Cousins and Strangers: America, Britain, and Europe in a New Century

by Chris Patten

"A magisterial volume―a cocktail of autobiography, political analysis of the state of the world, and policy prescriptions." ― Foreign Affairs


For fifty years, the Americans, British, and Europeans were close partners, yet today the Western alliance is strained to a moment of reckoning. In Cousins and Strangers , Chris Patten, one of Europe's most distinguished statesmen, scrutinizes what has happened in the years since the fall of the Berlin Wall, pinpointing the shifts in power and security that have reshaped our world.

In penetrating and sparkling analysis, Patten argues that to face the urgent threats of the twenty-first century―terrorism, nuclear proliferation, failed and failing states, massive environmental change―the Western alliance must stop bickering and kowtowing and start asserting cooperative leadership. Bad habits and easy, self-absorbed slogans must give way to smart politics in order to ensure the world's, and our own, best interests. Drawing on his decades of experience in government and international diplomacy, Patten sharply assesses the leadership of the United States, Great Britain, and Europe, and the stakes for all three if the West breaks apart.

320 pages, Paperback

First published January 10, 2006

About the author

Christopher Francis Patten, Baron Patten of Barnes, CH

Graduate of Balliol College, University Oxford (1965).

Among his services, appointments, and honors, he served as Member of Parliament (MP) for Bath (1979-1992), Minister for Overseas Development at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (1986-1989), Secretary of State for the Environment (1989-1992), Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster (1990-1992), Chairman of the Conservative Party (1990-1992), the last Governor of Hong Kong (1992-1997), appointed a Companion of Honour (CH) by Queen Elizabeth II (1998), Chairman of the Independent Commission on Policing for Northern Ireland (1998-1999), Chancellor of Newcastle University (1999-2009), 1999, appointed as one of the UK's two members to the European Commission (1999) and served as Commissioner for External Relations, appointed the European Union's High Representative of the Union for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy (2000-2004), received an honorary LL.D. degree from the University of Bath (2003), Chancellor of the University of Oxford (2003- ), elected a Distinguished Honorary Fellow of Massey College, University of Toronto (2005), received an honorary D.S.Litt. degree from the University of Trinity College, University of Toronto (2005), Toronto, an honorary D.Litt. degree from the University of Ulster (2005), and in 2005 he was also honored with a life peerage as Baron Patten of Barnes, of Barnes in the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames, as a Roman Catholic he played a vital role overseeing the visit of Pope Benedict XVI's to the UK (2010), and served as Chairman of the BBC Trust (2011-2014).

Reviews

[Benjamin Pierce · Rating 4 out of 5]

There’s no end to the ways which nice things are nicer than nasty ones…Kingsley
Amis, Lucky Jim

Chris Patten was a Conservative Member of Parliament in the era of Thatcher and
Major, the last British governor of Hong Kong, special negotiator in Ireland, and one of
Britain’s two Commissioners to the European Union. Now he takes up the job of saying
aloud what the smoky back rooms have taught him.
He looks at a world already about to go very wrong, and asks what, in about this order,
Britain, the European Union, the Atlantic partnership with America, and the whole of
humanity might pursue instead of dark disaster.
Patten describes himself as “an enthusiastic occupant of America’s undeclared
empire” ready to declare that “Pax Americana was a good thing for the world” who now
must ask “will America return to the world that it helped create” by recalling the value of
economic and diplomatic sanctions and the value of the EU and the UN in holding such
allegiances together. Yet the EU needs to recognize that America’s military might cannot
be omitted, paralleled or replaced.
The old Marshall-era strategy will never appear credible to Washington until Britain
takes full participation in the European Union, and if the European Union does not
recognize the unique value of Britain in counseling America.
Yet British fear of losing identity and sovereignty has foolishly cost Britain its’ best
opportunities. At the time the book was written, Britain faced the difficult job of introducing some version of its’ needs into an EU that had already taken shape without British input. Now we know the outcome. This is one of many matters where Cousins and Strangers reminds of of what the world we have left behind must have looked like.
Patten traces the fall of Thatcher and Major’s governments to badly- timed
Euro-skeptical positions, pointing out that in both cases that timing could not have been an
issue if Britain already had engagement in the inevitable formation of the EU.
Having pitched reconciliation and renewed resolve for the West, he argues that
Turkey—as an EU member—and then Russia, China and India need to be met as
necessary partners who each need to make important concessions in human rights, fair
political play and sane resource use—again, to their own ultimate benefit and despite
suspicions and doubts that don’t stand up to examination in terms of higher and thus
mutual self-interest.
Now, of course, we see that it hasn’t turned out anything like that, nor does there seem any change of course that would let us go where he once recommended.
Patten examines at length the role of the Islamic world, directly confronting Samuel
Huntington’s then-recent “clash of civilizations” thesis at every opportunity. He argues that
the real problem is the mistreatment of the Palestinians and the intransigence of the Likud
party and it’s American supporters. He is confident that the popularity of Western
popular culture, and the potential of business with the West to make democracy viable
and poverty absent is plenty to bridge the famous religious and cultural gap.
Anyone who finds globalization a threat or the IMF to be simply a tool for
imperialism will not enter this book on home ground. Anyone who has written America
off as the greatest ogre of recent history will not be in their living-room. Those who
wonder how anyone could question the wisdom of the current administration will not find
themselves among the faithful.
Patten challenges every other position that, at the time this was a new book, was getting play by offering facts, humanity and reason where factoids, sound-bites and sophistry have been the very best
offered by every other political writer now at work.

Throughout, he gives backroom insight upon telling anecdote, turning some very
witty barbs when dealing with Dick Cheney, Jacques Chirac, or anyone he sees choosing
petty ambition over more humane virtues. His zingers are as sharp as anything out there,
but with that touch of class that has been forgotten everywhere else.
However, there is a perhaps--fatal flaw in this generous and wise yet tough-talking
work. Patten seems to have really believed that the most contentious or difficult issues are
a question of a few mutually maintained but simply-exposed misunderstandings that mask
mutual self interest and distract from impending and dire common problems. Taken just at
his word, Patten convincingly argues his case. Yet any habitual observer of world politics
will see what Patten overlooks—it is hard to think inadvertently.
When Patten discusses petroleum, it is in terms of whether, given America’s bloated
addictions, China and India can be expected to play fair at securing oil and producing
greenhouse gasses—never mentioning that the world may have passed peak oil
production or a readily-healed greenhouse problem long before the book was written, let
alone now. Playing cricket may not be enough and might not have been enough if the world
had taken real not of him then.
There is a yet-more-glaring omission in his thesis that the Islamic world simply wants
to see the Palestinians treated as human beings—it is sadly necessary to point out the
currency that the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion” has had for three generations in the
Middle East, indeed the broader Islamic world, ever since Henry Ford began
disseminating it especially among persons who do not make a habit of reading.
The recent emergence of state-sponsored Holocaust Revisionism in Iran, in the midst
of now-failed negotiations on nuclear proliferation, shows how greatly this omission
distorts the picture. Whatever the solution, there is more here than a simple
misunderstanding and a few easily-exposed opportunists pulling strings.
He discusses China and India only as mutual competitors—ignoring the fact that
China, by recognizing Sikkim as Indian territory, had already forged an axis with India
with which to face—and perhaps divide--the established or re-emerging powers.
This new alliance may have fewer pragmatic reasons than humane reasons to settle
for less than an era where the Latinate “Pax” itself is seen as an ikon of yesterdays’ twilit
principalities.
In detailing the role that the EU played via fuel embargoes in toppling Slobodan
Milosevic—given as an EU success where before “America’s non-involvement was
decisive”, he simply does not mention the fact that NATO dropped some of the heaviest
conventional ordinance ever dropped—or the role of the CIA sponsored youth group
Otpor in carrying protest from the furnace-room to the streets.
We have a different picture once these realities are painted, belatedly, onto Pattens’
canvas.
Finally, on a philosophical rather than factual level, we are left wondering if Patten
does not ignore the possibility that one side might still be able to win—not because he
can disprove it but because, understandably, he doesn’t like the idea. Yet it may be that
the lion gets the worse end of the deal for lying down with the lamb.
Political writing since William Buckley’s oeuvre eclipsed William J. Lederer’s “A
Nation of Sheep” has been snide, empty, disingenuous, and never more naïve than when
it is deliberately deceptive—Mr. Patten reminded us how it is done. Looking at the bestsellers
in this genre that were to come, his example here had no impact, to our universal loss.
As far as practical politics goes, this book must fill us with nostalgia, but perhaps for a
world that, collectively, had already become impossible to realize.
If nothing else, we can always afford a reminder that what has become familiar would not so long ago have been unrecognizable. Yet here we are.