Engaging with the Asia-Pacific : Australian foreign policy in the Pacific century

Abstract

This thesis examines Australia's engagement with the Asia-Pacific. It seeks to locate Australian foreign policy within a larger Westerri discourse of international relations (IR) and geopolitics which has provided the dominant understandings, meanings and boundaries of international political life in the modern period. In the chapters to follow, I show how this larger discourse has been articulated in the history of Australian foreign policy through the dominant elite perspectives of market liberalism and power politics realism. Rather than treating these perspectives as discrete, mutually exclusive theories of IR, however, I understand each as contending poles of this larger Western discourse. In doing so, I argue that liberalism and realism have traditionally framed Australia's encounter with the AsiaPacific region. I also show that, in continuing to draw on these dominant perspectives, contemporary policy-makers have pursued a diplomacy of regional engagement designed to integrate Australian strategic and trade interests more fully into the rapidly growing economies of Asia. This thesis provides a critique of this regional diplomacy as an inadequate and narrow policy agenda that has focused on engaging with, and buttressing, unaccountable and undemocratic elites in the region. That has been at the expense of a more wide-ranging regional engagement with the grassroots communities of the Asia-Pacific. In advancing such a critique, this work is designed to count the costs and dangers of a foreign policy so unequivocally aligned to repressive and anti-democratic forces in the region. Those forces have engendered precisely the kinds of instabilities, volatilities and insecurities that contemporary foreign policy has been designed to counter. In pointing out as much, however, this thesis is not intended as a blanket condemnation of contemporary foreign policy for as I acknowledge there are some commendable elements of our recent regional policies. Those elements provide a glimpse of where we might begin to creatively respond to the challenges of contemporary global life. In particular, the acknowledgment by the more intelligent sectors of the foreign policy community that we need to seriously rethink identity through a fundamental intellectual and cultural engagement with the region represents an important insight in the context of present foreign policy challenges. The overall purpose of this thesis, then, is to question the more narrowly-conceived policy perspectives of Australian diplomacy. The aim in doing so is to open up space in which to rethink the dominant perspectives of liberalism and realism which have underpinned foreign policy. In the final part of this work, accordingly, I discuss how it might be possible to think beyond the realist-liberal impasse of prevailing foreign policy discourse in order to formulate perspectives more attuned to the everyday realities of regional life. I conclude that the formulation of such alternatives to traditional ways of thinking is imperative if more equitable, just and sustainable ways of life across the Pacific are to be achieved than those which are currently developing. Show more