First published 2003 by Ashgate Publishing
Reissued 2018 by Routledge
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Introduction
This book is about Australia's search for a sustaining and sustainable identity and place in the world, and particularly in the region of the world where it is located. Few peoples have had so much difficulty in defining themselves in regional terms or in reconciling themselves to their location as have the Australians. These uncertainties became more acute after the Second World War when the European, American and Japanese colonies in the region achieved independence. But before that there was always a sense of unease at the core of Australians nationhood, a clinging to Britain as the more fundamental identity and a sense of being a small lodgement in a part of the world which was alien to the British identity.
Necessarily the book draws on Australia's history in its examination of Australia's attempt to establish its regional identity. But its purpose is not primarily historical or narrative. Nor does it seek to be comprehensive. Thus it does not examine closely Australia's bilateral relations with the United States, China or Japan, whereas it does pay closer attention to relations with Indonesia, the country which has been at the heart of the attempt to engage closely with East Asia. There is little attention to functional aspects of foreign policy such as arms control, resources issues, conflict resolution and the many other matters which take up most of the time of foreign ministries and diplomats abroad. The purpose is rather to examine some of the main strands which Australia has sought to weave into its national goals and foreign policy, to ask whether those strands make a whole cloth, and, concluding that so far they do not, to consider Australia's options in a new century.
In the second half of the twentieth century Australia opened itself to non-British migration and became a much less provincial society. It gradually rid itself of the White Australia policy which had been so affronting to the inhabitants of the region in which Australia is located. It engaged in a deliberate, persistent and, until 1996, increasingly intensive attempt to forge links of all kinds with the countries of East Asia, especially in trade after it became clear that Britain was moving into the European community whose protectionist wall would virtually bring to an end large parts of Australia's export trade and decimate some Australian industries. But Australians retained some images or myths concerning themselves which seem to have been resistant to reality. For example there has been little or no questioning of the popular myth that Australians have a matchless record of battlefield heroism and that where they have not been successful (as at Gallipoli) that was due to the incompetence of others. In fact the Australian record in World War Two is rather patchy and it would be a healthy corrective to complacency if it were acknowledged that Asian soldiers (Japanese) inflicted major reverses on Australians in Malaya, in New Guinea and elsewhere.
On the other hand one former strong Australian preoccupation seems to have diminished to perhaps an excessive extent. Australians seem almost to have ceased to have a concerned awareness about the small population base of the country in relation to the massive and growing populations nearby. It seems extraordinarily unrealistic that there should be a significant lobby in Australia which favours a reduction in the population when the issue for much of the rest of the world will probably be whether a mere twenty million people are entitled to enjoy prosperous sole occupancy of a continent nearly as large as the United States in a world moving towards an expected peak population of nine billion. Migration of course will not solve population pressures elsewhere, but that is not really relevant to the likely politics of the issue.
Australia's search for a sustainable place in its regional context is also of wider relevance. Australia can be seen as an example of a country which is located in a different cultural or civilizational setting from that to which it inherently belongs and which faces stresses as a result. It has been argued (by Samuel Huntington) that Australia is in this regard a torn country which has sought to cross over a civilizational fault line, leaving the Western civilization from which it sprang for a regional East Asian hybrid. That was at the time strongly contested by Australian policy makers. But Australia's situation could well become a test case of whether a nation that is labelled different - and manifestly is different - can be accepted by and live on good collegiate terms with its Asian neighbours in a region which has begun to create its own collective image. It relates to one of the great issues of our time: whether differences of race, religion and income can at last be subsumed in shared commitments to universal values and opportunities for improvement of the human condition.
Australians have still not resolved basic issues which stand in the way of arriving at a clear sense of their identity. They have deferred or tried to ignore other issues which nevertheless overshadowed their thinking about their place in the world and, to the extent they think at all about this fundamental question, still overshadow their thinking about the nation's future. The most recent attempt to provide Australians with a new vision, or a greatly intensified version of a vision with a pedigree going back some decades at least, ran out of steam in the last three or four years of the twentieth century. That vision was of an Australia which would succeed in taking an important and fully accepted place in a region of democratizing and liberalizing states stretching from China in the north to Indonesia in the south. Australian governments never committed unequivocally to that vision. They equivocated between commitment to the Asia Pacific (that is the Pacific Basin including the United States) and commitment to East Asia. Even so it became clear in 1996 that many Australians were uncomfortable with the speed at which the Keating government had sought to implement the policy of strengthening engagement with East Asia.
