267 pages

English

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Little America , livre ebook

Pluto Press - Erik Paul

Découvre YouScribe en t'inscrivant gratuitement

Je m'inscris

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

267 pages

English

Obtenez un accès à la bibliothèque pour le consulter en ligne
En savoir plus

A propos
Informations
Extrait

Description

Australia is one of the US's most staunch supporters: Australia has sent troops to Iraq, and is an ally in the 'war on terror'. Australian domestic policy also follows the US economic model, as state industries and services have been privatised.

Erik Paul dissects the relationship between Australia and the US. He explores how Australia has become a key player in maintaining American dominance in South East Asia, and looks critically at the contrast between the Australian wealth and the comparative poverty of surrounding nations.

Examining the influence of neoconservative imperialism on Australia's economic and military strategies, he draws some startling conclusions about future Australian relationships in East Asia, in particular, its relationship with China.
List of Tables

1. Introduction

2. The US in Australia

3. A Corporate State

4. Politics of Greed

5. Australian Imperialism

6. Engagement with Asia

7. Confrontation with Asia

8. Conflict with China

9. The Americanization of Australia

Bibliography

Index

Sujets

International Relations

Political Science

Histoire

General officer

Theory

General

History

Australia

Informations

Publié par	Pluto Press
Date de parution	20 septembre 2006
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781849643252
Langue	English

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,6250€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

Little America

Australia, the 51st State

ERIK PAUL

P Pluto Press LONDON • ANN ARBOR, MI

First published 2006 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA and 839 Greene Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48106

www.plutobooks.com

The right of Erik Paul to be identiﬁed as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN-10 ISBN-13 ISBN-10 ISBN-13

0 7453 2540 8 hardback 978 0 7453 2540 8 hardback 0 7453 2539 4 paperback 978 0 7453 2539 2 paperback

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data applied for

Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd, Fortescue, Sidmouth, EX10 9QG, England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Printed and bound in the European Union by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne, England

To Keiko

List of Tables

Cont

1 The New Imperalism 2 The US in Australia 3 A Corporate State 4 Politics of Greed 5 Australian Imperialism 6 Engagement with Asia 7 Confrontation with Asia 8 Conﬂict with China 9 The Americanisation of Australia

BibliographyIndex

1 17 48 81 99 138 166 198 219

229 245

List of Tables

2.1 Australia and US investment, 1994 and 2003 2.2 Australia current account, major trading partners, 1993 and 2003 6.1 Foreign investment in Australia, 1990 and 2003 6.2 Permanent settlers born in Asia, 1961 to 2003 6.3 Australia’s current account with East Asia, US and EU, 1994 and 2003

34 146 156

157

1 The New Imperialism

Current theories of international morality have been designed to perpetuate the supremacy of English-speaking peoples. E. H. Carr

AUSTRALIA IN THE EMPIRE

Australia and the US have much in common. Both were born out of British invasions of the new world and the brutal dispossession of indigenous land and culture to form new nationstates. While their histories diverged for many generations, there has been a marked convergence in recent decades with Australia increasingly an adjunct to US foreign policy and more like the US in shaping its politics and civil society. Binding the similarities in economic and political culture is a shared messianic crusade to save the world from chaos and evil and a vision of a new world order promising prosperity and peace. The Americanisation of Australia is an important phenomenon which is changing what Australia is about in ways the country relates to the world and transforms its economy and society. Why is Australia so close and so much like the United States? At the core of this issue is Australia’s modern imperial history and the construction of a colonial mentality of dependency on protection from a powerful patron. Aus tralia’s nationstate is a modern creation of the British Empire and the expansion of AngloSaxon capitalism. From the beginning, Australia’s nationbuilding has been sustained by a series of confrontations with Asia moving from colonial consolidation and Cold War to a new * world of globalisation and war against terrorism. Australia’s modern history as a nationstate has been shaped and constructed by its relations with nonEuropeans. Captain Cook’s landing on the shore of what is today Sydney marked the beginning of

* The geography of the AsiaPaciﬁc includes all the countries listed under Asia in the Australian Bureau of Statistics, appendix 2 of the Balance of Payment Regional Series, 5338.0, 2001–02. Countries which are part of Asia can also be found under regional headings of West Asia, South Asia, Central Asia, Northeast Asia and Southeast Asia, in addition to a number of Paciﬁc Island states important to Australia and discussed in this book.

2 Little America

more than 200 years of ‘aggression, injustice and inhumanity towards the Aboriginal people of this land’ (Coombs 1980). The dispossession of their land and culture began with the raising of the British ﬂag and by 1830 the entire continent and the islands of Norfolk and Tasmania had been taken in the name of Britain. Aboriginal armed resistance in the interior of the continent continued into the 1920s. Torres Strait islands were taken by Queensland’s colonial government in the 1870s, and in 1883 Queensland annexed what is today the southern half of New Guinea. Invasion raised the question of proprietorship and the legitimacy of taking a continent from its inhabitants, which in turn engendered fear that people in the region, particularly Chinese, would take the land from British settlers. Asian migrants came in large numbers and their success in working the land and business enterprise brought them into conﬂict with AngloIrish settlers. In the 1880s nonEuropeans were in a majority in tropical Australia. ‘Asians made up half of the settler population in the Northern Territory and Western Australia and more than half in Darwin, Broome and Thursday Island’ (Reynolds 2003:xv). Competition for resources formed the basis for the intense level of racism against Asians during that period. Architects of the whiteAustralia policy such as Isaac Isaacs manipulated the crowds with his call to free Australia ‘for all time from the contaminating and degrading inﬂuence of inferior races’ (Reynolds 2003:160). Fear of invasion by Asia’s ‘yellow hordes’ was legislated for in the 1896 New South Wales Coloured Races Restriction Bill, the ﬁrst of many colonial laws, which barred entry to ‘all persons belonging to any coloured race inhabiting the Continent of Asia, or the Continent of Africa, of any island adjacent thereto, or any island in the Paciﬁc or Indian oceans’ (Yarwood 1964:11). Alfred Deakin, who played a leading role in the creation of the continent’s federation, tabled the commonwealth’s ﬁrst piece of legislation, the Immigration Restric tion Bill of 1901, which he said was to uphold the purity of the ‘British race’ and to ‘exclude alien Asiatics as well as the people of Japan’ (Meaney 1999:18). The act of federation led to new waves of dispossession and deportation. Asian settlers were encouraged to leave and thousands of islanders were deported after 1904 under the Pacific Island Labourers Act. Racism had become the foundation of Australia’s identity. An antiAsian mentality justiﬁed the taking of the continent and aggression against its Aboriginal population. Race supremacy legitimised the conquest. It brought to a quick end the existence

The New Imperialism 3

of a vibrant multicultural society in northern Australia. As a result tropical Australia ‘stagnated. It became a backwater – increasingly monocultural, socially conservative, provincial – which is the way it was seen by outsiders during much of the twentieth century. It also became more racist than it had ever been in the past’ Reynolds 2003:187). Australia’s important military role in the British Empire was to expand and protect its territorial and commercial integrity. Australia sent troops to New Zealand to ﬁght the Maoris’ attempt to keep the British out of their islands. Then came military expeditions to the Sudan and South Africa, and to China to put down a native rebellion against European presence and the British policy of creating an addiction to opium amongst the Chinese. Later during the West’s major civil war (World War I), Australia intervened in Turkey and Egypt, and added German northeast New Guinea to its growing empire. These were all preliminaries to the coming Paciﬁc battles and mass killing of World War II. Japan was modernising and rising to the challenge of Western imperialism. New ideologies about liberty and class struggle in the region were contesting Western presence and exploitation. Japan’s territorial aggrandisement and commercial and military expansion challenged AngloAmerican hegemony in a series of power plays among imperial players. The treaties between Japan and Britain in 1902 and Japan and the US in the TaftKatsura agreement of 1905, were attempts to negotiate an understanding about the division of spoils in the AsiaPaciﬁc region. Japan could keep Korea and Taiwan as long as it did not interfere with AngloAmerican colonies and regional commercial interests. Imperial geopolitics put the contestants on a collision course and Australia was irremediably drawn into preparations for war. Prime Minister Alfred Deakin invited the US Great White Fleet to visit Sydney in 1908 as a sign that ‘England, America and Australia will be united to withstand yellow aggression’ (Macintyre 1999:142). During WWI Prime Minister Billy Hughes warned Australians that should Germany win the war ‘this lonely outpost of the white man’s civilisation will be deprived of its scanty garrison and left open to cheap Asiatics, reduced to the social and economic level of Paraguay or some other barbarian country’ (Victoria 2002:3). After the war, Hughes voted against Japan’s motion for ‘racial’ equality in the League of Nations and made sure that trade in the newly acquired German New Guinea would be monopolised by Australia and free of Japanese

4 Little America

and Chinese traders or migrants. In the 1930s Australia’s restrictions on nonBritish imports brought retaliation against its wool export to Japan. Australia’s discrimination against Japanese migrants became a source of anger and antiWestern sentiment in Japan which was manipulated to advantage by nationalistic and militaristic domestic forces (Walker 1999; Meaney 1996). Preparation for war against Japan unfolded in the 1930s with the inclusion of Australia in the defence of the British Empire. Britain withdrew from the AngloJapanese alliance and reconfigured Singapore island as a naval fortress, partly to protect Australia’s north, and the US built up its forces in colonial Philippines against Japan’s southern expansion. Imperial confrontation gained momentum with the rise of nationalism and demands for independence in the region. Communism was a growing political force in many parts of Asia and a threat to colonialism and to Japan’s militarist culture. In Australia, fascism was mobilising larger sections of society. Japan went to war on the slogan of ‘Asia for the Asians’ while the West called for an end of fascism in the name of liberty and freedom. With the fall of British Singapore and the surrender of some 16,000 troops, Australia was at war with Japan. The arrival in 1942 of General MacArthur in Darwin, to take command of all Australian forces, marked the beginning of Australia’s role as an adjunct to the US empire. Australia’s confrontation with Asia after WWII was an integral part of the AngloAmerican alliance against communism. The Cold War was another hegemonic war between the US and Russia which expanded throughout the world largely because it became entangled with antiimperialist movements and wars in many territories occupied by Western forces. In Asia the rise of nationalism and demands for independence destabilised the entire region, and Mao Tse Tung’s Communist Party victory in 1949 raised anew Australia’s fears of an Asiatic invasion. Communism was the new enemy, another disease which, like the plague, had to be fought off throughout the Asia Paciﬁc region to save white Australia from destruction. Australia’s new axis of evil went from China to the whole of Southeast Asia. From the late 1940s, Australian military units intervened in Malaya, Singapore, Borneo, Korea, New Guinea and in Malta to defend British power in Egypt. In 1954 Australia joined the US, NZ, Britain and France in the Southeast East Asian Treaty Organisation (SEATO) to secure Western colonial interest in Indochina, Thailand and Pakistan. Other treaties signed in the 1950s such as ANZUS (Australia–New Zealand–US) further incorporated Australia in the AngloAmerican

The New Imperialism 5

alliance to regain control of the AsiaPaciﬁc region. A watershed was the Vietnam war. Australia started by sending advisers in 1962 followed by a fullscale military intervention in 1965. At the time, Australia was collaborating with the US push for a regime change in Indonesia. Covert operations by intelligence agencies enabled General Suharto’s military takeover and contributed to the massacre of large numbers of Sukarno supporters and other outcasts. Under Suharto’s rule, close to 100,000 political prisoners were detained without trial for many years in Indonesia’s gulag. After the fall of the Berlin wall in 1989 and the disintegration of the Soviet Union Australia became a sheriff of the US new world order. Australia was the ﬁrst country to join the alliance in the 1991 Gulf war against Iraq, and this was followed by sending troops to Cambodia to effect a regime change in 1993. In the late 1990s Australia became a major enforcer in controlling the ‘arc of instability’ to its north with operations in Papua New Guinea’s (PNG) war against Bougainville, and, after Suharto’s resignation in 1998, in the ‘liberation’ of East Timor from Indonesia. In 2002 Australia sent troops to Afghanistan and the following year took part in the US invasion of Iraq. In 2003 Australia’s military went to the Solomon Islands to take over the administration of the country, and the following year began operations to resume control of the country’s budget, courts and police force. With the election of John Howard’s conservative coalition in 1996, Australia became an integral part of the US–UK global geostrategy, and more assertive in its relations with the world and its region. A major regional task for Australia has been to advance the causes of market fundamentalism particularly in island states where Australia has a dominant economic position. Elsewhere in Asia, Australia has been engaged in strategies to weaken economic regionalism and promote an AngloAmerican model of capitalism, particularly in the context of the Association of Southeast Asian States (ASEAN). One ploy has been the formation of the AsiaPaciﬁc Economic Cooperation (APEC) to counteract the economic power of the European Union and weaken proposals for an East Asian economic bloc dominated by China which would exclude Australia and the US. Australia’s policy to secure the ‘arc of instability’ – the crescent of islands to the north of the continent – has been a ﬁxture of foreign policy since federation. In 1943, H.V. Evatt, the minister for external affairs, declared that Australia’s security ‘depended upon it controlling an arc of territory from northern Australia stretching some 2,400 km