The Irish government believes that a nuclear fuel reprocessing plant at Sellafield will contaminate its citizens. It placed an advertisement in The Times in November to say that the plant will be polluting at normal times and very dangerous in exceptional circumstances such as a terrorist attack.
With a nice symmetry, Michael Meacher, the British environment minister, had a few weeks earlier sharply criticised the Bush administration for not signing up to the Kyoto climate change treaty, which aims to reduce the use of fossil fuels (and may thus make nuclear power more attractive).
The point is not whether Britain is indifferent to the riskiness of Sellafield's MOX plant, nor whether the US is lazy about the dangers of its culture of fuel abundance. It is that although there are formal processes by which these things get thrashed out between states, senior politicians increasingly prefer direct appeals to the public. They have learned the joys of grandstanding. Unable to beat the NGOs-the professionalised romantics of our time-the statesmen have decided to join them.
But something even more dangerous is at work. Enter "Bystander Virtue," a principle which will become increasingly evident as politics starts to go global. So, for instance, if a country like Ireland does not have a nuclear industry, it is easy to pander to domestic misconceptions about nuclear power. Or since Britain has by mistake reduced the emissions which are supposed to lead to global warming (by closing its coal industry), it feels it is in a position to criticise the US for failing to embark on what would be a very much more difficult course of action.
Similarly, the British government, starting with the then environment minister, John Gummer, sided with the anti-whaling NGOs in the International Whaling Commission against the pro-whaling forces of Norway, Iceland and Japan. Conservative ministers had often been admonished for not caring (not least by Norwegian environment ministers). It must have been tempting to pay them back for the "Dirty Man of Europe" tag.
What price old-fashioned notions of good government, such as speaking to the facts, respecting the positions of other democratic and in any case sovereign states, and generally avoiding playground politics and posturing?
At a loftier level of self-interest, governments need to be able to show that they are guided by reason as well as by populism: they need arguments which will stand the test of time. That is why governments, unlike NGOs, really do have an interest in a high regard for evidence. The best understanding on whaling, for instance, was that the three nations which wanted to resume a limited hunt of minke whales in their coastal waters were likely to do no damage to the minke stocks.
States should aim to say clearly what their interests are, and they should promote them boldly. But equally when they have no significant interests they should also say so. On whaling, Britain should have said that its views were not important. The Irish should have generously understood that the British were in a harder place than them. And Michael Meacher should have been explaining to smugly insular Europeans that in the US very few elected politicians could be found to endorse Kyoto: that is to say, it would have been undemocratic, arrogant and absurd of Bush to have signed the treaty. The bystanders were opining with mock virtuousness on situations in which their neighbours had more difficult judgements to make.
If politicians really feel they must stop whaling, or nuclear reprocessing or the US's gas-guzzlers they should leave high office and go to work for NGOs, whose rhetoric and superficialities they are in any case mimicking.
