Centrism Beyond Imperialism
I begin with a sincere and well-deserved vote of thanks to the security personnel and all those who served the Guests of God. The success of this year’s Hajj was a living image of state efficacy: a state able to serve its own people and the peoples of the world. Thank you for your service.
Last week, on Speech Day, my son Fihr bin Malik stood in the Speech Room at Harrow, the venerable British school, and recited a passage from Jawaharlal Nehru’s “Tryst with Destiny” — the words spoken on the night of India’s independence, 14 August 1947. No one in the hall found the scene strange. In that absence of surprise lies the whole story: what Britain gives the world, when the world keeps it by choice, ceases to be imperial. It becomes shared infrastructure: the English language, common law, schools and universities, and a public inheritance of governance.
At Harrow itself, Sir Winston Churchill and Nehru meet, as it were — both Old Harrovians. Churchill represented the old nerve of empire: leadership, endurance, survival at the edge, and then transition. Nehru represented another meaning of the state: that the instruments of empire — language, law, education, and constitutional speech — can be transformed, in the hands of those who learned them, into a language of efficacy and good government. Nehru did not reject the colonial inheritance; he used it. That is the paradox: what was once imperial becomes, when retained by choice, a practical tool for governance and statehood.
From there comes a third moment, with another prime minister: Tony Blair. Last week, he wrote a sharp critique of the current Labour government’s policies and offered a powerful argument for the Radical Centre — not as a compromise between left and right, but as an attempt to recover the United Kingdom’s capacity to act. The point he reached, in my view, is global in reach: the crisis of democracy today is not only a crisis of transparency or integrity, but a crisis of efficacy — the ability of government to act, produce, make an impact, and translate public mandate into tangible result.
Centrism is not weakness, nor a grey zone between opponents. It is the station of legitimacy in the state when the state disciplines itself: governing by policy rather than anger, by competence rather than slogans, by law rather than popular impulse, and by impact rather than the mere declaration of intent. Capacity without law becomes governance without legitimacy; law without capacity becomes procedure without trust. Centrism restores the relationship between the two.
This is also becoming a condition of sovereignty in our time. Blair named the American and Chinese powers, placed India in the rising frame, and pointed to the Russian impulse. Great powers naturally seek to universalise their interests in security, money, technology, and standards. Middle powers therefore need resilient sovereignty: they must not merely react, nor become arenas for new empires.
This is not a lesson for the United Kingdom alone, but for all middle powers: to learn the meaning of government efficacy — law that governs, technology that is understood, an economy that produces, and alliances built without dependency. There is no shame in taking from an old inheritance what has now become common infrastructure, and using it with practical intelligence, as Nehru did: neither in nostalgia in submission.
Discipline begins in Atturaif…
and in the world it is tested.
Prof. Dr. Malik Ãl-Dahlan
Professor of Law and specialist in international law; International Mediator.
Honorary Professor, University of St Andrews;
Emeritus Professor of International Law and Public Policy, Queen Mary University of London, and;
Member, Peterhouse, University of Cambridge.