 Good afternoon. My name is Dr. Andrew Carr from the Strategic and Defence Study Centre at A&U. I'm joined here by Professor Rob Ascent, a Victoria University in Wellington. He's written an excellent new book, Headly Bull and the Accommodation of Power. Rob, thank you for joining us. Thanks for the opportunity, Andrew. So what led you to write about Headly Bull? Well, there's a simple answer to that question, which is that my doctoral supervisor, Professor Lawrence Friedman, one day suggested it to me as a follow-up to the book that I'd done on Thomas Schelling, who was a contemporary of Headly Bull and that is one of the reasons I did become interested in Headly Bull's work because I see them both as theorists of informal cooperation, cooperation without necessarily laws, treaties, formal government. But I guess a more complex answer to that question is that I thought that when I came to A&U as a master's student in 1988, Headly had been dead for three years at that stage at that time, his influence was very palpable and I don't think it's possible to go through A&U whether you're a strategic study student or an international relations student without having that sense. But I also felt as I came back to the A&U and worked in strategic studies that his work on strategic studies had perhaps not been given as much attention as it might have and I wanted to look at that. And as I went in through that, I also found that a single comprehensive book on Headly really hadn't been written, there'd been attempts to do and successful attempts to do collected essays and to look at particular aspects of his work, for example, on international society that Andrew Hurrell from Oxford was involved in. But I didn't feel that there was a single story of Headly and I think also because he's such an interesting person. The work itself is very good to read, I don't think it's dated that much and the early stuff which I wanted to look at is particularly useful to read. But I also felt that there was a person there so I wanted to weave together the story of Headly the person with Headly the scholar and hopefully communicate a sense of how those things related. And also I wanted to have a nice volume on the CV as most. So hopefully this is that. Yeah, definitely so. You start in telling that story with a bit of a focus of Headly's time at University of Sydney. How important was his study of philosophy and the training at that university to his later kind of worldview? Well, I think the influence of John Anderson on Headly Bull has already been recognised, for example, Rene Jeffery's work on that. And I think people are aware of this towering figure of Anderson who really perhaps subdued some of his students into taking or inspired at least a similar approach. The commitment to basically not accepting anything on the surface but digging deep, questioning a critical spirit. I think that had an influence on Headly very significantly. And even as he goes to Oxford and does his beef fill in those days that was a degree that you would do after your honours. That Headly still speaks and has let his back to his fiance, Mary Bull, who continues to live in Oxford. It's clear that he's trying to bring some of Anderson to those debates, the need to kind of go under the surface and question dogma. But as time goes on that wears off a little. I think in philosophy the commitment to thinking about ideas and thinking systematically about ideas and concepts that goes through in Headly as well. Although one thing that Adam Roberts, who knew Headly very well, he was a colleague of Headly's at Oxford. He said, I hope one of the conclusions of your book is not that it was all about philosophy. And I don't think it is all about philosophy. I think people can get a bit stuck on epistemology, ontology, all of that sort of thing. I think it was part of it. But I think in a sense, and I think it transcends it, but it is part of who Headly is. Similarly, his studies of history at Sydney are part of who he is. But his interest in political affairs, the political drivers of things, I think is something that sort of emerged as part of who he was and his own interests. One of the themes that resonates throughout the book is that Headly never seems to consider any issues fixed or completed that everything needed to be debated and argued. How important was that process of debate and his often kind of movement towards extreme positions at times to encourage clearer thinking? I think it's fundamental. I think one of the most interesting things about reading Headly Bull's work, particularly a broad range of his work, exposes the fact that he's having these constant internal debates with himself, that he never really fully finishes. And in a way he may have an obligation not to finish them, to continue to look for those opposing views and to try to find some way of dealing with that. So one of his early headmasters, before he went to Sydney, said he perhaps spends a little bit too much time on the dialectic. And so there's clearly that. He was a debater as a student and a formidable debater both in text and in person. And one of the things I came across in Oxford when I was doing the research on the Headly Bull papers, the main papers that are there in the Bodleian Library, on the back of some of his lecture notes that he had written, were some notes that he had taken old responses to mock exam papers that he had marked and then put his lecture notes on the other side. And the mock exam papers said things like, to a number of students, this is pretty good, but you fail to understand the other side of the argument. And he said that a number of times, and I think in a sense he thought that was the obligation of scholars. But debates were never finished. So the notion that he was, and he ended up somewhere himself in that middle ground, but that was not kind of a wet, soft, warm middle ground of not really having a view. It was the result of this contest. And I think so that meant that he sought out those extreme positions. He found them useful. So there were people that he read that he didn't necessarily agree with, but he felt that they were an intrinsic part of the debate. And if he continued to attack you, it was actually at times a sign of his respect for the importance of the position you held, even if he fundamentally disagreed with the position that you did held. He seemed a very lively figure throughout the text, and that's one of the joys of reading your book. Perhaps the central argument you seem to make is that in understanding Headley, we've looked too much at his latter work on international society and not enough on his strategic studies, work, nuclear arms control. Why might that kind of difference in interest have appeared, and what does that mean for our understanding of Headley's work? Yeah, I mean, I did start out, in a sense, writing a book about Headley Bull as the strategic studies person. As I did that, it became clear that that was much more closely connected to his other work than I had even anticipated. So for example, the work that, and I think one of the reasons that it's not given the attention it deserves is simply because it was his early work. It was the work that, and when Headley passed away, he was at the age of 52, a professor of, Montague Burton, a professor of international relations at Oxford. He was writing on issues about Third World issues, justice, human rights, international law at times, but he was also, at times, reflecting back on his work on arms control, and it's really his work on arms control that he made his name. And it was the arms control, the control of the nuclear arms race. The book that he wrote, the control of the arms race, I think is his best book. I may be in a minority on that, but I think it's a very, a particularly strong volume. And I think what you see in the early stuff on the control of the nuclear arms race as he went to the US, absorbed the thinking there and then came back and translated it and revised it for a British audience in that book. You see what I call the first example of his argument about accommodation. The book is called Hedley Bull and the Accommodation of Power. My basic thesis is that for, I think it's widely recognized that for Hedley Bull, he did a lot of work on order in international relations, and international society was the prism or the main flowering of that order. As I read the strategic studies stuff, it became, and the arms control stuff, and of course he also was an official for the British government, which a number of people don't pay much attention to in the late 60s before he came here to Canberra to take up his first chair in international relations. And in that, when he's writing about the Russians and the Americans and the quest for order there, he's really saying that the Americans and the Russians need to accommodate each other, but particularly the America is the existing power and the Soviet Union is the rising power, they need to accommodate one another through informal understandings so that they make room for one another, they have a series of, they reflect the common interests they have in the avoidance of disaster by these understandings. Not formal treaties which can reflect the big agreement, but the big agreements happen underneath. The big agreements are these informal understandings. And as Thomas Schilling would say, the tacit agreements, which is one of the reasons that Bull was attracted to Schilling, although when he was writing in the Foreign Office, Bull actually used that formulation and one of the officials wrote back and said, it's a nice paper but we had no idea what he meant by tacit agreements. So sometimes the scholar and the official, but it's interesting, so I think that's strategic study stuff to me is a big part of the explanation of Bull's approach to international society. In fact, I don't think you can understand his work on international society without appreciating the importance of that nuclear stuff. Similarly, the expansion of the nuclear club, the accommodation of China and France and Britain by Russia and America, that expansion was essential to order. So Bull recognized that you couldn't turn the clock back on that sort of proliferation but you tried to stop it to perhaps non-great powers. But that in a sense predates to some extent the work on the expansion of the international society, which was one of the last main books he wrote. So I see a real connection, so I think as I say to understand Hedley Bull as a scholar, even if you see him as a scholar of international relations theory, which of course he was, you need to also understand him as someone who is a close student of strategic studies because strategic studies and particularly the nuclear arms race provided him with some of his main models and most important models and some ways most complete models of the accommodation of power, of the role of the debate and in ideas in providing a way to accommodate the competition for material power that was occurring. How does some of these ideas about the accommodation of power and his early study on arms control and very hard military issues lead to the man who's then spent a lot of his time looking at human rights, justice, international law? How can we connect those two streams of his research? It's a good question and I think the fact that he did some of that later writing means that I think people do perhaps see Bull as quite at a emancipatory or progressive sort of thinker, but when you look at his stuff on arms control, he can come across as quite biting and conservative. He's that fantastic mix that I think it's so interesting to read. I think what really happened was that one of the keys that happened there actually was the time he spent here in Australia. When he came to ANU, he was called Wilson's man in one Canberra Times article because he was working for the Wilson Government and he was also the early press release for his position here. It's something like he's got a particular interest in strategic studies and will work with the Strategic and Defense Study Centre. He was of course appointed to the Department of International Relations and then I think it might have been Bruce Miller added the point and a bit of international relations theory as well. But when he came to Australia in particular, he was concerned that Australia in dealing with the changing distribution of power in Asia, the almost complete decline of Britain's strategic power in Asia, what he saw as a phenomenal drop-off of American commitment after Vietnam which actually he exaggerated to some degree. The rise of China, the role of Japan but also the importance of the Third World. He felt Australia in particular was exposed more than almost any other western country to the Third World in its own neighbourhood. One of the ways of dealing with that, of accommodating the Third World was actually to pay more attention to issues of justice, to issues of human rights. Not necessarily because these were intrinsically right things. Bull was a major opponent of natural law. But because these represented the basis of world opinion in which the Third World countries had acquired quite a bit of influence in the United Nations and other places, that it was absolutely important for Australia to have some way of accommodating its neighbourhood and that was part of it. So a commitment to justice became a necessary part of a commitment to order. But there are times when those two things start to, so Bull's work on justice versus order in international relations is a sign of that. And there were times when he pushed it so that he thought, well maybe justice now is more important than order. But I'm never sure he quite got there you know, if he did it was very very temporarily. The grumpy Headley usually trumps the kind of the progressive Headley. He felt that at a certain point that there needed to be this broader world society where cosmopolitan standards applied and he wanted, what he wanted to do was to have some modern version of the common culture and civilisation that had bound the European world order together in earlier centuries to apply to the new world order. And that required some sort of set of standards and values and what he thought would provide that was actually some cosmopolitan ideas including about modernity. And so he saw that as a recipe for but part of that was dealing with the inequities between the first and the third world. So it was also driven by his experience in India. He went to India in the late 60s and then he also went there in the 70s on sabbatical. And I think his sense of injustice, the way that India was sort of being excluded including on nuclear issues that India because he went there soon after India had exploded, its peaceful nuclear explosion in 1974 and he said, you know, it just seems to be quite wrong for there to be an assumption that India should be left out of this system, that India actually should be accommodated. And so there's a justice element to that as well. Yeah, reading through the book I was often almost quite sad that we've been robbed of his insights into the current order. So much of it seems so contemporary and so relevant and yeah, just a very kind of striking from such a distance, he could foresee some of these issues. Yeah, I mean I never met Heddy Ball but I've talked in the writing of the book to a lot of people who of course knew him, were his students were his contemporaries as scholars and I also I had many conversations with Mary Ball whose support for this work has been immensely valuable. And you talk to people like James Ball and Bob O'Neill and others and you just get the sense of this incredibly vibrant person that you really do want to meet. And I guess I've tried to meet the Heddy as much as I can in the writings that he left both published and unpublished. But I think particularly in terms of when you look at this time when he was here, he was here in Australia when the distribution of power was shifting and where at one point he, in a number of places actually talks about the need for Australia to rely less on its alliance with the US as its singular source of great power security and more to rely upon a quadrilateral equilibrium between America and Russia and China and Japan. And he was in a sense a little bit premature in that partly because as he realised before too long America had not dropped away quite so much after Vietnam. They had not really risen economically in the way that Japan was in Heddy's terms Japan could not really be a great power because to be a great power in the modern world you needed to have nuclear weapons. That was pretty much it and was one of the reasons that Britain still held on to some of the vestiges of its great power status. But that notion of the accommodation of Australia relying upon that quadrilateral equilibrium and he had different views on the concert of powers but he did at times advocate a concert of power in Asia. It's extraordinarily worthwhile reading for people who are thinking about order in Asia today and that's I think why people like Hugh White enjoyed reading Heddy's stuff from that period but that stuff's 1968, 1969, 1971, it's over four decades old. So I think I'm struck by that as well. That's not to say that everything sort of finished up the date and there are some attitudes that I think in Heddy's view of the world that do date him and there's a certain at one point for example his quest for debate was such that there was an Oxford Union debate about the virtues of colonialism that this house opposes colonialism and of course Heddy took the alternative physician and said actually if it wasn't for colonialism Oxford would be the sleepy little place and it's colonialism that made Oxford the place it is today. Now I would love to have been sitting there hearing watching the responses to that but I'm sure by then people knew that that was the sort of thing that Heddy might do. There's a great line in the book where you say that he loves to throw bricks at orthodox thinking and it seems not just intellectually but also as a kind of personality type, a bit of an outsider. Do you have a favourite Heddy story from all your time looking at his material? Well that was a question I used to ask the people I was interviewing, I used to say is there a favourite Heddy story that you have and I mean there's quite a range and so I hope you don't mind me recording some of them. One is just Sir Michael Howard's delight. I had a fantastic chance to interview Sir Michael Howard, he's got this fantastic library in his house and we sat there and I could just see him as he was talking about, he said it was great to see it in the control of the arms race and Heddy was precocious and he was a terror early on and he would just take on these folks from pretty much older than himself and Michael Howard said it was a delight to see him slaughter the sacred cows and serve up the cuts, that was a great delight. Bob O'Neill said that after the India, his trip to India in 74, Heddy returned to Canberra with a great determination to bring Indian scholars to ANU to show how important India was and one of these scholars gave a seminar not far from where we're sitting here today, I think in the Coombs building, about Nehru and at the end of it apparently said, well thank you very much for that, until hearing you, I'd forgotten what a pompous windbag Nehru really was. That's another one. I think there are a lot of and perhaps more moving Heddy stories but one of the funnier ones I think is where he's at in Oxford, because before he gets the Montague-Burton chair, he goes to All Souls for a visiting professorship and he writes a poem, a funny poem that he sends back to his research assistant here at ANU and it says he was having a, basically he was seeing some of the pretty girls on the high street, he was reminded of he was making these comparisons with Canberra and he's got nothing on Martin Indyk and Des Ball in high-heeled shoes and he sends this poem back and a little later his research assistant Elaine Mitchell who I interviewed in London, I found this stuff in the Bodleium where, or somewhere else, I'm not sure where, she'd written to a retailer in London in Savile Row, basically saying obviously she'd written a letter saying, have you got a this? There's a lovely delightful letter back saying, I'm sorry, we don't have quite that, but we do have one with a naked lady on that, would that be okay? There's a kind of a, but the interesting thing about that whole comparison between Britain and Australia, was it just reflected this tug that Hedley felt as an Australian, but as a British Australian, because he gave up his Australian citizenship to become a British official and one of his very last pieces of writing, which I think Bruce Miller said he wrote part of this when he was sick in his hospital bed, he said, and this was a contribution to a book on Australian-British relations, and Hedley said it's fantastic that Australia doesn't have the inferiority complex that it once had, and he went to Oxford in the early fifties, and he recalls to Mary in his letters saying how rude the British were to the Australians and how the other Australians, like Bob Hawke and others, you know, kind of gathered together with some of the other Antipodeans, and what a bunch of bastards the British could be. He changed his views, I think, on that and his views on Oxford, but in that last one of those last pieces, he says so he says, it's fantastic that Australia doesn't have this inferiority complex about Britain that it once does, but he says, but of course, and this is the typical I think Hedley, but of course Australia does have quite a bit to be inferior about and I think that kind of, you know, that sort of, you know, that to me is the delightful example of the type of logic that there's more to that, so even in the humour there's a pretty sharp point and I think that makes it great to have had the chance to read so much of his work. You quoted a lecture that he gave in the 1980s, and in some ways it shows not just that, that tuggy feel at the same time seems to feel between his academic role and the official role or that public intellectual role and if I can just quote a few of these because they just had me in stitches. So he described some of the international relations theorists as area specialists who say who were the I was their types the saints and men of peace, the wistful fanciers the defence experts who study the questions thrown up by government and study means not ends political economists who have a habit of avoiding the fundamental mental tools and my favourite which was the behaviouralist who he says they are wrong but that is not the point. How did Hedley view the role of academics in society and view those academics around him? It's a really important question that last point of, for example, behaviouralist, what he's really saying is that actually they are, they're not they're wrong but they're necessary. In other words the aura of quantification the false precision of that style of thinking doesn't detract from the fact that the American social scientific thinkers gave rigor to the analysis of international relations that was lacking in a British tradition which he sometimes felt was floppy and lazy and rather insular and wood-looking. The Americans had the social scientists. He also said that American soldiers, officers often there are many of them who suffer from monumental boneheadedness but there are among them people who have mastered the social sciences and then you have the British soldiers, British officers who sit around and drinking Madeira in the morning at their staff colleges so he's constantly what he's trying to do is to say that I fundamentally disagree with some of the conclusions and some of the methodology but there needs to be that freshness that that American perspective brings and that was one way of and in that same talk he says, yes there's a British school which now scholars now call the English School of International Relations but he says it's actually repetitive he identifies himself with it to some degree but it's not as fresh it's not as it needs to be opened up and so when he was in the British Committee on the Theory of International Politics, a famous group of scholars who would get together Martin White and others Herbert Butterfield some of these great scholars Hedley had Tom Schelling come and address them he gave talks on Karl Deutsch and Morton Kaplan the types of work, social scientific work that a lot of British scholars just not proper and I think he was constantly trying to change that so the job of scholars was to really to bring things into the debate and the argument to really unsettle received opinion to question everything to find in statements of universal position who would claim that they're in favour of complete disarmament to show that often times those claims were made to make sure that grandiose proposal failed and therefore you could actually blame the other person so it was to kind of get rid of dogma to get rid of he was not in favour of religious views of the world to get rid of myth and that sort of thing to in a sense replace it with sort of more scientific approach even though he was he was resistant to that approach at times too but I think also scholars also he had this interesting inconsistency tension between where the scholars what scholars relationship to officials ought to be he was an official himself at one point he had his own accommodation with power you know he he wrote when he was here at ANU he wrote memos that would be then on Australia's strategic policy and what it should do and why it should maintain certain weapons systems and why Indonesia was a worry and these sorts of things so he engaged the policy community but he also told people don't get too close academics or academics policy people and politicians in particular different places don't confuse one with another but similarly he told people you know don't do media stuff that's not the job of academics but if you look back into his earlier career he did a lot of media stuff a lot of BBC so he he was tempted by the things that he felt the need to resist and so I think always scholars should not be comfortable people for anybody to be around including themselves so they should actually be pushing each other pushing each other very hard and you see that in his early comments on his students work on the PhD work of Des Ball and John Vincent John Vincent's wife Angela said when John Vincent first got his first notes back from Hedley on his first draft where Hedley's first comment was this is awful and then he says it is awful because and the usual Hedley 1, 2, 3 type of thing he made lists a lot he would start articles with lists saying there's five ways of defining this 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 he even wrote official papers like that where he would define something it was quite incredible but that he's constantly trying to push and he would therefore be I think one of the things that Michael Howard said in his reference my favourite reference of Hedley's by someone else for his job here at ANU Michael Howard says Hedley Ball does not suffer falls gladly and never come across anybody whose definition of fall is so catholic and so I think Hedley's trying to but that could also give him the reputation for actually being rather arrogant too and I should imagine at times particularly in his young when he was young he would have been at times I think probably very hard to have around given these such diverse streams of intellectual engagement very prolific in his writings the various areas he researched is it that attitude of trying to unsettle orthodox thinking that should be how we remember Hedley? I think that's an important ingredient as part of the method but I think there's an aim there and that aim is about order the need for patterns of purposeful behaviour where you have a group of actors who restrain themselves out of common interest and who develop common values, common institutions to house those things and so I think and I think one of the things that sometimes worries me about views of international politics is there tends to be a very strong emphasis on formal structure probably the best recent example of this is the debate about Asia's security architecture organisations do not provide the answer Hedley once wrote that he didn't want to write about the United Nations because it didn't really interest him and his mentor at LSE Martin White said that felt that institutions were things like as Hedley himself wrote balance of power even war diplomacy those were the true institutions they were the practices it's that informal approach to order which I think for me is the thing that I think is most valuable but it's also in some ways it's the way you handle change but by doing so in a way that tries to find patterns so there is a conservatism there as well and I think therefore I sometimes am slightly perplexed by the way that Hedley seems to be connected at times by contemporary scholars to views that I'm not sure are completely consistent with at least a good deal of the things that he wrote it seems to me that people like to take their favourite bit of Hedley and extrapolate it whereas actually if the one thing that reading of all the material showed me is that as soon as you think you've got Hedley he escapes at the other end I think if there were 99 people in a room arguing A he would always argue B that seemed to be the way he dealt with it to the point where he actually at times would if you put them together would be virtually contradicting himself but that was the nature of the debate certainly I think a very big call for us all to engage with this amazing international relations scholar so the book is Hedley Bull and the Accommodation of Power by Professor Rob Bason Rob, thank you for joining us. Thank you very much Thank you Andrew