Building Citizens: Empire, Asia and the Australian Settlement

Abstract

Australia's diplomatic and political relationship with Asia has been the basis on which the boundaries and membership of its political community have been constructed. This essay uses the example of the Australian Settlement as a strategy of citizenship and state building located within the political framework of an imperial association. Hence, the narrative of Australian Settlement depended on a notion of freedom – a civic identity – in a liberal imperial association and set against a racial order within her immediate region. This dual sovereignty became especially important as a middle power ‘mask’ of the state. This paper argues that these middle power ideas with respect to Australia's position in a liberal imperial association provided the basis for an eclectic group of individuals to develop innovative ideas about Australia's role in the Asia-Pacific that anticipated ideas of Asian engagement.

Notes

¹See also Brawley (1995) for an incisive analysis of these issues.

²On relational approaches, see Lister (1997).

³As Poulantzas (1978) observes, it is not ‘shifting of frontiers that is important, but the appearance of frontiers in the modern sense of the term: that is to say, limits capable of being shifted along a serial and discontinuous loom which everywhere fixes insides and outsides’ (Poulantzas 1978, 104).

⁴On the concept of public narrative and its relationship to political identity, see Somers (1994).

⁵For most international relations theorists, middle power diplomacy is an attribute of foreign policy (Holbraad 1984; Cooper, Higgott and Nossal 1993). My approach takes middle power as a constitutive element of external, as well as internal sovereignty of Australian statehood. In this paper, middle power diplomacy is understood as a normative configuration of state practices and sovereignty that determine political identity, and not merely in terms of the attributes and capabilities of national power.

⁶Ex parte HV McKay (The Harvester Judgement) (1907) 2 CAR 1. The gender dimension is a crucial facet of these notions of self-reliance and independence. A consideration of this is beyond the brief of this essay, but see Frances (1993) and Hearn (2006).

⁷On populism, see Markey (1978, 78).

⁸This Indigenous history and its relationship to both the settler colonialism and imperial authority has been well documented in the work of Reynolds (see Reynolds 1981; see also Chesterman and Galligan 1997). These processes were particularly evident in the control and regulation of African labour in South Africa through various forms of political rule (see Ashforth 1997).

⁹Cotton (2008) gives a most detailed analysis of the early years of international relations theory. Of these, inter-war individuals and their role in organisations, such as the Australian Institution of International Affairs, is the most detailed analysis of the early years of international relations theory.

¹⁰See also the work of Torney-Parlicki (2000), which provides an interesting overview of journalistic writing on Asian engagement.

¹¹The activities of the AIIA is a good illustration of what Collins (1985, 155–8) calls ‘Australia's Benthamite culture’.

¹²Brown (1990) presents a highly illuminating account of the activities of the IPR and AIIA, especially during this period in relation to the association between developmentalism and culturalism.

¹³In conceiving of state formation as a process rather than an entity, the analysis presented here goes beyond so-called constructivist approaches to the state in the international order, which views state identity as pre-given or fixed (Katznelson 2002).

¹⁴For an analysis of the foreign and defence policies of the Hawke and Keating period see Evans and Grant (1991) and Pitty (2003a; 2003b).

¹⁵On the transition from Keating to Howard, see Johnson (2000).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kanishka Jayasuriya

Kanishka Jayasuriya is Professor of International Politics at the University of Adelaide. His research interests include the impact of international structures and processes on state building. His more recent book is titled Statecraft, Welfare and the Politics of Inclusion (Houndmills: Palgrave, 2006). He thanks the special issue editors and Roderic Pitty for their helpful comments on this article.