Dialogue: Centre-stage roles for diplomatic bit player

By RAMESH THAKUR and WILLIAM MALEY

By any objective criterion, Australia is a far more formidable power than New Zealand. Its population is five times bigger, its economy six times bigger and its defence capability far more robust.

Yet, paradoxically, over the past few years New Zealand has been the more influential of the transtasman twins in world affairs.

Consider these examples. In 1989, Australia's former Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser campaigned to be the Secretary-General of the Commonwealth, but lost. Ten years later, New Zealand Foreign Minister Don McKinnon contested the same post and won.

In 1992, New Zealand campaigned for one of the non-permanent seats on the United Nations Security Council. Conceding one seat to Spain, Wellington focused its campaign against Sweden and won against the odds. Four years later, Australia campaigned for the same seat, conceded one post to Sweden, focused its campaign against Portugal, and beat the odds to lose.

Last year, former New Zealand Prime Minister Mike Moore won a three-year split term as Director-General of the World Trade Organisation. Later in the year, former Australian Foreign Minister Gareth Evans contested the post of Director-General of Unesco and lost.

How can this uncoupling of power and influence be explained?

First, the size of the New Zealand foreign service is much smaller than that of Australia. The margin of fault tolerance is correspondingly smaller. Incompetence by just one officer will cost Wellington more dearly than Canberra. It will also show up more clearly, and the offending officer will be reprimanded or retrenched.

Encumbered with a bigger bureaucracy and being federally structured, Australia suffers relatively more from interdepartmental wrangling.

With more limited overseas representation than Australia, New Zealand spends more time reasoning from first principles and working on analyses from a more diverse range of sources.

Wellington has nothing but its diplomacy to rely on in protecting, pursuing and advancing its national interests. Therefore, it has to sharpen the skills of its diplomats to the highest possible level.

Australia, as a self-confessed middle power, tries to use economic and military muscle in the region. In the wake of East Timor, some Australian ministers have even elevated Australia to the rank of major power. They are wont to claim that their country's robust demonstration of military capacity earned them greater respect and recognition in the region.

But many in South-east Asia were critical of the Australian role and cynical about its motives. Canberra was the only country to have explicitly recognised Indonesia's annexation of East Timor, to have signed a treaty with President Suharto to exploit the resources in the Timor Sea, and to have signed a security agreement with Jakarta, in 1995. Yet when world opinion turned hostile to Suharto, Canberra promptly abandoned a former friend and quasi-ally to lead an international force into Indonesian territory.

New Zealand's equally professional military performance in East Timor drew much praise and no criticism. As a bit player in the world, New Zealand knows what life is like for countries on the margins of the world's political, military and economic centres of gravity.

As a small nation, it is less threatening to others than Australia, which portrays itself as the United States' deputy sheriff. Far too often, Australian foreign policy has been seen as simply an adjunct of the US State Department. Wellington can relate to the sensitivity of the world's smaller nations.

Experience in Oceania predisposes New Zealand to consensus. It is more attuned to the "Asian way" of eschewing confrontational politics.

Australians have forgotten their colonial history faster than Asians, for whom Australia's recent panic over the arrival of Middle Eastern boat people is an unhappy reminder of a discreditable past.

Neighbours are neither amused nor mindful at being lectured on universal human values by those who failed to practise them during European colonialism, and now urge them to cooperate in protecting Australia from the burden of unwanted victims of persecution.

At the same time, Australia rejects the right of the UN or any outsider to comment on the plight of Aborigines.

None of this helps build Australian influence.

Lacking economic, military and political clout, New Zealand is forced to rely on the occasional exemplar role, for example in the anti-nuclear crusade of the 1980s.

New Zealand is neither rich enough to bribe nor strong enough to bully others. But it is skilful enough to turn these apparent liabilities into assets, and principled enough to inspire.

Its criticisms of India's nuclear tests in 1998 were no less forceful than those of Canberra. Indian officials said in private that they understood and respected Wellington's concerns, which were consistent with the anti-nuclear policy espoused a decade earlier.

But Delhi was furious at Australia's perceived hypocrisy in having provided territory to Britain for nuclear testing in the past, and continuing to shelter under the American nuclear umbrella and hosting facilities that are integral components in the worldwide American nuclear infrastructure. At the same time, it would deny India the right to strike its own balance on the competing pulls of national security and international ideals.

After the tests, New Zealand was invited to join the New Agenda security coalition but Australia was not, even though much of the coalition's agenda was taken over from the 1996 Report of the Canberra Commission.

And even though Australia led the intervention in East Timor, it is New Zealand that is represented on the UN's high-level review of peacekeeping.

* Ramesh Thakur is vice-rector of the United Nations University in Tokyo. William Maley is an associate professor of politics at the University of New South Wales.