David Owen, Human Rights and the Remaking of British Foreign Policy, by David Grealy

David Owen unexpectedly became Foreign Secretary on the death of Tony Crosland in March 1977, one of the many twists and turns in a career that would see him play a leading role in the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in the 1980s and become an international diplomat in the 1990s. David Grealy has sought to rescue Owen from his sardonic Spitting Image caricature, emphasising instead his principled, meditative character and ability to influence British foreign policy long beyond his relatively short spell at the helm of the Foreign Office. This thoroughly researched and well-written book builds on Grealy’s Ph.D. thesis, and is based on a close reading of Owen’s extensive private papers at the University of Liverpool.

The book opens with a fascinating account of Owen’s early life and influences. He was an apolitical medical student who turned to politics after the Suez crisis, joining the Labour party in response to Hugh Gaitskell’s appeal to the ‘armchair socialists’. From the start Owen espoused Christian Socialism and fell under the spell of Mervyn Stockwood at Cambridge. Elected MP for Plymouth Sutton in 1966, Owen was initially a strong supporter of Harold Wilson, but soon turned against what he saw as Wilson’s abandonment of radical, moral policies for ‘hollow managerialism’. (Given that the book chronicles Owen’s own discovery of the virtues of compromise while at the Foreign Office, one hopes that he came to a better appreciation of the problems that Wilson faced in office). In the rapidly changing politics of the late 1960s, Owen came to see a commitment to human rights as the best way for Labour to connect with the new currents of extra-parliamentary activism. Human rights, he later wrote, must be a ‘natural policy for socialists to champion’.

On becoming Foreign Secretary Owen wasted no time in setting out his vision, telling an audience of diplomatic writers that Britain would ‘take a stand on human rights in every corner of the globe’, and even publishing a short book on the subject in 1978. However, as Grealy shows, he was to some extent building on the work of Crosland, and was ably supported by junior ministers such as Frank Judd, as well as Judith Hart at Overseas Development. Owen’s short but eventful tenure at the Foreign Office inevitably provides the book’s core, and two case-studies demonstrate clearly the dilemmas that he faced. In the case of El Salvador, Owen was able to reverse a commitment to supply armoured vehicles to the military regime, working alongside activists and religious leaders such as Cardinal Hume. The question of aid to Iran was, however, far more problematic, and Owen threw his weight behind the doomed cause of the Shah’s pro-Western regime, thereby undermining his relations with the left. As a commentator in Tribune noted, it was not surprising that the Foreign Secretary should back the Shah, but what turned his stomach was the ‘constant posturing and moralising we get from David Owen’.

Owen’s attempt to embed human rights in British foreign policy benefited immensely from coinciding with the Carter presidency, the closeness between the two governments facilitated by the new ambassador to Washington, Peter Jay. The more forceful Anglo-US stance on human rights affected relations with some key West European states: West Germany was concerned that its own delicate relations with the East could be undermined, while the French disliked Owen’s presentation of human rights as rooted in the British and American tradition of individual freedoms. However, Grealy notes that the differences with Europe should not be exaggerated. Owen worked hard, for instance, to make human rights an element of the next round of the EEC’s Lomé II trade agreements.

The story becomes more diffuse with Margaret Thatcher’s triumph in the 1979 election, and Owen’s subsequent involvement in the breakaway SDP. Even so, Grealy argues that there was a surprising degree of continuity in British foreign policy across the 1979 watershed which can to some extent be traced back to Owen’s hawkish anti-Soviet politics and his belief that human rights were a ‘powerful way to challenge Communism’, a view that he shared with Thatcher. This is an interesting reinterpretation of the period, but does beg the question of how far a policy that abandons any pretence to universalism in pursuit of ideological advantage in the Cold War should really be seen as a human rights policy at all.

As Owen drifted towards the margins of politics, he turned increasingly to initiatives that addressed global governance and humanitarianism. His unlikely return to the spotlight came in 1993 when he was appointed by the EU, alongside the former US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, to lead the diplomatic intervention in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The Vance–Owen peace plan, which envisaged a cantonal structure, failed, partly because it lacked any of the external military support that Owen increasingly demanded. He finally quit in June 1995, but Grealy argues that Owen’s bitter experience in Bosnia, which his participation in the Carnegie Commission on Preventing Deadly Conflict allowed him time to digest, was not wasted. His voice was certainly an element in the constellation of forces pushing for liberal interventionism by the Blair government in the late 1990s, forcefully expressed during the Kosovo crisis.

Grealy protests that he has not written a ‘hagiographic’ reassessment of Owen, and quite rightly so: this is a measured account that brings out Owen’s thoughtful approach to international politics and determination to foreground human rights in policy-making, while leaving the reader in no doubt that he was capable of making poor decisions. Although at times one feels that Owen’s career—he served little more than two years as Foreign Secretary—cannot bear the weight that the book’s title places on him, Grealy at least makes a convincing case for his continued influence, all the way to the strange coda to his career in Bosnia and beyond.