any
member state of the UN
could speak in the
so-called open meetings,
including Serbia.
But guess what?
Kosovo could not speak, had
a democratically-elected
government, but was
not entitled to speak,
was not entitled to engage
with this diplomatic process
about the future of Kosovo.
And this seemed to me to be
somewhat foolish, but also
profoundly unjust.
And living in Kosovo, I
saw how it contributed
to immense political
tension, frustration
of people who felt they had
no control over their future.
Beginning to sound familiar?
Anyway, that led--
in part, it was
one of the factors behind
horrible violence in March
2004, in which 18
people were killed,
mass riots, and attacks
across the country, which
I saw very, very up close.
Buildings were burned
next to my house.
We escaped a mob of people
charging after the UN.
Because the UN, as the
symbol of this inequity,
this unjust process, was
very widely hated in Kosovo.
Anyway, so my wife
had the idea, why
don't you become a consultant?
And I flew back to Kosovo.
Oh, by the way, a small detail--
I had, in fact, resigned
from the Foreign Office.
When I pressed that button,
I also sent that evidence
to the Foreign
Secretary, Jack Straw,
as my resignation letter.
They never replied.
But a few weeks later,
I did get an email
from my former personnel
manager inviting me
for psychological counseling
in the Foreign Office,
perhaps for fear that
I would do the same
as my poor friend, David.
Anyway, so I flew
back to Kosovo.
I could no longer
work for the UN.
I was no longer with
the British government.
I flew back to
Kosovo and had dinner
with the Kosovo prime minister,
a former leader of the Kosovo
Liberation Army,
a remarkable man
called Ramush
Haradinaj, who I've just
been discussing in the barbers
in Edgware Road, which,
of course, is full of
Kosovars and Albanians.
And I said to him, why
not come and advise you
about the diplomacy
about Kosovo?
And we clinked a glass of raki,
which is Albania's spirit.
And he said, yeah,
come and advise me.
And that was the beginning
of this organization
that I run to this day called
Independent Diplomat, which
is a charity here in the UK,
a nonprofit in the US, which
advises countries and
political movements
all over the world on
their diplomacy about them.
And so it started with Kosovo.
I took the Kosovo prime minister
to the UN Security Council,
where hitherto he
had been prohibited.
I told the Kosovars
what was really going on
in the diplomatic process.
I talked to Martti
Ahtisaari, the Finnish UN
envoy who was dealing with
the Kosovo Serbia negotiations
to decide the future
status of Kosovo.
Interestingly, all
of them accepted
the need for what I was doing.
Because they realized it
really helped the process
for the Kosovo government
to understand it.
It also helped them push
back against the extremists
in Kosovo who were
saying, oh, this diplomacy
is such bullshit.
The international
community is never
going to release us
from Serbia's hold,
never going to make
us independent.
We should unilaterally
declare independence,
which would have been a
highly provocative thing,
and probably would have
led to a resumption of war
between Serbia and Kosovo.
And of course,
the, quote unquote,
"international community"
did not want that to happen,
but hadn't taken the step
of actually explaining
their expectations that Kosovo
would become independent
at the end of this process.
And Martti Ahtisaari would
tell me this privately.
He would say to me things
that he couldn't say formally
to the Kosovars, which I would
then convey in Pristina--
the capital of Kosovo--
to the Kosovars.
And when they came
to the UN, I would
help them prepare their
speeches, their talking points,
press conferences, yada,
yada, ya, the sorts of things
I did as a British diplomat
for my foreign secretary.
Anyway, that, in essence, is
what an independent diplomat
does to this day, which
is do the sorts of things
that I did as a British diplomat
for all kinds of peoples,
political movements,
and governments
who are the subjects of
diplomatic processes,
often, where they
are not actually
part of those
diplomatic processes,
where other states, who have
far less of a stake than them,
are deciding their future.
It's only in
diplomacy that people
think that this is actually OK.
And even diplomats, when you
put that proposition to them,
wouldn't it make sense
to have actually people
from the ground talking
to you about what
to do about Palestine, Western
Sahara, Somalia, Syria, yada,
yada, ya, they say, of
course, it would make sense.
But we can't.
They can't come to the UN.
That's just not how it's done.
That's the state of diplomacy
to this day, I'm afraid to say.
Though, we are beginning to
chip away at these assumptions
through our work.
And also, the world is changing.
The mode of diplomacy, the
means of diplomacy has changed.
Diplomats now, of course, have
to scrutinize Donald Trump's
tweets to understand what
he is thinking, which
is a different form of diplomacy
than the one I was brought up
with in the '80s, the
'90s, and early 2000s.
So what we do today is we give
advice and political strategy
in what's called public
diplomacy, which is basically
PR, and international law,
the legal advice on the often
very, very complicated
international law
pertaining to situations
like Palestine,
or the state of the Rohingya
in Burma, Myanmar, or Syria.
And today, to give you some
examples of what we do,
we advise the Frente
Polisario, which
is the legitimate
representatives
of the people of the Western
Sahara, which is illegally
occupied by Morocco after
an invasion in 1975.
Nobody talks about this
place, but a great injustice
that the world
does nothing about.
And I'm very proud
to advise them.
Interestingly, their biggest
parliamentary supporter
in the British parliament
was one Jeremy Corbyn,
which speaks to me
that he was prepared
to [INAUDIBLE] for a people that
nobody talks about, who Bono
doesn't celebrate
in his concerts, who
Richard Branson doesn't meet,
doesn't invite to Davos.
They're my kind of people.
And we advise-- one of
the interesting-- well,
they're all interesting
in their different ways.
We advise the Marshall Islands,
which is a low-lying island
state in the middle
of the Pacific,
which is extraordinarily
vulnerable to sea level rise.
The average height
of it's atolls
are 70 centimeters
above the sea.
They're already suffering
extensive flooding and drought,
a double whammy
of global warming,
and are looking at the
destruction of their country
within 50 years.
And with their help
and with us, we
have worked to create a whole
coalition of countries called
the Higher Ambition Coalition,
High Ambition Coalition, which,
as its name suggests, wants more
ambition in global agreements
on climate change.
And at the Paris Agreement,
the negotiation of Paris,
in the last days, the
High Ambition Coalition,
which we had been putting
together in secret for years,
suddenly surfaced as the
most important coalition
of countries demanding a
particular kind of agreement.
It broke up the traditional
negotiating blocks of the UN,
and helped get some of the most
important elements of the Paris
Agreement inserted.
I could talk to you
in detail about those
if you're interested.
But one of them, for instance,
is fairly well-known.
The agreement aims to
limit global warming
to 1.5 degrees centigrade
to 2 degrees centigrade.
Before the High Ambition
Coalition came along,
that was 2 degrees centigrade.
You may not think that's a big
deal, but in diplomatic terms,
it's pretty important.
And we also inserted, in Paris,
a stipulation that countries
need to come back to the table
five years after the signature
of Paris with better
carbon emissions
commitments than
they made in Paris,
the so-called ratchet
that was invented
by two members of
independent diplomat
sitting in a cafe in Majuro, the
little capital of the Marshall
Islands.
So a real example of
empowering the most affected,
the most vulnerable, in
diplomacy, and a great
cause to be fighting.
Because one of the things
I've learned about this work
is that, actually, by
comparing the most vulnerable,
you're empowering everybody.
Because when you give those
most affected a voice,
they tend to speak of what
needs to be done in a way that
carries enormous authority.
And of course, we need to
deal with climate change.
And there is no more
authoritative voice
than a country that is
actually facing destruction
from climate change.
And as a result of the Marshall
Islands and the High Ambition
Coalition, the Paris Agreement
is significantly stronger
than it otherwise
would have been,
which is a global result that
is important to every one of us.
How shall I put this?
A different kind of
project is our work
with the Syrian Opposition, the
Democratic Syrian Opposition,
the Higher
Negotiating Committee,
which is an aggregation of
democratic groups in Syria.
And we've also helped
create a coalition
of Syrian civil society
groups from all over Syria--
doctors' groups,
women's refugee groups--
to empower them to take part
in the diplomacy about Syria.
Because of course, one of
the problems with diplomacy
is that it privileges
governments and states.
And it privileges leaders.
And the sorts of people
who become leaders
of political movements, who are
often great people, who often
are legitimate in what
they say to the world
community about the
needs of their people--
but there is nothing more
powerful than the people,
themselves.
And having been
with this delegation
of Syrian civil society at the
UN General Assembly, meeting
world leaders,
diplomats, officials,
it is extraordinarily
powerful when
they speak of what needs to
happen in Syria for their needs
to be addressed.
And we get beyond the bullshit
of, Russia thinks this,
and Trump thinks that, and ISIS,
and no fly zones, and Security
Council resolutions,
and the crap that
flies between the left and
right in this country about what
to do in Syria.
And you actually get to the
brass tacks from Syrians.
Because of course,
funnily enough,
it is Syrians who
should have the largest
voice in the future of Syria,
not us, not the West, not
diplomats, not Sergey Lavrov,
not Donald Trump, but Syrians.
And if Syrians get to
decide the future of Syria,
then maybe what
follows will actually
be a resilient and
decent outcome for Syria,
and thus, for the rest of us.
You follow my reasoning.
Anyway, that's what we do today.
Going back to the
sorts of stories
you'll read about in this
book of what goes on at the UN
Security Council,
the negotiations,
how diplomacy really
works, which, I daresay,
is actually pretty interesting.
Because it is very different
from the public face
of diplomacy.
We now bring
parties to conflicts
on the Security Council's
agenda to New York
to meet Security Council
diplomats in private,
in a hotel room, across
the road from the UN.
Because they're not
allowed into the UN,
because they're not
governments and don't have
the right badges.
But we take leaders
of guerrilla armies,
victims groups from
Darfur, leaders
of the Democratic Opposition
in DRC, Congo, or Burundi.
And it's an extraordinary,
extraordinary event sitting
in these meetings
in bland hotel rooms
where leaders of
opposition groups
will say to these diplomats,
unless the UN intervenes
in my country, there
will be genocide.
And in a way, it's come
full circle for me.
Because that is
where I used to work,
where I was one of the
people making decisions
about other people's countries,
decisions about which today I
feel great shame, in
particular, sanctions on Iraq,
which did enormous damage
to the Iraqi people
long before the US, UK invaded
that benighted country.
So that is the
story, if you like,
of Independent Diplomat,
the organization.
The analysis of how it came
about, and why it came about,
and the deficits
of diplomacy is all
in this book,
which has just been
republished after 10 years.
And there is a
broader story here,
which is not in the book,
which is in the movie, which
is about my own conversion,
partly through this experience,
and partly through
dealing with civil society
groups and legitimate opposition
movements all over the world,
meeting, if you
like, quote unquote--
I don't like this word--
"ordinary" people in Somalia,
Palestine, Britain, Detroit, and
realizing that they generally
have a far better idea about how
to fix the problems that they
confront than the rest of us.
And experiencing and looking
into more democratic forms
of self-government,
direct democracy
where large numbers
of people take
part in their own government,
including in a place
called Rojava in Northeast
Syria, which some of you
may have heard about.
And through that
experience, having become
convinced that that form
of self-government, which
some called anarchism, is
the right way forward for all
of us, including
in the West where
we confront a very serious
crisis of democracy,
of disillusionment, and
the profound injustice
wrought by the sort of
capitalism that we have today.
Anyway, that's another
story told in another book.
And I shall stop
there and look forward
to the discussion,
which is always
more entertaining and
interesting than my talk.
So thank you.
AUDIENCE: I'm just curious, can
you explain a little bit more
about your version of anarchism?
I'm curious to understand
what you mean by that.
CARNE ROSS: Anarchism
is self-government.
It's the rejection
of one person having
power over another, which is
a very beautiful principle.
Because I think the act of
using power over other people
humiliates the
person using power
as much as it humiliates
the person subject to it.
Of course, in its
extreme versions,
it's a kind of nasty
libertarianism,
of individualism, of
doing whatever you want.
That's not the
anarchism I believe in.
I believe in an
anarchism of putting
the community above all.
And communities, through
democratic assemblies
and new habits of
direct democracy,
govern themselves, and
indeed, make rules themselves,
and arbitrate disputes
and wrongdoing themselves.
There's been written about this.
I've written about it myself.
Anarchism is, unfortunately,
very widely misunderstood,
and I think,
deliberately denigrated
by defenders of the current
system, who, funnily enough,
may benefit from
the current system.
Because to me, it's
actually democracy.
What we have today here and
in America is not democracy.
You don't have the
government's rule
in the collective interest.
They rule in somebody
else's interests.
We could talk about whose
interests it does rule in.
But I profoundly believe,
having witnessed this up close
and been part of a government,
that our current system is not
working.
And it's actually
driving us towards great
social and ecological
crisis, which
if we don't wake up and
address pretty soon,
is going to get pretty bad.
AUDIENCE: I have two questions.
I'm wondering what's
your view on, A, Brexit?
And, B, what's your view on
the government's decision
to withhold the report on
foreign funding of terrorism?
CARNE ROSS: Ugh, Brexit.
I don't mind the question.
And I respect your
right to ask it.
It is depressing
coming back to Britain,
dealing my life in Syria, and
Palestine, and global warming.
And suddenly, the
world shrinks down
to soft Brexit, customs union,
the pathetic shenanigans
of the Tory party.
My feelings about
Brexit are complicated.
And as an anarchist,
you can imagine
that they might be complicated.
I am a very great
believer in open borders,
in the fact that
our lives should not
be determined by
where we're born,
that everybody should be free
to travel wherever they want.
I feel that partly
because of living
in Germany, which was an
incredible instruction in what
humanity is capable
of, but also how
humanity can transcend that.
And I think the EU embodies
that beautiful dream.
That was never talked
about in the Brexit debate.
It was always treated as
a transactional thing.
Do we benefit?
What are the costs?
What will we get back?
Which, to me, was very much
a discourse of capitalism,
unfortunately, the
discourse we've got
used to when there were
bigger principles at stake.
And for that reason,
I was against Brexit.
I'm profoundly hostile to
the bureaucracy of the EU,
which I've obviously
had to deal with a lot.
I think it's unaccountable.
I think it's un-transparent.
I think the British actually
have extraordinary power
to transform the EU.
Because I think most
people feel that it
needs to be much more
transparent and accountable
than it is, Germans,
Poles, French.
And that would have
been a better policy
to pursue than this silly binary
choice between Brexit or not
Brexit, which was a
reductive form of democracy.
Referendums in this
context are not democracy.
It is a mistake to
think they're democracy.
They're a particular snapshot of
opinion at a particular moment.
Where I believe democracy is a
process of constant interaction
of me listening to your
needs, you listening to mine,
us finding compromises,
ways forward,
because we have
to live together.
And a one-off vote
about something divisive
is not a good way of
governing ourselves.
AUDIENCE: I have a question.
I'm curious about Syria.
On the one hand, you say that
you advised the opposition
groups in Syria.
And on the other hand,
I read-- and this
may be simplistic
and inaccurate--
but I read that,
there, President Assad
has majority support.
And so how do you
reconcile what looks
like anti-democratic
movements in Syria that
want to go against the system
while the current system has
most of the people's support?
How do you reconcile that
with support for democracy?
CARNE ROSS: I have to say,
that's the most extraordinary
thing you've just said.
There is absolutely
no evidence whatsoever
that Assad is actually
supported by the majority,
not least because
there's never been
a democratic process in Syria.
So that's false from the start.
Let's just remember how all
of this started in 2012.
It was people demonstrating
on the streets
for democracy, which the Assad
regime violently put down,
arrested teenage boys,
tortured them to death.
So let's just remember
how this war started.
Yes, there were extremist
groups on the rebel side.
Assad has successfully destroyed
many of the moderate groups,
leaving not only extremist
groups on the ground,
but also moderate Free
Syrian Army groups.
It's a highly
complicated picture
with thousands of different
armed groups across Syria.
Every single Syrian I know,
every single one, particularly
those living in refugee
camps in places like Turkey,
particularly those
coming from Aleppo--
which has been besieged
by the Syrian regime using
the most indiscriminate
tactics, dropping barrel bombs
on hospitals, which are
deliberately targeted
with their Russian
allies who have used
heavy strategic bombers
to bomb indiscriminately
civilian areas.
The Assad regime has
used chemical weapons
on its own people in
a suburb of Damascus,
as well as other places.
You talk to Syrians, what
they want is democracy.
That is not Assad.
There will not be democracy
until Assad steps down.
And in my view, we
ought to be talking
much more vigorously about
how to get rid of the regime.
And until that happens,
there won't be democracy.
Because this regime
is not a democracy.
It does not represent the
majority of the people.
I can understand that there are
some supporters of the regime.
And their needs and
their need for protection
should be respected in any
future dispensation in Syria.
But it is a grotesquery to
claim that Assad somehow
represents the democratic
wishes of the Syrian people.
AUDIENCE: I do
respect your opinion.
And I do think it
is based on facts.
All I was referring
to was surveys
where Assad was found to
be popular among Syrians
who are in Syria.
Is that not accurate?
CARNE ROSS: There's no
meaningful way of conducting
a survey of that kind.
I mean, that's absurd.
That's absolutely absurd.
I'm sorry.
I don't, I'm afraid, have a
great deal of respect for that.
I mean, it's obviously
a ridiculous proposition
to hold a meaningful survey
of people's democratic wishes
when a good 50% of
the population, 50%,
has been driven out of the
country in the first place.
How about, how are you
going to survey them, go
to camps in Jordan, speak to
asylum seekers on the streets
out here?
How do their views
get heard in a survey?
Large areas of Syria
are not peaceful.
They're not accessible to
foreign independent observers
of any kind.
It is extraordinarily
dangerous for Westerners
to go to large areas of Syria.
So the possibility
of having anything
like an objective assessment of
Syrian opinion, collectively--
which in any case,
is meaningless.
Because it is a
highly-fragmented country,
where clearly, there
are lots of people
who want different things.
The idea that there can
be a singular assessment
of their opinion is ridiculous.
AUDIENCE: So I wanted to ask
another question on the EU.
It seems that here
in Northern Europe,
in general, the anti-EU
Sentiment comes from the right.
Whereas, in Southern
Europe, it seems
to proponents of non-EU deals
seem to come from the left.
Why do you think there's
this dissonance, I guess?
Hope my question makes sense.
CARNE ROSS: That's a
really good question
and it's an
interesting observation
on what's happening
in Greece, Spain,
really quite important seismic
political developments, which,
in many ways, I think overturned
the traditional understandings
of left and right.
And I think, probably,
we need a richer language
to describe what's going on.
I'm very hostile to terms
like nationalist, populist.
I think they are just labels
that really obscure more
than they describe
having got to know
a lot of these movements
in different ways.
What I think unites
left and right,
all the movements,
anti-Brexit, and hostility
in the left in Greece
against the EU,
is a common theme, which
is disenfranchisement
of people who feel
that they have
no control over their economy,
and over their livelihoods,
and over their futures.
And they are right to
feel disenfranchised.
And actually, I
think, frankly, this
is much more about the
nature of modern capitalism,
that people feel that
the work they're doing
is not properly rewarded.
They are getting
relatively poorer,
whilst a very small
number of people
are getting a great deal
richer and flaunting it
in the faces of the rest of us.
They feel that the work they're
doing in the modern economy
is not respected.
Burger flipping,
and filling shelves,
and looking after the old are
not respected professions.
So I think these are about
profound social forces that
are expressed in moments
like the Brexit referendum,
and expressed in movements like
Syriza, and others in Greece,
or elsewhere in Italy.
And I think the questions we
need to be answering ourselves
go far beyond EU or not EU.
One can talk about the
way the EU handled Greece,
for instance.
And there are many things
to be said about it.
But I think that our broader
forces at play here, which
need to be addressed.
And unfortunately,
settling ourselves
in a narrow debate
about Brexit, or not
Brexit, the EU or not EU, is not
embracing these bigger themes,
which I think all of us sense.
Everybody senses that
there's something basically
wrong with the economic
model we're pursuing,
where only a few really
reap the benefits,
and where immense damage,
irreversible damage,
is being done to the
world's environment.
I think future
historians will look back
at our generation, our society
as the most irresponsible
in history.
Because we knew.
We knew what was being done.
And we didn't do
enough about it.
And I genuinely think
the governments are not
going to fix this.
Unless people like us, you
and me, actually get busy,
it ain't going to get fixed.
AUDIENCE: I have a
related question.
So, like, you're very critical
about current so-called
democratic system
we have in the West
and how it deals with the
big issues at hand right now.
And you come up
with an alternative,
like, you call it anarchy.
But how would you go
from point A to point B?
There's a huge step.
And I fail to see
how it's actually
possible to go to there?
CARNE ROSS: Yeah, I mean
that's a good question.
And it's one I get a lot.
I have to say, in a sense, I
don't want to single you out.
Because I really
respect the question.
But it disappoints me that
it's not so easily imaginable.
All I'm talking about
is direct democracy.
And I think it is plausible for
us to, A, make this demand, B,
learn about it, and C,
start setting up assemblies
and forums that practice it,
where basically you invite
everybody concerned with an
issue or a group of issues--
you could do it here at Google.
You don't need to
call it unionization.
You just need to call a meeting.
And make sure everybody who
is affected by your decisions
is included.
And you start to discuss
the things that bother you.
And I would broaden it beyond
your terms, and conditions,
and your promotion prospects,
but actually to every impact
Google has in the world.
Because Google's impact
is extraordinary.
And you have far more
influence than most people.
Your views in this room
are of immense importance,
immense importance.
You're determining culturally,
sociologically, economically,
and politically, our
futures in important ways.
Personally, I would
like to see Google think
about collective ownership.
I believe that the
form of ownership
in our society of celebrating
individual entrepreneurs who
get lucky and make
enormous fortunes,
and that the rest
of us are supposed
to bow down to this form
of the economy is wrong.
I think that we all want
agency in the workplace.
We all want to feel we're
respected and have a share--
economic, but also political,
in that, we have a voice.
And the best way to achieve
that in the workplace
where most of us
spend a lot of time
is through a form of collective
ownership, a cooperative.
It is not implausible.
It is not at all impossible.
John Lewis, a big retail
chain, lovely shop down
on Oxford Street--
John Lewis, Jr. was lying
in bed after riding accident
when he realized that
his family was worth more
and earned more than all
the hundreds of employees
of his family
stores put together.
And somehow, he had an epiphany
and decided that was wrong.
And he turned over the
stores to the workers.
And that company has
endured well over 100 years,
and is one of the most
successful companies today
where the employees, in
general, are pretty happy.
Mondragon in Spain is
Spain's 10th largest company.
It's a coalition, a
collective of cooperatives.
It has transformed
the Basque region,
which was one of the
most economically
backward areas of Spain.
It works.
I absolutely reject
the notion that this
is kind of silly idealism.
It's not at all.
It can happen.
It is doable.
But it is in your hands.
And I profoundly
feel that we need
to change the way we think
about the possibilities
of political action.
We have been taught in the
current dispensation that
political action is
activism-- not a word I like--
putting money in somebody's
tin, making a donation,
voting for politicians-- who,
by and large, don't really do it
for us-- every five years.
We have been anesthetized.
Our political power has
been eviscerated from us.
And we have extraordinary
power, if only we use it.
AUDIENCE: I want to come back.
So I actually did that.
I started political
party in Belgium,
which is in my home country,
to actually go for there
to democracy.
And I have first-hand
experience with how impossible
the process is.
Like, there's literally
no road to go.
The media is not on your side.
Everyone is against it.
And within Google, Google
is not a democracy.
And so it's not up to us
to decide on that process.
So what is the path?
CARNE ROSS: Yeah, I hear you.
I don't think this is easy.
I have learned, in political
struggles all over the world,
that victory goes
to the determined,
to the people who don't give up.
I'm not saying
you are giving up.
Please, don't get me wrong.
I really respect what
you're trying to do.
But there are multiple
ways to change.
We are trying to
change a behemoth--
not just Google-- but a
behemoth of the world's
capitalist economy,
a system that
is defended by not
only its beneficiaries,
but by the laws which it has
co-opted by the governments,
which it is captured by
the media, which it owns.
And I sound like a
kind of radical lefty.
I'm a straightforward
mainstream guy.
I'm Bourgeois.
I'm a white male.
If people are middle-aged--
people like me are
saying this, then
there's something really
wrong with the system.
And I think there is
enormous appetite for this.
Everywhere I go, I hear
people saying, how do I do it?
What can I do?
It's an electrifying question.
And I think that, if
you sit with people
who care about it in the
same way that you do,
you will figure something out.
I can't tell you
what that thing is.
I'd be glad to
meet again and talk
about the specific circumstances
that you're facing.
Because I think this
is about specifics.
I can make bland
pronouncements about how
political change happens and
sort of fire everybody up.
I do think the devil
is in the detail.
I work constantly
on political change,
everyday from the Western
Sahara, to Palestine,
and Syria.
And it is a detailed struggle.
I think one of the
lies that we're told
is that society can be
transformed by Jeremy Corbyn,
by Theresa May, by leaving
the EU or not leaving the EU.
These are not true.
A society is each
one of us atoms.
I believe in complexity theory,
where each of our actions
creates the whole.
But actually, each
of our actions can,
in certain circumstances--
so-called criticality--
transform the whole.
I actually think we're at
a point of criticality.
The Arab world was at
a point of criticality
when the Arab Spring
swept the Middle East.
I think young people,
in particular,
are at a point of criticality in
the West, because they get it.
They get that this
is not working.
AUDIENCE: Thank you for coming.
My question is about Turkey.
And if you could comment
the last recent events
from the coup to the referendum
and the current crackdown?
Thank you.
CARNE ROSS: Could I
ask, are you Turkish?
AUDIENCE: No
CARNE ROSS: OK.
Is anybody Turkish here?
OK.
Well, I know a bit about Turkey.
I'm no expert.
And I would say--
if there was a Turk here, I
would actually turn to them.
And I really believe that's
the right thing to do.
Erdogan is a proto-fascist.
He is cracking down
on the free press.
There's a trial going on
right now of journalists.
He's cracked down on the
democratic opposition.
And he is waging a
war, a merciless war,
against the Kurdish
population in the Southeast.
Which the West, I'm afraid--
this government here, and the
German government, and others
are not doing anything
like enough about.
Because they've struck
a deal with Erdogan
to stop people swimming across
the small strait between Turkey
and the nearest Greek island
to try to migrate to Europe.
And that deal, to them, is
more important than the lives
of Turks, and human
rights in Turkey,
and democracy in Turkey.
It's very, very
depressing to see.
And the level of
violence and repression
is really staggering.
It's a story that's not
being told, particularly
what's going on in
Southeast Turkey
where whole towns
are being shelled.
Heavy weapons, tanks have
been used in civilian areas.
And this country
is not a democracy.
It is an emerging dictatorship.
I don't think you can really
argue that democracy exists
in a situation where
the opposition are
as repressed as they are, and
where a free press does not
really exist.
And yet, they are treated
as a legitimate government,
not subject to sanction.
But in fact, we sit down with
them and do deals with them.
Because we want the--
Erdogan's no fool.
He has played us.
AUDIENCE: I wanted to come
back to the involvement
of the British in Iraq.
I find this deeply fascinating.
I think this has not come
anywhere near a resolution.
From your vantage
point, from what
you've seen behind the
scenes, how did this happen?
What was the motivation?
What are the forces behind it?
This is a narrative that
Tony went to the states, then
had a chat with
his friend Georgie.
And they agreed, yeah,
I'm going to help you.
But there's got
to be more to it.
What were the
driving forces that
resulted in such a disaster,
and that necessaried
all the lies around it?
CARNE ROSS: That's a really
good question, obviously,
one I've dwelt on a lot,
and to which I do not
have a complete answer.
Because this was a
top-down decision
driven by Bush and Blair.
The view in the
British government
when I worked on Iraq was
absolutely that regime change
was a bad idea.
Because Iraq would fracture
between Shia and Sunni.
And that is, of course,
what's happened.
When I was a
British diplomat, we
would go to the State Department
every quarter for our big Iraq
bilaterals, where a few of us
from the British government who
dealt with Iraq would sit
facing a whole team of the US
administration.
And sometimes, the
State Department
would privately
ask us beforehand
to bring up the subject
of regime change,
so that we could say
what a bad idea it was,
so that the hawks in the
Department of Defense,
the Pentagon, and elsewhere
would hear that their closest
allies did not support it.
That was the view.
I know for a fact--
for fact.
This isn't speculation, the
he said, she said debate.
I know for a fact that the
reason they give about the war,
that they thought
Iraq was a threat,
that they were misled by the
intelligence, that is a lie.
That is a lie.
I know the intelligence
in great detail.
I probably know more about it
than almost anybody who worked
for any of these governments.
I worked on almost nothing
else for four and a half years.
And our assessment
for all of those years
was that Iraq's WMD--
we thought they may have some
so-called residual stocks.
There were accounting errors in
the destruction of Iraq's WMD,
its ballistic missiles,
chemical and biological weapons,
for which Iraq
could not account.
And we thought
that what was then
called the material balance
indicated that there might be
stocks we did not know about.
But we had no hard evidence of
anything, missiles, CW or BW.
And certainly, at
these bilaterals
I attended, we would
begin them by saying,
the policy of
containment is working.
Iraq is not a threat.
And almost overnight,
that changed.
And the thing that
changed it was 9/11.
And looking at this through
the lens that I now look at it,
I realize that part
of what was going on
was that the authority of
the American government
was deeply challenged by 9/11.
It had failed in
its fundamental duty
to protect the people,
which is the contract we all
make with government.
We're not asked to
make this contract.
But we're in this contract,
that we give up our liberty,
and allow ourselves to be
ruled, and legislated about,
and rule by law in return
for them protecting us.
That's the deal, the
Lockean contract,
the Hobbesian contract.
And they failed in that deal.
And they had to do something
to show that they could still
protect the people.
It was an assertion, a
deliberate assertion of power,
in order to reaffirm
its legitimacy.
And it was a lie.
Without 9/11, it would
not have happened.
I saw, day by day, how a
narrative was created in the US
administration by
the neoconservatives,
Richard Perle, Wolfowitz, and
others, that Iraq was a threat,
that toppling Saddam would lead
to broader change in the Middle
East, which would
drain the swamp,
which would cause a sort
of modern-day version
of the domino effect--
that, of course, had been the
logic in Vietnam, ironically--
that would bring democracy
to the Middle East, and thus,
make Middle
East-based terrorism--
to starve it at its roots.
And that theory became
dominant after 9/11,
because nobody had a better one.
And this was an epic
failure of government.
We think the governments sit
there and rationally debate
different alternate
policy options.
That is not how it happens.
Politicians make decisions
that are often emotional, ill
thought through, spontaneous.
And the officials go out
and collect the evidence
to justify that policy.
It is the opposite of
scientific method, which
is to go out, look
at the evidence,
then make a theory about
how to deal with it,
as I learned from Thomas
Kuhn in that library.
That's one of the things
that was going on, not,
by any means, the only one.
SPEAKER 1: Thank you
very much, Carne Ross.
