Chile and Australia

Contemporary Transpacific Connections from the South

Irene Strodthoff

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137479655
• Print ISBN:
  9781137479648
• Subtopic: International Relations

Exploring bilateral narratives of identity at a socio-discursive level from 1990 onwards, this book provides a new approach to understanding how Chile and Australia imagine and discursively construct each other in light of the bilateral Free Trade Agreement signed in 2008.

1. Unveiling Shifts in the Visibility of the Chilean-Australian Relations since 1990

Australia and Chile share an unusual record: two Australian miners trapped for 14 days in Tasmania in 2006 was the longest mining confinement in history until the accident involving 33 miners in the north of Chile who stayed underground for 69 days in 2010. The first machine for drilling a hole to rescue the Chilean miners was of Australian origin, a Strata 950. In a highly symbolic metaphor, technology, as one of the driving forces of progress, alludes to an asymmetrical representation of two mining countries: Australian technology provided Chile with the means to begin to save a group of Chilean workers in the most visible field of mutual cooperation. Nevertheless, the competing narrative of progress took shape in the form of a donation of a replica of the miners’ rescue capsule (Phoenix 2), designed by the Chilean Navy in collaboration with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) in the United States, which Australia exhibits in a square in front of the Australian National University in Canberra. The object symbolized a powerful story of national identity linked with progress, and unveiled the Chilean purpose of making its exceptionality visible worldwide in tangible ways.

This condition of exceptionality has been epitomized in the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) that Chile and Australia signed in 2008 as a consequence of the increasingly close relationship that both countries have developed over the last 20 years. This is precisely the context in which this book situates itself: it explores how Australian and Chilean notions of identity have been reworked with the increasing speed of globalization, and in the development of transnational networks and regionalism. This research traces how these constructions have been reframed, nuanced, and reinterpreted in light of the trajectories followed by Australia and Chile regarding the bilateral FTA. Chile is a country of staggering change in Latin América,¹ and in spite of the political alternation it has become a paradoxical example of continuity in terms of ideological power structures.² In the context of this book, the Chilean transformation has been symbolized in the only FTA signed by Australia with a Latin American nation. More recently, Chile has also been represented in an increasing Latin American leadership regarding the Pacific region with the foundation of the Pacific Alliance in Chile in June 2012, a bloc integrating Peru, Colombia, Chile, and Mexico, in which Australia expressed particular interest.

Taking these repositioned regional conditions into consideration, this book seeks to explore fully two sets of research questions. First, it aims to ascertain in what way the official discourse and the press contribute to reinforce and redraw dominant projections of notions of identity both in Australia and in Chile, and how their ambiguities and ambivalences confront the national projects. Second, it seeks to deconstruct how the discursive reproduction of social power shapes imbalances between Australia and Chile and in what way it reformulates the shifts and transformations of bilateral relations. In exploring these two questions, this book aims to unveil the way dominant projections of national identities permeate the construction of the Australian and the Chilean relationship in light of economic progress and particularly at the intersection of the FTA. In examining popular imaginaries and the central features and performative functions of Chilean and Australian dominant discourses, this project combines theoretical tools from the Latin American and English-speaking fields of cultural studies and from the area of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) theory and methodology.³ These tools are useful to analyze discursive operations through a selection of press articles and governmental discourses both in Chile and in Australia between the return of democracy in Chile in 1990 and the Chilean Bicentenary in 2010.⁴ They aim to shed light on the presences and absences in the way national actors construct the roles and representations of each other in a globalized environment.

This work maintains that the dominant discourse of each nation around economic progress and regional exceptionality has led to a closer approach between these two countries, albeit in a context of bilateral asymmetries and internal fissures regarding national cohesion. Additionally, this book ascertains that the national discourse both in Chile and in Australia remains fractured as a consequence of a hegemonic Eurocentric vision regarding the nation-building project. As a result, contemporary national narratives have been permeated by the reproduction of practices of exclusion and inclusion as well as notions of whiteness and masculinity as categories of power. These conditions have led to both the exclusion of the Indigenous peoples and an ambivalent positioning of migrants in relation to contemporary national projections, revealing the impossibility of constructing a homogeneous national discourse.

This intellectual production breaks fresh ground on the trajectory that Australia and Chile have followed within the context of the signing of the FTA and explores bilateral narratives of identity at a socio-discursive level. Hence this project goes beyond the research mainstream on international relations and trade and provides a new epistemological approach to understand how these two countries imagine and discursively construct each other in light of the FTA. This book is new in that it reframes a sociohistorical approach in order to examine the ambiguities and contradictions of national identity constructions. Therefore, the contribution of this book not only hinges on the topic but also on the perspective as it articulates, from a cultural viewpoint, new dimensions in the analysis of how two countries arrive at a particular transnational agreement, in this case in the economic field. This book constructs an archaeology of sense: it defines the symbolic power of cultural expressions, geopolitical spaces, and bilateral points of contact. The analysis focuses on the sociohistorical and the political fields as well as on the national media. This combination of elements becomes pertinent to any study that seeks to deconstruct how national projections are shaped in the context of international agreements.

Additionally, this research helps to recontextualize Latin American regional visibility and reposition Latin American theoretical tools in the English-speaking context. The absence of scholarly work that links Australia with Latin América is not necessarily a reflection of reality. Paradoxically, Latin América is much more visible within the Australian government through initiatives such as the Council on Australia Latin America Relations and the Australia-Latin America Business Council (ALABC), as well as within the business sector through the Chile Australia Chamber of Commerce that operates in Santiago and the Australia-Chile Chamber of Commerce that works in Sydney.

In a wider context, analyses taking transnational agreements into consideration are almost nonexistent; therefore the contribution of this project acquires more relevance in regard to the increasing importance of the Asia Pacific region. Similarly, this publication reveals bilateral fractures, similitudes, and contingencies through a theoretical maneuver that introduces a setting of transnational connections, reimaginations, and rearticulations in a south-south perspective. Aside from reframing theory within such a framework, this research provides access to first-hand sources—press articles and governmental discourses both in English and in Spanish—that are scattered around a wide range of public and private archives. The balanced availability to information both in Chile and in Australia contributes to a better understanding of the Chilean-Australian relations usually constructed from a dominant English-speaking geopolitical view.

Finally, this project helps to fill a gap in previous research from cultural studies by engaging with historical, political, economic, and social factors regarding Chilean-Australian relations from 1990 onward. While this research makes a substantial contribution to grasping how two distant countries are imagined and portrayed in a transpacific framework, it also shows that notions of identity, when attached to specific ideas of place, can become simultaneously a contested site for asymmetries and convergences.

BILATERAL POINTS OF CONTACT APPROACHING THE EARLY TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY

In a broader perspective, this book aims to broach in a new way how discourses reconfigure, reshape, or redraw bilateral relations regarding new contexts originating in the economic and cultural aspects of globalization processes. In situating this analysis within a wider bilateral scope, it is relevant to identify distinct stages of visibility and invisibility experienced between Chile and Australia as a consequence of their particular geographical, economic, and political features.

During the nineteenth century, there was a time of emerging visibility, when Chile and Australia saw a mutual but infrequent exchange of goods. At the beginning of the British settlement in 1790, Australia—at that time a penal colony—approached the Chilean coastal areas, on account of Australia’s interest in whale and sea lion hunting. In terms of trade, Chile played a relevant role in the introduction of the alpaca into Australia from 1803 and it became Australia’s granary between 1853 and 1866. This interchange was based on maritime trade between the seaports of Sydney and Valparaíso. Sea trade supplied the agricultural and livestock needs of Australia during the gold rush, particularly in Victoria. At that time, Chile was a leading South American country in terms of conventional developmental stages: its industrial activity was substantial, its level of education was similar to Europe’s, it had the first locomotive in the region, and it became the first country to link cities by electrical power.

Beyond commerce, there are two little-known events in the mutual relationship at that time: the first one took place at the end of 1837, when Chilean president Ramón Freire found political refuge in Sydney; and the second one is related to John Christian Watson, who was born in Valparaíso and became the third Australian prime minister in 1904. Taking into consideration that this political link was rather fortuitous, the historical conditions suggest that trade was the driving force of the relationship between Chile and Australian colonial times.

During most of the twentieth century and in spite of the establishment of formal diplomatic links in 1945, neither country was of major concern for the other. Their ties were rather limited, and Chile and Australia oriented themselves to other world regions until the end of the 1960s.⁵ After the military coup in Chile in 1973, Australia became one of the main destinations for Chilean political refugees until 1989, the year of the general elections in Chile. Despite the fact that figures about Chilean political refugees in Australia diverge, the largest Chilean immigration to Australia occurred between 1973 and 1989. Around 88 percent of the 23,000 Chile-born people in Australia arrived prior to 1996. According to the Chilean government, the Chile-born community is the largest Spanish-speaking group in Australia and the fifth largest Chilean community living abroad after Argentina, the United States, Sweden, and Canada. As many Chileans arrived in Australia as political asylum seekers, their life experience has been connected to the stigma of being a refugee.

Notwithstanding the distant bilateral relations while Augusto Pinochet was in power, Australian entrepreneurs began to invest in Chile. One of the first substantial Australian investments was made in 1987 by Alan Bond, who was later bankrupted and convicted of fraud in Australia. Bond bought Chile’s national telecommunications company (Compañía de Teléfonos de Chile), later sold to the Spanish company Telefonica. Additionally, in 1988 the Australian company BHP started to construct Escondida, the world’s largest privately owned copper mine, which came fully on stream in 1991. Twenty years later, a total of 76 percent of the Australian investment in Chile goes to the mining sector, and two of the six largest mining consortiums that exploit refined copper in Chile are of Australian origin, in this case BHP and Xstratta Copper.

At the multilateral level, both Australia and Chile became members of the Cairns Group, a coalition of 19 agricultural exporting countries created in 1986. The tensions between both countries slowly shifted into mutual cooperation with the resumption of democracy in Chile in 1990 and regional transformations related to the increasing speed of globalization, the end of the Cold War, and the emergence of the Asia Pacific region as a new center of power, in which both Australia and Chile have strategic interests. In broad terms and albeit schematically, for the purpose of this study, the two decades of this reshaped bilateral relationship can be divided in two blocs of time, with the following most prominent events:

• 1990 to 1999: Although Chile ascribed to economic neoliberalism during the 1970s and the results became more visible in the 1980s, the military in power made the country ineligible for international cooperation initiatives. Despite the fact that Chile regained democracy in 1990 and enjoyed international admiration for its economic performance, its reputation was still stained by the human rights’ violations committed under Augusto Pinochet’s regime. His position as the chief of the army after his tenure and his detention in London in 1998 showed that Chile was still bound to his shadow. The Chilean diaspora in Australia, permeated by a large number of political refugees, played an active role against him in close articulation with Australian trade unions.

With the transition to democracy there was a gradual shift in the bilateral relationship: a Chilean president officially visited Australia for the first time in history (Patricio Aylwin, 1993), promoting a rather positive representation of Australia and Chile in the media. In Australia, the agenda of Labor prime minister Paul Keating (1991–1996) included making Australia a republic (the initiative did not finally succeed), strengthening links with Asia, and encouraging reconciliation with Australia’s Indigenous population in the context of the Australian native title and the Mabo case.⁶ During this period, the Australian-Chilean Investment Business Council (ABCIC) and the Chilean Federation of Industry (SOFOFA) agreed on asking both governments to negotiate a bilateral FTA, becoming the first notional gesture in this direction.

At this stage, Chile and Australia enhanced regional partnership through the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) Forum and the Valdivia Group (1995), a southern transcontinental initiative of environmental cooperation proposed by Australia and involving Australia, Chile, New Zealand, Argentina, South Africa, and Uruguay, temperate countries located south of the Tropic of Capricorn but also former white settlements. This group, founded in the southern city of Valdivia in Chile, was later criticized for its limited role and agenda and for being a “modest example” of a regional organization (Dodds 1998: 730). More recently, albeit in a different context, Chile, through its navy, was accepted in Australia as a permanent member of the Western Pacific Naval Symposium, an 18-country forum created in 1988 to exchange information about security and the control of maritime spaces.

• 2000 onward: By capitalizing on media attention, the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games endeavored to reposition Australia as a modern country with “technological sophistication” (Chalip 2002). Australia, governed by Liberal prime minister John Howard, endorsed economic change but moved away from the official policy of multiculturalism, or so-called cultural diversity that gradually started in 1977. Howard considered it a concept intrinsically owned by the Labor Party and a policy that hindered the creation of a common Australian culture. His government sharpened the economic focus of immigration plans, reduced the size of the family-reunion component, and restricted new migrants’ access to welfare (Betts 2003: 169). As chapter 2 of this book mentions, one of the most controversial figures in this respect was the representative of One Nation Party, Pauline Hanson. Chile’s positive international reputation was strengthened on account of the APEC summit in Santiago (2004), an event that was later organized in Sydney (2007).

In 2005, the visit of the Chilean president Ricardo Lagos to Australia paved the way toward a more dynamic partnership at the bilateral level. In 2006, Chile elected its first female president, Michelle Bachelet. In that year, Chilean minister of foreign affairs Alejandro Foxley announced that Chile and Australia had initiated negotiations to sign a bilateral FTA that materialized two years later. The FTA was signed eight months after the election of the Australian Labor prime minister Kevin Rudd, whose early initiatives included the signing of the Kyoto Protocol, a parliamentary apology to the “Stolen Generations,”⁷ and the increase of the immigration quota. In bilateral terms, Australia emerged as Chile’s fifth largest foreign investor and Chile became the second largest Latin American investor in Australia.

On the occasion of the FTA signing, Chile also signed ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• 1.  Unveiling Shifts in the Visibility of the Chilean-Australian Relations since 1990
• 2.  Immigrants and the Indigenous Peoples: Challenging Official Constructs of Social Cohesion
• 3.  Negotiating Chilean and Australian Projections of Masculinities and Whiteness in a Neoliberal Context
• 4.  Shortening Imagined Distance: Toward the Bilateral Free Trade Agreement
• 5.  The Asymmetrical Links between Chile and Australia
• 6.  The Australian and the Chilean Bicentenaries (1988 and 2010)
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index