The politics of Australia's international economic relations: Adjustment and two‐level games

Economic adjustment, a political priority for Labor governments throughout the second half of the 1980s, and in contrast to earlier Australian scholarship and practice, is now recognised to be an internationally, as well as a domestically, determined and constrained enterprise. Theoretical developments in international political economy in North America of late have provided a variety of approaches for conceptualising this twofold enterprise. Taking two cases (the development of the Cairns Group and its activities in the Uruguay Round of Trade Negotiations and the development of Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation) this paper looks at two of these approaches—to show how they can contribute to the understanding of international economic policy under Labor in the late 1980s and early 1990s.     

Learning to love the republic: Jacobin propaganda and the peasantry of the Haute‐Garonne

The political societies, or Jacobin clubs, formed during the first years of the French Revolution undertook as one of their many projects the political and civic education of the peasantry. The political society of Toulouse, the large republican administrative centre of the south‐western department of the Haute‐Garonne, was particularly active in this mission. By 1790, society members had embarked upon a campaign of written propaganda, using both educational tracts and revolutionary almanacs. However, this initial method was of only limited effectiveness, due to the prejudices of urban society members with regard to the peasants, the widespread illiteracy and non‐comprehension of French in the countryside, and the difficulty of distributing written material to isolated villages at the end of the eighteenth century. The Jacobins of Toulouse attempted to conquer these obstacles through the composition of tracts in the local patois, the use of peasant‐oriented newspapers delivered to local, literate intermediaries, and finally, the sending of their own members into the countryside as political missionaries, armed with leaflets and a copy of the constitution. By the time political clubs were made illegal in 1795, the influence of Jacobin sociability had greatly facilitated a precocious political acculturation of rural communities, prefiguring their more complete politicisation during the course of the nineteenth century.     

The communist party of Australia and the eighty‐one parties conference

In November 1960 a conference of eighty‐one communist parties convened in Moscow to try to resolve serious differences which had arisen between the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) and the Communist Party of China (CPC or CCP). It was ‘probably the most important gathering of its kind in the entire history of Communism’ (Zagoria 1962:343).

Several years later the position adopted at that conference by the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) became the subject of an acrimonious and inconclusive controversy between pro‐Soviet and pro‐Chinese elements in the Australian party.

Of various scholars who commented on the CPA's stance, almost all ([Rigby] 1964:37; Mayo‐Wren 1981:87; Turner 1961:7; Turner 1965:154) claimed categorically that the CPA's delegates, Sharkey and Dixon, backed China. However in one exhaustive account of the conference (Griffith 1962) the CPA did not appear among the CPC's partisans. Most observers outside Australia relied heavily on Kremlinologist Edward Crankshaw. Crankshaw originally omitted the CPA from his list of pro‐Chinese parties (1962:10) but later revised his account (1963:61; 1965:120, 134).¹

In the standard historical work on the CPA Davidson (1969:160,152) qualified the notion that the CPA had supported China. ‘After a careful study of various views’ he concluded:

At the conference of eighty‐one communist parties in Moscow in 1960 the Communist Party of Australia (CPA) supported the Chinese interpretation of Marxist‐Leninist doctrine in preference to that of the Soviet party. Previous emphasis on the CPA's commitment to international communist unity has tended to obscure and even deny this.     

The ‘voices’ of children: de‐centring empowering research relations

This paper examines some problematic methodological and ethical issues associated with in‐depth qualitative research with children. The discussion has wider resonance for qualitative studies of young people in ‘rural’ contexts. Particular ethical issues arise when researching with children, which are underpinned by children's relative powerlessness in society. With this in mind, the paper considers substantive strategies to promote ‘empowering research relations’, drawing upon an empirical study with children in primary school spaces. Re‐theorisations of identities and power as fractured, dynamic and contextual, suggest that research is comprised of specific moments or ‘research performances’. It is argued that developing empowering research relations involves negotiating such performances in ways that contest, or transform, dominant societal relations between children and adults. In this paper, I consider some of the specific, embodied performances involved in my research, to expose some of the complexities of power relations and negotiations within space. Bringing to light particular moments emphasises that power relations between children and adults are not reducible to the powerless and the powerful. It is also demonstrated that research performances are influenced and constrained by expectations placed upon adult and child practices in society and institutional spaces, and by researchers' own unconscious reproduction of dominant identities.     

Technological utopianism in the twenty‐first century: russia's nuclear future

The Soviet nuclear power establishment, the second largest in the world, has embarked on an ambitious program to build dozens of reactors between 2003 and 2020. The rejuvenation of that Soviet establishment through Russia's Ministry of Atomic Energy (MinAtom) is based on the technological utopianism of Russian political and scientific leaders. They see nuclear energy as a way to maintain Russia's great power status. They have adopted approaches to reactor development prominent in the Soviet era. These include building dozens of new reactors in construction time faster than seen before in world history, upgrading several Chernobyl‐type reactors, accepting spent fuel from abroad for storage in exchange for cash, and floating—literally—nuclear power stations on barges for use in Russia's far north and for export. There are few controls on MinAtom within the government, and public involvement in the technology assessment process is limited.     

Expanding the ‘language’ of planning: A meditation on planning education for the twenty‐first century

What kinds of knowledge do planners need in a post‐modern age in which cities and regions are characterized by fragmentation, polarization, and ‘difference’ in its many guises? This paper identifies four dilemmas of traditional planning education: the reduction of ‘knowledge’ to a set of measurable skills; the ossifying of programmes around a core which reinforces an outdated modernist paradigm; the loss of focus on questions of meaning, of value, of the spirit, which has resulted from a divorce between planning and design education; and the tendency to draw tight boundaries around professional identity, which prevents a truly interdisciplinary practice from emerging.

Preparing planners for the challenges of the twenty‐first century might involve the following: identifying the specificity of the domain of planning in a more dynamic way so that the core does not become redundant every decade; articulating planning programmes with environmental and design programmes; shifting from an emphasis on skills to key literacies (five are identified); approaching planning as an ethical inquiry.