In all liberal democracies, Australia included, national self-regard resists identification with the harsh implications of reliance on, or celebration of, military force – unless it can be viably represented as defence of freedom, just war, or wars against unspeakable Others.
An updated Pearls & Irritations repost from December 23, 2020
And, in the case of liberal democracies originating in a settler state with ongoing unrecognised conquest of indigenous peoples, the racially inflected violence at the foundations of state-formation and national identity continues to ramify through the default settings of contemporary foreign policy.
WikiLeaks has posed a threat to a compelling part of the Australian unmasterable – our unrecognised connected history to the sources of ongoing profound global inequality and our continuing role in militarily containing the consequences of that shared imperial history. As Jacqueline Rose writes in The Last Resistance:
We are the past masters at getting rid of something un-masterable so that we can panic at the threat, which then becomes as inflexible as our own violent response to it, of something else. From displacement to projection is a single step.
WikiLeaks embodies the contemporary spirit of resistance to imperial power, when the external structure of empire derives from the fusion of two systems.
The first is material power represented by the more than 1,000 United States military bases outside its own territory. The second is the less visible but critical and equally potent digital network of the US government communications and computing infrastructure that the US military calls the Global Information Grid (GIG) – the globe, of course, being in American eyes presumptively US territory.
One way I can sketch the dimensions of the contribution of WikiLeaks to my understanding of empire today and Australia’s place within it is to look back at the ways in which I have relied on that unique body of material in my published research on Australia’s defence policies, its current wars, the ‘joint’ US–Australian military and intelligence bases in Australia, and the parallel case of US and Japanese signals intelligence facilities in Japan.
Sometimes, WikiLeaks documents, in small doses, show Australian and United States political leaders speaking to each other offstage, in tones markedly different from their remarks in public, especially about Australia’s alliance wars. One sequence from the US Embassy in Canberra in 2008, released by WikiLeaks in 2010, demonstrated the brazen duplicity of the Australian government towards the Australian public about the state of what was to become Australia’s longest war, beginning in 2001. At the same time as he was publicly predicting success in the war, Prime Minister Kevin Rudd told visiting US politicians ‘that the national security establishment in Australia was very pessimistic about the long-term prognosis for Afghanistan’. Ric Smith, the former Secretary of the Department of Defence and subsequently the government’s special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, was reported by US Embassy officials in Canberra to have ‘described the … mission in Afghanistan and Afghan government presence as a “wobbly three-legged stool”’. Given that there were no domestic political benefits to be gained from the ADF’s Afghanistan deployment, Rudd’s lying was aimed at bolstering the real rationale for the costly and strategically counter-productive Afghanistan deployment – demonstrating loyalty to the United States and maintaining the US alliance.
As far as the United States was concerned, Australia was one of the small number of allies it could rely on to conduct war as it ‘should be conducted’, unlike major European allies such as Germany and France, which the US thought were too concerned with peace and reconciliation.
Australia’s attitude to this divide among US allies in attitudes to war was confirmed by comments made by Prime Minister Rudd to visiting US political figures in January 2008, later revealed by WikiLeaks. Rudd quipped: ‘In the south-east, the US, Canada, Britain, Australia and Dutch were doing the “hard stuff”, while in the relatively peaceful north-west, the Germans and French were organising folk dancing festivals’.
In fact, contrary to the insinuations of Rudd’s distasteful borrowed machismo, the French had by that time lost 50 soldiers in Afghanistan, the Germans 45, and Australia 21.
WikiLeaks has also proven pivotal in challenging and exposing the “Five Eyes”.
WikiLeaks, Australia and the Global Democratic Deficit
The Anglosphere grouping of signals intelligence agencies labelled the “Five Eyes”, 70 years after the end of World War II, still forms a network that is, as Richelson and Ball described several decades ago in The Ties That Bind, ‘a truly multinational community’, able to shroud itself in secrecy and ‘the mantle of national security to an extent unmatched by even the national defence establishments’.
In Australian discussions of the asymmetries of alliance, questions of national sovereignty must be central, with the aim of maintaining democratic policy-formation at a national level. But WikiLeaks revelations point beyond maintaining an adequate level of national sovereignty to the need to establish cross-national processes of democratic control – a missing element of democratic global governance relevant to multinational institutions of truly global reach and deep penetration into the political cultures of national democratic polities.
To paraphrase the political scientist Allan Patience on Australia as a dependent middle power allied to the United States, Australia does have voice and agency in international affairs, but only when the dominant ally agrees with the Australian position, or does not care. The WikiLeaks revelations show the true political – and psychological – character of Australia’s relationship to empire. The Turnbull government’s response to Trump provided plenty of evidence of the persistence of these traits. In a US speech pandering to what she described as ‘the indispensable power’, Foreign Minister Julie Bishop called on the US to stay the course and preserve what she and all recent Australian governments called, entirely without irony, the global ‘rules-based order’. In echoing the US remonstrations to all but itself to construct and abide by a global ‘rules-based order’, one can only think of Gandhi’s reply to a question about his view of ‘Western civilisation’: ‘I think it would be a very good idea.’
Life under empire involves both our inner and outer lives, and WikiLeaks has become an icon of global resistance to empire, and as such has provoked deep and irrational resistance in turn. In psychoanalytic terms, Rose says, ‘Resistance is blindness … the strongest weapon or bluntest instrument the mind has at its disposal against the painful, hidden, knowledge of the unconscious’.
All we need is an Australian foreign minister trying to appease a US president to give us the Groucho Marx punchline to his complaint about his brother in law who thinks he’s a chicken: ‘We don’t talk him out of it because we need the [alliance] eggs.’
This is an edited extract from:‘WikiLeaks, Australia and empire‘, in Felicity Ruby and Peter Cronau, (eds.), A Secret Australia: Revealed by the WikiLeaks Exposés, Monash University Press, 2020.
Read the full version of the chapter here.
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