Poland of the Pacific

On the first of September 1939, Germany invaded Poland. Within weeks the Poles had capitulated. Soon after, Soviet troops invaded from the East and the Polish people began to endure what turned out to be fifty years of occupation by foreign forces. This was a familiar fate. Poland as a nation had been cobbled together by the victors of World War I at the Palace of Versailles. Barely twenty years before the Wehrmacht rolled up Polish resistance and sparked a second global conflict into which Australia was immediately drawn, Poland emerged with a slice of East Prussia giving it territorial access to the Baltic Sea. The secret agreement between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to divide Poland between them cancelled this clause of the Versailles Treaty. It also conjured memories of earlier momentous events in the history of this war-ravaged region. The three partitions of Poland in the latter part of the eighteenth century saw the Polish peoples’ changing allegiances to Imperial Russia, the Habsburg Empire and the Kingdom of Prussia. A century before that successive invasions by the Kingdom of Sweden marked Poland as Northern Europe’s cockpit.  To be a Pole was to be a member of a subjugated nation. It was, at base, to be a victim of geography, as well as history.

Modern Australia, like Poland, is also a victim of its history and geography. Since the arrival of Europeans, this previously invisible land and its original inhabitants, human and other, have been successively impacted by what has transpired in other parts of our planet. Initially, modern Australia served as a dumping ground for Britain’s down and outcast, before carving a niche in an expanding empire as a source of raw materials vital to British industrialisation and maritime supremacy. Australia’s isolation and strategic location dividing the Indian and Pacific Oceans made it an ideal bridgehead from which British interests in the Far East could be pursued and the regional inroads of rival French and Dutch interests repelled.

But isolation had its disadvantages. This became glaringly obvious just before Christmas 1941, as news of Japan’s strike against the American fleet in Hawaii reached our shores. As the Japanese army marched south-westward, island hopping towards us, and the imperial fleet massed to assault Port Moresby, barely three hundred miles from the tip of the mainland, a nervous country under a new government looked towards the United States. Two mighty sea battles halted Japan’s advance and a population of seven million breathed out. News of the bombings of Darwin in which more than two hundred Australians died was downplayed as the government began to ponder where to draw the last line of defence against an expected Japanese invasion from the north, an exigency that never arose.

But the shock to the national psyche was stark and permanent. The complacent belief of comfortable Australians that their antipodean paradise based on the social settlement of high wages, secure export markets for raw materials in Britain and the unchallengeable reach of the Royal Navy evaporated like early morning mist on the lower reaches of the Blue Mountains. Our national security now depended on America, an inconvenient truth that has held through the following eighty years. In the early decades of a new century twenty-five million Australians depend more than ever on American military power, especially on the Pacific fleet based in Pearl Harbour and San Diego, and its nuclear armed submarine force. But, as we speak, security experts are reporting that the Chinese navy has now overtaken America in total fleet size. The US is still overwhelmingly the most powerful military force in history – but China’s growing economic power is on track to overtake its western rival in the next decade, with major implications for the geopolitical shape of the world and Australia’s place in it. Although America remains an important trading partner and a significant source of foreign investment, our two-way trade with China has eclipsed our historic reliance on Western markets. Increasingly, we bob about uneasily in a stormy sea located between China and the United States. Our security as a sovereign nation continues to depend on maintaining strong ties with America as an ally in good standing. But our economic wellbeing increasingly depends on strengthening – or at least maintaining ties with China. This balancing act is akin to trying to walk down the middle of a busy highway with large trucks speeding in opposite directions.

The situation has become more complex and, for Australia, more problematic, over the last four years, as a Trump-led America has clashed with a Xi-led China over trade and other conflicting interests, views and values. The Australian government is finding the task of not offending either major player an almost impossible juggle. As Trump ramps up pressure and posturing in the South China Sea, Australia sails gingerly to the edge of the disputed zone and hopes their frigates won’t be noticed. As China harasses Australian journalists and businessmen and women in China, Australia’s leaders pretend not to notice. But temperatures are rising as America approached its most polarising presidential election since 1968. The Australian government has mounted a number of security-related actions that have angered the Chinese. A foreign interference act has followed earlier decisions to ban Chinese communications multinational Huawei from involvement in our 5-G mobile phone network, in part to appease American demands and in order to maintain a foot in the door of the five-eyes intelligence network of the Anglo-democracies. Foreign takeovers by Chinese firms have been blocked in the agricultural and minerals areas. Australia took the lead, possibly at Washington’s behest, to call for an international inquiry into the causes of the Covid-19 pandemic. China has retaliated by selectively halting its imports of Australian goods and freezing diplomatic relations. Claims and counterclaims are flying between Canberra and Beijing. A new low was reached when a middle-level Chinese foreign ministry official tweeted a fraudulent image of an Australian soldier threatening an Afghani child. It is not clear how a nation divided under a new US president will impact on the geopolitical realities of the region.

Geography is defining and confining our economic wellbeing, even as the Covid pandemic is concentrating attention at navel level. But it is history that makes our Polish-like position so uncomfortable at the beginning of the third decade of the new century. We are still shoe-horned into playing a below-stairs economic role in international affairs. Twentieth-century complacency pervades our present and threatens to pollute our future. The ruling elites, economic and cultural, aided by conservative politicians, continue to call the shots. Increasing economic inequality pervading the Western world has bitten hard in Australia. Policy focuses on shoring up our role as exporters of primary products, minerals, the natural environment and education, and importing almost everything else. The overwhelming share of Australia’s long period of economic growth has been appropriated by a minority of affluent robber barons, while the wage earners’ welfare state has atrophied and been replaced by the rebound of casualisation and underemployment.

Covid-19 has cruelly underscored the reality of Australia as three nations. The richest twenty percent of us own eighty percent of nation’s wealth, while the other eighty percent own the remaining twenty per cent, a seeming affirmation of Vilfredo Pareto’s contentious inequality ‘law’. The virus has cut a swathe through the lower half of the latter majority, while the affluent minority live behind high fences and on secure incomes. Included in this last group are the politicians and senior bureaucrats who decide policy for the rest of us. Itinerant and casual workers in the arts, universities and hospitality battle to stay alive, especially tenants who face eviction by small landlords in hock to the big banks. Four decades of growing economic inequality and increasing personal indebtedness have left a large majority of ordinary Australians on a cliff edge, financially and emotionally. But it is a third group – Indigenous Australians – where the tyranny of history makes its malign impact most severe. Displaced and discriminated against from the earliest days of white settlement, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders are most at risk in this Covid world. Third World health facilities and housing conditions, centuries of neglect and worse have placed these original Australians on the frontline, fodder for the virus, especially once the initial waves of this particular pandemic subside, and the attention of more fortunate citizens returns to rebuilding their lives. Even with the arrival of an effective vaccine, past experience suggests that it is unlikely that Indigenous peoples and other marginalised groups will find themselves at the front of the line for immunisation. The likelihood of effective, culturally sensitive and timely reach of any social policy to these citizens is anyone’s guess. History does not augur well.

On the international front, there is no apparent smooth path for Australia. We will always be called to follow America into any and every international military conflict, as we have from the Korean war onward. Our lopsided economy, based on the specialisations undergirding the wealth and power of dominant interests, will continue to confine our economic dependence on China. There will be calls by those interests to choose China over America, to lock ourselves into China’s recreation of an Asian ‘co-prosperity zone’. As a nation we may be pushed into choosing to jettison our security reliance on America, although Trump’s defeat looks like undercutting his neo-isolationist America-First policy.

Alternatively, Australia’s government may decide strategically to strengthen our American alliance and seek to transition our economy by reducing our reliance on exporting a narrow range of products to a narrow range of countries, while reducing our imports by building new domestic industries, much as we did in the twentieth century after both world wars. This would inevitably rouse the beast. Interests associated with mining, finance and agriculture, drawing on deep pockets and tight networks, would rally and march on Canberra, much as happened during the interminable carbon wars. The ‘big five’ lobby groups led by the Minerals Council of Australia and the Business Council of Australia wield enormous influence over our elected governments, backed by their cheerleaders in the Murdoch press. 

A third way would be to try to stand apart to some extent, playing a ‘non-aligned’ role in international affairs. We would then look more like the Sweden of the Pacific, rather than Poland. This, at a minimum, would demand a substantial investment in building an independent defence capacity, of a conventional cast, while establishing a close alliance with a nuclear weaponised country that is not America or China. In this context, India looms as a possible regional uber-ally important on both the security and economic fronts, while working with our South-east Asian neighbours, especially Indonesia and Japan, to build a bloc able to confront both China and the US. It would also be useful to reconnect with Europe and Britain post Brexit.

In some ways, this third option seems the most logical choice in the chaotic multipolar world of the early twenty-first century, a world of escalating inequality and insecurity, massive population mobility, incessant wars, nuclear brinkmanship, mass famine, severe water shortages and devastating climate change. But logic and the luxury of choice are denied to us as we sit uncomfortably in the Great Southern Ocean. Poland too tried gallantly to pursue an independent path, jammed between Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s Russia. And we know how that ended. The Poles were let down repeatedly by the western democracies and their representatives in the League of Nations. The logic of the situation, the sheer weight of geography and history, overtook them. 

Path dependence, the tendency of complex social systems to continue along the same tracks laid down in the past, biases Australia’s immediate future towards the first alternative, even greater reliance on America’s nuclear umbrella and the associated ratcheting up of tension with an increasingly expansionist China – unless an external shock of such magnitude causes the train to jump tracks. Covid-19 may prove to be the first of such shocks that disrupt the established logic of the current international system. By itself, this pandemic is unlikely to do the job, especially if an efficacious vaccine is rolled out globally in the next year. But Covid’s totally unexpected arrival on the scene and the devastating impacts wrought on the lives and livelihoods of most people on the planet leaves a general uneasiness; it can happen again. At any time. In the same way that Damocles’ sword of nuclear annihilation eventually moved the superpowers towards détente, the looming presence of the fourth horseman of the Apocalypse, pestilence, may move nations to greater cooperation in preventing or better controlling future pandemics. We can only hope that a similar force pushes the global us towards effective collective action on climate change.

To return the Polish analogy. Poland lost its independence during brutal dictatorships for almost half a century. After a brief flirtation with Western-style democracy, its leaders are turning back towards a new form of authoritarian governance, one better attuned to rebuilding relations with Russia under its oligarchic capitalist regime. History and geography are reasserting their grip on Polish life. The forces locking Australia into what’s left of the American empire are also far from dormant. Our geography and history are powerfully defining and confining our future. But history is not destiny. Winston Churchill once said – "History unfolds itself by strange and unpredictable paths. We have little control over the future and none at all over the past". The future is radically open, essentially unpredictable. Covid-19 has forcefully reminded us of this inconvenient truth of the human condition.

For some Australians, the chaotic nature of the present and unknowable shape of the future will encourage a mass resort to passive acceptance, a resolve to focus on the here and now, on me and mine, and let the future (and everyone else) look after itself. They will continue to comfort themselves with recounting the national triumphs of the past, to hanker for a return to the good old days, to punish fellow citizens and political representatives for failing to deliver those times; in short, to seek to recreate, if only in their dreams, the contours of the lucky country shorn of its originally intended ironic cast. To make Australia safe again.

But safe for whom? Not for those who lose jobs and small businesses gone bankrupt during and following Covid. Not for the cohorts of young people coming onto the job market over the next few years. Not for the workers over fifty who can no longer find employment in the types of jobs and for the levels of remuneration that they once held. Not for middle aged women who have divorced or suffered domestic violence during the pandemic. Not for retirees who have exhausted their savings in order to survive. Not for workers who have had to raid their superannuation savings and imperil their retirement down the track. And not for many Indigenous Australians who still face baked-in discrimination in the job market, and health, housing and justice systems.

What makes Australia’s predicament so wicked is the reality that whatever we do as a nation and however we do it, the consequences for us and ours depend on forces well beyond our control or, apparently, even influence. The new American government has a huge task in healing a country torn apart by a predecessor whose avowed aim was to put America first, regardless of the consequences for relations with other countries, including America’s traditional allies. American protection was always tendentious, based more on hope than firm commitment. As long as Australia offers up security assets to the alliance in the form of the Pine Gap base and an unhesitating willingness to follow America to war, the diplomatic fiction of the ANZUS Treaty can be politely genuflected to. But Trump’s idiosyncratic approach to the world, and his penchant for transactional politics has resonated deep isolationist sentiments in an America weary with the burden of being the world’s policeman. Too many young Americans continue to return to their homeland in body bags. Throughout the 1930s, the Polish people watched the rise of Nazism shrink and eventually obliterate the space for national existence. They paid a fearful price of being in the wrong place at the wrong time.

This is why geography is again asserting its grip. The historical creation – after the defeat of Imperial Japan – of the Pacific Ocean as an American Lake is fading in memory and fact. China is moving into the emerging vacuum. The future is opaque. Only the passing of time will tell us whether the Trump withdrawal heralds a permanent restructuring of our interdependent position in the broad region: time and the actions or inactions of our governments. The great danger lies in Australia’s historically embedded complacency, the idea that ‘she’ll be right’, that a return to normal after Covid means that there is no necessity to recognise and confront the new geopolitical realities and the threats to our sovereignty and wellbeing. Brave declarations defending our national sovereignty will not cut it. Poland’s Foreign Minister in the late 1930s, Jozéf Beck, thought he could finesse relations with Nazi Germany as a way of defending his country against Stalin. He was wrong. He should have put more effort into forging links with France and Britain. When that support came, it was too late.

Alternatively, the shock of 2020 and the tragic trajectory of the world since Nine-Eleven could galvanise a collective progressive project – including Australia as a stable middle power – to realise a new normal in which governments worked domestically to right the wrongs of pervasive inequality, discrimination  and insecurity, while working collaboratively to reform or replace the international architectures guaranteeing peaceful coexistence and victory against climate change. This would require a standard of political leadership and shared national purpose sadly absent in the Canberra bubble. Where are you Joe DiMaggio?