From British subjects to Australian values: a citizenship-building approach to Australia–Asia relations

Australia–Asia relations are inextricably bound up with the development of notions of statehood and citizenship. The argument advanced here is that the way a state acts within the international community markedly determines how it relates to its own citizens. Here we suggest that the continuing and politically resonant idea of Australia as a ‘middle power’ is a crucial thread that links the international and national dimensions of citizenship building. From the very beginning of Federation, the contingent sovereignty of the new Australian Commonwealth in the imperial order became necessarily entangled with debate over national political institutions and citizenship building. Long after the end of the British Empire, the notion of middle power politics has determined the nature and shape of citizenship building. These statecraft projects of ‘citizenship building’ are profoundly shaped, determined and reinforced by the institutions and policies of regional engagement. We explore this framework through three critical junctures of domestic and external policy: 1. the emergence of dominion status on the basis of a common racial and cultural identity within the empire in the first half of the century;

2. the developing notion of a good international citizen during the Hawke and Keating period;

3. the invocation of Australian values by John Howard.

     

Regionalising the state: political topography of regulatory regionalism

In recent years new modes of regional governance such as peer review, policy networks, and multi-level governance, have emerged not only in the European Union but in other regions such as the Asia Pacific. This article explains the rise of these new modes of governance in terms of the framework of regulatory regionalism. It suggests that these new modes of governance constitute distinctive forms of regionalised governance within the state. Hence emerging practices of regional governance are not above the national state, but instantiated within it. Just as much as the national territorial state was consolidated over the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, the twenty-first century is likely to see the consolidation of new forms and practices of regional governance in which the ‘regional’ becomes incorporated within the political space of the state.     

The political rationalities of regionalism: APEC and the EU in comparative perspective

Abstract

The essay is a comparative analysis of APEC and the EU, which looks at the particular sorts of economic orders these institutions are helping to create. It is argued that the two regions display some noteworthy differences that result from different approaches to the problem of economic governance. These differences reflect much more than the relative degree and level of regional institutionalization; they flow from different ‘political rationalities’ that are themselves a function of the very different liberal and illiberal polities in Europe and East Asia. Our key theoretical innovation is to use the framework of political rationality to explain different regional approaches to economic governance; more specifically we argue that the EU and the East Asian members of APEC may be understood as respectively subscribing to broadly conceived liberal and cameralist approaches to economic governance which are in turn reflected in the design of regional institutions.     

Introduction: Governing the Asia Pacific--beyond the 'new regionalism'

This paper provides a broad introduction to the special issue and examines the main contours of regional governance in the Asia Pacific. It suggests that prevailing theories of regional co-operation in the Asia Pacific fail to pay due heed to the manner in which regional integration is rooted in domestic coalitions, economic strategies, and state forms that prevailed in the boom years of the 'Asian Miracle'. The paper then goes on to argue that the collapse of the developmentalist project has given way to the new regulatory state, which in turn spawns new forms of regulatory regionalism that place a heavy accent on policy co-ordination and harmonisation.     

State transformation and resource politics: Australia and the regional political economy

Abstract

Although the 1994 Agreed Framework offers a solution to the North Korean nuclear crisis, many problems may prevent its successful implementation. Should the Agreed Framework break down, the United States and South Korea have indicated that they will ask Japan to join them in a trilateral economic sanctions regime.

Japanese participation would include the severance of trade and financial flows, including money sent to North Korea from Japan's ethnic Korean community. In this paper I examine this financial flow, and, finding it a valuable linkage to the North Korean economy, conclude that Japanese participation is vital for a successful sanctions regime against North Korea.

Given this, I examine whether or not Tokyo's cooperation will be forthcoming. Japan would be inclined to participate given that it has a strong interest in eliminating a regional nuclear threat. Furthermore, Japan would also feel pressure from its allies to display diplomatic leadership in the Asia‐Pacific region, as befits a country of its economic importance.

Despite these international reasons for Japanese participation, domestic factors will be likely to prevent Tokyo from joining a sanctions regime: constitutional questions, the possibility of terrorist reprisals, interest in Pyongyang's regime maintenance, concerns for the rights of Japan's ethnic Korean community, and political ties between North Korean and Japanese politicians. I find that these domestic factors will outweigh international pressures for Japanese participation, and thus conclude that in the event of a breakdown in the Agreed Framework, alternatives to a trilateral sanctions strategy against North Korea must be considered.     

The antipolitics of good governance

This article sets out to understand the relationship between the complex process of structural change and the proliferating political strategies and programs implemented to manage the process of political and social change. More particularly the authors examine how in the wake of the Asian economic crisis international financial institutions advocated a new global policy through programs such as Social Investment Funds. The thread that runs through the global social policy is a distinctly political project that uses the liberal language of participation and empowerment as a strategy of “antipolitics” that marginalizes political contestation. The authors argue, however, that the antipolitics of technocratic social policy gave way to a more populist form of antipolitics of a new government led by Thaksin Shinawatra. This article examines the nature of governance projects and seeks to explain the shift between them. This new populism may be a precursor to a new “authoritarian statist” mode of political regulation that could come to dominate Southeast Asia, buttressed by the requirements imposed by the “war on terrorism.”     

New geographies and temporalities of power: exploring the new fault-lines of Southeast Asia

Abstract

Since the end of the Cold War, the international arena has witnessed two concurrent worldwide trends. One is the gradual prevalence of universalism under the banner of human civilization; the other is the gradual revival of nationalism globally under exactly the same heading. Both trends are evident in China, a country which in the twenty-first century is perceived universally as a rising nation. However, does Chinese nationalism necessarily pose a threat to the world? By examining two debates on the Chinese intellectual response towards Sino-American and Sino-Japanese relations in the early twenty-first century, this paper investigates the status of Chinese nationalism. It questions whether it is a fixed set of ideas embraced by a solid entity, or whether it possesses multiple layers with dual elements contributing to both security and insecurity internationally. The paper argues that three separate nationalist processes are occurring concurrently but independently of each other: the construction of civic nationalist values; the development of an international relations strategy assigning responsible power to China; and the detection of alleged anti-Chinese conspiracies. The effect of the first two would be to encourage regional peace, and they could offset fervent nationalist expression. A somewhat counter-intuitive result of Chinese nationalism might be that it also becomes a stabilizing force within and outside China's borders.