Managing an outpost at the end of empire

Officers of the Australian diplomatic service are almost all dedicated, highly qualified and hard working. Yet, Australian diplomacy has functioned poorly, even failed, over a period of at least half a century.

Australian diplomats, and by extension Australian leaders, have failed to understand the peaceful rise of Asia, its cultural foundations and characteristics, and the manner in which it has already crafted an Anglo-American End of Empire. They have failed to prepare in any depth for the imminent end of several centuries of Anglo-American global order. Moreover, Australia's two centuries of European identity offer no experience with which to understand an End of Empire challenges and opportunities.

Over more than half a century, Australian diplomacy has had consistently positive rhetoric about Australia's Asian future. Moreover, it has overseen the rapid growth in Australian commodity exports to Asian markets and an increasing inflow of Asian hi-tech products. But Australian diplomacy has initiated little effective action in many of the most critical areas. Whether it is language education, cultural understanding, economic insight or strategic purpose, Australia remains trapped. A critical legacy of Anglo-American order is a range of anachronistic stereotypes that ensure that Asian languages, cultures, economies and strategies remain beyond the reach of our education and comprehension. Our fine diplomatic aspirations are exposed simply as rhetoric.

Almost a quarter century ago, the 1989 official publication authored by Ross Garnaut, Australia and the Northeast Asian Ascendancy, foreshadowed the 2012 Australia in the Asian Century report. Yet, it produced very little action apart from a growth in the economic interaction noted above. Yet over the past half century, and particularly the past quarter century, East and South East Asia have progressively, if discreetly, taken the place of the West as the dynamic centre of the global economy, and, more broadly, the global order.

Trapped in Anglo-American Stereotypes

Australia has progressed not at all in developing the knowledge, skills and experience necessary to comprehend, explain and learn from the cultural tradition that has informed this remarkable peaceful rise of most of East and South East Asia. Media, academia and officialdom all comfortably observe the certainties of an Anglo-American order that is badly compromised by financial bankruptcy, economic uncompetitiveness, educational complacency and emerging technological decline.

Australians, like other Anglophone peoples, use the American alliance to legitimise a thoughtless loyalty and inactivity. This demands little independent judgement or input concerning the transformation taking place in the regional and global order. Though much talked about, Australia's Asian expertise is notable for its conformity with uninformed assumptions in distant parts of the world. There is little hint of any cautionary comment on America's pivot to Asia. Nor is there any meaningful recollection of the cultural challenges that have in the past extracted a high price, with poor reward, for the military, political and economic aspirations of the United States in the region.

In fact, despite the distinctive and pervasive cultural qualities of East and South East Asia, neither the recent Australia in the Asian Centuryreport nor the DFAT response reveal any understanding of the fact that Asia east of South Asia is characterized as much by the seminal influence of the Chinese classics as the West is by the Greek classics.

Contesting Chinese (Confucian) and Greek (Platonic) Traditions

Indeed, the notion that the future of the global community is well on the way to being defined by a contest between what might be called Confucian and Platonic thought cultures is utterly alien to almost everyone educated in the English language. Even more alien is the idea that Chinese classical thought culture is relatively fluid, intuitive, holistic and practical when compared to the West's abstractions, theories, rationality and habits of belief.

Today, the more than 2 billion people of East and South East Asia possess the world's largest financial reserves, most advanced manufacturing, best skill-embodied workforces, most competitive education systems and surprisingly practical innovative cultures. At the same time, the West, comprised of 33 0 million Americans and 530 million Europeans, is mostly characterized by financial bankruptcy, economic decline, harmful technology, failing education and frequently unsustainable innovation. Moreover, when addressing Asia, fabricated and less than critical disputes over the East and South Sea Islands become major distractions for English language media and policy.

The most remarkable character of this situation is that there is, in the English speaking world, no purposeful or organized curiosity about these developments. Indeed, the more learned the discourse, the more aggressive is the dismissal of any curiosity and the more confident is the assertion of ignorant orthodoxies. This can only be explained as the typical complacency and misjudged sense of superiority that accompanies End of Empire experiences throughout human history.

Eurasian Diplomacy Marginalizes Anglo-American Power

The Anglo-American world confronts a typical End of Empire moment. China has navigated a number of such situations over its long history and often draws insight from these. The West, however, is inclined to go back to the decline of Rome for some understanding of contemporary processes and the remoteness of the experience appears to offer a type of subconscious reassurance.

Confronting such a tectonic shift in global order, Australia's talk of an Asian Century is profoundly simplistic. It is characterized by naïve hope rather than any resolute commitment to integrate with a subtle and advanced culture that remains an almost total mystery to all but Asian born and educated Australians.

The simple minded character of Australian diplomacy is evident once one recognises that China is at the centre of peaceful but powerful initiatives that go far beyond Asia and encompass the globe. Groupings like the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) and the Shanghai Cooperative Organization (China, Russia and four Central Asian members, with less formalized interaction with all major surrounding powers) are little addressed by mainstream media and academia, and almost totally ignored by official policy.

Yet BRICS links China with the distant continents of South America and Africa and has already advanced the development of alternative and independent financial and communication networks. Moreover, both groupings consolidate a new order in the globe's central continent of Eurasia. The Eurasian developments could reduce Western Europe to a dependent fringe and the broader South American and African actions have the potential to peacefully but increasingly marginalize the "indispensable" power of the United States. Such reflections are reinforced by innumerable hints that the United States has struggled to keep up with Chinese asymmetrical strategic thought and rapidly diversifying hi-tech military technology.

These types of unremarked geo-political evolution highlight the failure of Australian diplomacy. There is a total lack of diplomatic representation in the emerging nations of Central Asia, which were part of the old Soviet Union and have been the target of a largely failed American strategy. Moreover, there is no evident awareness of the potential for fast and cheap Chinese rail and road networks throughout Eurasia to transform fundamentally the character and economics of global commodity trade.

Australia Trapped in Past Certainties

Perhaps even more important, Australian diplomacy has done nothing to prepare for a world where today's international institutions may no longer function in any meaningful manner. Defined by Anglo American power after World War II in 1945, these built in many privileges for the English speaking world. Sadly, these privileges have been so abused in attempts to stave off decline that it is hard to believe they can be reformed to serve a new global power structure. Even more sadly, the media rhetoric and propaganda related to "humanitarian interventions" in places like Libya and Syria has only precipitated the decline in the authority of these post 1945 international institutions. This is deeply and widely felt outside the closed circles of a few declining Western powers.

Closer to home, Australia's diplomatic leaders just do not get it. The educational, commercial and administrative elites of four or the five countries focused on in the Australia in the Asian Century report are deeply shaped by the wisdom of the Chinese classics. The rote learning of these classics from a very early age is now being energetically revived in China and elsewhere. Yet none of this is noted in the report. The fabled Gonski Report was equally ignorant and inept in addressing the challenges and opportunities posed by the tradition of education that informs the peaceful rise of Asia.

In terms of acknowledging and comprehending the civilization that is rapidly transforming Australia's world, the Asian Century report and DFAT's glossy response are close to illiterate. How can Australia have generated more than half a century of positive rhetoric about Asia and learnt close to nothing?

Three answers might be advanced to this question. First, the Chinese classics have been the object of loud and crippling criticism and ridicule for much of that time, a legacy of political failure that followed the mid 19^th Century Opium Wars). They have had to rely on the discreet resolve of Asian peoples to preserve their authority. Second, Anglo-American order has drawn skilfully and heavily on a form of intellectual apartheid to assert and maintain its authority. Any thought not conforming with the European Enlightenment's universal values has been denigrated and marginalized, somewhat as captured in George Orwell's novel, 1984. Third, the Chinese classics often translate poorly and need to be memorized in their original language, preferably at a very early age, to reveal their true strength and character. If mastered in this manner they nurture lifetimes of fluid and questioning reflection informed by over four millennia of experience. This culture has demonstrated its strategic superiority over the West's best for more than the past half century. It, nevertheless, remains incomprehensible if trapped in the certainties of two centuries of Anglo-American order.

Shunning Literacy in the Asian Century

Australia may be slightly better prepared psychologically for an Asian Century than others outside Asia, including a neighbour like Russia that draws increasingly on a close alliance with China. Nevertheless, if Australia is to aspire to anything approaching literacy in the financial capitals (Beijing and Shanghai) of the emerging dominant civilization, numbers of non-Asian Australian children will need to undertake rigorous rote learning of the Chinese classics from a very early age. This is the emerging fashion in "Communist" China today.

It will then take three decades before these young people can inject any true insight into Australian policy development. If we had had understanding and action rather than pure rhetoric over the past half century we would already have such skills today.

It will be instructive, if painful, to see how long Australians continue to respond to these realities simply and solely with shock, revulsion and rejection.

Sadly, it is likely to be some time, and perhaps too late, before there is any readiness to address these emerging realities. Australia urgently needs diplomatic leadership and a domestic awareness that works and prepares for an as yet poorly imagined, but nevertheless clearly definable, future.

In the meantime, dedicated new leaders like Tony Abbot and Julie Bishop will flounder, lacking access to advice with any depth or realism in its comprehension of this future. It is essential to go beyond the failing stereotypes that still inform Australian public and private sector leaders, educated in certainties that once served a now rapidly declining Anglo-American global order.