Kevin Rudd, ex-PM...
by prudence on 24-Jun-2010
The ouster of the prime minister in the country where I'm currently travelling surely calls for comment. (OK, my travel in this particular country is accompanied by a lot of stuff, most of which is still sitting in boxes around me, but it's still travel...)
The way the deed was done raises concerns about party factions and power-brokers, and we'll have to wait and see, of course, as to whether we're out of the frying-pan and into the fire. But I'm not too disappointed to say goodbye to Rudd.
He was shunted for domestic reasons. But it is his faux pas in the area of international politics that have most perplexed me. Big goals, it seemed, were accompanied by little in the way of research and resources. He was a former diplomat, but relations with Japan and China soon hit the rapids, and his proposal for an "Asia-Pacific Community", announced without any consultation or even warning, seemed the ultimate in vaulting ambition unbacked by the hard yards of fact-finding and consensus-building.
As everyone knows, the Asian states have not refrained from going down an EU-type track simply because it never occurred to them. International institutions look very different in East Asia, for complex historical, social, and cultural reasons. ASEAN, the ASEAN Regional Forum, and APEC have all suffered from conflicts over speed and intrusiveness -- because the states involved have radically different interests to defend, and agreement is difficult to reach. Such problems are not to be solved by just announcing something new, and saying it will be comprehensive and different. Yes, Rudd later modified his ideas, and backtracked somewhat -- but by that time, the diplomatic damage had been done.
Former Japanese PM Hatoyama also had big ideas for an East Asian Community. If you were a conspiracy theorist, you might be thinking you were seeing a pattern here...
The way the deed was done raises concerns about party factions and power-brokers, and we'll have to wait and see, of course, as to whether we're out of the frying-pan and into the fire. But I'm not too disappointed to say goodbye to Rudd.
He was shunted for domestic reasons. But it is his faux pas in the area of international politics that have most perplexed me. Big goals, it seemed, were accompanied by little in the way of research and resources. He was a former diplomat, but relations with Japan and China soon hit the rapids, and his proposal for an "Asia-Pacific Community", announced without any consultation or even warning, seemed the ultimate in vaulting ambition unbacked by the hard yards of fact-finding and consensus-building.
As everyone knows, the Asian states have not refrained from going down an EU-type track simply because it never occurred to them. International institutions look very different in East Asia, for complex historical, social, and cultural reasons. ASEAN, the ASEAN Regional Forum, and APEC have all suffered from conflicts over speed and intrusiveness -- because the states involved have radically different interests to defend, and agreement is difficult to reach. Such problems are not to be solved by just announcing something new, and saying it will be comprehensive and different. Yes, Rudd later modified his ideas, and backtracked somewhat -- but by that time, the diplomatic damage had been done.
Former Japanese PM Hatoyama also had big ideas for an East Asian Community. If you were a conspiracy theorist, you might be thinking you were seeing a pattern here...