Saturday Extra

Prime Minister Kevin Rudd has returned home today after a pretty eventful overseas trip. The images from China in the last few days will take some time to digest fully -- here and elsewhere -- because it would seem as if a significant shift in focus is underway in terms of how Australia will be seeing itself in the world.

Transcript

This transcript was typed from a recording of the program. The ABC cannot guarantee its complete accuracy because of the possibility of mishearing and occasional difficulty in identifying speakers.

Geraldine Doogue: Well our prime minister, Kevin Rudd, arrives home today after a pretty eventful two weeks abroad.

The images from China especially will take some time to digest fully, here and elsewhere. In diplomacy, images, words and actions are all equally important, but it would seem as if a significant shift in focus is under way in terms of how Australia will be seeing itself in the world, and I suppose it raises the inevitable question: will Kevin Rudd run ahead of the population in how he positions this country, as Paul Keating was accused of doing, or does his apparent confidence actually run in parallel with some genuine building sense of ourselves as a useful international citizen; or is he trying to lead us in that direction?

Well this morning we want to take a slightly different angle on all of this, to flesh out whether this is middle power activism in practical form, and where it takes us next.

Dr Carl Ungerer has been specialising in international strategic assessment for more than 20 years now. He's now director of the National Security Project at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, and he joins me now. Good morning.

Carl Ungerer: Good morning, Geraldine.

Geraldine Doogue: Is this middle power activism as you imagined it, Carl?

Carl Ungerer: Well it's certainly a fresh new approach to diplomacy when we have the Prime Minister overseas for a lengthy period of time raising some quite difficult issues in each of the capitals he visited. He talks about the withdrawal of Australian troops from Iraq with the Americans; he went to Bucharest to speak about a better strategic cohesion with the campaign in Afghanistan with NATO; and some difficult human rights issues in China. So it's definitely a more proactive agenda, one that is taking Australian interests to the world stage, and in that sense I do think it is about a more active middle power approach to international affairs.

Geraldine Doogue: And you didn't mention the Pakistan development last night too. I watched that, and again the imagery was very strong of a very sure-footed person and prime minister, really wading in to this vexed area of Afghanistan and Pakistan, and offering free character analysis of where the Pakistanis haven't quite pulled their weight. Of course we've got troops in Afghanistan, so it's a clear national interest there.

Carl Ungerer: Oh, absolutely. And I think again demonstrates that Kevin's long engagement with international diplomacy, his depth of knowledge of these issues, is a reservoir upon which he can draw very quickly in answering a lot of these questions. So he's looked at each of these questions from Pakistan to Afghanistan; he's visited these places. So he knows the intricacies of many of the debates, and therefore is able to respond very quickly when these sorts of things are raised.

Geraldine Doogue: Yes. Dare I say it's as if he's relaxed and comfortable straight away, he doesn't have to settle in, which most Australian prime ministers generally do. And just judging from quite a lot of the verdicts I've heard around the place, people are not used to this.

Carl Ungerer: I think that's right. I remember back in the first six months of the Howard government when relations with China were deeply strained and difficult, over the cancellation of the DIFF scheme, and there was a degree of cautiousness and hesitancy about the diplomacy around that. I think, as I said, the Prime Minister's deep knowledge of and interest in international affairs will deliver an early confidence and ability to engage very quickly with many of these issues and I think that is a contrast with the past.

Geraldine Doogue: What is the history of this phrase 'middle power activism'?

Carl Ungerer: Ah. I'm glad you asked that, Geraldine.

Geraldine Doogue: Well it's just that it's been tossed around but nobody seems to delve into it.

Carl Ungerer: Well they have. I mean the concept goes back to the immediate postwar period when Doc Evatt, who was then the external affairs minister, was on his way to the San Francisco conference in 1945 which created the UN, and he was looking around, as were the Canadians and the South Africans and the New Zealanders indeed, for a way of elevating the status of those Dominion powers that had fought on the side of the allies, who wanted a greater say in international affairs, and how the world was to be run after the Second World War. They did not want -- and indeed actively argued against -- some sort of condominium between the great powers in running the world.

Now as we now know, the UN Security Council and the structures that were created were reflective of the broad power division between the great powers like the United States, the Soviet Union, China, Britain, and the others. That said, Evatt's activism at the San Francisco conference delivered a number of important benefits to Australia. He had several changes made to the UN Charter, for example, he was appointed the very first president of the UN General Assembly, many of the changes that occurred in Australian diplomacy in the immediate postwar period came about as a result of articulating this more active, more vibrant engagement with diplomatic affairs.

That contrasted very deeply, very significantly I think, with the entire period between Federation and 1945 when Australia really didn't have a foreign policy, and if we did, it was simply moulded upon that of what London thought at the time. We didn't have a separate ministry of external affairs for example until 1935. So this articulation and promotion of an active voice in international affairs was an important part of Evatt's diplomacy. And the irony about the -- I'll make this point, Geraldine -- the interesting thing about middle power diplomacy is that every single government since 1945 in Australia has characterised Australia as a middle power in the international system. Every single government bar one, and that was John Howard's, because when John Howard and Alexander Downer came to power in March of 1996, they needed to differentiate themselves from the previous Labor government. And one way they saw they could do that, and to shift our diplomacy away from what they thought was squishy multilateralism, back to sort of hard-headed realism and bilateralism, was to denounce the previous Hawke and Keating governments' use of active middle power diplomacy.

So this idea had a long gestation in Australian diplomacy. It's probably the one concept that has tied almost all of our postwar diplomacy together, and it's a way of articulating a view of the world, a promotion of interests which says that Australia cannot sit on its hands, Australia is not a big enough country to have others bend to our will simply by the force of arms or power. So we need to be out there in the international system, articulating our case, arguing our position, persuading others that they should follow a course of action that is in our interests.

Geraldine Doogue: So in other words, you make up for -- your clout comes from your capacity to argue your case as much as the force you can wield, or even threaten.

Carl Ungerer: Absolutely.

Geraldine Doogue: Or is it also the liaisons, the alliances you make with others, the way in which you twin yourself with others?

Carl Ungerer: Both of those, Geraldine. So persuasion and soft power becoming a critically important tool for a country the size of Australia and where we are geographically located. No-one's going to pursue Australians' interests for us, we have to do that ourselves.

Geraldine Doogue: I can see the gains, obviously; what are the possible risks of a policy or a sensibility like this? Can you over-reach and make an idiot of yourself?

Carl Ungerer: Well I think that's very true, you can over-reach. If you go for grand constructs and you simply make this symbolic rather than substantive, you can over-reach and you can end up with a diplomacy that is just all talk and no action. So I think the important thing here -- and as Gareth Evans used to talk about -- it's the ability to find niche issues that are of direct relevance to Australia, upon which we can have some bearing, where we can take the lead in a particular issue and achieve an outcome. So it's very much about the ends. If middle power diplomacy and being active and promoting your interests on the international stage forcefully is the means by which you do this, the ends are what you're trying to achieve, the political outcome you're trying to get.

In the 1980s and 1990s there were a couple of classic examples of the application of this type of diplomacy to achieve political outcomes. The Australia Group in the mid-1980s which dealt with chemical and -- originally biological, but later chemical weapons proliferation; the Cambodian peace initiative in the early 1990s which finally settled after decades of internal and external conflicting in Cambodia, a peace settlement that delivered a democratic outcome in that country. The Chemical Weapons Convention and the ability to bring all the countries of our region in South East Asia on board to the Chemical Weapons Convention so that we never see those sorts of weapons used in our region again. It was those sorts of examples, where you find a niche issue where you can deliver an outcome, and you pursue it actively.

Geraldine Doogue: I suppose the risk is, that you could become a true believer in this, and I was thinking of the Tony Blair analogy; that a man not dissimilar, it seems to me, to Kevin Rudd, a man of strong beliefs, highly intelligent, very adaptive, with a strong sense that you occupy your place on the world stage not just to do nothing. And we know what happened in Iraq, the jury's still out, but he took Britain into that very vexed issue and probably lost his job, frankly, as a result of it, one way and the other. So is caution still required?

Carl Ungerer: Absolutely, and none of this is to suggest that power is no longer an important element of your middle power diplomacy. The strength that Australia brings to a debate is critical in terms of the sorts of outcomes we can achieve, and no-one is pretending that power politics is not still the bedrock of international relations. It is. But it's also -- I think in the United States, the debate has moved on as well. It's about the application of soft power as well as hard power, and in doing so I think this at least conceptualising your approach to international affairs, is a first step towards achieving some of those sorts of outcome.

Geraldine Doogue: Thank you very much indeed. That's a very interesting analysis; I appreciate your time.

Carl Ungerer: You're welcome, Geraldine, nice to talk to you.

Geraldine Doogue: Dr Carl Ungerer, who is director of the National Security Project at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute in Canberra. And I'd be extremely interested to hear Saturday Extra's listeners' views on this -- I think maybe it's not even so subtle a shift, I think it's a quite definite shift in the way we're going to project ourselves on to the world stage, and whether something is asked of each one of us as well. So you just, you know, the usual thing, go to the website and you can see how you can either leave your thoughts on the guest book or contact us directly.

Guests

Dr Carl Ungerer
Director, National Security Project, Australian Strategic Policy Institute, Canberra.

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