Tag Archive for: Multilateralism

The Liberal Party’s rocky relationship with multilateralism

‘Covid-19 is a shared crisis—a reminder that many problems are best solved or, indeed, can only be solved through cooperation. At the heart of successful international cooperation is the concept that each country shares, rather than yields, a portion of its sovereign decision-making. And in return, each gets something from it that is greater than their contribution.’

— Australian Foreign Minister Marise Payne, National Security College, 16 June 2020

Australia’s foreign minister has made a wonderful argument for multilateralism.

Stress ‘argument’. Marise Payne does battle for the heart and mind of her party. Payne’s ‘Australia and the world in the time of Covid-19’ confronts the multilateral rejectionism in the Liberal Party over the past 25 years.

The speech is one of Payne’s strongest because it draws on the personality and philosophy that have marked her career. Reflecting her life inside the party, the speech builds a bridge between conservative instincts and liberal principles.

Some might see it as offering mere truisms on multilateralism. Not so in the Liberal Party context. For the Libs, this is a fight about what’s true and the true faith.

Payne does gentle pushback joined to persuasion in support of principle—the way she usually navigates rough party terrain.

The bridge Payne offers the Libs is that national interests can be well served by multilateralism. She is mounting a sophisticated case to counter the rejectionism that John Howard directed at the United Nations and multilateral institutions.

The rejectionist view is that the UN is a distraction from, even an impediment to, Australia’s core foreign policy interest; Australia should engage multilaterally only when the system is doing practical stuff that clearly serves our national interests. A decade ago, I noted that Howard’s phobia about the UN was on full display in his memoir:

There have been two strands of Australian political opinion on the United Nations: Evatt Enthusiasm and Menzies Scepticism. [Robert] Menzies preferred the reassurance of great and powerful friends to the ambition of the world body. John Howard shares that sentiment and has pushed the Menzies position so far that he’s almost created a new category. Howard has gone from scepticism and sniping about the UN to give the Menzies strand a grudging, even rejectionist tinge.

Australia’s second-longest-serving prime minister had a mental tic about the UN that became a rejectionist party mindset. The Lib chant of ‘bilateral good, multilateral bad’ is a strange mix of Oz pragmatism and US neocon rants.

Rejectionism can be risible: during the foreign policy debate for the 2010 election, Julie Bishop made the exasperated point that the Libs weren’t actually arguing that Australia should withdraw from the UN.

The chant oversimplifies Howard. His rejectionism in retirement isn’t an accurate guide to what he did in power. In office, he often embraced multilateral institutions and instruments. His national interest language fed a quiet commitment to internationalist solutions—the same bridge Payne offers the party.

Rejectionism coloured Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s ‘negative globalism’ moment in October in his Lowy Institute foreign policy lecture: ‘We should avoid any reflex towards a negative globalism that coercively seeks to impose a mandate from an often ill-defined borderless global community. And worse still, an unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy. Globalism must facilitate, align and engage, rather than direct and centralise.’

Morrison ordered the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade to do a ‘comprehensive audit of global institutions and rule-making processes where we have the greatest stake’.

As Canberra’s truest multilateralism believer, DFAT looked beyond Morrison’s coercion language to embrace his thought that Australia hasn’t been involved as it should be in setting global standards.

The audit is done and—surprise—the PM’s diagnosis is absolutely correct. And the answer is that Australia needs to do much more on the multilateral stage (there’s a reason DFAT’s art is called diplomacy). Greg Earl offers a characteristic Earlism (astute and dry): the Libs have discovered the joys of positive globalism.

Presenting the audit findings, Payne demonstrates anew that a foreign minister’s most important diplomatic relationship is with her prime minister. She reorients ScoMo’s ‘negative globalism’ to the positive.

The audit, she says, ‘affirmed that multilateral organisations, especially international standard-setting bodies, create rules that are vital to Australia’s security, interests, values and prosperity’.

Most politicians learn by doing. And the pandemic has given the Morrison government deep lessons, in the Payne telling:

Covid-19 has shown that our international order is as important as ever. There is need for reform in several areas, but the pandemic has brought into stark relief the major role of international institutions in addressing and coordinating a global response to a global problem across multiple lines of effort. What has been exposed is the magnitude of the consequences if we fail to ensure these institutions are fit for purpose, accountable to member states, and free from undue influence.

Australia wants global institutions fit for purpose, ‘free from undue influence’, with a strong Indo-Pacific focus. The UN and its agencies must be reformed to ‘improve transparency, accountability and effectiveness’. Oz foreign policy will seek to preserve system fundamentals:

– rules that protect sovereignty, preserve peace, and curb excessive use of power, and enable international trade and investment

– international standards related to health and pandemics, plus areas such as transport and telecommunications that underpin the global economy, which will be vital to a post-Covid-19 economic recovery

– … norms that underpin universal human rights, gender equality and the rule of law.

New rules are needed, Payne said, for ‘critical technologies, including cyber and artificial intelligence, critical minerals and outer space’.

Multilateral rules and norms enlist nations to deal with nasty stuff. The news headlines from the speech focused on the kick at Russia and China for pushing disinformation about the pandemic: ‘[I]t is troubling that some countries are using the pandemic to undermine liberal democracy to promote their own more authoritarian models.

Fighting words unite the party, as Payne points the Libs to the golden goals of globalism and the valuable norms of multilateralism.

The Libs know they want rules: the 2016 defence white paper referred to ‘rules’ 60 times—45 of them in the formulation ‘rules-based global order’. The answer to the rejectionists lies in the ambitious complexities of that simple phrase: a rules-based global order.

Deglobalisation and its discontents

Increasing global interconnection—growing cross-border flows of people, goods, energy, emails, television and radio signals, data, drugs, terrorists, weapons, carbon dioxide, food, dollars and, of course, viruses (both biological and software)—has been a defining feature of the modern world. The question, though, is whether globalisation has peaked—and, if so, whether what follows is to be welcomed or resisted.

People and goods have always moved around the world, be it over the high seas or on the ancient Silk Road. What is different today is the scale, speed and variety of these flows. Their consequences are already significant and are becoming more so. If great-power rivalries, and how well or poorly they were managed, shaped much of the past few centuries, the current era is more likely to be defined by global challenges and how well or poorly the world addresses them.

Globalisation has been driven by modern technology, from jet planes and satellites to the internet, as well as by policies that opened up markets to trade and investment. Both stability and instability have promoted it, the former by enabling business and tourism, and the latter by fuelling flows of migrants and refugees. For the most part, governments viewed globalisation as a net benefit and were generally content to let it run its course.

But globalisation, as is clear from its various forms, can be destructive as well as constructive, and in recent years, a growing number of governments and people around the world have come to view it as a net risk. When it comes to climate change, pandemics and terrorism—all exacerbated by globalisation—it’s not hard to see why. But in other areas, the increased opposition to globalisation is more complicated.

Consider trade, which can provide better-paying jobs in export-oriented factories or farms, as well as consumer goods that are often higher quality or less expensive, or both. But one country’s exports are another country’s imports, and imports can displace domestic producers and cause unemployment. As a result, opposition to free trade has grown, leading to calls for ‘fair’ or ‘managed’ trade in which the government plays a larger role to limit imports, promote exports, or both.

A similar trend is under way when it comes to information. The free flow of ideas might seem to be a good thing, but it turns out that authoritarian governments regard it as a threat to their political control. The internet is being balkanised into a ‘splinternet.’ China’s ‘Great Firewall’ led the way, blocking access to online news and other ‘suspect’ websites and ensuring that Chinese users cannot access content deemed politically sensitive.

The ability of people to cross borders in large numbers was traditionally accepted or even welcomed. Immigrants in the United States have been the foundation of the country’s economic, political, scientific and cultural success. But now many Americans view immigrants warily, seeing them as a threat to jobs, public health, security or culture. A similar shift has taken place in much of Europe.

All of this adds up to a shift towards deglobalisation—a process that has both costs and limits. Blocking imports can cause inflation, reduce consumer choice, slow the pace of innovation and lead others to retaliate with import restrictions of their own. Blocking ideas can stifle creativity and impede the correction of policy mistakes. And blocking people at the border can rob a society of talent and needed workers, while contributing to the misery of those forced to flee as a result of political or religious persecution, war, gangs or hunger.

Deglobalisation is also bound to fail in certain policy areas. Borders are not barriers to climate change. Closing them does not shield a country from the risks of disease as citizens can easily return home with an infection. Sovereignty guarantees neither security nor prosperity.

There is a better way to respond to the challenges and threats of globalisation. Effective collective action can meet the risks of disease, climate change, cyberattacks, nuclear proliferation and terrorism. No single country on its own can make itself secure; unilateralism is not a serious policy path.

This is what global governance (not government) is all about. The form of the arrangements can and should be tailored to the threat and to those willing and able to cooperate, but there is no viable alternative to multilateralism.

Isolationism is not a strategy. Nor is denial. We can stick our heads in the sand like the proverbial ostrich, but the tide will come in and drown us. Globalisation is a reality that cannot be ignored or wished away. The only choice is how best to respond.

The critics are right in one sense: globalisation brings problems as well as benefits. Societies need to become more resilient. Workers require access to education and training throughout their lives, so they are ready for the jobs that emerge as new technologies or foreign competition eliminate their current ones. Societies need to be better prepared to cope with inevitable pandemics or extreme weather events caused by climate change.

Globalisation is not a problem for governments to solve; it is a reality to be managed. To embrace wholesale deglobalisation is to choose a false cure—and one much worse than the disease.