澳大利亚的太平洋心态:历史基础

IF 0.6 4区 社会学 Q1 HISTORY Australian Journal of Politics and History Pub Date : 2023-05-31 DOI:10.1111/ajph.12910
Ian Kemish
{"title":"澳大利亚的太平洋心态:历史基础","authors":"Ian Kemish","doi":"10.1111/ajph.12910","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>Early in the 2022 Australian election campaign, in an address to the Lowy Institute in Sydney, then-Prime Minister Scott Morrison went out of his way to characterise Australia's regional neighbourhood as a geo-strategic theatre brimming with threats from a foreign power. He identified China, which had joined Russia in declaring a “no-limits” partnership shortly before the Ukraine invasion two weeks previously, as the key threat to the peaceful status quo in the region. He highlighted Beijing's expanding militarisation, along with “espionage, disinformation, cyber-attacks, foreign interference, and economic coercion.” Morrison said that China was becoming more assertive “in ways that are causing concern to nations across the region” and underlined that Australia's future was “inextricably linked” with those of the Pacific Island countries (PICs) to Australia's north and east.1</p><p>The Pacific is not usually an election focus in Australia — the region generally attracts only limited Australian media coverage. But the coalition government's decision to play the national security card, trumpeting its “Pacific step-up” program,2 combined with the subsequent revelation that Solomon Islands had secretly finalised a security agreement with China on the coalition's watch, was to ensure that the Pacific became a battleground in the struggle to win government. The Labor opposition bought into the prevailing national security narrative, seizing on the Government's discomfort over events in Solomon Islands. Shadow Foreign Minister Penny Wong told the media that “on Scott Morrison's watch, our region has become less secure.”3 Morrison continued to speak about the challenges arising from China's “intense” approaches to the PICs, warning in early April that “these threats still remain.”4 Labor brought forward a substantial new set of Pacific policies mid-campaign, positioning it well for intense, positive diplomatic engagement with the region in the early post-election period, led by Wong as Foreign Minister for the new government.5</p><p>The unusual domestic political focus on the Pacific led the mainstream Australian media into unfamiliar territory. With some exceptions, the intensive reporting that ensued in Australian outlets — and much of the accompanying commentary from Australian public figures — reflected little detailed knowledge of the Pacific itself. The region was often made to sound like nothing more than a vacant expanse full of risk, where China was locked in a dangerous contest with the West, led by Australia as its chief representative in the region.6 Little attention was given to the people of the region themselves — the challenges they face, their priorities, and their aspirations.</p><p>All this seemed to confirm the sense that Australian public interest in the Pacific is only aroused when other major powers are threatening to move in on our “backyard” — to use a habitual, neo-colonialist term that was redeployed regularly during the campaign. In other words, that <i>strategic denial</i> is the overwhelming motivation or instinct underlying both the Australian Government's approach and the Australian public mindset where the Pacific is concerned. In 2022 this built on a strong sense among Pacific islanders that the Australian Government, like the rest of the international community, had not been taking seriously their own aspirations and overriding preoccupations, particularly their concerns about climate change,7 described by regional leaders in their 2018 Pacific Island Forum (PIF) security declaration as “the single greatest threat to the livelihoods, security and well-being of the peoples of the Pacific.”8</p><p>It might be argued that it was natural for Australian public commentary about the Pacific during the 2022 campaign to focus almost exclusively on the “geo-strategic contest” playing out in the region, given the partisan contest that was playing out in Australia about China, and the broader global security context of the time. The Australian media were naturally most interested in the competing national security credentials of the two domestic political sides, and as we will explore later, there are also legitimate reasons for concern about China's approach to the Pacific, many of which are shared by regional leaders. And China's undoubtedly more active posture in the region, combined with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, made the geo-strategic picture an important story of public interest.</p><p>But the Australian media narrative also reflects an entrenched Australian cultural view about the Pacific in which our politicians and administrators participate, along with the broader public. There are longstanding historical foundations for the depiction of the Pacific as only a place of threat, rather than collaboration or opportunity, and the near-exclusive accompanying focus on denying strategic space to a foreign power which we believe represent threats to our interests and values. A review of the historical record confirms that these anxious elements had become integral to Australians' thinking about their place in the world by Australia's early post-federation years. In fact, a focus on strategic denial was present from the very beginning of the Australian colonial project, and this was strengthened further through the nineteenth century by the colonies' strong sense of isolation and the repeated foreign threats they experienced — or at least perceived — as manifesting in the Pacific region. Indeed, as we shall see, concerns about foreign threats to the security of Australia's place in the Pacific played an important role in stimulating the very drive towards Australian nationhood.</p><p>Denying the Pacific to others can be identified as among the motivations behind the decision to establish the New South Wales colony in the first place. The earliest proponents of the project argued that it would provide a base from which to attack Spanish commerce in the ocean and contribute to the defeat of Spanish America.9 Shaw, Blainey, and others have contended that that the motivations also included a desire to deny French occupation of what was to become Australia.10 In requesting the formal agreement of the East India company to the colony's establishment in 1786, British Home Secretary Lord Sydney noted that Botany Bay was within the company's area of trading monopoly and argued that it would “be a means of preventing the emigration of Our European Neighbours to that Quarter, which might be attended with infinite prejudice to the company's affairs.”11</p><p>The first Australian administrators understood that they had been charged by their imperial masters with authority over the Pacific. Governor Arthur Philip's appointment made him “Governor in Chief” of not only the eastern half of the Australian continent, but also “the islands adjacent in the Pacific Ocean within the latitudes aforesaid of 10°37′ South, and 43°39′ South,” a vast expanse of ocean radiating out from the eastern coastline between Cape York in the north and the southern tip of Tasmania.12 Here lay the seeds of an attitude of Australian “ownership” towards the Pacific. The Sydney colony conducted expeditions to Norfolk Island under this authority in its earliest years, and New Zealand effectively became a <i>de facto</i> extension of New South Wales in the first decades of the nineteenth century. More than two decades after Philip's arrival one of his successors, Lachlan Macquarie, referenced the terms of the original appointment in asserting his legal authority over far-flung Tahiti, after he had appointed a magistrate there to help maintain law and order.13</p><p>The first several decades of the nineteenth century saw the Australian colonies respond with anxiety to a series of strategic threats, real or perceived, from foreign powers in the Pacific. France and Britain had been competitors for regional exploration and new settlement in the late eighteenth century, with numerous French Pacific discoveries claimed through the period. The arrival of La Perouse and his ships in Botany Bay in January 1788, just as Philip was moving the first fleet into Sydney harbour, reflected this pattern of activity. New South Wales was established almost on the eve of the French revolution, and the subsequent prolonged war against Emperor Bonaparte came to be the overriding preoccupation for the British authorities in the early 1800s, as the new colony was finding its feet. Concerns about French interest in Australia drove an expansion of the British colony in this period. French explorers had been encountered in the Pacific. Thus, to secure any strategic locations within the southern station of the Pacific Ocean which might have been of use to France, Governor King dispatched an expedition to settle Van Diemen's Land in 1803.14</p><p>In fact, French exploration activity in the Pacific was severely curtailed in the years after the revolution, leaving the field more open to the British. But this period saw France reaffirmed in the public mind as Britain's traditional enemy, and suspicions lingered. Even in 1826, rumours of plans for a French colony in Western Australia drove British authorities to establish their own.15 This concern would not dissipate in the colonies as France moved from the 1840s onwards to establish possessions or protectorates from Tahiti to New Caledonia, New Hebrides, Wallis, and Futuna.</p><p>This was the period of the “Great Game” in south and central Asia, when Russian expansion stoked fears for British India; when Moscow consolidated its grip across Siberia and based a substantial Pacific fleet there to service the territory of “Russian America” (now Alaska), and to project its broader territorial designs across the ocean. Russian ships began visiting Sydney from as early as 1807, but it was in the 1830s, when Russian naval visits increased in frequency, when real alarm was first expressed in the colonial press. This intensified from 1854 to 1856 when Russia became a British enemy with the outbreak of the Crimean war, a development that stimulated significant defence activity in the colonies. The passage through nearby waters of a Russian naval squadron in 1854 led to the reorganisation of imperial forces in Australia, including the moving of military headquarters from Sydney to Melbourne and the construction of defensive batteries around Sydney harbour.17</p><p>China, had originally been seen more as trading opportunity than threat by the British planners of the Australian settlement, but a sense of danger crystallised in the colonies in the 1850s, when the discovery of gold had brought thousands of Chinese workers to Australia. Their work ethic and social habits were alien to Australian eyes, leading to a well-documented racist backlash. But in the nineteenth century China represented what has been described as a “demographic rather than military threat.”18 The Chinese state — the current Pacific preoccupation for Australian strategic thinkers — was not thought of as a threat in this way. It spent much of the century with Britain and other European powers dictating the terms of its diplomatic and trading position following the successive humiliations of the Opium Wars. Colonial fear of China was real, but it was not really of invading armies or blockading navies; rather it was of teeming millions escaping poverty by swarming down unchecked into an under-populated Australia. As the century progressed, fear of the “Yellow Peril” was to fuse with interpretations of Darwinism, to build a sense of White Australia as the bulwark of a superior civilisation.</p><p>The sense of strategic exposure was to grow in the Australian colonies in the latter half of the century, particularly after they assumed responsibility for their own defence following the withdrawal of British regular troops in 1870. These concerns were focused on a range of perceived threats in the Pacific — including, once again, from the French.</p><p>From the late 1860s onwards, Australian colonial officials and newspapers expressed strong opposition to the establishment of a French penal colony in New Caledonia. Their objections were framed in security terms — fear of escapees loomed large in the public mind, a risk highlighted by both colonial officials and the press. As others have noted, however, the reaction to this French initiative also revealed anxiety about the Australians' own recent history. Transportation to Australia finally came to an end in 1868, just as the French were commencing their own Pacific version of the scheme. Jill Donohoo argues convincingly that the Australian reaction to the French scheme should be seen as part of a larger story of post-colonial Australian convict shame.19 As the century progressed the activities of French settlers in the New Hebrides (modern-day Vanuatu) also came to be seen as threatening the security of the Melanesian Island chain, which the colonies hoped would in turn provide a bulwark against potential threats from Asia.20</p><p>The objections to French activity in the Pacific in this period were important in the development of a more independent external outlook by the Australian colonies through the last quarter of the century. Their views of France as a security threat in the Pacific increasingly differed from the strategic perspective in London, where Britain found itself needing to balance its support for the colonies with the shifting strategic dynamics in Europe. The imperial government was dealing with a rebalancing of relations between the great European powers. British relations with France were entering a new phase amidst the emergence of a united, militarily strong Germany, which was also to become a major focus of colonial concern over time.</p><p>German interest in the Pacific first emanated from the traditional Hanseatic trading centre of Hamburg. Companies based there began to develop their trading and plantation interests in Samoa in the late 1850s, spreading to the New Guinea islands in the early 1870s.21 The German government was not at all involved in these early trading ventures. Indeed, they pre-dated the formation of Germany as a unified state in 1871. And for more than a decade after unification, the leadership of the new Germany was firmly opposed to colonialism. Like their counterparts in London, officials in Berlin were focused on the major power dynamics in Europe itself.22 But the growth in German trading activity nonetheless led to a perception in the Australian colonies that Germany was a growing threat to “natural” British dominance in the region, and that New Guinea was where that threat was concentrated. The colonies of New South Wales and Queensland called intermittently on the imperial British authorities from the 1860s onwards to annex the unclaimed portion of the island of New Guinea (eastward from the boundary of the Dutch claim — essentially the territory now called Papua New Guinea). Gold discoveries near Port Moresby prompted heightened fears of foreign intervention, and occasional clashes between German plantation owners and “blackbirding” labour recruiters from Queensland did not help.23</p><p>Mutual antagonisms mounted, with German traders growing increasingly concerned about Australian demands for annexation and calling on their own government for action. An article in the German press in November 1882 caused much Australian alarm when it noted that supporters of British annexation saw the annexation of New Guinea as a national “duty,” and ventured that “perhaps we might, with quite the same right, affirm it is the duty of the German nation.”24 This formed part of the context for the decision by the Premier of Queensland — Thomas McIlwraith, a longstanding proponent of annexation — to take matters into his own hands in February of the following year, unilaterally despatching the police magistrate on Thursday Island to Port Moresby to lay claim to the territory on behalf of the empire. Henry Chester made the required declaration before the local inhabitants and bemused missionaries on 4 April 1883.25</p><p>Derby went on to comment that a “special difficulty” arose from the perception that part of the motivation for “some persons in Queensland” was to obtain “a large supply of coloured labour for the sugar plantations.”27 The British made it clear that they believed the Australian alarm about German activity in the region was overblown, and that the costs associated with New Guinea's annexation were unjustified. London also had no wish to encourage, through perceived British expansionism, an alliance of continental powers against itself. Anglo-French relations had been warming over time but were under some strain in 1883 following the British occupation of Egypt the previous year.</p><p>The convention's “Resolutions relating to the Islands of the Pacific” reflected equal concern about the regional dispositions of both Germany and France. Concerns about German activities to their north led the delegates to call for immediate steps to “secure the incorporation with the British Empire of so much of New Guinea, and the small islands adjacent thereto, as is not claimed by the Government of the Netherlands.”30 While acknowledging that Britain and France had an understanding that the New Hebrides should remain independent, the convention called for “some more definite engagement, which shall secure those islands from falling under any foreign dominion.”31</p><p>With these concerns firmly in participants' minds, the convention adopted a draft bill to establish a Federal Council of the Australasian Colonies, and within two years had convinced the imperial government to enact it as the Federal Council of Australasia Act 1885. While New South Wales and New Zealand did not join the council, this was an important step forward for an idea that had been circulating in one form or another in the colonies since the 1840s, and a key milestone on the road to federation.</p><p>Resentment over the British failure to back McIlwraith's annexation of New Guinea was not appeased in November 1884 when the British were forced to respond to the declaration of a German protectorate over northeastern New Guinea with its own protectorate over the southeast. (Bismarck had changed his position on colonialism in response to both domestic political and international considerations.) London and Berlin ultimately agreed four years later to proceed with annexation of their respective protectorates, dividing the territory between them.32</p><p>Developments continued to strengthen fears that an alien power would come to challenge British supremacy in the Pacific. A further Russian scare arose in 1885 because of a skirmish between Russian and Afghan troops in Central Asia which led in turn to a diplomatic crisis between Russia and Britain over the perceived threat to British India. Fearing that East Asia might become a battlefield in case an Anglo-Russian war broke out, the British government decided to occupy the Komundo islands off the Korean peninsula, which they referred to as Port Hamilton, to improve Britain's strategic foothold in this region.33</p><p>These combined threats led to a substantial upgrade of the colonies' own defence posture. The combined strength of permanent and part-time soldiers in the colonial forces grew from 8000 men in 1883 to a combined strength of nearly 22,000 in 1885. This has been described as a more significant event in colonial military history than the more famous decision to despatch an Australian colonial contingent to Sudan in March 1885 as part of the imperial intervention there.34 Interestingly, this contribution was opposed by figures such as Henry Parkes, then in opposition in New South Wales, on the basis that Australians should not blindly support imperial operations when events in New Guinea had shown they were unable to influence the determination of imperial policy.</p><p>The defence of the Australian colonies was an important subject for discussion at the First Colonial Conference held in London in 1887. The renewed Russian and British concerns about French designs on Egypt, and Australian worries about the Pacific, led to an agreement between the governments of Britain, Australia, and New Zealand to establish an auxiliary naval squadron in Australian waters. The colonies also found agreement with London that there should be a formal review of the defence capabilities of the Australian colonies — a task undertaken by Major General Bevan Edwards in 1889. Edwards judged that, without unification of Australia's military forces and a major defence upgrade, Australia was vulnerable to attack. He pointed directly to the situation between the great European powers at the time in making his point. During his visit to Sydney Edwards had several discussions with Sir Henry Parkes, now re-elected as premier of New South Wales and increasingly focused on federation as a personal legacy.35</p><p>Parkes clearly saw the benefit of Edwards' report to his cause. He drew on it in his famous Tenterfield speech of December 1899 to argue that federation would enable the colonies' militias to unite as a single national army under the command of a single national government.36 The federalist cause gathered momentum, with the Australian federal conference of the following year leading to the ultimately successful referenda held in the last years of the decade, and the declaration of a federated Australia in January 1901.</p><p>In a strictly military sense, Asian threats only impinged on Australian consciousness as Japan's militarisation peaked in the 1890s.37 Industrial modernisation had begun with the social reforms associated with the Meiji Restoration of 1868. A large Japanese conscript army was firmly established by the 1880s, and a major multi-year naval expansion began in 1882. In the mid-1890s Japan inflicted its own humiliating defeat over China in the first Sino-Japanese war, establishing Japanese dominance over the Korean peninsula, Manchuria, and the Chinese coastline. It then proceeded to launch an invasion of Taiwan. In the last years of the century, while Australian colonies were debating the constitutional principles to underpin their federal union, it was becoming abundantly clear that the balance of power between China and Japan had shifted substantially in the latter's favour.</p><p>Hoskins makes the persuasive point that “if Pacific security created the first fissure in the bedrock of shared Australian and British interest, race created the second.”38 Britain, still mindful of the need to counter Russian expansionism in the East, responded pragmatically to Japan's rise of this new force in the region. The Anglo-Japanese Treaty of Commerce and Navigation, which came into effect in 1899, established reciprocal rights of entry between Japan and Britain, including its colonies. This principle clashed with the emergent White Australia Policy — the strong colonial view, so clearly expressed by Parkes himself, that they had “sacred obligation” to prevent the “admixture of Asian blood” in Australia. This view was to gain full federal expression in the <i>Immigration Restriction Act</i> of 1901, and the infamous dictation test established under this act as the Australian way of getting around London's concerns about exclusion based on skin colour — which, among other things, would have breached Britain's treaty commitments to Japan.39</p><p>The commercial treaty between Japan and Britain was only the first step towards the formation of a substantial Anglo-Japanese alliance which would be formalised in a defence treaty between the two powers in 1902 and last until after the First World War. The decision of the mother country to align itself with this “Asian threat” was to remain the source of considerable consternation in Australia through the post-federation years.</p><p>Press and parliamentary debate from the early post-Federation period confirms that a concern to manage international security threats was by now central to the Australian mindset about the Pacific, almost to the exclusion of any other considerations. Several other characteristics of today's debate about national security were also in place. Even then, arguments in favour of greater national sovereignty in defence jostled with the belief that Australia's security interests were best preserved through alliance with a major power that shared what we would describe today as our values. In the early twentieth century, though, the bonds were characterised in unapologetic, racial terms.</p><p>Many of the debates in the early Australian parliaments were devoted to the question of whether and how British Pacific possessions should be transferred under Australian administration. There was some discussion about taking on responsibility for Fiji and Solomon Islands, and Prime Minister Barton even volunteered to parliament that if “steps were taken to acquire New Guinea […] the Government will favour placing of the Solomon Islands under Commonwealth control at the same time.”42 Ultimately, Australia declined the British offer to transfer responsibility for the group, and London was also content to retain direct control of Fiji.</p><p>British New Guinea, or Papua, was the clearest-cut case. It was readily enough accepted that the Commonwealth of Australia should take on a colony which some described as essentially an extension of the Australian mainland. There was some reluctance, however, to take on the actual financial responsibility associated with the administration of Papua. Quibbling about the proposed extent of the Australian states' funding contribution moved the Secretary of State for the Colonies to recall pointedly that the annexation of British New Guinea had taken place at the Australians' urging.43 The colonies had been much more enthusiastic, less than twenty years earlier, about denying others access to New Guinea, than they were to accept the administrative burden associated with its colonial management.</p><p>Today, strategic commentators express grave concern about China's desire for global projection and note that a Chinese navy capable of projecting serious power across the world would also need to be supported by bases in the Pacific. Vanuatu, formerly New Hebrides, is still commonly identified as having highly suitable locations for any such Pacific naval base and is assessed as being vulnerable to Chinese influence given the extent of its government's financial indebtedness to Beijing.</p><p>Referring to the Pacific as Australia's “backyard” was commonplace among Australian politicians and the media until 2022, when senior Pacific leaders such as former Fijian Prime Minister Bainimarama angrily rejected the terminology as betraying a patronising sense of ownership. This underlying attitude was, of course, being expressed without apology in the immediate post-federation era. There were clear calls in the very first federal parliament for an exclusive Australian zone of influence in the Pacific — a concept sometimes described as “an Australian Monroe Doctrine” after the US policy, first espoused in 1823, which opposed further European colonialism in the American hemisphere.</p><p>John Curtin's seminal “Look to America” speech, made more than thirty years later following the fall of British Singapore to Japanese forces, is generally regarded as the moment when Australia first signalled an intention to move on from its strategic dependence on Britain, and to seek to preserve its security through alignment with the United States. It is less well remembered today that in 1908, when the Japanese threat was not yet entirely “clear and present,” Prime Minister Deakin invited the US navy to conduct a high-profile visit to Australian ports to send a clear signal to militarised Japan that Australia had powerful friends. Deakin had not consulted London. While the British had granted him power to negotiate commercial treaties at the colonial conference the previous year, his request for greater involvement in the development of imperial foreign policy had been refused, and he was evidently keen to test the boundaries.</p><p>The Governor-General wrote to the Secretary of State for Colonies in London that “hundreds of thousands of people lined the shores of Port Jackson” and showed “unbounded enthusiasm” for the fleet's visit. He said that he was “credibly informed that the number of people who took part in the welcome constituted the largest gathering at any time in the history of New South Wales.”50</p><p>Leaving aside the obvious changes in language and style (especially the unconstrained expression of racial prejudice), these comments find their reflection today in the views of those Australians who argue for greater strategic autonomy today. This debate re-emerged most recently in February 2023, after the implementation plan was announced for the delivery of nuclear-powered submarine capability to Australia under the Australia-UK-United States (AUKUS) arrangement. Prime Minister Albanese and Defence Minister Richard Marles were both forced to reject claims by former prime ministers Keating and Turnbull that the plan would undermine the nation's sovereignty. And since the original announcement of the AUKUS pact by the Morrison Government in 2022, Australian defence expert Hugh White has argued that the agreement — and Australia's faith in America's willingness and ability to come to its aid — is encouraging a false sense of security.52</p><p>Of course, there is no mention, or even speculation, in the public commentary of the early twentieth century about what the people of the Pacific might have thought about it all. That this would even be a consideration would probably not have occurred to them. The near-absence of Pacific perspectives in the Australian press during the 2022 campaign suggests, worryingly, that our perspective has still not evolved far enough.</p><p>By the early 1900s, then, a national way of thinking had become entrenched which saw the Pacific in much the way Scott Morrison depicted it in his March 2022 Lowy speech — a vast, empty, threatening region where the involvement of an alien power, almost by definition, threatened Australian security interests. While we do not intend to consider the events of the intervening twentieth century in any detail, it is worth acknowledging three important developments in our post-federation history which helped shape further, and to some extent refined, the current national mindset.</p><p>First, the fears that our first federal leaders held about Japan ultimately came to pass in the 1930s and 1940s, when resource hunger and imperial expansionism combined with other global factors to bring about further Sino-Japanese conflict and then a full-scale Japanese war against the United States and its allies — including Australia. The existential battles fought across the Pacific in the early 1940s played an obvious and important role in shaping Australia's defence posture today — and its misgivings about threats that might manifest themselves in the Pacific.</p><p>Second, there has of course been a major shift in regional power dynamics between China and Japan. The communist authorities that took power in China only four years after the total defeat of Japan set their country on an uneven but highly successful road of national economic development, and by the early twenty-first century it had emerged as the second largest economy in the world. China had also become a major international military power, with a blue water navy keen to identify staging ports in the Pacific to support the extension of its global reach. Public surveys indicate that its increasingly aggressive approach in relation to regional security issues such as Taiwan and the South China Sea, and in response to bilateral disputes with Canberra and others, has contributed substantially to an erosion of Australian trust in China in recent years.53 Other surveys indicated that the racism which characterised early reactions to Chinese in Australia continues to linger in our society.54</p><p>Japan, by contrast, has come to be seen by Australians as a strong alliance partner, sharing their democratic standards and respect for the rule of law. Bilateral defence collaboration between the two countries is proceeding apace, as is plurilateral cooperation through the Quad alliance with India and the United States. Japan has also come to be recognised as a mature and substantial contributor to development in the Pacific.</p><p>Third, Australia's own relationships with the countries of the Pacific evolved very substantially over the century. Australia administered Papua New Guinea and Nauru directly for decades. While criticisms can certainly be made about the quality of the colonial experience there, Australia ultimately respected their drive to independence and joined the rest of the international community in respecting self-determination for other countries of the region. Australia has not always escaped criticism for its subsequent policies towards the region — climate change and labour market access continue to be sore points today. But over time, successive governments in Canberra have worked, in bipartisan spirit, to support PIC national development aspirations through the investment of billions of aid dollars. They have also helped run elections, repeatedly delivered disaster relief, and mounted stabilisation missions in regional hot spots.55</p><p>It should also be acknowledged that there has been substantial development in Australian diplomatic capabilities and expertise in relation to the Pacific, and this has been matched over time by improved attitudes and messaging from our politicians. There appears to have been a further step forward in very recent times in this sense, with Australia's current leaders appearing more mindful than their immediate predecessors that they are dealing with a region whose inhabitants have their own views, and their own agency. They have been more careful to project a respectful approach to regional partnerships, consistently emphasising that they want to “listen” to partners' concerns.56 With its somewhat more forward-leaning domestic approach to climate change, the Labor government has also been better positioned to signal that it takes seriously the PICs' concerns about global warming, although there remains some scepticism about Australia's resolve to abandon fossil fuels.57</p><p>However, as we have seen, the echoes of our early years still ring in our contemporary public discussion about the Pacific, contributing to an often-insecure, commonly narrow, projection of public views about the region.</p><p>This really matters. The resulting sense, that Australians are more interested in excluding others from the Pacific than they are in the region itself, is regrettable because it devalues the collective efforts of generations of Australian diplomats, soldiers, aid specialists, traders and even politicians who have engaged the region in open and positive spirit. It also ignores the thousands of people who are connected through family, cultural and other historic ties with both Australia and the Pacific.</p><p>The adverse perception we encourage through our public discourse also risks undermining legitimate Australian diplomatic efforts to build constructive influence in the region and, in the process, to manage the actual detrimental effects of Chinese influence. Showing support for the PICs as they progress their own priorities and aspirations does not require ignoring the risks which, many Pacific leaders agree, come with the expansion of Chinese activity. In some countries of the region, civil society representatives are concerned that Beijing's aggressive public information activities threaten to undermine media freedoms,58 and point to a lack of transparency in the links between Beijing and some leaders in the region.59 Others worry that Chinese training activities for military and police forces in the region will undermine their commitment to respecting freedom of speech and the right to demonstrate.60 Chinese engagement with each of the region's standing military forces — in Fiji, PNG, Tonga, and Vanuatu — has undoubtedly increased, and there is little reason to believe that the assertive maritime strategies that have underpinned China's actions elsewhere are not also guiding Beijing's approach in the Pacific.</p><p>The current government's predecessors, stretching back to the early colonial administrators, were not necessarily always wrong in pointing to the potential security threats arising from the activities of non-aligned or hostile powers in the Pacific. Australia's very real war with Japan in the mid-twentieth century, and China's recent aggressive behaviour in the region, should alone encourage us to remain wary about these kinds of risks. But some of our other, earlier fears probably say more about us than they do about the region. In any case, the real failing, then and now, has been to project <i>only</i> these concerns in the way we talk to, and about the Pacific. Even if the aim were only to build our own influence in the region, it is important to recognise the people who live there and to respect their perspective, which prioritises human development and the risks associated with climate change above strategic rivalries among the great and middle powers. It turns out that the Pacific is not a vacant expanse after all.</p>","PeriodicalId":45431,"journal":{"name":"Australian Journal of Politics and History","volume":"69 2","pages":"390-404"},"PeriodicalIF":0.6000,"publicationDate":"2023-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ajph.12910","citationCount":"0","resultStr":"{\"title\":\"Australia's Pacific Mindset: Historical Foundations\",\"authors\":\"Ian Kemish\",\"doi\":\"10.1111/ajph.12910\",\"DOIUrl\":null,\"url\":null,\"abstract\":\"<p>Early in the 2022 Australian election campaign, in an address to the Lowy Institute in Sydney, then-Prime Minister Scott Morrison went out of his way to characterise Australia's regional neighbourhood as a geo-strategic theatre brimming with threats from a foreign power. He identified China, which had joined Russia in declaring a “no-limits” partnership shortly before the Ukraine invasion two weeks previously, as the key threat to the peaceful status quo in the region. He highlighted Beijing's expanding militarisation, along with “espionage, disinformation, cyber-attacks, foreign interference, and economic coercion.” Morrison said that China was becoming more assertive “in ways that are causing concern to nations across the region” and underlined that Australia's future was “inextricably linked” with those of the Pacific Island countries (PICs) to Australia's north and east.1</p><p>The Pacific is not usually an election focus in Australia — the region generally attracts only limited Australian media coverage. But the coalition government's decision to play the national security card, trumpeting its “Pacific step-up” program,2 combined with the subsequent revelation that Solomon Islands had secretly finalised a security agreement with China on the coalition's watch, was to ensure that the Pacific became a battleground in the struggle to win government. The Labor opposition bought into the prevailing national security narrative, seizing on the Government's discomfort over events in Solomon Islands. Shadow Foreign Minister Penny Wong told the media that “on Scott Morrison's watch, our region has become less secure.”3 Morrison continued to speak about the challenges arising from China's “intense” approaches to the PICs, warning in early April that “these threats still remain.”4 Labor brought forward a substantial new set of Pacific policies mid-campaign, positioning it well for intense, positive diplomatic engagement with the region in the early post-election period, led by Wong as Foreign Minister for the new government.5</p><p>The unusual domestic political focus on the Pacific led the mainstream Australian media into unfamiliar territory. With some exceptions, the intensive reporting that ensued in Australian outlets — and much of the accompanying commentary from Australian public figures — reflected little detailed knowledge of the Pacific itself. The region was often made to sound like nothing more than a vacant expanse full of risk, where China was locked in a dangerous contest with the West, led by Australia as its chief representative in the region.6 Little attention was given to the people of the region themselves — the challenges they face, their priorities, and their aspirations.</p><p>All this seemed to confirm the sense that Australian public interest in the Pacific is only aroused when other major powers are threatening to move in on our “backyard” — to use a habitual, neo-colonialist term that was redeployed regularly during the campaign. In other words, that <i>strategic denial</i> is the overwhelming motivation or instinct underlying both the Australian Government's approach and the Australian public mindset where the Pacific is concerned. In 2022 this built on a strong sense among Pacific islanders that the Australian Government, like the rest of the international community, had not been taking seriously their own aspirations and overriding preoccupations, particularly their concerns about climate change,7 described by regional leaders in their 2018 Pacific Island Forum (PIF) security declaration as “the single greatest threat to the livelihoods, security and well-being of the peoples of the Pacific.”8</p><p>It might be argued that it was natural for Australian public commentary about the Pacific during the 2022 campaign to focus almost exclusively on the “geo-strategic contest” playing out in the region, given the partisan contest that was playing out in Australia about China, and the broader global security context of the time. The Australian media were naturally most interested in the competing national security credentials of the two domestic political sides, and as we will explore later, there are also legitimate reasons for concern about China's approach to the Pacific, many of which are shared by regional leaders. And China's undoubtedly more active posture in the region, combined with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, made the geo-strategic picture an important story of public interest.</p><p>But the Australian media narrative also reflects an entrenched Australian cultural view about the Pacific in which our politicians and administrators participate, along with the broader public. There are longstanding historical foundations for the depiction of the Pacific as only a place of threat, rather than collaboration or opportunity, and the near-exclusive accompanying focus on denying strategic space to a foreign power which we believe represent threats to our interests and values. A review of the historical record confirms that these anxious elements had become integral to Australians' thinking about their place in the world by Australia's early post-federation years. In fact, a focus on strategic denial was present from the very beginning of the Australian colonial project, and this was strengthened further through the nineteenth century by the colonies' strong sense of isolation and the repeated foreign threats they experienced — or at least perceived — as manifesting in the Pacific region. Indeed, as we shall see, concerns about foreign threats to the security of Australia's place in the Pacific played an important role in stimulating the very drive towards Australian nationhood.</p><p>Denying the Pacific to others can be identified as among the motivations behind the decision to establish the New South Wales colony in the first place. The earliest proponents of the project argued that it would provide a base from which to attack Spanish commerce in the ocean and contribute to the defeat of Spanish America.9 Shaw, Blainey, and others have contended that that the motivations also included a desire to deny French occupation of what was to become Australia.10 In requesting the formal agreement of the East India company to the colony's establishment in 1786, British Home Secretary Lord Sydney noted that Botany Bay was within the company's area of trading monopoly and argued that it would “be a means of preventing the emigration of Our European Neighbours to that Quarter, which might be attended with infinite prejudice to the company's affairs.”11</p><p>The first Australian administrators understood that they had been charged by their imperial masters with authority over the Pacific. Governor Arthur Philip's appointment made him “Governor in Chief” of not only the eastern half of the Australian continent, but also “the islands adjacent in the Pacific Ocean within the latitudes aforesaid of 10°37′ South, and 43°39′ South,” a vast expanse of ocean radiating out from the eastern coastline between Cape York in the north and the southern tip of Tasmania.12 Here lay the seeds of an attitude of Australian “ownership” towards the Pacific. The Sydney colony conducted expeditions to Norfolk Island under this authority in its earliest years, and New Zealand effectively became a <i>de facto</i> extension of New South Wales in the first decades of the nineteenth century. More than two decades after Philip's arrival one of his successors, Lachlan Macquarie, referenced the terms of the original appointment in asserting his legal authority over far-flung Tahiti, after he had appointed a magistrate there to help maintain law and order.13</p><p>The first several decades of the nineteenth century saw the Australian colonies respond with anxiety to a series of strategic threats, real or perceived, from foreign powers in the Pacific. France and Britain had been competitors for regional exploration and new settlement in the late eighteenth century, with numerous French Pacific discoveries claimed through the period. The arrival of La Perouse and his ships in Botany Bay in January 1788, just as Philip was moving the first fleet into Sydney harbour, reflected this pattern of activity. New South Wales was established almost on the eve of the French revolution, and the subsequent prolonged war against Emperor Bonaparte came to be the overriding preoccupation for the British authorities in the early 1800s, as the new colony was finding its feet. Concerns about French interest in Australia drove an expansion of the British colony in this period. French explorers had been encountered in the Pacific. Thus, to secure any strategic locations within the southern station of the Pacific Ocean which might have been of use to France, Governor King dispatched an expedition to settle Van Diemen's Land in 1803.14</p><p>In fact, French exploration activity in the Pacific was severely curtailed in the years after the revolution, leaving the field more open to the British. But this period saw France reaffirmed in the public mind as Britain's traditional enemy, and suspicions lingered. Even in 1826, rumours of plans for a French colony in Western Australia drove British authorities to establish their own.15 This concern would not dissipate in the colonies as France moved from the 1840s onwards to establish possessions or protectorates from Tahiti to New Caledonia, New Hebrides, Wallis, and Futuna.</p><p>This was the period of the “Great Game” in south and central Asia, when Russian expansion stoked fears for British India; when Moscow consolidated its grip across Siberia and based a substantial Pacific fleet there to service the territory of “Russian America” (now Alaska), and to project its broader territorial designs across the ocean. Russian ships began visiting Sydney from as early as 1807, but it was in the 1830s, when Russian naval visits increased in frequency, when real alarm was first expressed in the colonial press. This intensified from 1854 to 1856 when Russia became a British enemy with the outbreak of the Crimean war, a development that stimulated significant defence activity in the colonies. The passage through nearby waters of a Russian naval squadron in 1854 led to the reorganisation of imperial forces in Australia, including the moving of military headquarters from Sydney to Melbourne and the construction of defensive batteries around Sydney harbour.17</p><p>China, had originally been seen more as trading opportunity than threat by the British planners of the Australian settlement, but a sense of danger crystallised in the colonies in the 1850s, when the discovery of gold had brought thousands of Chinese workers to Australia. Their work ethic and social habits were alien to Australian eyes, leading to a well-documented racist backlash. But in the nineteenth century China represented what has been described as a “demographic rather than military threat.”18 The Chinese state — the current Pacific preoccupation for Australian strategic thinkers — was not thought of as a threat in this way. It spent much of the century with Britain and other European powers dictating the terms of its diplomatic and trading position following the successive humiliations of the Opium Wars. Colonial fear of China was real, but it was not really of invading armies or blockading navies; rather it was of teeming millions escaping poverty by swarming down unchecked into an under-populated Australia. As the century progressed, fear of the “Yellow Peril” was to fuse with interpretations of Darwinism, to build a sense of White Australia as the bulwark of a superior civilisation.</p><p>The sense of strategic exposure was to grow in the Australian colonies in the latter half of the century, particularly after they assumed responsibility for their own defence following the withdrawal of British regular troops in 1870. These concerns were focused on a range of perceived threats in the Pacific — including, once again, from the French.</p><p>From the late 1860s onwards, Australian colonial officials and newspapers expressed strong opposition to the establishment of a French penal colony in New Caledonia. Their objections were framed in security terms — fear of escapees loomed large in the public mind, a risk highlighted by both colonial officials and the press. As others have noted, however, the reaction to this French initiative also revealed anxiety about the Australians' own recent history. Transportation to Australia finally came to an end in 1868, just as the French were commencing their own Pacific version of the scheme. Jill Donohoo argues convincingly that the Australian reaction to the French scheme should be seen as part of a larger story of post-colonial Australian convict shame.19 As the century progressed the activities of French settlers in the New Hebrides (modern-day Vanuatu) also came to be seen as threatening the security of the Melanesian Island chain, which the colonies hoped would in turn provide a bulwark against potential threats from Asia.20</p><p>The objections to French activity in the Pacific in this period were important in the development of a more independent external outlook by the Australian colonies through the last quarter of the century. Their views of France as a security threat in the Pacific increasingly differed from the strategic perspective in London, where Britain found itself needing to balance its support for the colonies with the shifting strategic dynamics in Europe. The imperial government was dealing with a rebalancing of relations between the great European powers. British relations with France were entering a new phase amidst the emergence of a united, militarily strong Germany, which was also to become a major focus of colonial concern over time.</p><p>German interest in the Pacific first emanated from the traditional Hanseatic trading centre of Hamburg. Companies based there began to develop their trading and plantation interests in Samoa in the late 1850s, spreading to the New Guinea islands in the early 1870s.21 The German government was not at all involved in these early trading ventures. Indeed, they pre-dated the formation of Germany as a unified state in 1871. And for more than a decade after unification, the leadership of the new Germany was firmly opposed to colonialism. Like their counterparts in London, officials in Berlin were focused on the major power dynamics in Europe itself.22 But the growth in German trading activity nonetheless led to a perception in the Australian colonies that Germany was a growing threat to “natural” British dominance in the region, and that New Guinea was where that threat was concentrated. The colonies of New South Wales and Queensland called intermittently on the imperial British authorities from the 1860s onwards to annex the unclaimed portion of the island of New Guinea (eastward from the boundary of the Dutch claim — essentially the territory now called Papua New Guinea). Gold discoveries near Port Moresby prompted heightened fears of foreign intervention, and occasional clashes between German plantation owners and “blackbirding” labour recruiters from Queensland did not help.23</p><p>Mutual antagonisms mounted, with German traders growing increasingly concerned about Australian demands for annexation and calling on their own government for action. An article in the German press in November 1882 caused much Australian alarm when it noted that supporters of British annexation saw the annexation of New Guinea as a national “duty,” and ventured that “perhaps we might, with quite the same right, affirm it is the duty of the German nation.”24 This formed part of the context for the decision by the Premier of Queensland — Thomas McIlwraith, a longstanding proponent of annexation — to take matters into his own hands in February of the following year, unilaterally despatching the police magistrate on Thursday Island to Port Moresby to lay claim to the territory on behalf of the empire. Henry Chester made the required declaration before the local inhabitants and bemused missionaries on 4 April 1883.25</p><p>Derby went on to comment that a “special difficulty” arose from the perception that part of the motivation for “some persons in Queensland” was to obtain “a large supply of coloured labour for the sugar plantations.”27 The British made it clear that they believed the Australian alarm about German activity in the region was overblown, and that the costs associated with New Guinea's annexation were unjustified. London also had no wish to encourage, through perceived British expansionism, an alliance of continental powers against itself. Anglo-French relations had been warming over time but were under some strain in 1883 following the British occupation of Egypt the previous year.</p><p>The convention's “Resolutions relating to the Islands of the Pacific” reflected equal concern about the regional dispositions of both Germany and France. Concerns about German activities to their north led the delegates to call for immediate steps to “secure the incorporation with the British Empire of so much of New Guinea, and the small islands adjacent thereto, as is not claimed by the Government of the Netherlands.”30 While acknowledging that Britain and France had an understanding that the New Hebrides should remain independent, the convention called for “some more definite engagement, which shall secure those islands from falling under any foreign dominion.”31</p><p>With these concerns firmly in participants' minds, the convention adopted a draft bill to establish a Federal Council of the Australasian Colonies, and within two years had convinced the imperial government to enact it as the Federal Council of Australasia Act 1885. While New South Wales and New Zealand did not join the council, this was an important step forward for an idea that had been circulating in one form or another in the colonies since the 1840s, and a key milestone on the road to federation.</p><p>Resentment over the British failure to back McIlwraith's annexation of New Guinea was not appeased in November 1884 when the British were forced to respond to the declaration of a German protectorate over northeastern New Guinea with its own protectorate over the southeast. (Bismarck had changed his position on colonialism in response to both domestic political and international considerations.) London and Berlin ultimately agreed four years later to proceed with annexation of their respective protectorates, dividing the territory between them.32</p><p>Developments continued to strengthen fears that an alien power would come to challenge British supremacy in the Pacific. A further Russian scare arose in 1885 because of a skirmish between Russian and Afghan troops in Central Asia which led in turn to a diplomatic crisis between Russia and Britain over the perceived threat to British India. Fearing that East Asia might become a battlefield in case an Anglo-Russian war broke out, the British government decided to occupy the Komundo islands off the Korean peninsula, which they referred to as Port Hamilton, to improve Britain's strategic foothold in this region.33</p><p>These combined threats led to a substantial upgrade of the colonies' own defence posture. The combined strength of permanent and part-time soldiers in the colonial forces grew from 8000 men in 1883 to a combined strength of nearly 22,000 in 1885. This has been described as a more significant event in colonial military history than the more famous decision to despatch an Australian colonial contingent to Sudan in March 1885 as part of the imperial intervention there.34 Interestingly, this contribution was opposed by figures such as Henry Parkes, then in opposition in New South Wales, on the basis that Australians should not blindly support imperial operations when events in New Guinea had shown they were unable to influence the determination of imperial policy.</p><p>The defence of the Australian colonies was an important subject for discussion at the First Colonial Conference held in London in 1887. The renewed Russian and British concerns about French designs on Egypt, and Australian worries about the Pacific, led to an agreement between the governments of Britain, Australia, and New Zealand to establish an auxiliary naval squadron in Australian waters. The colonies also found agreement with London that there should be a formal review of the defence capabilities of the Australian colonies — a task undertaken by Major General Bevan Edwards in 1889. Edwards judged that, without unification of Australia's military forces and a major defence upgrade, Australia was vulnerable to attack. He pointed directly to the situation between the great European powers at the time in making his point. During his visit to Sydney Edwards had several discussions with Sir Henry Parkes, now re-elected as premier of New South Wales and increasingly focused on federation as a personal legacy.35</p><p>Parkes clearly saw the benefit of Edwards' report to his cause. He drew on it in his famous Tenterfield speech of December 1899 to argue that federation would enable the colonies' militias to unite as a single national army under the command of a single national government.36 The federalist cause gathered momentum, with the Australian federal conference of the following year leading to the ultimately successful referenda held in the last years of the decade, and the declaration of a federated Australia in January 1901.</p><p>In a strictly military sense, Asian threats only impinged on Australian consciousness as Japan's militarisation peaked in the 1890s.37 Industrial modernisation had begun with the social reforms associated with the Meiji Restoration of 1868. A large Japanese conscript army was firmly established by the 1880s, and a major multi-year naval expansion began in 1882. In the mid-1890s Japan inflicted its own humiliating defeat over China in the first Sino-Japanese war, establishing Japanese dominance over the Korean peninsula, Manchuria, and the Chinese coastline. It then proceeded to launch an invasion of Taiwan. In the last years of the century, while Australian colonies were debating the constitutional principles to underpin their federal union, it was becoming abundantly clear that the balance of power between China and Japan had shifted substantially in the latter's favour.</p><p>Hoskins makes the persuasive point that “if Pacific security created the first fissure in the bedrock of shared Australian and British interest, race created the second.”38 Britain, still mindful of the need to counter Russian expansionism in the East, responded pragmatically to Japan's rise of this new force in the region. The Anglo-Japanese Treaty of Commerce and Navigation, which came into effect in 1899, established reciprocal rights of entry between Japan and Britain, including its colonies. This principle clashed with the emergent White Australia Policy — the strong colonial view, so clearly expressed by Parkes himself, that they had “sacred obligation” to prevent the “admixture of Asian blood” in Australia. This view was to gain full federal expression in the <i>Immigration Restriction Act</i> of 1901, and the infamous dictation test established under this act as the Australian way of getting around London's concerns about exclusion based on skin colour — which, among other things, would have breached Britain's treaty commitments to Japan.39</p><p>The commercial treaty between Japan and Britain was only the first step towards the formation of a substantial Anglo-Japanese alliance which would be formalised in a defence treaty between the two powers in 1902 and last until after the First World War. The decision of the mother country to align itself with this “Asian threat” was to remain the source of considerable consternation in Australia through the post-federation years.</p><p>Press and parliamentary debate from the early post-Federation period confirms that a concern to manage international security threats was by now central to the Australian mindset about the Pacific, almost to the exclusion of any other considerations. Several other characteristics of today's debate about national security were also in place. Even then, arguments in favour of greater national sovereignty in defence jostled with the belief that Australia's security interests were best preserved through alliance with a major power that shared what we would describe today as our values. In the early twentieth century, though, the bonds were characterised in unapologetic, racial terms.</p><p>Many of the debates in the early Australian parliaments were devoted to the question of whether and how British Pacific possessions should be transferred under Australian administration. There was some discussion about taking on responsibility for Fiji and Solomon Islands, and Prime Minister Barton even volunteered to parliament that if “steps were taken to acquire New Guinea […] the Government will favour placing of the Solomon Islands under Commonwealth control at the same time.”42 Ultimately, Australia declined the British offer to transfer responsibility for the group, and London was also content to retain direct control of Fiji.</p><p>British New Guinea, or Papua, was the clearest-cut case. It was readily enough accepted that the Commonwealth of Australia should take on a colony which some described as essentially an extension of the Australian mainland. There was some reluctance, however, to take on the actual financial responsibility associated with the administration of Papua. Quibbling about the proposed extent of the Australian states' funding contribution moved the Secretary of State for the Colonies to recall pointedly that the annexation of British New Guinea had taken place at the Australians' urging.43 The colonies had been much more enthusiastic, less than twenty years earlier, about denying others access to New Guinea, than they were to accept the administrative burden associated with its colonial management.</p><p>Today, strategic commentators express grave concern about China's desire for global projection and note that a Chinese navy capable of projecting serious power across the world would also need to be supported by bases in the Pacific. Vanuatu, formerly New Hebrides, is still commonly identified as having highly suitable locations for any such Pacific naval base and is assessed as being vulnerable to Chinese influence given the extent of its government's financial indebtedness to Beijing.</p><p>Referring to the Pacific as Australia's “backyard” was commonplace among Australian politicians and the media until 2022, when senior Pacific leaders such as former Fijian Prime Minister Bainimarama angrily rejected the terminology as betraying a patronising sense of ownership. This underlying attitude was, of course, being expressed without apology in the immediate post-federation era. There were clear calls in the very first federal parliament for an exclusive Australian zone of influence in the Pacific — a concept sometimes described as “an Australian Monroe Doctrine” after the US policy, first espoused in 1823, which opposed further European colonialism in the American hemisphere.</p><p>John Curtin's seminal “Look to America” speech, made more than thirty years later following the fall of British Singapore to Japanese forces, is generally regarded as the moment when Australia first signalled an intention to move on from its strategic dependence on Britain, and to seek to preserve its security through alignment with the United States. It is less well remembered today that in 1908, when the Japanese threat was not yet entirely “clear and present,” Prime Minister Deakin invited the US navy to conduct a high-profile visit to Australian ports to send a clear signal to militarised Japan that Australia had powerful friends. Deakin had not consulted London. While the British had granted him power to negotiate commercial treaties at the colonial conference the previous year, his request for greater involvement in the development of imperial foreign policy had been refused, and he was evidently keen to test the boundaries.</p><p>The Governor-General wrote to the Secretary of State for Colonies in London that “hundreds of thousands of people lined the shores of Port Jackson” and showed “unbounded enthusiasm” for the fleet's visit. He said that he was “credibly informed that the number of people who took part in the welcome constituted the largest gathering at any time in the history of New South Wales.”50</p><p>Leaving aside the obvious changes in language and style (especially the unconstrained expression of racial prejudice), these comments find their reflection today in the views of those Australians who argue for greater strategic autonomy today. This debate re-emerged most recently in February 2023, after the implementation plan was announced for the delivery of nuclear-powered submarine capability to Australia under the Australia-UK-United States (AUKUS) arrangement. Prime Minister Albanese and Defence Minister Richard Marles were both forced to reject claims by former prime ministers Keating and Turnbull that the plan would undermine the nation's sovereignty. And since the original announcement of the AUKUS pact by the Morrison Government in 2022, Australian defence expert Hugh White has argued that the agreement — and Australia's faith in America's willingness and ability to come to its aid — is encouraging a false sense of security.52</p><p>Of course, there is no mention, or even speculation, in the public commentary of the early twentieth century about what the people of the Pacific might have thought about it all. That this would even be a consideration would probably not have occurred to them. The near-absence of Pacific perspectives in the Australian press during the 2022 campaign suggests, worryingly, that our perspective has still not evolved far enough.</p><p>By the early 1900s, then, a national way of thinking had become entrenched which saw the Pacific in much the way Scott Morrison depicted it in his March 2022 Lowy speech — a vast, empty, threatening region where the involvement of an alien power, almost by definition, threatened Australian security interests. While we do not intend to consider the events of the intervening twentieth century in any detail, it is worth acknowledging three important developments in our post-federation history which helped shape further, and to some extent refined, the current national mindset.</p><p>First, the fears that our first federal leaders held about Japan ultimately came to pass in the 1930s and 1940s, when resource hunger and imperial expansionism combined with other global factors to bring about further Sino-Japanese conflict and then a full-scale Japanese war against the United States and its allies — including Australia. The existential battles fought across the Pacific in the early 1940s played an obvious and important role in shaping Australia's defence posture today — and its misgivings about threats that might manifest themselves in the Pacific.</p><p>Second, there has of course been a major shift in regional power dynamics between China and Japan. The communist authorities that took power in China only four years after the total defeat of Japan set their country on an uneven but highly successful road of national economic development, and by the early twenty-first century it had emerged as the second largest economy in the world. China had also become a major international military power, with a blue water navy keen to identify staging ports in the Pacific to support the extension of its global reach. Public surveys indicate that its increasingly aggressive approach in relation to regional security issues such as Taiwan and the South China Sea, and in response to bilateral disputes with Canberra and others, has contributed substantially to an erosion of Australian trust in China in recent years.53 Other surveys indicated that the racism which characterised early reactions to Chinese in Australia continues to linger in our society.54</p><p>Japan, by contrast, has come to be seen by Australians as a strong alliance partner, sharing their democratic standards and respect for the rule of law. Bilateral defence collaboration between the two countries is proceeding apace, as is plurilateral cooperation through the Quad alliance with India and the United States. Japan has also come to be recognised as a mature and substantial contributor to development in the Pacific.</p><p>Third, Australia's own relationships with the countries of the Pacific evolved very substantially over the century. Australia administered Papua New Guinea and Nauru directly for decades. While criticisms can certainly be made about the quality of the colonial experience there, Australia ultimately respected their drive to independence and joined the rest of the international community in respecting self-determination for other countries of the region. Australia has not always escaped criticism for its subsequent policies towards the region — climate change and labour market access continue to be sore points today. But over time, successive governments in Canberra have worked, in bipartisan spirit, to support PIC national development aspirations through the investment of billions of aid dollars. They have also helped run elections, repeatedly delivered disaster relief, and mounted stabilisation missions in regional hot spots.55</p><p>It should also be acknowledged that there has been substantial development in Australian diplomatic capabilities and expertise in relation to the Pacific, and this has been matched over time by improved attitudes and messaging from our politicians. There appears to have been a further step forward in very recent times in this sense, with Australia's current leaders appearing more mindful than their immediate predecessors that they are dealing with a region whose inhabitants have their own views, and their own agency. They have been more careful to project a respectful approach to regional partnerships, consistently emphasising that they want to “listen” to partners' concerns.56 With its somewhat more forward-leaning domestic approach to climate change, the Labor government has also been better positioned to signal that it takes seriously the PICs' concerns about global warming, although there remains some scepticism about Australia's resolve to abandon fossil fuels.57</p><p>However, as we have seen, the echoes of our early years still ring in our contemporary public discussion about the Pacific, contributing to an often-insecure, commonly narrow, projection of public views about the region.</p><p>This really matters. The resulting sense, that Australians are more interested in excluding others from the Pacific than they are in the region itself, is regrettable because it devalues the collective efforts of generations of Australian diplomats, soldiers, aid specialists, traders and even politicians who have engaged the region in open and positive spirit. It also ignores the thousands of people who are connected through family, cultural and other historic ties with both Australia and the Pacific.</p><p>The adverse perception we encourage through our public discourse also risks undermining legitimate Australian diplomatic efforts to build constructive influence in the region and, in the process, to manage the actual detrimental effects of Chinese influence. Showing support for the PICs as they progress their own priorities and aspirations does not require ignoring the risks which, many Pacific leaders agree, come with the expansion of Chinese activity. In some countries of the region, civil society representatives are concerned that Beijing's aggressive public information activities threaten to undermine media freedoms,58 and point to a lack of transparency in the links between Beijing and some leaders in the region.59 Others worry that Chinese training activities for military and police forces in the region will undermine their commitment to respecting freedom of speech and the right to demonstrate.60 Chinese engagement with each of the region's standing military forces — in Fiji, PNG, Tonga, and Vanuatu — has undoubtedly increased, and there is little reason to believe that the assertive maritime strategies that have underpinned China's actions elsewhere are not also guiding Beijing's approach in the Pacific.</p><p>The current government's predecessors, stretching back to the early colonial administrators, were not necessarily always wrong in pointing to the potential security threats arising from the activities of non-aligned or hostile powers in the Pacific. Australia's very real war with Japan in the mid-twentieth century, and China's recent aggressive behaviour in the region, should alone encourage us to remain wary about these kinds of risks. But some of our other, earlier fears probably say more about us than they do about the region. In any case, the real failing, then and now, has been to project <i>only</i> these concerns in the way we talk to, and about the Pacific. Even if the aim were only to build our own influence in the region, it is important to recognise the people who live there and to respect their perspective, which prioritises human development and the risks associated with climate change above strategic rivalries among the great and middle powers. It turns out that the Pacific is not a vacant expanse after all.</p>\",\"PeriodicalId\":45431,\"journal\":{\"name\":\"Australian Journal of Politics and History\",\"volume\":\"69 2\",\"pages\":\"390-404\"},\"PeriodicalIF\":0.6000,\"publicationDate\":\"2023-05-31\",\"publicationTypes\":\"Journal Article\",\"fieldsOfStudy\":null,\"isOpenAccess\":false,\"openAccessPdf\":\"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ajph.12910\",\"citationCount\":\"0\",\"resultStr\":null,\"platform\":\"Semanticscholar\",\"paperid\":null,\"PeriodicalName\":\"Australian Journal of Politics and History\",\"FirstCategoryId\":\"98\",\"ListUrlMain\":\"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ajph.12910\",\"RegionNum\":4,\"RegionCategory\":\"社会学\",\"ArticlePicture\":[],\"TitleCN\":null,\"AbstractTextCN\":null,\"PMCID\":null,\"EPubDate\":\"\",\"PubModel\":\"\",\"JCR\":\"Q1\",\"JCRName\":\"HISTORY\",\"Score\":null,\"Total\":0}","platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Australian Journal of Politics and History","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ajph.12910","RegionNum":4,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"HISTORY","Score":null,"Total":0}
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摘要

2022年澳大利亚大选初期,时任总理斯科特·莫里森在悉尼洛伊研究所发表讲话,不遗余力地将澳大利亚的地区描述为一个充满外国威胁的地缘战略舞台。他指出,中国是对该地区和平现状的关键威胁。两周前,中国在入侵乌克兰前不久与俄罗斯一起宣布建立“无限制”伙伴关系。他强调了北京不断扩大的军事化,以及“间谍活动、虚假信息、网络攻击、外国干涉和经济胁迫”。莫里森表示,中国正变得更加自信,“其方式引起了该地区各国的担忧”,并强调澳大利亚的未来与澳大利亚北部和东部的太平洋岛国“密不可分”。1太平洋通常不是澳大利亚的选举焦点,该地区通常只吸引有限的澳大利亚媒体新闻报道但联合政府决定打国家安全牌,大肆宣扬其“太平洋升级”计划,2再加上随后所罗门群岛在联合政府的监督下秘密敲定了与中国的安全协议,是为了确保太平洋成为赢得政府的战场。工党反对派利用政府对所罗门群岛事件的不满,接受了普遍存在的国家安全叙事。影子外交部长Penny Wong对媒体表示,“在Scott Morrison的监督下,我们的地区变得不那么安全了。”3 Morrison继续谈到中国对太平洋岛国采取“激烈”做法所带来的挑战,并在4月初警告称,“这些威胁仍然存在。”4工党在竞选中期提出了一套实质性的新太平洋政策,在黄担任新政府外交部长的领导下,澳大利亚在选举后初期与该地区进行了激烈、积极的外交接触。5国内政治对太平洋地区不同寻常的关注导致澳大利亚主流媒体进入了陌生的领域。除了一些例外,澳大利亚媒体随后进行的密集报道——以及澳大利亚公众人物的大部分评论——反映出对太平洋本身的了解很少。该地区经常被认为只不过是一片充满风险的空地,在那里,中国与以澳大利亚为首的西方国家展开了一场危险的竞争。6该地区的人民自己——他们面临的挑战、他们的优先事项和他们的愿望——几乎没有得到关注。所有这些似乎都证实了一种感觉,即只有当其他大国威胁要进入我们的“后院”时,澳大利亚公众才会对太平洋地区产生兴趣——用一个在竞选期间经常重新部署的习惯性新殖民主义术语来说。换言之,这种战略否认是澳大利亚政府的做法和澳大利亚公众在太平洋地区的心态背后的压倒性动机或本能。2022年,太平洋岛民强烈认为,澳大利亚政府和国际社会其他成员一样,没有认真对待他们自己的愿望和压倒一切的当务之急,特别是他们对气候变化的担忧,7被区域领导人在2018年太平洋岛屿论坛(PIF)安全宣言中描述为“对太平洋人民生计、安全和福祉的最大威胁”。“8考虑到澳大利亚对中国的党派竞争,以及当时更广泛的全球安全背景,澳大利亚在2022年竞选期间对太平洋的公开评论几乎完全集中在该地区正在进行的“地缘战略竞争”上,这是很自然的。澳大利亚媒体自然对国内政治双方相互竞争的国家安全证书最感兴趣,正如我们稍后将探讨的那样,对中国在太平洋地区的做法也有合理的担忧理由,其中许多原因是地区领导人所共有的。毫无疑问,中国在该地区更加积极的姿态,加上俄罗斯入侵乌克兰,使地缘战略格局成为公众关注的重要故事。但澳大利亚媒体的叙述也反映了澳大利亚对太平洋根深蒂固的文化观,我们的政治家和行政人员以及广大公众都参与其中。将太平洋描述为一个只有威胁的地方,而不是合作或机会的地方,以及随之而来的对拒绝向外国势力提供战略空间的近乎排他性的关注,有着长期的历史基础,我们认为这对我们的利益和价值观构成了威胁。 对历史记录的回顾证实,在澳大利亚后联邦时代的早期,这些焦虑因素已经成为澳大利亚人思考自己在世界上地位的不可或缺的因素。事实上,从澳大利亚殖民项目一开始就关注战略否认,到19世纪,殖民地强烈的孤立感和他们在太平洋地区反复经历的外国威胁——或者至少被认为是这样——进一步加强了这一点。事实上,正如我们将看到的那样,对外国威胁澳大利亚在太平洋地区的安全的担忧在推动澳大利亚建国方面发挥了重要作用。拒绝将太平洋交给其他人可以被认为是当初决定建立新南威尔士殖民地的动机之一。该项目最早的支持者认为,它将提供一个基地,从中攻击西班牙在海洋中的商业,并有助于击败西班牙裔美国人。9 Shaw,Blainey,其他人则认为,其动机还包括拒绝法国占领即将成为澳大利亚的领土。10 1786年,在要求东印度公司正式同意建立殖民地时,英国内政大臣悉尼勋爵(Lord Sydney)指出,植物学湾属于该公司的贸易垄断区,并辩称这将“是防止我们的欧洲邻居移民到该区的一种手段,而这可能会对该公司的事务产生无限的影响。”。“11第一批澳大利亚行政人员明白,他们是被拥有太平洋权力的帝国统治者指控的。总督阿瑟·菲利普的任命使他不仅成为澳大利亚大陆东半部的“总总督”,以及“太平洋上上述北纬10°37′和43°39′的邻近岛屿”,这是一片广阔的海洋,从北部约克角和塔斯马尼亚南端之间的东部海岸线向外辐射。12这为澳大利亚对太平洋的“所有权”态度埋下了种子。悉尼殖民地在其最早的几年里就在这一权力下对诺福克岛进行了探险,而新西兰在19世纪的前几十年实际上成为了新南威尔士州的延伸。菲利普上任20多年后,他的继任者之一拉克伦·麦考瑞(Lachlan Macquarie)在维护他对遥远的塔希提岛的法律权威时引用了最初任命的条款,在他任命了一名地方法官来帮助维持法律和秩序之后。13在19世纪的头几十年里,澳大利亚殖民地对来自太平洋地区外国势力的一系列战略威胁做出了焦虑的反应,无论是真实的还是感知的。18世纪末,法国和英国一直是区域勘探和新定居点的竞争对手,在这一时期,法国太平洋地区发现了许多新发现。1788年1月,当菲利普将第一支舰队开进悉尼港时,拉·佩罗斯和他的船只抵达植物学湾,反映了这种活动模式。新南威尔士州几乎是在法国大革命前夕建立的,随后对波拿巴皇帝的长期战争在19世纪初成为英国当局最关心的问题,当时这个新殖民地正在站稳脚跟。对法国对澳大利亚兴趣的担忧推动了这一时期英国殖民地的扩张。法国探险家在太平洋遇到过。因此,为了确保太平洋南站内任何可能对法国有用的战略位置的安全,金总督于1803年派遣了一支探险队在范地定居。314事实上,在革命后的几年里,法国在太平洋的勘探活动严重减少,使该油田对英国人更加开放。但在这一时期,法国在公众心目中被重申为英国的传统敌人,怀疑挥之不去。即使在1826年,关于法国计划在西澳大利亚建立殖民地的传言也促使英国当局建立了自己的殖民地。15随着法国从19世纪40年代开始建立从塔希提岛到新喀里多尼亚、新赫布里底群岛、瓦利斯和富图纳的属地或保护国,这种担忧在殖民地中也不会消散,俄罗斯的扩张引发了对英属印度的担忧;当时莫斯科巩固了对西伯利亚的控制,并在那里驻扎了一支庞大的太平洋舰队,为“俄罗斯-美国”(现在的阿拉斯加)领土提供服务,并将其更广泛的领土设计投射到大洋彼岸。早在1807年,俄罗斯船只就开始访问悉尼,但直到19世纪30年代,俄罗斯海军的访问频率增加,殖民地媒体才首次发出真正的警报。 1854年至1856年,随着克里米亚战争的爆发,俄罗斯成为英国的敌人,这一事态发展加剧了殖民地的重大防御活动。1854年,一支俄罗斯海军中队通过附近水域,导致了澳大利亚帝国军队的重组,包括将军事总部从悉尼迁至墨尔本,并在悉尼港周围建造防御炮台。17澳大利亚定居点的英国规划者最初将中国视为贸易机会而非威胁,但19世纪50年代,当黄金的发现将数千名中国工人带到澳大利亚时,殖民地就产生了一种危险感。他们的职业道德和社交习惯在澳大利亚人眼中是陌生的,导致了有据可查的种族主义反弹。但在19世纪,中国代表了一种被描述为“人口而非军事威胁”的东西。18中国政府——澳大利亚战略思想家目前关注的太平洋问题——并没有被认为是这种威胁。在鸦片战争的连续耻辱之后,它在本世纪的大部分时间里都与英国和其他欧洲大国一起决定其外交和贸易地位的条款。殖民地对中国的恐惧是真实存在的,但它并不是真正的入侵军队或封锁海军;相反,它是数百万人通过涌入人口不足的澳大利亚来摆脱贫困。随着世纪的发展,对“黄祸”的恐惧与对达尔文主义的解释融合在一起,建立了一种白人澳大利亚作为优越文明堡垒的感觉。在本世纪后半叶,澳大利亚殖民地的战略曝光感不断增强,尤其是在1870年英国正规军撤出后,他们承担起了自己的防御责任。这些担忧集中在太平洋地区的一系列感知威胁上,其中再次包括来自法国的威胁。从19世纪60年代末开始,澳大利亚殖民地官员和报纸强烈反对在新喀里多尼亚建立法国流放地。他们的反对意见是从安全角度提出的——对逃亡者的恐惧在公众心中若隐若现,殖民地官员和媒体都强调了这一风险。然而,正如其他人所指出的,对法国这一举措的反应也揭示了对澳大利亚人自身近代历史的焦虑。1868年,当法国人开始自己的太平洋版计划时,前往澳大利亚的交通终于结束了。Jill Donohoo令人信服地认为,澳大利亚对法国计划的反应应该被视为后殖民时代澳大利亚罪犯耻辱的更大故事的一部分。19随着世纪的发展,法国定居者在新赫布里底群岛(现瓦努阿图)的活动也被视为威胁美拉尼西亚岛链的安全,殖民地希望这反过来能为抵御来自亚洲的潜在威胁提供一个堡垒。20这一时期对法国在太平洋活动的反对对澳大利亚殖民地在本世纪最后四分之一世纪发展更独立的外部前景至关重要。他们将法国视为太平洋安全威胁的观点与伦敦的战略观点越来越不同,在伦敦,英国发现自己需要平衡对殖民地的支持与欧洲不断变化的战略动态。帝国政府正在处理欧洲大国之间关系的重新平衡问题。随着统一、军事强大的德国的出现,英国与法国的关系进入了一个新阶段,随着时间的推移,德国也将成为殖民地关注的主要焦点。德国对太平洋的兴趣首先来自汉堡传统的汉萨贸易中心。19世纪50年代末,总部设在萨摩亚的公司开始在萨摩亚发展贸易和种植业,19世纪70年代初扩展到新几内亚群岛。21德国政府根本没有参与这些早期的贸易企业。事实上,它们早于1871年德国作为一个统一国家的形成。在统一后的十多年里,新德国的领导层坚决反对殖民主义。与伦敦的官员一样,柏林的官员也关注欧洲的主要权力动态。22但德国贸易活动的增长导致澳大利亚殖民地认为,德国对英国在该地区的“自然”主导地位构成了越来越大的威胁,而新几内亚正是这种威胁的集中地。从19世纪60年代起,新南威尔士州和昆士兰的殖民地间歇性地呼吁英国帝国当局吞并新几内亚岛无人认领的部分(从荷兰主权边界向东,基本上是现在称为巴布亚新几内亚的领土)。 澳大利亚殖民地的防御是1887年在伦敦举行的第一次殖民地会议上讨论的一个重要议题。俄罗斯和英国对法国在埃及的设计再次感到担忧,澳大利亚对太平洋的担忧导致英国、澳大利亚和新西兰政府达成协议,在澳大利亚水域建立一个辅助海军中队。殖民地还与伦敦达成协议,对澳大利亚殖民地的防御能力进行正式审查——这项任务由贝文·爱德华兹少将于1889年承担。爱德华兹判断,如果没有澳大利亚军队的统一和重大的国防升级,澳大利亚很容易受到攻击。他在阐述自己的观点时直接指出了当时欧洲大国之间的局势。在访问悉尼期间,爱德华兹与现已连任新南威尔士州州长的亨利·帕克斯爵士进行了几次讨论,并越来越关注联邦作为个人遗产。35帕克斯清楚地看到了爱德华兹的报告对他的事业的好处。1899年12月,他在著名的滕特菲尔德演讲中引用了这一点,认为联邦制将使殖民地的民兵能够在单一的国家政府的指挥下团结成一支单一的国家军队,1901年1月,澳大利亚宣布建立联邦。从严格的军事意义上讲,亚洲的威胁只在19世纪90年代日本军事化达到顶峰时才影响到澳大利亚的意识。37工业现代化始于1868年明治维新的社会改革。19世纪80年代,日本建立了一支庞大的征兵军队,1882年开始了多年的大规模海军扩张。19世纪90年代中期,日本在第一次中日战争中耻辱地击败了中国,确立了日本对朝鲜半岛、满洲和中国海岸线的统治地位。接着对台湾发动侵略。在本世纪的最后几年,当澳大利亚殖民地就支持其联邦联盟的宪法原则进行辩论时,很明显,中日之间的力量平衡已经发生了实质性的转变,有利于后者。霍斯金斯提出了一个有说服力的观点,即“如果太平洋安全在澳大利亚和英国共同利益的基石上造成了第一个裂缝,那么种族就会造成第二个裂缝。”38英国仍然意识到有必要对抗俄罗斯在东方的扩张主义,对日本在该地区崛起这一新势力做出了务实的回应。1899年生效的《英日通商航海条约》确立了日本和英国(包括其殖民地)之间的互惠入境权。这一原则与新出现的白人澳大利亚政策相冲突——帕克斯本人明确表达了强烈的殖民主义观点,即他们有“神圣的义务”防止“亚洲血统的混合”在澳大利亚。这一观点在1901年的《移民限制法》中得到了联邦政府的充分表达,根据该法案建立的臭名昭著的听写测试是澳大利亚绕过伦敦对基于肤色的排斥的担忧的一种方式,除其他外,这将违反英国对日本的条约承诺。39日英之间的商业条约只是建立实质性英日同盟的第一步,英日同盟将于1902年在两国之间的防务条约中正式确立,并一直持续到第一次世界大战之后。祖国决定与这一“亚洲威胁”保持一致,这在后联邦时代仍然是澳大利亚相当震惊的根源。后联邦时代早期的新闻界和议会辩论证实,对管理国际安全威胁的关注现在是澳大利亚对太平洋的心态的核心,几乎排除了任何其他考虑。今天关于国家安全的辩论还有其他几个特点。即使在那时,支持在国防方面拥有更大国家主权的论点也与这样一种信念相冲突,即澳大利亚的安全利益最好是通过与一个与我们今天所说的价值观相同的大国结盟来维护。然而,在二十世纪初,这种纽带的特点是不道歉的种族术语。早期澳大利亚议会的许多辩论都集中在是否以及如何在澳大利亚政府下移交英国太平洋领土的问题上。 由此产生的感觉是,澳大利亚人比在该地区更感兴趣将其他人排除在太平洋之外,这令人遗憾,因为这贬低了几代澳大利亚外交官、士兵、援助专家、贸易商甚至政治家的集体努力,他们以开放和积极的精神与该地区打交道。它还忽视了成千上万通过家庭、文化和其他历史关系与澳大利亚和太平洋地区建立联系的人。我们通过公开言论鼓励的负面看法也有可能破坏澳大利亚在该地区建立建设性影响力的合法外交努力,在这一过程中,管理中国影响的实际不利影响。在太平洋岛国推进自己的优先事项和愿望时,对他们表示支持并不需要忽视许多太平洋领导人都认为,随着中国活动的扩大,风险也会随之而来。在该地区的一些国家,民间社会代表担心,北京咄咄逼人的公共信息活动可能会破坏媒体自由,58并指出北京与该地区一些领导人之间的联系缺乏透明度。59其他人担心,中国在该地区的军事和警察部队训练活动将破坏他们尊重言论自由和示威权利的承诺,毫无疑问,中国在其他地方行动的坚定海洋战略并没有指导北京在太平洋地区的行动。现任政府的前任,可以追溯到早期的殖民管理者,指出太平洋地区不结盟或敌对势力的活动所产生的潜在安全威胁并不一定总是错误的。澳大利亚在20世纪中期与日本的真实战争,以及中国最近在该地区的侵略行为,都应该鼓励我们对这些风险保持警惕。但我们早期的其他一些担忧可能更多地反映了我们,而不是该地区。无论如何,当时和现在,真正的失败是在我们与太平洋对话和谈论太平洋的方式中只表达了这些担忧。即使我们的目标只是在该地区建立自己的影响力,重要的是要认识到生活在那里的人们,并尊重他们的观点,即将人类发展和与气候变化相关的风险置于大国和中大国之间的战略竞争之上。事实证明,太平洋并不是一片空白。
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Australia's Pacific Mindset: Historical Foundations

Early in the 2022 Australian election campaign, in an address to the Lowy Institute in Sydney, then-Prime Minister Scott Morrison went out of his way to characterise Australia's regional neighbourhood as a geo-strategic theatre brimming with threats from a foreign power. He identified China, which had joined Russia in declaring a “no-limits” partnership shortly before the Ukraine invasion two weeks previously, as the key threat to the peaceful status quo in the region. He highlighted Beijing's expanding militarisation, along with “espionage, disinformation, cyber-attacks, foreign interference, and economic coercion.” Morrison said that China was becoming more assertive “in ways that are causing concern to nations across the region” and underlined that Australia's future was “inextricably linked” with those of the Pacific Island countries (PICs) to Australia's north and east.1

The Pacific is not usually an election focus in Australia — the region generally attracts only limited Australian media coverage. But the coalition government's decision to play the national security card, trumpeting its “Pacific step-up” program,2 combined with the subsequent revelation that Solomon Islands had secretly finalised a security agreement with China on the coalition's watch, was to ensure that the Pacific became a battleground in the struggle to win government. The Labor opposition bought into the prevailing national security narrative, seizing on the Government's discomfort over events in Solomon Islands. Shadow Foreign Minister Penny Wong told the media that “on Scott Morrison's watch, our region has become less secure.”3 Morrison continued to speak about the challenges arising from China's “intense” approaches to the PICs, warning in early April that “these threats still remain.”4 Labor brought forward a substantial new set of Pacific policies mid-campaign, positioning it well for intense, positive diplomatic engagement with the region in the early post-election period, led by Wong as Foreign Minister for the new government.5

The unusual domestic political focus on the Pacific led the mainstream Australian media into unfamiliar territory. With some exceptions, the intensive reporting that ensued in Australian outlets — and much of the accompanying commentary from Australian public figures — reflected little detailed knowledge of the Pacific itself. The region was often made to sound like nothing more than a vacant expanse full of risk, where China was locked in a dangerous contest with the West, led by Australia as its chief representative in the region.6 Little attention was given to the people of the region themselves — the challenges they face, their priorities, and their aspirations.

All this seemed to confirm the sense that Australian public interest in the Pacific is only aroused when other major powers are threatening to move in on our “backyard” — to use a habitual, neo-colonialist term that was redeployed regularly during the campaign. In other words, that strategic denial is the overwhelming motivation or instinct underlying both the Australian Government's approach and the Australian public mindset where the Pacific is concerned. In 2022 this built on a strong sense among Pacific islanders that the Australian Government, like the rest of the international community, had not been taking seriously their own aspirations and overriding preoccupations, particularly their concerns about climate change,7 described by regional leaders in their 2018 Pacific Island Forum (PIF) security declaration as “the single greatest threat to the livelihoods, security and well-being of the peoples of the Pacific.”8

It might be argued that it was natural for Australian public commentary about the Pacific during the 2022 campaign to focus almost exclusively on the “geo-strategic contest” playing out in the region, given the partisan contest that was playing out in Australia about China, and the broader global security context of the time. The Australian media were naturally most interested in the competing national security credentials of the two domestic political sides, and as we will explore later, there are also legitimate reasons for concern about China's approach to the Pacific, many of which are shared by regional leaders. And China's undoubtedly more active posture in the region, combined with Russia's invasion of Ukraine, made the geo-strategic picture an important story of public interest.

But the Australian media narrative also reflects an entrenched Australian cultural view about the Pacific in which our politicians and administrators participate, along with the broader public. There are longstanding historical foundations for the depiction of the Pacific as only a place of threat, rather than collaboration or opportunity, and the near-exclusive accompanying focus on denying strategic space to a foreign power which we believe represent threats to our interests and values. A review of the historical record confirms that these anxious elements had become integral to Australians' thinking about their place in the world by Australia's early post-federation years. In fact, a focus on strategic denial was present from the very beginning of the Australian colonial project, and this was strengthened further through the nineteenth century by the colonies' strong sense of isolation and the repeated foreign threats they experienced — or at least perceived — as manifesting in the Pacific region. Indeed, as we shall see, concerns about foreign threats to the security of Australia's place in the Pacific played an important role in stimulating the very drive towards Australian nationhood.

Denying the Pacific to others can be identified as among the motivations behind the decision to establish the New South Wales colony in the first place. The earliest proponents of the project argued that it would provide a base from which to attack Spanish commerce in the ocean and contribute to the defeat of Spanish America.9 Shaw, Blainey, and others have contended that that the motivations also included a desire to deny French occupation of what was to become Australia.10 In requesting the formal agreement of the East India company to the colony's establishment in 1786, British Home Secretary Lord Sydney noted that Botany Bay was within the company's area of trading monopoly and argued that it would “be a means of preventing the emigration of Our European Neighbours to that Quarter, which might be attended with infinite prejudice to the company's affairs.”11

The first Australian administrators understood that they had been charged by their imperial masters with authority over the Pacific. Governor Arthur Philip's appointment made him “Governor in Chief” of not only the eastern half of the Australian continent, but also “the islands adjacent in the Pacific Ocean within the latitudes aforesaid of 10°37′ South, and 43°39′ South,” a vast expanse of ocean radiating out from the eastern coastline between Cape York in the north and the southern tip of Tasmania.12 Here lay the seeds of an attitude of Australian “ownership” towards the Pacific. The Sydney colony conducted expeditions to Norfolk Island under this authority in its earliest years, and New Zealand effectively became a de facto extension of New South Wales in the first decades of the nineteenth century. More than two decades after Philip's arrival one of his successors, Lachlan Macquarie, referenced the terms of the original appointment in asserting his legal authority over far-flung Tahiti, after he had appointed a magistrate there to help maintain law and order.13

The first several decades of the nineteenth century saw the Australian colonies respond with anxiety to a series of strategic threats, real or perceived, from foreign powers in the Pacific. France and Britain had been competitors for regional exploration and new settlement in the late eighteenth century, with numerous French Pacific discoveries claimed through the period. The arrival of La Perouse and his ships in Botany Bay in January 1788, just as Philip was moving the first fleet into Sydney harbour, reflected this pattern of activity. New South Wales was established almost on the eve of the French revolution, and the subsequent prolonged war against Emperor Bonaparte came to be the overriding preoccupation for the British authorities in the early 1800s, as the new colony was finding its feet. Concerns about French interest in Australia drove an expansion of the British colony in this period. French explorers had been encountered in the Pacific. Thus, to secure any strategic locations within the southern station of the Pacific Ocean which might have been of use to France, Governor King dispatched an expedition to settle Van Diemen's Land in 1803.14

In fact, French exploration activity in the Pacific was severely curtailed in the years after the revolution, leaving the field more open to the British. But this period saw France reaffirmed in the public mind as Britain's traditional enemy, and suspicions lingered. Even in 1826, rumours of plans for a French colony in Western Australia drove British authorities to establish their own.15 This concern would not dissipate in the colonies as France moved from the 1840s onwards to establish possessions or protectorates from Tahiti to New Caledonia, New Hebrides, Wallis, and Futuna.

This was the period of the “Great Game” in south and central Asia, when Russian expansion stoked fears for British India; when Moscow consolidated its grip across Siberia and based a substantial Pacific fleet there to service the territory of “Russian America” (now Alaska), and to project its broader territorial designs across the ocean. Russian ships began visiting Sydney from as early as 1807, but it was in the 1830s, when Russian naval visits increased in frequency, when real alarm was first expressed in the colonial press. This intensified from 1854 to 1856 when Russia became a British enemy with the outbreak of the Crimean war, a development that stimulated significant defence activity in the colonies. The passage through nearby waters of a Russian naval squadron in 1854 led to the reorganisation of imperial forces in Australia, including the moving of military headquarters from Sydney to Melbourne and the construction of defensive batteries around Sydney harbour.17

China, had originally been seen more as trading opportunity than threat by the British planners of the Australian settlement, but a sense of danger crystallised in the colonies in the 1850s, when the discovery of gold had brought thousands of Chinese workers to Australia. Their work ethic and social habits were alien to Australian eyes, leading to a well-documented racist backlash. But in the nineteenth century China represented what has been described as a “demographic rather than military threat.”18 The Chinese state — the current Pacific preoccupation for Australian strategic thinkers — was not thought of as a threat in this way. It spent much of the century with Britain and other European powers dictating the terms of its diplomatic and trading position following the successive humiliations of the Opium Wars. Colonial fear of China was real, but it was not really of invading armies or blockading navies; rather it was of teeming millions escaping poverty by swarming down unchecked into an under-populated Australia. As the century progressed, fear of the “Yellow Peril” was to fuse with interpretations of Darwinism, to build a sense of White Australia as the bulwark of a superior civilisation.

The sense of strategic exposure was to grow in the Australian colonies in the latter half of the century, particularly after they assumed responsibility for their own defence following the withdrawal of British regular troops in 1870. These concerns were focused on a range of perceived threats in the Pacific — including, once again, from the French.

From the late 1860s onwards, Australian colonial officials and newspapers expressed strong opposition to the establishment of a French penal colony in New Caledonia. Their objections were framed in security terms — fear of escapees loomed large in the public mind, a risk highlighted by both colonial officials and the press. As others have noted, however, the reaction to this French initiative also revealed anxiety about the Australians' own recent history. Transportation to Australia finally came to an end in 1868, just as the French were commencing their own Pacific version of the scheme. Jill Donohoo argues convincingly that the Australian reaction to the French scheme should be seen as part of a larger story of post-colonial Australian convict shame.19 As the century progressed the activities of French settlers in the New Hebrides (modern-day Vanuatu) also came to be seen as threatening the security of the Melanesian Island chain, which the colonies hoped would in turn provide a bulwark against potential threats from Asia.20

The objections to French activity in the Pacific in this period were important in the development of a more independent external outlook by the Australian colonies through the last quarter of the century. Their views of France as a security threat in the Pacific increasingly differed from the strategic perspective in London, where Britain found itself needing to balance its support for the colonies with the shifting strategic dynamics in Europe. The imperial government was dealing with a rebalancing of relations between the great European powers. British relations with France were entering a new phase amidst the emergence of a united, militarily strong Germany, which was also to become a major focus of colonial concern over time.

German interest in the Pacific first emanated from the traditional Hanseatic trading centre of Hamburg. Companies based there began to develop their trading and plantation interests in Samoa in the late 1850s, spreading to the New Guinea islands in the early 1870s.21 The German government was not at all involved in these early trading ventures. Indeed, they pre-dated the formation of Germany as a unified state in 1871. And for more than a decade after unification, the leadership of the new Germany was firmly opposed to colonialism. Like their counterparts in London, officials in Berlin were focused on the major power dynamics in Europe itself.22 But the growth in German trading activity nonetheless led to a perception in the Australian colonies that Germany was a growing threat to “natural” British dominance in the region, and that New Guinea was where that threat was concentrated. The colonies of New South Wales and Queensland called intermittently on the imperial British authorities from the 1860s onwards to annex the unclaimed portion of the island of New Guinea (eastward from the boundary of the Dutch claim — essentially the territory now called Papua New Guinea). Gold discoveries near Port Moresby prompted heightened fears of foreign intervention, and occasional clashes between German plantation owners and “blackbirding” labour recruiters from Queensland did not help.23

Mutual antagonisms mounted, with German traders growing increasingly concerned about Australian demands for annexation and calling on their own government for action. An article in the German press in November 1882 caused much Australian alarm when it noted that supporters of British annexation saw the annexation of New Guinea as a national “duty,” and ventured that “perhaps we might, with quite the same right, affirm it is the duty of the German nation.”24 This formed part of the context for the decision by the Premier of Queensland — Thomas McIlwraith, a longstanding proponent of annexation — to take matters into his own hands in February of the following year, unilaterally despatching the police magistrate on Thursday Island to Port Moresby to lay claim to the territory on behalf of the empire. Henry Chester made the required declaration before the local inhabitants and bemused missionaries on 4 April 1883.25

Derby went on to comment that a “special difficulty” arose from the perception that part of the motivation for “some persons in Queensland” was to obtain “a large supply of coloured labour for the sugar plantations.”27 The British made it clear that they believed the Australian alarm about German activity in the region was overblown, and that the costs associated with New Guinea's annexation were unjustified. London also had no wish to encourage, through perceived British expansionism, an alliance of continental powers against itself. Anglo-French relations had been warming over time but were under some strain in 1883 following the British occupation of Egypt the previous year.

The convention's “Resolutions relating to the Islands of the Pacific” reflected equal concern about the regional dispositions of both Germany and France. Concerns about German activities to their north led the delegates to call for immediate steps to “secure the incorporation with the British Empire of so much of New Guinea, and the small islands adjacent thereto, as is not claimed by the Government of the Netherlands.”30 While acknowledging that Britain and France had an understanding that the New Hebrides should remain independent, the convention called for “some more definite engagement, which shall secure those islands from falling under any foreign dominion.”31

With these concerns firmly in participants' minds, the convention adopted a draft bill to establish a Federal Council of the Australasian Colonies, and within two years had convinced the imperial government to enact it as the Federal Council of Australasia Act 1885. While New South Wales and New Zealand did not join the council, this was an important step forward for an idea that had been circulating in one form or another in the colonies since the 1840s, and a key milestone on the road to federation.

Resentment over the British failure to back McIlwraith's annexation of New Guinea was not appeased in November 1884 when the British were forced to respond to the declaration of a German protectorate over northeastern New Guinea with its own protectorate over the southeast. (Bismarck had changed his position on colonialism in response to both domestic political and international considerations.) London and Berlin ultimately agreed four years later to proceed with annexation of their respective protectorates, dividing the territory between them.32

Developments continued to strengthen fears that an alien power would come to challenge British supremacy in the Pacific. A further Russian scare arose in 1885 because of a skirmish between Russian and Afghan troops in Central Asia which led in turn to a diplomatic crisis between Russia and Britain over the perceived threat to British India. Fearing that East Asia might become a battlefield in case an Anglo-Russian war broke out, the British government decided to occupy the Komundo islands off the Korean peninsula, which they referred to as Port Hamilton, to improve Britain's strategic foothold in this region.33

These combined threats led to a substantial upgrade of the colonies' own defence posture. The combined strength of permanent and part-time soldiers in the colonial forces grew from 8000 men in 1883 to a combined strength of nearly 22,000 in 1885. This has been described as a more significant event in colonial military history than the more famous decision to despatch an Australian colonial contingent to Sudan in March 1885 as part of the imperial intervention there.34 Interestingly, this contribution was opposed by figures such as Henry Parkes, then in opposition in New South Wales, on the basis that Australians should not blindly support imperial operations when events in New Guinea had shown they were unable to influence the determination of imperial policy.

The defence of the Australian colonies was an important subject for discussion at the First Colonial Conference held in London in 1887. The renewed Russian and British concerns about French designs on Egypt, and Australian worries about the Pacific, led to an agreement between the governments of Britain, Australia, and New Zealand to establish an auxiliary naval squadron in Australian waters. The colonies also found agreement with London that there should be a formal review of the defence capabilities of the Australian colonies — a task undertaken by Major General Bevan Edwards in 1889. Edwards judged that, without unification of Australia's military forces and a major defence upgrade, Australia was vulnerable to attack. He pointed directly to the situation between the great European powers at the time in making his point. During his visit to Sydney Edwards had several discussions with Sir Henry Parkes, now re-elected as premier of New South Wales and increasingly focused on federation as a personal legacy.35

Parkes clearly saw the benefit of Edwards' report to his cause. He drew on it in his famous Tenterfield speech of December 1899 to argue that federation would enable the colonies' militias to unite as a single national army under the command of a single national government.36 The federalist cause gathered momentum, with the Australian federal conference of the following year leading to the ultimately successful referenda held in the last years of the decade, and the declaration of a federated Australia in January 1901.

In a strictly military sense, Asian threats only impinged on Australian consciousness as Japan's militarisation peaked in the 1890s.37 Industrial modernisation had begun with the social reforms associated with the Meiji Restoration of 1868. A large Japanese conscript army was firmly established by the 1880s, and a major multi-year naval expansion began in 1882. In the mid-1890s Japan inflicted its own humiliating defeat over China in the first Sino-Japanese war, establishing Japanese dominance over the Korean peninsula, Manchuria, and the Chinese coastline. It then proceeded to launch an invasion of Taiwan. In the last years of the century, while Australian colonies were debating the constitutional principles to underpin their federal union, it was becoming abundantly clear that the balance of power between China and Japan had shifted substantially in the latter's favour.

Hoskins makes the persuasive point that “if Pacific security created the first fissure in the bedrock of shared Australian and British interest, race created the second.”38 Britain, still mindful of the need to counter Russian expansionism in the East, responded pragmatically to Japan's rise of this new force in the region. The Anglo-Japanese Treaty of Commerce and Navigation, which came into effect in 1899, established reciprocal rights of entry between Japan and Britain, including its colonies. This principle clashed with the emergent White Australia Policy — the strong colonial view, so clearly expressed by Parkes himself, that they had “sacred obligation” to prevent the “admixture of Asian blood” in Australia. This view was to gain full federal expression in the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901, and the infamous dictation test established under this act as the Australian way of getting around London's concerns about exclusion based on skin colour — which, among other things, would have breached Britain's treaty commitments to Japan.39

The commercial treaty between Japan and Britain was only the first step towards the formation of a substantial Anglo-Japanese alliance which would be formalised in a defence treaty between the two powers in 1902 and last until after the First World War. The decision of the mother country to align itself with this “Asian threat” was to remain the source of considerable consternation in Australia through the post-federation years.

Press and parliamentary debate from the early post-Federation period confirms that a concern to manage international security threats was by now central to the Australian mindset about the Pacific, almost to the exclusion of any other considerations. Several other characteristics of today's debate about national security were also in place. Even then, arguments in favour of greater national sovereignty in defence jostled with the belief that Australia's security interests were best preserved through alliance with a major power that shared what we would describe today as our values. In the early twentieth century, though, the bonds were characterised in unapologetic, racial terms.

Many of the debates in the early Australian parliaments were devoted to the question of whether and how British Pacific possessions should be transferred under Australian administration. There was some discussion about taking on responsibility for Fiji and Solomon Islands, and Prime Minister Barton even volunteered to parliament that if “steps were taken to acquire New Guinea […] the Government will favour placing of the Solomon Islands under Commonwealth control at the same time.”42 Ultimately, Australia declined the British offer to transfer responsibility for the group, and London was also content to retain direct control of Fiji.

British New Guinea, or Papua, was the clearest-cut case. It was readily enough accepted that the Commonwealth of Australia should take on a colony which some described as essentially an extension of the Australian mainland. There was some reluctance, however, to take on the actual financial responsibility associated with the administration of Papua. Quibbling about the proposed extent of the Australian states' funding contribution moved the Secretary of State for the Colonies to recall pointedly that the annexation of British New Guinea had taken place at the Australians' urging.43 The colonies had been much more enthusiastic, less than twenty years earlier, about denying others access to New Guinea, than they were to accept the administrative burden associated with its colonial management.

Today, strategic commentators express grave concern about China's desire for global projection and note that a Chinese navy capable of projecting serious power across the world would also need to be supported by bases in the Pacific. Vanuatu, formerly New Hebrides, is still commonly identified as having highly suitable locations for any such Pacific naval base and is assessed as being vulnerable to Chinese influence given the extent of its government's financial indebtedness to Beijing.

Referring to the Pacific as Australia's “backyard” was commonplace among Australian politicians and the media until 2022, when senior Pacific leaders such as former Fijian Prime Minister Bainimarama angrily rejected the terminology as betraying a patronising sense of ownership. This underlying attitude was, of course, being expressed without apology in the immediate post-federation era. There were clear calls in the very first federal parliament for an exclusive Australian zone of influence in the Pacific — a concept sometimes described as “an Australian Monroe Doctrine” after the US policy, first espoused in 1823, which opposed further European colonialism in the American hemisphere.

John Curtin's seminal “Look to America” speech, made more than thirty years later following the fall of British Singapore to Japanese forces, is generally regarded as the moment when Australia first signalled an intention to move on from its strategic dependence on Britain, and to seek to preserve its security through alignment with the United States. It is less well remembered today that in 1908, when the Japanese threat was not yet entirely “clear and present,” Prime Minister Deakin invited the US navy to conduct a high-profile visit to Australian ports to send a clear signal to militarised Japan that Australia had powerful friends. Deakin had not consulted London. While the British had granted him power to negotiate commercial treaties at the colonial conference the previous year, his request for greater involvement in the development of imperial foreign policy had been refused, and he was evidently keen to test the boundaries.

The Governor-General wrote to the Secretary of State for Colonies in London that “hundreds of thousands of people lined the shores of Port Jackson” and showed “unbounded enthusiasm” for the fleet's visit. He said that he was “credibly informed that the number of people who took part in the welcome constituted the largest gathering at any time in the history of New South Wales.”50

Leaving aside the obvious changes in language and style (especially the unconstrained expression of racial prejudice), these comments find their reflection today in the views of those Australians who argue for greater strategic autonomy today. This debate re-emerged most recently in February 2023, after the implementation plan was announced for the delivery of nuclear-powered submarine capability to Australia under the Australia-UK-United States (AUKUS) arrangement. Prime Minister Albanese and Defence Minister Richard Marles were both forced to reject claims by former prime ministers Keating and Turnbull that the plan would undermine the nation's sovereignty. And since the original announcement of the AUKUS pact by the Morrison Government in 2022, Australian defence expert Hugh White has argued that the agreement — and Australia's faith in America's willingness and ability to come to its aid — is encouraging a false sense of security.52

Of course, there is no mention, or even speculation, in the public commentary of the early twentieth century about what the people of the Pacific might have thought about it all. That this would even be a consideration would probably not have occurred to them. The near-absence of Pacific perspectives in the Australian press during the 2022 campaign suggests, worryingly, that our perspective has still not evolved far enough.

By the early 1900s, then, a national way of thinking had become entrenched which saw the Pacific in much the way Scott Morrison depicted it in his March 2022 Lowy speech — a vast, empty, threatening region where the involvement of an alien power, almost by definition, threatened Australian security interests. While we do not intend to consider the events of the intervening twentieth century in any detail, it is worth acknowledging three important developments in our post-federation history which helped shape further, and to some extent refined, the current national mindset.

First, the fears that our first federal leaders held about Japan ultimately came to pass in the 1930s and 1940s, when resource hunger and imperial expansionism combined with other global factors to bring about further Sino-Japanese conflict and then a full-scale Japanese war against the United States and its allies — including Australia. The existential battles fought across the Pacific in the early 1940s played an obvious and important role in shaping Australia's defence posture today — and its misgivings about threats that might manifest themselves in the Pacific.

Second, there has of course been a major shift in regional power dynamics between China and Japan. The communist authorities that took power in China only four years after the total defeat of Japan set their country on an uneven but highly successful road of national economic development, and by the early twenty-first century it had emerged as the second largest economy in the world. China had also become a major international military power, with a blue water navy keen to identify staging ports in the Pacific to support the extension of its global reach. Public surveys indicate that its increasingly aggressive approach in relation to regional security issues such as Taiwan and the South China Sea, and in response to bilateral disputes with Canberra and others, has contributed substantially to an erosion of Australian trust in China in recent years.53 Other surveys indicated that the racism which characterised early reactions to Chinese in Australia continues to linger in our society.54

Japan, by contrast, has come to be seen by Australians as a strong alliance partner, sharing their democratic standards and respect for the rule of law. Bilateral defence collaboration between the two countries is proceeding apace, as is plurilateral cooperation through the Quad alliance with India and the United States. Japan has also come to be recognised as a mature and substantial contributor to development in the Pacific.

Third, Australia's own relationships with the countries of the Pacific evolved very substantially over the century. Australia administered Papua New Guinea and Nauru directly for decades. While criticisms can certainly be made about the quality of the colonial experience there, Australia ultimately respected their drive to independence and joined the rest of the international community in respecting self-determination for other countries of the region. Australia has not always escaped criticism for its subsequent policies towards the region — climate change and labour market access continue to be sore points today. But over time, successive governments in Canberra have worked, in bipartisan spirit, to support PIC national development aspirations through the investment of billions of aid dollars. They have also helped run elections, repeatedly delivered disaster relief, and mounted stabilisation missions in regional hot spots.55

It should also be acknowledged that there has been substantial development in Australian diplomatic capabilities and expertise in relation to the Pacific, and this has been matched over time by improved attitudes and messaging from our politicians. There appears to have been a further step forward in very recent times in this sense, with Australia's current leaders appearing more mindful than their immediate predecessors that they are dealing with a region whose inhabitants have their own views, and their own agency. They have been more careful to project a respectful approach to regional partnerships, consistently emphasising that they want to “listen” to partners' concerns.56 With its somewhat more forward-leaning domestic approach to climate change, the Labor government has also been better positioned to signal that it takes seriously the PICs' concerns about global warming, although there remains some scepticism about Australia's resolve to abandon fossil fuels.57

However, as we have seen, the echoes of our early years still ring in our contemporary public discussion about the Pacific, contributing to an often-insecure, commonly narrow, projection of public views about the region.

This really matters. The resulting sense, that Australians are more interested in excluding others from the Pacific than they are in the region itself, is regrettable because it devalues the collective efforts of generations of Australian diplomats, soldiers, aid specialists, traders and even politicians who have engaged the region in open and positive spirit. It also ignores the thousands of people who are connected through family, cultural and other historic ties with both Australia and the Pacific.

The adverse perception we encourage through our public discourse also risks undermining legitimate Australian diplomatic efforts to build constructive influence in the region and, in the process, to manage the actual detrimental effects of Chinese influence. Showing support for the PICs as they progress their own priorities and aspirations does not require ignoring the risks which, many Pacific leaders agree, come with the expansion of Chinese activity. In some countries of the region, civil society representatives are concerned that Beijing's aggressive public information activities threaten to undermine media freedoms,58 and point to a lack of transparency in the links between Beijing and some leaders in the region.59 Others worry that Chinese training activities for military and police forces in the region will undermine their commitment to respecting freedom of speech and the right to demonstrate.60 Chinese engagement with each of the region's standing military forces — in Fiji, PNG, Tonga, and Vanuatu — has undoubtedly increased, and there is little reason to believe that the assertive maritime strategies that have underpinned China's actions elsewhere are not also guiding Beijing's approach in the Pacific.

The current government's predecessors, stretching back to the early colonial administrators, were not necessarily always wrong in pointing to the potential security threats arising from the activities of non-aligned or hostile powers in the Pacific. Australia's very real war with Japan in the mid-twentieth century, and China's recent aggressive behaviour in the region, should alone encourage us to remain wary about these kinds of risks. But some of our other, earlier fears probably say more about us than they do about the region. In any case, the real failing, then and now, has been to project only these concerns in the way we talk to, and about the Pacific. Even if the aim were only to build our own influence in the region, it is important to recognise the people who live there and to respect their perspective, which prioritises human development and the risks associated with climate change above strategic rivalries among the great and middle powers. It turns out that the Pacific is not a vacant expanse after all.

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来源期刊
CiteScore
0.60
自引率
12.50%
发文量
59
期刊介绍: The Australian Journal of Politics and History presents papers addressing significant problems of general interest to those working in the fields of history, political studies and international affairs. Articles explore the politics and history of Australia and modern Europe, intellectual history, political history, and the history of political thought. The journal also publishes articles in the fields of international politics, Australian foreign policy, and Australia relations with the countries of the Asia-Pacific region.
期刊最新文献
Issue Information Issue Information Western Australia July to December 2023 Commonwealth of Australia July to December 2023 Issues in Australian Foreign Policy July to December 2023
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