Australian External Policy and the End of Britain's Empire1

The winding down of Britain's colonial empire in the 1950s and 1960s impacted upon Australian external policy in several ways. Australia had to build diplomatic capacity in order to manage relationships with numerous newly independent states. As many of these states were non-aligned in the Cold War context, Australia had to think afresh about the problems of regional security. Decolonisation also meant the transformation of the Commonwealth into a "nest of republics", a development that hastened the demise of the older sense of organic empire and, for Robert Menzies, compromised the quality of the Anglo-Australian relationship. The effect on Australia of Britain's post-colonial restrictive immigration policy compounded this process. So too did Britain's move towards Europe. In addition there were implications for Australia's policy towards the United Nations and towards its own dependent territories.     

Brave New Liberal: Percy Spender

Percy Spender's pioneering work as External Affairs Minister is often held up as a significant contribution to Liberal policy-making and Australian foreign policy more generally. A closer look at his life and thinking illuminates some of the factors behind his policy-making. Some of the more prominent, shaping factors can be organised under the headings of his overseas travels before becoming External Affairs Minister at the end of 1949; his sense that the mid-twentieth period was one in which Asia suddenly played a big role; and his determination that Australians should be proactive in their relations in their region, rather than merely reactive in foreign policy.     

Eagle's-eye View: An American Assessment of the 1973 Yom Kippur War

The United States displayed a keen interest in the nature, progress and results of the Yom Kippur War, because the fighting was thought to reflect how non-nuclear hostilities between the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Warsaw Pact (WP) would unfold on the plains of central Europe in case war broke out there. In contrast to many observers of the war, who concluded that the losses suffered by the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) at the hands of Egyptian and Syrian anti-aircraft and anti-tank weapons had rendered the aircraft and the tank largely impotent, thereby revolutionizing how wars would be waged in the future, Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analysts and United States Army Training and Doctrine (TRADOC) Command officers, based upon an in-depth review of the nature, progress and results of the fighting, re-affirmed the centrality of these weapons systems on the modern battlefield. Rather than focus obsessively on technological developments, they concluded that training, leadership and tactics were ultimately the decisive elements in the Yom Kippur War.     

Money,Mortgages, and the Conquest of America

In colonial America, land acquired new liquidity when it became liable for debts. Though English property law maintained a firm distinction between land and chattel for centuries, in the American colonies, the boundary between the categories of real and personal property began to disintegrate. There, the novelty of easy foreclosure and consequent easy alienation of land made it possible for colonists to obtain credit, using land as a security. However, scholars have neglected the first instances in which a newly unconstrained practice of mortgage foreclosure appeared—the transactions through which colonists acquired land from indigenous people in the first place. In this article, I explore these early transactions for land, which took place across fundamental differences between colonists’ and native communities’ conceptions of money, land, and exchange itself. I describe how difference and dependence propelled the growth of the early American contact economy to make land into real estate, or the fungible commodity on the speculative market that it remains today.     

Contesting Legality in Authoritarian Contexts: Food Safety,Rule of Law and China's Networked Public Sphere

Since the introduction of the Internet, China's networked public sphere has become a critical site in which various actors compete to shape public opinion and promote or forestall legal and political change. This paper examines how members of an online public, the Tianya Forum, conceptualized and discussed law in relation to a specific event, the 2008 Sanlu milk scandal. Whereas previous studies suggest the Chinese state effectively controls citizens' legal consciousness via propaganda, this analysis shows that the construction of legality by the Tianya public was not a top‐down process, but a complex negotiation involving multiple parties. The Chinese state had to compete with lawyers and outspoken media to frame and interpret the scandal for the Tianya public and it was not always successful in doing so. Data show further how the online public framed the food safety incident as indicative of fundamental problems rooted in China's political regime and critiqued the state's instrumental use of law.