Sixth Annual Hawke Lecture
Waging War and Making Peace
Delivered by The Hon Gareth Evans AO, QCPresident, International Crisis Group
Thursday 18 September 2003 at the Adelaide Town Hall
"Faced with an imperfect world we can raise our sights or lower them. We can argue for rules and principles, or accept that might is right. We can settle for national interest meaning just our own security and prosperity, or argue that it must also include being a good international citizen. We can turn our back on our neighbours, or work cooperatively with them for a better world. The choice is ours, and there's a lot hanging on it."
Foreign Ministers and Prime Ministers
Whenever former Foreign Ministers get together to relive what they like
to think of as their glory days - as, being a clubbable bunch, they do from
time to time - some themes invariably recur in the conversations. One is the
constraint imposed on intelligent foreign policy making by the pressures and
vagaries of domestic politics. And another, not unrelated, is the
frustration created for intelligent foreign ministers by their less than
scintillatingly brilliant bosses - prime ministers or presidents as the case
may be.
What makes me a little distinctive in these gatherings is that, in relation
to my own bosses, I have trouble finding something to grumble about. I had
the pleasure of being foreign minister for nearly eight years under two
prime ministers who both - despite their totally different, to put it
gently, managerial and personal styles - had a tremendous instinct for the
process of foreign relations; a great sense of what could and should be
done; a great willingness to lead the public rather than being constantly
riven by anxiety as to what the existing domestic ideas market could bear;
and an absolute intolerance of any appeal to lowest common denominator
community prejudices for political gain.
And better still, while very much wanting to be involved in designing and
selling the big picture, they were willing, by and large, to leave the
brushwork to me.
My years as Bob Hawke’s Foreign Minister, from 1988 to 1991, coincided with
the end of the Cold War, the remaking of much of the architecture of
international relations, and a sense of real hope internationally that
through newly possible cooperative strategies the world could be made a
better and more peaceful place. Those few years were, quite simply, the most
stimulating and productive of my professional life, and they were made so by
the wonderfully strong and supportive relationship I had with Bob Hawke.
These were the years in which saw, among much else (including the first Gulf
War), the initiation of the successful peace plan for Cambodia; the creation
of APEC and the ASEAN Regional Forum as major Asia Pacific economic and
security policy dialogue bodies; the completion, in which Australia played a
critical role, of the Chemical Weapons Convention; the emergence of
Australia as a leading voice on UN reform issues, and a leading campaigner,
through the Commonwealth and beyond, on financial sanctions against South
Africa’s apartheid regime.
There was also the achievement of a ban on mining and oil drilling in the
Antarctic, which in this case I have to acknowledge, although it happened on
my watch, owes just about everything to Bob Hawke and practically nothing at
all to me, not only because he personally conducted most of the diplomacy,
but since I told him at the outset it seemed like a lost cause - something
of which he has been reminding me ever since!
All heads of government have particular initiatives or positions they want
to stamp indelibly as their own, and foreign ministers - like their domestic
counterparts - have to know their place when these come along. But the trick
is to accommodate this within a relationship which is not subservient, but
one of confident give and take, in which there is strong mutual respect
between leader and minister, and a willingness by each to temper one’s more
exuberant enthusiasms - at least sometimes - in the light of advice by the
other.
Above all it is crucial that there be totally open and regular
communication, not only on particular issues or crises as they unfolded, but
on larger strategy issues, to ensure that each knows the other’s thinking,
and to ensure that - most of the time, anyway - neither springs surprises
on the other.
I had exactly that kind of relationship with Bob Hawke, and I will be
forever grateful to him for it. He was a brilliant prime minister, in
foreign policy as in so much else, and I am delighted to have been invited
to deliver this Annual Hawke Lecture in his honour.
A World at Risk
Looking around the world more than a decade later, it’s a more frightening
place than it seemed then - and in fact more frightening than it has been
for as long as I can remember.
This is not because the number of conflicts, between and within states, is
increasing: in fact, looking at year by year trends[1], the converse is the
case.
Nor is it because the number of terrorist incidents is increasing: on the
contrary, it is declining.
Nor is it because the overall number of people being killed in battle or by
terrorist incidents is increasing: although it may not, again, feel like it,
that figure too is in trend decline. As bad as conflict and mass violence
continues to be, it is significantly less bad than it was a decade ago.
Nor is it because there are no grounds for hope that new conflicts can be
prevented or old ones resolved. On the contrary, the overall figures speak
for themselves, and I am confident that the work we do across five
continents in this respect at the International Crisis Group really does
make a difference.[2]
The problem is, rather, that the security problems we have left are very big
ones indeed; that they are, if anything, growing; and that our capacity to
deal with them is, if anything, diminishing. There are some big things going
wrong, both in terms of risks on the ground and in the way in which we as a
global community are dealing with them.
In terms of risks, there are three generic ones that are alarming most
people. The first is the growth of international terrorist networks with
deeply frightening agendas, and deeply frightening capacity - with the risk
extending not only to the home territory of the major Western powers and
their allies, but to soft Western targets in non-Western locations, as
Australians hardly need to be reminded after Bali.
The second is the deterioration of the effectiveness of the treaty regimes
trying to achieve the non-proliferation of weapons of mass destruction, none
more important or effective until now than the Nuclear Non-Proliferation
Treaty (NPT), which confounded the predictions of the 1960s that there would
be by now 20-30 nuclear weapons states - but which is looking now
desperately fragile.
And the third is the continuing existence, and emergence, right across the
arc of instability from West Africa to East Asia of too many fragile,
collapsed and internally warring states, where as a result of government
action, inaction, incapacity or huge internal division there is a major
threat to the country’s own people - or a threat to others through the
export from these countries of terrorism, drugs, other crime, fleeing
refugees, health pandemics or environmental catastrophe.
In terms of the way in which we as a global community are dealing with these
various risks, there are also three big things going wrong. There’s a
weakening of confidence in the rules that are supposed to govern the use of
force.
There’s a weakening of confidence in the institutions making such rules as
there are and trying to enforce them.
And there is little or no consensus about the strategies that are needed to
deal with the great risks of terrorism, weapons of mass destruction
proliferation, and the threats - both internal and external - posed by
fragile, collapsed and warring states.
How each of these problems, particularly the first, should be addressed by
the global community will be my central theme in this lecture, and I will
conclude by drawing out some of the implications, as I see them, for
Australian foreign policy.
I am well aware that any single one of these issues would take an evening in
itself to begin to seriously explore. I’m also aware that you’re aware that
I have a certain tendency to, shall we say, thoroughness on these occasions.
So will you no doubt be relieved to hear that I’m only proposing to offer
you a platter of hors d’oeuvres on these matters, not la grande bouffe.
A Lopsided World
By way of setting the table, it’s worth saying at the outset that all the
problems I want to address are affected one way or another by the particular
global context in which they arise, which is, in short, the most lopsided
global power balance that the world has ever known.
The military budget numbers alone make the point. Before even getting to
Iraq - which continues to cost the Pentagon nearly $US 1 billion a week -
U.S. defence expenditure will come in this year this year at nearly $400
billion, just about as much as the whole rest of the world together. In
percentage terms, this is over 40 per cent of global defence expenditure,
and eight times the U.S. share of global population. And in dollar terms,
this is higher than the combined total of Britain, France, Germany and the
entire European Union; and China; and Russia - with the seven ‘rogue states’
identified by the Pentagon as its most likely adversaries (including Iran
and North Korea) thrown in as well.
The United States is, quite simply - militarily, economically, and
culturally as well - the biggest dog that has ever turned up on the global
block. And its behaviour as such - actual, perceived, anticipated, feared or
imagined - is the catalyst in turn for a great many reactions by other
countries and peoples, both rational and some irrational, that bear upon
global, regional and national security.
At one end of the spectrum U.S. dominance is the catalyst for rage and
hatred. This may not be all that different to the hostility which has always
been expressed toward the top dog of the day, from the Romans to the
Ottomans to the Imperial British, but no less real for that.
At the other end of the spectrum it’s the catalyst for what might be called,
under present management, the Australian crawl: responding to the new power
imbalance with uncritical devotion to its source, passing up no opportunity
along the way to earn, as Phillip Adams was the first to wickedly put it,
Frequent Fighter Points.[3]
And somewhere in the middle it’s the catalyst for efforts to create
‘counterweights’ to US power. But even on the most favourable assumptions,
it would take decades for either China or the EU to catch up economically,
let alone militarily, with the US. In the meantime France’s aspirations to
play that role by itself alone have about as much persuasive power as the
Black Knight in Monty Python - bellowing, you will recall, “I’ll do you for
that!” as each of his limbs is successively hacked away.
Much of the hostility expressed toward U.S. is obviously just inherent in
the country’s size and clout, and the disappearance of the Soviet Union as a
power balancer. Some of it has to do with routine policy disagreements. But
some of it also has had to do with certain other behaviour patterns, real or
perceived, and not just under this administration, which have often made the
U.S., even to those who love it most, a rather irritating brand of hegemon.
Part of the charge sheet here is good old-fashioned hypocrisy - or, as I’ve
recently heard it put more elegantly - ‘talking like Athens, but behaving
like Sparta’. More prosaically, there’s the suggestion one hears of a
national problem with Attention Deficit Disorder (with one Korean official
recently describing Washington as like an excitable surgeon who leaps around
the theatre slicing open the next patient before he’s sewn up the first,
while at the same time gazing enthusiastically at the next emergency room
arrival).
Other unkind variations I hear on this theme are various sorts of Amnesia
(particularly in remembering which current enemies used to be friends),
Chronic Fatigue Syndrome (a certain recurring tiredness when it comes to
post-war peacebuilding, or responding to mass killing in small countries far
away), and even Narcissistic Personality Disorder (a condition which
involves, among other unmentionable things, the subject being not quite as
strongly blessed with the gift of empathy as he expects others to be).
All unfair, no doubt, but all part of the backdrop to some very big
controversies about some very serious issues indeed.
Restoring Confidence in Rules
In terms of the way in which we are handling the world’s security
challenges, the first of the major problems I described, and the one on
which I want to spend most time, is a weakening of confidence in the rules
governing the use of force - a growth of cynicism and scepticism about those
rules. The problem is, in short, that states - under the guise of acting to
meet threats of one kind or another - are making up rules as they go along,
going to war when they should not be, and not going to war when they should.
There are three different situations here we have to distentangle: the right
to take military action against another state in self-defence; the right to
take such action against a state posing a threat to any other states or
individuals outside its borders; and the right to intervene against a state
when the only threat involved is to those within it.
Self Defence. On self defence, Article 51 of the UN Charter clearly
acknowledges that there is an ‘inherent right of individual or collective
self-defence if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United
Nations’ - which can be exercised without prior UN Security Council
authorisation (as it was by the US, without much argument from anyone, in
Afghanistan after 9/11).
It is well accepted in international practice that this right extends beyond
an actual attack to a threatened one, at least where the threatened attack
is ‘imminent’. What is very much challenged is the US notion, asserted in
relation to Iraq in 2003, that the right to react in self-defence extends
without check to situations where the threatened attack is neither actual
nor imminent - and where the state reacting (here the U.S.) is, in effect,
the sole judge of whether there is a real threat at all.
The problem is not so much with the notion of pre-emption as such. Countries
have never been expected to wait until an imminently threatened attack
became actual, and it is perfectly possible to imagine threats, including
the nightmare scenario combining rogue states, WMD and terrorists, which are
very real indeed, albeit not imminent. But international unease has to be
expected when, as Sandy Berger has put it, this Administration has ‘elevated
pre-emption from an option every President has preserved to a defining
doctrine of American strategy’.[4]
Ultimately the question boils down to credible evidence, and whether -
assuming there is time to consider alternatives - the military attack
response is the only reasonable one in all the circumstances. This is why
there continues to be so much focus on the issue of whether credible and
compelling intelligence was indeed available to support the war in Iraq. It
is difficult to argue with the proposition that, if the whole international
security system is not to descend into anarchy, the less imminent a threat
and the weaker the evidence of its reality - as clearly was the case in Iraq
2003 - the greater the need to win Security Council support for the proposed
response.
External Threats Generally. Moving beyond self-defence cases to response to
external threats generally, Chapter VII of the UN Charter clearly empowers
the Security Council to take any action ‘necessary to maintain or restore
international peace and security’. The Council can, and does at its complete
discretion from time to time, authorise or endorse the use of force by blue
helmets, Multinational Forces, ‘coalitions of the willing’ or individual
states, as well as endorsing (sometimes after the event) military action by
regional organisations operating under Ch VIII - e.g. ECOWAS in Liberia and
Sierra Leone.
The Iraq situation has rung all the changes on this theme. The Security
Council gave such an authorisation for the attack on Iraq in 1991, after its
invasion of Kuwait; but didn’t, of course, in 2003, though I remain
persuaded that it probably would have done so if more time had been
available to test Iraq’s apparent failure to cooperate with the
international inspectors.
Internal Threats. For wholly internal threats, raising the issue of so
called humanitarian intervention, the UN Charter is conspicuously unhelpful.
Article 2.7 expressly prohibits intervention “in matters which are
essentially within the jurisdiction of any state” although this is in
tension with language elsewhere acknowledging individual human rights, and a
mass of law and practice over the last few decades which have set real
conceptual limits claims of untrammeled state sovereignty, not least the
Genocide Convention.
The Security Council can always authorise Chapter VII military action
against a state if it is prepared to declare that the situation, however
apparently internal in character, does in fact amount to a ‘threat to
international peace and security’ - as it did for example in Somalia, and
eventually Bosnia, in the early 1990s.
But more often than not, even in conscience shocking situations like Rwanda
in 1994, it has declined to initiate or authorise any enforcement action at
all. Most people accept that the Security Council should continue to be the
first port of call in these situations; the question is whether it should be
the last. This is the issue that was brought to a head by NATO’s
intervention in Kosovo in 1999, bypassing the Security Council. And it has
been brought to a head again in Iraq 2003, with the emergence of the
argument - as other rationales in terms of bombs and terrorists drop away -
that it was Saddam’s murderous tyrannizing of his own people that made him a
suitable case for humanitarian intervention treatment.
The Search for Guidance. Faced with all this tumult, and the way in which
the Security Council has been used, misused and bypassed over the last
decade, some voices - the most strident of them Professor Michael Glennon,
writing in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs [5]- are going so far as to
claim that there are just no rules any more, that the whole UN Charter
‘edifice [has come] crashing down’, that the reality of US power and the
failure of the Security Council structure to reflect it should be frankly
recognised and that, in any attempt in the future to recreate a body of
international law governing the use of force in all its manifestations,
‘what the design should look like must be a function of what it can look
like’.
This is deeply alarming talk, classic unprincipled might-is-right realism
dressed up as international law analysis. It should be rejected not just by
those of us with progressive political values but by anyone who values
decency in the conduct of international relations. The search for an
orderly, principled system of international law and practice on conflict is
as old as conflict itself. There is always a choice, when confronted with
the unhappy reality that governments don’t always behave as we hope they
might, of raising your sights or lowering them: the tragedy of
intellectualising failure in the way that those like Glennon do, is that it
encourages so many to lower sights when the acute need is to raise them.
Putting all that together, the most urgent need in the international
security debate, from whatever point in the ideological spectrum one
approaches it, is to try to re-establish consensus about what the basic
rules, or principles, governing the use of force should be, and how they
should be applied in practice. I want to suggest that in all cases there is
a basic over-arching checklist of six principles, or criteria, that must be
worked through in determining whether it’s right to fight - applicable
whether the threat is external or internal; or whether the threat is
constituted by armies marching, by WMD acquisition, by terrorism, or by
tribal machetes.
When it’s Right to Fight: Six Criteria. These six criteria - a threshold
test of seriousness, four prudential criteria and a legal test - were
essentially those agreed by the International Commission on Intervention and
State Sovereignty [6] which I co-chaired with my Algerian colleague Mohamed Sahnoun. The ICISS commission, as it has become known (Mohamed and I are
still waiting wistfully for someone to call it the ‘Evans-Sahnoun
Commission’) [7], published its report ‘The Responsibility to Protect’,
setting out these principles, in December 2001. The formulation of the
criteria, as will be clear in a moment when I spell them out, owes much to
traditional Christian ‘just war’ theory. For some that may be a turn-off.
But these principles owe their force much more to their intuitive
acceptability than to any theological doctrine. And they are certainly
intended to reflect universal, not just Western, values. They are as
follows:
(1) Just Cause: is the harm being experienced or threatened sufficiently
clear and serious to justify going to war? For external threats to others,
as with self defence, everything depends on the quality of the evidence.
Actual behaviour is one thing, merely threatened behaviour is something
else: to establish a threat, plausible evidence of both capability and
intent to cause harm is required.
For internal threats, the threshold criteria to justify coercive
intervention need to be tough. Unless the bar is set very high and tight,
excluding less than catastrophic forms of human rights abuse, prima facie
cases for the use of military force could be made across half the world: the
only rule book would be the whim of the potential enforcer, and any prospect
of mobilising consensus for international action in the cases most deserving
it - e.g. another Rwanda - would fly out the window.
It was these kinds of considerations that led my ICISS commission to propose
that the ‘just cause’ for intervention in these internal cases should be
narrowly confined to two kinds of situation: large scale loss of life,
actual or apprehended, with genocidal intent or not, which is the product
either of deliberate state action, or state neglect or inability to act, or
a failed state situation; or large scale ‘ethnic cleansing’, actual or
apprehended, whether carried out by killing, forced expulsion, acts of
terror or rape.
For Iraq 2003 this threshold test cuts both ways. It would certainly have
been satisfied a decade and more ago (when the West could not have cared
less), but probably not in more recent years, as tyrannical as Saddam’s
regime continued to be in other ways. I find it difficult personally to
accept as a trigger for war a ‘humanitarian intervention’ ground which is
only seriously advanced as other grounds for military action retrospectively
evaporate. But on the other hand I acknowledge my ICISS commission colleague
Michael Ignatieff’s point [8] that it is hard to denounce Saddam’s murderous
behaviour for twenty years, as many of us have done, then object, at least
on this ground, when someone finally proposes to do something about him.
Call honours even on this one.
(2) Right Intention: is the primary purpose of the proposed military action
to halt or avert the external or internal threat in question, even if there
are some other motives in play as well?
For Iraq 2003, in the case of the UK, the judgment of history may be that
the decision to go to war was wrong-headed, but at least palpably sincere.
For the US, however, the jury on intention may well be out a good deal
longer, given most observers’ experience that the only common motivation was
regime change, for reasons not having an awful lot to do with Saddam’s
bastardry towards his own people. There may have been a genuine fear of
physical attack with WMD by Saddam or those he might assist. But a variety
of other considerations, each coming down to a regime change bottom line,
all seemed to rank higher in the motivation table - if not a hand in Iraqi
oil production , then certainly considerations like bestowing the values of
American democracy on the Arab world; or asserting absolute U.S. military
authority for its demonstration effect; or just being seen to be doing
something (and never underestimate that as a motivation for any government)
to keep up the momentum of response post 911.
For Australia, if there was any other motive than following the leader, I
have yet to hear it credibly argued - but being out of the country, I may
have missed something.
(3) Last Resort: has every non-military option for the prevention or
peaceful resolution of the crisis been explored, with reasonable grounds for
believing lesser measures will not succeed?
In the case of Iraq, it continues to be strongly argued by opponents of the
war - with more and more credibility in retrospect - that there was ample
time for the inspection process to have been carried through, and that
resort to military action in March 2003 was at the very least premature.
That kind of response doesn’t go to an argument based on Saddam’s past
treatment of his own people, but it is a pretty good answer to the other
rationales for war.
(4) Proportional Means: is the scale, duration and intensity of the planned
military action the minimum necessary to secure the defined human protection
objective? In the case of Iraq, the question has to be asked whether some
5,000 civilian deaths and 10,000 military deaths - assuming that those
guesstimates are at least roughly accurate - were an appropriate trade, from
an Iraqi perspective, for the end of Saddam Hussein’s capacity to persecute
his people
(5) Reasonable Prospects: is there a reasonable chance of the military
action being successful in meeting the external or internal threat in
question, with the consequences of action not likely to be worse than the
consequences of inaction? Military action can only be justified if it stands
a reasonable chance of success, and will not risk triggering a greater
conflagration or a greater peril.
This has to be called at the outset, not with the benefit of hindsight, but
it has been from the beginning, and certainly remains now, a tough one for
proponents of war in Iraq. We cannot finally assess the balance of
consequences until we know how long Iraq’s post-war misery will last,
whether it is going to become a democracy or a theocracy, whether the war
has indeed concentrated the minds of other dictators, and whether al-Qaeda
and like networks will indeed find it easier to recruit. But the outlook on
most of these fronts was not very encouraging before the war, and it is
getting worse, not better, now
(6) Right Authority: is the military action lawful? As international law now
stands, if the Security Council says no that means no. But should the
absence of Security Council endorsement be the end of the intervention
story? Is legality the whole story or, as many have argued, are there not
wider questions of legitimacy as well? What if the Security Council fails to
approve military action in another Rwanda-type, utterly conscience-shocking
situation that just about everyone else thinks cries out for action? A real
question arises as to which of two evils is the worse: the damage to
international order if the Security Council is bypassed, or in the damage to
that order if human beings are slaughtered while the Security Council stands
by.
The ICISS Commission’s response to this dilemma was to give a clear
political message: if an individual state or ad hoc coalition does step in,
fully observe and respect all the necessary threshold and precautionary
criteria, intervene successfully, and ends up being seen to have so acted by
world public opinion, then this is likely to have damaging consequences for
the stature and credibility of the UN itself. That is pretty much what
happened with the U.S. and NATO intervention in Kosovo: the UN cannot afford
to drop the ball too many times on that scale.
On the other hand, in Iraq 2003, the contrary argument has been put with
some force - that compliance with the six criteria was on balance so weak,
particularly on the issues of last resort and reasonable prospects - that
the Security Council would have lost global credibility had it supported
military action.
Implementing the Criteria. It will be a long haul to gain general acceptance
in principle of the relevance and utility of all six criteria
[9], and an
even longer haul to have them systematically applied in practice in every
case - and when they are applied it won’t mean the end of argument about
particular cases, as we have just seen. The alternative to making a serious
effort to enforce the international rules we have, and to supplement them
with further principled guidelines and criteria of the kind here proposed in
the areas where there are gaps is to abandon the field to those who are more
comfortable with the ad hoc exercise of power - who don’t really want to be
limited by rules and principles, who feel constrained by international
process, who see multilateral cooperation in very narrowly self-interested
terms.
But a world that appeals to people like this is not one in which most people
in the world want to live. And it’s simply not an option for those of us
whose hearts and minds remain firmly on the progressive side of politics.
Restoring Confidence in Institutions
The effectiveness of the international security system depends not only on
the rules in place but the credibility of the institutions making and
enforcing them. There are multiple problems in this respect at the global,
regional and national level which need to be addressed.
United Nations. Secretary General Kofi Annan last week [10]
added his very
explicit voice to those arguing that UN institutional architecture is badly
out of date and desperately needs reform - designed as it was for its
original membership of 51 states, not its current 191, and reflecting in the
composition and powers of the Security Council the power balances of 1945,
not the world of 2003. The decisions of the Security Council, he said,
‘increasingly…lack legitimacy in the eyes of the developing world, which
feels that its views and interests are insufficiently represented among the
decision-takers.’
Amen to all that. But the question is whether those big five with the power,
whose veto can block any Charter change, will ever be in the mood to
relinquish that power, or share it with the likes of India and Brazil and
Nigeria. Will Britain and France, for a start, ever be prepared to subsume
their identity in a single EU seat? Will a legion of developing countries in
the General Assembly ever be prepared to abandon the old-think which has
blocked any talk, for example, of a new role for the old Trusteeship Council
in managing non-colonial states in distress?
Will they ever be prepared to support even the establishment of a serious
conflict assessment and analysis capability within the Secretariat?
[11] And
will any country, developed or developing, ever be seriously prepared to
vest the necessary authority and resources to create a standing military
rapid reaction force to do the Security Council’s bidding when emergencies
demand it?
I worked all these issues for several years around the UN corridors as
foreign minister - back in the days when Australia was widely seen as a
credible broker - and achieved for my pains not very much. Our efforts were
followed by the establishment in 1993 of the 'Open-Ended Working Group on
the Question of Equitable Representation and Increase in the Membership of
the Security Council and Other Matters Related to the Security Council',
which I am now told enjoys the distinction of being ‘the entity with the
lengthiest name in the history of multilateral negotiations’ and as holding
(although there are some competitors emerging for this, including the Geneva
Conference on Disarmament) the ‘record for continuing to go nowhere for the
longest period of time.’ [12]
Everybody acknowledges that the UN has its uses, and may even be
indispensable as a source of legitimacy and a vehicle for global burden
sharing. Even the U.S. is now going through one of its periodic learning
experiences in this respect. But continued UN credibility and the
maintenance in perpetuity of present Permanent Five privileges simply don’t
mix: sooner or later one will have to go.
A good start, quite a gentle one, would be for the Permanent Five to reach a
gentleman’s agreement (actually proposed once by the French), in which they
would undertake to each other, in the absence of their own vital interests
being involved, not to exercise the veto to obstruct humanitarian
intervention missions for which there was otherwise majority support on the
Council. But when, as co-chair of the ICISS commission, I was given the
opportunity by Kofi Annan last year to put this among other proposals to the
Security Council, I discovered yet again the force of Prime Minister Ben
Chifley’s immortal line: “The trouble with gentleman’s agreements is that
there are not enough bloody gentlemen.”
Others. So UN reform is a dispiriting business. But these are all issues on
which we must, in a spirit of optimism, persist. Just as we must continue to
work away to try to strengthen the security role of regional organisations -
with NATO a potentially important new recruit to the role of UN enforcer not
only in Europe but out of area; with the Asia Pacific countries, among
others, potentially playing a much more important role; and with the African
organisations absolutely crucial.
So too must we continue to urge individual countries, in Europe and
elsewhere, to strengthen their own defence capability, building greater self
reliance in strategic lift and other areas of conspicuous shortfall. As
Washington not unreasonably comments from time to time, complaints about
U.S. military dominance would carry a little more weight if more countries
did a little bit more to pull their weight: part of the answer is providing
the soft power (development funds and the like) while the U.S. provides the
hard power, but it is not the whole answer.
One of the biggest problems being confronted every time there is a call for
manpower to perform UN mandated peace enforcement and peace keeping tasks is
to find countries willing to supply troops, or supply them at the necessary
level of competence and experience: not least in Africa, where among other
problems HIV/AIDS is cutting a particularly devastating swathe. Thus the
growing talk, in very hushed tones, about the possible employment of, as the
preferred euphemism would have it, ‘private military companies’. The UK
Government produced at the House of Commons’ request an intriguing Green
Paper [13] last year on the regulatory issues involved, and - discomfiting
as it may be to all of us to contemplate the triumph of Thatcherism in yet
another quintessentially public sector area - this may be, simply for want
of a better alternative, an idea whose time is about to come.
Developing Confidence in Strategies
In the conduct of international relations, on issues of war and peace as
elsewhere, rules and institutions are only as good as the intelligence with
which they are applied. The big problems I identified at the outset - global
terrorism, weapons of mass destruction proliferation and coping with
fragile, collapsed and divided states - all need sensible response
strategies. How well have we been doing in developing them?
Terrorism. The global war on terror that has been waged since 9/11 is not
going brilliantly well, producing not a lot more than more war and more
terror. Osama bin Laden is still alive, and Al Qaeda is down but not out.
Its offshoots and affiliates in South East Asia and elsewhere are damaged
but certainly not destroyed. In Iraq, where the terrorist connection was the
least plausible of all the reasons for going to war, terrorist violence has
now become the most harrowing of all its consequences. In Israel, with the
collapse of the roadmap process, the suicide bombers are back with a
vengeance. Nobody anywhere is confident that the ‘big one’ can’t or won’t
happen - an attack bringing together the sophistication and ruthlessness of
the attack on the twin towers with the use of nuclear, chemical or
biological weapons.
There are at least two general lessons we can learn from what has happened
so far. One is that to wrap everything up in the language of a “war on
terrorism” or a “war on evil” doesn’t contribute much to clear operational
thinking. A war against evil is, almost by definition as many have said,
unlimited and interminable. The concept doesn’t help us much in identifying
points of entry, and there is certainly no obvious exit strategy.
In terms of Isaiah Berlin’s famous dichotomy, there’s a place for
‘hedgehogs’ - those consumed by one big idea - when it comes to global
security issues, but most of the time the most productive work is done by
‘foxes’: those who know many things, and who understand the need for
endlessly varied approaches to solve endlessly variable problems. There are
big risks in ignoring those problems which are not easily subsumed under the
mantle of a war against terror. And perhaps there are even bigger risks in
wrapping in that mantle security problems - like those in Iraq, Iran and
North Korea - which at most are only marginally connected to terrorism.
The second lesson is how little the fundamentals of conflict have actually
changed since 9/11. The great dangers come from political problems - some of
them with underlying economic and social causes - that are unresolved,
unaddressed, incompetently or counter-productively addressed or deliberately
left to fester, until they become so acute they explode. Part of the
fall-out of such explosions can be terrorism, but this is not in and of
itself a self-driving concept, or in and of itself an “enemy”. It is not
even an ideology, as anarchism was in the 19th century. Rather it is a tool
or a tactic, resorted to almost invariably by the weak against the strong -
weak individuals, weak groups, weak states.
Since power relativities have changed to the point where virtually everybody
is weak in comparison to the U.S., and since 9/11 has shown the way, there
is considerably more risk today that those in serious dispute with
Washington, and by extension its allies, will use terror as a tactic to
compensate for that weakness. But the core problems go back to political
issues, broadly defined. Military force is part of the answer, and was
wholly legitimately used in Afghanistan for punitive, retaliatory and in
effect self-defence purposes. But - whether in the hands of the U.S., Israel
or anyone else - it can never be an effective substitute for the traditional
hard work of dealing with those core problems.
The right strategy for dealing with global terrorism involves operating at
five different levels simultaneously: first, homeland defence; secondly,
pursuit and punishment of known perpetrators; thirdly, and most crucially,
building frontline defences in the countries of origin of the terrorists
themselves, by building in turn the capacity and will of those countries to
act both internally and cooperatively with the wider international
community; fourthly, addressing the political issues that generate
grievance; and fifthly, addressing the underlying social, economic and
cultural issues that generate grievance.
The real point of addressing the so-called underlying political and economic
causes of terrorism is not to try to destroy the motivation of every
individual terrorist: we all know that most of the 9/11 perpetrators were
not poor and cared little about the Palestinians. Rather it is to neutralise
support for terrorists in the communities in which they live, and above all
to generate the will to act against them and the capacity to act against
them by the relevant governments and authorities. And it’s that job that we
are not now doing very well.
This is not the occasion for any detailed discussion of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict but it is perhaps here that the international
community is doing least well of all, with this week’s Security Council vote
on the Arafat removal issue constituting further evidence, if we needed it,
of how far off the road to peace we have now stumbled. There is a peaceful
two-state solution, which has been outlined by many and mapped in great
detail by ICG [14], which is perfectly well known to the leaderships of both
sides, which will both meet the aspirations of the Palestinians and
guarantee Israel’s security as a Jewish state, and which big majorities of
ordinary Israelis and Palestinians would accept - but which their leaders,
left to themselves, have proved utterly incapable of delivering. They can
get there, but only with the U.S.-led Quartet - playing it straight down the
middle - assisting, monitoring, militarily supervising, and above all
leading, the process every inch of the way. To abdicate responsibility to
address the real and resolvable political grievances that lie at the heart
of the terrorist violence yet again being perpetrated, to do nothing to give
moderate Palestinian leaders the capacity to deal with the extremists in
their midst or Palestinians as a whole the will to oppose them, is to
condemn both Israelis and Palestinians to ever more killings, to endless
further tragedy.
Weapons of Mass Destruction. International legal regimes generally, and arms
control treaties in particular, play a critical stabilising role in the
international community. But here it has to be acknowledged that the present
U.S. administration has been leading by example in the worst possible way,
and not just in relation to Kyoto and the International Criminal Court.
After playing an important leadership role a decade ago in securing a tough
international inspection regime for chemical weapons, the most recent
contributions of the US have been to scuttle a draft protocol seeking a
similar enforcement mechanism for biological weapons, withdraw unilaterally
from the Anti-Ballistic Missile (ABM) treaty (which continues to have
implications for long term strategic stability in North East Asia in
particular), and to assert the US right to develop a new generation of
nuclear weapons, including the so called bunker-busters.
With the Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Comprehensive Test Ban Treaties both
faltering, the risk is now more real than it has been for years of the few
nuclear weapons states becoming many. The recent entry of India and Pakistan
to the club - joining the five original declared nuclear powers and Israel -
should remind us once again of the simple but powerful conclusions of the
Canberra Commission on the Elimination of Nuclear Weapons a few years ago:
that so long as any state retains nuclear weapons, others will want them;
that so long as any state has them, they are bound one day to be used, if
not by design then by accident; and that any such use will be catastrophic
for humankind.
The compelling force of these conclusions continue, unfortunately, to leave
the relevant policy makers unmoved, for reasons that are never very
compellingly explained. Why, in the post Cold War World, it is necessary to
ultimately retain, after a series of progressive reductions, any nuclear
weapons at all for balance of terror reasons is not at all clear.
Why you need nuclear, chemical or biological weapons to deter rogue states
producing or using them, when current generation conventional weapons give
you all the deterrent or retaliatory muscle you could ever need, is never
explained. Why you could need a nuclear or CBW armoury to deal with
terrorist groups or individuals producing home-made weapons of this kind is
simply impossible to explain.
As we know from ordinary life, saying ‘do as I say but not as I do’ cuts no
ice with anyone. And it certainly cuts no ice internationally for major
countries with pride and dignity and aspirations of their own.
Peacebuilding. The third big area in which there needs to be a refocus on
basic strategy by all the major international players is peacebuilding -
building the conditions for sustainable peace in societies that are fragile,
collapsed or divided, prone to war or already broken by it. If conflict or
mass violence is ever to be stopped from occurring in the first place, there
are a myriad of structural and governance-improving measures that can
usefully be applied. And if, after war, conflict and mass violence are to be
stopped from recurring - with the whole cycle beginning over again - there
are a myriad of such measures that must be so applied.
If there is any single lesson we imbibed with our mother’s milk during the
whole long debate on conflict prevention through the 1990s, that was it. The
need to effectively address not only immediate security needs, but economic
and social needs, governance and participation needs, and justice and
reconciliation needs as well has been the central conclusion of every
peacekeeping mission, successful and unsuccessful, of the last decade. It
has been a major theme of every major independent report on the subject,
including that of the ICISS commission.
In these circumstances it almost beggars imagination that so little was done
to prepare adequately for the post-war peacebuilding task in Iraq, or that
the commitment to Afghanistan’s reconstruction remains so incomplete and
fragile. Every situation has its own distinct combination of needs, and it
is difficult to usefully generalise about the strategies required in each
case. But there are at least two general propositions that stick out from
all my and the International Crisis Group’s experience over the last decade.
The first is that too much attention tends to be focused on democratic
elections as the critical exit signpost, and not enough on the establishment
of a viable justice system and something approximating the rule of law. It’s
not just a matter of consolidating a sense of personal security; it’s a
matter of creating the minimum conditions for serious economic activity and
foreign investment, for which the most generous aid in the world is no
substitute if a broken country is ever to get back on its feet.
Secondly, it is critical to have a close understanding of both the cultural
norms and the internal political dynamics of the society that one is trying
to reconstruct. As ICG first warned in Bosnia in 1996, while the urge to get
legitimate local leadership in place is wholly understandable, early
elections can be disastrously counterproductive if they only consolidate
existing ethnic or other divisions: concentrating on first building civil
society institutions can often make much more sense.
In Iraq we are now warning, similarly, of the huge downside risks in what
looks at first sight the very clever arithmetical weighting of the appointed
Iraqi Interim Governing Council, and the new cabinet it has just selected,
to precisely reflect Shiite and Sunni, and Arab and non-Arab proportions of
the population. The trouble with this is that for the first time in the
country’s modern history, sectarian and ethnic identity has been elevated to
the rank of primary organizing political principle. People are now more
likely to join political parties built on these lines, and secular Iraqis
are feeling weakened. The irony is that the U.S., which for so long has
feared Shiite activism in Iran and Lebanon, is now effectively promoting it
in Iraq.
Lessons for Australian Foreign Policy
What are the lessons of all of this for the conduct of Australian foreign
policy? There are just three basic points I want to make - about our
relations with the rest of the world generally, our neighbours and the US -
and I can make them pretty briskly. I don’t want to be too preachy, and I
don’t want to be any more partisan than the occasion demands: I’ve been out
of the country too long, and out of politics too long.
I’m really speaking just as an Australian with a sense of what has been,
what should be, and what can be again - given the state of the contemporary
world, our place in it and how I know we are perceived
First, Australia’s interests, as a medium size country, are unequivocally
bound up with a rule-driven international system based on multilateral
cooperation. We are never going to be big enough or strong enough to make
our own rules, and there are a great many contemporary problems - from
terrorism, to drugs, to refugees, to SARS - which can only be solved by
making common cause with others.
Nor can any single bilateral relationship take us as far as we need to go.
Not even a country as mighty as the United States can have its way on
everything in today’s interdependent globalised world, with so much movement
of people, capital, goods and information - controlled and uncontrolled,
honest and dishonest, innocent and evil.
As Australia has effectively disappeared from the lists of important players
in multilateral decision making, so too has there disappeared from this
government’s policy white papers the terminology of ‘good international
citizenship’ (which under the Labor governments ranked as a national
interest in its own right, alongside traditional economic and physical
security concerns). It’s time to think about restoring the language and,
more importantly, acting it out. We have nothing to lose but our
irrelevance.
Secondly, Australia’s interests are unequivocally bound up with the region
in which we live. We will be judged not only by our neighbours themselves,
but by the rest of the world, by how efficiently and sensitively we handle
our relationships from the South Pacific to South and North East Asia and
across the Indian Ocean. We are doing better now - especially with our
post-Bali cooperation with Indonesia, and our belated willingess to take on
the difficult neighbourhood policing task requested of us by the Solomons -
but only after a period in which we could hardly have done worse.
While our actions will always speak louder than our words, one of the ways
we can most help ourselves is in fact by adjusting our words: talking much
less about projecting ‘Australian values’, as our government leaders and our
policy white papers now incessantly do (in pale imitation of the linguistic
solipsism of our most powerful friend) and much more about our commitment to
universal values. We don’t lose anything in substance that way, but we do
gain a lot in credibility.
Freedom and dignity, economic and family wellbeing, the right to participate
in choosing those who govern us, are values overwhelmingly shared and sought
by everyone. Our neighbours don’t talk about ‘Asian’ values very much these
days, and we should reciprocate the analysis by laying off talking about
ours.
Thirdly, our relationship with the United States - as hugely valuable as it
undoubtedly is - should not be the prism through which we view our
relationship with everyone else. At the end of the day U.S. economic and
political and security interests are not always going to be identical with
Australia’s, and it is no help to Australia to have the rest of the world
perceiving us as if they are. We have interests of our own and should have
views of our own on all the issues I have been discussing - from rules about
force, to institutional reform to the right approach to dealing with
terrorism, weapons of mass destruction and peacebuilding.
The key point in all this is one that struck me with acute force when I was
foreign minister. If Australia does approach its relationship with the U.S.
in a spirit of lively independence, having disagreements from time to time
on issues of policy and not being afraid to air them publicly if the
occasion demands, our support - when it is asked for and given on something
really important - is that much more valuable to the U.S., because it is
considered, not reflexive, and that much more appreciated.
In our period in office we had many big arguments with Washington, not just
in the case of hoary setpieces like farm access, but gut issues like nuclear
disarmament, missile tests, multilateral security arrangements in Asia,
US-China policy: we just weren’t very good at the old
four-paws-waving-pink-tummy-exposed-puppy-dog routine. But when we were
needed, on the big issues, we were always there.
More than that, we were able to carry heavy water for the US a number of
times on some very sensitive issues - for example the Chemical Weapons
Convention negotiations, embracing the global chemical industry - where the
U.S. was seen as too self-interested to be effective, where we were seen as
having a mind of our own, but where we shared absolutely identical
objectives. And so we led the treaty finalisation process, to great positive
effect and great mutual benefit.
By contrast, while the US unquestionably appreciated Australia’s military
support in the recent Iraq War - and John Howard has had his Crawford visit
to prove it - it is not clear to me that Australia’s involvement made more
than a tiny difference to the US capacity to wage the war or meet its other
policy objectives. Nor, I’m afraid to say - and I spend a week every month
in the U.S. - did it win us any attention or plaudits among more than a
handful of US policy makers or the wider American population.
On the great issues of waging war and making peace Australia is never going
to be a dominant global player. But whatever the prevailing power balances,
and the prevailing mood in Washington, we can always be a significant
player, and a lot more significant player than we are now. The critical
thing is to stay focused, stay engaged, and look for the opportunities to
make a difference, not just be there to give applause or be a helpless
bystander.
Nor is it very sensible - though it’s sometimes a temptation on our side of
politics - to just retreat into a shell of grumbling self-righteousness when
we are unhappy with the course of events. Just as the U.S. has to guard
against what Fulbright called the ‘arrogance of power’, so too do the rest
of us have to avoid succumbing to what Australia’s best known international
relations scholar Hedley Bull called the ‘arrogance of impotence’.
Individual Australians in positions of prominence and influence, have
demonstrated over many decades that we do have the capacity, energy,
creativity, willpower, persuasiveness, and sheer staying power, to really
make a difference in the world on matters of life and death, of high policy
and the most basic humanity. We can be very proud of what we achieved as a
country.
And we can be very proud of the Labor Governments that have led the way,
most of them well led, but none of them better led than those of Bob Hawke,
under whom I was proud to serve, and whom I am proud again to have been
given this opportunity to honour tonight.
17ix03
Footnotes
[1] The trends referred to here will all be fully documented in the first
annual Human Security Report, to be published by OUP early in 2004, produced
by the University of British Columbia Human Security Centre, directed by
Andrew Mack ( Director of the UN Secretary-General’s Strategic Planning Unit
1998-2001 and formerly Professor of International Relations at the
Australian National University)
[2] The International Crisis Group (ICG) is an independent, non-profit,
multinational organisation, with 90 staff members on five continents,
working through field-based analysis and high-level advocacy to prevent and
resolve deadly conflict. Its Chairman is former Finnish President, UN and EU
envoy Martti Ahtisaari, and its 55 Board members include Zbnigniew
Brzezinski, Wesley Clark, I.K.Gujral, Mo Mowlam, Fidel V. Ramos, Salim A.
Salim, Surin Pitsuwan and Grigory Yavlinsky. For a full account of ICG’s
work in some 40 conflict or conflict-potential areas see
www.crisisweb.org
[3] Phillip Adams, ‘Luggage of loyalty never collected’,
The Australian, 23 April 2003
[4] Samuel R. Berger, ‘Power and Authority: America’s Path Ahead’, Brookings
Institution Leadership Forum, 17 June 2003
[5] Michael J Glennon,
‘Why the Security Council Failed’, Foreign Affairs, May-June 2003, 16-35
[6] The Commission’s members were Gareth Evans and Mohamed Sahnoun
(co-chairs), Gisele Cote-Harper, Lee Hamilton, Michael Ignatieff, Vladimir
Lukin, Klaus Naumann, Cyril Ramaphosa, Fidel Ramos, Cornelio Sommaruga,
Eduardo Stein and Ramesh Thakur. It consulted comprehensively over a full
year, meeting in Asia and Africa as well as North America and Europe, and
holding roundtables and other consultations in Latin America, the Middle
East, Russia and China. The ICISS`report, with its large supplementary
research volume, is available on www.iciss-ciise.gc.ca. On the six criteria
for military intervention, the specific context of our report was the
responsibility to protect against internal threats; but the language we came
up with– generalised just a little - is equally applicable to external ones
[7] Paul Kelly was an exception: ‘Unresolved Dilemmas
in the Age of Global Intervention’, The Australian, 6 August 2003
[8] ‘Why are we in Iraq? (And Liberia? And
Afghanistan?)’,New York Times, 7 September 2003
[9]
Efforts have already been made within the Security Council and the
General Assembly, led by the Canadian government (who initiated the ICISS
commission) and supported by the Secretary-General, to win at least informal
acceptance of these criteria, and these efforts will continue in forthcoming
months. The argument is that with perseverance and application and
declaratory resolutions guidelines can become norms, and norms can become
accepted principles of customary international law, even if they never see
the light of day as treaty or Charter provisions
[10] Implementation of the United Nations Millennium Declaration, Report of
the Secretary –General, 8 September 2003
[11] The Brahimi Panel on UN Peace Operations recommended in 2000 the
creation of a new Information and Strategic Analysis Secretariat (EISAS),
with a staff of over 50, to bring a strong new focus and professional
competence to this task. But essentially because of member states’ anxieties
about the secretariat becoming too competent in its receipt and handling of
sensitive intelligence, the proposal was drastically watered down, and has
still not been implemented even in its diluted form
[12]
Thomas Weiss, The Illusion of UN Security Council Reform, Washington
Quarterly, Autumn 200
[13] Private Military Companies: Options for Regulation, HC 577, February
2002
[14] See ICG Middle East Reports Nos 2-4, 16 July 2002: Middle East Endgame
I: Getting To A Comprehensive Arab-Israeli Peace Settlement; Middle East
Endgame II: How A Comprehensive Israeli-Palestinian Peace Settlement Would
Look; and Middle East Endgame III: Israel, Syria and Lebanon – How
Comprehensive Peace Settlements Would Look
Biography
Gareth Evans, Foreign Minister from 1988 to 1996, was a Cabinet Minister in
the Hawke and Keating Governments for thirteen years. Since January 2000 he
has been Brussels-based President and CEO of the International Crisis Group,
an independent, non-profit, multinational organisation, with over 90 staff
members on five continents, working through field-based analysis and
high-level advocacy to prevent and resolve deadly conflict.
http://www.crisisweb.org/
This event has been kindly supported by British Airways
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