Foreign Minister Bob Carr has rejected the suggestion I made in a Lowy Institute Snapshot yesterday, that the South China Sea is the most unpredictable and dangerous dispute in our region and that Australia should be more active in helping work towards a solution. Here's what Senator Carr told Radio Australia's Stephanie March*:

I don't think it is in Australia's interest to take on for itself a brokering role in territorial disputes in the South China Sea.  I don't think that is remotely in our interest, I think we should adhere to the policy we have got of not supporting any one of the nations making competing territorial claims and reminding them all that we want it settled, because we have a stake in it.

I don't for a minute advocate taking sides with any of the parties to the dispute; that would hardly be conducive to our playing a role in working towards a solution. But it does seem like a very timid and low-horizoned approach to a dangerous flashpoint in our region, particularly since in recent years we've had a great deal to say about the crises in Libya and Syria, which can have much less impact on us, and where we can have much less impact in turn. Senator Carr went on to say:

...we think a code of conduct is very useful and that is why we have taken a real interest in the work being done in ASEAN towards a set of ASEAN principals on the disputes registered in the South China Sea.

As I argued in the Snapshot, ASEAN's Code of Conduct is part of the problem. Beijing refuses to deal with any of the Southeast Asian claimants unless they abandon a search for a common position. To think that increasing the pressure on China to accede to an ASEAN-determined Code of Conduct will simply prompt Beijing to roll over and accept is a serious misunderstanding of how China works.

Worse, I have a suspicion that American support for ASEAN's Code of Conduct efforts makes them even less palatable to Beijing. By simply adding its name to the ASEAN-US position, Australia contributes nothing to resolving this dispute, and in fact marginally pushes a solution further away.

As tensions rise in the South China Sea, I argue in a new Lowy Institute Snapshots paper that finding solutions should be given the highest priority, with Australia well placed to play a brokering role.

in 'What's at Stake in the South China Sea', I liken the South China Sea to a 'geopolitical Bermuda triangle', where Asia's power dynamics are most concentrated and on display. Maritime tensions pit communist China and Vietnam against one another, unite usual enemies China and Taiwan, and draw the US into partnership with Vietnam. I've explained the basis of my arguments and findings in a short video:

This new research paper complements earlier work by Lowy Institute experts, including the 2011 report 'Crisis and Confidence', which warned of the risks of war in the South China Sea, and a recent speech delivered by Rory Medcalf at the 2012 South China Sea conference at CSIS in Washington, DC.

Sam's discussion of conservative internationalism has piqued my interest, and not only because I spent a few years interviewing members of the Howard Government about its foreign policy philosophy.

I think Sam's onto something, but I think it needs better definition. One of the first things a senior bureaucrat told me about the Howard Government's foreign policy was that I'd need to reverse engineer its philosophical approach from its actions because Howard and his ministers were not into making big defining statements of principle.

Sam defines conservative internationalism by way of an attitude of respect for 'the practice of diplomacy, hundreds of years old and with its own traditions, language, lore and rituals (which) by embedding interstate relations in a web of tradition...takes some of the edge off the Hobbesian contest for power'.

I would go a bit further and add that the conservative approach to international affairs is one that relies on time-tested practices and understandings to find the best possible balance between the independent prerogatives of the state and the limits on state behaviour needed to maintain a dependable and stable international system.

At its core, conservatism accepts and tolerates society's imperfections as inevitable. Above all, it is suspicious of those who fixate on the imperfections and ignore what works, advocating instead grand schemes of reform; who in pursuit of perfection are prepared to sweep away the good with the bad.

It's taken me too long to respond to Sam's thoughtful piece on the new bipolarity. His idea of 'conservative internationalism' really got me thinking and in the end has made me revise a major premise of my original idea.

In first observing the qualitative differences between how seriously Atlantic and Asian states take their commitments to domestic and international institutions, I'd simply accepted the argument of people such as Robert Cooper and Robert Kagan, that regions which take institutions seriously are all idealists. That is, they believe that in building these institutions, they are building a 'postmodern' world that will eradicate war and build a perpetual peace.

Now I'm not so sure. Harry Gelber's fascinating contribution to the debate, pointing out the common defensive intent of associations, from empires to regional blocs, in the face of rising powers suggests a deep pragmatism behind what Kagan and Cooper take to be wildly idealistic enterprises. As Europe contemplates its steady relative decline and Africa and Latin America their persistent under-performance, solidarity and rules that promote stability have become the order of the day.

Thus we can see a major motivation for Mercosur is the need for solidarity among South America's states in dealing with the US, initially but not only in negotiations for a Free Trade Area of the Americas. And take the Sirte Declaration, which paved the way for the establishment of the African Union, which proclaims a 'vision for a strong and united Africa, capable of meeting global challenges and shouldering its responsibility to harness the human and natural resources of the continent in order to improve the living conditions of its peoples.'

This is not idealism; it's conservative internationalism.

In a really helpful critique of the new bipolarity, Andrew Carr argues that I'm overplaying the institutional differences between the Atlantic and Asian realms and points out that there is no shortage of institutions in Asia (though that figure of 700 meetings a year came as a bit of a shock to me).

I think we need to look a bit deeper than counting institutions and meetings. We need to look at what those institutions are committed to and what they do; once we do, the differences just become starker.

Atlantic institutions prepared to act

The Atlantic's institutions have undergone a profound qualitative change since the end of the Cold War.

In North America, the Organization of American States has acquired the right to suspend any member whose democratically elected government has been overthrown by force, through Resolution 1080 and the Protocol of Washington. In South America, Mercosur (through the Treaty of Asuncion) and the Rio Group have defined themselves as associations of democratic countries, stipulating that any member state in which democratic order is interrupted will be suspended until democracy is restored.

Ten years ago, Robert Kagan grabbed everyone's attention by declaring 'Americans are from Mars, Europeans are from Venus'. It was, he told us at the outset of his article-turned-bestseller, 'time to stop pretending that Europeans and Americans share a common view of the world, or even that they occupy the same world.' As war clouds gathered over Iraq, Kagan argued that Americans were prepared to use force to uphold international order, while Europeans placed their hopes in institutions that would build a post-modern world where force was rare.

At the base of Kagan's analysis is an argument about power and psychology that has long intrigued me. He tells a parable about a man in a forest inhabited by a prowling bear: if the man is only armed with a knife he will probably lie low and hope to avoid the bear; but if the man is armed with a gun, he is more likely to go looking for the bear to eliminate the threat to his safety.

His point is that the more power you have, the more proactive you're likely to be in seeking out and eliminating threats to your safety. Hence Americans will find and eliminate threats, whereas weaker Europeans are more likely to try to either tolerate or placate threats using diplomacy and institutions. 'Great powers', he goes on to say, 'often fear rules that constrain them more than they do anarchy. In an anarchic world, they rely on their power to provide security and prosperity.'

It's here that any superficial applicability of the Mars-Venus divide to my Atlantic-Asian divide breaks down, because as I argued in my previous post, it is Asian states that are least willing to invest in institutions, and most insistent of their sovereign prerogatives.

In my previous post, I used a couple of data sets to show that Asian states spend less on institutions and are investing more on weapons than African, European and Latin American states.

I think this is important because it portends a new bipolarity in international affairs, if we use the concept of polarity as it should be used, rather than as it has been defined by the international relations discipline. Since the dawn of the Cold War, IR has defined polarity in terms of competing centres of initiative and consequence, the number of which determine how the world works. The assumption is that all poles, irrespective of institutional or ideological makeup, play the same game of power politics, with common understandings and expectations.

But we need to remember that the concept of polarity comes to us from physics, which defines it as 'the possession of opposite or contrasted principles or tendencies.' I think this describes the current divide between the Atlantic and Asia really well; each operates according to a different tendency in interpreting and reacting to international events.

I’m also keen to rescue my concept of the new bipolarity from another common usage in international relations – the realist-idealist divide. Hugh White suggests that if we look at the Atlantic and Asia using these terms, we'll see that states can switch from realism to idealism according to the circumstances.

But the new bipolarity is about more than alternating moods; it's about real commitments, institutions and philosophies that can't be switched on and off at will. We can see this if we stop for a moment to examine something really interesting that's occurred in the world over the past 20 years, but which few people seem to have noticed.

I’m delighted my thoughts on a new bipolarity provoked several people to respond. I found the responses really helpful, and have been deep in research and thought as a result.

I guess I'd class all of the responses in the 'nice idea, but I’m not convinced' category. Some people, such as Volker Perthes and Hugh White, agreed that there are differences in approach to international affairs, but disagreed that the differences were between two groups, one Atlantic, one Asian. Both argued that there are actually several different groups of approaches to international affairs.

I'd like to have another go at convincing them, and other silent sceptics. There are all sorts of distinctions and classifications that can be made in international affairs; the trick is to pick the one(s) that are significant – in the sense that they shape the way the world works. Both Volker and Hugh argue (though for different reasons) that the important distinctions are regional ones. For Volker it's based on 'cultures' of international relations; for Hugh (and Peter Layton) it's about 'strategic re-regionalisation' and 'regional security complexes'.

I don't think regions are the key to the way the world works, certainly not for the big questions of war and peace and our capacity to address the big issues faced by the planet. On these questions, it is an Atlantic-Asian divide that will have a big impact.

First, some statistics that I think show that Africa and Latin America are closer to Europe than Volker and Jim Terrie believe, and that give some real definition to the 'Asia' that Peter questions the existence of. I looked into two data sets that would distinguish the Atlantic from the Asian outlook: how much states spend on international institutions, and how much they spend on weapons.

In part 1 of this series, Michael describes one side of the new bipolar divide, the 'Atlantic community', which includes the Americas, Europe and Africa. Part 2 describes the other side of the divide, Asia.

The new bipolarity is very different from that of the Cold War. This divide is not one of opposing coalitions clustered around all-powerful poles. It features strong interdependent links rather than a chasm of rivalry and fear between its two components. The new polarity is of a different type, with two different communities of states divided by a widening gulf of perceptions and expectations about global institutions, international norms, and the basic ground rules of international affairs.

These are not competing or even non-trading coalitions; rather they represent two steadily diverging conceptions of how the world works. Whereas the Atlantic community holds fast to a teleological belief in the steady improvement of international relations, a resignation to playing out a cycle of rising, declining and competing powers is pervasive in Asia.

This new divide may be less dangerous than its predecessor, but it will be no less determining of global affairs. The Atlantic and the Asian mindsets will struggle to find common ground in global institutions and on the big planetary challenges that face us. It will be a recurring dialogue of the deaf between idealists and arch pragmatists. It is hard to see how institutional solutions will be arrived at in negotiations between one group of countries committed to internationalism and another group sceptical of internationalism.

The Cold War ended with the victory of one side and the implosion of the other. The new bipolarity can't be resolved in this way because the two sides aren't competing – in fact they're not even speaking the same language. Whereas the preponderance of global production and minerals lay on one side of the Cold War divide, allowing the West to construct a quasi-global order, this time around production, resources and legitimacy are much more evenly spread between the Atlantic and Asia. The new bipolarity will likely be more enduring than the Cold War version.

Perhaps the biggest challenge posed by the new bipolarity will be to the global leadership of the US. America will be torn between the Atlantic and Asian realms. Its sympathies and predilections lie very much with the Atlantic community, whose ideals reflect and extend FDR's postwar internationalism and which still looks to Washington for leadership. But America's pragmatic interests lie in Asia, where it faces the most serious strategic challenge since the collapse of the Soviet Union, as well as the best prospects for the recovery of its economy.

America will struggle to come to terms with the new realities in Asia, because it will approach them with an Atlantic mindset. Its expectations about what it can do, and how it does them, will need constant readjustment in Asia. Whether it can juggle two different approaches to international affairs will be a major challenge for the US in the twenty-first century.

Suggestions, comments and critiques on all three parts of this series are gratefully accepted.

Photo by Flickr user Aaron Molina.

In part 1 of this series, Michael describes one side of the new bipolar divide, the 'Atlantic community', which includes the Americas, Europe and Africa.

On the other side of the new bipolar divide is Asia, a collection of countries driven by a set of preoccupations completely different from those of the Atlantic community. This is a region – it cannot be described as a community in any meaningful sense – undergoing rapid change in power relativities.

Over the past decade, Asia has evolved from a region in which no state was large and rich enough to contemplate dominance to a region in which one state, China, is large enough, and rapidly amassing wealth and power sufficient to make its dominance imaginable among its neighbours. As a consequence, there are few pretensions towards a non-competitive, post-modern pattern of international relations in Asia. As the Atlantic community steadily disinvests in its armed forces, Asia's states are engaged in a prolonged and determined arms build-up.

Asian institutions have always been less ambitious than Atlantic institutions, in that their adherence to Westphalian norms of non-interference and consensus has been uncompromising. Despite the proliferation of regional institutions in Asia, none have been permitted to address the region's multiplying points of stress and tension among its jostling powers. In a region in which power competition is rising, institutions are becoming even less relevant.

While Asian elites may at times mouth support for norms such as the Responsibility to Protect, few would admit that it is an operative expectation in their part of the world. The prospect of an international coalition intervening to prevent a massacre in, say, Burma, are vanishingly small.

Back in February, Sam drew attention to University of Colorado Professor Roger Pielke's observation that blogging is a great way of critiquing, extending and refining new ideas:

(Blogging) is a remarkably powerful tool for refining ideas, for collecting intelligence, for making contacts. I get routinely better feedback critique from ideas, arguments, I put out on my blog than I do in the peer review process.

Well, as a lapsed academic, I'm intrigued enough to give it a go.

On a recent trans-Pacific flight, I tapped out some impressions I'd formed while attending a Council on Foreign Relations conference, which brought together the heads of 20 think tanks from around the world to discuss global governance. I call the piece 'Back to Bipolarity?' because it is an argument that the world has split into two different communities of understandings and expectations about how the world works.

I'd like to test these ideas before I put them together into a journal article, by presenting them on The Interpreter in a three-part series, and asking specialists from around the world to respond. In particular, I'm going to encourage some of the other participants in the 'Council of Councils' conference to critique my impressions. Suggestions, comments and critiques from you, the reader, are also gratefully accepted: blogeditor@lowyinstitute.org .

On one side of the new bipolar divide is an Atlantic community, which includes the Americas, Europe and Africa. The Atlantic community places great hope in the progress of global institutions and norms such as the Responsibility to Protect, and believes strongly in the prospect of building a non-conflictual, 'post-modern' international system by way of regional and global institutions.

Indeed, it has been Africans and Latin Americans at the forefront of extending post-modern norms: witness the African Union's rejection of non-intervention in favour of a norm of 'non-indifference' in its July 2000 Constitutive Act, and Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff's call for a norm of 'responsibility while protecting' in her address to the General Assembly in September 2011.

At the risk of sounding pedantic, the centralised foreign-policy-making system Andrew refers to in his post was not created by Prime Minister Rudd, but rather was inherited from his predecessor John Howard.

In a chapter in the latest Australia in World Affairs collection, I describe this as the rise of a 'presidential' system of foreign-policy-making in Australia. Globalisation and transnational threats have broadened the foreign policy remit to include most departments of state, while creating complex interlinkages among issues.

Howard's logical response was to progressively strengthen coordination mechanisms to guard against contradictory responses, lapses in communication, and embarrassing or dangerous security leaks. The experience of leading the INTERFET operation in 1999 further deepened the need for clockwork-like coordination across government. Between 2002 and 2009 the international and security policy staff in PM&C increased by 290%.

Howard was also determined to play a central role in national security policy-making. On coming to office he strengthened and regularised meetings of the National Security Committee of Cabinet (NSCC), as well as establishing powerful supporting bodies within the bureaucracy as a single hierarchy of advice and decision. The creation of the position of National Security Adviser gave the PM single-point delegation of all security policy decisions, without having to rely on his Ministers or their Departments to transmit his wishes.

I'm afraid not many of my best reads of 2011 were actually published in 2011, mainly because the backlog of books I simply must read lengthens with each passing year. I guess that's why they invented retirement. But enough preamble.

Subversion as Foreign Policy: The Secret Eisenhower and Dulles Debacle in Indonesia, by Audrey and George Kahin provides a detailed account of US support to rebellions in different parts of Indonesia, a policy backed by Taiwan, the Philippines, Singapore, Malaysia and Australia. If you read one book into the psychology of Indonesian fears about dismemberment, this should be it.

Exorbitant Privilege: The Rise and Fall of the Dollar and the International Monetary System by Barry Eichengreen is a lively and accessible history of the US dollar as a global reserve currency, a sober assessment of the power benefits it has provided to the US, and a careful forecast of the future of the dollar and the global monetary system. The financial side of global power is not something many non-economists think much about; Exorbitant Privilege provides us with another history of the late 20th century.

The Most Dangerous Place: Pakistan's Lawless Frontier by Imtiaz Gul is a wonderfully written, deeply researched, but profoundly depressing book. Gul takes the time to explore in detail the social, historical, tribal and religious complexities of the Pakistan-Afghan border regions in ways that show why any and all attempts to impose external order are deeply futile. The Most Dangerous Place should give pause to optimistic scenarios that there will be stability and peace in that part of the world any time soon.

War by Sebastian Junger continues this depressing theme. An embedded journalist with an American forward-operating base in one of the most dangerous parts of Afghanistan, Junger writes an intensely human portrait of some of the soldiers at the cutting edge of this war. As only a writer of his imagination and ability can, Junger includes a riveting and haunting passage on the body's psycho-biological reaction to being shot at. War is a modern classic which deserves to be listed alongside A Homage to Catalonia and All Quiet on the Western Front.

Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr and the Hunt for His Assassin by Hampton Sides is my favourite for the year. This is narrative non-fiction at its best — even better than In Cold Blood. The narrative traces the parallel paths of James Earl Ray and his victim to that fateful evening of 4 April 1968 (U2 got it wrong — its wasn't the early morning), powerfully evoking the social and political mood in the US between the fading hopes of the civil rights movement and the rising anger of the racist right. The man-hunt part is interesting, particularly the portrait of a conflicted FBI under Hoover — but nowhere near as riveting as the prelude to the assassination.

My book for the holidays? Sacred Games by Vikram Chandra, a novel about gangsters in modern day Mumbai.

I heard late on Saturday night about the NATO strike on a border post that killed 24 Pakistani soldiers, as I stepped off a plane having spent a week in Pakistan. A week of talks in Pakistan had left me in no doubt that Pakistani-American relations are in deep, deep trouble.

One commentator told me that relations have never been worse, and that they are now locked into a downward spiral. Another observed that whereas Pakistan and America never trusted each other at a strategic level, they could collaborate effectively at a tactical/operational level. But events in 2011 have shattered even that tactical interoperability.

There are several causes of this breakdown which make patching things up so much harder.

At the level of geostrategy, Islamabad has watched a steady divergence of Pakistani and American interests. Washington's engagement with India is seen as reducing Pakistan to a minor role and destroying the strategic balance on the sub-continent.This has driven Pakistan's push for more nuclear weapons (including possibly battlefield nukes), further isolating it and garnering American ire.

Islamabad sees US engagement as self-interested and narrowly issue-specific — Afghanistan, nukes and terrorism — which makes it always nervous that Washington will suddenly abandon the relationship.

The point Andrew makes about building demand for Asian language study first is absolutely crucial.

The Gillard Government's discontinuation of funding for Asian language teaching in Australian schools last budget laid to rest a 20-year experiment with top-down, government-led Asia literacy. Government-funded teaching of Japanese, Mandarin, Korean and Indonesian in Australian schools coincided with a long-run erosion of student interest in studying Asian languages.

The next impulse must come from the grassroots; from curious students asking parents, and parents asking principals, about the languages, cultures and societies of Asia.

But in focusing on the failure of Australian schools to teach Asian languages, we're missing the big picture, and probably setting the bar too high. My point is that no Australian school student will be curious about an Asian language while he or she is relatively ignorant about the societies of Asia: their history, geography, politics, economies and so on.

My own education, from year 1 to year 12, contained not one scrap of teaching on Southeast Asia. Not one. No history, geography, society, politics. Imperial China we covered briefly in history, and a smattering of Japan. Perhaps a lesson on haiku. I didn't encounter the societies of Southeast Asia until I got to university. And looking around the Australian schools curriculum, it seems that not much has changed in 30 years. We remain focused on Australian and Western history, literature and social studies.

Is it any wonder Australian school students are reluctant to embark on the study of a language spoken by a society they know nothing about? Is it any wonder Australian kids visiting Southeast Asia's beach resorts with their parents remain incurious about the societies they're visiting?

If we just focus on teaching and learning languages, we're setting the bar too high. Let's focus on teaching about the societies, histories, cultures, politics and economics of the countries to our north first. I'm willing to bet that if we do, a grassroots-led demand for access to learning those languages will follow.

Photo by Flickr user Elephi Pelehi.

Of all the reasons I had for writing There Goes the Neighbourhood, giving offense to Australia's former and serving diplomats was not one of them. Yet something about the book has caused Geoff Miller to take such personal and collective umbrage as to drag him into a reading of its arguments that seems tendentious at best.

Prime Minister John Curtin with General Douglas MacArthur, Parliament House, Canberra, 26 March 1942. Courtesy of Wikipedia.

Geoff accuses me of dismissing the advice of Australia's diplomats on our foreign policy. At no point in the book do I do that. When I wrote (on p.173) that our foreign policy challenges can't be 'left to the diplomats' I was responding to the quotation on p.138 from Hugh McKay, who argued that, in their comfortable complacency, 'Australians are ready to leave...international relations to the diplomats.'

I go on to suggest that 'diplomats may make the wrong choices' — not that they will make them. My argument is that Australia's international relations now extend far beyond the narrow foreign policy agenda managed by our Foreign Affairs department, and that their management therefore must draw in the interests and input of other parts of government and the Australian community.

I quite deliberately use the term 'policy makers' when I level the charge of a lack of ambition at Australian's foreign policy — precisely in order to include both appointed and elected officials. I'm therefore a bit mystified why Geoff would read my book as an attack on diplomats, or see the need to remind me that foreign policy issues are the subject of Cabinet deliberations and decisions.

In the spirit of trans-Tasman rivalry, I'm obliged have a go at topping Rob Ayson's mixed metaphors. So here goes.

In his latest contribution to the multilateralism debate, Rob accuses multilateralism's sceptics of tilting at straw men. He argues that they conjure 'an almost mythically universal form which involves the maximum number of participants' before using 'this super-sized species of multilateralism as a stick to beat the entire genus.'

Rob asks, 'isn't plurilateralism just the multilateralism of the few, the multilateralist's view of the coalition of the willing?' Well, no.

The distinction between multilateralism's universal membership and restricted membership varieties has long caused misunderstanding between trade specialists and foreign policy specialists. To the tradies, 'multilateral' means universal membership of the GATT/WTO type, to be distinguished from restricted membership, or 'regional' agreements.

But to foreign policy types, multilateral can refer to both universal and restricted associations. The problem is that IR academics have broadened its remit so far as to slide it towards meaninglessness. So, in the spirit of Tim Dunne, it's important that we specify exactly what we mean by 'multilateral'. To my mind, it's not a question of membership. To be multilateral, an association must have three properties.

Ambassador Woker raises an important caution about burdening multilateralism with unrealistic expectations, and then judging it harshly when it falls short. He argues that often it is the process itself that is the important outcome.

His example of the Conference for Security and Cooperation in Europe is a good one — the iterative process of meetings between the halves of Europe divided by the Iron Curtain played a key role in stabilising the continent as the Second Cold War began after 1978. Another example, closer to home, is ASEAN, an organisation short on actual collaborative outcomes, but long on stabilisation and mutual trust, built up over decades of meetings.

Distinguishing process from progress is important in working out when multilateralism is working and when it isn't. Situations of high mutual mistrust and antagonism are ideally suited to an open-ended process of meetings, without the pressure of agreeing on a concrete plan of collaboration. As long as the major protagonists have no greater goals than co-existence, multilateralism will do the trick.

The problem is that multilateralism is being tasked with much greater demands than these. Michael Heazle has rightly shown how the solutions required on climate change are well beyond the capacities of the multilateral process. Arguably, so is the reform of the global financial system, which has been placed on the agenda of the G20.

Ambassador Woker and Senator Trood argue for a well calibrated mix of multilateralism and bilateralism. I agree, but to deal with the emerging challenges to global order, we need to be more creative than just relying on these two techniques, however judiciously they are combined.

Previously I argued for a rigorous appraisal of where multilateralism works, where it has stopped working, where it will never work, and where it's making things worse. Multilateralism works on functional issues where states basically see eye-to-eye: health, communications and transport protocols, etc.

But on issues involving global public goods where major stake-holders have very different interests, prescriptions, and senses of entitlement, multilateralism has stopped working, will never work or is making things worse. This category of challenges is growing, not shrinking.

A rational response is to admit that multilateralism on its own — the traditional intergovernmental organisation and multi-state summit meeting — is of declining value. The next step is to reverse the trend of recent decades where states such as Australia have devoted increasing proportions of scarce diplomatic resources to servicing the annual agenda of multilateral meetings.

The counterpart to this is to begin investing fewer expectations on what these multilateral meetings can achieve for regional and global governance, and devoting greater resources to thinking about and experimenting with other techniques — or, as Rob Ayson suggests, non-multilateral forms of cooperation. Here are a few ideas on ways forward.

Kanishka Jayasuriya has raised the intriguing possibility that multilateralism is not a timeless and universally applicable technique, but a form of diplomacy that was enabled by a certain set of historical circumstances, and therefore in decline as those circumstances pass into history.

With no small injustice to Kanishka’'s detailed writings on this topic, he argues that the post-War multilateral order was built on two things: western global dominance and a social constitutionalist contract broadly subscribed to among western countries. To these two conditions, I would add three more.

1. Powerful states, unchallenged in their capacity to shape global affairs by markets, corporations, civil society actors or transnational flows.
2. The mutually-reinforcing imperatives of trade and security: alliances that kept major trading partners confident enough to trade; and trade that enriched and empowered allies.
3. A coalition of countries that could remember the pre-World War I golden age of globalisation and were prepared to forego a fair bit of self-interest to build the supporting structures for a new age of globalisation.

This world has gone. The commanding heights of global affairs are no longer the exclusive domain of the Atlantic powers. The GFC, the Euro crisis and political gridlock in the old democracies have sapped their confidence in the inherent superiority of their models of governance and markets.

As Nick Bisley notes, the state’'s capacity to control events inside and outside their borders now has serious challenges. Trade, investment and security now pull at cross purposes, with major rivals becoming each other’s largest trading and investment partners. Globalisation is no longer a golden memory but a huge, complex and unforgiving freight train that states struggle to comprehend, and they are more inclined these days to try to control it than enable it further.

If multilateralism is to play the same central role in the next 60 years as it did in the last 60, it needs to be able to handle three new challenges:

1. Can it accommodate a diversity of actors and interests that now have not only a voice but the ability to shape and block cooperation in ways they couldn't in the past? The emerging states are a diverse lot with very different interests from each other, let alone the west. And then there are multinational corporations, civil society movements, transnational flows...
2. Can it manage the scale and complexity of global affairs, which have broadened far beyond the foreign policy agendas of states? Can multilateral processes help manage the turbulence and risk of global flows, and the wicked problems that Michael Heazle reminds us are a consequence of deepening globalisation and interdependence?
3. Will multilateralism be a mechanism for mitigating rivalries and mutual paranoias among deeply interdependent states, or the vehicles for prosecuting those rivalries?

Multilateralism as currently practiced cannot hope to meet these challenges alone. It can do part of the job, but it needs help from new methods and mechanisms. In my next post, I'’ll suggest a few.

Photo by Flickr user scratch n sniff.

The number and range of contributions to our debate on multilateralism shows just how overdue this discussion is.

Indeed, the breadth of responses shows that multilateralism has become many things to many people. Tim Dunne is right to caution that we need to be clear about what multilateralism is. Unfortunately, multilateralism seems to have acquired many incarnations.

One incarnation is multilateralism-as-ideology, or 'dogma', as Ian Hall puts it. The ideology of multilateralism is that it is a process which inevitably, if not swiftly, leads to greater levels of trust, agreement, and cooperation. To its partisans, multilateralism has an all-or-nothing quality to it. If a foreign policy is not multilateralist by default, it must be unilateralist or bilateralist — and by implication selfish, instrumental, and low-horizoned.

But by expecting multilateralism to do everything, its partisans expose it to two big risks:

1. In some cases, rather than building trust, agreement and cooperation, multilateralism can actually deepen suspicion and aggravate rivalry. Multilateral negotiations, by definition, take place in front of an audience of leaders, policy-makers, and officials of several other countries. This at times tempts some countries to push for maximalist positions, dressed in the rhetoric of collective responsibility. Such situations lead to increased resentment among countries that disagree over being embarrassed or blindsided, and can lead to a hardening of positions and to unproductive name-calling and blaming. In these cases, the private, iterative nature of bilateral talks, which allow compromise and face-saving, can be much more effective in building agreement and trust.
2. By loading too much onto the multilateral agenda, its partisans risk advertising its failures and eroding support for the institutions which Russell Trood reminds us play such an important role in underpinning the global order. Because perceptions do matter. It is governments that bankroll international organisations, and in the current environment of public debt and fiscal tightening, taxpayers just might start questioning why money is being used to keep institutions they feel are irrelevant, incompetent or ineffectual running.

Multilateralism's partisans need to accept that it will not bring about agreement on all issues needing to be addressed collectively.

As I'll argue in my next post, the range of issues that multilateralism can't fix is growing. It's time to heed Ian Hall's call for pragmatism and take a good hard look at multilateralism's progress: where it's working; where it has stopped working; where it will never work; and where it's making things worse. And for the last three of these categories, it's time to put aside the multilateralism-only fetish and get creative about what mechanisms might actually do a better job at building collective action on the pressing challenges the planet faces.

Photo by Flickr user United Nations Photo.

In my book, There Goes the Neighbourhood, I describe multilateralism as 'the band aid of Australian diplomacy'.

It's a habit Australian policy-makers have fallen into, a universal solution to any problem that arises. Once an institutional solution is proposed, it cauterizes the need to think about the problem any more. By focusing on the familiar, comfortable mechanisms of multilateralism, policy-makers can avoid the need to think really hard about the problem itself. Australia has so fetishized multilateralism that the other options in its diplomatic toolkit have been starved of resources and serious intellectual engagement.

This is really dangerous, because multilateralism has become the copper wire phone network of twenty-first century international relations: it's good that it's there and still performs useful functions, but it's useless for dealing with the really important and pressing tasks. There's little prospect that the big challenges we face – global warming, financial imbalances and instability, food, water and energy competition, a changing and unpredictable global power balance, rising migration pressures, nuclear weapons proliferation – will be addressed multilaterally.

Multilateralism's malaise has five causes:

1. Inflexibility in both membership and mandate: international organisations tend to preserve their memberships, power hierarchies, agendas and decision procedures in aspic. They are very hard to change. They can admit new members as required but find it impossible to exclude members that are no longer relevant. Those countries that used to be powerful but are no longer stubbornly refuse to countenance a demotion. The result is that regional and global institutions become obsolete as the world around them changes.
2. Institutions have become more conducive to conflict than co-operation: any major issue that requires international collaboration will be referred to a multilateral body, and it is here that opponents of the proposed solution can kill it. Multilateralism has been around long enough that all countries know the many ways it can be gamed. The veto points are numerous and familiar, from loading down agendas to weak chairs to filibustering to leaders who agree to save face but instruct officials not to act on the agreement.
3. The contradiction between size and capacity: the bigger the organisation, the harder it is to get agreement, and the less binding and decisive its decisions become. A great example is the Doha Round. So tortuous have been its deliberations that the deal on the table – estimated by the Petersen Institute to promise the equivalent of just one day's global trade in trade gains – is regarded as not worth the pain of fighting an agreement through the US Congress.
4. The rise of competitive co-operation: the unwieldiness of universal membership organisations has spawned smaller organisations – 'the herd of Gs' – from the G77 to the G7 to our latest fetish, the G20. But smaller organisations inevitably breed internal and external opposition: internal from countries that prefer a different configuration (what about a G10; the old G7 minus Canada and Italy plus the BRICs? [all said in a French accent]); external from the countries left out (reference Singapore's campaign to start a 3G – the Global Governance Group).
5. Old institutions never die, they just clog the landscape. It's very rare for institutions that have outlived their usefulness to be killed off. It's much easier to just propose a new body for each new problem that arises, or constellation of countries that become important. Meanwhile, the space junk of past multilateralism chews up diplomatic capacity, leaving fewer and fewer resources to work on pressing problems.

This isn't a call to scrap multilateral institutions; they perform a wealth of useful functions. But let's get real about the prospects for multilateralism in dealing with the really pressing issues the world and this country are facing. It's time to start thinking of new techniques and mechanisms for dealing with the new international relations of the 21st century.

Photo by Flickr user nathangibbs.

My thanks to John Quiggin for plugging my new book on his blog, and apologies for taking so long to reply. John admits he hasn't read the book, and then takes issue with a claim on the jacket that 'the benign and comfortable world that has allowed Australia to be safe and prosperous is vanishing quickly'. He goes on to argue that over the past few years, the threats to Australia have lessened.

This is precisely the point I make in 'There Goes the Neighbourhood'. I argue in Chapter 5 that 'practically every international issue that really worried Australians at some stage over the past 60 years has seemed to simply fade away without even a whimper' – resurgent Japanese militarism, communism, American isolationism, the Yellow Peril, terrorism, the Soviet navy. But the point of my argument is that the world that has given Australia such a benign neighbourhood is coming to an end.

Quiggin issues a challenge that unless someone 'can point to something I've missed, I'm going back to sleep'. Well, here goes. In a nutshell, five big changes should give us serious pause for thought:

1. The unprecedented rise of the world's only two continent-sized economies, at approximately the same time. We can already feel their gravitational effect, and the future will see us ever more tightly bound into their economic dynamics. Their increasing influence and centrality will mean that our world and our choices are more and more shaped by the preferences of countries that see the world differently to how we see it, and less and less shaped by the preferences of countries that think like we think.

2. In a political sense, these will be very different great powers. All other great powers have been rich; India and China, even when they are the largest and third largest economies in the world, will still be poor in per capita terms. The combination of power and poverty will ensure they have very different priorities from other leading countries, and this will affect the prospects for meaningful collective action on everything from climate change to global financial instability to nuclear proliferation, to energy, food and water security.

Before the financial crisis skewed things even further, New Zealand's per capita wealth was 87 percent less than that of Western Australia. But what really caused angst across the ditch was that New Zealanders' average wealth was 13 percent lower than Tasmania's.

You can explain a richer WA by what's in the ground — but Tasmania has exactly the same assets as New Zealand, only much fewer of them. The logical question that few Kiwis dare utter out loud, is whether their forebears made the right decision about not joining the Australian federation.

There's an economic pessimism that pervades every non-sport-related conversation you have in New Zealand. It takes the visitor by surprise, because the place looks as wealthy as Sydney or Melbourne (I'm visiting this week as a guest of the Asia-New Zealand Foundation).

But it's not long before you realize the causes of the pessimism: the remarkable boom that's occurring in Australia. No Kiwi I've spoken to has failed to mention the El Dorado across the Tasman.

The streets of Auckland and Wellington are heavily populated with Australian brands that have come over and prospered. And labour-starved Australia is a massive magnet pulling skilled New Zealanders in — especially as the New Zealand economy splutters along and places like the UK wind up their working holiday visa schemes.

But if things continue along the current trajectory, Tasmania pulls further and further ahead in wealth, and out of sheer despair New Zealand applies to become the seventh Australian state, this time we should say no.

In the realm of international relations put-downs, none can touch Dean Acheson's description of Britain in the 1950s as a country that had lost an empire but not yet found a role. It's a jibe that has always rankled the British, particularly since Acheson's America did more than any other country to hasten the end of the British Empire – and then to quietly take up the reins of a world order the British had done so much to build.

The British have since developed a range of coping strategies for their loss of empire. One early gambit was to try to tell the Americans how to run their imperium. In Harold Macmillan's view, the Americans were a twentieth century version of the brash, brutal Roman Empire to which the British could play the role of the wise, cultured Greek advisers.

More recently, the British coping strategy has been to forecast the end of the American empire. This began with Paul Kennedy's prediction of American imperial overstretch in the 1980s. More recently Niall Ferguson has pronounced that it's all over, while Gideon Rachman tells the readers of Foreign Policy why China is the imperial challenger America had to have.

The curious thing is that Americans appear to love forecasts of their decline spoken with an Oxbridge accent. Kennedy, Ferguson and Rachman have been eagerly embraced by the Ivy League, and are high profile commentators in the US (despite being frequently wrong in their forecasts).

It makes one wonder whether the ultimate coping strategy for loss of Empire is to watch the next one fall. And should Kennedy, Ferguson and Rachman be right about America's decline, what will Americans' future coping strategies be?

Cross-posted from our companion blog, Interpreting the Aid Review, which was launched today.

In July 2009, the American Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, tasked the State Department to undertake a major review to streamline diplomacy and foreign aid. The report for this first ever Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review was published last month (mid-December), several months later than initially scheduled – an indicator of the size of the task.

Last November, Foreign Minister Rudd also set in motion Australia's own review of its aid program. The independent review team was given just five months to put together its report and recommendations. Given the breadth of the review's terms of reference, this is going to be an enormous task. But similar to the US review, so is its significance.

The last time Australia took a serious look at its aid program was during the preparation of the Howard Government's White Paper, Australian Aid: Promoting Growth and Stability. It identified four themes guiding Australia's development assistance: accelerating economic growth; fostering functioning and effective states; investing in people; and promoting regional stability and cooperation.

Nearly five years later, much has changed in the world of Australia's aid policy, as I discuss here.

For starters, Australia's aid budget is expected to double over the next four years to meet the government's commitment of spending 0.5 per cent of Australia's gross national income on foreign aid by 2015-2016 or on current estimations, somewhere between $8 billion and $9 billion. Meeting this commitment will put the aid budget in the government's top ten annual expenditure items. That in itself is an important reason to look carefully at how and why the money is being spent.

As Sam and Rodger have already noted, we're nearing a parliamentary debate on our military presence in Afghanistan. Notwithstanding Peter Leahy's thought-provoking analysis on the need for full parliamentary discussion of military commitments, I have two reservations about the value of our upcoming debate.

The first is a growing scepticism about the real value of debate. I think we idealise debate because we think that by airing and having to justify our positions, we'll collectively arrive at a more considered and consensual outcome. But I'm not so sure that's what debate delivers in the Fox News age.

Perhaps it's the complexity of issues or the sheer availability of information that backs any side of the argument, but we seem to have eroded our ability to genuinely listen to the arguments of others and to concede when they have a point. As many of the print media responses to Hugh White's Quarterly Essay showed, there are too many people who mistake name-calling and sloganeering for actual debate.

My second reservation is that our parliament will be debating the wrong war. Whatever's said, agreed to, or disagreed in the chamber will have little effect on the outcome of the conflict in Afghanistan. In the highly unlikely scenario that the debate delivers a complete change of Australian strategy, what's the likelihood that we'd be able to convince our coalition partners to change course? If it results in a resolution to withdraw, our allies will have to scramble to fill the gap in Uruzgan, but it would hardly be the difference between success and failure.

What no one in this country, or any other country that I'm aware of, is debating is the more relevant war – the one that hasn't happened yet.

In other words, what do we do the next time a major terrorist attack occurs on the homeland of one of our close allies, one mounted from within a fragile state? What are the likely reactions of our allies to a massive attack in Times Square or Trafalgar Square, planned and financed from Yemen or Somalia? And how should we be involved? What are the lessons we would draw on from our involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan?

I'm not sure a parliamentary debate will help with that – but surely it needs to be something we think about before it happens?

Photo by Flickr user justinknol, used under a Creative Commons license.