The gang of six lost in Kyotoland - Page 3
From Griffith REVIEW Edition 12: Hot Air
© Copyright Griffith University & the author.
Written by Graeme Dobell
DURING TEN YEARS IN OFFICE, THE HOWARD GOVERNMENT HAS UNDERGONE its own series of conversions on Delhi and Beijing. Those learning curves have been both painful and instructive. The pain with Beijing was really concentrated in 1996. During that first year in power, the Howard Government, almost inadvertently, managed to push just about every wrong button it could in Beijing. Australia was the only country in the region, apart from Singapore, to support the deployment of the US Navy to the Taiwan Straits during the missile crisis. Australia made a symbolic restatement of the ANZUS alliance only a couple of weeks after some significant moves in the Japan-US alliance. The new government sent some positive signals to Taiwan and John Howard cheerfully had a meeting with the Dalai Lama.
Beijing then taught Canberra a valuable lesson – how much pain it could impose. After a few months in office, the Howard Government found itself undergoing the diplomatic death of a thousand cuts. Every single thing that Australia had going through the Chinese system in 1996 ground to a halt. Everything. The Chinese scrapped high-level visits, every Australian doing business in China, whether miner, banker, insurance executive or diplomat, was screaming at Canberra: "Make this pain go away."
So, at the end of 1996, Howard had his Butch Cassidy moment. In the movie, Butch Cassidy is standing on a hill watching the posse that has been pursuing him across the plains of the West. Butch turns to the Sundance Kid and Paul Newman's character says: "If they gave me the money they're spending to stop me robbing them, I'd stop robbing them!" Howard went to his first meeting with China's leader, Jiang Zemin, and delivered a version of Butch's line. The Prime Minister effectively told Jiang: "If you stop imposing the pain on us, we'll stop doing the things which have made you impose that pain on us." And, by and large, the Jiang Zemin-Butch Cassidy pact has held.
When Hong Kong returned to China in 1997, Australia lined up with the Asian states rather than with the US and Britain. Australia, along with the rest of Asia, went to all the ceremonies of the handover. The Europeans and Americans avoided some of them because of the implicit endorsement of the political structure China had designed for Hong Kong. Howard went to Beijing and announced that Australia would no longer take part in the UN human rights process on China. Instead, Australia started a bilateral human-rights dialogue with China. And the next time the Dalai Lama visited Australia, he met no government ministers.
Whenever you hear Howard talk about the Chinese relationship, he will always, somewhere in his default script, put in that line: "We'll concentrate on the things that we can do together and not concentrate on the things which divide us." And, as with so much of the Prime Minister's language, there are a series of meanings and understandings cemented into those words. The "emphasise the positive and sidestep the differences" mantra means Australia has avoided much of the Washington argument about whether China will be a strategic partner or strategic competitor.
The nuances were displayed at the White House in July 2005, when Howard and Bush answered questions on what the rise of China would mean. The US President said he believed that his country and Australia should work together to get China to accept "the same values we share". Australia's leader wasn't interested in joining a values crusade, nor in getting in the middle between America and China: "We don't presume any kind of intermediary role." Australia's relationships with China and the US, he said, were completely separate. Spare us, please, any either-or choices. And the optimistic view put by the Prime Minister is that a "dust-up" between America and China is far from inevitable as a growing China matures and takes its rightful international place.
The differences between Washington and Canberra are often expressed in silence. A key example is the way Australia has quietly sided with China over the biggest economic argument between Beijing and Washington over the past four years. The US has continually harangued China to raise the value of the yuan, saying the artificially low value of the currency gives China an unfair trade advantage and is responsible for much of America's balance of payments crisis. Australia's Treasury, in its 2005 budget strategy, gently dismissed the US position as risible. The Treasury noted that the US current account deficit in 2004 was a record $US666 billion, and offered a series of reasons for this huge imbalance: lack of savings, poor growth in Japan and Europe, and under-investment in some East Asian countries.
Just in case that repudiation of America's China-bashing was too subtle, the Treasury then gave explicit backing to Beijing's position: "The strength of the Chinese economy has led to external calls for greater flexibility in its exchange rate, particularly from the United States. However, a more flexible Chinese exchange rate is likely to have only a limited impact on global imbalances. Broader liberalisation of the capital account should be approached cautiously and coincide with a further strengthening of the Chinese financial system."
No wonder some of the sharper-eyed policy wonks in Washington have started to worry about how far Australia is straying into the Chinese sphere in areas apart from the alliance.
THE LEARNING CURVE AUSTRALIA HAS FOLLOWED WITH CHINA over the past decade is slowly being replicated with India. Beyond the bromides about the links that run from parliamentary systems to playing fields, the India– Australia diplomatic conversation has been strangely sterile. Australia has been slow to recognise the essential Indian dimension to its Asian strategies. New Delhi's standard view has been of Australia as an obedient member of the Western alliance, happy to act as a cipher for the US. The clash of temperaments and world views reached its low point at the United Nations in 1960, when Nehru took the rostrum to savage an earlier speech by Robert Menzies, arguing that Australia's views on colonialism and the Cold War could not be taken seriously. Menzies wrote furiously to his wife that Nehru was poisonous, sneering and grossly offensive: "All the primitive came out of him."
Four decades later, Australia still had trouble placing India. The Howard Government's first foreign affairs white paper, in 1997, didn't rank India as one of the states that "most substantially engage Australia". And only six months after India announced itself as a nuclear-weapons power with five bomb tests in 1998, Australia's Foreign Affairs Department was able to scrap its separate South Asia and Indian Ocean branch as a budget measure. The contrast between the concentrated focus Australia has given China with the somewhat dilatory nature of the engagement with India is one element in New Delhi's frustration with Canberra. The purpose of Howard's visit to India this March was partly to bury some history as well as lighting the path of future history with one of Asia's pivotal states.
The change in India's significance can be told through two multilateral moments. In 1997, Australia helped ensure that the Asia Pacific Economic Co-operation (APEC) door was closed on India for a decade. By 2005, Australia was slipping into the first East Asia Summit using the diplomatic opening created by India.
At the Vancouver summit of the APEC forum in 1997, India was one of eleven counties seeking to join APEC. Only three got in: Russia (sponsored by the US), Vietnam (courtesy of ASEAN) and Peru (backed by Mexico and Chile). The snub for India was that a ten-year moratorium was then imposed on new APEC members. Closing APEC for a decade was a decision that came out of the daylong leaders' retreat. Howard said he would "very strongly" support the ten-year freeze. The Prime Minister was modest about his own role in ensuring that the moratorium was a decision announced from the summit: "Well, it came up earlier in the discussions and one of the leaders reminded the meeting at the end that it [the freeze] should be included." India's view was that the encouragement it got from some APEC members like Singapore, Malaysia and South Korea had been vetoed by a jaundiced Australia.
By 2005, it was impossible to conceive of the Asia Pacific Climate Partnership or the East Asia Summit without India's involvement. In drawing up the guest list for the first Asian leaders' meeting in Kuala Lumpur in December 2005, China took a narrow view of who should be at the table. Beijing said it preferred the ASEAN-plus-three formula: the three powers from North-East Asia – China, Japan and South Korea – with the ten South-East Asian members of ASEAN. ASEAN could not embrace that formula because it would have excluded India and given China a form of veto over a process supposedly run by ASEAN. Admitting India – a geopolitical must – meant it was easier to invite other states beyond East Asia: Australia and New Zealand.
India, with a middle class that now outnumbers the population of the US, doesn't have to worry anymore about getting invitations. India matters as much as China in everything from clinching a deal at the World Trade Organisation to launching the next stage of the Kyoto process in Montreal.
Indeed, as many of the developed states confront the reality that they can't achieve their Kyoto targets over by 2012, the developing economies on the threshold of Kyotoland have even more room to manoeuvre. The Conservative government that took power in Canada in January 2006 is already showing wobbles about the pain that will be imposed by Kyoto.
Standing outside Kyotoland, the problem for Australia is finding a true role for a non-binding, voluntary partnership. The portents are not good. In that other Asia-Pacific partnership, APEC, the voluntary approach failed spectacularly. Australia championed a fast-track idea in which APEC members would rush to free-trade purity. It was called "early voluntary sectoral liberalisation". That vision died at the APEC summit in 1998 when Japan refused to offer up any voluntary liberalisation in agriculture. Australia's Trade Minister at the time, Tim Fischer, commented that the issue could have destroyed APEC if the argument with Japan had been pushed over the brink.
In trade, Australia has discovered over many decades that the toughest issues can be tackled only when everything is negotiated together in the multilateral system operated by the World Trade Organisation, with binding, legally enforceable rules. In the world of climate change, apparently, different rules can be made to work. Kyotoland is beset by mirages as well as hot air. ♦