There have been two types of commentary upon ‘Helpen Fren’, the decision to send troops and police into the Solomon Islands in an attempt to restore order. The first commentary has reflected unease about the decision, especially in its dismissal of national sovereignty, but also because the new policy has a resonance with past colonial policy. However, as far as the broad meaning of the intervention is concerned, this unease has largely translated into silence. It is as though the deep dilemmas of the Solomon Islands’ situation, especially its social disintegration, silence any sense of foreboding about where the policy may lead.
The second type of commentary has been eulogistic. The central motif of this approach has been John Howard the revolutionary leader, swimming against the tide of anarchy and casting aside impediments from the past — sovereignty here and the United Nations there. In this view, Howard is laying the basis for a future that includes a more aggressive and militaristic policy for Australia towards the Melanesian cultures of the Pacific. As the actual moment of intervention arrived, the tone became celebratory. Australia has come of age! It is taking hold of the world positively and forthrightly. There will be no nonsense from now on.
There are several backdrops behind the new policy. The first of these is significant in the short term and clearly informs it. This is the doctrine of rogue states (and failed states) that supports the US led war on terror. It goes roughly like this: the main danger associated with global terrorism is the rogue state that, by definition, supports terrorist organisations. A prior stage of the rogue state is the failed state. Failed states are those that have dysfunctional institutions. Tending towards disintegration into anarchistic structures, they allow easy entry by terrorists who can then employ the state resources for terror. Failed states are not necessarily rogue states, but they have all the pre-conditions to make that transition possible.
With these concerns in mind, the war on terror, amongst other things, attacks the notion of sovereignty (and by implication the United Nations, which is founded on the building block of sovereign nations) with the strategy known as the pre-emptive strike. Usually it is the dangers of weapons of mass destruction that justify this putting aside of national sovereignty. However we now know, after Iraq, that the truth of the strategy of pre-emptive strikes is pragmatic rather than principled. It is closer to ‘anything goes’, thumbing its nose at the modern order based on the nation state.
The intervention in the Solomons derives from this doctrine. This is not to say that it is identical. That New Zealand has joined the intervention force when it would have nothing to do with the Coalition of the Willing in Iraq is one difference of significance. That other friendly Pacific nations have also joined the force is another. And that the Solomon’s Assembly invited the force in to restore order is yet another. These facts have softened the impact of the intervention. Nevertheless some offers of help are also offers you can’t refuse. The fears about failed states creating the conditions for global terrorists and the ‘need’ to intervene despite sovereignty represent key features of this revolutionary policy. After all, to intervene and constitute order, as opposed to providing strategies to assist the government to achieve its own order, is a vast difference, whatever the intention. The message, as the more reactionary commentators have gleefully conveyed, is this: get your act in order or you will be next!
The second backdrop could not be said to inform policy at all, yet it is longer term in its impact and ultimately far more significant. It also happens to be the backdrop to the war on terror. Like many states around the world — and more locally in the Pacific — the Solomon Islands have been struggling to find stability for years. The Solomons have their particular histories that shape the way they order their world. But the massive forces that now threaten their existence overwhelm these histories. These constitute, in the first instance, the unfolding global culture and economy that entices them away from settled practices and ways of producing and living, into another world that works on different principles altogether. This emerging world is one of multiple lifestyle choice and consumption-envy on the one hand and high-tech ways of producing on the other.
Because high-tech production is capital intensive on a scale that is beyond all but the most developed economies (requiring specialised knowledge and highly developed institutions of higher education), the whole resource balance between small and large states has shifted. It is especially difficult for small states to break into such a world and find a niche. Sometimes, as in the case of Nauru, they do so desperately — by engaging in collaborative efforts with shadowy organisations seeking to launder money. Terrorist organisations in disguise, amongst others, have exploited this vulnerability. In this world, where the only practical form of globalisation is dominated by the neo-liberal market, the prospect of becoming a failed state (not unlike becoming a socially redundant individual) always beckons. The detention camp, that version of the Pacific solution, could easily become a model of the way to go if these states prove unable to develop and as such prove to be ‘recalcitrant’.
Our politicians take this backdrop for granted as the only viable reality. No challenge to the superficiality of the concept of failed states has credibility in their eyes. So, suitably locked in, what sort of world is opening up here? Where will such interventions lead?
Even Alexander Downer knows that only short term solutions will arise out of military adventures. The difference is that he thinks that once order is restored and the myriad contending groups are disarmed, the economy and culture will reassert itself. The failed state will be no more! But we do not have to look any further than Afghanistan or Iraq to see the folly of military intervention without a workable plan for civil redevelopment. What is this to be in the Solomons or in the next example of a failed state? This intervention will certainly fail because order will be unrelated to an internal way of life that engenders hope. Alexander Downer, like Rumsfeld in Iraq, expects the military to be out within weeks. Formally speaking this may turn out to be the case, but without a viable plan the military will be needed again soon enough.
And while it is hardly the main issue here, we must also ask how Australia, the main party to the intervention, is going to be able to support its own vastly expanded role in this new Pacific solution. With an army already stretched beyond its capacity it will not be long before our revolutionary leader will have to contemplate conscription to allow his New Pacific solution to proceed. As the Philippines now moves towards the category of failed state, it is significant that authorities have had to deny that Australian troops may be needed there. Policy based on impulse and bravado without a proper recognition of the scale of the problem will quickly descend into farce.
But the major point lies elsewhere. What no one is able to face here is that rather than having a failed state on our hands it is actually the neo-liberal market that has failed. It ushers in a form of development that is stunning and seductive in certain respects but, centred as it is upon technologically enhanced associations between people, it cannot offer a viable way of life. Failed states are really composed of institutions and people seduced by the culture of the neo-liberal market. That market is hostile towards all community-based association and economies that do not fit its structure. The destruction of community structures that have been the basis of our humanity for many millennia is the name of the game.
The implications of these global forces are all too apparent right now in the Solomons and to a lesser degree in the Philippines. But the same disabling forces that decimate the Solomons and other Pacific cultures are also at work in our own culture. They are perfectly visible if we care to look. We, too, desperately need new strategies for redevelopment. Unless the neo-liberal market can be radically contained by counter social institutions that defend locality and social identity — institutions that combine the economic with the cultural located in place — there is no future for any of us, let alone the Solomon Islands.
That ‘Genghis’ Rumsfeld and ‘Freedom’ Bush can only think of developing Iraq by introducing neo-liberal institutions points to the heart of the problem. If they push ahead, and this is undoubtedly their intention, Iraq will come to hate ‘freedom’ over the coming decades; and the world will become one huge military camp. Both Iraq and the Solomons deserve better. Hopefully Australians too will come to see it this way.
John Hinkson is an Arena Publications editor.
