Историк Джеймс Керран оценил глобальное видение экс-премьера Австралии Пола Китинга и критику сделки AUKUS

There have been two topics on which former Australian prime minister Paul Keating has been a persistent, passionate commentator in the three decades since his retirement. One was intensely local: Sydney urban planning. The other was as wide as the world: the global order and Australia’s place in it. Each came out of what James Curran calls “his deep desire to find unity or harmonious integration in all things”. Or, as his adviser Allan Gyngell put it, “Keating liked things that worked, that fitted together well, properly. So a good piece of policy was to be appreciated as much as a French imperial clock.” Grand Ambition: Paul Keating’s Global Vision for Australia by James Curran (Simon & Schuster) Curran is one of Australia’s leading political historians and foreign policy commentators. Grand Ambition: Paul Keating’s Global Vision for Australia is based on deep archival research, but has also benefited from the author’s access both to Keating’s personal papers and to Keating himself. The book is highly readable. Keating is famous for his turn of phrase and Curran surely rises to the standards of his subject, in references such as “the barrow boys of the British press”. International reforms and ‘open regionalism’ Keating is unusual among recent Australian prime ministers in having produced no memoir. But as Curran indicates, he has still been active as “curator and commander of his own historical record”. When he came to the prime ministership in December 1991, however, he was something of an unknown in international affairs. That said, he had long been a reader of history and biography, and counted Napoleon Bonaparte, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and, above all, Winston Churchill as heroic makers of history. He also engaged publicly with international affairs as early as his maiden speech in 1970, where he critically referenced the Coalition subservience to the United States’ policy on the Vietnam War and praised John Curtin turning to America when Britain abandoned Singapore and Australia in 1942. There would be more of that a couple of decades later. Keating’s preoccupations as treasurer in the Hawke government had been largely and necessarily with domestic economic policy. Still, his reforms often had an international dimension. The narrative was of the opening of the Australian economy to the world: through the floating of the Australian dollar, the licensing of foreign banks, the easing of restrictions on foreign investment and the reduction of tariff protection. That agenda would dovetail rather well with his prime ministerial vision of Australia producing competitively, trading freely, and living prosperously and securely in the Asia–Pacific region. Keating called for “ open regionalism ”. It was a large and generous vision, nicely attuned to the peculiar, unexpected circumstances in which Keating found himself in the early 1990s. The Soviet Union was dissolved just days after Keating became prime minister. George H.W. Bush, due to visit Australia over the New Year and expecting to be meeting with Bob Hawke, instead found himself face-to-face with Keating and his big plans for the region. Here was the perfect environment for a creative politician of Keating’s talents. Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC), founded in 1989 as a regional “meeting of economies”, became the key instrument of his ambition. Keating wanted to upgrade APEC in at least two senses. It should bring together heads of government in a leaders’ summit, not merely ministers and officials for more humdrum kinds of gathering. And, in promoting greater regional economic integration, it could draw the nations of the region into closer security relations. APEC would bring the leaders of both China and the US into the same room. And, by providing an avenue for US engagement with the region, it would insure against Japanese domination. Curran captures Keating’s almost evangelical approach to APEC, his persuading Bill Clinton it was worthwhile, and his success in drawing on his increasingly intimate relationship with Indonesia’s President Suharto to bring it all together. He flattered, cajoled, listened and enthused, even managing to help Clinton out of the dark aftermath of disastrous mid-term US elections. APEC gave substance to Keating’s desire for greater Australian engagement with Asia. It was the monogram of his grand vision, as well as its purest expression. Yet to admit as much is already to plant seeds of doubt about the Keating achievement. APEC was never able to play the role Keating intended for it. It was never really a “community” – the term Keating would have preferred to the “cooperation” of the acronym. Negotiations over tariffs were handed over to the newly formed World Trade Organization. Nor could it carry the security baggage Keating hoped it might bear, with multilateral trade to pave the way for security cooperation in a kind of concert of the Asia-Pacific. Grand ambitions and an economic cyclone Curran’s vivid account of Keating’s energetic pursuit of his APEC vision raises other questions about his prime ministership, too. It is hard, when reading of all those phone calls and international visits over APEC, not to think of what was happening in the less rarefied atmosphere of the Australian economy, where jobs and businesses were being shredded by the “recession Australia had to have”. Curran reports that when Clinton spoke of APEC, he also spoke of American jobs. It is hard, at least in the evidence presented by Curran here, to find much of that kind of talk from Keating. Perhaps Keating took for granted that Australians would understand that when he talked of regional economic integration, he had their living standards in mind. But if so, he erred badly. Australia’s 1990s were lean, with unemployment resilient, public services shrinking, and corporate collapse always on the horizon. How was all that talk of new regional architecture going down among workers, with the unemployment rate the worst since the Depression of the 1930s? Or among business owners, with skyrocketing interest rates and plunging consumer demand? Were they reassured that markets would eventually open up for them in Indonesia or China? It may well be that Keating’s greatest failure was to connect his grand ambitions, in all their aesthetic beauty, to the lives being wrecked by an economic cyclone many held him responsible for. That lack of connection was probably only compounded by other aspects of the Keating vision. Polling showed majority support for a republic by the early 1990s, but Curran shows that Keating confused the issue with his history lessons on the failure of the British to defend Australia in 1942 and attacks on the Liberal Party for its Anglophilia, past and present. Curran reports the 1995 security treaty with Indonesia being received as a bombshell, yet beyond foreign and defence policy elites, it is likely to have barely registered at all. As I once heard speechwriter Don Watson observe, voters were sharpening the axes they had kept at hand for some years. A ‘deeply unhappy’ legacy Curran largely endorses Keating’s global vision. Still, he recognises that a vision formed in a postwar, post-imperial age might not have been quite suited to the globalising era of the 1990s, with its “clamour for an indivisible world”. One might take the critique further. The “world” Keating helped create lasted only a decade and a half before it was swept away by the global financial crisis of 2008. Moreover, the legacy of the effort to create a liberal economic order under the umbrella of America’s post-Cold War hegemony has been an unhappy one, involving rising inequality, declining trust and populist revolt. In the early 1990s, it looked like liberal democracy had triumphed; it no longer had any serious global rival. Today, it seems imperilled even in the US. Keating can hardly be blamed for all that, but it is a reminder that much – perhaps most – of what he wanted failed to stick. His vision was too top-down. It paid too little attention to the need to connect with everyday experience. It failed to establish anything like the durable post-World War Two settlement. It was blasé about human rights, too. It is defensible to argue, as Keating did, that Australia’s relationship with such a large and important neighbour as Indonesia should not be held hostage to a single issue like the future of East Timor. But Keating appears to have so impressed the Indonesians that their ambassador in Washington held up his approach to dealing with Suharto on human rights as a model for the Americans to follow. That is hardly the most flattering of tributes, just three years after the 1991 Dili massacre. Keating, in this matter as in so many others, is best understood as a proponent of Labor realism in foreign policy. Back in the 1990s, during the period of his government, scholars wrote of a Labor tradition in Australian foreign policy, emphasising liberal internationalism, multilateralism and support for the United Nations. It is arguable that this approach underestimates Labor’s realism, which has been especially influential in Australia’s dealings with its own region, whether it was External Affairs Minister Bert Evatt initially welcoming the return of European imperial powers to the colonies in Australia’s north at the end of the World War Two, or Gough Whitlam recognising the People’s Republic of China and Soviet sovereignty over the Baltic states. Keating stands in this Labor realist tradition – and it helps explain his relentless hostility to AUKUS. For Keating, as for Curran, AUKUS lacks this hard-nosed realism. It represents a return to the false security offered by subservience to the US and a return to the arms of the Mother Country, the United Kingdom. For critics of AUKUS, such as Keating and Curran, it is not just an abrogation of sovereignty and abandonment of independence. It is also based on a failure to practice realism – which, as in Keating’s formulation, demands that Australia seek its security in Asia, rather than from it.