Remarks at the Guildhall
3 April 2008: IISS 50th Anniversary
Dr John Chipman
Your Royal Highness, Lords, Ladies and Gentlemen, let me begin tonight, on behalf of the Chairman of the Institute Francois Heisbourg, the Chairman of the Trustees Fleur de Villiers, Vice President and former Chairman Michael Palliser, former directors Christophe Bertram, and Robert O’Neill, and the Institute as a whole, by thanking our President Emeritus, Sir Michael Howard, for the splendid Alastair Buchan Lecture he gave yesterday at Arundel House.
This year, the IISS celebrates its 50th anniversary. We do so today, in London, the place of our birth, but will also do so during the rest of the year at special events, international conferences and regional summits that we will be hosting in Asia, Europe, the Middle East and North America. Our purpose will be to mark the accomplishments of an organisation established 50 years ago. It will also be to advertise how much we have grown, widened our reach and extended our influence.
Initially, we were preoccupied with the question of how civilised international relations could be conducted in the nuclear age. We helped to measure and analyse the balance of power between East and West, proposed ideas on how that balance of power could be maintained through arms control, influenced governments to take sensible steps towards conflict resolution and sometimes quietly brought the relevant parties together to help them do what they could not do alone. The reputation for independence, factual authority, useful originality and practical action in the service of good public policy built up in the early days sustains us to this day. We owe a great deal to our founders and early directors.
The best tribute I can pay to them is to read out a letter I received this week:
Dear Mr Chipman,
‘Knowing that the IISS is celebrating the fiftieth anniversary in April I would like to congratulate.
For the past 50 years, practically since its founding, I have enjoyed a close association with the International Institute for Strategic Studies. On the occasion of its anniversary, I would like to congratulate its successive directors, its dedicated staff and its members on their remarkable job during these past five decades. Throughout, from the early days of East-West détente to the major crises of the Cold War - over Soviet missiles in Cuba in the early 1960s and medium-ranged missiles in the 1980s - to today's world of globalized insecurity, the Institute has served the international strategic debate through solid research, influential publications and stimulating conferences. I have been proud of my membership.
As a young Social Democratic M.P. in the 1950s, I became involved in designing the constitutional framework for the new German army. I soon started studying military and security matters, especially the very existential political, strategic and moral questions raised by the existence of nuclear weapons. Those were the very questions that preoccupied men like Admiral Anthony Buzzard, Air Vice Marshal John Slessor, Michael Howard, Alastair Buchan, Denis Healey, Bernard Brodie, Tom Schelling and Albert Wohlstetter, the men who gave shape and intellectual thrust to the Institute in its formative years. My book Defense or Retaliation, first published in 1961, owed a great deal to far-ranging conversations with these first-rate strategic thinkers. Many of them became personal friends whose memory I value to this day.
At one point during my years as German chancellor, the IISS assumed a momentous significance for me. In September 1977, my London address in honour of Alastair Buchan launched the debate on the need for the West to counteract the deployment of Russian medium-range missiles in Europe. Around the dinner table after my speech, I elaborated the underlying ideas. It was Helmut Sonnenfeldt, then a member of the Institute's Council and present at the dinner, who helped that these ideas were paid due attention in Washington. The upshot of my London speech was NATO's double track decision in 1979. In the end, it made Moscow relent. The Soviets withdrew their SS20s; American Pershing II were not deployed in Europe. The outcome contributed significantly to the changes within the Soviet leadership that finally ushered in the end of the Cold War.
So the Institute has played an important role in my life as a politician and publicist just as it has done and continues to do in the lives of many who engage in the debate over the great issues of power, restraint, and responsibility on our troubled planet. In the emerging world of the 21st century, its role as an agent for new ideas and for informed strategic analysis, and as a stimulating international meeting -place will be no less important than it was during the Cold war. On the occasion of your - our! - Fiftieth anniversary I send you my appreciation for what the IISS has achieved in the past, and my very best wishes for what it will achieve in the future.
Signed, 28 March 2008
Helmut Schmidt’
It is, indeed, as an agent for new ideas and strategic change, that the IISS sees itself today. In the first thirty years of our existence we were naturally consumed by the geopolitical realties that ruled over the European continent. We continue to devote time to the security questions of Europe. A forthcoming IISS Strategic Dossier will analyse European defence capabilities. We have played a role in bringing together some of the parties to Europe’s so-called ‘frozen conflicts’ in efforts at conflict resolution. In the last few years, even as relations between the West and Russia have suffered a downturn, the IISS has maintained solid relations with the Russian national security establishment and a regular dialogue.
But throughout our history we have been alert to the dynamics of conflict and conflict resolution in other parts of the world. As you will see from the edition of Classic Adelphi Papers that you will receive at the end of this dinner, the IISS has sought to offer astute analysis of strategic issues, widely defined, in the Middle East, Asia, Africa and Latin America throughout its history. From the 1980s, we made a very concerted effort to extend our individual and corporate members to nearly 100 countries. Our international character thus strengthened, we have been able not just to be an influential commentator, but also an actor in international strategic affairs. Our ability to do this derives from our determination to be seen as a genuinely international institute, no longer uniquely defined by the membership within the transatlantic family that was our original main household.
Now, for example, when many of the great geopolitical challenges of the day are thrown up by conflicts, latent, active, or badly resolved in Asia and the Middle East, the IISS is principally active there. If in the 1980s three quarters of our work was on transatlantic affairs, and most of our funding came from the US and Europe, now three quarters of our work is conducted outside Europe and North America, with an equivalent proportion of our income flowing from these areas. That work is no longer only analytical, but direct and practical.
For years, IISS analysts had noted the absence of an effective regional security mechanism in the Asia-Pacific, and the lack of a forum at which defence ministers could meet. We created the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore attended by ministers of defence, chiefs of defence staff, intelligence chiefs and national security advisers of over twenty states in the Asia-Pacific with representation too at defence minister level from North America and Europe. The IISS Shangri-La Dialogue has become the principal mechanism for defence minister dialogue across the Asia-Pacific. At it, for example, new intergovernmental arrangements for maritime security in the Malacca states have been agreed, and the conditions improved for the establishment of a hotline between the US Pentagon and the Chinese government.
Similarly, politicians, particularly in the West, have long called for the creation of an enlarged regional security institution in the Gulf. The IISS this year will host its fifth anniversary Manama Dialogue in the Kingdom of Bahrain, that brings together the national security establishments of all the GCC states, plus Iraq, Iran, and other regional states, with the US, and key powers in Asia and Europe. Again, where a formal institution was lacking, the IISS has sought to fill the void unofficially, but engaging formal delegations from over twenty states in the service of dialogue on regional confidence building. What then, defines the ambitions of the IISS today?
First, we want to remain at the forefront of modern strategic thought. We conduct work on all major regions of the worlds and across a number of themes. The guiding principle is to help people think and act strategically. The demands of summitry, and the requirements of managing day-to-day affairs, too often lead governments to confuse the conduct of diplomacy with the elaboration of a foreign policy, the statement of policy, with the implementation of strategy. To maintain the art of strategic thinking is therefore a core IISS aim. In doing so, we are alert to distinguishing between the trend and the merely trendy.
We have never been prisoners of the conventional wisdom, or paid slavish attention to current academic fashions. One professor I knew at University used to say ruefully to me: ‘copying from one source is plagiarism, copying from many is considered good scholarship.’ I have always been guided too by the words of Professor Hedley Bull, whose wife we are delighted to have with us tonight, who reminded his students: ‘Thinking, is also research.’ At the IISS, we can contribute to creating new conventional wisdoms only by breaking some of the old that may have been rendered useless by changing realities, but we should not seek to shatter sound strategic axioms, out of some misguided appetite for originality or to seek fleeting publicity. Our role then is to help shape strategic debate, on a strategic plane, without either currying too much favour with the established point of view, or indulging in a feckless originality complex.
Second, our international status requires that we play a role in what I call para-diplomacy, the unofficial convening of governments for inter-governmental dialogue. Our strategic analysis must lead to something and our healthy and wide ranging contacts with governments across the world equally inform our work. The IISS should not shy away from itself helping to shape regional and transnational diplomacy where it can. We continue these efforts, in other parts of the world, at the invitation of government officials, and with the involvement of experts and representatives of the international business community.
Third, to do these two things successfully, we need to plant ever deeper roots around the world. We have opened offices in Singapore and Washington and have plans to establish others by next year. A stronger physical presence internationally is vital also to building a stronger international cohort of corresponding Research Associates and active members, who will be able regularly to support the work of our permanent staff on emerging strategic issues.
Fourth, just as the Institute has always had excellent relations with governments, the media and the academic community, so do we want to deepen our relationship with the international business community. This is not just because we have something to offer in terms of our political risk analysis and practical advice. (Recently, for example, we were delighted to collaborate with Lloyds of London to produce analysis on how business could cope with the risks of terrorism.) It is also because the viewpoint of business is essential to understanding current strategic trends, and the involvement of business in geopolitical thinking is an essential component of getting the analysis right.
Our overall aim is to spread the habits of reasoned debate and intellectual provocation, and to inculcate the traditions of effective conflict resolution. We have an important role to play and we should not shirk it. In a world where sectarian movements and small groups of non-state actors can have such a malign effect on international security, should we, the people of this Institute, turn down the opportunity directly to contribute positively where we can? I think not. As all strategists know, horrible mistakes can be made by people whose plans are grandiose, but detached from the realities that a proper sense of modesty imposes.
But it is also true that every worthy enterprise begins with a conceit. Perhaps it was a presumption nearly 50 years ago to seek to capture the global Military Balance in less than a dozen pages. More recently, perhaps it was a bit much of the IISS to talk of creating regional security institutions. But these initiatives have worked and have become points of reference. We need to stretch our ambitions to the extensive cloth of today’s ‘globalised uncertainty.’ This very effective, though under-capitalised Institute needs the financial resources to do the good that it can, and would otherwise be interred in our thoughts alone. We will get those resources as more people understand what we can do, and that no one else can do quite as well. We need them, because we can contribute to better understandings and sharper thinking in a world that is developing at an allegro vivace pace, but is too often stalled from making real progress by the strategic entrepreneurship of the misguided and the strategic arthritis of the well-meaning.
All of us at the IISS welcome the support you in this room can give us towards realising our ambitions as we enter a new phase in our history. Thank you for being part of it. We at the IISS will do our best to contribute intelligently to the kind of world from which we can all prosper.
Strategie Oblige.
