Dr Coral Bell
Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Group
20 June 2000
Contents
Major Issues
Introduction
Norms and Their Evolution in
The Society of States
The Origins of the Contemporary
Normative Shift
The Long-Term Implications for
Australian Policy-Making
Immediate Issues
Endnotes
Major
Issues
The paper seeks to identify and discuss some
significant changes underway in the global context in which
Australia conducts its foreign relations. International relations
since the era of ancient Greece have always involved
'norms'-expected and required behaviour at a particular time in the
society of states. These international norms did not change greatly
for the three hundred years after the Treaty of Westphalia (1648):
an anti-slavery norm was added in the nineteenth century and an
anti-imperial and colonial norm was added from the early twentieth
century.
However, the pace of change in relation to
international norms has increased greatly, especially in the past
decade. Areas in which new or revised norms have become evident
include the rights of national governments in relation to minority
peoples (for example in Kosovo) and the responsibilities of
contemporary decision-makers for past actions by still-functioning
governments or authorities (for example, the Papacy in relation to
past attitudes towards Jewish people).
Three factors may be seen as contributing to the
current normative shift. Firstly, there has been a process of
institutionalisation of diplomacy which has seen greatly increased
regular communication among officials and governments. Secondly,
the advent in the post Cold War era of a 'unipolar world' with the
United States as paramount power has fostered the promotion of
revised norms. Thirdly, the 'knowledge revolution' based on new
technologies is having a powerful influence, not least because it
has the potential to redistribute power, both within and among
states. It has for example, greatly facilitated the establishment
and operation of non-governmental organisations who may seek to
challenge prevailing norms (as they did during the World Trade
Organisation meetings in Seattle). Further contests for influence
over international norms are likely, especially between those
advantaged by globalisation, and others who see themselves as
disadvantaged by it.
The process of change in relation to
international norms will have long-term and immediate implications
for Australia. In the long-term Australia may be affected by
developments in international norms about relationships with 'First
Nations' (indigenous peoples) and over environmental issues (such
as greenhouse gas emissions). Normative shifts may also complicate
Australia's regional engagement, given Australia's strong
identification with Western institution and values.
In the immediate future, in a unipolar world
which may also experience considerable instability, Australia's
defence policymakers should emphasise the need to maintain
capacities for 'interoperability' of Australia's defence forces
with those of the US. Australia may also be affected by the
increased willingness of the international community to support
intervention in cases of serious dispute between national
governments and dissident provinces or oppressed minorities and by
the increasing emphasis on regional approaches to maintaining
security ('security regionalisation'). If Australia is likely to be
more involved in peacekeeping operations, consideration should be
given to the kinds of forces which can best pursue such roles. For
many of the roles of peacekeeping, a 'second wave' or 'guardian
force' rather than combat forces may be more appropriate and more
feasible to deploy and sustain.
Introduction
The context of Australian policy making in
international matters has changed quite radically in the past few
years. The most obvious factors in that process of change are East
Timor, the Asian economic crisis of 1997-99, the recent tension in
the Taiwan Straits, the turbulent Pacific, the nuclearisation of
the India-Pakistan relationship, and the economic uncertainties of
globalisation. But beneath the surface of those developments there
is a more subtle, less visible and much less well-understood
phenomenon: a profound normative shift in the society of states. It
is already affecting Australian policy-making in both domestic and
international matters, and its future impact will be greater, not
less.
Normative shift may sound like a vague sort of
movement of opinion, interesting only to sociologists and legal
theorists. But this one, although as yet only eight years in full
operation, has already shaken two established sovereignties
(Yugoslavia and Indonesia), has altered the political destinies of
two small peoples (the Kosovars and the East Timorese) and has seen
several people previously accounted politically invulnerable (like
President Suharto, General Pinochet, General Wiranto, maybe
President Milosovic) either facing legal tribunals or in danger of
being hauled before them. It has induced the Pope to apologise for
the Crusades, Tony Blair to apologise for the Irish potato famine
and Bill Clinton to apologise for the ill-treatment of black
Americans. It has seen Swiss banks and German corporations having
to make restitution for injuries inflicted more than fifty years
earlier, in the Nazi period. It has caused some of those who had
been comfortably riding for years on traditional gravy-trains like
the European Commission and the International Olympic Committee to
have suddenly to account for perks previously taken for granted. It
has induced the Pentagon to invent a new military norm, a 'force
protection' norm, which has already dictated strategy in NATO's
first campaign, Kosovo, and which will affect defence
establishments and doctrines in many countries, including
Australia.
Most important of all, for decision-makers in
Canberra and Darwin and Perth, it has induced a new international
focus on minorities, especially those who used to be called
'Indigenous Peoples' but are now more respectfully called 'First
Nations'. That name-change alone is an important political and
diplomatic signal.
With all that to its credit (or debit, according
to your point of view) normative shift is clearly a phenomenon that
needs to be understood by policy-makers. Especially as the social
and technological factors which drive it are, in my view, still in
their infancy, but are putting on muscle at great speed. As
Churchill asked in the early stages of the Cold War, 'If these
things are done in the green wood, what shall be done in the
dry?'
Norms and Their Evolution in The Society of
States
So what are norms, and why do they shift
domestically and internationally? The derivation of the word is
illuminating: from the Latin for a carpenter's set-square. The
set-square tells the carpenter what a right-angle is 'expected and
required' to be. A domestic social norm defines 'expected and
required' behaviour in a particular society at a particular
time.
An international norm likewise defines 'expected
and required' behaviour at a particular time in the society of
states.
It may instantly be objected that national
societies have radically different norms and therefore that it is a
contradiction in terms to speak of international norms. It is
certainly vital to bear in mind those national differences:
behaviour in accordance with the social norms of Canberra could get
you stoned to death in Afghanistan. Nevertheless, the society of
states, in its successive incarnations since the brilliant little
world of the city-states of ancient Greece, has always had both
norms and institutions. (That particular society of states, for
instance, had the institution of the Olympic Games and stringent
norms about behaviour while they were on.)
What makes the past half-century of
international history, and especially the last decade,
distinctive is that normative shift began to speed up about
fifty-five years ago, and has been moving at a positive gallop
during the past decade. The contrast with earlier history is
striking. For the three hundred years from the Peace of
Westphalia(1) in 1648 to the UN Declaration of Human
Rights in 1948, the normative basis of the society of states hardly
changed at all. An anti-slavery norm was added in the nineteenth
century, but that took ninety years, from the British legislation
against the slave trade in 1806-7 to the end of the American Civil
War in the 1860s. An anti-colonial and anti-imperial norm emerged
in the early twentieth century, but that also took almost a century
to become fully effective, if you count from the first emergence of
demands for Indian independence through the winding up of the
European overseas empires by 1975 to the falling apart of the great
contiguous Russian empire (built by the Czars and maintained by the
Soviet Union) at the end of 1991. Contiguous empires, or
mini-empires like the old Yugoslavia, can readily be disguised as
unitary or federal states, unlike overseas empires. (That was known
as the 'salt-water fallacy'(2).) But on the evidence of
the past few years, such empires may still have a lot of falling
apart to do.
An anti-war norm has striven to emerge from the
time of the First World War, and has been hopefully embodied in
various bits of international legislation since the League of
Nations Covenant in 1919, but obviously there have been so many
wars since then that the best one can say on that point is that the
right to make war has been circumscribed, and that war between
democracies now seems very unlikely.(3)
I will come presently to the reasons for the
current radical speeding-up of change. First it must be noted that
(even more importantly) there has also been a radical extension of
the sphere of governmental action prescribed or forbidden by
international norms. The old norms dealt primarily with actual
relations between governments: 'external affairs' as the Canberra
department that dealt with them used to be called. But the new
norms often deal with matters that used to be defined as
essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of the sovereign state
and are still 'internal affairs' in the eyes of many governments,
and of many electorates.
The most familiar category, and by now a widely
accepted one, has been the new environmental norms: greenhouse
gases, the ozone layer, tropical rain forests, whaling, fisheries
and such. That group of norms has potentially momentous economic
and social consequences for Australia (and will present some
political dilemmas); but they have developed fairly slowly over the
past forty years, and are now fairly well understood, so I will not
say much about them here.
A second familiar category is that of weapons
development, especially weapons of mass destruction (nuclear,
biological and chemical). That area of normative shift is actively
beneficial to Australia: we turned away from any prospect of making
nuclear weapons three decades ago, and the more their proliferation
can be restricted, especially in Asia, the less we are likely to be
caught in any 'fallout'. A nuclear encounter between India and
Pakistan, with China perhaps intervening, would be among our worst
nightmares. Australia has had some modest success in forwarding
anti-proliferation norms.
No doubt restrictions on what governments can do
to their environments, and what weapons they can develop and
deploy, both erode sovereignty a little around the edges. What
actually strikes to the heart of the concept, however, are
normative changes which affect the relations of governments with
their own peoples. That is why the international interventions in
both Kosovo and East Timor were major milestones and precedents for
the whole society of states, and have been widely seen as such. (In
fact, also seen as potential landmines in the society of states for
some vulnerable sovereignties. That may well prove to be so.)
The norm that was asserted and upheld by a
military operation in both cases was the same: minorities, however
troublesome in the eyes of the government which claims sovereignty
over them,(4) are not to be massacred or expelled, or
deprived of their human rights as defined in the 1948 UN Convention
on Human Rights.
The implications of that norm for fragile
sovereignties will be explored later. First it is necessary to
consider a point which offers a vital clue to the process of
normative shift as a whole. Those two crises took place in 1999:
the UN Declaration was in 1948. If, as I would argue, the Kosovo
and East Timor crises were the first to be 'norm-driven', rather
than 'interest-driven',(5) what accounts for the lapse
of fifty-one years (which saw many, many crises, some with far
worse humanitarian consequences than these two) between the
official enunciation of the relevant principles and the decision on
military action to uphold them?
My hypothesis (quite tentative(6)) is
that a confluence of factors which attained 'critical mass' only in
the final decade of the twentieth century accounts for the timing
of the change. The boulders which made up the avalanche, so to
speak, may have been accumulating for fifty-five years or more, but
only at the end of that time did they attain the critical mass
which sent them thundering down the mountainside quite suddenly,
thus changing the normative landscape of the society of states.
Confirmation of that hypothesis seems to be
provided by a striking anomaly in the timing of some other relevant
events. By 1946, the victims of the Nazi period, and the guilt of
those who had collaborated with that nightmare regime, were
apparent for all to see.(7) Yet it was again more than
fifty years before, for instance, Swiss banks had to account for
their dealings in Nazi loot, and German corporations who had been
using slave or forced labour had to pay
compensation.(8)
In my interpretation, that timing illustrates
one of the primary characteristics of normative shift: it allows
the landscape not only of the recent past but of the relatively
remote (or even the very remote) past to be seen in a new light. So
what had earlier been accepted with a shrug as just part of
history's long record of 'the crimes, follies and misfortunes of
mankind' is seen instead as the outcome of policies agreed by past
decision-makers of still functioning historic entities, like the
Papacy, or the U.S. Presidency, or the British Cabinet. So the
current chief representatives of those institutions apologise for
policies which are recognised to have been fully in accord with the
norms of their predecessors' times but which, in the light of
current norms, appear abominable. (9)So the
Pope in the Middle East, for instance, apologises for anti-semitism
in past Church doctrines, and for the Crusades, and the
Inquisition. It does not alter the past, and it does not please all
those of other faiths,(10) but at least it both
recognises and furthers the current normative shift, and
may assist the process of reconciliation.
I am not by any means implying that the
existence of inherent and inalienable human rights is a new idea;
far from it. The US Declaration of Independence, for instance,
defined them briefly but quite forthrightly as 'life, liberty and
the pursuit of happiness' almost two centuries before the UN's more
long-winded version. The notion of humanitarian intervention is to
be found in Grotius,(11) and Gladstone in 1876 was
campaigning against atrocities in the area that then included
Kosovo, the old Ottoman Empire.
So the new factor is not the concepts
themselves: it is that the structure of world politics has recently
changed in ways that enable those concepts to be treated as norms
(actually 'expected and required behaviour') rather than as merely
noble principles or ideals, or pious sentiments. Only in a few
cases, however, could one expect them to be enforced by military
intervention. President Milosovic could be coerced by NATO's air
campaign into withdrawing his troops from Kosovo, but President
Putin cannot be militarily coerced into taking Russian troops out
of Chechnya, nor President Jiang Zemin into taking them out of
Tibet.
Does that mean that norms are only ever likely
to be enforced against rather weak sovereignties? As far as
military enforcement is concerned, that is probably the case. But
in the contemporary world of global interdependence, military force
is not the only or the likeliest means of influencing even the
powerful and tough-minded governments of great powers. Neither
Moscow nor Beijing can entirely disregard the pressures of
international precedent and consensus, especially as both Russia
and China need economic favours from the rest of the society of
states-Russia for economic reconstruction and China for economic
development.
The use of that potential lever would clearly
create some dilemmas for Canberra's policy-makers, particularly
with regard to markets in China, but I would not expect much
serious international effort along those lines for the foreseeable
future. The great powers of the society of states have to deal with
each other, as hedgehogs make love, very cautiously. The ancient
norms of prudence and proportionality, dating right back to the
'just-war' doctrine of the 5th century,(12)
require that the maintenance of peace and good relations between
them must outweigh all but the most dangerous forms of aggression
and delinquency.
Norms are not the only kind of rules that
governments are supposed to observe: there are also, of course,
laws and rules of protocol. A clear conflict has been evident in
some recent international episodes between a newly-effective norm
and an older law or rule of protocol. The case of General Pinochet
is an important milestone in that kind of conflict, with profound
implications for future political and military leaders.
When Pinochet arrived in Britain in 1998, almost
everyone believed he was protected by 'sovereign immunity', a
traditional rule of protocol. But the British Law Lords decided
that the old rule had (apparently to the Government's own surprise)
been suspended by Britain's ratification in 1988 of a UN Convention
against torture.(13) So Pinochet was placed under house
arrest for eighteen months until judged not fit to stand trial and
allowed to return to Chile. The Home Secretary's final decision on
health grounds does not vitiate the original legal precedent:
former (or present?) heads of state are no longer protected by
'sovereign immunity' from having to answer for acts perpetrated by
their minions while they are in power. In effect, people like
Karadic, Mladic or Idi Amin thus now cannot leave their respective
refuges without risking arrest.
When the principle is applied to
existing heads of state it presents as yet unresolved
diplomatic problems. President Milosovic is already an indicted
war-criminal: would Western governments be able to negotiate with
him in the event of a crisis in which Serb forces seemed likely to
invade a would-be independent Montenegro? Was the new Australian
ambassador in Belgrade truly obliged to present his credentials to
a head of state who is subject to an international arrest-warrant
and who would be picked up by NATO troops if he ventured outside
Serbia? Such matters are still for future decision in the society
of states.
The Origins of the Contemporary Normative
Shift
Three factors may be seen as contributing to the
current normative shift. The first is the institutionalisation of
diplomacy, dating from 1945, after a 'false dawn' in 1919. The
second is the advent of the 'unipolar world' in 1992, after the
dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991. The third is
the great technological change called the 'knowledge revolution',
dependent on contemporary modes of communicating information, which
was only fully developed with the Internet's universalisation, in
about the mid-1990s. I will look at each of these briefly in turn,
but all of them deserve much fuller examination.
Institutionalised diplomacy on both the global
and the regional level imposes on decision-makers (presidents,
prime ministers, foreign ministers and their equivalents) and
policy-makers (mostly high bureaucrats) quite a burden in the way
of frequent meetings. But that time-consuming process does create a
familiarity (especially at the regional level) and a sort of
'collegiality' plus a sense of common interest in the preservation
of the institution concerned. That factor sometimes helps to get
things done with surprising speed in unexpected settings, as when
the APEC meeting in Auckland (originally scheduled to discuss trade
matters) was converted into a forum in which the Australian Prime
Minister could put together his 'coalition of the willing' for the
intervention in East Timor.
The same factor of institutionalisation has
sometimes for policy-makers a less welcome capacity: that of
headline-generating. An unfavourable report in a UN committee, or
in an ILO meeting, will be picked up by the media and the
Opposition in any democratic country, (not just Australia) and be
used to point out to the targeted government the error of its ways.
The obvious case in Australia recently has been the issue of
mandatory sentencing in Western Australia and the Northern
Territory. A brisk rain of criticism is probably good for the souls
of policy-makers: the trouble is not that, but the almost universal
tendency for criticism from any foreign quarter to excite
nationalist resentment at the grassroots level, resentment which
may be manipulated for party-political ends. In the United States,
the UN has been made widely unpopular by that sort of reaction, and
members of Congress play up to it by refusing to pay the US's
assessed share of costs. At a pinch, a super-power can defy
international opinion: the UN needs the US more than
vice-versa.
For a middle power like Australia, however, the
situation is quite different. Both its security and its prosperity
depend on rules-based systems, such as international organisations
are created to promote. So catering politically to
nationalist-populist sentiments would be damaging to Australia's
long-term interests in the viability and prestige of the overall
system. Although the rulings of the Committee on the Elimination of
Racial Discrimination (CERD) and the World Trade Organisation may
quite frequently go against Australia, the system as a whole is an
asset for Australian security and welfare, even if it sometimes
seems a burden to policy-makers. And whether we like it or not, the
level of what grassroots critics will call international
interference in domestic affairs will certainly increase, not
diminish, for reasons connected with other developments to be
discussed presently.
The second factor in the current normative
shift, the advent of a 'unipolar world', with the US as paramount
power, obviously dominated the 1990s, and in my view is likely to
continue to dominate world politics for the next three or four
decades. In effect, the old central balance of
power,(14) which set the main agenda of the society of
states for five hundred years, is for the time being 'in
intermission' or even in abeyance. That was rather unexpected:
originally this phase of diplomatic history was called 'the
unipolar moment' and was expected to be quite brief.(15)
However, the current vast military superiority of the US, plus its
economic dominance and its dominance also in what has been called
'soft-power' (cultural and diplomatic influence) are for the
foreseeable future the context which every other government in the
world has to make its policies.
America has had several foreign policy
traditions, but the one dominant in the current normative shift is
Wilsonianism: the concepts and doctrines associated with Woodrow
Wilson, the US president during World War I and subsequent
peace-making.(16) The reason for regarding the ghost of
Wilson as the presiding spirit of the contemporary normative shift
is his emphasis on self-determination and minority rights, as well
of course as his role as Founding Father of the League of Nations,
and thus grandfather, so to speak, of the United Nations. Every
potentially separatist minority in the contemporary world (and
there are scores of them, from Aceh to West Papua and Zanzibar)
might well want to emblazon on its banners a maxim attributed to
Wilson: 'every people has the right to choose the sovereignty under
which it shall live.' (Of course, his definition of 'a people' was
not quite the same as those of some contemporary separatists.)
Bill Clinton, like Wilson, is a Southern
Democrat who has had a good deal of trouble with Republicans.
Insofar as one can discern a 'Clinton Doctrine' in US foreign
policy since 1993, it looks at first sight like just Wilsonianism
updated to fit the context of this unipolar period. But it is to my
mind a bit more subtle than that. The 'declaratory policy'-i.e. the
enunciation of ideals, such as the universalising of democracy and
human rights, along with market economies, has a strong Wilsonian
ring to it. And in many of what may be called the attempted 'revive
and rehabilitation' efforts-Korea, Middle East, Northern Ireland,
India-Pakistan, Haiti, Somalia, early Bosnia-though often far from
successful, have clearly been attempts to put those norms into
operation. The more surprising and more successful strand of policy
has been Clinton's considerable skill, to my mind, in preserving
and expanding what I would call the US diplomatic 'bandwagon',
which is one of the underpinnings of the unipolar world. That has
meant primarily maintaining and enlarging America's Atlantic
alliance, NATO. Post Kosovo, its realm now covers all of South-East
Europe, and is creeping towards the Russian frontier. That process
would have been a dangerous strategic adventurism if it had been
pursued at the cost of the alienation of Moscow but, on present
indications, that has not been the case.(17) On an
optimistic interpretation, indeed it looks as if it might mean that
most of Eastern Europe, even possibly Russia itself, might in time
be assimilated into a 'security community' stretching, in the words
of a previous Secretary of State, from 'Vancouver to Vladivostok'.
(President Putin has said on TV that he could contemplate Russia's
joining NATO.)
If diplomatic relations can be inched in that
direction, it will have profound implications for China. Despite
the difficulties over Taiwan, (which must probably be expected
every time Taiwan has a Presidential election) a reasonable working
relationship has been preserved between Washington and Beijing, and
Japan has been induced, in the 1997 revision of its US Security
Treaty to take on some extra strategic obligations. So despite the
enormous difficulties created by Clinton's inability to persuade
the Republican congress to agree to anything much, except on issues
like the approval of Permanent Normal Trade Relations (P.N.T.R.)
for China,(18) I would tend to argue that a
well-maintained and even strengthened American alliance structure
in both the Atlantic and the Pacific will be the chief diplomatic
legacy of the Clinton years. Over the long-term, the normative
shift of those same years also seems to me likely to be on the
credit side of the ledger, despite the interim difficulties with
the Third World.
If Al Gore makes it to the presidency, that
policy line will certainly be extended, although probably with more
pressure for the observance of environmental norms, and a new
Secretary of State. If it is George Bush, the changes should be
marginal at most. Like his father, Bush is fully a member of the
internationalist wing of the Republican Party. Indeed, it would
probably be easier for him than for Gore to get some useful
policies (except maybe on Taiwan) through Congress, especially if
both houses remain Republican.
The political reasons are the same as those
which enabled Nixon, a hard-core Republican, to make the initial
breakthrough with China,(19) and the elder Bush to be
the first American envoy in Beijing, back in the 1970s.
Whichever US party happens to be in power for
the next three or four decades, the structure of the society of
states seems likely to remain unipolar, for reasons deriving from
the difficulty the potential 'peer-competitors' are facing in
attaining that status.(20) For that length of time at
least, Western influence on international norms will almost
certainly continue to be an irritant to many non-Western countries,
who have strong cultural and social norms of their own, and who are
resentful and apprehensive that their younger generations may be
seduced into American ways of life. That is not much of a problem
for most members of the Western camp, but for Australia it could
mean, so to speak, a potential tug-of-war between the East Asian
camp of our neighbours, and the Western camp to which history and
culture assign us. On a worst case analysis, there might be at some
future date a necessity to choose between the American alliance, on
which our security is founded, and the Asian markets, on which our
prosperity mostly depends. But that kind of dilemma will probably
remain in the realm of theory rather than actuality, because the
major Asian powers most relevant to us-China, Japan and
Indonesia-are all, for very different reasons, for the time being
as anxious for a co-operative relationship with Washington as
Canberra itself. While that remains the case, the irritants should
remain minor, like exclusion from ASEM (the Asia-Europe meetings)
and from the East Asia economic grouping as it develops. (There
are, however, enough internal tensions in the East Asia region to
make that prospect seem a little questionable.)
The third factor in the normative shift is more
subtle, more open-ended, more unpredictable and potentially far
more transformatory in its long-term effects than the other two. It
is the 'knowledge revolution' based on the new technologies. All
its consequences are unpredictable but the least so is its ability
to redistribute power, both domestically and internationally.
On the domestic side, that redistribution of
power is currently most apparent in Western democracies. But it
cannot be confined to that part of the world. In China, for
instance, there were reportedly, in 2000, about 10 million people
on the Internet, with the numbers doubling every year. Even a
government as authoritarian as that in Beijing is reluctant to do
much to discourage that process, since the knowledge revolution
promises to engender national prosperity, which is the central norm
of its regime. ('To get rich is glorious' as Deng Xiaoping put it.)
Assuming the current rate of change will continue, there should be
about 100 million Chinese on the net before the end of the decade,
and similar increases elsewhere. Staying with China for a moment,
one can only speculate about what that will do to the society. Will
it enhance Chinese military capacity as some Western strategists
fear? Possibly, but is it not rather more likely to begin changing
the nature of the society, and the distribution of political power
within it, empowering dissidents of all sorts, especially ethnic
minorities and the economically disadvantaged?
That has certainly been the experience
elsewhere. The 'battle of Seattle' in December 1999 and the siege
of the Washington meetings of the Bank and the Fund in April 2000
('Son of Seattle') have, at the time of writing, been the most
vivid demonstrations of how the political empowerment of dissident
opinion groups works via technological change. The world of the
Internet and e-mail was made for them.
It has never been easier or cheaper to put
together an NGO (non-governmental organisation) on a normative
basis, or to concoct its plans and plot its strategies. The numbers
of such organisations operating worldwide reflect that fact. It
rose from about 5000 early in the decade to about 26 000 towards
its end. The WTO meeting in Seattle could be regarded as having
been defeated by 'an NGO swarm'.
Taken together, globalisation and the knowledge
revolution are tending to create a three-way battlefield of norms,
those of nationalism, internationalism and cosmopolitanism. The
last two, internationalism and cosmopolitanism, are often equated
with each other, but they are quite distinct, and indeed
fundamentally at odds with each other. Internationalism still puts
'the nation' as represented (allegedly) by its current government
at the centre of the action: inevitably the sovereign player in the
world drama, so to speak. The Bank, the Fund and the WTO are,
obviously, all international institutions, put together by
governments to defend or advance their respective national
interests, (especially in economic matters) as defined by the
government of the time.
Confusingly, both governmental organisations
like those three and NGOs are called 'international' by the UN and
almost everyone else, but the NGOs should more accurately be called
cosmopolitan. That is, their basis is not 'the nation', still less
'the government'. It is the individual. A whole-hearted
cosmopolitanism is entirely dismissive of the concepts of nations,
nationalism, national interest and especially national sovereignty.
The concept assumes that humanity is one single great society, all
of whose members are citizens of the 'cosmopolis', (literally, the
'universal city') and are entitled to the same rights, regardless
of the views of the governments which claim authority over them at
any given time.(21)
I would not for a moment imply that the
protestors at Seattle were predominantly adherents of cosmopolitan
norms. A great many of them were economic nationalists, disguising
resentment at the loss of American jobs and capital as concern for
the labour standards of the downtrodden workers in, for instance,
American-owned factories in Indonesia. On the surface of events,
the battle of Seattle was between internationalism on the one side
versus on the other a combination of economic nationalists and
assorted adherents of cosmopolitan causes (like the rights of
dolphins and turtles and monarch butterflies), plus a handful of
anarchists. Paradoxically, the high-tech, globalised,
capital-driven developments which the protesters at Seattle were so
intent on denouncing and combating nevertheless have constituted a
major factor in promoting the cosmopolitan tendency in normative
shift. A great many of the protesters were students, most of whom
would have used computers since they were in primary school. They
are citizens of cyberspace, or 'netizens': a highly cosmopolitan
concept. The net has indeed been called 'the wired
cosmos'.(22) Over the long-term, a fully globalised
world economy would probably create and require a cosmopolitan
normative structure. One can already see its beginnings in the
environmental and human rights movements.
But for the time being, cosmopolitanisation and
globalisation are at daggers drawn, and the battles may not be all
fought out for decades yet. The resentments of those disadvantaged
by economic change can engage the sympathies of those-the worldwide
cohorts of students, and comfortable middle class radicals-who are
likely to be advantaged by it. The internationalist institutions
which deal with economic change-the Bank, The Fund and the WTO-are
inevitably going to be caught in the middle, unless and until they
can come up with adequate means of tempering the wind to the shorn
lambs of global change.
In the past, cosmopolitanism has been a concept
advantaging only very small elites: the wandering knights of the
early middle ages whose swords might carve out a career with any
sovereign, or the 'scholar gypsies' of the early universities who
had a common language, Latin. Or the monarchs and gentry who ran
the 19th century Concert of Europe. In each case, they
were a tiny fraction of their respective populations. But
globalisation and the new technologies are currently creating a
very substantial class who are advantaged by it. At the base of
that class, the vast worldwide contemporary cohort of students, who
in the prosperous countries now constitute a high proportion of the
relevant age group, and who (although they may deny it) are a sort
of elite-in-waiting. At the top are the entrepreneurs themselves,
and their staffs and bureaucracies, (US high-tech companies, for
instance, recruit PhDs by the thousands from places like India and
Taiwan). In the middle are the media people, and academics and the
'chattering classes' in general. These also include, in the
prosperous world, a very large group of shareholders who have
stakes in the fortunes overseas of their respective 'telcos' and
airlines and mining companies and every other sort of enterprise
that has transnational ambitions.
So altogether, there is now quite a substantial
'beneficiaries' cohort: mostly Western, of course, but not
exclusively so even now, although the process is still in its
infancy. When and if globalisation is full-grown and truly
universalised, as was implied earlier, cosmopolitanism might prove
to be its logical normative partner. But that is still a long way
off, and in the meantime there remains also a very large cohort of
the disadvantaged. They remember the 'nest-warmth' of the old
familiar ethnic community, before the 'newcomers' arrived, and
remember also the old protective tariffs that they believe ensured
their jobs: 'all-round protection', as John McEwen used to say. The
political tensions of the immediate future seem likely to be often
between the 'party of the beneficiaries' and 'the party of the
disadvantaged' in many countries. Australia has already had a small
taste of that, in the rapid rise and decline of 'One Nation'. But
it will be far more serious elsewhere, producing perhaps armed
clashes or neo-fascist politics.
The technological changes will redistribute
power internationally as well as domestically, but the precise
nature of those shifts are difficult to see. At the moment they
seem to be favouring most English-speaking countries, especially
those with what used to be called a surplus of the educated labour
force. For instance Ireland in Europe and, in our region, India,
which has a large middle-class which still speaks English. The
language of the Internet and of the most advanced technologies is
primarily English: teaching it as a second language is already an
earner of foreign currency and will probably be more so.
The
Long-Term Implications for Australian
Policy-Making
This essay has already mentioned in passing some
of the likely impacts of normative shift on Australian
policy-making. The most obvious case is the realm of relationships
with Australia's 'First Nations', the Aboriginal peoples. The
pacesetter of change in this general field has been Canada,
although even its remarkable pioneering has not entirely exempted
it from UN criticism. At the very least, Australian policy-makers
should watch with great care the development of events in Canada's
indigenous self-governing territory, Nunavut, which offers a
Parliament and a Premier of their own to the Inuit people. That is
the sort of policy area in which 'best practice' may rapidly become
internationally-expected 'required practice', i.e. the norm for
governments like Australia's with vast territories and
disadvantaged Indigenous Peoples.
A second fairly obvious area is that of
environmental norms, especially greenhouse gas emission. Australia
was lucky to escape so lightly at the Kyoto conference, and perhaps
will not do so again, especially if Al Gore makes it to the US
presidency. He has long taken the dangers to the environment more
seriously than any other prominent American politician, and
Australia's per capita rate of greenhouse gas emissions may well
exceed that even of the US if the projected American controls go
into operation. If we cannot move away from the use of carbon-based
fuels, we should at least move towards the least polluting of them,
natural gas, and put a lot more high-tech research into modes of
cleaning the emissions from power-generation, and developing
alternative forms of fuels for cars and trucks. Reliance on
re-afforestation as a 'carbon-sink' will not seem particularly
convincing to overseas critics, but scientific research is
suggesting some other possibilities, even in the detested algae
blooms. If there was ever a field in which Australia should aim to
be at the cutting edge of scientific research, this is surely it,
as much for the sake of our small Pacific neighbours, and some very
large Asian ones, as for our own. If the worst that is predicted
for global warming actually comes true, they will be far more
affected then ourselves, and their peoples may have no alternative
but to seek refuge elsewhere. Our present 'boat-people' problem
could seem like a pinprick in comparison.
More immediately obvious and troubling is the
dent that normative shift has put into our policy of regional
engagement. Australia is inescapably, by history, culture,
political institutions, diplomatic affiliations, economic status
and ethnic majority a member of the 'Western Club'. None of our
neighbours is in any doubt about that, and they are not likely to
be convinced by any rhetorical pretence to the contrary. We cannot
escape the Western consensus, including its current normative shift
which, as was pointed out earlier, is unmistakably Western-driven,
and is feared, resented and resisted by many non-Western societies,
including many (most?) of those in Australia's general
neighbourhood.
I do not believe that this 'action-reaction'
syndrome is likely to change much for several decades. It is part
of a worldwide phenomenon, a sort of enhanced cultural
self-consciousness brought about by globalisation and the knowledge
revolution. Both those processes, as was mentioned earlier, are in
their relative infancy. So are the conflicts they will precipitate.
We are already seeing the beginnings of all that in the East Asian
regionalism from which non-Asians (like Australians and Americans)
are being firmly excluded.
Immediate Issues
Those basically are long-term factors, but there
are a few which will influence more immediate and specific choices,
especially on the defence budget.
Australia's decision-makers in the field of
foreign and defence policies will have to bear in mind three major
factors: normative shift, security regionalization and the
revolution in military affairs. Those factors have already altered,
and will continue to alter, the strategic context in which both
alliance policy and the structure of the defence forces must be
formulated. Over the long-term, they need not necessarily work to
our disadvantage but in the short-term (the next few defence
budgets) they do present quite a variety of dilemmas.
No doubt we shall mend our diplomatic fences
more or less adequately with Indonesia in due course, and even Dr
Mahathir will probably forgive us our activism over East Timor in
due course. The problem, long-term, is not specific relationships
with specific governments or decision-makers, but that some Asian
and Pacific prospects-economic, political, military and
diplomatic-which had looked 'set fair' for the decade or two until
mid-1997 have since then become more uncertain, less predictable,
less hopeful. Our security policies have always had to be reached,
of course, on a balance between two sets of assessments, global and
regional. As a matter of historic record, it has in fact been the
global rather than the regional developments that have shaped
Australia's destiny: the two World Wars, the Great Depression, the
forty-year-long Cold War, the winding-up of the European overseas
empires. Despite that evidence, the leaders (and prospective or
past leaders) of the actual or potential alternative governments in
Canberra have for the past few years been given to talking as if
the regional context was the only one that would matter in the
future. That may have been (consciously or not) just a polite and
necessary diplomatic fiction, but it has tended in my view to
obscure some highly relevant international developments, or at
least lead to their being underrated.
As was argued earlier, the structure of the
society of states is at present unipolar. That is to say, the
current paramount power, the United States, faces no serious
challenge for the foreseeable future. That has important
implications for the kinds of wars the world is most likely to see,
and consequently the kinds of defence structures that will be most
useful.
A few over-optimistic people originally assumed
that the end of the Cold War made any future military conflicts
unlikely. The past decade has continually proved that view was an
illusion. Nevertheless, there was one slim strand of reality at its
heart. Post-Cold-War power-relationships have at least made
hegemonic war (Armageddon-style all-out global conflicts like World
Wars I and II) almost impossible for the next few decades. And
since it is only in that context that direct military attack on
Australian territory (as from Japan between December 1941 and May
1942) would have any military logic, the need to defend the
'sea-air gap' to our north is for those three or four
decades(23) the least likely of the prospective
contingencies we need to provide against. On the other hand, the
Cold War was not the first hegemonic struggle in international
history, and unless history has taken a sudden benign turn, it is
not likely to be the last. And since the security of our territory
is the most vital of our vital national interests, that does need
to be at the top of the defence planner's preoccupations, even if
on the basis of 'thirty years hence' kind of lead-time for weapons
procurement.
Fortunately, the kind of equipment necessary to
defend the 'sea-air gap' is also the kind necessary for a much more
probable contingency we must provide for: a major regional conflict
in which our less direct but still vital national interests are
involved. The usual scenario here, at least as the Pentagon sees
it, is a major crisis in the Gulf (to be major it would have to
involve either Iraq, Iran or Saudi Arabia) which inspires the
erratic chief decision-maker in North Korea, Kim Jong-Il, to
'chance his arm' in some desperate adventure against the South.
(Just possibly it could work the other way: a crisis in the Korean
peninsula or the Taiwan Straits inspiring a bit of opportunism in
the Gulf.) The Pentagon's budgets are intended to provide for
logistic capacity, troop deployments and advanced weaponry to cover
two such regional crises at once, but even the Pentagon's budgets
have been shrinking recently. They have fallen to 2.9 per cent of
America's GNP, as against almost 15 per cent at the height of the
Cold War (1953). Of course that dwindling percentage is of an
enormous and fast growing GNP, but even so resources would be a bit
stretched if two simultaneous crises did eventuate, especially if
the current US troop commitments (or new ones like Montenegro?) in
the Balkans were still in operation. So Washington would
undoubtedly call on its NATO allies for help in the Gulf, and its
Pacific allies, including Australia, for help over Korea or
Taiwan.
That brings us to the complex question of
'interoperability' with US forces. While high or complete levels of
interoperability are certainly expensive, in terms of
state-of-the-art data-exchange systems, command and control
systems, and surveillance systems as well as weapon-systems, it is
a matter of Australia's own vital interest (not just the alliance
interest) that we should continue to compete as well as we possibly
can in this field. For we should need to be as proficient as
possible in advanced technologies of those kinds if push should
ever come to shove in our own defence. And we should also of course
need American help, which would be more efficiently given assuming
interoperability.
The campaign over Kosovo was very instructive
about the importance of the technological edge which the US gets
from its enormous military research and development capacity, which
no other power can at present (or foreseeably) match. Not only were
70 per cent of the air sorties American (some from bases in the US)
but the whole surveillance and location system was American. As the
new Secretary-General of NATO noted, the other eighteen members of
that alliance together spend about two-thirds of what the US spends
on defence, but they do not, even together, get two-thirds of the
military 'clout'. And that certainly showed in the 'distance
warfare' which secured the final deal over Kosovo, without any
ground combat by the NATO armies. That kind of 'distance warfare'
may be the likeliest analogy for the defence of the 'sea-air gap'
to our north. Maintaining the best level we can of interoperability
with the US is therefore the most feasible way of maintaining the
technological edge which would be vital if such a strategy were
ever forced on us.
In view of the current global structure of the
society of states, the probable duration of this unipolar phase of
international history, and the current regional balance, it would
not be unreasonable, when contemplating large purchases and the
impending 'bloc obsolescence' problem, to think of emerging
technologies like Unarmed Aerial Vehicles (UAV), and J Joint
Direct Attack Munition systems (JDAMS)(24) rather than
more sophisticated versions of contemporary aircraft. Again the
lessons of Kosovo deserve careful scrutiny. The revolution in
military affairs is not necessarily likely to slow down: that
episode seems likely indeed to cause it to put on more speed. The
'force protection norm' as successfully demonstrated in zero combat
casualties for NATO in Kosovo, has been quite an object lesson for
Washington, of the 'payoff' for R & D in very advanced systems.
Political pressure from Congress, whoever is elected this year,
will ensure that 'zero casualties' is likely to become a standard
demand for US troop involvement in any crisis not touching on vital
US interests. Which means almost every crisis, because in a
unipolar world challenges to US vital (as against marginal)
interests are quite unlikely. Moreover, the 'force protection' norm
must spread from the US to its allies as it did in Kosovo, since
allied governments cannot risk the accusation that they are being
less careful of the lives of their troops than Washington is of its
troops.
That seems to me to mean that as far as the Air
Force and Navy are concerned, interoperability with US forces must
remain a primary concern, as much for its usefulness as a means of
maintaining the 'cutting edge' of skills we may some day need in
our own defence as for its importance in maintaining the alliance.
Our access to US intelligence information and advanced technologies
is for us, as for the much richer NATO countries, a diplomatic
bargain with a very favourable cost-benefit ratio. According to
The Economist, the other eighteen NATO powers would have
to at least quadruple their defence spending to achieve as much
strategic security as they at present enjoy, if they should ever
lose the US connection. The same sort of calculation would no doubt
apply in Australia's case.
However, neither hegemonic war nor major
regional crisis is the likeliest source of demands for an
Australian military presence in the next few decades. Instead it is
the expected prevalence of what may be called 'identity wars' and
the consequent need for peace-enforcement or peacekeeping
detachments, as in East Timor. It is in this connection, among
others, that the ongoing normative shift has to be taken into
consideration. The international community, usually (but not
always) through the UN is now much more likely to intervene in
relations between a metropolitan power and a dissident province or
an oppressed minority. It is difficult to believe, for instance,
that if relationships should deteriorate further in either West
Papua or the Solomons, Canberra could militarily wash its hands of
the situation. And while logistic or surveillance tasks for naval
and air detachments might no doubt be very useful, the demand is
almost certainly going to be also for 'boots on the ground'.
The brings us to the problem of the future role
of land forces. It can hardly have escaped anyone's notice that
though the Army detachments sent into both Kosovo and East Timor
were combat troops, their tasks have not been primarily combat.
Diplomacy, combined in the Kosovo case with an air campaign, had
secured for each contingent a 'permissive environment', i.e. the
withdrawal of the main adversary force, leaving behind in both
cases assorted local militants with a quite inevitable (if
deplorable) urge for revenge. So we have from Kosovo, for instance,
seen TV shots of British soldiers, all hung about with advanced
weaponry, getting out of armoured personnel carriers to deliver
meals-on-wheels to ancient Serb widows who dare not emerge from
their apartments in Pristina. No doubt it is necessary, but it is
not what combat troops are for.
In fact, after the first wave of combat troops
have secured a territory in a 'peace-enforcement' operation, what
is needed for the subsequent 'peacekeeping' operation is what might
be called a 'guardian force' rather than a combat force. Its tasks
would be in fields related to civil order and civil reconstruction
in the society 'under guardianship'. Judging by various official
statements from NATO and the UN, that period is expected to last
three years or even more in the cases of both Kosovo and East
Timor. In Bosnia the troops are still there after five years of
'peace'. And for reasons indicated earlier, quite a few similar
situations to those three are likely to recur, some of them
obviously calling for Australian help.
One of the advantages of giving thought to a
'second wave' or 'guardian' force is that its members could be
drawn from a different age-group to that which supplies recruits
for the traditional forces. Combat forces may need to be very fit
young people between twenty and thirty-five or so. But a 'guardian'
force could recruit reasonably fit people between thirty-five and
fifty-five, and a much higher proportion could be women. That kind
of composition could even be an advantage, since the local people
they would be dealing with would mostly be women and children, the
elderly or infirm, and in general the sad civilian casualties of
modern wars. The decline in birthrates throughout the Western world
means in any case that young people are going to be a scarce and
dwindling resource. So it would be judicious for the services to
think outside the groups they have traditionally sought. Reservists
would be ideal of course, because of their previous training and
their familiarity with military discipline and rules of engagement.
But such a force could also attract those who have never felt drawn
to military effort, but have skills which would be useful in
reconstructing societies as devastated as that in East Timor, and
who could feel a real enthusiasm for the work. When future requests
for an Australian contingent in another UN peacekeeping force come
in, as they undoubtedly will, a 'reserve' along those lines would
reduce the pressure on the regular forces and the police. It would
also be readily interoperable with the sort of contingent New
Zealand, on present indications, would be likely to volunteer, and
with contingents that might be available from Pacific and
South-East Asian societies. On the other hand, for a major regional
crisis involving the US, an Air Force or Naval detachment which
could find a 'niche' role and be fully interoperable with US forces
would be the appropriate token of diplomatic support.
In mid-2000, with Australian troops still in
East Timor, coups in progress in Fiji and the Solomons,
uncertainties in Papua New Guinea, and Indonesian resentments (both
at official and grassroots level) likely to be exacerbated by
developments in West Papua, a division of labour along those lines
appears likely to prove useful. Whatever its potential discomforts
for future Australian decision-makers (and it may often put them
between a rock and a hard place), the process of security
regionalisation is already under way. One can see it clearly in the
crises over Kosovo and East Timor, especially perhaps in the
initial reaction in Washington to East Timor. The change is driven
by forces that Australia can neither control nor resist: worldwide
forces like the knowledge revolution, globalisation, the revolution
in military affairs and normative shift. Over the long-term, those
forces are more in accord with our own value system and mode of
living than with those of most of the existing sovereignties in our
neighbourhood. But in the immediate future, they will require
careful thought about strategies of crisis-management and damage
limitation.
Endnotes
-
- After the Thirty Years' War. The primary international norm
established at that time was expressed in the Latin phrase 'cuius
regio, eius religio'. For modern times that may be rendered as 'The
ruler is entitled to make the rules in his own domain'; i.e it
established a 'non-intervention' norm. That non-intervention norm
was re-asserted in Article 2(7) of the UN Charter in 1945, being
espoused particularly at the San Francisco Conference by the then
Australian Minister for External Affairs, Dr. Evatt. It is
interesting to note that the very issue, criticism of Australian
treatment of aborigines, which is causing comment in 2000, was
presciently foreseen in 1945 while the UN Charter was still being
formulated. The author, then a very junior officer of the then
Department of External Affairs, was directed at the time to gather
together existing books and articles on the treatment of
aboriginals, and report on what ammunition they might provide for
UN critics. Departmental embarrassment was enhanced when the most
important work turned out to be by one of its own officers, Paul
Hasluck, later Governor-General.
- The idea that empires were only empires if they were across
salt-water.
- Some scholars maintain that major war is actually obsolete. See
for relevant arguments 'Is Major War Obsolete? An Exchange' in
Survival, (the Journal of the International Institute for
Strategic Studies) vol. 41, no. 2, Summer, 1999.
- The Kosovars were undoubtedly a thorn in the side of the Serbs,
though the East Timorese were not the same sort of problem for the
Indonesians, except for a few officers and others with investments
there.
- In many earlier crises one can discern a 'mix' of national
interest motivations and normative motivations. In the Gulf crisis
of 1990, for instance, the national interest was clear: the
importance to all the participating nations of Middle East oil
supplies. But a norm was also asserted and upheld: that aggression
should not be allowed to prosper.
- Because we have only two examples so far.
- And apologies had been delivered by many German political
leaders.
- About $10 billion was awarded in 2000 to the few who then
survived, or their descendants.
- There seems to be a considerable element of personal
temperament and political orientation in willingness or otherwise
to apologise. It is not surprising that Bill Clinton and Tony
Blair, both 'with-it' politicians of Social Democratic orientation
could do so quite readily. The Pope's case is, at first sight, more
surprising. But although on social doctrines (birth control,
abortion, celibacy, women priests) he has strongly adhered to past
Church norms, on the Church's diplomatic and political roles he has
been quite adventurous.
- As was fully apparent on that occasion in the attitudes of some
Muslim and Jewish religious dignitaries.
- Hugo de Groot (1583-1645), a Dutch lawyer, who published in
1625 the fundamental tenet on international law, De Jura Belli
ac Pacis, (Of the Laws of War and Peace).
- The doctrine was developed by St Augustine and other early
fathers of the Church to establish norms for the authorities of
those times in their many conflicts with each other. For making
war, the requirements were (1) legitimate authority; (2) a just
cause; (3) a right intention; (4) the action had to be
proportionate to the wrong; (5) the end to be proportionate to the
means; and (6) there had to be a good prospect of success.
- Protocol mostly deals with fairly trivial matters of diplomatic
etiquette but can, as in this case, have very substantial
implications.
- Which was bipolar from 1945 until the collapse of the Soviet
Union at the end of 1991, but in earlier centuries had mostly been
multipolar.
- The reason for now expecting so long a duration of unipolarity
are set out in the author's 'American Power and the Pretence of
Concert' in The National Interest (Washington, Fall,
1999).
- He lost office in 1920, having earlier also lost his fight to
take the US into the League of Nations.
- Clinton's visit to Moscow in June 2000 was surprisingly
successful, in view of his acknowledged 'lame duck' status at the
time. It could not be expected that Putin would agree to the
projected US missile defence schemes, but the door was left open
for some possible future deals.
- Permanent Normal Trade Relations, previously called M.F.N.
American business is ardently for trade with China, so two-thirds
of Republicans voted for China's new trade status. Democrats are
heavily dependent on the unions for funds and votes, and they are
fearful of loss of jobs to China. So two-thirds of Democrats voted
against. In some cases, votes were also influenced by China's human
rights record.
- A Republican president, though not exempt from Republican
criticism in the House and Senate, can usually count on Democratic
support for conciliatory policies towards Russia and China, whereas
a Democratic president with the same policies would be met by
Republican efforts to block him, and might not be able to count on
Democratic support, party discipline not operating in the US.
- See the author's previously cited article for reasons.
- Until the second half of the twentieth century, very few
institutions were actually or even nominally cosmopolitan in their
outlooks. The Christian church was so originally, of course: 'in
Christ there is neither Jew nor Greek'. But over the centuries,
doctrinal splits identified particular sects with particular
nations or regions. The Communist Party went down rather the same
path, developing particular doctrines for local circumstances. The
Chinese party has made it official, speaking of 'Socialism with
Chinese characteristics'.
- Time, 24 April 2000.
- This assumption is based on the assessment of the time any
potential 'peer-competitor' (i.e. serious economic rival or
military challenger) of the US would take to reach the level of
near-equality which would make an actual challenge feasible. China
and Russia, singly or in alliance, are the only powers usually
considered.
- Unarmed Aerial Vehicles and Joint Direct Attack Munition
systems (a cheaper substitute for cruise missiles).