Finding Common Ground: Negotiating Across Cultures on Peace and Security Issues
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12354 |
| Date | 01 September 2016 |
| Author | Gareth Evans |
| Published date | 01 September 2016 |
Finding Common Ground: Negotiating Across
Cultures on Peace and Security Issues
Gareth Evans
The Australian National University
Text of the Seventh Annual King Hussein Memorial Lecture
at Durham University, 4 May 2016.
I feel very privileged to have been invited by Durham
University to deliver this Seventh Annual Lecture honouring
the memory of His late Majesty King Hussein of Jordan. Few
statesmen have been as adept at navigating across cultural
divides as King Hussein, a globally respected figure, univer-
sally acknowledged as the most able and committed of the
region’s peacemakers, who spent decades trying to find
common ground with Israel, supporting the West without
becoming captive to it, and resisting extremism and sectari-
anism within and between his Arab neighbours.
Australia and Australians are probably not most people’s
first choice as cross-cultural navigators. But we have been
learning fast in recent decades, as it has become obvious
that our Asian, or Indo-Pacific, geography is going to be far
more relevant to our future than our European history. As I
said in one of my first speeches after I became Foreign Min-
ister in 1988: ‘This region is where we must find a place and
a role if we are to develop our full potential as a nation. This
is where we live, and must learn the business of normal
neighbourhood civility’.
We have had some hard lessons to learn in that respect.
One that has become a textbook example of cross-cultural
miscommunication occurred in 1993, when my then Prime
Minister Paul Keating became unhappy, not unreasonably,
about Malaysian Prime Minister Mahatir’s deep reluctance,
essentially on Asia-is-for-Asians grounds, to participate in a
summit meeting of the Australia-initiated Asia Pacific Eco-
nomic Cooperation (APEC) forum, and as was Keating’s
wont, he made his views known publicly, saying ‘I couldn’t
care less, frankly, whether he comes or not. APEC is bigger
than all of us –Australia, the US, and Malaysia, and Dr
Mahatir and any other recalcitrant’.
This was met with full-throttle rage from Mahatir, with
demands for a public apology, and threats of a complete
breakdown in bilateral relations until one was forthcoming.
Keating’s initial response was to see this eruption as com-
pletely out of proportion, and not to back down: ‘recalci-
trant’may not exactly be a complimentary expression, but
nor in English is it an especially abusive one, carrying with it
as it does some flavour of grudging admiration for the wil-
fulness being demonstrated.
But we then became aware that, in translation into Malay-
sian, absolutely none of that moderating flavour is carried
over: the roughly equivalent expressions, kurang ajar and
keras kepala, are completely denigratory, implying not only
wilfulness, but lack of education and breeding, and beha-
viour calculated to bring discredit on one’s family and
community. Neighbourhood civility from us, we had to
acknowledge, this was not. And so (after wrestling, I remem-
ber, for half a night with the PM to get our language right)
we found a form of words which incorporated the word ‘re-
gret’–if not entirely that sentiment –in a way which ended
up satisfying honour all round.
1
Cross-cultural miscommunication, when things get lost in
translation, can sometimes have its pleasures as well as its
tensions. I remember our former Prime Minister, Bob Hawke,
whose expression often became idiomatic when he wanted
to make a strong point, saying in a speech to a business
audience in Tokyo on Australian industrial relations reform:
‘We’re just not interested in playing silly buggers on this
issue’. This was greeted not just with ordinary common-and-
garden incomprehension, but full Monty head-shaking and
eye-rolling. It later transpired why. It seems that the inter-
preter –acting on the principle when in doubt, keep it
literal –had rendered the PM’s sally as ‘We’re just not inter-
ested in acting as laughing homosexuals’.
Where cross-cultural misunderstanding and miscommuni-
cation is no laughing matter is when it bears on issues of
peace and security, of life or death. How behaviour is per-
ceived and understood, how messages between governments
are conveyed and interpreted, and how negotiations are con-
ducted –whether they be aimed at preventing or ending or
avoiding the recurrence of some particular deadly conflict, or
crafting general new rules of the road on peace and security
issues –are all very much affected by cultural difference.
The most familiar way of articulating and characterizing
cultural difference in the academic literature –and certainly
the approach that resonates most with me, with all the
practical experience I have had as a foreign minister, inter-
national NGO head, and chair or member of a number of
high-level international commissions –is to distinguish
between ‘low context’societies at one end of a spectrum,
and ‘high context’societies at the other.
2
The core of the
difference (and what explains this terminology) is that in
low-context society communications, the substance is in the
message itself: what you hear, or read, is essentially what
you get; whereas in high-context societies, most of the sub-
stantive meaning is implied and indirect, and has to be
found in the surrounding context, or setting, within which
the communication is made.
©2016 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. Global Policy (2016) 7:3 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12354
Global Policy Volume 7 . Issue 3 . September 2016
458
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