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Santamaria: The Price of Freedom
Paul Monk
An Address
at the Land Warfare Studies Centre
Royal
Military College
Duntroon
3
September 2003.
Opening
Remarks
Let me begin by saying that it is a
considerable honour to have been invited to address you here, this morning,
at the Land Warfare Studies Centre. As I understand it, I was invited to do
so chiefly on the strength of an essay in Quadrant, in April 2001,
‘Twelve Questions for Paul Dibb’ and an essay in The Australian Financial
Review, on 6 June this year, ‘A Strategic Changing of the Guard’. They
both centred on Paul Dibb. So, why have I come here today to talk, not of
Paul Dibb, but of Bob Santamaria?
The answer is that we are at a profound
watershed in our national security policy and in need of a deep sense of
perspective on it. We could gain that in a number of ways, but I do not
think that Paul Dibb has written anything that would enable us to get it.
Bob Santamaria did so; however much one might disagree with a number of his
views.
His book of essays and
addresses, The Price of Freedom, first published by the Campion Press
in Melbourne in 1964, provides an integrated view of Australia’s national
security from the point of view of The Movement, better known as the NCC.
That view, looked back on after almost 40 years of extraordinary changes,
seems to me to offer a useful foil to the thinking we need to do as we enter
a new epoch.
The very title The Price
of Freedom is evocative. From Santamaria’s point of view, writing as far
back as 1959, Australia was under threat of seeing the whole of Asia overrun
by Chinese inspired communism and of having its own liberties extinguished
by the determined sedition of the Australian communists. No-one fears such
things in 2003. Yet we are again confronted by the sense that our tenure on
freedom and the future of global security are problematic. I think it is
instructive to ponder the differences between Santamaria’s fears in the
early 1960s and our present circumstances, in order to get a deeper
perspective on both.
Santamaria was also deeply
concerned about citizenship and the formation of young people for public
life. He believed, of course, in a very particular approach to both of these
things, but at least he addressed them and integrated them into his
reflections on where the country was heading and what we needed to do, if we
were to take responsibility for our future and, to the greatest extent
possible, take command of our own destiny. This is the second reason why I
have chosen to reflect, here today, on The Price of Freedom.
There is a third reason,
though, why I have chosen to reflect on The Price of Freedom and it
is somewhat more personal. I grew up in an NCC household, in which
Santamaria’s ideas were ever present. My father had worked closely with
Santamaria in the 1950s and early 1960s, at the time The Price of Freedom
was being written and published. He subscribed to the NCC’s journal, News
Weekly, throughout my childhood and adolescence, so it was always around
the house. Santamaria’s weekly TV program, Point of View was a
fixture in the family week.
In addressing Santamaria’s
worldview and concerns for this country’s future, therefore, I am also
coming to terms with my own upbringing as both a Catholic and an Australian
citizen. Above all, though, I am seeking to define the terms of debate for
an integrated sense of national security in 2003 and in the years ahead.
Not communism but terrorism
is the threat now most evident. Not revolution but anarchy, not
totalitarianism but state failure; not Chinese Maoism but Chinese hegemonism
looms over the horizon. Yet within Australia the challenge now, as then, has
to do, first and foremost, with the nature of our internal political culture
and strategic thinking. These were at the heart of Santamaria’s concerns.
They are also at the heart of my own.
The
Price of Freedom
For many years, as an adolescent, I argued
with my father about politics and religion, the NCC and communism, Australia
and Vietnam. During those years, Santamaria’s The Price of Freedom
sat on the family bookshelves, but I did not read it. Nor did I read it as a
university student. I blush to say that I disdained to do so. I didn’t think
I had anything to learn from it.
After Santamaria died, I
asked Peter Westmore, at the NCC, for an old copy of the book that he had
sitting at the NCC offices. Yet I did not read it even then. It was only
this winter, after being invited by Michael Evans to come up here and give a
talk, that it occurred to me to open the book and actually read what the old
man had written all those years ago – when he was the age I am now.
Coincidentally, but perhaps
fittingly, I read it during a business trip to Canberra and Sydney by road,
during which I drove through large stretches of rural Victoria and New South
Wales, finishing the book in a small hotel at Cann River a fortnight ago.
That trip was an excellent occasion for reflecting on what sort of country
Australia is and what made it so, where it is heading and what challenges we
face in the near future.
Reading the book, I found
myself anything but dismissive of its content. I was impressed by
Santamaria’s erudition, his moral passion, his patriotism, his eloquence and
his civilized and magnanimous manner of addressing audiences. I did not skim
the book, mind elsewhere. I read it closely and annotated it extensively, as
is my habit in reading generally. It is the fruits of that close reading
that I’d like to share with you here this afternoon, as food for thought.
The book is divided into
four parts: Actualities, Ends, Means and Epilogue. The Epilogue is the title
essay ‘The Price of Freedom’. Actualities consists of two chapters, ‘Issues
in Australian Politics’ and ‘The Movement 1941-1960 – An Outline’. Ends
consists of six chapters: ‘Realities of Power in Asia’, ‘The Idea of a
Pacific Community’, ‘Principles of a National Defence Policy’, ‘The
Under-Developed Nations in the Light of Mater et Magistra’,
‘Nationalism’and ‘Migration and Australia’s Future’. ‘
Means consists of seven
chapters: ‘Religion and Politics’, ‘The Tactics of Sectarianism’, ‘Catholics
and Protestants’, ‘Nazis, Communists, Catholics and Jews’, ‘Equality in
Education’, ‘Public Leadership in a Democratic Society’ and ‘Training for
Public Leadership’. Sixteen chapters in all. Of these, some are more dated
than others. Seven of them are, I think, of particular interest and I shall
dwell chiefly on aspects of these.
What this set of essays
embodies is a whole social philosophy and an integrated approach to public
policy and politics in Australia. I believe we need a similarly integrated
approach in 2003. We face significant challenges and it is widely perceived
that both major political parties are all but moribund at the grass roots
level.
Let me be clear in stating
that I am not here to declare that we should all adopt the specific social
philosophy that Bob Santamaria espoused. Only that we need to think, as he
did, at the system-high level if we are to get a grip on the challenges that
we face and which we must address.
The
Issues in Australian Politics
In his opening essay, originally an
address to the Canberra Press Club on 27 July 1964, Santamaria wrote: “One
definition of politics current in our political science schools is that
‘politics is about power’. It is partially true, but totally inadequate.
Just as important as power are the ends it seeks and the terms on which it
can or should be held.” This is surely so and reflection on this point is as
vital in Australia in 2003 as it ever has been.
A leading Liberal politician came to me
recently, earnestly wanting to discuss political philosophy. He had, he told
me, been reading Plato’s Republic and believed that the great
philosopher had been correct in saying that only the best people, qualified
to govern, should be permitted to do so. He was sincere and troubled by the
condition of his own party, not supercilious or a born-to-rule type. I
thought it was rather interesting that he had turned to Plato.
I suggested that he turn
from Plato to Aristotle, read the latter’s Politics and then read
The Federalist Papers, in order to see how concerns about the ends of
power and the terms on which it can or should be held had shaped both
classical and modern thinking about constitutional government – what is
loosely, in our time, referred to as ‘democracy’.
Santamaria was not, however, pitching his
address at quite that level of generality. He was concerned with two highly
specific issues in Australian politics: what he took to be the overwhelming
danger of communism, centering on Mao’s China and what he saw as the
fatefully flawed condition of the Australian Labor Party. China sought to
neutralize Australia, he said, by detaching it from the American alliance.
This would require that one of the major parties in Australia should become
a neutralist party. He feared that the Left would make the ALP that party.
A generation before Paul Dibb, Santamaria
declared that three policies were “fundamental to Australian security and
complementary to each other”. The first was that Australia develop “its own
completely adequate and independently controlled military…so that it is able
to defend itself without allies, if necessary, and so that it is able to
commend itself to allies if they are available.”
The second was that “Australia should
endeavour to stimulate the creation of a Pacific Community of nations”,
including India and Japan. The third was that both of these policies “should
rest upon the foundation of a binding American alliance, which should be
regarded as so fundamental to Australian security that no Australian
government would ever equivocate about the alliance or the obligations which
flow from it.”
It is interesting to reflect that all this
was written in 1959 and published in 1964. It took another generation for
APEC to emerge. During that time, there had been major domestic ructions
over the American alliance, occasioned by the Vietnam War and American bases
in this country. The ALP was at the centre of those ructions, though it was
the Left in particular that caused them.
Partly as a consequence of
them and in belated response to the Guam or Nixon Doctrine, the Defence of
Australia doctrine emerged, ie the idea of Australia actually developing
“its own completely adequate and independently controlled military…so that
it is able to defend itself without allies, if necessary”. Yet, for reasons
that those present this morning are largely aware of, this development has
not occurred.
The resources for such
development have simply never been allocated. The basic statistics are
fairly familiar. Even if one granted the strategic premises of the Dibb
Review, the requirement was that not much less than 3% of GDP be spent
annually on defence. It has not been. The cumulative shortfall, since 1987,
has been in excess of $100 billion.
The current defence
financial situation is, in consequence, so serious that just a fortnight
ago, the Treasurer publicly declared that the $50 billion defence capability
plan set out as recently as 2001 “is undeliverable, unaffordable and
uncertain.” As Patrick Walters reported, in The Australian, on 20
August, we face drastic cuts in core capabilities in all three services as a
direct consequence of budgetary shortfalls.
I shall come back to this
matter of defence funding. For the moment, the point to be made is simply
that of the three goals Santamaria set out in 1959, one (a Pacific
Community) has been achieved well beyond his expectations; another
(bipartisan commitment to the American alliance) has wavered and wobbled a
bit but has pretty much held up, but the third (an independent and robust
military capability) has never been achieved and is in some disarray.
In the intervening years,
of course, China has ceased to be a power of the kind it was in 1959. It has
become much more interesting from a national security point of view.
The ALP has not been able to shake off its neutralist wing on the Left. What
is even more interesting is that it has fallen into the doldrums for reasons
that cannot be blamed on Santamaria. As John Button wrote last year, in his
Quarterly Essay Beyond Belief: What Future For Labor?, “the party is
at an all time low in its morale, its ideas and its democratic
participation” – rather, I am tempted to remark, like the Carlton Football
Club in the wake of John Elliott.
A few months ago, a leading
Labor politician told me that the ALP, throughout the Cold War, had had
three main factions: the Fabians, the Social Democrats and the Christian
Democrats. Since the end of the Cold War, he said, they have all lost their
way and have fallen to squabbling with one another. What they need to do is
to rethink the century old agenda of the ALP in a twenty-first century
context.
Santamaria, in 1959 and
1964, saw the structure of the ALP as being at the root of its problems. In
particular, he argued that the disproportionate influence of the trade
unions on the Federal Conference of the party left the party a prey to
factional maneuverings that undermined its capacity to make sound policy.
John Button and others, in 2003, are arguing basically this very thing.
In 1959, of course, the ALP
had only a few years before been split, as a direct consequence of Doc
Evatt’s decision to turn against the Movement. This had resulted in the
formation of the Democratic Labor Party, which, as ALP people well remember,
played a key role in keeping the ALP from political power until 1972.
Santamaria remarked, in
1959, that the split had been, even then, “a great pity for Australian labor
and for Australia” and that if the ALP was able to reform its structure and
remove the baneful influence of communists in its ranks, then 80 per cent of
DLP voters would rejoin “a united Labor Party which had clearly fought the
Communists, which adopted a foreign and defence policy removed from the
nonsense of neutralism or neutralization and which provided tangible
guarantees that this was not merely an electoral manoeuvre.”
There is an analogous
problem in 2003. The DLP has long since faded away, but the ALP has lost
considerable electoral ground in part because it has lost credibility on
national security affairs, because too many of its members flirt with
neutralism in the name of an independent foreign policy; and because its
Federal structure remains dominated by unelected trade unionists and
political apparatchiks. Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke and Paul Keating have all
come and gone without the underlying problems being solved.
Realities of Power in Asia
It was against the background thus broadly
sketched out that, in 1962, Santamaria wrote a substantial review of George
Modelski (ed) SEATO – Six Studies (F. W. Cheshire, Melbourne, 1962),
George K. Tanham Communist Revolutionary Warfare – The Vietminh in
Indochina (Methuen, London, 1962) and Richard Rosecrance Australian
Diplomacy and Japan 1945-1951 (Melbourne University Press, 1962), under
the heading ‘Realities of Power in Asia’.
His fundamental claim, in this review, was
“The realities of power in Asia show our nakedness.” SEATO and ANZUS, he
argued, were the basis of “a dangerous illusion” – “the popular belief that
our existence is protected by a pair of water-tight alliances with the
United States.” His description of SEATO as “a paper tiger”, on the grounds
that its Asian members were weak and its Western members divided by
conflicting geopolitical interests, is a case study in the failures of
collective security and reminds one of the very real problems with the UN
for decades.
Drawing on Modelski, he pointed out that
“In the seven separate situations to which SEATO might have been relevant,
the procedure has always been the same – meet, confer, do nothing, issue a
reassuring communique.” As a consequence, the United States did not take
SEATO seriously. It also came to realize that, when action was called for,
it would have to be taken outside the SEATO framework “so as to avoid the
British and French veto and the undignified Australian attempts to straddle
the fence between the American and British viewpoints.”
Many of those present, I suspect, will
immediately think, listening to these lines, not so much of SEATO in the
1950s as of NATO in the 1990s, but even more of the UN, not least in regard
to the events of the past twelve years respecting Iraq. Santamaria’s concern
centered, at that time, on Indochina, where he believed it was necessary to
break the strength of the Communist guerillas, as had been done in Malaya
and the Philippines, rather than concede the ground. Our present concerns
are not with Indochina or with Communism, but similar themes lie at the
heart of the dilemmas we confront and the choices we must make – and have
been making.
Santamaria was not an advocate of mere
brute military power. He declared, “The basic problems of East and South
East Asia are obviously economic as well as political, military and
diplomatic. What is needed is the development of a single integrated concept
which provides a coherent and harmonious solution for each of these
problems, treated as aspects of a single crisis.”
His concern was that “the
nations of East and South East Asia will develop a medley of contradictory
programmes, seeking now to solve their economic problems, at another time
their political and military problems, but in isolation, not understanding
that steps taken in one field will fatally compromise those which should be
taken in the others.”
The solution he proposed was the formation
of a Pacific Community, centering on the United States, Japan and Australia.
This was still an idea that lacked currency within either of the major
parties in 1963, when Santamaria was writing. His observation regarding the
origins of ideas, as compared with their reasonableness, is still worth
reflecting on. He wrote: “If the idea of a Pacific Community should be
disfavoured because it was the Democratic Labor Party which first suggested
it, it might be some solace to realize that the original proposal for
Pacific Pact came from the Chifley Labor Government.”
The
Idea of a Pacific Community
He was not, of course, optimistic that the
Pacific Community could be created and Communism defeated. His essay ‘The
Idea of a Pacific Community’, an address to Christian Social Week, on 1
September 1963, forty years ago almost to the day, pivoted on the claim that
“the situation is dark and getting darker.” He saw Mao’s China as a state
having “the central political direction which permits it to maximize its
resources along the lines of any chosen policy.” He saw an Indonesia ruled
by “an ageing roué, with Hitler’s demonic powers of mass hypnosis” and a
decided leaning towards Communist China. He believed that, if not checked,
China would extend its direct influence over the whole of South East Asia.
Checking the rise of Communist China, he
argued, required “a vision as distant and a patience as complete as that of
the Communist.” It required recognizing that the Old European Order and the
ephemeral Japanese New Order would be replaced by a Communist Order unless a
Pacific Community was created that would offer the people of the region a
better alternative. That alternative, he argued, would necessarily have to
involve greater access to the markets of the advanced countries for the
developing countries of the region and a pro-active commitment on the part
of the advanced countries to the security, development and democratization
of the developing countries.
He believed that the emergence of the
European Economic Community and the European Commission provided a basic
model for a Pacific Community, if only because Europe faced the threat of
the Soviet Union, while Asia faced the threat of Communist China. In
addition to the US, Japan and Australia, he expected that India would be a
frontline state (if only because it had been attacked by China in 1962) and
that South Korea, South Vietnam, Taiwan (which he called Formosa), the
Philippines, Thailand, Malaya and New Zealand would all play a role.
Looking back 40 years, it is striking that
while a Pacific Community of a kind eventually emerged, it did not do so
until Chinese Communism had ceased to be a serious threat, it drew China in
rather than holding it at bay, it included Indonesia in its ranks (as,
indeed, Santamaria anticipated that it might, once Sukarno had passed from
the scene) and it diverges markedly from the European model.
He was perfectly aware of
the “difficulties which make the Pacific Community so much more difficult of
realization than the European project – the lack of a common language, of a
common religion, of a common culture”, but felt that a common interest in
survival could override all these. He argued that, provided the United
States was prepared to support the idea, there were possibilities that
should be explored. In time, of course, they were.
This is worth looking back
on, I suggest, for several reasons. First, because so much has changed since
1963, almost entirely for the better, that we can appreciate how far we’ve
come. Second, because China as a potential or aspiring Asian hegemon is
almost as much on the minds of strategic thinkers in 2003 as in 1963,
despite the fact that Communism has ceased to be a significant consideration
in strategic calculations. Third, because while we still need an overarching
vision, it is not evident that the EU provides a useful model and it is not
“survival” that is at issue so much as progress.
Principles of a National Defence Policy
“The concept of a Pacific Community,”
Santamaria declared, in an address to Christian Social Week, in Melbourne,
in August 1962, “performs two functions. It defines a type of international
association for the non-Communist nations of East and South East Asia which,
in association with the United States, is essentially capable of meeting the
security problem of the region. It [also] supplies the perspective against
which the development of the various aspects of Australian policy should be
planned. But as no alliance can substitute for a nation’s own independent
power of self-defence, the premises of Australia’s defence policy need to be
considered.”
Here we come to the heart of the matter,
from the point of a view of current debates over Australia’s strategic
policy, defence budgeting and force structure development. Santamaria, as we
have seen, believed that Australia’s very survival was in jeopardy, at least
as a Western democratic state. He allowed that “Those who do not see our
problem in this way either will give a totally different answer to the need
for a defence policy, or, perhaps, will give no answer at all.” But he
believed they were in error.
Santamaria was haunted by Pearl Harbor and
the Japanese blitzkrieg through South East Asia, in early 1942. He quoted
the chief American Lend-Lease administrator, a man by the name of Wasserman,
who arrived in Australia after the fall of Singapore and the Dutch East
Indies, as having reported, “Almost immediately upon my arrival, one of the
Ministers came to see me…He locked the door and, in an awed whisper, said to
me ‘Mr Wasserman, Australia is completely defenceless. In my opinion, we
have three more weeks of liberty, after which time the Japanese invasion
will commence.’”
Now, as most of you will be aware, we were
not so completely defenceless as the Minister of the day feared. Not because
we were well prepared to defend ourselves. We were not. But because our
geography made a Japanese invasion extremely difficult. The Japanese, even
when lodged in the Dutch East Indies and Papua New Guinea, were so badly
overextended that their forces were grinding to a halt and vulnerable to a
damaging counter-offensive. When that counter-offensive came, one after
another Japanese occupation forces were overwhelmed, suffering casualties an
order of magnitude larger than those of the Allied forces.
Yet that counter-offensive would not have
occurred had it not been for the power of the United States. Even that power
might not have turned swiftly to counter-offensive, had it not been for the
cryptological edge the US gained over Japan, enabling it to crush the
Japanese navy in a series of crucial battles in 1942. Australia was very
much a peripheral player in all of that. Had Japan been able to maintain its
naval capability for another year; had it won the battle of the Coral Sea or
Midway, Australia might, after all, have been invaded.
This scenario, this memory of fear,
underlay his advocacy of what he called “an adequate and independent
military force” – including acquisition of tactical nuclear weapons – to
guard against Australia proving defenceless, should Communist China come to
dominate Asia as Japan had done. Years before the American debacle in
Vietnam, he argued that, just as we had relied on British military power to
protect us, until the shock of the fall of Singapore, so we now (in 1962)
relied on American power to do so. We would be foolish, however, he
asserted, to assume that American power would provide any more infallible a
defence than British power had. We needed to look to our own defences.
The two countries which he identified as
potential threats to Australia’s security and territorial integrity were, of
course, China and Indonesia. His reasons for fearing China are clear enough.
His reasons for fearing Indonesia are, also, anything but mysterious. The
perceptions and assumptions he was working from were quite common currency
in the 1950s and early sixties. They are not altogether out of date even
now.
Sukarno, he argued, was
able to take West New Guinea “only because he was given very strong military
support by the Soviet Union.” One might add that Australia was discouraged
from even attempting to do anything to defend the self-determination of West
New Guinea, by the decision of Washington and London to throw West New
Guinea to Sukarno as one might throw a bone to a dog.
It had not been the preference of Sir
Robert Menzies or Sir Arthur Tange to see West New Guinea ceded to Sukarno.
The subject had been debated at the highest levels in Canberra, for a decade
prior to 1962. As some of you will be aware, a Top Secret report completed
for Tange in 1957 recommended that Australia seek to interest the Dutch in
developing West New Guinea and Papua New Guinea in concert, with a view to
self-determination for a unified Melanesian state.
In late 1961, however, Menzies received an
Eyes Only letter from Harold MacMillan, which went approximately as follows:
“Dear Bob, I’ve had a chat with Jack in Bermuda about this New Guinea
situation. We think that, on balance, it would be best for all concerned if
you were to roll over on this one. If we support the Dutch, we only give the
Communists an opportunity to charge us with imperialism and make common
cause with Indonesian nationalists. If we throw Sukarno this bone, we’ll rob
the Communists of a stick to beat us with. We can then find other means for
dealing with the problem of the Indonesian Communist Party.”
Santamaria was not sanguine, in August
1962, that such other means were to hand. He correctly described the
Indonesian Communist Party (the PKI) as “undoubtedly the most powerful
outside the Iron Curtain” and as “ably led by well-tried veteran
revolutionaries”. “No one can predict with any confidence”, he judged,
“either that there will be a conflict between it and the Army after Soekarno;
or that, if this conflict eventuates, the Army will win it.”
It is worth noting that the same
judgements were made by the CIA’s Guy Pauker, in a major report, written at
Rand in 1964. Yet the Army won the conflict hands down, of course, following
the controversial events of September 1965. The PKI was decimated and has
never recovered. The Army, led by Suharto, established a regime which sought
to become respected in the region, friendly with Australia and economically
developed. It also made a habit of crushing all domestic resistance the way
it had crushed the PKI.
From an Australian point of
view, the most troublesome and troubling of such cases was that of East
Timor, from 1975. But West New Guinea has never been authentically pacified,
Aceh remains chronically rebellious and other outlying provinces of
Indonesia have been strife torn in recent years, as the Suharto regime
crumbled and the centralism it had ruthlessly upheld cracked.
On the whole, realistic
though his basic assessments were, Santamaria’s worst fears regarding both
Chinese and Indonesian threats to Australia proved unfounded. He did not
foresee the destruction of the PKI, though he did foresee that, if this
could be accomplished, Indonesia might become a friend rather than a threat.
He did not foresee the Chinese fear of the Soviet Union and Mao Zedong’s
consequent overtures to Nixon and Kissinger, in 1971-72.
He did not foresee the
reform and opening of China from within, after the death of Mao in 1976. He
certainly did not, in 1962, foresee the demise of Communism due to its own
inner weaknesses. He attributed far too much resilience and coherence of
vision to the leaders of the Communist world and did not foresee that they
would themselves decide that their system did not work and that radical
reforms of it were unavoidable. Finally, he did not foresee the unipolar
world that arose with the collapse of Communist self-belief.
There was much that he did
not foresee. Yet he was not alone in that regard. His good fortune was that
he failed to foresee not unfortunate developments, but fortunate ones, from
Australia’s strategic perspective. None of his benign failures of foresight,
I suggest, was quite so spectacular as that of Paul Dibb, who wrote, in
1986, in the preface to his book The Soviet Union: The Incomplete
Superpower:
“The Soviet
Union’s internal political system is not considered here, because no
fundamental changes are to be expected…What has been built so painstakingly
over the generations, with much sacrifice, ruthlessness and conviction will
not be allowed to disintegrate or radically change. The USSR has enormous
unused reserves of political and social stability on which to draw and in
all probability it will not, in the next decade, face a systemic crisis that
endangers its existence.”
I love that passage! It’s simply remarkable to think
that it was written at all in a critical examination of the weaknesses of
the Soviet Union, but all the more so given that, a little over five years
after it was written, the Soviet Union ceased to exist.
But I digress. In 1962,
given his rather pessimistic outlook, Santamaria argued that Australia
needed to develop an independent and adequate military strength, so that it
could defend itself “in the last resort, even without allies”. With such
strength, he believed, Australia could both have something to offer to a
Pacific Community in collective security terms and also exert a strong
influence on American policy in the South West Pacific.
“This is the precise
opposite of the situation which prevails at the present moment,” he went on
to claim. “To all intents and purposes, we have no armament at all. An
official statement of Australia’s military strength allots us two battle
groups (with a doubtful capacity for reinforcement) and certain minimal
naval and air forces…Our entire military policy is based on the assumption
that the problem of defending this Commonwealth is so great that we cannot
defend it except with the assistance of the United States.”
“When Soekarno began his
unprovoked and aggressive attack on West New Guinea, what would have
happened if Australia had felt that this advance should be stopped? Could we
have in fact stopped it? Did we possess sufficient military force to enable
us to back up such a limited policy? In fact, we did not…[So] if the policy
of the United States runs counter to our own wishes, as it obviously did in
West New Guinea, what then? The answer is nothing. There is nothing that we
can do independently.”
Now, we could debate
whether disregarding the advice of both Washington and London on West New
Guinea in 1961-62 would have been a prudent course of action for Australia,
even had we possessed the sort of military power to which Santamaria was
alluding. But regardless of how that specific debate might be resolved, the
underlying point must be addressed. What military capabilities would
Australia require, in order to be able to defend itself, in the last resort,
or to defend what it believed to be its irreducible regional interests?
West New Guinea, 1962; East
Timor, 1975, were both cases where this question arose. In 1999, with the
INTERFET operation, we decided to use our military forces in the region,
after a great deal of shilly-shallying by senior bureaucrats in DFAT and
Defence, who had first suppressed intelligence reports indicating that
Indonesia would lose the plebiscite and then wreck East Timor.
We have, this year, after
several years of similar hesitancy and denial, intervened on a substantial
scale in the Solomons. An ABC report that this intervention was prompted by
discovery that Indonesia was considering intervening adds a most interesting
strategic dimension to the case. We have, at the very same time, finally
seen a frank admission by the Federal Government that even our existing
defence capability plan is unaffordable.
We are, in fact, at a
watershed in our defence policy and must decide where we go from here.
Santamaria, forty years ago, invoked the examples of Israel and the Republic
of China on Taiwan as contrasts with our relatively supine defence policy.
Here, he pointed out, were two small states, heavily dependent in important
respects on the United States, but resolute in developing and maintaining
formidable military forces.
We have seen, especially
over the past two years, a rudimentary strategic policy debate. On one side,
Paul Dibb and Hugh White, with their bureaucratic and service epigones, have
clung to the Defence of Australia doctrine, in a long series of rearguard
actions. On the other side, we have seen the cautious advancement of a
reframed strategic policy that would have us more pro-active and flexible in
our strategic posture and engagements.
In the light of these
debates, it is interesting to reflect on Santamaria’s description, in 1962,
of what a serious, independent Australian Defence Force should be capable of
doing.
He wrote:
“Competent military advice suggests that such a
force should include the existence of five Australian battle groups, with
adequate reinforcements and logistic support. These military forces should
be part of a coordinated development of land, sea and air forces of the type
which would enable the various arms to be deposited swiftly in danger
points, before ‘brushfire’ incidents affecting the security of
Australia could develop and gather momentum.”
He acknowledged that this would be expensive, perhaps
costing half a billion pounds per annum out of a GDP of 7.5 billion pounds,
or rather more than 6% of GDP. This is about the proportion of GDP that
South Korea spent in the 1980s and 1990s. We cannot escape the fact that
serious military capabilities are expensive – increasingly so, in terms of
both personnel and platforms.
Thus, both elements of our current dilemma
were present in Santamaria’s 1962 vision, even though the circumstances and
strategic contingencies he feared were quite different from those we now
confront. What is most striking, I think, is that the sort of capabilities
he called for not only were not adequately developed in the 1960s and 1970s,
but were scaled back and undermined by the Defence of Australia doctrine in
the 1980s and 1990s.
If, in some respects, the architects of
the DoA based their strategic doctrine on Santamaria’s premises regarding
China and Indonesia, they clearly did not based their force structure
planning on his premises regarding the need to be able to intervene in
brushfire situations around the region swiftly and sustainably. Yet it has
been precisely these requirements that have been most needed in the 1990s
and in the first years of the 21st century.
As the Chief of Army, Peter Leahy wrote,
in the first issue of the Australian Army Journal, in June this year:
“In the 1994 Defence White Paper there was
statement that the Army would develop its force structure for the defence of
Australia with no exception other than at the margins…The offshore
operations of the 1990s were, in fact, a profound challenge to the
continental defence orthodoxy of most Australian strategic planners. How
could the strategic reality of operational commitments in support of
interests be reconciled with a rigid strategic doctrine that upheld defence
of geography? Ultimately, strategic planners developed a logic that forces
structured for the defence of continental Australia could be peeled away to
perform offshore tasks as a matter of routine.
The reality was starkly different. The experience
of offshore operations seriously undermined the assumption that a land force
structured primarily for continental defence could easily accomplish complex
offshore operations. In truth, over a period of two decades, the Defence of
Australia construct seriously eroded core land force capabilities…We
gradually lost strategic agility; our units became hollow; and our ability
to operate away from Australian support bases declined to a dangerous
degree. Moreover, our capacity to generate, sustain and rotate forces in the
field diminished alarmingly. When the ADF went to East Timor in 1999, it was
only the tremendous efforts of our personnel in the field and in the rear
that concealed these deficiencies in the Army’s capabilities.”
It is not, of course, my purpose here to argue that
any specific proposition by Santamaria was true, or has stood the test of
time, much less to suggest that his specific force structure recommendations
are what we need for 21st century manoeuvre operations in the
littoral environment. I simply found his reflections of forty years ago
stimulating, reading them belatedly, in 2003.
Public
Leadership in a Democratic Society
Passing over many interesting essays in
the book, let me turn to Santamaria’s reflections on public leadership and
training for it, since it seems to me that this is, more than ever, a great
need in Australian society. There is, in our time, widespread cynicism about
the political parties and political leadership. Yet there appears to be a
dearth of qualified people who are both willing and able to step forward and
provide better leadership.
Santamaria was historically and
politically literate enough to appreciate that democracies decay and perish
when this trend passes a certain point. Yet the political parties could not,
even as a matter of principle, automatically find solutions to the social
and security challenges of a democracy, he believed. He stressed that he
held this opinion “as one who has an immense respect for the parliamentary
system”, but also as one who saw that more was needed than the political
party machines.
The critical weakness of democratic
governments, he thought, was that they became prey to special interest
groups that thwarted sound policy, or ensured passage of unsound policy, or
by their conflicts with one another induced a certain paralysis of the whole
policy process. He drew here, not on quasi-fascist theoreticians, as is
sometimes alleged, but on Walter Lippmann’s The Public Philosophy and
on the Greek classics, especially Thucydides and Aristotle.
Somewhat to my surprise, he made no
reference to precisely this process in the decay and collapse of the Roman
Republic in the second and first centuries BCE. Nor did he make mention of
the fact that it was chiefly this great and protracted drama that exercised
the minds of modern constitutionalists, between the 16th and 19th
centuries, as they pondered how to replace absolute monarchies with
commonwealths or republics that might endure.
In any case, his point was that there was
a clear need for what, in the 1990s, with reference to changes in the
Communist world, we came to call “civil society”. Santamaria believed that
there was a profound need to educate what he called “a force of men who will
act publicly in public bodies, not for individual or even corporate material
interest, but for what they regard – correctly or mistakenly – as the public
interest of the whole community.”
He immediately commented, “There is a
great danger here of self-delusion or humbug. There is a great danger of
repeating what has already been done: of speaking in moral terms when the
end is really private or sectional interest.” He wanted, he insisted, to see
the rise of a calibre of person who would with integrity address matters of
public interest. He believed that the Christian faith was the best available
source of the motivation for such integrity and commitment to the public
interest. Yet he also accepted that the rise of the political machines meant
that individual action on these lines was doomed to be largely ineffective.
Organisation was vital.
As he was well aware, from the behaviour
of Dr Evatt and his partisans in the ALP, there were those then, as there
are now, who “literally shudder at the thought of the organization of
Christians for action in public life.” He was undeterred. He was convinced
that such organization was a vocational call and that it demanded adequate
funds, organizational staff, research staff and offices. That was the basis,
of course, of the NCC.
He did not believe that it was sufficient
to give people “a solid spiritual and intellectual formation, with a
particular emphasis on Christian social teaching, and then turn them out
into the world…each to make his own individual impact.” No, he advocated the
engagement of people so trained in concrete, imaginative objectives that
could engage their whole loyalty and commitment.
This was, of course, the root of both his
achievements and the considerable opposition he aroused, between the late
1930s and the 1990s. It is not my intention to dwell on the history of those
achievements or that opposition, only to ask where we are in 2003 with
regard to education for public leadership. For the need has certainly not
diminished.
My own sense is that we lack such
education. It isn’t that no-one makes any attempt, only that such attempts
seem to be quite discombombulated and sectional. There are still, of course,
here and there those who seek to awaken young people to political awareness
and action. But an assured curriculum for doing so systematically is
lacking.
If we are to sustain a democratic
Australia whose citizens will willingly run for office and defend the public
interest, we need to do better than we are doing. Yet, since the classical
world, we have always needed to do better. That was what prompted Plato to
write his Republic long ago. It is what prompted Augustine to write
The City of God 700 years later. It is what prompted John Locke to
write Two Treatises of Government nearly 1300 years after Augustine.
It is what prompted
Alexander Hamilton, James Madison and John Jay to write The Federalist
Papers, a century after Locke. A minimal requirement, in any curriculum
that would prepare Australian citizens for public leadership, would, I
think, be that they be familiar with such classics as these. Neither our
schools nor our universities currently guarantee any such thing.
A second vital component of
such a curriculum is, surely, involvement in some form of community work and
experience in taking responsibility for decisions and their consequences. It
was Alexis de Tocqueville who wrote, in the 1830s, that the great
constitutive power of the American republic was its town councils and rural
communities, in which small assemblies of citizens took counsel for their
immediate good. We lack too much of that and it would seem to lie at the
root of the devitalisation of the major political parties.
The
Price of Freedom
“The Australia which will not be
defended”, Santamaria declared in September 1959, in an address titled ‘The
Price of Freedom’, “is the Australia of milk bars, television and hire
purchase; the Australia whose sole objective is the highest possible
standard of material consumption for a relatively few people…and
which…proceeds to that end by building an insulated economy, buttressed by
rising tariff and import restrictions.”
Santamaria believed in an Australia of
robust ideals, strong character and generous commitments to the region. He
called for tariff reductions, increased immigration, an end of the White
Australia policy, a strenuous increase in the national savings rate in order
to raise capital for national development, a ten fold increase in our
foreign aid program and a pro-active policy to exhibit to Asia the virtues
of Christian and democratic society.
He was gloomy about the possibilities of
most of this being incorporated into the public platforms of the major
political parties, because he considered that “A programme designed to save
Australia is also a programme designed to lose elections; and democratic
parties naturally aim to win, not lose elections.” To close the gap between
the pragmatism of party machines and the apathy of the mass of voters, he
believed, the energies of small dynamic groups outside the narrowly
electoral process were required.
Santamaria drew on Jacques Maritain,
Arnold Toynbee and Bertrand de Jouvenel in advocating the formation of such
free associations of highly motivated citizens. Maritain called them
“prophetic shock minorities”, Toynbee the “creative minority”, de Jouvenel
the “vis politica”. Santamaria saw the NCC as being such a force – an
organized group whose purpose was to rouse the citizenry from their
“congenital sleeping sickness” for the public good.
The willingness to take such initiatives,
to make democratic demands on the political parties, to stand for the public
interest; the willingness to give energy and time to such endeavours, is the
price of freedom. In closing his address, in 1959, Santamaria quoted John
Ruskin’s remark, “For the triumph of evil, nothing is needed but the
inactivity of the good.” He also quoted Edmund Burke’s maxim, “When evil men
combine, the good must associate, else they will perish singly ignoble
victims in an ignominious struggle.”
These are maxims well worth recalling in
2003. Both in our domestic affairs and in our foreign entanglements, these
maxims apply. They apply to our need to revitalize our democracy, just as
they apply to our involvement in the coalition of the willing in Iraq and in
East Timor and the Solomons. Nor can I think of many better places in which
to invoke such maxims than before an audience of military officers and
analysts of strategic affairs.
Santamaria trumped both the Ruskin and
Burke quotations, however, with a famous passage from William Butler Yeats,
which also resonates rather powerfully in present circumstances. I, too,
shall conclude with these lines from Yeats, because they are so resonant and
because they are a challenge to all of us to reflect deeply on what we are
committed to and why and what means we have in common to address the
challenges we face in the 21st century:
Turning
and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon
cannot hear the falconer;
Things
fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere
anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The
blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The
ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best
lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full
of passionate intensity.
Thank you for the profound courtesy of your attention.
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