The Domestic Politics of International Relations

Cases from Australia, New Zealand and Oceania

Roderic Alley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9781138729681
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351746984
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This title was first published in 2000. An important comparative study, which considers the domestic/international interface. The book covers climate change in Australia; New Zealand and the abolition of nuclear weapons; the Bougainville conflict and settlement in Papua New Guinea; Decolonization (New Caledonia, East Timor, West Papua); Indigenous Rights (Australia, New Zealand,and Fiji); Governance Reform and Environmental Management challenges in the Pacific Island states. The conclusion evaluates propositions advanced in the introductory chapter regarding the distinctive domestic/international issues raised and argues that, in order to comprehend foreign relations in an increasingly complex world, there is no substitute for a thorough knowledge of distinctive local, social and political dynamics shaping international orientations. The theme of the book is the way that these interactions have operated in the cases examined.

1

Introduction: International Relations and Domestic Politics

International relations and domestic politics interact in ways that help explain each other. That observation is not new, but its implications have expanded enormously and will continue doing so. We live in a world where the consequences of what occurs within the very strongest, yet also most abject of societies, can readily assume global ramifications. Sometimes the juxtapositions are acute: Americans dying in Somalia’s lethal quarrels, shaped domestic United States opinion that turned the Clinton Administration away from supporting international intervention against Rwanda’s 1994 genocide. In 1999 however, President Clinton decided international public opinion had tightened sufficiently against the Indonesian military’s conduct in East Timor to warrant supporting a United Nations-backed ‘coalition of the willing’ to help halt the carnage. Under duress, the Indonesian government ‘consented’ to ‘invite’ such a force.

Among the factors explaining why the Clinton Administration’s 1999 response differed from that five years previously, domestic/international interactivity deserves consideration. This extends beyond individual instances where domestic and international factors may interact, but the totality of that interactivity. As in the difference between a globe and a map, similar objects appear differently according to representation requirements. Events do not change by crossing borders or moving between the different ‘worlds’ of domestic politics and international relations. That transition may alter the way happenings are construed, explained, ignored, exaggerated, or manipulated, however. Such interpretations may inform policies that justify conduct previously found unacceptable. Intervention into former Yugoslavia avoided previously in Rwanda, meant life as a Kosavar Albanian in 1999 was safer than trying to survive as a Tutsi five years earlier. That difference is explained by more than domestic political considerations in say Britain or the United States, but they nevertheless remained significant.

External conduct justified as ‘a necessary interest’ may persist for a period, but ignores mounting domestic resentment to its cost. The Vietnam War’s toll within the United States still haunts the State Department. Subsequent warnings to those conducting Washington’s foreign relations emerged about safeguarding domestic interests – even to a point of exaggeration. Although conjectural, it is likely that had President Clinton acted to save Rwandan lives in 1994, he would have won re-election to the White House two years later. Much depends, therefore, upon how the interplay of domestic and international politics is ‘read’, by whom, and for what ends. In October 1999, British Prime Minister Blair, French President Chirac, and German Chancellor Schroeder wrote a joint letter to the New York Times, unsuccessfully appealing to the United States Senate not to block ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Assuredly President Clinton, favouring ratification, and Republican Senate Foreign Relations Committee Chairman Helms who remained vehemently opposed read that appeal very differently.

What considerations, then, shape the investigation of domestic/ international interactivity? We are concerned with not only the interaction of domestic and international developments, but the nature of that interactivity. How identifiable is that dynamic? Does its behaviour furnish valid generalisations? Given the range of potential determinants, what identifiable pointers exist?

First, we are concerned about activity that is organised and purposeful. It results in identifiable forms of public change. A dynamic is involved performing functions that may comprise institutional development, normative adjustment, and attitudinal change. A domestic/international interactivity approach may embrace multiple domestic actors: legislatures, courts, lobbies, information brokers, or a wide array of bureaucratic interests negotiating policy convergence with external counterparts for rule-governed or standard setting conduct. An empirical investigation of cases, as provided here, assists us appreciate how domestic and international factors interact and to what effect. This represents a useful basis for comparison and theory formation.

A second focus of the interactivity under investigation concerns the location of responsibility. The domestic governance, environmental stewardship, and internal political accountability of states may all affect their external conduct. Never distant is whether power-holders are ultimately bound by the consent of those they govern. That interrogation encourages reassessment of self-determination, autonomy, and sovereignty principles. Those who speak for states they claim to represent internationally, cannot perform that function divorced from the societies within which they live. But that ‘society’, as General Pinochet has found, extends well beyond conventional territorial borders. Accountability denied at home is being exerted from abroad.

Interactive processes linking domestic and international factors encourage other comparisons. They include the effects upon foreign relations of democratisation, human rights, civil-military relations, and the role of judicial institutions in upholding and promoting principles of rule-governed domestic order. Focus upon domestic/international interactivity helps expose external representation functions performed by contemporary governments.

A prescriptive challenge lies in comprehending why governments enter commitments abroad, but then fail to implement them at home. Here, a third task is determining how domestic/international interactivity effects particular forms of response. The response path may comprise a progression flowing beyond agenda setting into the negotiation of rules and agreements, their ratification, and eventual implementation. After agreeing to implement measures negotiated abroad, governments regularly encounter local implementation barriers. Attempting to enlist internal support may even galvanise local interests, anxious to obstruct an initiative deemed threatening because of its offshore origins.

This underlines the difficulties that governments face when conceiving, organising, or promoting something termed the ‘national interest’. An intensity of domestic/international interactivity offers scope to redefine, alter, or reconfigure that interest. It does so by placing governments under pressure to respond to transnational agendas. They may resist that pressure, as has China over human rights. However, failure to make any accommodation incurs costs.

Although not always the culprit for what its critics may claim, globalisation is a ready target for domestic suspicion. Pressures for international competitiveness, deregulation and privatisation, can leave the domestic state structure not a protector from, but local facilitator to the forces and demands of the global economy (Cox, 1999: 12). This difficulty is often acute for governmental handling of international economic relations – for example, trade liberalisation and tariff reduction negotiations. Domestic opposition by material interests is one form of response, but there are many others.

An example is the use of domestic/international channels less in defence of sectional demands than in the promotion of international campaigns. Notwithstanding national, language, or cultural differences, domestic interests interact with counterparts abroad to gain information, further local support, and promote ideas in the formulation of transnational public strategies. Regardless of agenda, local groups inform international audiences about conditions that they deem unsatisfactory in their own and other countries. Subjecting governments to adverse international publicity is viewed as legitimate political leverage – although some companies confronting Greenpeace have thought otherwise.

Governments everywhere are uncertain about which developments may engage publics, at what level, and with how much intensity. Statehood is seemingly about control within physical limits, ‘yet the citizens who reside within a state territory may feel multiple forms of allegiance which not only transcend cartography but shift in response to events both internal and external’ (Bishai, 1998: 92).

In domestic political environments that are authoritarian or worse, a sudden telescoping of domestic and international events may jolt them towards fundamental policy redirection or, more drastically, outright regime collapse. As in Hamlet, their ‘troubles come not as single spies, but in battalions’. Sometimes the linkages concerned are only dimly perceived, much less responded to – as when Southeast Asia’s drought, debt, and devaluations helped oust Indonesia’s Suharto regime in 1998. Less dramatic combinations of domestic and international events may offer warning signals allowing regimes scope to adjust in anticipation.

Given the potential range of imponderable ‘rogue factors’ that may shape domestic/international interactivity, what analytical challenges emerge? Between them, Comparative Politics and International Relations offer valued tools, although their collaborative utilisation remains inadequate. This is evident through the delayed investigation of ethnicity’s international dimensions. Nevertheless, ‘most scholars in comparative politics, together with a good many in international relations do recognise that the long separation of international relations from domestic political relations has been totally artificial’ (Strange, 1996: 69). Keohane sees a need for ‘better theories of domestic politics ... so that the gap between the external and the internal environments can be bridged in a systematic way, rather than by simply adding catalogues of exogenously determined foreign policy facts to theoretically more rigorous (international) structural models’ (Keohane, 1989: 60). Yet because each country is unique, there is the risk that empirical detail and national distinctiveness may deter generalisations beyond a single case (Frieden, 1997: vii). Distinguishing between sovereign, plural, and the normative dimensions of the domestic/international dynamic is a beginning. They relate to foundation intellectual streams in the study of international relations that deserve attention. Next, cases surveyed by this study are introduced. Comments on comparative criteria employed conclude this Introduction.

The Sovereignty Paradox

As a philosophy of international relations, realism and its adherents view domestic factors as essentially irrelevant to the struggle for power, influence, and status identified as persisting features of external state conduct. Realism is pessimistic about reforming an international system, whose dominant influences ensure rules remain instrumental to discretionary application according to state interest. Reform does not reduce propensities for cheating, or preoccupation with relative gains. Necessarily, this diminishes the scope for national institutions to further international co-operation and evolve shared cross-border interests. Barriers demarcating foreign from domestic affairs persist; they are those imposed by priorities of survival in a potentially anarchic world. Article 2 (7) of the United Nations Charter is an example of a principle grounded in the belief that the domestic/international boundary is an essential component within a state-based international order.¹

Under this approach, state discretion is extensive. Here the domestic/ international nexus affords state operatives latitude to rationalise extra-legal conduct in the name of ‘security’. Governments insist security imperatives exonerate the executive from compliance with laws applicable to the citizenry at large over wiretapping, trespass, breaking and entering, or search without warrant. Justifications are grounded in presumed linkages between internal and external threat. Conditions of ‘emergency’ are prolonged, and state agents operate with impunity from prosecution. International means of accountability, due process, or sanction only gradually emerge for the most egregious of violations.

Even in less drastic circumstances, executive dominance in the conduct of foreign relations, is widely evident. Utilising privileges of secrecy and exclusiveness, officials claim that as pragmatists and technicians, they are ‘above’ the daily hurly-burly of domestic politics and partisan strife. In sum, the realist perspective helps those willing to afford little weight to citizen efficacy or the intra-societal networking increasingly evident in much international non-governmental activity.

However, this should not belittle the importance of the domestic dimension in some foreign policy case studies drawn from orthodox, state-based appraisals.

Hanrieder (1967) saw external and internal dimensions linking in ways that help to inform judgements about feasible conduct in foreign relations. Feasibility is best evaluated by posing domestically inspired goals against external constraints. A sound understanding of the domestic environment is essential to gauge consensus over foreign policy means and ends. This understanding contributes to a store of prudence and judgement, derived from lessons of observed state conduct. Similarly Wallace (1971), believed domestic support, and the management of domestic interests, constituted a first call for those charting foreign relations. However ‘the degree to which foreign policy has remained a separate area, or has become part of the domestic political process, is ... a matter of some uncertainty’ (Wallace, 1971: 40).

Carlsnaes (1981) evaluated foreign relations conduct and domestic democratic processes. For that link to function, requirements included a critically reflective public; a corps of sufficiently informed politicians able to avoid domination by experts or professional bureaucrats; and an arena of public debate not beholden to any particular set of interests. Goldman (1988) investigated domestic forces for their role in stabilising the conduct of external relations. This occurred through institutionalisation, and the extent to which a government is committed to pursue a particular policy by using domestic supports. Issue salience was interpreted as a capacity to affect coalition outcomes following domestic political struggles. Externally, foreign relations are stabilised by treaties, agreements, customs, and norms whose violation is not cost-free (Goldman, 1988: 30).

These contributions reflect thought about domestic dimensions as components of statecraft. More recently, however, globalisation’s surge has breached the internal/external demarcation at many points. Forces included the impact of international diasporas, large-scale migrant and refugee flows, transnational media networks, the flood of small weapons to non-state operatives in an unregulated arms market, and expanding global support for human rights. The frequency, complexity, and obduracy of protracted internal wars, embroiling neighbouring regions, and engendering controversy over intervention, is further testimony to the inextricability of domestic and external forces.² So are growing security apprehensions about non-military threats exploiting the ‘grey zones’ between domestic and international controls -crime, narcotics, trafficking in humanity, and money laundering. Should peace reconstruction move beyond declarations of intent, then implementation requires co-ordination between domestic and international institutions, humanitarian agencies, and funding providers.

Another line-breaker has occurred as international system change and state collapse have helped inflame state/nation dichotomies. Some believe there is ‘historical tension between state sovereignty, which stresses the link between sovereign authority and a defined territory, and national sovereignty, which emphasises a link between sovereign authority and a defined population’ (Barkin and Cronin, 1994: 108). Because both types fundamentally differ in the basis of their originating legitimisation, they necessarily affect inter-state relations in different ways. Walker (1993: 169-172) has viewed sovereignty as both a defining characteristic and a problem to overcome. This includes questions about whether it is exercised legitimately within states, of governments openly coercing people and denying them their rights, and of state weakness within an increasingly interdependent global capitalist economy. Thus across many fields of social endeavour and political activity, sovereign demarcati...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Tables, Boxes and Maps
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 New Zealand and the World Court Project
• 3 Australia and Climate Change
• 4 The Bougainville Conflict
• 5 Decolonisation
• 6 Indigenous Rights
• 7 Public Management in the South Pacific
• 8 Environmental Prescription in the South Pacific
• 9 Conclusions
• Select Bibliography
• Index