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Of caution and circumstance

By Michael Wesley - posted Thursday, 15 June 2006


Niccolò Machiavelli was no stranger to the vagaries of luck. At 29, he became Secretary and Second Chancellor to the Florentine Republic, only to be imprisoned, tortured and exiled by the Medici restoration 14 years later.

His masterpiece, The Prince, written almost 500 years ago, includes a chapter on luck (fortuna), which he compares to a “ruinous river, which when in flood” carries all before it. The essence of politics is to dominate fortuna, at times building embankments and dykes to direct its impetus.

Generally, argues Machiavelli at his most misogynistic, “it is better to be impetuous than cautious, because fortuna is a woman, and it is necessary to beat her and to maul her when you want to keep her under control”.

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John Howard also knows about fortune. Made Treasurer at 38, soon after he was to bear the brunt of the Liberals’ decade of infighting in Opposition. In 1986 he famously declared “the times will suit me”, and ten years later led his party to government, becoming after another decade Australia’s second-longest serving Prime Minister.

In my recently completed book, The Howard Paradox: Australian Diplomacy in Asia 1996-2006, I argue that the Howard Government’s foreign policy successes in the Asian region - ranging from strong relationships with most regional governments to invitations to the inaugural meetings of a new East Asian regionalism - in large part derive from a fortuitous match between the Coalition’s distinctive foreign policy approach and the evolving diplomatic environment in East and South-East Asia.

In short, the Howard Government’s pragmatic, incrementalist approach has worked well in a post-Asian crisis region preoccupied with stability, development, and how to handle a rising China.

The Howard approach to Asia

There is a widespread view that Howard was not interested in foreign policy at first.

On the contrary, throughout his career, Howard has regularly aired strong views on foreign policy, telling one journalist in the mid-1980s he harboured a dream to become Foreign Minister, and another, on entering Parliament in 1974, that foreign affairs was one of the two issues in which he was most interested.

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As Judith Brett argues, Howard’s political values and understandings have profoundly reshaped conservative politics in Australia; I think Howard’s values have had as profound an effect on Australia’s foreign policy as on constitutional reform, indigenous issues, or industrial relations.

One can find in Howard’s 2006 foreign policy speeches the same foreign policy philosophies and approaches that inform his 1995 headland speeches and the Coalition’s 1996 pre-election foreign policy statement, A Confident Australia.

Howard’s political values have been shaped by three major influences: his long and often bitter experience of politics; his conservatism, and his Methodist upbringing.

Political experience has imprinted Howard with a deep pragmatism, an empirical concern with what works, and an impatience for abstract schemes. Society is complex. A leader must be mindful of, and work within, the traditions, institutions and values of society, which have evolved and persisted through time because they have demonstrated their superiority over alternatives.

Howard sees the role of government as facilitating changes that are intimated within society, its processes and institutions, and abolishing those institutions that are untenable and carry within themselves the forces of their own dissolution.

In foreign policy terms, this has meant that the Howard Government eschewed Labor’s multilateral approach to Asia in favour of pragmatic bilateralism. This is more than an attempt at “product differentiation” as some commentators have argued; it is an expression of a philosophy and approach to governing that is deeply rooted in Howard’s attitudes. Foreign affairs is too “messy and uncertain”, and the Asian region too diverse, to be pushed or cajoled into rationalist constructs.

Howard’s conservatism leads him to the conviction that politics takes place within and between moral communities. He shares Menzies’ belief in three “natural” units in society - the individual, the family, and the nation - and his deep suspicion of other “contrived” social formations, such as class or ethnic grouping, or, in foreign policy terms, “natural” regional associations. Because societies evolve by “selecting [from their heritage] things … of enduring value, yet reject[ing] things … which hold [them] back,” the values and symbols that define the nation are inherently to be esteemed.

Consequently, Howard rejected what he saw as Labor’s “cringing” approach to Asia. This looked to him like an extension of the national self-loathing of the black arm-band crowd: their denigration of Australia’s history and institutions fitted well with their eagerness to subscribe to “Asian” practices.

Howard’s belief in the moral basis of community serves as his foreign policy lodestone. With Western countries, Howard talks of a “similarity of values”, observing, “it is common values that in the end bind us together more tightly that anything else … and so it is with the values that bind nations together”.

Howard’s preferred diplomatic formula is that Australia approaches the Asian region on the basis of “mutual respect and shared interests”. The formula “shared interests” as the basis for relations between entities with different values follows from Howard’s understanding of political community. Because genuine community can only be the result of common values, relations between communities of different values must be organised on the basis of interest.

It is the milieu of the family versus the milieu of the market. In the family, all interaction is framed by a set of mutual moral commitments. In the market, those interacting have no ongoing moral obligation beyond the bounds of the transaction.

The other part of the formula, “mutual respect”, leads Howard to a strong belief that “good neighbours recognise and respect each other’s values and beliefs”. The participants in transactional relationships should treat each other as do citizens in a liberal society - without interfering with or being unduly judgmental about one’s interlocutors.

A respect for cultural difference does not mean that John Howard is a believer in the equal value of all national cultures. He believes that there are some ways of doing things - many of which are practiced in Australia - that are better than others. Nor does Howard’s understanding of values render him a raging neo-conservative, hell-bent on converting other societies to Australian values.

Howard was brought up in a strongly Methodist family. Methodists believed in the importance of an individual’s “pure feeling of absolute certainty” of divine forgiveness. There are strong signs of this in Howard’s dogged adherence to his opinions and convictions despite choruses of opposition and mountains of contrary evidence and his insistence that contemporary individuals are in no way implicated in past crimes against indigenous people.

It also makes him often tone-deaf to the resonances of his statements and policies in Asian countries. As Michelle Grattan observes: “John Howard seems to lack diplomatic manners. A plain and straightforward man himself, without great subtlety, he fails to grasp the importance of words, symbols and gestures in the smooth conduct of international relations. That’s one reason he misjudged the damage Hanson could do abroad.”

Asia during the Howard years

Critics have argued throughout the Howard years that this approach is doing untold damage to Australia’s foreign policy interests in Asia. The paradox I explore in my book is that both the qualitative and quantitative evidence suggests otherwise.

The Howard Government has pioneered and stuck with a diplomatic approach to the region that is very different from that of its predecessors and by and large, it has worked. There are several reasons why, but one cannot ignore the major influence of fortune. Just as the Howard Government began settling into office, the international relations of East and South-East Asia began to change in ways that made the states to our north more amenable to the new approach.

Events between 1994 and 1997 deflated much of South-East Asia’s confident, assertive early-1990s regionalism. ASEAN absorbed four poor, governance-challenged new members, leading to a serious loss of organisational cohesion and momentum. The poor performance of regional institutions during the Asian financial crisis further contributed to this regionalist malaise.

In this environment, a government in Canberra not as devoted to regionalism as its predecessor was welcome. The Howard Government’s preference for bilateralism was closer to South-East Asian diplomatic practices.

The history of regionalism in East Asia shows that its states prefer to manage their relations primarily through bilateral means, and have kept multilateral arrangements weak, procedural and non-binding. Repeatedly, East Asian states have either rejected more binding, legalistic forms of multilateralism or have failed to commit to what appeared at the outset to be strong multilateral agreements.

In the context of the turmoil and political change brought on by the Asian financial crisis, an avowedly pragmatic government in Canberra was also welcome.

Gareth Evans had believed a “globalisation of values” was reducing the salience of the cultural divide between Australia and Asia, as English is adopted as the universally accepted lingua franca, and an ideological consensus emerges on multiculturalism, democracy, free market economies, “inclusivity” and co-operation. The Howard government’s “mutual respect and shared interests” formula appeared much closer to the ASEAN norm of non-intervention and resonated positively with a new crop of pragmatic, technocratic leaders refocused on stability and development.

The third major change during the Howard years has been the rise of China and its increasingly assertive role in South-East Asia. China’s economic development has been the single greatest driver of the post-Asian crisis growth of other East Asian countries. So while the region’s countries have a vested interest in China’s continued economic boom, Beijing is gaining levers of influence over its neighbours. Most South-East Asian countries are aware of China’s growing economic and political importance but are wary of becoming too beholden to Beijing.

South-East Asian countries have adopted four coping strategies. One has been to engage with China as a group, catching the wave of its economic growth.

Another has been to launch a new round of ASEAN integration, forging closer security relations and pushing forward with economic and financial integration.

A third has been to engage China through the ASEAN + 3 process, in order to tie in its interest in South-East Asia while moderating its behaviour through institutional norms.

Fourth, South-East Asian states have been eager to develop external relationships as ballast to China’s weight. Australia has become a more sought-after diplomatic partner - as have New Zealand, India, and the United States - as a way for South-East Asia to hedge against China’s pull.

The future

Howard’s attendance at the December 2005 East Asia Summit stands as a capstone for a decade’s successful diplomacy in Asia. But Machiavelli would argue that there is no cause for complacency, because fortune can change, especially as fortuna “shows her power when there is no virtù [prudent but bold resolve] marshalled to resist her”.

Not even the Howard Government’s most loyal supporters would accuse it of grand strategic vision or sweeping diplomatic initiatives: its own foreign policy White Paper asserted that “preparing for the future is not a matter of grand constructs”.

The major challenge for the Howard Government will be how it deals with challenges in the Asian region that do not respond to pragmatic incrementalism. Machiavelli would not have been optimistic: “The cautious man … cannot act impetuously when the times demand it of him, and this leads to his ruin.”

Howard’s cautious pragmatism has served him well so far, but may be a liability in dealing with major coming challenges. One such challenge is where Canberra’s growing closeness to Beijing will take us.

In his speech to the Lowy Institute in March 2005, Howard said, “Australia does not believe there is anything inevitable about escalating strategic competition between China and the United States”.

There is a desperate optimism in this statement, used to mask a deeper strategic uncertainty about where Australia might stand if forced to choose between its traditional great and powerful friend and the coming colossus. If it precludes careful, long term thought about issues such as this, the Howard approach to diplomacy in Asia may yield diminishing returns in the coming years.

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About the Author

Professor Michael Wesley is the Director of the Griffith Asia Pacific Research Institute at Griffith University.

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