It’s not controversial to suggest that we live in troubled times. Even without the erratic and destructive presidency of Donald Trump in the United States, which has upended the so-called rules based international order, security was already in short supply. Major wars in the Middle East and Eastern Europe provide a sobering reminder that conflict remains an ever-present danger, despite decades of peace in much of the world. Interstate wars of the type Russia and Ukraine are engaged in had become gratifyingly rare; conflict when it occurred usually occurred within rather than across national boundaries.
The distinctive institutionalised pathways to peace that emerged in Western Europe and East Asia are under severe stress, not least because of the re-emergence of great power competition and declining confidence in the U.S as a reliable ally. While many analysts, especially in the U.S., have had a remarkably uncritical and benign view of ‘American hegemony’, its military power and institutional influence through the ‘Bretton Woods institutions’ clearly played an important part in underpinning economic development and strategic stability in Europe and Asia in particular.
But with the U.S. in decline and limits to what China can do to replace it, there are serious doubts about the ability of the much-discussed ‘international community’ to maintain a stable order and address what is perhaps the most important and difficult problem facing humanity as a whole: climate change. If a stable international order is ever to be achieved in which common problems can be effectively addressed, traditional security priorities and relationships will have to be rethought and possibly jettisoned.
China and Australia could provide a useful example of joint action and cooperative behaviour if there was greater trust and mutual understanding between the two countries. Given the levels of economic interdependence that exist between China and Australia it is clearly something from which both countries might benefit. The challenge for both is to rethink traditional views of security in theory, practise and geographical context. This will not be easy, but pressure from civil society and a more receptive attitude from both countries’ security establishments might help.
The rest of this article focuses primarily on Australia to explain why obstacles to meaningful cooperation remain significant, and why it is so difficult for political and strategic elites to imagine anything other than the status quo, even when that is being deliberately upended by the US, which remains the foundation of Australia’s foreign and strategic policy. Such a situation provides China with an opportunity to offer a more reassuring alternative; or it does if its leaders prove to be more imaginative than Australia’s.
Cooperation: Sounds like a good idea
Given that some of the most pressing problems facing the world are irredeemably collective, it is both surprising and sobering that policymakers everywhere are not urgently exploring new forms of cooperation or at least attempting to make established ones work more effectively. There are enduring arms control agreements between the US and Russia, for example, which need updating and expanding to include other members and technological innovations if they are to limit the spread of nuclear weapons in particular. Indeed, it is remarkable that humans spend more on weapons of mass destruction than they do attempting to solve some of the very real problems that confront those unfortunate enough to live in some of the deprived and insecure parts of the ‘global south’.
No doubt so-called ‘realists’, who make up the bulk of security analysts around the world, would argue that it was ever thus, and it is naïve to believe that human nature can ever change or that policymakers can have confidence in the declarations of their counterparts elsewhere. The principal obligation of policymakers everywhere, we are told, is to defend the state in a self-help world where ‘the struggle for power is universal in time and space and is an undeniable fact of experience’. In this context, according to political scientist Hans Morgenthau, who did more to embed realist thinking in the US than anyone else, ‘political power is a psychological relation between those who exercise it and those over whom it is exercised’.
The resultant conventional wisdom, or the unchallengeable ideational orthodoxy from which actual policies emerge, limits what is deemed feasible or intellectually and politically defensible. As a result, the possibility that a country such as Australia might adopt a more independent set of foreign and/or strategic policies, free of its historical reliance on one ‘great and powerful friend’ or another is simply unimaginable. In such circumstances, the chances of making progress in human affairs are necessarily circumscribed as some ideas are judged too implausible, impractical or simply too dangerous to contemplate in a world in which some theories and practices are unthinkable.
Unprecedented collective action problems
We have no real historical parallels for thinking creatively about global problems. Climate change may have always existed, but we have no experience of its possible impact as a conscious species with a common interest in managing the natural environment upon which nothing less than our survival depends. What is needed, political scientist Emanuel Adler argues, is ‘an evolutionary collective-learning process that takes place within and between communities of practice and through their action in their broader material and social environments’.
States are still the foundational political institutions that shape political, economic and strategic outcomes, but they are not currently configured to achieve collective goals. On the contrary, the limited progress that has been made toward something like ‘global governance’ has been inadequate to address the challenge of climate change. But unless ‘we’, in this case the human race, rapidly develop effective forms of collective action, debates about democracy versus autocracy or states versus markets will not even be of academic interest.
The possibility of progress
There is no doubt that humanity has made remarkable historical progress, even if its benefits have been unevenly distributed, and it is associated primarily with scientific and technological achievements that had their origins in the Western Enlightenment. Although such depictions generally overlook the important contribution made by other cultures, especially China’s, the idea that any improvement in our understanding of reality is possible is what matters.
We may not make history in circumstances of our choosing, as Marx famously claimed, but we do have the collective ability to remake the material reality in which we find ourselves. Indeed, so great has this capacity become that is has now become customary to refer to the current epoch as the Anthropocene. Unfortunately, our impact on the natural world has become increasingly destructive and threatens our very survival, in anything like a ‘civilised’ condition, at least. As a result, it is becoming commonplace to argue that ‘resilience’ is the best we can hope for in a world increasingly disfigured by destructive and unsustainable human activity.
Despite the overwhelming scientific evidence about the causes and possible consequences of climate change, many policymakers are reluctant to take the problem seriously. Australian political elites are especially reluctant to act, particularly if it is judged not to be in their short-term political interests. One of the disadvantages of the Australian political system is the very short time between elections. Politicians generally have little incentive to consider non-immediate issues; defence and security are the noteworthy and revealing exceptions in this regard, a reality that has been illustrated in the development of the AUKUS pact between the US, UK and Australia.
The lack of action on climate change
The excuse for inaction is that if Australia acts, and major power greenhouse gas emitting countries such as China and the US don’t, then it is a futile and self-harming gesture that will benefit no one. There is clearly something in this argument, but it is a recipe for inaction and blame-shifting that is bound to make environmental problems worse. It also overlooks the fact that, despite China being the largest emitter of CO2 gases in the world, it has made significant progress in transitioning to green energy.
China’s efforts are plainly not enough to single-handedly ‘save the planet’, but they are not nothing either. On the contrary, the sheer scale of China’s economic transition means that our collective environmental problems would already be much worse without potentially important initiatives like the ‘green’ Belt and Road Initiative and the adoption of more green energy domestically. At least Xi Jinping talks about the importance of moving toward a more sustainable ‘ecological civilisation’, which is more than anyone in the Trump administration is doing.
In Australia, too, successive Australian governments have done next to nothing. On the contrary, Australia continues to authorise new coal extraction and has recently approved an extension for the Northwest Shelf LNG development to 2070, which will likely double emissions from the region. Given that the gas is 85-95 percent methane, which has 100 times more impact than carbon dioxide, this is a major problem for Australia and the world. This behaviour is at least partly ascribable to Western Australia being a ‘captured state’ and subservient to the fossil fuel industry.
What is to be done?
Two of the most insoluble problems inhibiting effective action on climate change, arms reduction, wealth redistribution and many of the other collective goods that would seem a necessary part of our response to global problems, are that we lack both effective leadership and examples of responsible best practise. Unlike Australia, China has at least done something, but it could do more. Indeed, it may even be able to provide the sort of leadership many thought the US had historically provided. Whatever the merits of that claim, the US is plainly not currently providing good international leadership.
One problem confronting China and its apparent desire to play a more prominent leadership role is that it lacks the sorts of followers that have underpinned American hegemony. Australia is a somewhat extreme version of the genre, having fought in a succession of wars of choice on behalf of the U.S despite their being of no direct danger to the island continent. But Australia illustrates something important about addressing common problems: global challenges require global responses.
When the US is either incapable or not interested in proving leadership on climate change (and much else), the ‘international community’ must look for other sources of inspiration. Europeans have begun to address this leadership deficit by trying to improve coordination and self-reliance. In the ‘Indo-Pacific’ where institutions are less powerful and the organisations that do exist are often primarily concerned with old-fashioned strategic threats—which are primarily designed to ‘contain’ China—rather than those posed by climate change, there is no similar political infrastructure.
In such circumstances substantial cooperation between China and Australia is unlikely, perhaps unimaginable. And yet—if we are to survive, let alone prosper—we have no alternative but to develop continuing patterns of cooperation within the region and across the world to address common threats. If, and this is a very big ‘if’, China and Australia were to put aside years of suspicion and agree to work constructively on climate change and arms control this might provide the sort of constructive leadership that is often called for but rarely seen, especially between two such unlikely partners.
Conclusion
Perhaps Australian policymakers could and should take seriously Ambassador Xiao Qian’s invitation to ‘join hands’ to maintain open trade relationships. Indeed, perhaps Australia could counter-offer and suggest that cooperation could be extended to the environmental realm: Australia will stop opening new coal mines if China agrees to stop building new coal fired power stations, for example.
The reality that it is impossible to imagine this happening tells us much about the seemingly insurmountable obstacles humanity faces if it is to achieve meaningful collective action. In such circumstances, independent voices and civil society organisations have an even bigger responsibility to hold governments everywhere to account and encourage cooperation and mutual understanding wherever they can. If we don’t do it, who will?
Image: The main entrance to China’s embassy in Australia’s capital Canberra. Credit: Nick-D/WikiCommons.
