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Ed Webb

Canada-Australia-U.K. Alliance Could Stand Up for Liberal Internationalism - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...rump-canada-australia-alliance

IR analysis opinion Russia China Canada Australia UK Britain institutions UN G7 G20

shared by Ed Webb on 01 Jul 20 - Cached
  • This club of three—as a new C-3 grouping of Canada, Australia, and Britain—has legs. But the idea must be reclaimed from the nationalist right: Not only is deepening foreign-policy coordination among Ottawa, Canberra, and London increasingly attractive amid the accelerating decay of the American-led world order, but this grouping has shown itself over Hong Kong to be far more meaningful in world affairs than seemed possible
  • Canada, Australia, and Britain are all facing a moment of crisis in their foreign policies. Canada’s humiliating failure to make it onto the United Nations Security Council reflects that it can now be picked on by China, or even Saudi Arabia, as the United States weakens. Australia is faced with cyberattacks and growing Chinese pressure. Britain, now outside the European Union, has been repeatedly threatened by China over Hong Kong, Huawei, HSBC, and nuclear power plants. All three are struggling to make their voices heard in international politics, in the various G-groups, in global bodies, and in President Donald Trump’s Washington.
  • Sadly, for all three, Germany and France are in a very different place from them on the authoritarian powers. Berlin, constrained by huge exports to China, wants to find a middle way between Washington and Beijing and is not ready to throw the EU into greater competition that could jeopardize critical trade for the sake of the interests of either Canada, Australia, or Britain. Paris, similarly, thinks differently on Russia. French President Emmanuel Macron’s emerging vision for a European Security Council or “Eurogroup”-style body including Russia, Turkey, and Britain is well outside the anti-authoritarian frame than Ottawa, Canberra, and London share.
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  • Chinese and Russian aggression against the democracies is likely to grow, the United States might critically weaken, and the EU seems firmly set on pursuing a middle path. Instead of worrying about looking back to the past, leaders in Ottawa, Canberra, and London should embrace the idea and propose a significant deepening of their foreign-policy coordination. This is most definitely not about “getting the band back together,” as one British Conservative member of Parliament greeted a trade talk announcement, but three middle powers building an anti-authoritarian group to resist great-power bullying in the 21st century.
  • A mini C-3 format would offer the best approach: a summit with follow-up that is both flexible and lightweight enough to get off the ground but with a permanent working group in foreign ministries advancing dossiers and initiatives. As the C-3 are all Commonwealth countries, summits could be timed to coincide with the biennial Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting, where the leaders of Canada, Australia, and Britain regularly meet anyway.
  • Drawing both on Britain’s joint initiative with Canada to block Putin attending the G-7 and on Canada’s humiliating experience at the U.N., among this C-3’s first tasks should be to coordinate joint positions inside the U.N., G-7 and G-20. As far as major goals are concerned, this could include supporting any future attempts of Canada to win a seat on the U.N. Security Council and for Australia to formally join the G-7.
  • This is not about replacing working with the EU or the United States but creating a group for Canada, Australia, and Britain to jointly present tougher anti-authoritarian packages to big powers than had they tried to individually present them alone. The C-3, like the E-3 to the EU, would be complementary to existing Euro-Atlantic bodies.
  • deeper cooperation between Britain, Canada, and Australia has an image problem
  • imperial nostalgia or conservative culture politics
  • too anchored on ethnic fraternity
  • the idea needs to be decolonized
  • what about other middle powers? Why not include, say, Japan? This is where two critical principles of international politics come into play: Does your grouping have enough like-mindedness to be able to function and enough load-bearing capacity to get anything done? What Canada, Australia, and Britain are after is mutual geopolitical support; adding members that aren’t willing to offer that risks creating another talking shop like the Franco-German Alliance for Multilateralism. That group, which stretches from Chile to Kazakhstan, lacks the ability to agree on anything of substance—and the power to act on it.
  • there are simply not a lot of like-minded democracies to go around
  • Ottawa, Canberra, and London didn’t need each other in a U.S.-led world order or in a relatively benign world without authoritarian superpowers. But that system has decayed. Deep divisions, not just between the Europeans and Donald Trump, but with much of the U.S. national security establishment, are breaking up the old Washington-led ideological West. The common anti-authoritarian frame that once glued together Western foreign policy has come unstuck
  • In this world, the C-3 is a liberal international, not a nationalist, cause
Ed Webb

By Ignoring Racism and Colonialism, Mainstream International Relations Theory Fails to ... - 0 views

foreignpolicy.com/...ir-blind-to-racism-colonialism

IR racism colonialism theory empire opinion history pandemics

shared by Ed Webb on 07 Jul 20 - No Cached
  • Beginning with its creation as an academic discipline, mainstream IR has not been entirely honest about its ideological or geographic origins. It has largely erased non-Western history and thought from its canon and has failed to address the central role of colonialism and decolonization in creating the contemporary international order.
  • the international processes through which race and racial differences have also been produced.
  • The history of the modern state system, as it is often taught, focuses on the impact of the American and French Revolutions in the late 18th century. However, this is precisely the period of colonial expansion and settlement that saw some European states consolidate their domination over other parts of the world and over their populations, who came to be represented in racialized terms.
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  • the so-called modern state—which, then, is imperial as much as national. The racialized hierarchies of empire defined the broader polity beyond the nation-state and, after decolonization, have continued to construct inequalities of citizenship within states that have only recently become national.
  • Scholars and practitioners of international relations must take seriously the colonial histories that were constitutive of the formation of modern states
  • there is no historical evidence that Western presence has ever enhanced the well-being of the previously colonized world. It took me a solid decade—and exposure to post- and decolonial approaches—to change my doctoral research question from: “When do Western actors not show up?” to “Should they be there in the first place?”
  • democratic governance from India to South Africa to the American South has emerged principally through the activism and agency of subaltern populations—those subjected to the hegemony of a more powerful class or group, especially colonial subjects, and those victimized by anti-Black racism and other forms of discrimination.
  • the global subalterns and historically marginalized peoples are the ones who have pushed the international system to adopt whatever level of democratic governance exists
  • The subalterns have had to rectify the contradictions of global liberalism by transforming the idea of freedom for some into the practice of freedom for all.
  • it is clear that many pre-colonial African polities’ activities had important international implications
  • The scholarly imperative is to study and question the current international system built on racial capitalism, and to imagine alternatives
  • Taking the problem of racism seriously in the field of IR means viewing it not merely as an issue of stereotypes or cultural insensitivities, but as a colonial technology of life and premature death built on ideologies of whiteness and white supremacy
  • International relations that do not reproduce the logic of colonialism must instead engage with ideas of repair, dignity, and even retreat.
  • race almost always operates in conjunction with other categories—such as caste, class, civilization, and, in today’s context, the racialized Muslim. The challenge for IR is to find a new language that is not confined to just one master concept or one corner of the world.
  • IR was born in the age of empire, and for the first few decades of its history it was explicitly occupied with questions of colonial administration and the justification of racial supremacy
  • Race was often viewed as the basic unit of politics—more fundamental than state, society, nation, or individual.
  • Though the most extravagant versions of Anglo-utopianism were exhausted by the mid-20th century, the idea that the “English-speaking peoples” are destined to play a leading role in shaping world politics has proved remarkably durable. It has resurfaced in assorted conservative visions of the so-called Anglosphere and in projects for reorienting Britain’s post-Brexit foreign policy.
  • the majority of what students read about in IR continues to be written by a minority of the world’s people. The presumption that all worthwhile ideas originated in the West is not only exclusionary but false
  • Feminist foreign policy often allows wealthy countries to focus attention on the plight of women in countries with developing economies. Wealthier countries, or developed economies, then position themselves as being better placed to respond to the challenges around gender discrimination.
  • A country with a feminist foreign policy often invokes its own experiences as good practice elsewhere. Yet gender discrimination is universal, and often members of minority groups within the developed economies are significantly disadvantaged by endemic racism and xenophobia
  • A different way of doing foreign policy that is people-led rather than state-led and emphasizes solidarity over interest is the only means toward justice for all.
  • what the world is witnessing today could be the third phase of cultural encounters. The pretention of Western culture to universal validity is being challenged from the angles of cultural relativism (what is valid in one society in the West was not valid in another); historical relativism (what was valid in the West at the beginning of the 20th century was not valid in the West at the beginning of the 21st); and empirical relativism (the West often failed to live up to its own standards, and occasionally those standards were better met by other societies).
  • This is the era of the West on the defensive.
  • The COVID-19 pandemic and the global protests against police brutality demonstrate that, first, the challenges to humanity transcend the territoriality of the state and the parochialism of race and, second, a transnational, if rudimentary, convergence of political sensibilities may be emerging at the grassroots level. For many around the world, the moral disease of racism needs to be confronted as vehemently as the physical disease now sweeping around the globe.
  • shared sensibilities could, in the long run, become a catalyst for something bigger: the creation of a truly global village that is based not on cultural hierarchy but on what Mazrui called cultural ecumenicalism—a combination of a global pool of achievements with local pools of distinctive innovation and tradition
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