"Increasing Interconnectedness": Globalisation and International Intervention

Speech

Australian Minister for Foreign Affairs, Alexander Downer

Sydney, 17 July 2000

"Increasing Interconnectedness": Globalisation and International Intervention

Speech by the Hon Alexander Downer, MP, Minister for Foreign Affairs,to the Sydney Institute, Sydney, 17 July 2000.

Introduction

It is my great pleasure to be able to address you today. The Sydney Institute has established a fine reputation as a forum for debating issues that cover the full range of public affairs. After quite a few years of service in the Commonwealth Parliament, I am convinced of the value of forums like this Institute. They bring to public affairs a more balanced and dispassionate tone than is often possible in the rough and tumble of political life in this country.

Globalisation

I have taken as my broad theme the topic of Globalisation and International Intervention. As I travel around the world, I am struck by the familiarity of the debates between the globaphiles and the globaphobes. In our own country, resistance to globalisation has emerged in the One Nation phenomenon, and is still active in some parts of our trade union movement, amongst NGOs of the left and right and even - here and there - in some segments of our mainstream political parties.

Abroad, its homes are very much the same: the US trade union movement, parties of the far left and right in Europe and extreme nationalist movements in Asia, Latin America and Africa.

That there should be some resistance to global integration should not come as a surprise: great change in social organisation, led by technology, inevitably brings social and political tensions. The experiences of the agricultural and industrial revolutions taught us that.

But what history also teaches us is that those societies which recognise the inevitability and irreversibility of new technologies and harness them, all the time carefully managing social changes, will succeed. Those which try to resist the tide of evolution are doomed to despair.

The Australian Government has pursued economic reform programs to ensure we do harness the benefits of information and communications technologies. By the standards of the world we are doing well: our economy, which is growing so strongly, is experiencing unprecedented improvements in productivity partly because we have warmly embraced new technologies.

Personal computer penetration in Australia is second only to the United States; our expenditure on communications technology was around 8.0% of GDP during the late 1990s - significantly higher than, for example the European Union. An Australian is more than twice as likely to own an internet home page and 60% more likely to own a computer than a German.

In fact Australians are among the world leaders in accessing and using the Internet. According to data from The National Office of the Information Economy, Australia is the fourth most connected community in the world on a per capita basis and second to the United States in secure e-commerce capability (which is most relevant to commercial transactions). Adult access to the Internet has been growing at more than 40 per cent per annum.

Recent surveys show that per capita living standards have been rising strongly across the socio-economic spectrum (although not at a uniform pace) demonstrating that overall our embrace of openness to the world of trade and technology has been a triumph for Australia.

That is not to say that either nationally or internationally we can just take for granted that the benefits of globalisation will be broadly understood.

Late last year, most governments turned up to the Seattle Trade Ministers meeting in anticipation the meeting would launch a new round of global trade liberalisation negotiations. They were wrong. Frightened, at least politically, by the vehemence of the demonstrators, some participants at the meeting decided it would be judicious to postpone negotiations to launch the trade round.

I don't wish to enter into the blame game: everyone has their own pet theory about whose fault this was. What I do know is that the failure of Seattle has given the globaphobes an extraordinary victory: without any intellectual effort they have successfully made the world hesitate and wonder whether this exciting process of global engagement should be allowed to proceed.

That is why, for a country like Australia, we have to continue to take a lead in promoting global trade and economic liberalisation. The arguments can never be taken for granted. Nor can we afford to be insensitive to one simple reality: information and communications techonologies are changing the way the world interrelates forever.

For foreign policy, technological change has been catalytic.

Advancements in telecommunications have had a great effect on the formation of public opinion in liberal democracies like our own. Television in particular has transformed the nature of public debate. In many ways the world has been "shrunk" to fit within what news editors believe the people are interested in.

This can sometimes have a distorting effect on public perceptions. For example, the need for emergency assistance in response to natural disasters like earthquakes or floods may be more newsworthy than the less dramatic but painstaking work of arresting the disturbing progress of diseases like malaria or HIV/AIDS, yet all are worthy objects of humanitarian action.

Importantly, relatively few injustices can now be kept indefinitely away from the attention of the international media. When brought to light, they inevitably fuel demands for international intervention in some form.

This is a new type of interaction between the public and foreign policy makers - ignored by democratic governments at their peril. When the demand to "do something" is heard, governments are understandably expected to respond. And these demands will continue to grow as a plethora of images and the "interconnectedness" of the world increases.

Last year, the NATO allies acted to deal with human rights abuses in Kosovo. What is significant here is that such drastic measures were taken to deal with a crisis in a place which was of no great strategic significance, at least to the United States.

Regardless of whether you supported NATO's bombing of Yugoslavia, what is interesting is that public opinion, driven by television images, demanded "something be done".

Equally, had Australia and its partners done nothing about the violence in East Timor in September last year, the global community - including Australians - would have been appalled. On the contrary, the degree of public outrage encouraged the UN Security Council to adopt a Chapter VII mandate for Interfet and made it all the easier for Australia to assemble a coalition of countries to participate in Interfet. Naturally, I would claim these achievements were a triumph for Australian diplomacy, but integrity demands I tell you that global public opinion supercharged anything we were doing!

Some people argue that in the interest of good relations with Indonesia we should never have sent Interfet to East Timor; others say the slow civil war in East Timor which had killed around 200,000 people between 1975 and 1998 should have been allowed to continue without busybodies from Australia and elsewhere urging it to be drawn to a conclusion.

That sort of amoral approach to foreign policy is finished: in the year 2000 with mass communications the global public simply won't cop cruelty and inhumanity being ignored in the interests of realpolitik.

And rightly so.

International intervention

This, then leads me to my central point: if globalisation means people won't cop injustice and inhumanity anymore, how is the world going to stop it?

In the short to medium term, there are three types of measures the international community can take. First, there is direct intervention, such as occurred in East Timor. Second, there is the carrots and sticks approach using sanctions and incentives. Thirdly, it may be increasingly possible to resort to the international legal system.

But a word of warning: there is never any guarantee that international intervention can work. For as long as national sovereignty remains at the heart of the international system, there will be limits to what the international community can achieve.

Let me run through the three options in some detail.

First, direct military intervention: ideally, this should require four criteria to be met. The host nation should accede to the intervention; the force should have the authority of the UN Security Council; it should enforce or uphold a peace settlement or final outcome already designed; there must be an exit strategy for the force.

I said these criteria were ideal. All four applied in East Timor and, in the early nineties in the Gulf War. They didn't in Kosovo. The point is, though, that if all four criteria do not apply then the consequences of direct intervention will be considerably greater and may even preclude that option, as they did for example, in Chechnya.

Suffice it to say I do not regard my four criteria as an iron law of international intervention, only as prerequisites for a straightforward and successful intervention.

Secondly, I spoke of sticks and carrots. One of the most popular cries that accompany outrage is the call for sanctions.

The present ALP Opposition has, since 1996, called for sanctions against Burma, Indonesia, Cambodia, India, Pakistan, Iran and Fiji on top of sanctions that already apply either to those countries or others.

Sanctions as an instrument of persuasion have a very mixed record. The work of Elliott, Schott and Hufbauer in their book Economic Sanctions Reconsidered: History and Current Policy makes this very clear. Their study showed that sanctions have failed to have had even partial success in coercing desired changes in two-thirds of cases. Other studies have suggested this may well be a conservative estimate. What the study also showed is this record has been getting worse since the global economy has become more open.

Furthermore, blanket economic sanctions can simply exacerbate a humanitarian crisis and harm third countries.

Let me use some examples. If Australia were to apply full economic sanctions against Fiji we would decimate its economy; tens of thousands of people would lose their livelihoods, businesses would be lost forever and, given Fiji's political position in the Pacific, countries like Kiribati, Samoa, Tuvalu and Tonga would be sucked down with Fiji.

I am just not prepared to be that cruel. And furthermore my judgement is this would breed regional hatred towards Australia which would last for a generation.

Would such measures restore democracy to Fiji any faster? I am certain they wouldn't - and indeed could have the reverse effect.

In the case of Iraq, economic sanctions have been somewhat alleviated in their impact by the so-called food for oil deal negotiated by the UN. This became necessary because of the humanitarian crisis the sanctions themselves caused. Furthermore, many have noted that despite the sanctions, the US had to resort to bombing Iraq to destroy chemical and biological weapons facilities put in place since the end of the Gulf War.

There is evidence however, that "smart" or targeted sanctions which aim at those responsible for unacceptable behavior, can have a more beneficial impact politically without causing widespread economic devastation.

The sanctions which seemed to have worked most effectively against South African apartheid were not general trade sanctions - the South Africans found novel ways of circumventing them - but financial sanctions which threatened the capacity of white dominated big business and the Government's capacity to raise or extend finance from abroad.

In Fiji's case, the Government will tomorrow consider a range of targeted measures designed to place pressure on Fiji's decision-makers to return the country to democracy.

As many of you will know, I announced on 29 May a range of measures which the Australian Government will put in place if there is an unacceptable political outcome to the crisis in Fiji. These include suspension of government-to-government cooperation under the bilateral Australia-Fiji Trade and Economic Relations Agreement (AFTERA); downgrading the aid relationship, in particular, suspension of projects involving the Fiji public sector and the award of new scholarships; downgrading the defence cooperation relationship, including suspension of forthcoming naval visits and joint military exercises; and a thorough review of sporting contacts, including in particular a possible ban on the Fiji national rugby union team visiting Australia.

These measures will be supplemented by bans on visits to Australia by all those who were involved in the coup.

These are good examples of smart sanctions which target particular sections of the Fijian community without destroying the lives of tens of thousands of innocent people.

My thesis is that the world should increasingly look at targeted or smart sanctions focussing on decision-makers, rather than blunt comprehensive sanctions that harm those who are already victims of human rights abuses and/or the abrogation of democracy.

What is more, governments which do breach human rights, or constitutional norms, can ironically often build domestic support against the international community by claiming the outside world is damaging ordinary people's living standards.

In addition to the "sticks" represented by sanctions, governments should look at incentives, or "carrots". Such incentives should be designed to bring change without confrontation. This mutually agreed approach to bring about change is most evident in the Government's aid program.

The Australian Government believes our aid program has a central role to play as an advocate of good governance and human rights. Australia's support for improving governance is a key area of the new 2000-2005 Treaty arrangements between Australia and PNG. Both governments agree the aid program should target PNG's structural and institutional problems by strengthening good governance across the spectrum of PNG institutions and civil society.

In the Pacific a major governance project has been the Policy and Management Reform (PMR) initiative. PMR funds are allocated competitively to countries on the basis of demonstrated commitment to reform. Institutions interested in reform are helped to develop solutions to their problems and rewarded with technical and financial support. The focus is on increasing the efficiency and accountability of government.

Another practical way to achieve desired outcomes is through the government human rights programs. The China Human Rights Technical Assistance Program, at about $1 million each year, provides practical assistance to promote attention to human rights issues in China and complements the annual human rights bilateral dialogue between Australia and China. Activities include training and seminars for example, in human rights reporting obligations, legal issues, and development of minority rights, such as in the delivery of services.

In recent times I have aroused some controversy by providing human rights training for a small number of Burmese officials. Many believe that sanctions should be the sole mechanism used to encourage reform in Burma.

Personally I doubt their efficacy. To put in place a positive program to tackle human rights seems an obvious and constructive supplement to what is otherwise a punitive approach.

The third form of international intervention is through the international legal system. This type of intervention is only in embryonic phase. The international criminal tribunals for the former Yugoslavia and Rwanda have started to have some impact.

But most importantly, 97 countries, including Australia, have now signed the Statute for the International Criminal Court. This Court, which Australia did so much to help create, will not only be able to prosecute and convict perpetrators of egregious human rights abuses, but it will act as a very serious disincentive to commit such acts.

I have no illusions about the difficulty in building an intervention legal framework to help ensure the world becomes more humane. Nor do I think such institutions will be sufficient, but I do think the International Criminal Court and other global institutions can make a serious difference.

Finally, let us face a simple reality of international relations: no matter how hard the global community may try, there is no guarantee of success. There are dozens of examples of what the media like to term "failures" by the international community to stop abuses or restore democracy.

The first and greatest constraint remains the notion of national sovereignty. Some governments, such as Burma's, are unmoved by the ire of the outside world and its use of punitive measures.

The second constraint, following on from the first, is a perfectly understandable reluctance to use military force. Direct and uninvited military intervention is inevitably going to be rare: after all, how much value do any of us place on the blood of our young service people?

Therefore, we have to accept there are limits to what the world can achieve to end abuse and rogue behavior without throwing the globe into widespread conflict.

Conclusion

Globalisation, and in particular the communications revolution which is a part of it, has created new pressures on governments to respond to international crises. It is a new complexity within the foreign policy environment and requires more, not less, sophistication when examining calls for international intervention, especially where sanctions are concerned.

Australia stands up in the world for democracy and the rule of law. In a world of globalisation, a world of "increasing interconnectedness", these are values worth backing up with meaningful action when the occasion demands it. But we must seek to ensure that in doing so we do not unacceptably burden those whom we seek to assist and we do promote positive change. This is the fundamental principle we should never forget in the midst of increasing demands for international intervention in the world today.