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From Ideas to Action: "Political Will" in International Decisionmaking
Address by Professor Gareth Evans, Co-Chair of the International Commissions on Nuclear Non-Proliferation & Disarmament and Intervention & State Sovereignty, President Emeritus of the International Crisis Group, and former Foreign Minister of Australia, Brisbane, 31 March 2010
For any of us engaged in public policy issues, domestic or international, as practitioners, academics, media commentators or simply interested observers, one of the most oft-repeated lamentations of them all - one that we’ve all heard more times than we can remember, and have probably uttered ourselves almost as often – is that there is a “lack of political will” to do something that is crying out to be done, and which seems on the face of it to be not impossible to do, even though it might be difficult, complex and take time. Whether, to take just a few familiar international examples, it is delivering sustainable peace between Israelis and Palestinians, or Greek and Turkish Cypriots, or Indians and Pakistanis over Kashmir; or intervening robustly to stop mass atrocity crimes in Rwanda or Darfur; or simply getting on with the business of ridding the world of the most destructive, indiscriminately inhumane and militarily unuseable weapons ever invented, over and again we are inclined to say, by way of explanation or excuse, that the problem is simply that the necessary political will is just not there.
I have been familiar with that lamentation, and wailed it often enough myself, through a lifetime of trying to influence public policy. First as a young civil society activist trying to get local, state and national politicians engaged and energized on issues like indigenous land rights, law reform and apartheid. Then as a politician and cabinet minister myself, trying to mobilize my peers within the national government to see issues the way I did and give me the budgetary resources to tackle them. Then also as foreign minister for a number of years, trying to energize my peers in the international community to initiate and follow through collective responses to various problems we faced, whether it was delivering peace in Cambodia, building new regional economic and security architecture, or meeting the challenge of chemical and other weapons of mass destruction. Then again as a rather older civil society activist with the International Crisis Group, in the somewhat unusual position of playing the traditional NGO bottom-up advocacy role but being able as well to work the high-level peer group access track. And on multiple occasions over the last twenty years, sitting on international panels and commissions with various of the global great and good trying to not only identify but implement global solutions to problems ranging from conflict and mass atrocity crime prevention to nuclear disarmament. Whether one is inside or outside the decision-making tent, or somewhere in between, the frustrations – I can testify better than most – are just as acute. The biggest constituency, in any policymaking community, is inertia: doing nothing is almost always easier than doing something, and reasons for caution or delay can always be found.
But what I have learned very clearly from four decades of trying to make things happen, nationally and internationally, is that there is no point in simply wailing. The absence of political will is the occasion not for lamentation, but mobilization. As the Wobbly labour agitator Joe Hill put it before he faced a Utah firing squad on a trumped up murder conviction in 1915 - in words which at least some of my fellow agitators and film buffs from the 60s might recognize – ‘Don’t mourn, organize!’. To explain a failure as the result of lack of political will is simply to restate the problem, not provide an explanation or any kind of strategy for change. The need to generate the necessary will to do anything hard, or expensive, or politically sensitive, or seen for better or worse as not directly relevant to the national interest, is just a fact of public policy life. Political will is capable of creation, and subject to change: its presence or absence is not a given. It is not a missing ingredient, waiting in each case to be found if we only had the key to the right cupboard or lifted the right stone. It has to be painfully and laboriously constructed, case by case, context by context.
So what do we have to do to contruct that political will, to move from ideas to action, when it comes to international decisionmaking? What if anything have I learned from all the different experiences I have had – in the world of government, activist NGOs, and policy commissions – about how to get things done? Mainly, I think, that the task has to be accomplished at four levels - ensuring first, that there is knowledge of the issue by everyone that matters; second, that there is concern to do something about getting it right, third, that there is a clearly identified process available in terms of both strategic solution and the institutional and organizational means to advance it; and fourth, that there is the necessary leadership, without which - even if every other box is ticked, inertia will inevitably prevail.
In the time remaining I want to illustrate these themes by referring particularly to my experiences in the two areas in which I have co-chaired international commissions – on Intervention and State Sovereignty, and Nuclear Non-Proliferation and Disarmament – and from which I think more general lessons can be drawn as well as from anywhere else. The discouraging news, let me say at the outset, is that putting in place all the elements I have mentioned is very hard work indeed: it needs good arguments, sustained energy and creativity in advancing them and, especially in the case of leadership, a measure of luck. But the better news is that at least the arguments and strategies are there, and that there are plenty of both governmental and civil society actors around – not least in Australia itself – with the competence, commitment and organizational capacity to advance them.
Perhaps it is worth stating one rather obvious general caveat before we plunge further into detail. What is in issue here is not just political will as such, but the right kind of political will. Getting what one asks for in life can be a risky business, and here as elsewhere it is important to stay clear-headed. There was no shortage of will involved in the coalition invasion of Iraq in 2003, or some other alarums and excursions of both historical and recent memory. The problem of political will can on occasion be not so much its absence as its over-exuberant presence.
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The first requirement for getting something done about an international problem is knowledge - ensuring that all the relevant players know that it exists. In my experience this is not usually as inhibiting a factor as it is sometimes claimed to be, but nonetheless there are a number of ways we can improve the chances that this will not be a credible excuse for inaction.
In the case of mass atrocity crimes – genocide, ethnic cleansing, major war crimes and crimes against humanity - there is a long history of political leaders trying to explain their inaction in the face of catastrophes such as Rwanda saying after the event “we didn’t know what was happening” or, more subtly, “we didn’t fully appreciate how serious the problem was.” But over and again, when these claims are properly evaluated they turn out to be quite false. There was always someone within the system in question who had a clear sense of the nature and scale of the catastrophe that was unfolding, and in most of the worst cases there was at least some kind of memorandum conveying that information finding its way to the most senior decision-making level. That nothing, or not enough, then happened was a function of there going missing one or more of the other elements that make up political will – insufficient concern, insufficient belief that external action would make a difference, poor institutional process in shaping deliverable options and acting on them, or simply failed leadership.
One of the clearest examples remains the United States reaction to Rwanda in 1994. When President Clinton visited Kigali in 1998 he said, in the course of a moving speech to the crowd at the airport, “All over the world there were people like me sitting in offices, day after day, who did not fully appreciate the depth and the speed with which you were being engulfed in this unimaginable terror.” But a subsequent report in 2004 by the National Security Archive, an independent nongovernmental research institute based in Washington D.C., which went to court to obtain the material, disclosed that the CIA's national intelligence daily, a secret briefing distributed directly to the president, vice-president and hundreds of senior officials, included at the relevant time almost daily reports on Rwanda, with considerable detail about what was happening.
More can be done to ensure that the “no knowledge” excuse within governments and intergovernmental organizations is in future totally untenable. An important step would be for them to establish focal points within their systems staffed by officials whose full-time day-job it is to keep track of the relevant information, evaluate it, ensure that it gets on to the relevant desks, identify response options and follow them through. Those who have never been involved in decisionmaking at the highest levels can scarcely begin to imagine how many problems and issues are simultaneously clamoring for attention at any given time, how hard it is to get anyone to focus on anything but the most immediate and urgent, and how tempting it is to deny, diminish or defer a problem in the hope that it will disappear entirely or be seen as someone else’s. The “focal point” approach - still barely in its infancy in most of the governments and organizations with which I am familiar - will make succumbing to that temptation much less easy.
The media, non-governmental organizations and other civil society actors, including research institutes both inside and outside universities (like UQ’s Asia-Pacific Centre for the Responsibility to Protect), all have crucial information-generating and disseminating roles in this area. For NGOs and research institutes, the challenge need is to supplement the kind of sharply focused reports and briefings and alert bulletins being regularly distributed by organizations like the International Crisis Group and Human Rights Watch with more broadly based, coordinated and sustained public advocacy on such a scale and of such an intensity that it simply cannot be ignored by senior decisionmakers.
In the case of the media, there is no question but that good reporting, well-argued opinion pieces and in particular real-time transmission of images of suffering do generate both domestic and international pressure to act. The “CNN effect” can be almost irresistible. But with few exceptions there is less to this than first meets the eye. Part of the problem is that many atrocity crimes occur in security environments too hair-raising to expect news crews to stick around, or in areas where they have been refused access by the authorities, and conscience-shocking and action-motivating images just do not get into circulation. And the other part of the problem is that in the current “infotainment” media universe, most international stories – to the extent they get covered at all – are treated briefly, selectively and without sustained follow up.
It may be that the traditional role of the mainstream media as the basic information source for policymakers, as well as publics at large, is now being superseded, particularly for generations younger than mine, by all the new forms of electronic communication, broadcast, narrowcast and direct personal messaging. But the lesson is that if civil society organizations and activists do want to ensure that decisionmakers continue to have no excuses when it comes to knowledge of mass atrocity crime situations, they will have to continue to work hard to communicate the relevant information by every means that modern technology has to offer.
In the case of nuclear issues, when it comes to militaries, defence ministries, weapons research laboratories and think tanks and research institutes generally there is still a substantial pool of specialist technical knowledge on nuclear weapons systems and arms control strategies. But it is not clear that enough of these specialists and scholars are finding it possible to make the transition from Cold War thinking to that required in today’s world, where – and I will come back how this issue should be now argued – nuclear weapons are far less the solution than the problem. Nor is it clear that the pool is being refreshed at a sufficient rate by new entrants with both the skills and mindset to cope with the huge challenges involved in winding back the whole existing system.
The mainstream media, it has to be said, remains largely uninterested, except in the context of the immediate challenges of the kind posed by North Korea and Iran. And among publics at large, although the younger generation is far more information-technology and social-networking savvy than its elders, it is not clear that nuclear issues are gaining much traction by comparison with other public policy concerns like climate change, environmental degradation generally, resource security, global disease, and financial and employment security. Clearly there is a need, which hopefully will be partly met by reports like that of my Commission, for advocates of change to do a better job of explaining to the media and publics directly why the elimination of nuclear weapons is a good idea. But public engagement is a long-haul enterprise, requiring rather more than a few well-placed op-eds, and public lectures and seminars in major capitals, and even well-managed NGO campaigns.
There needs to be, in my and my Commission’s strong view, a renewed emphasis on formal education and training, in schools and universities. High school curricula should find a place for explaining the history of the nuclear arms race, the huge risks that the world faces if it continues in any form, and the sheer enormity of the horrors that are involved in any actual use of nuclear weapons. And an associated need is for more specialized courses on nuclear-related issues – from the scientific and technical to the strategic policy and legal – in universities and diplomatic-training and related institutions. The kind of programs that are on offer from UQ’s School of Political Science and International Studies and elsewhere are a good start, but they need to be much more widespread.
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Knowing about an actual or emerging international problem is one thing, but having enough concern to want to take some action in response is something else, particularly if it may involve the expenditure of national blood or treasure. What can be done to encourage in decisionmakers in national governments, and relevant intergovernmental organizations, the sense that they do in fact have a responsibility to take appropriate action which it is within their physical and financial capacity to deliver? Part of the answer is to frame the overall issue in a way that it cannot be readily dismissed; another is to articulate specific arguments for action in a way that cannot be readily ignored.
In the case of mass atrocity crimes, the framing question continues to be crucial. So long as the issue was cast in terms of “the right to humanitarian intervention”, with the policy choices being either to send in the Marines or do nothing, there was never a prospect of any kind of global consensus being reached about how to respond to even the most catastrophic genocidal situations, like Cambodia, Rwanda and Bosnia: the global North focused on coercive military intervention but the South, for understandable enough reasons, was deeply resistant to any opening up of the traditional sovereign immunity from any external intervention in internal matters. The great achievement of the Canadian-government commission I co-chaired in 2001, whose basic recommendations were unanimously endorsed by the UN at head of government level in 2005, was to re-conceptualise the whole issue in terms not of the “right to intervene” but the “responsibility to protect”, placing the primary responsibility on sovereign states to protect their own people from mass atrocity crimes, a secondary responsibility on others to help them to do so, and only then – if a state proved unable or unwilling to act appropriately emphasising the responsibility of the wider international community to engage in any way necessary to halt or avert catastrophe.
If the responsibility to protect is to be more than just a general principle still honoured more in the breach than the observance, it is crucial to ensure that in particular cases as they arise the right arguments are directed to the right people – by individuals or organizations who themselves have credibility with the decisionmakers in question. From my own experience, both in government and beating on the doors of government, one has to recognise that there are certain individuals, at or near the top of the decisionmaking food chains whose attitudes are going to be decisive, and good arguments have to be found that will both appeal to them and be useful to them in explaining and defending their decisions. There are four different kinds of argument that matter in this respect in most contexts, not just the immediate one of mass atrocity crimes: moral, national interest, financial, and political.