Future directions in Australia–Japan relations: an Australian perspective

This article offers an Australian perspective on future directions in Australia–Japan relations. An attempt is made to identify issues that will have a bearing on the bilateral relationship over the next five years and beyond at the national level. There is not any likelihood of a substantial rupture or change in relations in the short-term. The continuation of a stable, close and dynamic relationship in the mid to long-term, however, will depend on how both countries conduct their respective foreign policies towards China.1 1. I wish to thank Bill Tow for his comments on a draft of this article. Peter Drysdale, Purnendra Jain, Chris Pokarier, Chris Braddick, Takashi Terada and Geoff Miller also provided useful comments on a draft at the Workshop on the 30th Anniversary of the NARA Treaty organised through the Australia–Japan Research Centre at the Australian National University, and the Australian Institute of International Affairs, 31 July 2006. View all notes     

The micro-politics of implementing and resisting principal-agent relations in a weak state

ABSTRACT

To understand why quality of government (QoG) varies, scholars have drawn on two theoretical approaches: principal-agent and collective action theories. The literature tends to bifurcate these two theories, and focuses on the national scale and the structural conditions under which collective action and principal-agent problems arise. This article highlights how principal-agent relationships and collective action problems shape the implementation of decentralisation policy in two subnational governments in Papua New Guinea. It is argued that pathways to QoG are contextual, and determined by both principal-agent and collective action relationships. In the case of PNG, these relations are shaped by history, culture and the agency of elites and citizens.     

Sanitizing Szigetvár: On the post-imperial fashioning of nationalist memory

ABSTRACT

In this essay, I examine an early modern battle between the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires, the Siege of Szigetvár, and its protagonists, Nikola ?ubi? Zrinski and Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent, as sites of memory in Hungary, Croatia, and Turkey. In relation to recent commemorations of the Siege, I focus on how sanctioned memories of Szigetvár have been sanitized for national(ist) ends, evacuating fraught historical and political questions related to the enmity between the two empires. Concomitantly, I pursue the silences and erasures that hegemonic memories of the battle and its protagonists have produced, both in relation to specific landscapes of memory in Szigetvár and through an analysis of three narratives of the Siege: a Hungarian-language epic poem, a Croatian opera, and a Turkish television serial.     

Pedigree and productivity in the British and North American cattle kingdoms before 1930

The origin of the concepts of breed and pedigree in cattle in late eighteenth-century Britain, and the circumstances of their translation to north America are examined. Pedigree had a particular value to north American importers and was more widely adopted in both Britain and America for that reason. However, from the outset, competitive pressures developed which owed little to performance as measured in beef or milk. The descendants of early importations of improved but unpedigreed Shorthorn cattle were stigmatized as «unfashionable» while other bloodlines, particularly those descended from the stock of British breeder Thomas Bates, gained the attention and the premiums associated with fashion. The «fancy» thus attracted both north American and British enthusiasts, but with different results. As in Britain, fashionable pedigrees were acquired as positional, non-material goods within a general environment of speculative excess, though with less serious consequences for the overall performance of north American livestock agriculture. There appear to have been two reasons for this. First, north America had no equivalent to the British landlord–tenant system, which encouraged the wider dissemination to the productive sector of costly cattle with indifferent productivity credentials. Second, and more important, in north America the «fancy» and those who promoted it acted as a stimulus to a different kind of boosterism, which promoted competing breeds of cattle on the basis of productivity. Though breed boosters had less success in the dairy than in the beef sector, the net outcome was the more constructive application of pedigree to productivity in north America than in Britain.