As a diplomat,he has worked at various British embassies abroad,notably those in Tokyo and Bonn. At the Foreign Office,he was Head of the Policy Planning Staff from 1989 to 1993. He has also been seconded to the Bank of England and spent a period in the Cabinet Office as Deputy Secretary for Defence and Overseas Affairs. He was the UK's Special Representative in Afghanistan until mid-2002.
After the Treaty of Lisbon's shake-up of EU foreign policy structures,and Solana's replacement by Catherine Ashton,Cooper sat on the steering committee which drew up the proposals for the new European External Action Service (EEAS).[2] After the EEAS,the EU's foreign service,was formally established in December 2010 Cooper was made an EEAS "Counsellor".[3] Subsequently he was released from the EEAS,but appointed as a Special Adviser to the Vice-President of the European Commission Catherine Ashton,primarily with regard to Myanmar,from April 2013 to March 2014.[4]
In March 2011,Cooper apparently came under fire for his support of Bahraini government crackdowns against protesters,waving off suggestions of police violence and saying "accidents happen."[6] His comments came a week after a video[7] surfaced showing a Bahraini police convoy performing drive-by shootings against unarmed protesters.
Cooper is best known for his exposition of the doctrine of "new liberal imperialism",as expressed in his The Post-Modern State (2002). This contains such ideas as the designation of countries as "Failed states","Modern states" and "Postmodern states",and statements such as "The challenge to the postmodern world is to get used to the idea of double standards". His world-view is said to have been influential in the political thinking of Tony Blair as well as the development of European Security and Defence Policy.
Publications
His publications,apart from a number of articles in Prospect and elsewhere,include:
The Post-Modern State and the World Order (Demos,2000), ISBN1841800104.
The Post-Modern State, in Mark Leonard (ed.) Re-Ordering the World: The long-term implications of 11 September (Foreign Policy Centre: London, 2002) Observer Special ReportFull text (pdf)
The Breaking of Nations: Order and Chaos in the Twenty-First Century (Atlantic Press, 2003), ISBN0-7710-2266-2.
The Ambassadors: Thinking about Diplomacy from Machiavelli to Modern Times (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2021), ISBN1-7802-2836-8.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
