English

In a new development, Prime Minister David Cameron has vowed to cut aid for countries with poor record on gay rights.

According to the Daily Mail, countries that persecute gay and lesbians will receive funding “fines.” Countries that are on the forefront of possible aid cuts include countries like Uganda and Ghana with poor LGBTI rights.

In a tough measure, Britain cut £19million of its foreign aid to Malawi after the southeastern African country imprisoned two gay men for holding an engagement ceremony.

In the wake of the new announcement, the Ghana government, which receives £36million in aid from Britain annually, has promised to “check the menace of homosexuality,” as to an article in TIME magazine.

LGBTI organizations around the world has hailed Britain’s move, including Nepal’s Blue Diamond Society.

“Aid should be denied to any government who persecute their citizens on grounds like gender, race, cast, ethnicity, disability, sexual orientations, gender identity, health condition etc.” it was quoted in a blog set up in 2008 to help save an Iranian gay teenager from deportation. The blog now promotes LGBT rights for asylum and refuge in the UK.

But not everyone welcomes the British PM’s take on the aid policy.

In his article in the American Spectator, Hal G P Colebath argues that if is being slashed in African countries for persecuting the gays, “Pakistan will continue to receive more than $400 million a year despite the victims of persecution are only Christians, who don’t count.”

“All persecution is worse than deplorable,” he says.

In another reasoning, an article in the Daily Mail says that’s it’s not only gay people who are being persecuted in the developing countries with poor human rights record.

“Christians, Animists and other faiths are being butchered and ethnically cleansed in Africa; women are systematically oppressed in Islamic countries. Yet the Government does not suspend aid on their account,” writes Melanie Phillips.

And as LGBTI organizations are in support of PM Cameron move, the question lingers: How good of a move is it?

Use ‘soft power’ to promote British values, advance development and prevent conflict. Use ‘soft power’ as a tool of UK foreign policy; expand the UK Government’s contribution to conflict prevention; promote British values, including human rights; and contribute to the welfare of developing countries. (p.76)

So the first part of this says that soft power is a tool but the part after the semicolon is ambiguous – are we talking about tools or objectives?

On page 86 the paper refers to ‘defence diplomacy and the projection of defence soft power’  on the following page we learn that ‘the FCO participates in a number of Key MoD [Ministry of Defence] engagement planning committees’.  There’s a summary of what defence diplomacy means in the UK lexicon here.

The other place where Soft Power appears is on page 97 where we get this:

As set out in the FCO Business Plan, we will work with other government departments to agree a joint approach to enhance British “soft power” that uses all our national instruments, including the UK’s world-class programme of aid.
In his appearance in front of the Liaison Committee in November 2010, the Prime Minister said that “we should be clear that the development budget gives Britain clout and influence in the world. Six months into the job, I really feel that. When you sit round the table at the G8 or G20 discussing Haiti, Pakistan or Yemen, often the modern equivalent of a battleship is the C17 loaded with aid and the brilliant Oxfam team that is going to go in and help deliver water or whatever. They are real tools of foreign policy and influence and heft in the world. We should be quite frank about that, and not be embarrassed about it”.

I’m surprised that I missed this at the time because the explicit embrace of aid as a tool of policy is very different from the normal British approach   Under the last government implying that aid was at all instrumental was a definite no no. This line sounds almost…..French?  The other question that comes to mind is who is being influenced here is it the people in Haiti or Pakistan or is it the other members of the G20?

The interesting thing is that idea of soft power isn’t used in discussing some areas that you would expect it to be used for eg education, health, culture.  So what we have here is the view that soft power is a foreign policy instrument particularly in relation to the use of aid and defence diplomacy.  It’s not used, in this document at least, in the way that Nye would use it in relation to attraction.

Incidentally pages 233 onwards of the .pdf include a lot material on staffing practice in the FCO – worth looking at if you’re interested in what capabilities diplomats are supposed to have and which embassies and consulates are regarded as hardship postings.