Once upon a time an Englishman’s home was said to be his castle. Inside he was, in a word, free. The state’s job was to keep things that way, punishing hard anyone who might interfere with his person or property once he left the premises. This profound, revolutionary idea – that the state’s power was limited in favour of free individuals – redefined world civilisation for the better.

Then it all changed, in slow, sly slices. The state began to tell an Englishman what he could or could not do at home, as well as out on the street. The state acquired the power to be rude – to enter a house without permission from the owner. The argument was that ‘the greater good’ required this. As in some cases it does.

If a fire breaks out in my house or I have a diseased cow in my field, it makes sense that someone can step in to stop trouble spreading if I can’t or won’t act. But this simple principle has been eroded by collectivist politicians, who have blurred the line between private property and official intrusion. Thus now, amazingly, UK public authorities have over 1,000 legal powers to enter private property to investigate, among other things: pot plant pests, energy ratings of refrigerators,
unregulated hypnotism, the height of garden hedges, diseased bees, dog breeding and storage of taximeters.

The website www.BigBrotherWatch.org.uk gives the full horrible list, and much more. What does all this have to do with Diplomacy?

Our good friends the Treaties of Osnabrück and Münster signed in 1648 – the Peace of Westphalia – ended the Thirty Years’ War within the Holy Roman Empire. This created a new idea, state sovereignty, based upon courtly principles of good manners: if you agree not to meddle in my country, I will not meddle in yours.

This simple idea has had impressive staying power. It explains why the United States-led military intervention in 1990 to throw Iraqi forces out of Kuwait was, as US-led military interventions go, pretty popular. Saddam Hussein had not only interfered in Kuwait’s internal affairs by invading Kuwait, he had purported to abolish Kuwait altogether. If there is one thing all countries agree on, it is the idea that countries should not be abolished by their bullying neighbours.

States have sovereignty not just over their own land, but also the resources found below it and the air above it. Most people never think about the legal aspects of flying from one country to another – the misery of security checks, plastic food and volcanic ash are enough. Yet someone flying from London to Singapore travels over a number of countries in between, all of which have formally given their consent. If that consent is withdrawn, the aircraft must find another route – sovereignty in action.

But surely ‘sovereignty’ is much less important these days? Have not European Union Member States ‘surrendered sovereignty’ to a ‘higher’ authority, namely the Union itself?

EU-level institutions are unique in world history. They create legal norms binding on all the Union’s Member States, even in the face of opposition from some Member States. Thus if the UK opposes a new EU Directive purporting to reform banks and funds, it can be outvoted by other Member States which want the change. And, once outvoted, it is expected to enforce the new requirements in a dutiful way.

This arguably is not a reduction in UK sovereignty, but rather an expression of UK sovereignty. The UK has of its own free will (at least as expressed through Parliament when ratifying the Lisbon Treaty) accepted EU voting rules which allow this to happen, just as the Treaty also provides a procedure to enable a Member State to leave the Union and get back all its sovereignty once again.

Nonetheless, as the eurozone crisis gathers momentum, the existential question of sovereignty is coming back to the fore even in placid, postmodern Europe. What claims, if any, do (say) Greeks have on (say) German resources and hard work by virtue of EU ‘solidarity’? What claims do eurozone members have on (say) the UK, smugly watching the disarray from across the Channel? Tricky.

The evolution of state intrusiveness into private goings-on is exemplified by how domestic violence is now tackled. Once upon a time, the police would loath to intervene, let alone launch prosecutions where one family member was brutalising another. Courts too steered clear of such supposedly private problems.

Now by contrast domestic violence is tackled firmly. A householder cannot hide behind his/her home’s territorial ‘sovereignty’ if violent crimes against people or indeed animals are being committed there.

This simple proposition aimed at protecting victims of blatant abuse is far from being accepted at the international level. An undemocratic regime may (alas, more often may not) incur international odium for brutalising its own people on a terrific scale. But international law and practice favour strict non-intervention, even in extreme cases where millions of people are suffering misery and oppression for years on end. Yes, we mean you, North Korea.

Worse. Representatives of regimes dishing out this oppression and misery may end up on the UN Human Rights Council, lecturing the rest of us on high moral principles – and warning not only against any ‘intervention’ aimed at saving lives, but also against any external support for groups on the ground struggling to make things better.

In my own career this question came up in an interesting way after the NATO bombing of Serbia/Kosovo in 1999. That episode represented a classic attempt by Tony Blair to establish the principle of ‘humanitarian intervention’ under the idea of a new ‘Right to Protect’ populations from massive human rights violations by their own authorities.

This principle made sense at the time – the fact that so many people had been murdered at Srebrenica in eastern Bosnia shuddered the UN system. Nonetheless, the way NATO intervened in Serbia/Kosovo was morally problematic, for me at least. NATO forces bombed countless Serb targets almost at will, killing hundreds of Serbian soldiers and civilians. Milosevic and the top Belgrade leadership whose policies had prompted the intervention were unscathed, although most of them ended up facing war crimes charges at the Hague Tribunal.

When that NATO bombing ended, I was appointed by then Foreign Secretary Robin Cook to lead on the British diplomatic policy towards the Balkans in general and Serbian leader Slobodan Milosevic in particular. We of course wanted Milosevic to resign or be toppled. But we were not allowed by FCO lawyers to say that we were acting to make this happen. That would be pressing for regime change – a quite improper interference in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia’s internal affairs under firmly established international law.

Anything we might contemplate doing to help see Mr Milosevic depart had to be described in bland, unspecific ways – for example, supporting democratic reforms and European standards of the sort Belgrade itself had endorsed under the Helsinki Accords. Pshaw. Back in the real world we did a lot to help anti-Milosevic forces. And we won.

‘Interfering’ in another state’s internal affairs need not be so active and intrusive. Mere words matter too. France’s President De Gaulle caused a fine diplomatic row in Canada in 1967 by openly championing the slogan of Quebec separatists: Vive le Quebec libre! The ensuing stupendous row cut short his visit.

These days, scarcely a week goes by without a country that lacks normal democratic legitimacy complaining about even innocuous statements in favour of more pluralism. China takes an especially dim view of anything that might be seen to challenge its sovereignty. In 2008, the European Parliament’s award of the Sakharov Prize to Hong Kong human rights campaigner Hu Jia did not go down well in Beijing: ‘To present this type of prize to a criminal amounts to interference with China’s judicial sovereignty,’ said a Chinese spokesman. In February this year, the US Ambassador to China was summoned and given an official complaint that President Obama’s meeting with the Dalai Lama was a ‘gross violation of the norms governing international relations’.

A good rule of thumb for oppressive regimes is this: always blame internal discontent on external meddling. No shortage of examples in Iran, where in 2009 the authorities expressed synthetic fury at British support for the pro-democracy demonstrations, prompting the then Foreign Secretary David Miliband wearily to deny any such manipulation.

Then in April this year, the Egyptian elite seemed rattled by a statement of the obvious by a US State Department spokesman, who said that Egyptians should be allowed to ‘determine who will run and win Egypt’s upcoming elections.’ Egypt quickly accused the US of interfering in its internal affairs. Zzzzz.

Active symbolic ‘interference’ apparently aimed at taking sides in another country’s internal politics is one thing. Sometimes, merely tolerating on one’s territory oppositionist elements who are working busily for change elsewhere is enough to get denounced. As in 2008, when Russian Prime Minister Putin denounced London for granting political asylum to Chechen leader Akhmed Zakayev: ‘Why do you allow Great Britain to be used as a launching pad to fight Russia? If we were to give safe haven to militants of the IRA, with arms in their hands, what would you do? Why can they engage in open anti-Russian activity? That’s why it’s not possible to build normal relations with Britain.’ Hmm. A nice problem for William Hague.

The question of the inviolability of national sovereignty goes to the heart of planetary order. We have a globalising networked world. Cheap accessible gadgets are giving billions of people a voice. Governments in turn have to find clever new ways to oppress and control – and to meddle from afar with their own people and with foreign populations too.

Do rules set up some 350 years before YouTube still make sense? Maybe not. But they are the only rules we have.