The Australian School of International Relations

J. Cotton

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781137308054
• eBook ISBN: 9781137308061
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book offers the first comprehensive account of the emergence of the IR discipline in Australia. Initially influenced by British ideas, the first generation of Australian international relations practitioners demonstrated in their work a strong awareness of the unique local conditions to which their theorizing should respond.

CHAPTER 1

The Institutional Setting

The members of the Australian school considered in this book were, variously, scholars, commentators, and teachers; most of them also discharged policy roles for the Australian government or for international organizations. This chapter is devoted to sketching the institutions in which they pursued their activities. With the foreign policy functions of the government discharged by a rudimentary bureaucratic machinery, and universities and similar institutions slow to offer formal courses of instruction, other institutions often provided the context for the analysis and debate of foreign policy (Walter and Moore 2010: 161–2). By far, the most important of these was the Australian Institute of International Affairs (AIIA), to use the title adopted officially from 1933, although some of its component groups used it before that time. AIIA membership often overlapped with that of the League of Nations Union (LNU), which was more than an organization merely devoted to advocacy. A number of other organizations came into existence from the 1920s as instruments of policy advocacy, but few had a lasting impact on deeper questions of analysis. The teaching of IR, despite the novelty of the subject, did begin in the 1920s and contributed to the emergence of a community of scholars and commentators. The modest government structures devoted to international questions—augmented when the Department of External Affairs was reorganized in 1935—will also be considered. Finally, in discussing these structures, some notice will be taken of the significant role of foreign models and foreign funding. As well as providing important sources of support in an era where few resources, official or unofficial, were devoted to international affairs, these linkages also served to reinforce the transnational consciousness of the early IR community.

The AIIA

Prior to 1920, the Australian division of the Round Table, founded in 1910 as a result of a trip to Australia by the apostle of the movement, Lionel Curtis, was the most active group devoted to debate on Australia’s place in the world (Foster 1986). Into the 1920s, the Round Table remained a group dedicated to closer Empire–Commonwealth ties, and its journal carried important contributions from Australians including on international affairs. Eggleston and Harrison Moore were prominent in the early Round Table, and later Duncan Hall, Hancock, and Crocker all made contributions. However, the original project of the Round Table had been the establishment in some form of an imperial union, but the events of the World War and particularly the assertion of dominion initiative by Canadian and South African leaders rendered its original rationale obsolete. In practice, Round Table proceedings were progressively supplanted by the activities of the other institutions that will now be considered; many members of the Round Table also became members of these institutions, bringing with them their belief in the historical mission of the Empire–Commonwealth.

Founded in 1932, the Australian Institute of Political Science (AIPS) devoted some of its attention to external policy but its main focus was domestic. Into the 1950s, the most comprehensive and certainly the most influential of all the groups devoted to debate on international questions was the AIIA. The subject of a comprehensive historical study by John Legge (1999), the following sketches the earlier role of the AIIA and especially its contribution to IR scholarship (Cotton 2008; Edwards 1983: 93–7; King 1982; Millar 1977).

F. W. Eggleston, J. G. Latham, and Robert Garran were all members of the Australian delegation at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. Latham (later External Affairs minister and first Australian minister to Japan) had been present at the Hotel Majestic, the headquarters of the British Empire delegation, when the idea of an institute devoted to the study of international affairs was mooted at a dinner on May 30, 1919, attended by some members of the British Empire and American parties in Paris. Eggleston, Latham, and Garran became foundation members of the (then) British Institute of International Affairs; on their return to Australia, they were members of the Institute (“Royal” from 1926) groups that began meeting regularly in Sydney (from 1924) and Melbourne (from 1925), and later in Brisbane, Canberra, and Perth. After endorsement from the Royal Institute of International Affairs (RIIA) in London, a federal body emerged in 1933, when the current name of the Institute was officially adopted.

Active within all of these groups were the leading IR commentators of the day, many of whom also played key policy roles. All of the figures considered in this book were associated with the AIIA or its predecessors; other prominent members included Persia Campbell, A. H. Charteris, Stephen Roberts, and P. D. Phillips. These individuals laid the foundations for a distinctive Australian contribution to international thought (Cotton 2009).

Given the fact that the AIIA was constituted from entities formed when members of the British Institute returned to Australia from Britain, it might reasonably be inferred that it was an organization in which British influence was predominant. It is certainly the case that AIIA members paid a capitation fee to the RIIA (of £1.1.0), and one of the privileges of membership was access to Royal Institute publications, which were among the most comprehensive and contemporary publications in the field in their day (at least on the topics they chose to analyse). When traveling to London as they sometimes did, Institute members could avail themselves of the conveniences of the RIIA headquarters at Chatham House, and the AIIA archives contain a number of letters advising London that a member would shortly call and would be grateful for hospitality and introductions.

This impression is supported by the reception given to another institute with parallel, if not rival, objectives, the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), which was first constituted in Honolulu in 1925 (Holland 1995; Hooper 1994; Thomas 1974: 3–15). Following its formation, there were attempts in Sydney and then in Melbourne to form local chapters. The prime mover in Sydney was H. Duncan Hall, then lecturing in IR at the Sydney Workers’ Educational Association (WEA), whose ideas are a focus of a chapter of this book. The IPR was perceived as an American initiative and was regarded by some as a vehicle for American influence, which, in zero-sum terms, was assumed would displace that of Britain. In longer term, in fact, there developed a very fruitful cooperation with the IPR. After some maneuvering, the AIIA came to function as an IPR affiliate and as its chapter in Australia, as Chatham House fulfilled the same role in Britain.

The IPR acted as the most important conduit for access to American ideas and, to an extent, American influence among the international affairs community (Akami 2002). Of the nine figures considered in this book, Duncan Hall, Eggleston, and Harrison Moore attended one or more of the early IPR conferences in Honolulu (1925, 1927), Kyoto (1929), and Shanghai (1931). It is clear, as will be shown, that this attendance was formative for the development of their ideas.

In the earlier years, the AIIA worked to raise awareness of international issues in Australia, producing commentary upon such questions as Australia’s evolving position within the Empire–Commonwealth and the nation’s obligations as a member of the League of Nations. The AIIA also played a major role in the fostering of early Australian IR scholarship. The first publication of the Melbourne group (though several of its authors were Sydney based) was The Peopling of Australia (Phillips and Wood 1928). Its origins derived from the fact that from the beginning, the IPR was concerned with population issues, and when materials were being gathered to inform the Australian delegates to the second IPR conference, it became apparent that there was no ready source on this question. However, the key IPR contribution was funding. As the editors observed:

It is a matter upon which Australians will do well to ponder, that portion of the necessary funds for so humble an enterprise as this volume had to be sought outside Australia in the munificent benefactions of the United States, made available through the central organisation of the Institute of Pacific Relations. (1928: 7)

“Pacific Relations Series, No. 2” was the volume The Australian Mandate for New Guinea (Eggleston 1928b). It was again predominantly a Melbourne product, and was edited by Eggleston. The LNU and a number of other organizations were involved in the meeting that led to its publication, and the book was associated with the Union on its title page, but it is the IPR that was acknowledged for that “financial assistance . . . which provided the means for the publication of this book” (Eggleston 1928b: ii). Something of the IPR methodology is reflected in the statement of purpose in the introduction, namely, “that the primary object of the discussion was to ascertain the facts, to clarify the ideas of those who took part, and thus to enable them to discharge their duty as citizens” (Eggleston 1928b: 1).

The Sydney group followed with Studies in Australian Affairs (Campbell et al. 1928). “Pacific Relations Series, No. 3,” as it was designated, covered a wide range of topics, and again appeared (as is noted in the preface) thanks to a grant from the Central Research Fund of the IPR. Persia Campbell and her coeditors R. C. Mills and G. V. Portus offered a rationale for the volume similar to that of their Melbourne counterparts. The IPR was seeking “to throw some light on the social forces determining the course of Pacific affairs” (Campbell et al. 1928: 1), thus providing a basis for their control and direction, and the book was an attempt to delineate those forces in Australia especially that were likely to affect the Pacific. Once again the emergent Australian IR community was pursuing work that fitted an IPR template.

AIIA records show that all of these early studies were supported by the IPR on a pound-for-pound basis, though it seems that the Australian contribution was often in kind, including in respect of the time academics took from their other tasks to produce them. A fourth “Pacific Relations Series” volume, The Peopling of Australia (Further Studies) appeared from the Victorian group in 1933 and was again supported by the IPR; its aim was in common with similar IPR studies in other countries to “assist towards revealing the essential conditions for the regulation of international relations and social advancement around the Pacific” (Eggleston et al. 1933a: 6).

AIIA access to IPR funding continued to provide the means for Australian scholarship. At the Hangzhou IPR conference of 1931, some 17 research projects were endorsed by the IPR at an annual budget of US$39,000, the funding derived from the Rockefeller Foundation (Holland 1932). An undertaking was given in China to provide US$1500 for funding also to produce a volume on land utilization in Australia. The Australian delegation was led by Sir William Harrison Moore, professor of law at the University of Melbourne, who had served as an Australian delegate to the League of Nations Assembly 1927–29 and who was also the most senior member of the Institute group in Victoria. With the support of the Victorian group and especially Eggleston, S. M. Wadham, and G. L. Wood, both at the University of Melbourne, undertook the research project that was published as Land Utilization in Australia (1939). A further product of the Melbourne group was Australian Standards of Living, which was edited by Eggleston and others and appeared in 1939. Although less prolific—Melbourne’s greater access to IPR funds was a cause for some resentment in Sydney—the New South Wales group published in 1935, Australia and the Far East. Diplomatic and Trade Relations (Clunies Ross 1935).

The first work to be published with the phrase Australian foreign policy in the title was Australian Foreign Policy 1934, produced by the Queensland branch of the AIIA, the centerpiece of which was A. C. V. Melbourne’s case for a more self-reliant Australian approach to the world (Dinning and Holmes 1935). Later AIIA publications included Press, Radio and World Affairs: Australia’s Outlook, edited by W. Macmahon Ball (1938), which argued that Australians were very poorly served by the news media, the inadequate international coverage of which deprived citizens of the resources necessary to contribute to or make informed decisions regarding foreign policy. In 1938, H. L. Harris published, again under Institute auspices, Australia’s National Interest and National Policy, the first book with such a title. His key argument was that Australia was “British” in sentiment, but increasingly dominated by events and forces in the Pacific (Harris 1938: 121). This approach was taken further in Jack Shepherd’s, Australia’s Interests and Policies in the Far East (1940), issued by the IPR (with the Institute’s role as its Australian manifestation duly recorded).

In the period before World War II, there were few outlets for writing on international affairs. The organ of the AIPS, Australian Quarterly, first published in 1929, did carry a number of important articles on the subject, though much of its content had a domestic focus. In April 1937, on the initiative of the Melbourne group, the AIIA began publication of a bimonthly journal, The Austral-Asiatic Bulletin, which appeared—with some irregularities during the Pacific War—until 1946. It was replaced by Australian Outlook (now the Australian Journal of International Affairs) in 1947.

As might be expected of a body parented by the RIIA, the AIIA kept members of the Australian foreign policy community in communication with the discourse of the wider Empire–Commonwealth (McIntyre 2008). In 1933, Chatham House, in collaboration with groups in a number of Empire countries, organized the first (unofficial) British Commonwealth Relations Conference. This meeting, held in Toronto, brought together 77 members of the various affiliated institutes across the Empire–Commonwealth and included a small Australian party (Toynbee 1934). In 1936, significantly at the IPR conference at Yosemite, a meeting of Commonwealth delegates formed a committee to agree upon the agenda and principles of the organization and in 1937, the committee accepted the proposal of the AIIA to act as host the following year. In all, 125 delegates from the Empire–Commonwealth institutes assembled at the Lapstone Hill Hotel (now RAAF Glenbrook) outside Sydney for the second conference in 1938. This meeting was the most prestigious international affairs meeting ever staged in Australia to that point; it is still one of the most important ever held in this country. The Munich crisis unfolded during its proceedings, rendering its business utterly contemporary. It attracted worldwide attention and was lavishly covered in the press. The British party was led by Lord Lothian; it included a future foreign secretary, Ernest Bevin, who received his first sustained exposure to foreign policy debate at Lapstone. The Commonwealth Relations Conference series continued, though on a progressively more modest scale, with meetings in London (1945), Canada (1949), Pakistan (1954), and New Zealand (1959). Australian delegates were present at all of these gatherings.

With experience of the work and capabilities of research institutions in America and possessed of a keen interest in international affairs, Melbourne business figure E. C. Dyason attempted to place the activities of the AIIA on a surer financial footing. In 1929, Dyason established in Melbourne and largely from his own funds a “Bureau of Social and International Affairs,” which provided administrative support for the AIIA as well as the LNU in Victoria, and also the Round Table (Forsyth 1974). After being convinced of the importance to Australia of knowledge of contemporary Asia, Dyason funded an “Austral-Asiatic Section” attached to the Victorian branch of the AIIA 1936, as well as becoming chair of the Institute’s financial committee. The Section set about collecting library and reference materials on Asia and also facilitated the publication of the Austral-Asiatic Bulletin.

Dyason was a close friend of Eggleston who, as a member of the IPR’s Pacific Council and as such conversant with IPR funding, was no doubt a source of information on the potential of US foundation support. The first successful direct approach to the American foundations for assistance for the AIIA was made by Dyason personally in 1936, when he traveled to New York after attending the IPR conference at Yosemite. Dyason had already persuaded the IPR (which in turn was drawing specifically on Carnegie funds) to host a visit by William Gray, secretary of his “Austral-Asiatic Section” of the AIIA, to the Institute in New York, as part of a tour that would also include London and then the “Far East.” Dyason sought and obtained direct support from the Carnegie Corporation to improve the library of the Section in Melbourne.¹

Rockefeller proved even more generous. In New York, Dyason met Joseph Willits of the Social Sciences Division of Rockefeller Foundation (Stapleton 2003) to explain what the men at the Foundation found to be the most confused situation in Australia, where state branches of the AIIA did not always see eye-to-eye. Willits favored granting US$7,500 over three years, but only if Rockefeller’s conditions were met, namely, that there should be a single national body to which funds could be directed and that the body in question should be incorporated. After some negotiation, Rockefeller’s conditions were determining, and the Institute found a Commonwealth secretary and a research director.² As a result of wartime disruption, the full grant was not expended until 1944, when an additional three years’ funding was requested. It was granted in 1945, on the condition that the Institute find ways to sustain its activities from local sources.³

Whatever the prospects for indigenous support, the foundations showed great confidence in the promise of the Institute, which they hoped would become a southern equivalent of the Council on Foreign Relations. In 1947, Carnegie assumed the role of Institute patron, granting the AIIA US$7,500 over three years (1948–50).⁴ The funds were paid on a diminishing scale, with the understanding, again, that by 1950 the organization would have used the money to generate self-supporting finances. In addition, a separate sum of US$3,600 was paid to the Institute’s full-time secretary, George Caiger, to undertake a study tour of other institut...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1   The Institutional Setting
• 2   W. Harrison Moore: Imperialism and Internationalism
• 3   Frederic Eggleston: The Empire and the Pacific
• 4   A. C. V. Melbourne: The Limits of Early Australian School Nationalism
• 5   H. Duncan Hall: Theorizing the Commonwealth
• 6   W. K. Hancock: The Commonwealth and World Government
• 7   Fred Alexander: The Duty of Public Education
• 8   W. Macmahon Ball: A Focus on Asia
• 9   Walter Crocker: The Afro-Asian Challenge to the International System
• 10   An Australian School of International Relations
• Notes
• References
• Index