The Case for Decency: Are we a Good International Citizen

Published in The Sydney Morning Herald, 26 February 2022

Why should we care about poverty, human rights atrocities, health epidemics, environmental catastrophes, weapons proliferation or any other problems afflicting people in faraway countries when they do not, as is often the case, have any direct or immediate impact on our own security or prosperity? Should Australians care about terrorist atrocities in the Middle East only because extreme jihadist movements seek to recruit deluded young men who may return to threaten our homeland security? Should we care about Ebola outbreaks in West Africa only because the disease might turn up here? Should we care about refugees from Afghanistan and Iran and Sri Lanka only because they might become queue-jumping asylum seekers threatening our territorial integrity by arriving by boat? Should we care about the catastrophic humanitarian risks of any nuclear weapons exchange only if radiation-cloud or nuclear-winter impacts are likely to reach Australian shores?

Isn’t all this just boy-scout stuff, not the real business of national government? What has it got to do with what any country should really care about—advancing and protecting its national interests? My answer, which I hope will be seen as compelling, is that we have both a moral imperative and a national interest imperative to be, and be seen to be, a good international citizen.

At the heart of the case for good international citizenship is simply that this is the right thing to do—that states, like individuals, have a moral obligation to do the least harm, and the most good, they can do. Answers will vary, depending on one’s philosophical or spiritual bent, as to what is the source of that obligation. But the striking thing is just how much convergence there is around basic principles, whether one’s approach to ethics is religiously or humanistically based, and whatever the cultural tradition in which one has been brought up.

The main ethical traditions all point in essentially the same direction: demanding respect for our common humanity. People should be treated not on the basis of what we are as a result of our genes, or where we were born, or the circumstances of our upbringing, but on the basis of what we do, and above all on the decency or not with which we behave towards our fellow human beings. And what is true for individuals in our local and national communities is also true for whole countries in the global community. Recognition of, and respect for, our common humanity is the moral core of the concept of good international citizenship.

Of course, it is the primary business of any country’s foreign policy to advance and protect the national interest: we should be neither naïve nor defensive about this. But foreign policymakers, and those in the media and elsewhere who influence them, far too often still think of national interests only in terms of the familiar duo of security and prosperity: geopolitical, strategic and physical security-related interests on the one hand, and trade, investment and prosperity-related interests on the other.

Instead of conceptualising national interests just in terms of the two familiar boxes of security and prosperity, we need to think in terms of every country having a third national interest: being, and being seen to be, a good international citizen. The returns from good, selfless international behaviour are more than just warm inner glows. Such behaviour can generate hard-headed, practical national advantage of the kind that appeals to realists—and political cynics—as well as idealists.

There are three kinds of hard-headed return for a state being, and being seen to be, a good international citizen. The first is progress on issues requiring collective international action which might not otherwise be achievable. Good international citizenship requires, almost by definition, a cooperative mindset—being willing to engage in collective international action to advance global and regional public goods. These include bringing global warming under control, and achieving a world free of health pandemics, out-of-control cross-border population flows, international trafficking of drugs and people, and extreme poverty; a world without cross-border terrorism; and a world on its way to abolishing all weapons of mass destruction.

The second return from good international citizenship is reciprocity. Foreign policymakers are no more immune to ordinary human instincts than anyone else, and if I take your problems seriously, you are that much more likely to help me solve mine. The reciprocity involved is not always explicit or transparent, and subtlety will often be an advantage in achieving it. But no practising diplomat will be unaware of the reality, and utility, of this dynamic, and no government policymaker should be oblivious to it.

The third return, more intangible but perhaps most significant overall, is reputational. A country’s general image, how it projects itself—its culture, its values, its policies—and how in turn it is seen by others, is of fundamental importance in determining how well it succeeds in advancing and protecting its traditional national interests. Over many decades of active international engagement I have witnessed, over and again, how this ‘soft power’ matters. It matters in determining whether one is seen as a good country to invest in and trade with, to visit, to study in, and to trust in security terms. And it matters in being seen as a good country to support for responsible international positions and in responsible decision-making forums, and as one good to work with in solving those transnational issues that are beyond the capacity of any country to solve by itself.

There are four big practical benchmarks which matter above all else when one is assessing any country’s record as a good international citizen. Being a generous aid donor. Doing everything we can to protect and advance universally recognised human rights. Doing everything we reasonably can to prevent the horror and misery of war and mass-atrocity crimes, and to alleviate their consequences, including for refugees fleeing their impact. And being an actively committed participant in attempts to meet the great existential risks posed by health pandemics, global warming and nuclear war.

Australia likes to think of itself as a good international citizen and from time to time has deserved to be so regarded. But only from time to time. Against these benchmarks our overall record has been patchy at best, lamentable at worst, and is presently embarrassingly poor.

On overseas aid, we have been the worst-performed of any rich-country donor in terms of the decline in our generosity over the last five decades. On human rights, where what happens at home very much matters abroad – nobody likes a hypocrite – our record has been at best mixed. So too with our contributions to international peace and security. In peacemaking diplomacy, and responding to mass-atrocity crimes, we have played some important positive roles, notably in Cambodia. As international peacekeepers we have always done well, but accepted too few such obligations in recent years. In the case of actual warfighting we have been at our best when making our own decision to fight just wars, lawful under the UN Charter, and at our worst when persuaded to go to war for less just causes in the hope of buying alliance insurance protection against possible future threats to ourselves. In meeting our responsibilities to refugees and asylum seekers, our record has been at times in the past a very proud one, but in recent years little short of shameful.

In helping meet the three great existential risks to life on this planet as we know it, our international performance has been underwhelming or worse. A bare pass in the case of pandemics, but a dismal fail on climate change, where our response has been grudging, minimalist, and done nothing to redeem our now well-established international reputation as a climate laggard. On nuclear weapons, we have played a useful role in the past, and can again. in advancing both risk reduction and the ultimate goal of elimination, but in recent years our contribution has been more of an encumbrance than an encouragement.

What is intriguing is that, on all the available evidence, the problem lies not with the negative attitudes of our people, but our governments. Australian polling conducted by the Lowy Institute over the last fifteen years shows clear, and often overwhelming, public support for just about all my benchmark tests of good international citizenship. (Aid at first sight seems the big exception, but on closer examination, it is anything but: when people understand the actual sums involved, they want us to be more, not less, generous).

When governments have taken strongly principled good international citizenship positions, they have had no obvious difficulty in taking the community with them. The nervousness so many of them have shown has not had any obvious political justification. Maybe these issues are not sufficiently central and salient to win elections, but there is no evidence of which I am aware that they lose them.

A country with Australia’s general record and reputation as an energetic, creative middle power which has many times in the past played a world-leading role in international diplomacy, should be setting its sights higher. The bottom line is that we have just one planet, we are a global community, and our political leaders should give more weight than too many of them have done to what Abraham Lincoln famously called ‘the better angels of our nature’. Those in office might prefer Berthold Brecht’s solution—‘Dissolve the people and elect another’—but the right course for the rest of us is to persuade our political leaders, on both moral and national interest grounds, to change their ways, and vote them out if they don’t.

This is an edited extract from Good International Citizenship: The Case for Decency by Gareth Evans released on March 1 as part of the In the National Interest series published by Monash University Publishing.

This article was originally published in The Sydney Morning Herald as 'The case for decency: Are we a good global citizen?' on 26 February 2022.