In my review of Hugh White's Quarterly Essay, I mentioned that Samuel Huntington's description of Australia as a 'torn country' had come to mind. Hugh's Essay is about being caught in the middle of a mighty tug-of-war (or tug-just-short-of-war) between two superpowers which both have great cultural heft. As the Essay notes, Australia has been accustomed over 200 years to Britain or the US wielding the final say in Asia. The China power shift is blighting that Australian birthright.
How much will Australia be torn, frayed or rumpled by the tug of war? To follow the torn country idea, I pulled the Huntington's Clash of Civilisations from the bookcase. Here's the original Foreign Affairs article that started the argument.
The Clash tome sits next on my shelf – and opposite in opinion — to Fukuyama’s liberal End of History. The two works bookend what now looks like a happier time in the mid '90s. The Soviet Union had died in bed. Asia was as peaceful as it had ever been, while getting richer by the day. The US could revel in its unipolar uniqueness and party hard on the peace dividend.
Huntington's work was an element in the rebuild for the international relations realists who had completely missed the end of the Cold War. In the realist universe, superpowers always expire in battle, never in bed. The Huntington remake was the prediction that future conflict would be between religions/civilisations rather than between nations and ideologies. Two chaps called Osama and George W. have since done their best to fulfil this vision, but let us move quickly to the issue of Oz as a torn nation.
Some 15 years after Clash was published as a book, Huntington's China call is looking healthy:
The emergence of new great powers is always highly destabilising, and if it occurs, China’s emergence as a major power will dwarf any comparable phenomena during the last half of the second millennium...East Asian countries and the world will have to respond to the increasingly assertive role of this biggest player in human history.
Discussing Asia, China and America, he concluded: 'The underlying cause of conflict between America and China is their basic difference over what should be the future balance of power in East Asia.' Well, 15 years on, we can all say 'yes' to that too.
The rise of East Asia, Huntington said, meant Australia could be the first of many Western countries to 'attempt to defect from the West and bandwagon with rising non-Western civilisations.' For a country successfully to redefine its civilisational identity, he argued, required at least three things: (1) the political and economic elite had to embrace the shift; (2) the public had to at least acquiesce; and (3) the dominant elements in the host civilisation had to embrace the convert.
Ultimately, Huntington was sceptical of Australia's ability to defect from the West and remake itself as an Asian society: 'The case for redefining Australia as an Asian country was grounded on the assumption that economics overrides culture in shaping the destiny of nations.'
Huntington's torn metaphor is useful, but setting the terms of the conflict at the civilisational/cultural level makes the terms of the debate too broad. Australia certainly feels a bit conflicted at the emerging tussle between China and the US. But as a practical people, if there is to be any real discussion of defecting from the West, it will be conducted in terms of the alliance.
The real sound of a rip in Australia will be if a major argument develops over the Holy Grail, the alliance with the US. Hugh White lays out this argument in detail, with various options such as clinging ever more firmly to the US or adopting the New Zealand model (go from a middle power to a small power).
Part of the fun in playing spot-the-tear will be if China shows any ability at Huntington's third requirement: embracing the convert. Rowan Callick recently had an interview with China's departing ambassador, Zhang Junsai, who argues that Australia has become a crucial testing ground for China's relations with the West and other Asia-Pacific countries. Australia will have to play a lot of attention to what Beijing actually expects from what the ambassador called a 'model relationship.'
Photo by Flickr user firemind, used under a Creative Commons license.
