Fear of Abandonment
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Fear of Abandonment

Australia in the world since 1942

Allan Gyngell

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Fear of Abandonment

Australia in the world since 1942

Allan Gyngell

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Updated edition, covering Brexit, Trump, Xi's ambitions for China, and the geopolitical implications of the COVID-19 pandemic Everything Australia wants to achieve as a country depends on its capacity to understand the world outside and to respond effectively to it.In Fear of Abandonment, expert and insider Allan Gyngell tells the story of how Australia has shaped the world and been shaped by it since it established an independent foreign policy during the dangerous days of 1942. Gyngell argues that the fear of being abandoned – originally by Britain, and later by our most powerful ally, the United States – has been an important driver of how Australia acts in the world.Covering everything from the White Australia policy to the South China sea dispute, this is a gripping and authoritative account of the way Australians and their governments have helped create the world we now inhabit in the twenty-first century. In revealing the history of Australian foreign affairs, it lays the foundation for how it should change.Today Australia confronts a more difficult set of international challenges than any we have faced since 1942 – this new edition brings the story up to date.Allan Gyngell is National President of the Australian Institute of International Affairs and an honorary professor at the Australian National University. His long career in Australian international relations included appointments as director-general of the Office of National Assessments and founding executive director of the Lowy Institute. He worked as a diplomat, policy officer and analyst in several government departments and as international adviser to Paul Keating. He is the co-author of Making Australian Foreign Policy and the author of Fear of Abandonment.

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1
FEAR OF ABANDONMENT
The fear of abandonment lies deep in the history of European settlement in Australia. ‘Here on the summit of the hill, every morning from daylight until the sun sunk did we sweep the horizon, in the hope of seeing a sail,’ wrote Watkin Tench, a young British officer who arrived in Port Jackson with the First Fleet in 1788. The colonists and convicts in the struggling British settlement ‘on the shores of this vast ocean’ had no fresh supplies and no information about the world outside. For Tench, ‘The misery and horror of such a situation cannot be imparted, even by those who have suffered under it.’1 It would be two and a half years before relief arrived.
This book is in many ways the story of how Australia has responded to that fear. For the early settlers in this new land (new, at least, to them; home for millennia to those who were already here), this was the dilemma: how could this small group of people protect an audacious claim to a vast continent far from the places from which most of them had come and from the markets for their products?
For a century and a half after Tench scanned the horizon, only one response was conceivable for most of the people who lived here. They thought of themselves as just as much part of the great British Empire as residents of London or Manchester. They were, in the image they used so often, children of the mother country – scattered perhaps, but bound as family. Australia’s security and Britain’s were, they knew, inseparable.
The ambitions and rivalries of European imperialism moulded Australia’s modern identity. It was why the continent was explored and settled. And those imperial ambitions also shaped large expanses of Asia. India, Burma, Singapore, the Malayan peninsula and Hong Kong were all part of the British Empire. The Dutch controlled the Netherlands East Indies (NEI), the French ran Indochina. Weak and impoverished, China had been carved up, first by the European powers and later by Japan. Japan was the exception to this story of European control in Asia, and the more threatening for it.
Australia had a Minister for External Affairs from the beginning of the federation. The title ‘External Affairs’ was important. Foreign policy was still conceived of as the responsibility of Britain, which was not, of course, foreign. As late as 1949, Richard Gardiner Casey, the Australian diplomat and future minister, would still be talking of Australia as ‘a member of a great cooperative society: the British race, of which the senior partner is our mother country’.2 And twenty years after that, the department I joined as a young diplomatic trainee in 1969 was still called External Affairs, and relations with Britain were formally handled by the prime minister’s department.
Although neither London nor the new Australian government in Melbourne thought in terms of Australia’s conducting an independent foreign policy, the Commonwealth needed its own means of dealing with a range of practical issues that came with nationhood. These included relations with Papua – Australia’s own colony – and the Pacific, and the control of passports and immigration. The Immigration Restriction Act of December 1901 had entrenched the White Australia policy, and the protection of that policy became one of the main external policy aims of Australian governments.
At Imperial Conferences held every four years or so, Australia was given an opportunity – with Canada, South Africa, New Zealand and the other self-governing dominions of the Empire – to discuss imperial foreign policy, but none of the participants was in any doubt that it was set by London.
Even at this early stage, however, Australians were conscious of differences between Australian and British priorities. Australian apprehension about Japan’s naval ambitions, reinforced by its startling defeat of the Russian navy in the Russo–Japanese War of 1904–05, would continue to grow throughout the following decades, notwithstanding the alliance agreement signed by Britain and Japan in 1902.
But when war with Germany broke out in 1914, Australians were united in their support for Britain and the Empire. Labor leader Andrew Fisher promised that Australians would join the fight to ‘our last man and our last shilling’. Drawn from a population of five million, 330,000 members of the Australian Imperial Force would serve overseas in the Middle East and on the Western Front.
The national unity did not last. The carnage of the war, the experiences of the troops and the deep sectarian and political divisions revealed during the 1916 and 1917 referendums on conscription for overseas service split the country and the governing Labor Party. Labor prime minister Billy Hughes, who had replaced Fisher, broke away to form a new party.
It was Hughes who went to the Versailles Peace Conference at the end of the war. Like the other dominion leaders, he was in an ambiguous position, partly a member of the British Empire delegation, partly representing Australia. He made his mark, declaring, ‘I speak for 60,000 [Australian] dead.’ Unfortunately, his aims were narrow and short-term: support for tough German reparations, demands for the transfer of German colonies to Australian control, and vigorous opposition to Japanese efforts to include a commitment to racial equality in the covenant of the new League of Nations – for fear that it might lead to criticism of the White Australia policy.
With the war’s end, pressure began to build from the other dominions, especially Canada and South Africa, for greater control over their own relations with other countries. The lesson they had drawn from the war was that they needed the right to act internationally and to sign treaties independently of Britain. The term ‘Commonwealth’ began to replace ‘Empire’. The move towards greater dominion autonomy began at the 1923 Imperial Conference in London and developed during the 1920s. A report by the former British prime minister Arthur Balfour to the 1926 Imperial Conference set out the terms of the new relationship, which eventually found legislative form in the 1931 Statute of Westminster. This Act of the British parliament declared the dominions to be ‘autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown’. For the first time, the dominions’ assertion of rights outside their own territory was fully legitimised.
The other dominions took advantage of these changes to appoint overseas diplomatic representatives. But Australia was reluctant. The nation seemed drained and inward-looking as it tended the wounds of war. The conservative parties did not want to have to think about the world and found it more comfortable to defer to London. The Labor Party, traumatised by its split, embraced something closer to isolationism than Australia has seen from one of its major political parties before or since. Both sides believed in the preservation of the White Australia policy and tariff protection for industry, and both expressed their loyalty to the Empire and Britain.
The political uncertainty facing the Labor government of James Scullin (1929–32), as it wrestled with the economic disasters of the Depression and fears that the Statute of Westminster might threaten the unity of the Empire, led the Australian parliament to pass legislation stating that the statute would not apply to Australia until it was specifically adopted. It would be eleven years before that happened.
Even so, from immediately after World War I, tentative steps were taken to expand Australia’s engagement with the world. The Covenant of the League of Nations permitted membership by dominions and non-self-governing territories, so Australia took its seat at the table. This became an additional external affairs responsibility, although not one that received much high-level attention.
Formally, information about the world flowed to the Australian prime minister through the conduit of the governor-general, who at that time was the representative of the British government, as well as the Crown. Stanley Melbourne Bruce, who replaced Billy Hughes as prime minister in 1923, was keen to strengthen Australian links with imperial foreign policy and to secure his own insights into it. So in 1924 a position of London Liaison Officer was established outside the formal channel of the Australian High Commission, to liaise with the foreign office and report directly to Bruce in Melbourne. Casey was the first appointee and held the position successfully until 1931.
In 1933 the Minister for Commerce, F.H. Stewart, convened a conference on Eastern trade in Sydney, announcing that the Depression had taught Australia that ‘external trade can no longer be left to look after itself’3, and parliament passed the Trade Commissioners Act, which led to the opening of trade posts in Japan, the NEI and China.
In early 1934 John Latham, the Minister for External Affairs, was sent by Prime Minister Joseph Lyons on an extensive ‘mission of friendship and goodwill distinct from a trade mission’ around Asia. This visit to the NEI, Japan, China, Hong Kong, Malaya, Singapore, French Indochina and the Philippines was the first of its kind. Latham returned to report to parliament that although this region was ‘the “Far East” to Europe, to the old centres of civilisation . . . we must realise it is the “Near East” to Australia’.4 But Latham’s visit had no lasting impact on Australian policy. Requests to Latham from the Japanese foreign minister for the establishment of diplomatic relations were, like other approaches from China and the United States, rebuffed.5
Most Australians, carrying memories of the war and facing tough times, did not think much about the outside world. The country was an insular and self-absorbed place. It was difficult, the future external affairs minister, Percy Spender, wrote later, ‘to recapture the degree of ignorance of and indifference to foreign affairs which existed in Australia, even in its parliament – before the outbreak of hostilities in 1939, indeed right up to the time when the Japanese swept like a torrent almost to the shores of Australia.’6
Nevertheless, a small group of individuals like Latham himself, the lawyer and politician Frederic Eggleston and the public servant Robert Garran, who would go on to influence the development of Australian connections with the Pacific and Asia, tried to generate greater Australian interest in international affairs through organisations like the Round Table movement, the League of Nations Union and the Australian Institute of International Affairs (AIIA). Their numbers were tiny but they began to write for the first time about something called Australian foreign policy, the title of the proceedings of a 1934 conference of the Queensland branch of the AIIA.7
And throughout the 1930s the world kept reminding Australians that it could not be ignored. With the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the rise of the European dictatorships of Hitler and Mussolini, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, the Italian invasion of Abyssinia, and the Second Sino–Japanese War, the hopes of the early supporters of the League of Nations foundered.
From 1935 onwards, the Department of External Affairs was given independent status within the public service, as a separate department with its own minister. It was becoming clearer that Australia needed its own sources of information about the world. In 1937 an Australian liaison officer was posted to work out of the British embassy in Washington. But that was not enough. With the international situation deteriorating, the United Australia Party prime minister Joseph Lyons decided that Australia had to appoint its own diplomatic representatives in the Pacific. He was opposed in this both by his external affairs minister, Billy Hughes, and by Attorney-General Robert Menzies, who saw the proposal as a threat to British unity that would ‘lead to nothing but chaos and disaster’.8
But although Menzies was out of the government in March 1939 when the decision was taken, it fell to him a month later, as the incoming prime minister, to announce the appointments of new Australian representatives to Washington, Ottawa and Tokyo. As he told the Australian people: ‘In the Pacific we have primary responsibilities and primary risks . . . What Great Britain calls the Far East is to us the near north. Little given as I am to encouraging the exaggerated ideas of dominion independence and separatism . . . I have become convinced that in the Pacific Australia must regard herself as a principal providing herself with her own information and maintaining her own diplomatic contacts with foreign powers.’ Even so, he was emphatic that ‘I do not mean by this that we are to act as if we were a completely separate power; we must, of course, act as an integral part of the British Empire’.9
The first diplomatic appointment was that of Casey, who had entered parliament on his return from London, to head the Australian Legation in Washington. In 1940 Latham was sent to Tokyo and in 1941 Eggleston arrived in China.
In many respects Australia shuffled its way into a foreign policy. Several potential starting points for the history of that policy present themselves, but none would have seemed so to the people who were involved in them. The one indisputable marker of the nation’s sovereignty as a full member of the international community was the ratification of the Statute of Westminster in 1942 by John Curtin’s Labor government, which had taken office just before the outbreak of the Pacific War. That was the point at which Australia was legally free from any residual formal constraints by London. Not that you would have known it from the parliamentary debate about its ratification. Opposition members worried that, whatever the merits of the bill, even debating it in this atmosphere of wartime crisis would ‘inflame public opinion’; it would be seized on by ‘the high priest of propaganda, Dr. Goebbels . . . as evidence of the disintegration of the empire’.10
As attorney-general (and also external affairs minister), H.V. Evatt was equally insistent that there was nothing to see here: the bill would simply tidy up some regulatory loose ends – ‘a few dry technical questions of law that have been thrashed out over a long period of years’.11 Nothing else would change. ‘Another question which has been asked . . . is: “Will the adoption of the statute weaken the Imperial ties?” My answer is unhesitatingly “No”. I go further. I say that the tie between Britain and Australia will be confirmed and strengthened.’12
But the changes would come, and it is from this unexceptional beginning that the following chapters proceed. The mounting international crises of the 1930s had shown that a policy of isolationism would not protect Australia. And the idea that Australian interests could be addressed solely or primarily by trying to influence a single imperial policy set in London seemed increasingly fanciful.
In quite a short period it would become clear that an emerging Australian foreign policy would have to embrace three broad responses to address the nation’s fear of abandonment. First, Australia could continue – as it had from the beginning – to embed itself with what Robert Menzies famously called ‘our great and powerful friends’. Second, it could seek to shape the region around it to create a more benign environment. Another prime minister, Paul Keating, would explain that as seeking Australia’s security ‘in and not from Asia’. Finally, as a state with weight in the world but not enough of it to determine outcomes through its own power, it could support and try to influence, in its own interests, the organisations, rules and norms – the generally accepted standards of behaviour that most states apply to themselves and others – which together made up a rules-based international order.
Although the origins of these approaches were seldom acknowledged, the Coalition’s ideas about that order rested on traditions drawn from the seventeenth-century Dutch philosopher Hugo Grotius, who argued that the international system requires rules if order is to be maintained. Labor’s commitment to liberal internationalism, most clearly seen in the views of ministers such as Evatt and Gareth Evans, was more heavily drawn from the philosophy of the eighteenth-century German thinker Immanuel Kant, who sought to extend individual and national rights to the international arena.13 But for each of them, the core was the r...

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