Australia’s relationship with the European Union: from conflict to cooperation

ABSTRACT

After decades of tension, Australia and the European Union (EU) now have a substantive relationship, interacting and cooperating with each other within a wide range of areas. The relationship is currently at a critical turning point. The Framework Agreement has, for the first time, elevated the relationship to a treaty level. It strengthens Australia–EU actions and interests on bilateral, regional and multilateral issues. There is considerable potential for closer cooperation and more extensive pooling of the resources and capacities of both interlocutors on a range of policies and within the multilateral context. This article provides an assessment of the relationship, the current state of play and key challenges facing the relationship as the EU and Australia forge stronger ties through the conclusion of a Framework Agreement and the commencement of discussions on a Free Trade Agreement at the same time as the UK’s exit negotiations from the EU. It demonstrates that, although there are challenges facing the relationship, there are also significant opportunities to further develop and strengthen ties.     

Contextualising Australia–Japan security cooperation: the normative framing of Japanese security policy

On July 1, 2014, Prime Minister Shinzō Abe's cabinet commenced a historic transformation of post-war Japan's security policy by overturning previous interpretations of the constitution's pacifist clause, Article 9. The Cabinet Decision on the Development of Seamless Security Legislation to Ensure Japan's Survival and Protect Its People stated that collective self-defence was consistent with the constitution and, consequently, Japan would immediately develop a more proactive and less constrained security policy. But while this outcome may seem sensible and overdue from a realist perspective of Japan's standing as a mature democratic nation in an increasingly difficult geopolitical situation, the manner in which it is being enacted may seriously undermine the normative legitimacy of Japan's new security identity. In this article, the author examines how Shinzō Abe's administration has attempted to shape the norms surrounding security policy revision in Japan, and how these norms, in turn, have affected or constrained Abe's agency. This is done with specific reference to the external contexts of the USA's ‘rebalance’ policy and the deepening of Japan's security relationship with Australia, with a view to anticipating how normative turmoil might impact on the potential of this relationship.     

Cross-border higher education in the Australia–Japan relationship

Over the last three decades there has been a significant increase in higher education student mobility between Australia and Japan and a proliferation of formal exchange agreements between institutions. Yet education issues have not been prominent in the official bilateral relationship and initiatives of substance have been limited. The growing scale of student mobility, despite this, is testimony to the broader strength of the bilateral relationship, a well developed Australia-bound private education services industry, and complementarities between the two education sectors. There is considerable scope for further initiatives, both at the intergovernmental and educational institution levels, to capitalise on established bilateral patterns of individual student mobility. Australia–Japan higher education linkages remain incommensurate with the scale, complexity and importance of the broader economic and political partnership. Australia and Japan, as leading study abroad destinations in the region and with internationally mobile populations, can do more to enhance the public and private institutional architecture of cross-border education, both within and beyond the Asia–Pacific region.     

Assessing Australia’s options in the context of Brexit: engaging with the UK and the European Union

ABSTRACT

The Brexit vote will fundamentally transform the European Union (EU) and will change how the UK relates to Europe and the rest of the world. What are the implications for Australia at this critical juncture? The UK has been a major player in the Australia–EU relationship, and Australia will now need to recalibrate its approach to both the UK and the EU across a range of policy areas. This article examines the future of Australia–UK and Australia–EU relations in the wake of Brexit, and assesses Australia’s options going forward. The authors advance three considerations. Firstly, Australia’s national interests are best served by adopting a pragmatic rather than nostalgic approach towards future relations with the UK and the EU. Secondly, Australia should avoid pursuing one relationship at the expense of the other and creating a zero-sum dynamic. Finally, Australia’s future strategy must consider broader global developments, such as events within its own region and the US presidency.     

Australia’s relations with the European Community in a historical perspective: an elusive partnership

ABSTRACT

In 2015, Australia and the European Union successfully negotiated a Framework Agreement. This agreement is an essential step in establishing a stronger Australia–European Union partnership and achieving closer bilateral cooperation. For years, negotiating such an agreement had proved impossible. In the 1970s, successive Australian governments showed interest in enhanced collaboration with the European Community, but the political climate for closer relations was far from encouraging. This article explains why this was the case. In doing so, it also explores how the Whitlam and Fraser governments envisaged, framed and developed Australia’s ties with the European Community in the 1970s, and asks whether a more positive approach on their part could have led to a stronger relationship. Based on recently declassified government files, this article shows that although both Whitlam and Fraser fully grasped the importance of the European Community as an emerging international actor and were willing to deepen Australia’s ties with it, significant constraints existed against enhanced bilateral cooperation. With the Common Agricultural Policy still a considerable challenge to Australian economic interests and with the European Community focused mainly on the management of its internal market, broader political considerations were inevitably relegated to the margins of Australia–European Community consultations.     

General Cariappa encounters ‘White Australia’: Australia,India and the commonwealth in the 1950s

There have been a number of studies of the White Australia policy and some examination of white Australia's relationship to the new, multiracial Commonwealth that emerged after the Second World War. Drawing extensively on Indian sources, this article examines how Australia was viewed by India's high commissioner to Australia and New Zealand, General K. M. Cariappa. In the period from September 1953 to April 1956 he sparked considerable controversy by suggesting that the White Australia policy ran the risk of alienating Asian opinion and undermining the Commonwealth ideal in India and Pakistan. Cariappa maintained a high public profile throughout his stay in Australia and was widely regarded as one of the most prominent diplomats posted to Canberra in the 1950s.     

Australia’s Detention Centre and the Erosion of Democracy in Nauru

Since 2013, the Nauru government has undermined democracy by reducing the independence of the judiciary, treating opposition MPs as potential traitors, curbing freedom of speech and restricting visits by variously defined groups of people who include journalists, Australians and New Zealanders. New Zealand responded by suspending its aid to Nauru’s justice and border control department. Australia, by contrast, has said little. The Nauru government would not have acted so boldly in curbing civil freedoms and weakening the rule of law if Australia had been less dependent on its goodwill to act as host for Australia’s Regional Processing Centre, which houses asylum seekers who have attempted to reach Australia by boat. Australia’s reliance on Nauru – driven by urgent domestic political considerations – has fostered an atmosphere where the principles of good governance can be flouted with little fear of significant criticism from Canberra.     

Australia’s engagement with the European Union: partnership choices and critical friends

ABSTRACT

This article examines the development of Australia’s relationship with the European Union (EU) by focusing on drivers and obstacles. Underlying the relationship are the burden of memory and common interests and values. It argues that, although the past still resonates, the changes to the range and depth of interests and values have resulted in a more fruitful engagement. It suggests that a history of a negatively framed context of engagement, characterised by Australian critiques of the EU and, in turn, by EU neglect of the relationship, has contributed to distance between the two interlocutors. It is only in recent years that this distance has been bridged and perceptions have changed. Australia has chosen partnerships with the EU that enhance its economic and political choices. Links with a long-term partner, the UK, are being recast as Brexit presents a new challenge at a time of Australia’s stronger engagement with the EU through a key agreement and trade talks. Finally, the article argues that Australia and the EU are critical friends.     

Japan’s strategic interests in the South China Sea: beyond the horizon?

Japan has a national interest in the South China Sea issue. Although its direct commitment is ultimately limited in a material sense due to a lack of military capabilities, as well as political and constitutional constraints on the Self-Defense Force, Japan has maintained its firm stance to uphold international maritime rules and norms, and nurtured strong diplomatic relations and conducted maritime capacity-building programs with the South-East Asian states, as well as the Association of Southeast Asian Nations. These actions contribute to consolidating the rule of law at sea and provide those claimant states an opportunity to withstand pressures from China. Given the Trump administration’s unclear South China Sea policy and South-East Asia’s strategic uncertainty, Japan is becoming a key player in maintaining regional maritime stability in East Asia through diplomacy.     

Testing the waters: the limits of consequentialist logic in Australia’s asylum seeker debate

This work takes existing justifications for Australian asylum seeker policy at face value. For the past five years now both major parties have articulated themselves using the rhetoric of consequentialism, arguing that the policies of offshore detention and boat turn backs are all about securing the safety of refugees. This work puts the personal opinions of each member of parliament aside and examines whether these rhetorical justifications are internally consistent. What will become clear is that the utilitarian framework used in this debate does not sit on terra firma. Rather, its foundations lead to conclusions many might find uncomfortable – suggesting that existing theoretical justifications for Australian asylum seeker policy are ultimately implausible.     

Australia’s war in Vietnam: debate without end

Australia’s commitment in Vietnam can be interpreted as a small ally drawing its superpower partner into war for its own ends. Two studies by eminent Australian authors throw light on the role of human agency, and in so doing bring Australian historiography of the war closer to the trend in the United States. Peter Edwards’s history just about describes Vietnam as ‘Menzies War’. However, he finds no new sources on Menzies’s mindset, and diminishes the roles of his foreign ministers, Garfield Barwick and Paul Hasluck. The late Geoffrey Bolton’s intimate biography of Hasluck shows him as an active minister and also that his private papers are thin on Vietnam, the part of his distinguished career on which he never wrote. The Cabinet meeting of 17 December 1964 reveals much more about Australian decision-making on going to war than can be gleaned from Edwards’s cursory treatment and Bolton’s second-hand account. Barwick’s different approach, and even Hasluck’s last-minute caution, show Australia had a choice. Barwick, if he had remained Foreign Minister, might have kept Australia out of the Vietnam war, so freeing it to continue to play a leading regional political role.     

Throwing the Baby Out with the Bathwater: Australia’s New Policy on Treaty-Based Investor-State Arbitration and its Impact in Asia

Abstract

Treaties allowing investors to initiate arbitration claims directly against host states for illegally interfering with cross-border investments are becoming increasingly common in Asia, but Australia announced in 2011 that it will no longer include such protections in future treaties. The backdrop to this decision includes keen interest from Asia in foreign direct investment (FDI) into Australia’s resources sector, meaning that potential investors may not be significantly deterred by a lack of arbitration provisions in future treaties. This article argues, however, that Australia’s policy shift risks undermining the entire investor-state arbitration (ISA) system, with the earliest impact being felt by major pending treaty negotiations by Australia with Japan, China and Korea (respectively); and that the shift may significantly reduce FDI flows or have other adverse effects. The article criticises the cost-benefit analysis of ISA protections in one pivotal study conducted in 2010 by an Australian Government think-tank, arguing that this assessment is insufficiently nuanced. Instead, the article presents a justification for more tailored and moderate changes to ISA provisions in future treaties. Its tentative interest-group analysis suggests, however, that there may be surprisingly few public or private constituencies that would prefer such moderate reforms, and that most may well prefer the more extreme position recently adopted by Australia, despite the damage that will be done to the ISA system as a whole. The article also argues that Australia’s policy shift and think-tank analysis may make Asian countries more cautious about ISA, especially those (like the Philippines and Vietnam) which have traditionally been more cautious about this dispute resolution system.     

Japan’s role conception in multilateral initiatives: the evolution from Hatoyama to Abe

This article examines Japan’s role conception in its multilateral commitments to the Asia-Pacific after the global financial crisis in 2008. The Hatoyama government launched an East Asian Community initiative, which aimed to assume a kingmaker role in creating a new order in East Asia. However, the East Asian Community initiative did not develop due to stress on self-reliance and distance from partnership with the USA. The Abe government sought to play a dual role in its major multilateral commitments. On the one hand, the government sought to play a follower role in enhancing the position of the East Asia Summit with an eye to consolidating the US-based institutional framework. On the other, Abe’s new multilateral initiative of the Free and Open Indo-Pacific represented Japan’s kingmaker role in maintaining a free and open maritime regime, and to keep a liberal and open economic regime under the emergence of the Trump administration.     

Europe’s mediation junction: technology and consumer society in the 20th century

This article reviews the literature on the relationship between consumption and technological development to understand the character of Europe’s 20th‐century trajectory, i.e. the hidden integration of Europe long before the formal process of unification started. Within the rich historiography, the paper focuses on the intersection between production and consumption, where a range of social actors and institutions sought to represent consumers and mediate consumption. It is at this juncture of mediation that social actors and institutions negotiated the mediated design and the appropriation of new products and technologies. The paper further historicizes the juncture of mediation by introducing the European politics of the state, marketplace, and civil society within the context of economic crises, world wars, revolutionary changes, post‐war reconstruction, and cold war. By looking at the mediation junction, a conceptual frame is offered to understand the connection, the disconnection, or the reconfiguration of technologies and consumer identities in 20th‐century Europe. In a final section, the article suggests new avenues for research to examine the hidden integration of Europe.