The most influential book I read this year

If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.
..for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

You would be forgiven for thinking that a book whose subtitle is A Study of Provincial Life had little to offer in terms of understanding international affairs. Forgiven, but nonetheless mistaken.

George Eliot’s Middlemarch should be read by everyone. It should particularly be read by those who want to understand the world within which people and their governments must act. It is far too easy, when thinking about the currents of international events – political upheavals, technological change, conflicts, corruption – for them to become abstractions. In some ways this makes sense.

An individual, sitting for example in Bligh Street in Sydney, can have little influence on whether or not China chooses to annex Taiwan, or the United States chooses to strike Venezuela. But this individual would be affected by both. A member of Australian society appears to have little influence on its defence policy, but is nonetheless affected by it, as they are by climate change or the changing landscape of international trade.

Whether or not these effects are consciously identified is almost irrelevant. As George Eliot puts it, if we were aware at all times of the immensity of the individual processes and experiences that make up our immediate lives we would be deafened by its noise. This is even more true of our international lives.

Every Australian, every person around the world, no matter how isolated or remote they may be from other people, has an international life simply by virtue of being. Just as in Middlemarch, where everyone from Sir James Chettam to Mr Brooke’s illiterate tenant farmers, are affected in one way or another by the Reform Act of 1832, so too are people affected by the policies their countries adopt internationally. We are sometimes too keen to think that social engineering can only occur at the level of domestic policy. This is wrong and unhelpful.

When we discuss the increasingly difficult tasks involved in promoting Australia’s security in an uncertain world, we often ignore a basic question: what is the Australia that we are protecting today, and what will that Australia be once its many new defence projects come to fruition?

This is not an argument against any of these plans, or against lifting defence spending to meet challenged faced. Far from it. It is to state, as Ken Booth does, that new capabilities produce new obligations. Any change Australia makes to how it acts internationally will change it domestically. To pretend otherwise is to willingly accept, as Eliot would say, a “Dead Hand” guiding all future action. She would also note that such a path does not end well.

Reading Middlemarch is an exercise in a kind of awareness of effects to the tenth order. Awareness not just of how changes in policy can affect structures, and not just about how those structures affect people’s actions, but about how they affect people’s lives. Foreign policy, in this sense, is not foreign at all.

To say that an international policy’s aim is to promote security is to make half an argument, no matter if its conclusion is correct. Security to do what? These are the discussions we ought to have to promote understanding of just how important the international system is to Australia. Abstractions such as the rules-based order, open trade, and international norms – critical though they are – have not done so.

This is because the world is made up of billions of people living faithfully their own hidden lives. It is these people who feel hardships or successes, and it is to them that any country, wishing to do more in the international sphere, must justify any action.

Middlemarch provides a rare insight into the fundamental unit of political life – the individual. It ought to be required reading for anyone interested in international affairs.