The American government published a new ‘National Security Strategy’ the other day. Most people around the world barely took notice – apart from some Europeans, who responded with their usual agonising reappraisal hysteria.
Perhaps Americans would take advice from a (still) friendly quarter regarding such troublesome foreigners:
After almost two years I still find myself suspended between the same two opposing views of [Tunisia] as I did in my first despatch (and which I there entitled the Dyspeptic and the Lotophagous)….
During the visit here in 1976 of Her Royal Highness The Princess Margaret we stood for some minutes in the room at Monastir where President Bourguiba was born… The conversation, led by Habib Bourguiba Junior, turned for some reason to the Watergate scandal and the bugging of the Democratic headquarters. ‘And did you know, Ma’am,’ he concluded in his (almost) faultless English, with the air of a conjuror producing (as indeed he did) a rabbit of an unexpected kind, ‘Did you know that the plumbers were the buggers?’ Princess Margaret’s eyebrows rose almost imperceptibly; but the phrase has stayed with me as a kind of encapsulation of what is amiss in Tunisia itself.
I am not referring in the literal sense to the defects of Tunisia’s sanitary engineering – striking though they are, and true though it is that one of the capital’s main hotels has to keep all its windows hermetically sealed. Nor am I thinking of the shoddy nature of so much workmanship and the casual nature of so much behaviour which in Tunisia, as in other Third World societies, drive visitors from our own to drink or apoplexy. It is in the political sense that I would apply Bourguiba Junior’s memorable phrase to his own country. For the root fault of this republican regime is that it too interferes – needlessly as well as improperly – in the legitimate activities of its democratic rivals…. The singular conceit which so disfigures the Tunisian persona is matched by a singular sense of insecurity. Maybe this is why the Tunisian temperament, like Tunisian toilet-paper, tears in such unexpected directions…
During my farewell call on one of the Tunisian Ministers he said something that I think worth passing on – with no less diffidence than he passed it to me…. The Minister concerned is a pronounced lover of England and the English, and he has seen the world both as a diplomat and as a politician. What he said was this: ‘Your country is no longer a power of the first order. But she has unrivalled experience of world affairs and an influential role to play. Why cannot she adjust her dealings with the Third World to suit her new situation – not… by a feeble contraction of her overseas posture, nor by the vulgar reduction of her diplomatic criteria to cost-effectiveness and of her diplomats’ qualifications to degrees in economics, but by giving your profile a new and less ungracious _expression_?
The Third World has a great respect for your cleverness, but a sad disbelief in your sincerity. Even when your thought processes lead you to make concessions to Third World opinion, you make them with a cold and grudging air. Perhaps because of some imperial hangover your public attitudes to the Third World still sound de haut en bas, liverish if not arrogant. The Third World will not say so to your rulers because it would be impolite; and your diplomats resident abroad are unlikely to reflect it if London’s ears are open only to the crudities of economics. But that is what the Third World thinks – I know this (he went on) because I belong to it and live with it. The Third World has come to stay and is growing. We are emotional people: coldness and calculations of cost-effectiveness give us the shivers. Why do you British not realise this and (in your own interests as well as ours) condescend to it – without an air of condescension. It is not so much a matter of what you do (or don’t do) as of what you say (or don’t say) and of the way you say it (or don’t say it). Look at the way de Gaulle changed the whole course of Franco-Arab relations with a single phrase! Whereas in your country…’ Could he, I wonder, have a point?