Taiwan has been the focus of international media after former US president Donald Trump said the nation should pay the US for defense. Former Trump administration officials such as Elbridge Colby and Robert O’Brien believe Taiwan should boost defense spending to demonstrate its willingness to resist China. However, a narrow focus on spending distracts from more urgent issues the nation needs to address, which is making civil society more resilient in the face of external hostilities.
President William Lai (賴清德) last month announced the establishment of the Whole-of-Society Defense Resilience Committee to boost civil society’s resilience, including building up food and energy stockpiles, increasing labor resources and strengthening communication infrastructure.
Civil society resilience refers to the “ability to operate without disruption during crises, with citizens continuing to carry out their lives and perform their duties without panic,” Yen Wei-ting (顏維婷), an assistant professor of government at Pennsylvania’s Franklin & Marshall College, said in a commentary for the Brookings Institution.
At present, Taiwan is inhibited from building up its civil society resilience as there is no consensus on the nature of the security threat. Some politicians have even criticized the committee as a Democratic Progressive Party power grab, or denigrated civil society defense initiatives as a waste of time.
Finland, which has a more than 1,340km border with Russia, can offer lessons for Taiwan. Having fought multiple bloody wars against Russia, there is a strong consensus on the nature of the threat and the need for a robust national defense where everyone plays their part, which is beyond party politics.
As Finnish defense analyst Minna Alander said: “Finland has a pragmatic, largely nonideological approach to security and defense policy: Both nonalignment and the decision to join NATO were based on practical considerations.”
In her commentary on what lessons Taiwan can draw about civil society resilience from its COVID-19 pandemic response, Yen said that the nation’s pivotal early success in tackling COVID-19 was because of the nation’s swift “securitization” of the virus, including the use of warlike language, which helped to foster a “unified framework that helped citizens understand the situation and their roles, thereby reducing societal panic.”
The key to Taiwan’s pandemic success was that the government fostered a “whole-of-nation response” that unified the country to defeat a national security threat. However, Taiwan’s pandemic response effectiveness declined when the virus became “politicized,” Yen said.
This “not only amplified and exploited existing vulnerabilities, but also created openings for massive disinformation campaigns, which seriously undermined national unity and crippled effective governance,” she said.
A society’s willingness to defend itself is not only about readiness to fight, but also involves mental preparedness and resilience in the event that war should break out, she said. Simply pouring money into the national defense budget is not enough. Taiwan needs to conceptualize defense in wider terms and build a whole-of-society approach based on a consensus on the nature of the national security crisis.
It would be easier for Taiwanese to unite when there is a national consensus that an invasion by China constitutes a national security crisis. However, if political parties do not agree on the security threat, even this can become “a point of political contention, preventing societal unity,” as Yen said.
In seeking to make the nation more resilient, instead of thinking about “getting defense spending to 5 percent of GDP,” Taiwan should be thinking about “getting to Finland” — a comprehensive whole-of-society security approach based on the collective understanding of the threats the nation faces.
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