Indigenous international relations: old peoples and new pragmatism

ABSTRACT

This lightly edited transcript of the inaugural (2023) Coral Bell School Lecture on Indigenous Diplomacy sketches the foundations of Aboriginal Australian socio-political ordering and inter-nation relations while issuing a challenge to dominant International Relations (IR) scholarship and the settler-derived Australian political order. For many millennia the original peoples of the Australian continent engaged in a long-term process of evolutionary political design using landscape as a template for political ordering. The resulting relationalist system enables the interconnected autonomy of individuals and groups, facilitates inter-group diplomacy, and provides long-term stability and security while managing survivalist human tendencies. Aboriginal political ordering and diplomacy are largely unknown in IR scholarship per settler-colonial dominance and the discipline’s institutionalisation of survivalism. Aboriginal relational approaches nonetheless offer resources for expanding mainstream understandings of international relations and ameliorating dominant political practice, including by reconceptualising approaches to multipolarity and diplomacy. While there are no easy or immediate equivalences between Aboriginal inter-polity relations and contemporary political and international affairs, the civilisational culture of Australia’s original owners and runners of Country provides openings for supporting modern nation-building and advancing diplomatic relations in our region. Headings in the text indicate sections of the lecture delivered by Mary Graham and Morgan Brigg.

KEYWORDS:

• Relationism
• survivalism
• political design
• diplomacy
• political ordering
• political philosophy
• Aboriginal Australia

Mary Graham

My father was a big influence in my life, as was my mother. As a I grew up, as young person, I gradually became aware of how Europeans had behaved in Kombumerri and Yugambeh Country, and right across the continent now called Australia in the early phases of colonisation. This early awareness of how whitefellas do inter-nation relations made me quite wild and angry as a young person, as has occurred with a lot of us.

I recall speaking with my father about it, wanting to know why and how. I asked him ‘Why did they behave like that?’ ‘Why do they still behave like this still, today.’ He paused. He stopped for a minute. And then he gave a really considered reply that surprised me. He said, ‘They don’t know what they are doing.’ Now, he could have said anything that he liked, but that’s what he said. He could have said some really, really damning things, but that’s what he said. Growing up later, I only understood his meaning many years later, especially after reading Hannah Arendt, about understanding what fascism is, and its relation to colonialism.

We are slowly building greater knowledge and awareness of the doing that my father referred to – how you do things – of the historical relations between colonisers and First Nations people. But we’re only at the beginning of knowing what underpins the doing, of learning and having conversations about the foundations of how Europeans and Indigenous peoples everywhere structure political order and inter-nation relations.

How we the oldest living human communities on the planet, who invented diplomacy, I don’t doubt, constructed political order and relations among polities remain almost entirely unknown in international relations scholarship. We are here to speak to you about these matters. I speak from my own experience and my own Aboriginal mob, of course, Kombumerri and Yugambeh as well as Waka Waka, but I expect that what I say resonates for First Nations peoples everywhere.

We know that some Europeans imagine us in quite particular and strange ways, including as noble savages, as simple peace-loving peoples, living close to nature and so on. But Aboriginal people are not intrinsically peaceful. Human frailties – the wildcard of the ego, competitive or aggressive impulses – are part of human being and experience. Killings, raids, and feuds among Aboriginal people are documented in the ethnographic record and in some of the old Dreaming stories, as is the use of physical violence to process disputes and restore personal or clan dignity and autonomy. But human frailties and conflict are managed so that wars of conquest are unknown in Aboriginal political life. In fact, it’s not even in our languages. From what I know the word ‘conquest’ or ‘invasion’ doesn’t appear.

Much about Aboriginal political ordering and inter-nation relations arises from the fact that we are, in straightforward terms, an old people. We lived in relative isolation for tens of thousands of years and therefore had the opportunity to slowly develop ways of relating with the land and each other. We have, then, as Morgan says – I like this phrasing – engaged in a long-term experiment in human order-making. The spectacular timescales that are involved see Aboriginal political order emerge gradually through a process of evolutionary political design. The process here may be something like what Leanne Simpson calls ‘thinking in formation’ (Simpson 2017, 37, emphasis in original). This type of slow, collective, and emergent process is central to the way political order arose in this continent.

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Aboriginal people came to produce socio-political order over tens of thousands of years by using landscape as a template. Aboriginal ontogeny, the beginning of the ordering of the world, lies in the Dreaming, when the world was soft and totemic ancestor figures moved through the landscape, giving the world form, shaping rivers, mountain ranges, and particular sites. Through their behaviour, ancestors produced Country (with a capital C), or in Bill Stanner’s definition, land already deeply related with people (W.E.H. Stanner 1965, 14).

The Dreaming is not simply an ancient set of events. It is continually present as a poetic guide for living in and renewing the world with moral force and meaning (W. E. H. Stanner 1979; Miyarrka Media 2019, 213). Ancestor movements continue to resonate, providing the template for how individuals and nations connect to each other through networked relations.

In this system, Place is used like an ontological compass, a calibrating mechanism for regulating connections with the beings and relations that link to and radiate from where people take their grounding. If time is fleeting, then Place serves as a device for modulating experiences that can appear random in time.

Landscape and the relations that derive from it are the foundation for self-regulating governance, with each individual invited to recognise the ‘more-than-human … moral force’ (Miyarrka Media 2019, 213) of the Dreaming as the calibrating mechanism for growing and disciplining one’s self. How does one ‘measure up’ in one’s Country? How does one ‘scale’ one’s behaviour in given constellation of relations? How does one ‘weigh’ different courses of action in relation to Country, to others in and outside the group, to the ancestors, and to the overall register of the Dreaming? How does one become worthy of what is proper in a relationalist cosmos?

Just as individuals are connected to others – to ancestor figures, immediate and distant kin, and other living beings through kinship systems interleaved with ‘skin’ or subsection systems – so are nations. Nations are related with each other through songlines that connect sites, people, and groups both near and far away. These relational systems are not ineluctably local because they are connected through landscape as a template. As the geographer Doreen Massey explains, if ‘we really think … relationally, then … our connections … may go round the world’ (Massey 2005, 365).

Morgan Brigg

So, this system of using landscape as a template for socio-political ordering generates relational autonomy. This is an apparently paradoxical combination of autonomy and connection for individuals, and for nations. Individuals are highly autonomous, in contrast with mistaken assumptions that Aboriginal people are exclusively group oriented. Nations are similarly autonomous, with other nations described to some observers as places inhabited by ‘wild blackfellows’ (Mulvaney 1989, 2). However, networks of trade, exchange and intermarriage also link nations with many leading observers noting the remarkable ‘uniformity or patterning’ of Aboriginal social organisation across the continent (1989, 2), and the ‘almost complete identity … of certain … customs in [different] places’ (Howitt 1996, xiii). Songlines, the sacralised pathways of ancestors documented in story and ceremony, connect nation to nation. And these links of course continue in the present as we saw in Paul House’s wonderful Welcome tonight.

Over tens of thousands of years of human ordering this deeply relational way of living and organising political order generates what Mary terms a relationalist ethos. This characteristic spirit of Aboriginal peoples places humans amidst the world with humans of course but also with other-than-human beings while providing a flexible yet ordered universe for people – an order which is more laterally organised rather than hierarchical.

But relational autonomy and a relationalist ethos do not imply a peaceful Aboriginal arcadia imagined by some Europeans. Autonomy is demanding and sometimes tense. It requires reflective self-regulation because in Aboriginal cosmology and political ordering the autonomous self is a self-regulating being. It is not a law unto itself. Autonomy requires concerted effort in actively considering, weighing, and scaling relations with others and the world, as Mary has already signalled, while looking out for and protecting one’s autonomy. Relational autonomy requires guarding autonomy while being attuned to the relational constitution of the cosmos; it defends a form of autonomy which is always already related to and interdependent with others.

Relational autonomy of course helps to keep relations flowing when relations are good. It serves as a fulcrum for smooth relations, for recognising others – other people, and other diverse beings and entities including other nations – and for weighing and moderating the responsibilities that come with ordered entanglement.

But relational autonomy is perhaps most crucial when relations are tense or difficult. Indeed, a capacity for dealing with enmity and conflict is the true measure of how relational autonomy helps to sustain political order. It is a way of being that sits between, in the middle, preserving one’s dignity while staying in tension – even amidst conflict or a fight – and thus in relation with others. The relationalist ethos, which derives from what Mary terms autonomous regard, is a steadying disposition for relating in peace and also in conflict.

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Part of what is achieved by this form of political design is the provision of important public goods, with perhaps the most important of these being long-term stability and security. There is naturally a type of conservatism in operation here, and a commitment to the indivisibility of security in the basic meaning of being free from danger or threat as foundational for life. These broad goods of course speak to all humans, but the relationalist ethos generates a form of inter-polity relations that is of a very different type to the forms of internationalism which have emerged in comparatively very recent times out of European origins.

The relationalist ethos underpinning Indigenous inter-nation relations generates a type of expansive internationalism (Simpson 2017, 58, Chapter Four). This type of internationalism is a poetic and life affirming inter-species stability system that uses landscape as a template to develop a multifaceted and laterally organised system of obligations and dispositions. This system operates through a type of fractal relationalism that fits one thing with another from the very small to the cosmological, from the internal to the external, and from the prosaic to the ethereal to generate security, order and meaning. One of its key achievements is to recognise and accommodate human needs, both individual and group, for autonomy and connection, for connection with other individuals and nation-groups.

This algorithm for stability and security, as Mary terms it, works by countering survivalist inclinations through a relationalist ethos. Now, survivalist impulses and behaviours are part of being human and the human experience. The aggressive impulse, competition and an array of cognate human behaviours are part of who we are as human beings. Mix these with the wildcard of the ego, or an inability to meet key needs due to an internally or externally generated crisis, and survivalist desires apparently become primary.

Survivalism is also naturally heady, exhilarating, and intoxicating. It seems important because it is so highly charged and because it has the appearance and feel of getting to the heart of things – and indeed, it does get to the heart of things in the sense of the survival of one’s own life or of one’s group. In these moments survivalism does seem especially important, perhaps even foundational.

But, and this is a major ‘but’, there is a risk that humans grant survivalist responses more importance than they deserve in the cool light of a fuller consideration of the patterning of human behaviours and existence. Some peoples, those who hold dominant influence in today’s world, have gone so far as institutionalise survivalist scenarios and behaviours, developing a survivalist ethos in thinking about and operationalising political order. Tales of scarcity proliferate and come to be seen as a truth courtesy of mainstream economics, and self-maximising, acquisitive, competitive, and combative impulses are normalised and even celebrated.

Of course, in the short-term a survivalist ethos facilitates forms of human existence that overpower others. To exist in this mode is to survive others, human and non-human, and to trade in domination. To institutionalise survivalism may be a tempting short-term solution to the challenges of social life and being together, and indeed to the fundamental challenge of politics. But as Mary sometimes asks, does domination have a used by date?

The Aboriginal relationalist view is that stability and security, developed over tens of thousands of years of shared life on this continent – so definitely not short-term – requires finding ways to manage and counter rather than institutionalise the survivalist impulses of humans. The Aboriginal way of doing this is to use landscape as a template for developing cross-cutting relations, including by sacralising that which is ready to hand by turning land and sea into Country (capital C Country), thereby relating people with land and sea, with other beings, and with each other.

Mary Graham

Now we are here, amidst the knowledge and governance institutions of the coloniser in an era of great global political change and challenge. How Indigenous peoples construct political order and relations among polities is almost entirely unknown in international relations scholarship. We face survivalists who have wrought incredible violence on our peoples, in some cases bringing us to the brink of extinction. We have been victimised, but we are definitely not victims. We are the original owners and runners of Country, actually. Our long-term habit of running the country [Australia] has been rudely disrupted but has not gone away. We want that autonomy back so that we can redeploy our long-term experience in facing and managing survivalist phenomena as part of a collaborative experiment in human order-making.

We now stand at the beginning of bringing those insights to our current relations with whitefellas and to the larger global canvas. Indeed, the circumstances that we find ourselves in call for the rejuvenation and exercise of relational Aboriginal diplomacy with the coloniser and in the wider world.

The most obvious example of Australian Aboriginal diplomacy, giving expression to Aboriginal governing authority, is the seafaring and trading connection between First Nations peoples of northern Australia and peoples of what is present-day Eastern Indonesia. This connection, based around the trade of trepang (or sea cucumber), was ended by colonial government in 1906. Our knowledge of this connection is limited, but we do know (see Brigg 2011) that the positive trading relationship is likely to have been modulated by relational forms of selfhood coupled with personal status and socio-political order mediated through kinship moieties (in the Aboriginal case), and royal houses (in the Indonesian case) – rather than inflexible notions of sovereignty and statist politics informed by a survivalist ethos.

Morgan Brigg

The Indonesian connection shows that relationalism can enable and promote inclusive and grounded connections beyond the Australian continent. Indeed, this is not simply idiosyncrasy or historical anomaly. Relationalism is in fact foundational in a range of philosophical traditions and religions of the world and can also operate in the contemporary era amidst a world of nation-states. Indonesia’s first president, Sukarno, gave voice at the 1955 Bandung conference to a relationalist vision that registers the constraining effects of the contemporary international system. At Bandung, Sukarno directly acknowledged the fact of diversity and connection among peoples. He sought:

to impress on the world … that it is possible to live together, meet together, speak to each other, without losing one's individual identity; and yet to … develop a true consciousness of the interdependence of men and nations for their well-being and survival on earth. (Sukarno 1955)

Sukarno’s vision goes some way towards what Mary describes as multipolarity with Aboriginal characteristics (see Brigg, Graham, and Weber 2022), which is also one way of bringing old Aboriginal insights for managing inter-polity relations into exchange with International Relations scholarship and to bear upon current challenges. This is not multipolarity that conceptualises nations as independent of place and enacting sovereign power relations within a given territory. Nor does it see emergent order as arising solely out of the play of competitive power relations and utility maximisation.

Multipolarity with Aboriginal characteristics recognises the fact that nation-states arise through lateral relations and that they are integrally bound with their place and their history. Aboriginal inter-polity ordering arises not solely because of the play of contestation with other nations – though that is not entirely absent – but because peoples maintain cross-cutting responsibilities to others, human and non-human, even as they assert their autonomy.

These are not idealist propositions. The reality of this type of multipolarity is either upon us or urgently and insistently calling us. Amidst hyper-connected inter-polity relations of the twenty-first century, resonating connections across and among polities more accurately describe international relations than does an understanding of disarticulated contesting entities. And of course in relation to climate change, an Aboriginal approach to multipolarity suggests the grounding of politics in place and landscape as a foundational way for people to be engaged with and care for the well-being of the systems they inhabit and embody.

Stepping aside from the survivalist ethos, or attempting to manage the survivalist ethos by pursuing relational Indigenous diplomacy and multipolarity with Aboriginal characteristics involves, in the most basic sense, being worthy of what is proper in a relationalist cosmos. This suggests the value of respecting and being curious about other political philosophies – we heard that word, ‘curiosity’, from Minister Wong too. So being curious about other ways of relating and connecting. Difference is not to be feared but engaged. For instance, there are likely parallels and divergences – certainly divergences too – between Aboriginal understandings of the centrality of kinship relations and the Confucian view of the family as the model of wider social relations; between kinship obligation and Xiao, or filial piety. A commitment to relational autonomy makes it possible to do this work of engaging difference while being clear-eyed about one’s own values and autonomy, including amidst conflict if that be the case.

To suggest the value of relational autonomy and multipolarity with Aboriginal characteristics is not to argue for a relationalist approach against the modern nation-state regime or against International Relations scholarship. Nor are we calling for the representation of Indigenous people or making an ideological push for institutionalising an Aboriginal approach. That would reverse but not resolve the structure and form of domination. And moreover, tens of thousands of years of political design and stability generates a more expansive vision.

We are suggesting, though, that Australia’s foreign policy, albeit constrained by dominant political architecture, can gradually be recast to become commensurate with longstanding First Nations ways of approaching political order, including by asserting autonomy while responding to current regional and global circumstances. The First Nations ways of being and relating that could be drawn upon here are not esoteric, but Aboriginal relationalism is also demanding and may in some respects seem other-worldly to mainstream International Relations scholarship and indeed to mainstream Australia. First Nations people represent a challenge to the colonial mainstream, as they have always done.

One way of deploying a relationalist ethos to counter and manage survivalism in our contemporary international relations is to develop an Australian conceptualisation and practice of multipolarity by drawing upon Aboriginal approaches to political ordering and inter-polity relations that we have sketched here and begun to discuss elsewhere (e.g. Brigg, Graham, and Weber 2022). There are filaments of possibility emerging to support this work. Those filaments are strongly evident here today, including through discussions of First Nations Foreign Policy, and obviously in the remarkable announcement that we’ve heard today. First Nations Foreign Policy represents an opportunity to seriously rethink the conceptual underpinnings and practice of Australia’s foreign policy and diplomacy. Of course, there are also risks here, not least because there are in fact no easy or immediate equivalences between the Aboriginal inter-polity relations and contemporary international affairs. Developing First Nations Foreign Policy will require serious and long-term effort.

To underpin this and related efforts, we suggest a new type of pragmatism that draws on the insights of Old Peoples. We use the term pragmatism, in case it’s not obvious, not in the everyday sense to evoke the triumph of expediency over principle, but to refer to the philosophical tradition which suggests that thinking is a form of contingent and recursive doing that is in and of the world rather than apart from it. In this tradition, thinking should be used for forms of knowing directed towards guiding, predicting, planning, and acting. Pragmatist thinking does not claim to deliver singular or complete knowledge of the world. We have not, here tonight, set out to convince you that Aboriginal political thought describes the Truth of what politics or international relations is.

But as in many other areas, First Nations peoples were philosophical pragmatists before there was pragmatism. The processes of evolutionary political design that generates what Mary refers to as Aboriginal political thought is thinking for doing; thinking for generating socio-political order. We refer to ‘new pragmatism’ because to the extent that International Relations scholarship has begun to engage with pragmatism (e.g. see Bauer and Brighi 2009) it has tended to retain both the pretence of European and American origins and their dominant conceptual and institutional coordinates. Here we suggest the possibility of something else and something new: A form of pragmatism borne of this continent and our joint being here together. To inform this work we have sought to suggest to you that First Nations have different and valuable insights for organising being together and rethinking international relations. Such a ‘new pragmatism’ would be one developed from and drawing upon both our traditions, a joint venture oriented to our belonging and responsibilities in this continent and also, very crucially, in this region.

Mary Graham

So, in conclusion, in straightforward terms too, Aboriginal peoples are Old Peoples. We have had time to develop a relationalist political philosophy and approach to inter-polity relations through an extremely long-term process of political design. Aboriginal peoples are a society of great age. Australia, in contrast, is very young, and has asserted sovereignty through invasion and the rapacious cruelties of colonialism.

One result is that mainstream Australia exercises power on this continent, but Aboriginal people have authority. We are the legitimate holders of jurisdiction. Whitefellas are more able to bring force to bear to direct behaviour, but their legitimacy on this continent is questionable. Blackfellas can’t readily mobilise significant force, but the legitimacy of our presence and governance is not fundamentally in question. This difference can block us from working together; from being worthy of what is proper in terms of both our traditions and a relationalist cosmos. But it can also be the foundation for us – together – to build a fuller, modern, and confident Australia.

Because Australia is young it lacks a serious conceptual underpinning. There are ideas of what Australia is, but these are often derivative, as Australia’s approach to international relations often can be. To develop a proper sense of its place and history, and to pursue relational Aboriginal diplomacy or First Nations Foreign Policy, Australia must come to terms with not only its founding violence but also with the deep influence of survivalism in its European-derived systems of politics, law, governance, and international relations. This requires serious engagement with First Nations, not to incorporate Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people into Australian liberal democracy, but to engage us as political interlocuters to build a modern and confident Australia.

Morgan Brigg

From the 1990s the term ‘civilisation state’ has been sometimes deployed by countries seeking to stress their civilisational identity in contrast to Western and liberal twentieth century ‘nation-states’ (Acharya 2020). This discourse, which Mary and I are not endorsing, highlights that Australia has a deep lack of a deep civilisational tradition. Without such a tradition, Australia will always remain somewhat insecure and uncertain, governing an ungrounded albeit slowly evolving European outpost in an unfamiliar region.

We wonder, to twist this language a little, if Australia might be able to develop a ‘civilisational state’. First Nations people of this continent are a civilisational culture who have never had a need for a state. The state, arising with agriculture and as a way of centralising power, is substantially less than 10 000 years old. From an Aboriginal perspective – from the perspective of a society of great age – the state is an unruly teenager. Aboriginal people now face and are forced to engage with this unruly teenager that is demonstrably uncivilised. Can we develop a civilisational society to overcome the uncivilised behaviours of the state and to pursue a mutually beneficial process of nation building that draws on both our traditions and is deeply grounded and embedded in this continent and in this region? If agriculture and the state have brought us to this point, then, as Mary often asks, what does the next 10 000 years hold?

This continent offers much to its inhabitants, the region, and the world. First Nations people, as Mary says, became human in this place so the depth and meaning of their connection with the continent is unassailable. But the relationalist ethos means that First Nations people do not tend to seek to impose their meanings upon those, colonist and others, who have come across the seas. In repeated acts of what can only be described as truly remarkable generosity, First Nations people tend to look for ways to face the future together.

Mary suggests that the continent might be thought of as a type of shelter that makes land the source of the law for all of us who live here. The corollary is that all who live here are also responsible for a form of stewardship that manages not only the continent but also counters survivalism through relationalism. The aesthetic entailments of such a concept might just sustain us in a collaborative venture to draw upon civilisational First Nations cultures to develop a civilisational state and to develop and pursue an Australian form of multipolarity. Along the way, this concept may help us to recognise and engage First Nations approaches to political ordering and international relations, to see the value of landscape as an ontological compass, and to pursue autonomy while fulfilling all our responsibilities in a relationalist cosmos.

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Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mary Graham

Mary Graham is a Kombumerri person through her father’s heritage and affiliated with Wakka Wakka through her mother’s people. She has worked across government and universities, teaching Aboriginal history, politics, and comparative philosophy, and incorporating Aboriginal knowledges into curricula. Mary has held a variety of leadership roles, including as a member of the first Council for Aboriginal Reconciliation, on the ATSIC Regional Council for Southeast Queensland, and as a member of the ethics council of the National Congress for Australia’s First Peoples. She is widely recognised as a leading Aboriginal philosopher and is one of Australia’s foremost writers on Aboriginal Australian political philosophy.

Morgan Brigg

Morgan Brigg is an Associate Professor at the University of Queensland and long-term collaborator with Mary Graham. He specialises in conflict resolution, peacebuilding, political theory, and the politics of knowledge. His research facilitates exchange between Western and Indigenous political philosophies and socio-political orders as part of a wider exploration of the politics of cultural difference, governance, and selfhood. Morgan’s current work examines how ideas of relationalism can be utilised to re-theorise relations among diverse global peoples and traditions, de-colonise political science, and improve Indigenous-Settler relations.