Newsletter: Week 16, 2023
The pains of presenting online, and weird and complex political relationships undermining Australia's Liberal Party
Communication Is Key
This week I gave a talk and had a Q&A session with a group of Indian students from the India-UK Youth Forum. The forum had organised a series of speakers to discuss some of the current pressing concerns in global affairs. They had asked me to speak to the subject of AUKUS – the trilateral agreement between Australia, the United States, and the United Kingdom. The centrepiece of which will be a fleet of eight nuclear-powered submarines for the Australian Navy.
In my talk I outlined the history of the past decade of Australia’s attempt to secure a new submarine fleet, the current strategic landscape that drove Australia’s thinking, how the agreement will affect Australia’s regional relationships, some of the problems around the agreement, and what Australia’s ambitions are into the future.
The Q&A session was a great way to chat with some really smart and curious emerging scholars. With it having been seven years since I was last in India it was also a great opportunity to connect with people in India. For a while in the 2000s and early 2010s I was travelling to India almost annually, often staying there for months at a time. Whenever I get the chance to meet with and talk to Indians it provides me with a strong sense of why I have been drawn to the country, and how I miss it.
Admittedly though, I find talks like this personally very difficult. Over the past few years I have be presenting on a number of topics in online forums, and I feel I am getting better at it. However, from the moment I wake up in the morning my primary objective is to open my mouth as little as possible. Under the right conditions I can easily go a week without saying anything at all (thank you supermarket self-serve checkouts!), and I feel no sense of social or emotional discomfort with this.
Yet I recognise there is a conflict here. Both politics and international relations are sociable fields that are centred on communication as a fundamental necessity. I suspect my knowledge of the world is weakened by my instinct to avoid this very basic form of human interaction. To be a better writer I may need to start talking – or maybe conversing is the better term – a lot more.
Strained Bedfellows
I had a second item that I wished to write about for this week’s newsletter, but it morphed into something else. There is a lot of debate in Australia at the moment about how the Liberal Party – and in particular its leader Peter Dutton – is seemingly behaving is ways that are counter to their interests. In recent years I’ve found the behaviour of conservative parties to be fascinating – in a bad way – as one of the major strands of our increasing global insecurity. My previous essay The Failure of Fusionism sought to get to the “why” of this behaviour.
Yet there’s an extra element here, which I started contemplating this week – the psychological rewards of losing. Why people want to lose and what they gain emotionally from this. This is part of our collective movement towards a post-rational form of politics.
However, there is another more rational explanation for the Liberal Party’s recent behaviour and it has to do with the complex nature of the Coalition – which in Australia is the permanent alliance between four political parties, although inside the federal parliament they function as two. I think what we are seeing now is what happens when the Liberal Party is led by someone not entirely from the Liberal Party.
This may seem very confusing to any non-Australians reading this, but as a member the Liberal National Party of Queensland who now finds himself leading the federal Liberal Party, Peter Dutton is simply running the Liberal Party in the interests of the Liberal National Party. That is, he’s not really concerned with how the Liberal Party fares federally, he is simply concerned with the Liberal National Party winning the next Queensland state election. And certain issues and positions play better in Queensland than they do in other areas of the country.
Through this lens his behaviour is a rational attempt to advance the interests of his own political party. But it’s an extraordinary situation, and one I don’t think the Liberal Party contemplated and comprehended when in Queensland in 2008 the Liberal and National parties fully merged into a single entity with its own constitution and distinct interests. No Queenslander had ever led the party before. But having lost many of its previously safe seats in Melbourne and Sydney where the party would usually place its “leadership material” they are now lacking options.
An addendum to this is that I’m currently contemplating how I take this Substack forward. I’m rather time poor at the moment and have a backlog of half-finished pieces that I wish to complete. Often I’ll get an idea for the newsletter but realise it’s a bigger idea that requires much more time and effort. These are the things I would prefer to write about, but as more considered pieces, and I currently can’t find the time. However, I’ll be returning to Sweden in a few weeks for most of the rest of the year and once there I’ll be able to reassess my time and see what I can and can’t dedicate myself to. I hope to maintain weekly posts, but these do pull my attention away from the more in depth writing I wish to do.
This Week’s Reading
The Importance of Augmenting AUKUS
Melissa Conley Tyler & Grant Wyeth
“Building a network of allies and friends that collectively seek to protect and enhance mutually beneficial rules and norms is the ideal path for Australia’s security, yet, obviously, the world is far too complex (and occasionally turbulent) for this to be its sole guarantee. Military might is often a necessary requirement to provide back-up to rules and norms, to make the cost of disruption too great to consider. In Wong’s words, this means “A balance where strategic reassurance through diplomacy is supported by military deterrence.”
The purpose of AUKUS is to provide this strong signal that Australia is willing to invest in military capability to deter aggression and coercion. However, as is the perpetual problem of international relations, this runs the risk of heightening the security dilemma of the Indo-Pacific – encouraging other states to also invest heavily in military hardware and increasing the risks of catastrophic misinterpretation.
Which is why to augment AUKUS Australia requires a keen investment in its other tools of statecraft that can mitigate the risks of this security dilemma. Wong explained that “our job is to lower the heat on any potential conflict, while increasing pressure on others to do the same… we do that in our diplomacy.”
AUKUS is Good for Australian Diplomacy
Hugh Piper - Australian Outlook
“While the immediate reaction to the March 2023 AUKUS announcement throughout the region has been mixed, Australia must focus on the longer-term shift in perceptions. It is hard to imagine a clearer sign of intent than the SSNs that Australia sees its own security as deeply enmeshed with that of its neighbours – in particular, that Australia wants to curb and respond to the worst excesses of Chinese aggression throughout the region, and not just when they directly threaten Australia. This makes Australia a more valuable and desirable full spectrum partner for any country that wants to avoid a region dominated by China’s assertiveness. As others have argued too, AUKUS will help anchor US (and British) power and presence in the Indo-Pacific, undeniably in Australia’s interests.
Thinking about AUKUS in zero sum terms, and as a boost to defence at the expense of other arms of Australian statecraft, misunderstands the cross-cutting effects of greater comprehensive national power. The real challenge is to recognise and grasp the benefits of an iron fist within the velvet glove of Australian statecraft: creatively and consistently leveraging the effects of greater military power across the full gamut of international policy.”
Is Asian Studies And ‘Asia literacy’ In Crisis In Australia And What Is Its Future?
Melissa Crouch - Melbourne Asia Review
“At the moment, the federal government doesn’t have a policy and there is no strategy. There is no coordination across federal and state levels, across government and university sectors, across primary schools and high schools and universities in terms of Asia literacy. That’s where a really big gap lies and it’s in contrast to the past. If we look back several decades, we did have a federal policy on Asia literacy. There were enormous efforts to coordinate and put in place structures that make it easier for students to take up a language and to advance their language skills. At the same time, the current government in Australia, which is obviously relatively new in office, has already made indications that it sees Asia as central in a range of ways including economically, but that it also recognises the gap that exists on Asia literacy and that they plan to do something in that space.”
How to Survive a Great-Power Competition
Huong Le Thu - Foreign Affairs
“But unlike in the Cold War, when Southeast Asia was mostly poor, newly independent, and weak, today’s ASEAN states are largely middle income and can be influential—as the region’s diplomacy illustrates. In the years to come, these countries’ economies will continue to grow, as should their populations. Both increases will give the region dividends that Beijing and Washington lack: China’s population is contracting, and the United States is struggling with domestic political polarisation that could hamper its growth and leadership capacities. The two competitors may therefore find that their relative power will decline in the decades ahead—a trend that will narrow the power disparity between these two states and the ASEAN countries.
In fact, the coming decades could give Southeast Asia distinct global advantages. The International Monetary Fund has projected that the region will have some of the highest levels of economic expansion in the world over the next several years. If there is a global recession, Southeast Asia could become the growth engine for the broader Asia-Pacific region. Indonesia and Vietnam, Southeast Asia’s biggest and third-biggest states by population, respectively, are on pace to become high-income countries in the next two decades. Southeast Asia, then, could soon have substantial international influence.”
Matias Spektor - Foreign Affairs
“Yet hedgers from the global South are optimistic about multipolarity for reasons beyond history. One prevalent belief is that a diffusion of power will give developing countries more breathing space since intense security competition among the great powers will make it harder for the strong to impose their will on weaker states. Another common view is that rivalries among the great powers will make them more responsive to appeals for justice and equality from smaller states, since the strong must win the global South’s favor to compete with their rivals. A third view is that diffuse power will open opportunities for small states to voice their opinions in international institutions, such as the United Nations and the World Trade Organization. When they do, global institutions will begin to reflect a wider range of perspectives, increasing the overall legitimacy of these international bodies.
But such optimism about the prospects of a multipolar order may be unwarranted. Security competition in multipolar systems may push the great powers to create stricter hierarchies around them, limiting chances for smaller states to express their preferences. For example, the United States has cajoled many countries into pushing back against Chinese influence, shrinking their freedom of action. Furthermore, the great powers might act in concert to repress calls for justice and equality from smaller countries, as the so-called Holy Alliance among Austria, Prussia, and Russia did in the nineteenth century, when it quashed nationalist and liberal grassroots movements across Europe. In the past, great powers have maintained their authority by excluding and imposing their will on others. The victors of World War II, for example, appointed themselves as the five permanent members of the UN Security Council, cementing their power within multilateral institutions. It is far from obvious that developing countries will fare better under multipolarity than they did under previous global orders.”
Why Europe And America Will Always Think Differently On China
Janan Ganesh - Financial Times
“Then there is the immutable fact of distance. If, in the end, even the most awkward nations in western Europe clung to the US during the cold war, it was because the Soviets were too near a problem to risk doing anything else. That isn’t true of China.
Follow this thought a bit further, and you realise that even the US has a claim as an Asian country. This is not just a matter of several thousand miles of Pacific coastline. Or the demographic trends that suggest Asian-Americans will pass Hispanics as the largest immigrant group in the US by mid-century. It is sheer habit. Whether we date it from the opening of Japan (1853) or the Spanish-American War (1898), the US was a military factor in Asia long before it ever was in Europe. During the “isolationist” 1930s, it was in possession of the Philippines. Japan alone accounts for 31 per cent of active-duty US troops stationed abroad. California, the most important cultural, technological and military state, is Asia-facing in more than just the physical sense.
The US feels every power shift in Asia with the sensitivity of, if not quite a local, then something far more than a remote trading partner and security guarantor. This level of psychic investment in that “theatre” does not exist among the governing class of any European capital.”
What Republicans Are Doing Is ‘One of the Odd and Scary Things About American Politics’
Thomas B. Edsall – New York Times
“Robert Lieberman, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins and a co-author, with Suzanne Mettler, a political scientist at Cornell, of “Four Threats: The Recurring Crises of American Democracy,” argued in an email that “Democratic procedure is not a threat to democracy per se, but it is fair to say that it has vulnerabilities.”
“Democratic procedures,” he continued, “are intended to provide a means to hold leaders accountable,” which include:
Horizontal accountability — institutional checks and balances that enable public officials to hold each other accountable; and vertical accountability — ways for citizens to hold public officials accountable, such as elections or popular mobilisation. In a well-functioning democracy, both kinds of accountability work together to limit the concentration of power in the hands of a single party or individual.
But Lieberman pointed out, “Democratic procedures can also enable would-be authoritarians to undermine both kinds of accountability under the cloak of democratic legitimacy.”
Democratic regimes, he wrote, “are less likely than in the past to be overthrown in a sudden violent burst, as in an overt coup d’état. Instead, democracies are more frequently degraded by leaders who use apparently legal, democratic means to hollow out democratic accountability.”
William Davies - The New Statesman
“Rawls’s communitarian critics focused on one aspect of his liberalism: the abstract, unencumbered model of the reasoning self at the heart of A Theory of Justice. For Rawls, the way to establish the norms of justice is to ask what kind of society we would choose to live in if we had no idea of our economic or political position in it (the thought experiment known as the “veil of ignorance”). But for communitarians, this is to ignore the very things that make us who we are and lead us to engage in politics in the first place: our beliefs, traditions, identities and social bonds. These may be accidents of history and culture, but they are also indispensable components of solidarity, which can tip into something uglier when they become too exclusionary. Rawls invites us to consider politics from the perspective of a disembodied observer; communitarians insist that it is only through embodied, lived social experience that ethical values exist at all.
It would be simplistic to claim that the communitarians have ‘’won’’ this argument. However, liberalism finds itself deadlocked and beleaguered facing political movements that challenge the possibility of universal principles of justice. What Taylor termed the “politics of recognition” (whereby individuals and groups demand to have their particular identities and differences affirmed by others) has stretched liberalism almost to breaking point, as events such as Brexit attest. On both left and right, “liberal” has become an insult, aimed at anyone who strives for consensus or objectivity in public life, as if to do so is merely a form of hubris born of cultural privilege.
In many cases, liberalism has been swallowed whole by communitarian logic, such that the defence of “liberalism’’ has itself become (or become represented as) a kind of identity-based demand for recognition. David Goodhart’s distinction between “anywheres” and “somewheres” turns liberals into just another tribe, while ongoing Conservative attacks on “activist lawyers”, “citizens of nowhere” and “north Londoners” adds a whiff of anti-Semitism to the critique. If A Theory of Justice lacked any clear sense of an enemy in 1971, the same can’t be said in 2023. How to defend liberalism in the age of Suella Braverman, Elon Musk, Facebook, millennial socialism, Viktor Orbán, Brexit and so on?”
Sarath K. Ganji - Journal Of Democracy
“Since the 1970s, the international human-rights movement has used “naming and shaming” to put pressure on abusive governments and their surrogates. This approach, however, often relies on institutions (such as the Helsinki Accords and the Council of Europe) that are increasingly subject to autocratic capture. To sidestep this problem, Sport for Rights appealed instead to IOC principles regarding sports—namely, that they should help to develop humankind and to preserve human dignity—in order to highlight Aliyev’s excesses and shame his collaborators.
As Garry Kasparov, Russian dissident and chair of the Human Rights Foundation, observes, sportswashing today is a “step up” from how dictators used to buy influence—it has become a way for them, through money, to “infiltrate societies in free countries.” Autocrats now not only seek to stage prestigious sporting events at home but also pursue opportunities abroad, including in open societies. State-owned enterprises and state-run or -affiliated organisations help with this.”
‘I Trained To Be An Engineer … Now I Am A Pickle Seller’. What Does Migration Do To A Wife?
Farjana Mahbuba - The Conversation
“I see a pattern emerging. A pattern where a migrant woman’s financial misery starts at day one of her journey to Australia; the day she steps into an unknown world, where her only bridge to this world is her husband. A husband who himself is often extremely busy earning enough money to support his two families; the new family in Australia, and his own parents and siblings back home in Bangladesh.
Intentionally or not, the wife is left alone, isolated and uninformed. She gets lost. And the impact lasts for many years to come. Financially and otherwise, she gradually becomes totally dependent on her husband.
For some couples, it does not take long for the husband to turn his wife’s financial dependency into a tool to control her mobility. Spousal financial abuse thrives when one partner starts manipulating, deceiving or coercing to create or maintain the other partner’s dependency.”