Tag Archive for: international order

Liberal democracy: just one option among many

The increase in authoritarianism and illiberal democracy is a concern for those who see an indissoluble bond between capitalism and democracy. And it’s a worry for those who believe that international liberalism is required to foster globalised capitalism. For others, the mere existence of authoritarian states or illiberal democracies highlights an unacceptable relativism that denies the universality of liberal values.

Many thinkers have questioned the connection between capitalism and liberal democracy, or whether the association is beneficial to either. But in West European, North American and Australian strategic policy it seems to be axiomatic that the spread of liberal democracy’s values is indispensable for trade and security.

In the jubilant wake of ‘The Unipolar Moment’, ‘The End of History’, ‘Democracy’s Third Wave’ and ‘From Geopolitics to Geo-Economics’ or, as George W.H. Bush had it, the ‘new world order’, the roll-back of liberal democracy seemed impossible.

For a moment in the 1990s, ‘it appeared that totalitarianism had at last been vanquished and liberal democracy had won the great ideological battle of the 20th century’. The number of representative democracies rose from 60 countries in 1989 to 100 in 2000.

Yet even where democratic elections take place there’s no guarantee of liberal values. Aggregating the number of elected governments isn’t the same as identifying the number of liberal democracies around the world. As Fareed Zakaria lucidly observed in 1997, many democracies are illiberal, repressive and violent.

It needs to be recalled that by 1938, eight of the 13 European parliamentary democracies established after the Treaty of Versailles had been replaced by dictatorships: Bulgaria, Estonia, Greece, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and Yugoslavia. By 1938, fascists were in power in Italy, Germany and Austria, while Portugal and Spain were both under military dictatorship and Poland had an authoritarian constitution.

Following the Soviet capture of Eastern Europe, democracy was extinguished in the Baltics, Poland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and the Balkans until the early 1990s. Now, illiberal and ethnonational tendencies have begun to re-surface since the liberation of many post-Soviet states. Strongman or authoritarian regimes have emerged in Belarus and in the Central Asian states of Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan.

The former democracies of Egypt and Turkey are now oppressive dictatorships in all but name. The Arab Spring’s democratic promise has dissipated. The political vicissitudes of sub-Saharan Africa don’t supply much optimism for liberal democracy. Similarly, in South America the once vigorous democracy of Venezuela has fallen to a dictator. Even in Europe, the political recidivism of a number of states, like Hungary and Poland, is creating great concern for the European project.

In 2017, for the ‘12th consecutive year’, according to Freedom House’s Freedom in the world 2018, ‘countries that suffered democratic setbacks outnumbered those that registered gains’.

Perhaps the real lesson from the long period of US military, cultural and economic hegemony is that liberal democracy cannot be imposed on peoples that draw their values from non-Western historical, social and religious traditions. The traditional political values of Western Europeans and North Americans have made few permanent inroads in Islamic states. Perhaps, when seen from the capitals of the developing world, the promotion of those values often appear patronising, hypocritical and self-serving.

If the global hold of liberal democracy is tenuous, it raises the question, how much does this matter? Are the security and prosperity of liberal democratic nations really irrevocably entwined with a liberal international order?

One of the major events of modern history took place before the end of the Cold War. Deng Xiaoping rose to be China’s paramount leader and set that autocratic country on the path to becoming a dominant economic and military power. As a consequence, today it’s a successful world power that’s in no sense liberal.

Deng’s reforms resulted in what Barry Buzan and George Lawson categorise as ‘state bureaucratic capitalism’. The post–Cold War world engendered not a liberal international order, in their view, but a move towards a ‘decentred globalism’. By that they suggest international competition in future will be between the ‘alternative modes of capitalist governance’: liberal democratic (the US, the UK, Australia and Canada), social democratic (Europe, India, Japan and South Korea), competitive authoritarian (Russia, Malaysia, Pakistan and Kenya) and state bureaucratic (China).

There is ‘much common ground between all types of capitalism’ because they all need ‘the global trade, production and financial circuits on which their prosperity and growth depend’. The emerging order, they argue, will be made up of a range of states, each exhibiting different political economies, as well as varied relationships between citizens, governments and markets, but still essentially capitalist.

The nexus between trading capitalist economies and liberal democracy will be broken. As trade will still be integral to the wealth and power of those states, they’ll still seek a rules-based international order in which to conduct international business. However, for many states—perhaps most—a clear separation between the rules for international commerce on the one hand, and trade and liberal values on the other, will be a given.

If authoritarianism and illiberal democracies cannot be eradicated the international order is unlikely to exhibit a liberal character. What that might mean for the norms of international behaviour and conflict may already be apparent in Ukraine and in the Middle East.

There still seems to be a deep reluctance to accept that liberalism is neither universal nor essential. However, the world wars, the post-colonial wars of independence, the Cold War and the ‘war on terror’ have all failed to embed liberal values. The best option for the liberal democracies may be to prepare for an illiberal international order.

Syria a symptom of a broken international order

Last Saturday US, British and French forces bombed three chemical weapons facilities in Damascus in retaliation for the alleged use of chemical weapons by Syrian forces in Douma on 6–8 April that killed around 70 people.

Others will discuss the strategic context and consequences of the allied air strikes on Syria. As a student of UN-centric global governance, I want to make the larger ‘structural’ argument that—considered in its totality—the strikes reflect and will further contribute to a broken system of international order.

First, they highlight the West’s self-appointed role as the moral policeman of the world. State sovereignty is the bedrock principle of the contemporary, essentially Westphalian, global order. Erosion of the principle includes demands that governments’ domestic behaviour conforms to international normative standards.

But there’s the matching demand that states’ international use of force be constrained by international law. The international community hasn’t elected Britain, France and the US to act as the arbiters and enforcers of state behaviour by other countries acting within their borders.

Syria and its patron, Russia, vehemently denied that a chemical attack had even taken place, let alone that President Bashar al-Assad was responsible. Russian foreign ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova insisted that ‘Damascus has neither the motive to use chemical weapons nor the chemical weapons themselves’.

A second aspect of the broken international system, therefore, is the lack of international criminal investigative and accountability mechanisms to ensure compliance with prevailing norms and humanitarian law that’s credible, effective and timely. Such mechanisms would ensure the punishment of perpetrators while also deterring repeats of the abhorrent conduct by thugs in the future.

The third is the lack of enforcement mechanisms. This is why countries with core humanitarian values step in to fill the void. The international community has proscribed the possession and use of chemical weapons. If they are used, then—realistically speaking—who other than the West is going to do anything about it? The alternative is to reduce the abolition of chemical weapons stockpiles and manufacturing infrastructure, as well as the global prohibition on their use, to empty gestures.

Unfortunately, the politics of a permissive environment for punishing heinous war crimes works against the requirements of a forensic examination that can provide the necessary proof of culpability. Consider the case of Khan Sheikhun in Syria’s Idlib province. Held by the rebels at the time, the town was attacked with chemical weapons on 4 April 2017, killing more than 80 people. Assad denied responsibility while Moscow claimed that a warehouse bombed by the Syrian air force may have been used as a storage site for chemical weapons by the rebels. All sides agreed to an independent investigation by the UN’s chemical weapons watchdog, the Organisation for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW).

The US claimed that jets from the Shayrat air base had bombed the town, and on 7 April it hit the base with 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles. The unilateral, non-UN–authorised strikes were warmly applauded by most Western and several other countries. On 6 October, the UN Human Rights Commission’s independent inquiry commission pinned the blame on the Syrian air force. The OPCW–UN Joint Investigation Mission confirmed this finding in its own report on 26 October.

In other words, it took six months for independent investigations to confirm regime culpability. Had the US waited until then, it seems highly unlikely that President Donald Trump could have mustered support domestically or internationally for punitive raids long after the provocation had faded from public minds.

A fourth consideration is the veto clause that allows just one of the five permanent members of the UN Security Council (UNSC) to paralyse decision-making by the world’s only duly-constituted law enforcement body. China and Russia have employed the veto on numerous occasions to block UNSC action against Syria. Reflecting on Syria’s savage civil war Amnesty International rightly concluded six years ago that the Security Council is ‘tired, out of step and increasingly unfit for purpose’.

Since the uprising against Bashar al-Assad that began in 2011, around 500,000 people have been killed in total on all sides, and around 13 million have been displaced internally or become refugees. Some of the rebel groups backed by the West are no less unsavoury than the regime that is backed by Russia.

With the complex internal sectarian divides intersecting with regional power rivalries, existing international institutions have proven totally inadequate to the challenge of coping with the multiple crises.

In the 1999 Kosovo war, most Western analysts concurred with the Kosovo Commission that the NATO bombing of Serbia was illegal but legitimate. It was illegal because it hadn’t been authorised by the UNSC. Nor was it a response to an armed attack on a NATO member. But it was held to be legitimate because its primary purpose was to halt humanitarian atrocities by the murderous Slobodan Milosevic.

The legality–legitimacy distinction now haunts the UNSC more broadly. It has the legal authority to bind the international community but is so badly out of alignment with the real world that its actions are increasingly illegitimate. Three of the five permanent members—the very three that have just bombed Syria—are Western. Their 60% dominance is wildly out of proportion to their population and economic weight in world affairs.

Another three elected members are also Western (presently, the Netherlands, Poland and Sweden). With six of the 15 Security Council seats—40%—Western representation is grossly disproportionate to UN membership and global population distributions.

It’s easy for Australia to say this is the best we have and we must live with it. We wouldn’t be so sanguine and respectful of UNSC decisions, on the grounds that there’s no alternative, if the US were the only Western permanent member and there was only one additional Western elected member on the council.

Thus, this is the final measure on which the Syria crisis highlights the sorry state of world order arrangements. The major Western countries have failed to prioritise the reform of the Security Council with the requisite urgency. Meanwhile, a short-term measure would be for the UK and the US to back French efforts for a code of conduct that would see a voluntary exemption of humanitarian crises from the veto.

Strategic ambiguity

Smoke

As final touches are applied to Australia’s new Defence White Paper, policymakers are being urged to ‘embrace’ ambiguity in international security policy.

An elegant and deeply thoughtful paper by Singapore ambassador-at-large Bilahari Kausikan (PDF) suggests that strategic ambiguity is the best policy for nations concerned about US–China competition. The idea, he says, is ‘to position oneself to avoid having to make invidious choices’.

It’s an appealing notion reflecting an apparently flexible, tolerant and realistic approach to potential challenges arising from US–China competition. But I want, reluctantly, to question the wisdom of Kausikan’s view. The clarity and certainties of the Cold War world may have vanished, as Kausikan notes. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that the optimum approach to post-Cold War global policy is Kausikan’s apparent willingness to embrace something close to appeasement in order to avoid ‘invidious choices’. Nor does it follow, as Kausikan argues, that ‘to be forced to choose is to have failed’. Choices, invidious or otherwise, can become unavoidable in a competitive world.

Kausikan seeks to qualify his argument by insisting that ‘we must stand firm on our own vital interests and basic principles’ while applying them flexibly and bending them to accommodate reality. But this concession merely highlights the difficulties inherent in his argument: how are vital interests to be defined? What are the limits to flexibility? Who decides what constitutes ‘reality’?

The new Australian Defence White Paper will undoubtedly express Australia’s vital interests and its assessment of the current strategic environment, including US–China competition, with judicious caution. It will set out in some detail the nation’s future sea, air and land force structure requirements and explain how the Defence Force is to be financed into the future. So the White Paper will reflect choices—strategic, political, technological and financial—that can’t be avoided. There’s no room here for ambiguity: allies and competitors alike should know where we stand.

Kausikan’s notion of strategic ambiguity needs some analysis. There are words and deeds, statements and actions, in security policy. The embrace of ambiguity seems, essentially, to involve leaving uncertainty in the minds of strategic competitors about the limits of what you can accept or tolerate. But while words can be crafted to leave competitors unsure or in doubt, it’s harder to maintain ambiguity when policy choices involve the acquisition of advanced new military armaments, bigger defence budgets and increased military activities including patrols, exercises and surveillance activity. Those sorts of actions signal intent and preparation to confront challenges regardless of weasel words to the contrary. They would be pointless if they didn’t.

Kausikanan’s strategic ambiguity might be appropriate in an environment where all parties are sufficiently satisfied to accept the prevailing state of affairs, where there’s an equilibrium that all actors can accept or tolerate. If equilibrium prevails it may be possible to avoid invidious choices.

But the situation is quite different when one powerful actor (or actors) is dissatisfied and wants to change the status quo. If dissatisfied parties speak and act in ways that discomfort and threaten others, then there’s a clear need for those who are perturbed to be clear about their concerns and how they might react. Strategic ambiguity in those circumstances can encourage aggression. Indeed it may be hard to distinguish from appeasement. It’s certainly true, as Kausikan says, that the less powerful should recognise that there are limits to their ability to influence events and that they should be careful not to over-reach. But this doesn’t mean that smaller countries need to cower impotently before the might of the powerful.

For Australia, the implications of US–China competition have been underscored in recent days by China’s response to statements by Australian ministers at the AUSMIN talks in the US. Following US and Australian expressions of concern over Beijing’s construction of artificial islands in the South China Sea, the Chinese embassy in Canberra has reiterated claims that the US and Australia are lighting a fire and adding fuel to the flames, that China’s actions are reasonable, just and lawful, and that its intentions are peaceful.

Whatever the truth of those contested and self-serving claims, they were certainly not ambiguous and Australia was right to avoid ambiguity in response. Instead Australia agreed to enhanced naval cooperation with the US—an invidious choice, perhaps, but one that signals that Beijing cannot throw its weight around without prompting responses from Canberra.

Kausikan argues convincingly that US–China competition in the South China Sea has far to run and that neither Washington nor Beijing is yet clear about their ultimate objectives. In the meantime, Australian policymakers need to be clear about their interests and objectives. To embrace ambiguity would be to embrace helplessness.