Australian Journal of Politics and History最新文献

With combat in Second World War shifting to the Pacific region after the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, the Allied General Headquarters was established in Brisbane, Australia, in July 1942. American military personnel in wartime Brisbane were subject to a two-tier criminal justice system, with the US military claiming extraterritorial jurisdiction over all crimes committed by American troops in Australia. In practical terms, this meant that American soldiers rarely faced local justice, which contributed to existing tensions between the American contingent and the Australian public. Although Americans accused of crimes were typically transferred to US custody, this jurisdictional arrangement did not extend to cases where Americans were victims of crimes allegedly committed by Australians. This article draws on extensive historical research to examine one such case, wherein American soldier Robert L. Norwood was killed by Australian Alma Muriel Morgan. By focussing on this case from the investigatory phase, and through the court process, it is possible to garner insight into the American experience with the Queensland legal system during the Second World War and to consider whether anti-American tensions (particularly around sex) unduly impacted on securing justice where Americans were victims of crime.

Two western Pacific states — the Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea (PNG) — experimented with unusual and ambitious reforms aimed at strengthening political parties in the new millennium. In this paper, we look at what those laws entailed and how they worked in practice. In both cases, we find that unforeseen repercussions dominated. In PNG, the new laws encouraged candidates who formerly contested as independents to now nominate as members of microscopic one- or two-member parties whereas in the Solomon Islands many formerly party-affiliated candidates adjusted by contesting as independents. In PNG, the law was one of a range of devices aimed at strengthening incumbent governments, but money politics and manipulation of parliamentary procedure proved more significant. Core anti-defection provisions in the new law were ruled unconstitutional in 2010, but other still valid clauses preserved an advantage for the “largest party” in government formation. In the Solomon Islands, the law created a shadow world of free-floating individuals able to switch at liberty between formally constrained hermit crab shell parties. In neither country did these laws succeed in strengthening party systems.

NATO's unified command structure affords the US Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff influence in transatlantic foreign and security policy unparalleled with any other region. This, as Stephen Saideman has argued, is a function of the central role the Supreme Allied Commander Europe (SACEUR) plays in Alliance decision-making. This paper explores the early development of this decision-making structure. It is argued that the structures, norms, and rules that advantage US military advice in transatlantic security and foreign policy were a function of domestic US civil-military and international bargaining in the early development of NATO institutions. In exchange for supporting new US commitments in Europe, uniformed Pentagon leadership insisted on German rearmament and a key set of provisions in the development of NATO military structures and institutions that ensured US military leadership, especially regards the duties and responsibilities of SACEUR.

Over the past century, crises have enabled the construction of Australian foreign policy orders, or sets of ideas that reduce uncertainty and stabilise interests. However, such ideas have also engendered misplaced certainty and renewed crisis. Developing a constructivist framework, I stress the ways in which ideas can over time impede the use of information and fuel instability and crises. In a staged model, I trace the construction of ties with “great and powerful friends”, their conversion in ways that fuel misplaced certainty, and the construction of crises which advance change. Empirically, I then trace the construction of an early Imperial order, misplaced certainty in UK-backed austerity and appeasement, and crises in the Great Depression and fall of Singapore.

The Kerguelen archipelago in the Southern Indian Ocean was never militarised and never posed a realistic naval threat to Australia or the British Empire during the twentieth century. However, there were two episodes, once in the Federation Era and during the Second World War, when there was debate within Australia as to whether this outlying French possession posed a threat to Australian security. By examining these periods of Australian anxiety surrounding the Kerguelen archipelago, it becomes possible to see that these concerns were more reflective of Australian strategic angst than any tangible threat posed by a remote, unpopulated, nominal French possession. This episode is an example of a broader Australian angst in the early and mid-twentieth century that remote colonial possessions could be weaponised to isolate Australia and threaten it. The Kerguelens represent one of the most peculiar examples of the manifestations of Australian strategic insecurity.

In August 1974, the Australian Labor Party Government under Prime Minister Gough Whitlam announced it had recognised the incorporation of the Baltic states into the Soviet Union de jure. Historical writing around this diplomatic recognition is scarce and sheds little light on why the policy was enacted. Using previously unavailable archival evidence, as well as other sources including testimony from Government and public service workers, this article demonstrates that the recognition was induced primarily by Whitlam, the Department of Foreign Affairs, and Sir James Plimsoll, Australia's ambassador to the Soviet Union. These actors were motivated by varying considerations. These included an adherence to realist foreign policy principles, concerns regarding Australian–Soviet bi-lateral relations, convictions around the legitimacy of Baltic self-determination, and ethnic prejudice against Australians of Baltic descent.

During the Cold War, defectors from the Russian Intelligence Services to the West were of critical importance. They exposed and neutralised hundreds of Soviet agents who had penetrated government departments and democratic institutions. Stretching from Anatoli Granovsky in 1946 to Oleg Gordievsky in 1985, these Soviet defectors were highly prized for the intelligence they provided to security services. Ranked amongst the most valuable at the time was Vladimir Mikhailovich Petrov, who defected in Sydney in 1954. Yet he, almost alone, has overwhelmingly been cast by commentators and historians as lazy, inefficient, and incompetent. This article will offer an alternative interpretation of Petrov. My argument has three prongs. First, Petrov's contact with Russian individuals and pro-Soviet political organisations in Australia was far more extensive than generally assumed. Second, contrary to the historiographical consensus, he withheld intelligence about his contacts and informants from his security service debriefers. Third, rather than Petrov seeing espionage as too dangerous, as suggested, he was a committed and active Soviet intelligence cadre. By reappraising Petrov, the article seeks to provide a fresh understanding of this key episode, the Petrov Affair, in Australia's Cold War history.