Mandy's Ethical Foreign Policy

I'm not quite sure what to make of Lord Mandleson's performance before the white-shirted cadres at Beijing's high-powered Party School this morning. It's hard not to speculate on whether the UK business secretary's stumbling series of mixed messages perhaps tells us more about his fraught experiences on the dating circuit than it does about Britain's China policy.

The click of chips was almost audible as Mr. Mandleson raised the possibility of Europe lifting its embargo on China, in force since the 1989 Tiananmen square massacre (or incident, depending on who you ask). "There are some things we in Europe would like China to accept or sign up to just as there are things you would like us to repeal or adjust. Perhaps there are the makings of good bargaining there."

Afraid that such remarks might be read the wrong way, he was then helpful enough to clarify, "I don't want to pitch a deal to the Chinese on the arms embargo."

Yes, rather.

In some ways, it's rather refreshing to see a Western politician (sort of) stripping the human rights issue down to a straightforward political gambit. The generally held view among Chinese academic and policy circles is that the developed world's hang-ups over the country's human rights record are simply part of a strategy of using ideology to 'control' China's rise. While this particular brand of realism-with-Chinese-characteristics fails to appreciate the genuinely important role that moral sentiment plays in democratic politics, it is, in many ways, not that far wide of the mark.

As the much-missed foreign secretary Robin Cook came to realize as he was politically disembowelled in its service, a purist 'ethical foreign policy' is difficult to enforce much further than one's doorstep. While China hacks may look forward to the much-needed dose of February cheer that the side-splittingly disingenuous annual US-China 'human rights record' exchange brings, there are, perhaps, more dignified ways to conduct our business (this year's match ended in an agonizing 1-1 draw, with America's seemingly-secure 38,000 word lead all but overhauled by China's more concise I-know-you-are-but-what-am-I comeback).

Perhaps Mandleson's wavering displays at its core an understanding, however murky, of the dual persona that ethical issues are forced to adopt when international politics are concerned. As countries where the intertwined worlds of politics and public life are constructed around a complex and unendingly contested set of moral codes and consensuses, it would be wrong of us not to make ethics our business. But at an international level, we must accept that, like agricultural subsidies and WTO memberships, ethical demands are, and cannot help but be, tools; unless we sideline them entirely, we will inevitably find ourselves deploying them as means of negotiation or coercion. While this raises a difficult set of choices in its own right, the reality alone does not sully the purity of our ideals, such as they are.

Chinese rhetorical hypocrisy is annoying. No, more than that, it's infuriating, a kind of toe-curling, fist-clenching smugness. But underlying that, perhaps worse, is the fact that at some level, it will always remind us of our own.