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A Mixed Bag of Dilemmas: Australia's Policy-Making in a World of Changing
International Rules
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).
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