Pearls and Irritations

In a recent article for the Washington Post on the militarisation of Australia’s north, the Minister for Defence, Richard Marles, said: “We’re working together [with the United States] to deter future conflict and to provide for the collective security of the region in which we live.”

The defence preparations against China­ that Marles describes do not promote collective security in the Indo-Pacific. The “deterrence” he mentions may prevent specific contemplated actions, but cannot stop war in general. History tells us that efforts to deter specific actions through alliances often make war more likely. Some alliances, like the Franco-Russian alliance directed against that between Germany and Austria-Hungary before 1914, resulted in the very conflicts that they were designed to prevent. With the advent of nuclear weapons in 1945, the stakes are even higher in potential wars between great powers than they were in the total wars of the first half of the twentieth century.

Under a collective security arrangement, used in its proper sense, an aggressor against any one state is considered an aggressor against all other states, which act together to repel the aggressor. International action to promote collective security developed after the Napoleonic Wars to maintain the status quo among European states in the 19th century.

After the First World War, statesmen sought to provide remedies against the cataclysm believed to have been started by arms races, alliances, and the licence for sovereign states to initiate war for their own benefit. They created, in 1919, an international organisation, the League of Nations, to prevent war through disarmament, open diplomacy, international cooperation, restrictions on the right to make war and penalties against aggressor states.

Congress did not allow the United States to join the League of Nations. The US Government did, however, champion one of the most successful collective security initiatives of the 20th century, the Washington Naval Conference of 1921-22. The conference was conducted outside the auspices of the League of Nations, but attended by nine nations, including the United States, Britain, Japan and China. It led to agreements that limited the naval arms race in the Asia-Pacific during the 1920s.

After the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in 1937, Australian Prime Minister Joseph Lyons made another proposal for collective security in the Indo-Pacific. This came in the form of his suggestion (not taken up) for a non-aggression pact between the major powers in the Pacific.

The archetypal collective security body was the one championed by the United States in 1945: the United Nations Organisation. The UN Charter outlawed war between states and endowed the Security Council with the power to impose sanctions, including the use of collective military force, against aggressor states. The idea of four policemen (the United States, the Soviet Union, Britain and China) maintaining international order broke down during the Cold War. This was especially when the permanent members of the Security Council could wield their veto to stop enforcement action. In the late 1940s, however, some policymakers in the Chifley Labor Government saw the creation of the NATO alliance (collective defence against the Soviet Union) as endangering the “collective security” promised by the United Nations Charter.

Despite the Cold War, Australia and other states promoted collective security through measures such as the 1959 Antarctic Treaty. This treaty set aside the potential for sovereignty disputes between parties, and excluded military activities from the Antarctic. Another was the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (sponsored by the super-powers) that sought to limit the proliferation of nuclear weapons beyond the still small group of states that possessed them and to encourage the nuclear weapon states gradually to wind back their nuclear arsenals. The Keating Labor Government tried to strengthen this process through its 1995 Canberra Commission and the Hawke Government championed the Chemical Weapons Convention. Coming into force in 1997, it prohibited use of chemical weapons and the large-scale development, production, stockpiling or transfer of chemical weapons.

In the 1970s, during the height of the Cold War, the Helsinki Process in Europe is a model for Asian collective security and crisis resolution. The Helsinki Conference of the 1970s had a wide membership, including the United States and the Soviet Union, and 33 other European states from both sides of the Iron Curtain. It was based on the ideas of sovereign equality and the rights inherent in sovereignty, refraining from the threat of force, peaceful settlement of disputes, non-intervention in internal affairs, cooperation among states and fulfilment in good faith of obligations under international law. Many scholars now are more inclined to recognising the part played by the Helsinki process in ending the Cold War in the 1980s.

In the third decade of the 21st century, Marles lauds the process by which Australia and the United States are strengthening their alliance and militarising Australia’s north in the interest of “deterrence” against a country that they erroneously liken to Imperial Japan before the Pacific War. This process is targeted against the second most populous Indo-Pacific state, by some measures the largest economy in the world, Australia’s largest trading partner and the Asian state with the strongest military. It is collective defence not collective security.

If Australia were really to contribute to collective security in the Indo-Pacific, it would look to past examples and include the China in confidence-building and peace-building processes. These examples include the Washington Naval Conference of 1921-22, the League of Nations and the United Nations, the Antarctic Treaty of 1959, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (a regime weakened by Australia’s participation in AUKUS) and the Helsinki process in Europe. A major problem for Australia in moving in this direction is that foreign policy is now dictated too much by the Defence Department at the expense of an enfeebled Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade.

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