E3G

John Ashton speech: Building a politics of interdependence

By Chris Littlecott

E3G founding director John Ashton, in his role as the special representative for climate change of the UK Foreign and the Commonwealth office, delivered a speech to the official launch of chinadialogue.net on September 27, 2006 at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) in London.

Drawing on his extensive experience of diplomatic relations with China, he spoke on the theme of China’s interdependence with the rest of the world. The article that follows below is taken from his speech. It had been previously published on the chinadialogue.net website in November 2006.

Building a politics of interdependence

The environmental crisis knows no borders, argues the UK’s “climate ambassador” John Ashton. Governments may now be encountering their biggest challenge: building a common language to resolve the planet’s shared dilemma.

I describe myself these days as an escaped diplomat who has been recaptured. I was enjoying life outside government running an independent organisation when the call came. It was an offer I had to take very seriously. So I am recaptured by government, but actually happily recaptured because it is a tremendous privilege to have this role.
 
There’s one force, whether you are Chinese or African or European or American, which, more than any other is shaping the world that we live in, and that is the rapid growth of interdependence. It means that there is very little now that we can sensibly deal with, very few actions that we can take, that we can take in isolation from everybody else.

One of the scary things about the modern world is the sudden appearance of increasingly nasty epidemics. We have learned the hard way that the choices that are made by the institutions and governments in the places where they first appear have enormous importance all over the world. Such choices might make the difference between a local epidemic and a rampant global pandemic that wreaks enormous havoc.