The problem of establishing a perfect civil constitution depends upon the problem of law-governed external relations among nations and cannot be solved until the latter is.

Immanuel Kant

That quote is from Immanuel Kant's Idea for a Universal History with Cosmopolitan Purpose: Seventh Principle which Lee brought to my attention.

Kant argues that natural state of nature for mankind, and nations, is a brutal state of freedom. Where individuals and states act in arbitrary and violent means in order to preserve their perfect freedom and autonomy of action.

To Kant a perfect civil constitution is impossible while there are outside pressures on it, as the permanent state of war, or preparation for war is ultimately destabilising as the state bends the individual to the state's will.

Kant concludes;

As long as states will use all their resources for their vain and violent designs for expansion and thus will continually hinder the slow efforts toward the inner shaping of the minds of their citizens, and even withdraw from their citizens all encouragement in this respect, we cannot hope for much because a great exertion by each commonwealth on behalf of the education of their citizens is required for this goal.

Every pretended good that is not grafted upon a morally good frame of mind is nothing more than a pretence and glittering misery. Mankind will probably remain in this condition until, as I have said, it has struggled out of the chaotic condition of the relations among its states.

International liberalism's answer to this conundrum is meta-national institutions for nations to air their grievances. It attempts to replace violence with direct communication. This philosophy grew out of the depravities of World War I and World War II where violence between the nations consumed the whole globe.

Statesmen such as Woodrow Wilson and Australia's Doc Evatt were heavily involved in the forming of meta-national institutions such as the League of Nations and United Nations. Doc Evatt and John Burton often took the principle of brutal and honest communication to extremes, shocking diplomats from other nations in their plain talk.

The other side to international liberalism is power politics. This seeks to replace communication with sheer power in terms of military and economic might backing up diplomatic movements. The two purist players in power politics are the United States and France, the latter following the Gaullist tradition of foreign policy. Unsurprisingly the Americans and French butt heads often.

The neo-conservative movement in the United States has derided the United Nations as irrelevant. Ironically the United Nations itself often served as an institution for factions in its membership to push their interests. Wars were fought for instance in Korea with the United Nations against North Korea and China.

Power politics has left the Middle East in a maelstrom benefiting the control and collapse of power to the central governments of the United States, Iran and Saudi Arabia. While leaving Iraq and Afghanistan without an enforceable civil constitution. They exist in a vacuum of civil stability.

Is there a third way, or are we just left to hope that trade and globalisation will smooth out the wrinkles between nation-states?

Engagement

Paul Keating and Gareth Evans undertook a foreign policy known as Asian Engagement . This was a radical break from past Australian foreign policy doctrine which I don't think has been fully appreciated yet by political commentators.

The Howard and Hawke governments, as well as every government prior until Billy Hughes practised the Great and Powerful Friends doctrine [GAPF] of foreign policy. It was first developed by Billy Hughes at Versailles in 1919 when he used Australia's efforts of supporting Britain in WWI to get a seat at the table.

He was challenged by Woodrow Wilson to explain why Australia, a dominion of the British Empire, should be represented at the table by Hughes and not by Britain's foreign minister, Lloyd George. Hughes replied that he; " represented 60,000 dead. "

Once gaining a seat Hughes did not advance Australian interests, he advanced British interests. Britain was a huge trading market for Australia and he was worried that if Australia was disloyal, then Canada, and in particular its wheat, would get favoured access to British markets.

Hughes was also concerned that Australian security depended on the Royal Navy. So he subsumed Australian military and foreign policy to replicate British interests - uncritically - in order to guarantee British security for Australia and access to British markets.

It was a bit of a furphy. Britain knew it could not protect Australia if there was simultaneous conflicts in Europe and Asia. Australia knew it too. Australian subservience in foreign policy did not get us any improved access to British markets either. Australians found new markets to export into - as entrepreneurs do.

All The Way With LBJ!

That was Harold Holt's cry when he promised increased Australian involvement in Vietnam. It is indicative of the uncritical nature of our relationship with our Great and Powerful Friend which after World War II was the United States, not Britain.

John Curtin is often acknowledged for his courage in defying Winston Churchill and uttering the words in 1941;

Australia looks to America, free of any pangs as to our traditional links or kinship with the United Kingdom.

This is the same policy - just swapping Britain for America. Since then Menzies followed it, though grudgingly with America, seeking to return to Britain's fold through the Commonwealth. Both Fraser and Hawke did; and now Howard, who returned to the policy with an almost violent thud. Menzies and Curtin could not have scripted Howard's doctrine and its perceived benefits more closely.

Howard has added another permutation to this policy, namely the complete absence of power politics. The Howard government is highly uncritical of the United States, even when there has been plenty of room for meaningful criticism. Howard has acted in a similar way with other countries, particularly China.

The Complete Approach

Asian Engagement is predicated on several premises;

• Australia is located in the South Pacific and South-East Asia
• We are a regional military and economic power
• Our main trading partners are regional (our biggest is Japan)
• Regional stability and prosperity will come through the complete political, military, economic, social and cultural engagement of the nations in the region.
• Australian power and influence can be advanced beyond the region through this engagement doctrine.

It is a kind of diplomatic globalisation where the nations enmesh to such a point that violence, warfare and cutting of communication is unthinkable. The radical nature of it is not only in how Australia projects itself, but also the confidence Australia has in being able to project its identity as well as absorb the identities of others into itself.

This policy is an improvement over the Great and Powerful Friends doctrine and in my opinion is superior for countering terrorism than a policy of hard power and the GAPF policy. I have also argued for the defence style of engagement that is inherent in the Engagement doctrine which would both secure our region while simultaneously advancing our interests.

Back To Kant

Neither of these four foreign policy methods solve the problem that Kant proposed that the constant violence and preparing for violence between nations must first be solved before a perfect civil constitution can be constructed. I believe that the Engagement doctrine is the superior one of all the options.

However, I still maintain that a policy of strong defence capability is necessary.

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The 1990s has seen an acceleration of globalisation as the prior Cold War nations opened their economies and the democratic dividend started to be felt in Europe and parts of Asia. The increasing capital, labor and communication flows of globalisation make many aspects of the old industrial order uncertain - one of these being the authority of the nation-state.

Allen Gyngell and Micheal Wesley describe globalisation as having the attributes:

• economic interdependence
• transnational communications
• homogenisation of differences
• collapse of chronological time and geographic space (ie world is getting smaller)
• transnational social and political movements
• local action for global causes
• transfer of allegiance away from the state

One of the other interesting ones was the "emergence of a global risk culture where people regard the greatest threats that face them as ones that overwhelm the state's response." However the argument for globalisation is that individuals are creating social, cultural, economic and political networks outside of the geographic space and political confines of the nation-state.

Under such a situation ethnic-nationalism becomes an antiquated political technology. Other pressures are placed on nationalism as an informative political technology through the mobility and cosmopolitan nature of the modern workforce. Citizenship as defined under nationalism becomes a discriminative and isolating technology that effectively denies suffrage to individuals who are fully immersed socially, culturally, economically and politically in a nation for work reasons.

As Gyngell and Wesley note, it is unclear how globalisation will affect the nation-state as a form of social and political organisation, but it is obvious already that changes will occur.

In terms of collective decision making, a liberal democratic nation-state remains the best form of organisation. Though some of the technologies the state used in the 19thC to sustain, define and legitimise its authority - such as ethnicism, nationalism, protectionism and isolationism - will have to go. Apart from being socially and morally repugnant to many, they are inefficient technologies in a world where the dominant form of competition between states is economic.

Central to this is that globalisation is eroding both the state's control over the individual in a global polity as well as the state's capability to give individual's singular and collective identity. There will be those that continue to crave a collective identity anchored in the state's authority, however, as the Australia diaspora is showing, economic competition is dominating as Australians head overseas in search of higher remuneration.

This process will only increase as labour is unfettered in the same manner that capital has been. Nation-states currently have an isolationist approach to immigration and migration. Due to the desire for economic advantage Australia has already seen its immigration policies changed from an ethnic one in the 1960s to one that is more merit based.

As it is one quarter of the Australian work force is foreign born, while nearly one million Australians are overseas working in other nations. To put the diaspora in perspective it is nearly ten-percent of the current Australian workforce.

The Great and Powerful Friends [GAPF] doctrine has guided Australian foreign policy for nearly a century. Other than a short spate of international liberalism during Doc Evatt's time, when the United Nations was established, the GAPF has been dominant.

The Engagement doctrine rose in the 1990s under Paul Keating and Gareth Evans. I consider this a disruptive technology or policy because it is heavily aimed at harnessing globalisation for Australian advantage.

Central to the Engagement doctrine is the philosophy that security comes from complete engagement with a political entity. GAPF policy tends to be bilateral and not go beyond the relations that states historically have communicated with. For instance diplomatic, military and high level economic talks where the states negotiate economic terms.

Under Engagement the political entities communicate politically, culturally, socially and economically. Engagement goes beyond the arms of state intersecting and places all aspects of national life as a communicative tunnel toward national advantage.

There are several things that comes from this. One is that security is not possible unless there is political, social, cultural and economic familiarity between political entities. Additionally it is not necessarily nation-states having the monopoly on being a political entity that is recognised by the Australian nation-state. This is important in the global polity and transnational nature of globalisation.

Secondly there is an inherent belief in Australian culture, society and economic achievement that it will give something positive to the world through Engagement, while, at the same time being strong enough to positively absorb outside influences such that Australia is culturally, socially, economically and politically advantaged.

Thirdly it recasts Australian power, strength and influence as being beyond, and not limited to, the machinations and institutions of the nation-state. For instance the Lowey Institute's report on the Australian Diaspora contained the recognition that the diaspora advanced Australian interests in unusual and unexpected ways.

Engagement recasts Australian political influence as being beyond the geographic space and political confines of Australia (or its great and powerful friend) defining it instead as limited only by the reach of modern communications and immigration. For this reason Engagement is a superior foreign policy doctrine for the reality and opportunities of globalisation.

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Paul Keating's interview on Lateline has been doing the rounds, and well it should, this is genuine news, rather than delivered soundbites. Keating transitioned into a statesman a while ago, as did Malcolm Fraser, and in a manner which Bob Hawke and Gough Whitlam have not really managed to do. Statesman should be opinionated. We rely on them, to be free of the political pressures, but with their former inside knowledge, knowing when to call BS.

Keating in the end was too arrogant for me, and he was Prime Minister at the end of a hectic Labor period of governance. Government's tire after three terms and political gamesmanship often replaces good governance, which is an issue the Howard and Carr/Iemma governments are having. It was time in 1996 to give the Liberals a go again.

Australia needed the kick in the pants from the likes of Keating, Greiner and Kennett. It also needed the mundane and bland managerial innoffensiveness of the likes of Howard, Carr and Bracks afterwards as well.

However, I consider Keating and Greiner two of the great politicians and policy makers of the modern Australian political era. Keating is extra special as his use of language and ability to articulate a policy narrative is still unparalleled. He is as a statesman should be - shaking the status quo with "can't take your eyes off" delivery.

The Keating interview is entirely on policy, and politics only intrudes as much as the interviewer is trying to get his drama out of the piece.

Keating is defending his legacy, but he is correct in what he is saying. In terms of economic rationalism (liberalism) and establishing a market-state; he and Hawke have it all over the Howard government.

He is also correct when he talks of his policies of establishing apolitical or non-political pressure valves such as floating the dollar, the reserve bank doing interest rates and the dropping of tariffs. His argument was weakest with the Chinese Effect but low-cost Japanese manufactures have been coming to Australia for years. This is a new version of that process.

The Howard Government is not particularly economically liberal. The best that can be said of their economic management is that they have not interfered politically in the non-political institutions. But in areas that need economic liberalisation, they have botched policy for political reasons. QANTAS and Telstra are two ongoing examples.

Howard's economic management has followed Frasernomics - which is not a surprise as he was Treasurer under Fraser. If we look at Howard's economic management in that light, the Budget and Workchoices as policy become obvious.

Frasernomics has two main principles - keep inflation down by; one, keeping the budget out of deficit; and two, stopping unions increasing wages.

Under those principles the anti-federalist grab by Howard for Industrial Relations to be in Canberra and the prohibition of collective bargaining in Workchoices make sense.

But this is a very dated view, as Keating commented. The services industry in Australia is going gangbusters, and it has almost no union penetration. The best way to limit union involvement is by having real wage growth - not statutorial prohibition which is an affront to individual liberties. Keating said:

I mean you take the instance, the liquor allied entertainment restaurants, entertainment industry in this country since the '80s. It's been massive. Unionisation hasn't happened. There's some of it there, basically hasn't happened.

Keating blames union incompetence for it. It is more likely, in my opinion, the 2% wage growth each year for twenty years that he mentioned in the interview. Personal prosperity is an important motivator.

Additionally, despite the interference of nation-states in a globalised economy, labour is becoming a global resource rather than a protected one inside a nation-state. This makes union power ineffective anyway - as Fred Argy commented:

In today's highly competitive, globalised economy, unions cannot determine market wages and conditions except in rare situations where businesses have monopoly power (in which case unions are merely giving their workers a share of the monopoly profits).

Another method to lower wages is to increase the supply of labour in Australia - and immigration has increased under Howard, but given the employment figures of the last few weeks - not enough. This is where the nation-state and its non-porous political boundaries limit an economy's ability to satiate its labour needs.

There appears to be consensus amongst economists that real wage growth follows productivity growth. Since most of the market-state structural changes were made under Hawke and Keating, I don't think Howard, or Rudd for that matter, know what they can do from that level of government other than chip around the edges and stay largely hands off until something becomes a political issue that threatens their political power.

The High Court's ratification of Workchoices as constitutional was a bad decision for many reasons. One of the issues raised by Paul Keating was that it allows central control over a minimum wage through legislation alone.

Workchoices gets its legitimacy as legislation through the appeal to employers being from constitutional corporations. From the Workplace Relations Amendment:

"Australian employer" means:

(a) an employer that is a trading corporation formed within the limits of the Commonwealth (within the meaning of paragraph 51(xx) of the Constitution); or

(b) an employer that is a financial corporation formed within the limits of the Commonwealth (within the meaning of paragraph 51(xx) of the Constitution); or ...

The relevant part of the Australian Constitution is Sect 51.xx which read narrowly is:

51.The Parliament shall, subject to this Constitution, have power to make laws for the peace, order, and good government of the Commonwealth with respect to: - ...

(xx.) Foreign corporations, and trading or financial corporations formed within the limits of the Commonwealth: ...

Which may seem cut and dried, but read broadly with other heads of power in the constitution is not, as industrial relations is mentioned explicitly as well:

(xxxv.) Conciliation and arbitration for the prevention and settlement of industrial disputes extending beyond the limits of any one State:

For this reason national control of industrial relations has gone to three referendums for constitutional amendment to xxxv - all of which have failed.

Originally the corporations power was read very narrowly with a 1909 case, but since the 1970s when the High Court doctrine changed from one of federalism, to the doctrine that the judicial branch has the capability to make the constitution a 'living and breathing document', otherwise known as judicial activism, the corporations power has been one of opening the floodgates.

Because the High Court decision ignores the inter-state requirement of xxxv, and trashes the federal character of the Australian Constitution, making it national - or unitary - then it is open to all manner of centralised industrial management with legislation alone - including minimum wage.

From the Keating interview:

Let me make this clear, the Liberals decided that they wouldn't use the conciliation and arbitration power.

Under that power of the constitution you always needed a commission who tested capacity to pay and comparative wage justice. They've now used the corporations power and the High Court for the first time as validated its use. That means a Federal Government can now legislate the wage and the conditions.

and:

The safety nets now are the National Wage Case and the National Wage Case has gone because the commission has gone. But the Government can have Mr Harper and the Fair Pay Commission, but it's got no commission power it's really the Commonwealth Government. That's the point I'm making. It's not me saying it, it's the High Court saying it.

The nation-state is devoluting into the market-state. Where the nation-state used to be this heavily capitalised intensive centralised structure which would throw money to the poor and slow regions to make them catch up to the achieving regions; the market-state follows the lines of communications and is decentrsalised with innovation happening on the edges and bubbling into the center.

Workchoices is an industrial era approach to industrial relations - and focuses on issues that globalisation have largely made irrelevant. The issue for Australia is that its heavy centralisation of industrial relations is a weakness - a political and structural weakness.

One of the more interesting people in Australian politics at the moment is Julia Gilliard, especially with the establishment of the Rudd Government. She is the obvious heir apparent to Rudd as the Prime Minister and since Australian governments can expect to be in power for at least nine years in modern politics thanks to the advantages of incumbency there will come a time when she believes she is ready to be Prime Minister. I consider this healthy.

We have two templates from opposite ends of the spectrum in Paul Keating and Peter Costello in how this has been handled. Keating made it so uncomfortable for Hawke that the party established Keating as the Prime Minister after some procrastination. The other end of the scale is Costello who continually bent to the wishes of his party leader and party; never seriously challenging for the position and watching Howard lead his party and Costello's chances of being PM into crushing defeat.

Westminster government's openness and poor separation of powers invites executive exhaustion and overstay. This was obvious in the national election and there are several state goverments suffering from similar executive over-reach and policy poverty. However, there has been two interesting retirements in NSW and Victoria with Bob Carr and Steve Bracks saving themselves from themselves. Carr was hastened out by ICAC on his heels, but Bracks' retirement seems entirely genuine.

More Prime Ministers and Premiers should look to Bracks' example.

... so does the country.

From the article:

"We're not the mean waterboarding company that people think we are," said George Brunt, general counsel for the firm, which sells a combination of online and personalized instruction - packaged as "coaching" and running $3,000 to $15,000 - to customers who are solicited by telephone.

and:

"I don't know if this would even be an issue if it weren't for Guantanamo Bay," Brunt said.

"How many times did the CIA even do waterboarding? Three times?" added Dave Ellis, the company president.

"But look at the damage it did to America's reputation," Brunt pointed out. "And it's going to hurt our image."

Sounds like the horse has bolted.