Now the puff and fluff of the Olympics are fading, just as the hype of the Paralympics gets underway, we might assess again what we actually know and care about the world. After all, sport is supposed to be one reliable way to appreciate other cultures. Playing games ranks up there with tourist excursions, immersion in an atlas, romantic escapades, reading novels in translation, language classes or even, back in the day, pen pals.
None of those techniques is infallible. Romance might offer an intense, but truncated, vocabulary. Tourist spots may be too cluttered and clogged to enjoy. Atlases have been supplanted by more prosaic and pedantic guidance from a GPS. Spectators might rejoice in unprecedented gold medal victories in Paris by Dominica, Botswana and Guatemala without being able to find those places on a map.
Not one of those approaches succeeds, to borrow an old SBS slogan, in “bringing the world back home”.
Foreign policy professionals often over-estimate what they actually know about other countries.
Happily, Australians have another marker to hand, each year in the form of the Lowy Institute Poll, now in its 20th edition. Evaluating who your compatriots like or trust, whom they fear, what they think matters, all that introspection might prove salutary elsewhere. Australia is an island, the largest in the world, but has never been able to act like one. By contrast, some other countries kid themselves that they can still afford insularity, parochialism or ignorance.
How many French citizens have visited Germany out of simple curiosity, noting the relative weight of a neighbour with 20% more people and a GDP half as big again? How many Indians and Pakistanis have been able to acquire first-hand knowledge of the other’s land? What might it take for Americans to notice Canada, a country with which they share an 8,891-kilometre border? If we use Lowy’s feelings thermometer, those pairs of nations have sometimes slid into the frigid category. On Lowy’s measure of trust, some of the ratings would be fairly dismal as well.
As for people in glass houses, how many Australians have an up-to-date understanding of Indonesia beyond Bali’s beaches and bars? Indonesia ranked at only 16% in the Lowy Poll as Australia’s best friend in Asia.
Blind spots by governments are less forgivable. Despite shared history and culture, the powers that be in Moscow seem to have entirely misjudged Kyiv and the people of Ukraine. For many in Washington, Iran remains utterly unknown, possibly unknowable, much as China did before Richard Nixon’s visit. Seen from the other side, a senior official in Tehran once spent ages deriding each of the adjoining countries in a crowded region, without any evident awareness of how much those neighbours mistrusted and disliked Iran. As for London, Brexit seems to have obliged the British to unlearn and re-learn a lot they thought they knew about how the world worked.
On the other hand, foreign policy professionals often over-estimate what they actually know about other countries. That way clientitis beckons. Experts in government and think tanks alike have been known to argue that, if only we understood another country better, we would sympathise with them more easily and agree with them more often. An equally damaging delusion is the notion that sovereign nations can be bundled together by an illusory common purpose, whether into a European “home”, a Pacific “family”, an African “community” or a New Silk Road.
To make an obvious but still obviously important point, the best foreign policy experts know, respect, love and trust their own country first and most of all. For example, New Zealand’s servants overseas are rusted-on patriots, a remarkable force multiplier for a small, distant country. Folk from other lands might need to cherish something more intimate and more personal than the nation state, perhaps a Heimat for Germans, a province for Canadians, a pays for the French or Tasmania for its legions of expatriates. In New Zealand, though, home is indeed where the heart is.
