Whose ‘Freedom of Navigation’? Australia,China, the United States and the making of order in the ‘Indo-Pacific’

The so-called freedom of navigation through the Malacca straits and the South China Sea, some of the world’s busiest trade routes, has long been of concern to scholars and practitioners of international politics in the region. Increasing tensions around territorial disputes recently propelled the issue to the forefront of global foreign and security policy making. Yet, despite the frequent invocation of threats to the ‘freedom of navigation’ for the justification of military measures to protect the ‘liberal rules-based order’, the substance of this rule or norm remains ambiguous and the nature of the threatened order unclear. Located at the confluence of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, Australian discourses represent a suitable case for clarifying both. Starting from the original provisions on navigational regimes in international law, this study analyses the meanings that officials, think tank analysts and academics have been attributing to the freedom of navigation and contextualize them in the evolving debate about order. Focusing on political rather than legal discourses, it finds that concerns with the freedom of navigation are largely unrelated to the safety of maritime transport. Instead, they serve as proxy for an increasingly static imagination of international order – written backward in time – to be secured.     

Japan's security agenda in the post‐cold war era

The radically changed regional security environment in the post‐cold war Asia‐Pacific poses serious challenges to Japan's security policy. Tokyo must develop a new strategic view of the region to complement its tendency to emphasize security based on economic growth and interdependence. Japan's relations with the United States, Russia and China have far‐reaching, long‐term regional security implications, yet Tokyo is barely managing to respond to bilateral political and economic issues as they arise. While the waning of the cold war security threat and budgetary considerations are putting increasing constraints on Tokyo's spending for both defence and foreign economic assistance, there are conflicting international demands and fears concerning expanded Japanese international security roles. At the same time, Tokyo's desire to participate more actively in United Nations peacekeeping and to gain a permanent seat on the United Nations Security Council is hampered by the domestic constitutional debate and widespread pacifism, both legacies of the Second World War and the cold war. Tokyo must muster both domestic and international support for legitimate uses of the nation's enormous power potential.     

The Australian Public Service and Policy Advising: Meeting the Challenges of 21st Century Governance

This concluding article summarises the case study findings comprising the Special Issue on ‘Advising Australian Federal Governments: Assessing the Evolving Capacity and Role of the Australian Public Service’, identifies and discusses cross‐cutting issues, and considers strategic implications for future practice and research. It reviews key findings from six case studies – Treasury, Prime Minister and Cabinet, Intergovernmental Relations, Housing, the BER Stimulus program, and Defence – and assesses the policy advising capacity of the Australian Public Service, with a focus on the policy‐political interface between governments and officials. Putting recent experience in historical context, it considers the performance of the Commonwealth's policy advisory system, the impact of prime ministers and centralisation, the link between advising and analytic capacities, the system's resilience and readiness, whether recent dissatisfaction over APS advising reflect lack of capacity or a culture clash, and the responsibility for ensuring high‐quality policy advice. It recommends developing a more systematic approach to assessing policy advising capability, building on recent APS reforms.     

The Australian Environmental Policy Agenda

This paper seeks to identify major shifts in the Australian environmental policy agenda over the past fifty years, and discusses the possible causes of and variables affecting agenda change. The issue of what comprises ‘environment’ policy is discussed, with reference to overlaps and intersections with other policy sectors such as agriculture, public health, energy and regional affairs. While the diversity of the environment policy domain complicates any analysis of trends, there have been two persistent trends of (i) an expansion from a more narrowly to a more broadly defined suite of issue (from environment to sustainable development) and incorporation of environment into natural resource management, and (ii) an increasing diversity of policy instruments being used. Consistent with the wide variety of issues confronted, pragmatism and convenience are often as influential as political ideology or underlying trajectories. The drivers of policy change are diverse, including biophysical factors such as drought, political leaders and international policy developments, and punctuations are often better interpreted as intensification or redirections of past policy trajectories.     

Political context,policy networks and policy change: the complexity of transition in Hong Kong

Abstract

Central to the debates on the transition of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty is how this process has affected change in the policy process and policy outputs. Many see policy change as a result of the evolving political environment in Hong Kong following the political transition. This article, however, adopts the notion of policy networks and argues that the analysis of policy change cannot be reduced to a simple contextual stimulus – the policy alteration model. A case study – ‘the development of civic education’ – demonstrates the importance of policy networks, as a particular structure of government and group relations in decision making, in explaining the course of policy change. It is apparent that the relationship between regime change and political liberalization, on the one hand, and established networks, on the other, tends to be complex and dialectical in Hong Kong. Despite the importance of sovereignty transition and political restructuring, the effect of contextual factors on public policy greatly depends on the nature of the network involved.     

The Multiple Domains of Harmonisation: Politics,Policy, Process and Program

This article builds a taxonomy of the different functions performed by the term ‘harmonisation’ in contemporary policy debates. Four broad functions or domains of use are identified – political, policy, process and program – within each of which there are multiple different uses. Based on this classification, the article then develops a multi‐dimensional conceptual framework through which the term can be better understood and examined, its political uses identified and isolated, and harmonisation initiatives constructed, framed and analysed. The framework should prove useful for Ministers and government departments called upon to determine if, how and to what extent to harmonise regulations in a particular area; regulators called upon to administer and enforce harmonised regulatory regimes; and regulatees, practitioners and academics concerned to understand the impact of a harmonisation task.     

Pragmatic Federalism: Australian Federalism from Hawke to Howard

The article explores the nature of Australian federalism by examining four major themes in the period from Hawke to Howard. The investigation of these themes – Australian conceptions of federalism; the role of party in shaping federalism; the way problems and politics have influenced policy‐making and thereby federalism; and the nature of federal judicial review – suggests that Australian federalism can most accurately be characterised as pragmatic. It appears as a federalism shaped by pressing problems, specific policy agendas and the prevailing political dynamic, rather than by overarching conceptions of federalism derived from political theory or articulated in party ideology. This pragmatic federalism explains important aspects of Australian federalism, especially the trend towards centralisation of authority.     

China's ‘charm offensive’ in the Pacific and Australia's regional order

Abstract

In recent years, a perception has emerged among many policymakers and commentators that the deepening of the People's Republic of China engagement in the Pacific Islands Region, predominantly through its expanding foreign aid programme, threatens to undermine the existing regional order, in which Australia is dominant. In this article, it is argued that China's apparent ‘charm offensive’ in the Pacific is mainly driven by commercial, not political, imperatives and is far more fragmented and incoherent than is often assumed. Hence, its (real) political effects hinge, not on any Chinese strategic designs for regional domination, or even a more limited resource security agenda, but on the intent and capacity of Pacific governments to harness deepening aid, investment and trade relations with China towards their own foreign and domestic policy objectives, which include limiting Australian interference in the internal governance processes of Pacific states. This argument is demonstrated by the case of Fiji after the December 2006 military coup.     

International Power and Local Action – Implications for the Intersectionality of the Rights of Women with Disability

The recent United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (CRPD) reframes how policy responds to disability, difference, interdependence and rights. We examine how Australian disability activists used the CRPD to advocate for the intersectional rights of women with disability. We applied a framework from Zwingel's conceptualisation of mutually constituting global norms to analyse the intersectionality of rights represented in three stages of the CRPD process – during the drafting, the wording in the Convention, and the periodic review. We found that disability activists were able to shape the gendering of disability through their targeted representation as people with lived experience. This expertise filled a knowledge gap in the policy process valued by the actors at other policy levels. Extending Zwingel's concept of global discourse translation, it also suggests that the dynamic contribution continues in the international interpretation of the CRPD itself.     

States on Steroids: The Intergovernmental Odyssey of American Climate Policy

Climate change has conventionally been framed as an issue that would be addressed by an international regime established through negotiation among nation‐states. The experience of policy development in the decade following the signing of the Kyoto Protocol indicates that climate change also needs to be examined as a challenge of multilevel governance. The increasingly central role of state governments in American climate policy formation squares with recent experience in other Western democracies that share authority across governmental levels. This paper examines the American experience, considering factors that have contributed to a state‐centric policy process and using that body of experience to assess competing strategic choices faced by individual states based on their mix of emission trends and policy adoption rates. In turn, the collective state experience allows for consideration of the varied political feasibility of competing climate policy tools that remain under active review in subnational, national, and international contexts. The paper concludes with a set of scenarios that explore different ways in which a state‐centric system may be integrated with expanding involvement at the national level.     

The use and abuse of medical intelligence

When a leader suffers from a diminished ability to formulate high quality judgments and decisions, international peace and security may be compromised. Systematic use of medical intelligence on foreign leaders can provide early warning to American leaders about the potential for destabilization in particular regimes where leaders are gravely ill. This information remains particularly important in less democratic governments, where power and decision making remain concentrated in the hands of very few, or even one man, or where an entire governmental structure appears unstable. This paper examines the impact of medical illness in foreign leaders in four cases in American foreign policy: the Shah of Iran; Ferdinand Marcos; Tancredo Neves; and Boris Yeltsin.     

The Tax Reform Agenda in Australia

This paper applies concepts developed in the Policy Agendas Project (PAP) literature to an analysis of Australian tax policy over the post war period. It argues that a major turning point in the Australian tax policy agenda occurred during the second term of the Hawke Government (1984‐87). Beyond this turning point, and despite the fierce partisan conflict concerning tax policy over the past two decades, there has been remarkaly little difference between Australia's two major parties at the level of substantive policy content. The Australian tax policy agenda over the post war period can be characterised by remarkable policy continuity punctuated by a period of change in the mid 1980s when structural change in the international political economy precipitated unprecedented domestic liberalisation.     

Workplace Bullying Policy in the Australian Public Sector: Why Has Gender Been Ignored?

This article examines the question of gender-neutral workplace bullying policy in the Australian context. It draws on the international workplace bullying literature and interview data gathered from policy actors located in Australian public service administrations, including managers, policy implementors and employee advocates. Our findings show that both the literature and the policy actors tend to present workplace bullying as a product of individualised behaviour, overlooking the nuances and dimensions of organisational power relations that include gender. As part of this tendency, policy actors insisted that workplace bullying be represented as gender-neutral. Our analysis reveals two key factors underpinning the defence and dissemination of workplace bullying as a gender-neutral problem: the tendency to individualistic remedies in public sector policies; and the idea among policy actors that if workplace bullying was portrayed as needing gender analysis, its current support as an important organisational issue would dissolve.     

Foreign Policy as Battlefield: A Study of National Interest and Party Motives

In no other policy arena are party unity and national unity considered as critical as in security and foreign policy. Party unity on foreign policy is viewed as a national security strategy of particular importance in times of international crisis and uncertainty, or as an expression of party strategy and ideological considerations. Through an empirical study of programs, congresses, voters and ideology of the Swedish parties 1945–1993, we show that the presence or absence of tension in the international system does not affect the inclination of parties to take issue on matters of foreign policy. We also show that parties argue just as much about issues that are central to Swedish security policy as they do about issues that do not directly affect national interest. The main sources of party disagreement over foreign policy seem to be ideologically motivated.     

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse: Understanding Human Security

Since the end of the Cold War, security studies have broadened to take into account a wide range of non‐military threats ranging from poverty to environmental concerns rather than just national defence. Security scholars, backed by international organizations and a growing number of national governments, have developed the concept of ‘human security’, focusing on the welfare of ordinary people against a broad range of threats. This has aroused vigorous debate. The first part of this article proposes an analytical model of human security. The second part argues that it is important to measure how ordinary people perceive risks, moving beyond state‐centric notions of human security. New evidence is examined that draws upon survey items specially designed to monitor perceptions of human security, included for the first time in the sixth wave of the World Values Survey (WVS), with fieldwork conducted in 2010–12. The third part demonstrates that people distinguish three dimensions – national, community and personal security – and then explores some structural determinants driving these perceptions. The fourth part discusses why perceptions of human security matter, particularly for explaining cultural values and value change around the world. The conclusion argues that the shift from a narrow focus on military security toward the broader concept of human security is a natural response to the changing challenges facing developed societies, in which the cost‐benefit ratio concerning war has become negative and cultural changes have made war less acceptable. In this setting, valid measures of perceptions of human security have become essential, both to understand the determinants of the concept among ordinary people and to analyze their consequences.     

Advising Ministers – The Special Problem of Defence

Successive Australian Defence Ministers have been frustrated and occasionally embarrassed by the quality of advice and information provided to them by the Defence organisation. Decades of reviews and reorganisations have failed to find solutions to the special difficulties that Defence faces in providing accurate, timely information and advice to ministers across the broad spectrum of their responsibilities. This article argues that there are multiple explanations for the concerns that are frequently expressed about its policy advisory capacity – most of which are inherent to Defence organisations around the world. While the Defence culture of secrecy is partly responsible, other factors such as the scale of Defence's operations, the multiple cultures that exist within it (military, civilian, and intelligence) that make coherence harder than in more homogenous departments, the long‐time horizons of defence planning as well as the high costs of procurement, must also be considered. The erosion of trust between the organisation and minister has been exacerbated by the intense scrutiny of the media that overburdens ministers and adds another layer of complexity to their role. As history shows, there are push and pull factors that continue to embroil ministers in the minutiae of defence difficulties, while the complexity and scale of operations will undoubtedly continue to impact on the timeliness of advice.     

Resistance from Within: Why Mexico's Attempt to Advance an Active Foreign Policy Failed

After becoming the first opposition candidate to win since 1910, President Vicente Fox kindled expectations at both national and international levels. He claimed he would enhance significantly the scope of the Mexico's foreign policy and engage the country in international politics in a way more befitting of its newly acquired democratic status. Nevertheless, little consideration was given to the fact that for many decades foreign policy in Mexico had been deployed to create an area screened‐off from domestic politics where conflicting factions were brought together and a policy consensus worked out. That consensus was sufficiently ample for the authoritarian elite, given its foreign policy goals and principles. It would, however, fail to suffice for any political leader willing to step outside the box of tradition. Fox did just that. In consequence, widespread reactions of disapproval from key political actors and the media led the president to settle for a more modest international agenda in 2002. This article explores the key processes that triggered so much internal resistance to Fox's foreign policy designs. I argue that these processes underpin what continues to be the essentially autarchic nature and scope of the Mexican foreign policy tradition. Such an autarchic approach is glorified in Mexican political rhetoric, yet has led to many lost opportunities for Mexico. Most importantly, I stress that the Mexican foreign policy tradition discourages and forecloses the kind of engagement in the international arena that seeks to share in rather than to free‐ride the collective efforts of the international community to procure security and peace. So despite its new democratic status, Mexico remains more of a spectator than an actor on the international stage.     

Japan's military research and development: A high technology deterrent

Abstract

This article examines the increased linkage between domestic and foreign policy that has been a consequence of democratization and globalization in Korea. It argues that while prior to 1987 foreign policy-making saw very little public input, and while democratization did not lead to a weakening of domestic political institutions nor a rise in nationalism, it did open up domestic political space where foreign policy-making increasingly became part of the contentious electoral competition. The globalization policy, initiated with the purpose of raising Korea's international status, which has remained a goal of succeeding administrations, created a complex interdependency which led to a breakdown in the separation between the domestic and international, and that often brought with it a domestic backlash. As a consequence foreign policy-making, in the absence of a tradition of political compromise, increasingly runs the risk of either inconsistency, or even deadlock.     

Rethinking the Europe‐Taiwan relationship

This article attempts to construct an overview of Japan's defence problematique in the post‐cold war era. Its approach is to survey the historical legacies that have shaped Japan's defence policies and perceptions, and to assess how these fit, or do not fit, with the new security environment within which Japan now finds itself. The purpose is to argue that a policy of non‐offensive defence (NOD) could solve many of the difficult defence questions that Japan now faces. As a consequence, the discussion will concentrate mainly on military and political issues, mostly leaving aside questions of economic, societal and environmental security on the grounds that these issues interact less strongly with NOD. Section 1 considers the geopolitics of Japan's security that arise from its being an island country. Section 2 analyses some crucial historical considerations, particularly Japan's status as a great power, and the particular circumstances of its historical relationship with its neighbours. Section 3 looks at Japan's position during the cold war, examining how the legacies of its defeat in the Second World War blended into the demands placed upon it as a front‐line ally of the United States against Chinese and Soviet power. Section 4 surveys the actual and possible changes in Japan's security environment consequent upon the ending of the cold war. It focuses on Japan's relationships with the United States, the East Asian region, the international system as a whole, and finally on Japan's relationship with itself. Section 5 considers the requirements for a Japanese defence and security policy in the post‐cold war era.     

The UK and EU Foreign and Security Policy: An Optional Extra

Foreign and security policy were not areas in which Prime Minister Cameron was seeking to renegotiate the relationship between the UK and the European Union (EU), but security may be a key issue in the EU referendum. The untangling of Britain's foreign and security policy from the EU following a Brexit vote would be relatively uncomplicated. The EU's arrangements for collective foreign and security policy, the Common Foreign and Security Policy (CFSP) and Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP), are conducted on an intergovernmental basis which allows the UK to preserve independence in its diplomacy while allowing for the coordination of policy where interests are held in common with other member states. The UK retains substantial diplomatic and military capabilities which would allow it to continue to pursue a separate national foreign, security and defence policy in the case of either a ‘Leave’ or ‘Remain’ outcome.