The Search for Peace

"The Search for Peace by Douglas Hurd, who was UK Foreign Secretary for seven years from 1989, just after the fall of the Wall. He wrote it soon after stepping down. It’s a fine book, which for its day was quite comprehensive and authoritative. It’s a bit of a modern primer, which explains the techniques of bilateral diplomacy as well as multilateral diplomacy, and really deals with the failures and successes of the last century. The emotional heart of the book comes from his dedication to his own uncle, who was called Douglas Hurd, and died on the Somme. And the spirit informing the book is that, ultimately, the diplomats have to find ways of heading off those worst outcomes. The other interesting aspect is that even after ten years it shows its age, because it was written at the high watermark of what people now describe as liberal interventionism – Blair’s and Clinton’s wars. He tells the story, over the best part of 100 years, of how non-intervention as such is not really a strategy. The two World Wars and the course that the Cold War took illustrated that – it’s very difficult to opt out of the great games. The 90s of course were the decade of Bosnia and the humiliation of Europe in former Yugoslavia. Within Europe, Hurd was a very fine foreign secretary, a successful negotiator, and he understood the European context. But what I see in this book is something a little quirky – Douglas Hurd perhaps stretching his own interventionist instincts. This was his liberal interventionist moment, where I think he was tending towards the view that yes there should have been more interventionism in Yugoslavia, and more effective interventionism. However, a few years later he rather returned to his more natural position: he was one of those who stood out very clearly against the American engagement in Iraq, and he turned out to be right."