 I'm delighted to have this opportunity and in my remarks I would like to put out some basic points which can then form the basis of discussion and the title of my presentation is what help or what use Western intervention in the Arab Spring. Now my remarks are under three headings here. A quick overview of what is the Arab Spring, although I think it's just been said, it's like the Irish summer, but what is it that we're dealing with here? Something about Western engagement, it's not as if an intervention from the West be at the United States or the European Union or Member States or a combination, it's not as if that's new and I want to explain why. And then conclude with some intervention options and their implications, some of which are already being tried out. Illustrate what I want to say with maps. Let's just have those states behind us for now. I shall want to revisit the maps, but I find it useful, I mean change the maps, but I find it useful always to be staring at a map so I'm not going to be offended if you stop staring at me. There are some region wide phenomena which define the Arab Spring and there are some local variations. At the region wide level I'd say that we're talking mostly about a demographic phenomenon, the youth bulge, an issue to do with the distribution of resources which is not just energy resources but also water scarcity and you put together the fact that the region is not readily habitable all over. You get concentrations of the population in the major urban centres and the rural populations have gravitated towards the urban centres and I think it is true to say that with the marginal exception of Iraq it seems impossible for any of the Arab countries to sustain themselves in terms of local food production. These are the kinds of issues being faced. Another thing that is region wide in this Arab Spring is aging autocrats or otherwise self-sustaining rulers who have presided over increasingly corrupt systems. Another regional phenomenon, common phenomenon is the role of information technology and telecommunications technology in spreading the word, inspiring the youth, connecting the people and getting the message out to the outside world. There is a role there for contemporary technology but it's not the whole story and the last thing I want to say about the regional dimension it is Arab and the Arabs are extremely proud of this. As soon as the revolution started in Tunisia and then certainly when it got going in Egypt there was a sense that it was no longer something to feel ambivalent about to be an Arab, the Arabs too had a voice and the Arabs too had courage and they would stand up for their dignity and liberty. All the Arabs that I know wanted a piece of this inspiring phenomenon. What is local about it, the local configurations of the factors vary from country to country. So in some cases the population is relatively homogeneous. I think you could say that about Tunisia and you could say it about Egypt relatively homogeneous. But you cannot say it about Syria and one of the complications is it's multi sectarian and you have a number of different minorities in the mix and there are some tensions that cut across society in a way that they don't cut across Egyptian society by comparison. There's a contrast between the way the monarchies are handling unrest, demands for jobs and largely with money because most of the monarchies have oil, if anybody wants to talk about Jordan in particular we can, versus the republics that talk the language of popular will and elections but don't actually deliver in terms of the people having access. The Arab Spring to date has been characterised by some common slogans, liberty, dignity, jobs and an end to corruption. Why should we care coming onto my second topic? Well those slogans we identify with, we in the west that is, we identify with the call for liberty, dignity, jobs and anti-corruption and so we think we're on the same side as the people coming out in the streets and calling for that. We think we are, but we also have interests at stake and over the past 15 years, if not 25, the debate in the European Union around the Mediterranean has been very much about how do you get economic growth in North Africa so that the people of North Africa stay put and they don't try to migrate into the Union. Migration into the Union, especially when those migrating are seen to be Arab and Muslim is perceived as a potential source of social tension and that those migrating from the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean into Europe will retain links to unhappy populations elsewhere. The Islamist opposition movement of Tunisia would be just one example and actually London played host to the head of that organisation, and it was a source of great contention between the British government and the Tunisians that the British wouldn't hand him over to the Tunisians. We have interests at stake, especially the United States in strategic terms in the energy of the region and of course North Africa is a great source of gas for the European Union but at large the whole region is vital in terms of global energy resources and in the US sense, decreasingly in the British and French sense, but definitely in the US sense, this is an area of strategic military importance with an astonishing amount of US personnel, military hardware, training camps, training camps. Training agreements across the whole region and to upsticks the fifth fleet in the Persian Gulf, the main base of US central command in Qatar in the Gulf, there's a lot at stake in this region. So is it true that we're really on the side of those who are demonstrating for their freedom, democracy and to corruption, especially if it's going to mean a lot of instability. Now Western engagement and involvement in the region of course dates back to well before the time of Christ. And I'm particularly fond of this map because the Mediterranean is in the centre. Interaction around the Mediterranean is as old as civilisation. Successive empires knitted together the north and south shores. It is a totally new concept to think of Europe as utterly divorced from something called the Middle East which is full of Arabs and Muslims or utterly divorced from North Africa because we don't do empires anymore. So my contention is that Europe has been and will never cease to be intimately engaged in the affairs of the southern and eastern shores of the Mediterranean and vice versa. Our futures as well as our pasts are intertwined and the Arab Spring grew out of the pre-existing context. It didn't come from nowhere. The factors which contributed to its emergence include some in which the West is complicit. So insofar as we identify with the ideals of the Arab Spring we have to be a little bit careful because we were saying pretty nice things about Mubarak and Ben Ali. Ben Ali's economic opening up programme, the state of his economy in Tunisia in particular, the rights of women in Tunisia in particular. We were talking about Mubarak as the pillar of stability, an ally in the war on terror, a crucial mediator for us in the Arab-Israeli peace process. And then all of a sudden we are encouraging him to exit power. So what exactly are we saying here? Have we completely changed our attitude towards who's a good guy and a bad guy? Something else I want to say about the Western role and the Europeans, the British and the French in particular, which has relevance to what's going on today. Something more specific. What the British did, the French did something similar, inclusive of North Africa. But what the British did was turn the map that you see there into that. At the beginning of the 19th century, end of the First World War, collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the big idea was not so much democracy as statehood, post-colonialism statehood. And in their wisdom, the British decided that the Arabs weren't quite ready for total independence, so there better be a few mandates, inclusive of the mandate for Palestine, which was to be the home of the Jewish people. And they drew these lines on the map, some of which are extraordinarily arbitrary. And those lines cut across, actually this is the way it was carved up in 1923. Those lines cut across pre-existing social and commercial interactions, linkages, ways of life. And if you look at Jordan in the middle there, Jordan is a total invention, as is Iraq, which is less, in both cases, less than 100 years old. If you take the case of Iraq where we know as a result of the intervention of Iraq, we're talking about a majority of the Arab population and the majority of the population overall are of Shia Islam as opposed to Sunni Islam. And there is a large, a sizeable, up to a quarter minority, ethnically speaking, who are Kurds as opposed to Arabs. Now in that mix the British put together three different Ottoman provinces, inclusive of one endowed with oil, and so this will work as a state. Now I contend that the intervention in 2003 in Iraq was so destabilising, especially in the opportunity that it gave to Iran to increase its influence, especially in the opportunity that democracy and the rights of the majority gave to Shia Arabs in Iraq, that 2003 has started a process of revisiting those lines. And whether they make sense in terms of national identity, belonging, economic viability and so on. And certainly since the end of the Cold War, by which time US hegemony had replaced British and French imperial power in the region, certainly by the end of the Cold War, there was a sense of post-imperial, proprietorial attitude about what was good for regional democracy, regional governance and regional security. And as of 9-11 I would contend regional security trumped democracy and economic development. And cooperation with regimes in the name of combating terrorism has been the story of the last decade, inclusive of the invasion of Iraq. If you consider that the people of the region all grow up very conscious of the role of the West in their history, very suspicious of the British because of their involvement, I don't make a single visit to the region without being told, did you hear about the Belford Declaration? That's a British invention and increasingly anti-American. Now in that context coming to my concluding set of remarks about what options and what use Western intervention, any Western intervention now in the Arab Spring, in any of the countries involved, will be received within the context that I've just described. And that therefore we have to be a bit careful because the intervention in Iraq in 2003 has left a sense of anger, distress, that the Americans and the British didn't know what they were doing and may have caused more harm than good in what they were doing in Iraq. And there's also a question, what is it that the West has to sell? Can the Western players genuinely claim who have always been the champions of the slogans of the Arab revolutions, the Arab Spring? Not according to the history that I've offered you. So three possibilities for intervention. If you choose to try and help the trend as opposed to oppose it, development aid to whom? With or without conditionality, what conditions? And where are the funds going to come from? Tunisia would be a core example of that. If the Government of Tunisia can't create jobs fast and recover the health of the tourist industry fast, the economy will be in worse shape than it was when the revolution happened and whichever government takes over will not succeed in delivering on the people's aspirations. And so those glorious aspirations will be disappointed and there could be a reversion to something more authoritarian. If we have funds that we want to donate to prevent that happening, how exactly do you disperse it? Especially when the country is in transition and they will not have a new elected government until they've got a constitution. Another possibility is opening the doors to migration, offering jobs, remittances, so these can be sent home, recognising that the demographics in Europe are the opposite to those in the Arab world. Could we not team up together? Well, I don't think I need to explain that Europe isn't feeling quite that inclusive, expansive, warm and welcoming at the moment for the reasons I described earlier. And I think there is a big question mark over how do you help Egypt in that respect because job creation is a terrifyingly difficult thing for any country, any government to solve in Egypt. And I'm not sure that in the European Union right now, given the current crisis situation, that we are perhaps as confident of our socioeconomic and liberal capitalist models as we once were to sell them to somebody else, especially not somewhere like Egypt. And then of course there's military intervention. Much was made of the value of the Arab League plea for UN NATO intervention to save the people of Bengali. It's worth remembering that the Arab League was more old guard than it was new when that plea was made and none of them liked Gaddafi. And that they have been singularly off radar since. I've heard the former head of the International Criminal Court proceedings vis-a-vis the former Yugoslavia and Human Rights Lawyer par excellence. Louise Arbor say to contend that in a moment of emergency as Libyan forces were closing in on Benghazi to contend that there was no time to think through where intervention might take us is not a responsible position to take. And we've had enough experience over the last 20 years to know exactly where intervention can take us. And I was fascinated by an article in yesterday's Financial Times where the reporters have access to a plan that the British have worked out for the Libyans for post-Gaddafi Libya and how long each phase should last and who the Australians have a job, the Canadians have a job, the various Europeans have a job, what the UK is going to help. I mean it's no longer a Libyan revolution I'm afraid and ownership of the revolution is key. Military intervention is going to involve deaths so to argue it's in the name of saving lives you've got to be incredibly careful I believe to be able to argue that we'll save more than we'll lose with our intervention and over how long a time. So lots of caution about military intervention and it's not even on the cards with Syria and Yemen in part because it's much clearer in the cases of Syria and Yemen than it was in the case of Libya that the dividing lines are too fudged, too fuzzy. Where do you insert troops on whose behalf? And who are the good guys and who are the bad guys? And if the people in the forefront are former prisoners, political prisoners, does that make them automatic democrats in three years time? And if we commit to some of the characters in the mix are we going to regret it later? And I conclude with a word about Palestine because of course this summer is a deadline for Palestine and a project that the European Union with varying degrees of skepticism or enthusiasm has been supporting which is the creation of a Palestinian state in the West Bank under the kind of leadership that is considered preferable. That is Salam Faithd, the Prime Minister and Mahmood Abbas, the President and Fatah rather than Hamas. One effect of the Arab Spring has been to increase ordinary Palestinian pressure on the two factional leaderships to stop their dispute and to reconcile Fatah and Hamas. And pressure coming from the Arab countries has been we can't actually help you if you don't combine forces. If there's no Palestinian unity then the Israelis don't have a partner to work with. So you could say that there's been some interesting repercussions with some positive aspects to them in the Palestinian community but the result of that is the challenge that faces the international community in September. If there is no progress towards Palestinian statehood at the negotiations level then should the state be recognized nonetheless. And if you do what does that mean and if you don't what does that mean? So my realistic conclusion to what use Western intervention in the Arab religions is there's little to be gained, little difference to be made by intervention. And whilst it may seem cold, hard, calculating or simply indecisive to ffens sit it would be irresponsible to suggest that Western intervention can make the difference between success and failure for the nice guys.