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Fear of Security
Rarely has security been such a preoccupation of Australian politics, and rarely has it seemed so far from being achieved. This celebrated book argues that security has dominated and distorted Australia's foreign policy and national life, from Cook's first voyage to the Tampa crisis, 9/11 and Iraq. Whether in the Great War, Vietnam or the treatment of asylum seekers, Anthony Burke shows that Australia's security has been bought with the insecurity and suffering of others. Against this corrosive tradition, he offers a new - cosmopolitan and non-coercive - model of national existence and responsibility. At once a deep historical survey and an argument with its society, Fear of Security is a landmark account of how Australia relates to itself, its region and the world. Turning powerful academic and political orthodoxies on their heads, it is essential reading for those concerned with the burning questions that face Australia and the Asia-Pacific.
304 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2001
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July 9, 2020
This is a seriously interesting book. In the Australian psyche runs a fear. I think of this fear as a kind of mirror. As if it is a conscious realisation of the absurdity that Australia was colonised by Europeans. Australia is about as far away from Europe as it is possible to be while still being on the planet. I mean, Australia is the ‘antipodes’ - if you drilled a hole through the earth from here you would end up in the Atlantic Ocean. One of our first ‘great’ books considering the history of the place was called ‘The Tyranny of Distance’. One of our Prime Ministers, renowned for his turn of phrase, said Australia was the arse-end of the world. You might interpret this as self-deprecation, and don’t get me wrong, from cutting down tall poppies to sycophantic displays towards our British (Prime Minister Menzies said he was British to his bootstraps) to US (Prime Minister Holt saying all the way with LBJ) masters, we do do self-deprecation, but really it needs to be understood as fear. Our protectors, the ones we rely upon, are so very, very far away and we know, deep down, that they really don’t give a stuff about us. And our nearest neighbours are as linguistically and culturally different from us as it is possible to be, well, other than for the culture we destroyed in taking over this continent. They were pretty different from us too.
You might think that being surrounded by water, would make Australia feel safe. But unlike the Irish, who can sing:
The sea, oh the sea is the gradh geal mo croide (bright love of my life)
Long may it stay between England and me
It's a sure guarantee that some hour we'll be free
Oh, thank God we're surrounded by water.
Australians just see all that water as an easy passage for some other invasion party in a cruel repetition of the original invasion that we benefited from. Rather than freedom, the water is a source of our nightmares. There’s the rub, as my late, mate Hamlet might say. If we could destroy the most ancient culture on the planet to take over this land, well, what is to stop the teaming hordes of Asia from doing the same to us? Security, ladies and gentlemen, security, is the name of the game.
From the earliest days of European conquest of this island continent we have been obsessed with security. When Matthew Flinders discovered Bass Strait, cutting a thousand miles off the journey to Sydney, we tried to create a settlement where I now live in Melbourne so as to stop the French from doing the same and turning Australia into a kind of sunny Canada. And that has been the story, like a scratched LP record, for the last couple of hundred years. There are battlements at Queenscliff, at the mouth of Port Phillip Bay, that were built to defend us in the 1800s from the French, the Russians and, during the Civil War, from the USA. Almost always in Australia, fear comes from the north, and most likely from the Asian north, and not always rationally. There are so few of us and so many of them. One of the problems with this idea, though, is that Australia isn’t nearly as attractive as we like to think of ourselves. Most of Australia is a kind of waste land – made infinitely worse by our introducing rabbits and cows and sheep. If the teeming masses to our north want to invade, like us, they are going to need to cling to the shoreline.
Australia is as large as continental USA, but most of that land is desert. We are known as the ‘oldest continent’ mostly because we are geologically dead. With global warming (something our politicians deny is happening) even less of Australia will be habitable. Australia likes to call itself the ‘lucky country’, not even realising that this name was meant as an insult by the person who coined it. His point was that we ended up wealthy through luck. Our politicians are second rate (at best) and our business leaders have included people who wanted to use nuclear weapons to create ports and to finish the job of genocide against the Aboriginal peoples of Australia. Our current treatment of asylum seekers would hardly inspire a sense of compassion in any potential invader.
One of the first Acts of the new parliament of 1901 was to become known as the White Australia policy. That is, migration was to be limited to people defined as white from Europe. The reason for this wasn’t always expressed in terms of racial superiority, although, it often was. Rather it was also seen as a way to avoid starvation wages in Australia. The notion being that if non-white people were allowed to enter Australia it would drive down wages and destroy living standards. It was literally inconceivable that non-white people might receive the same wages as white Australians, even at a time when there was an Award system that fixed wages.
This book documents the role Australia played for its own ‘security’ from its inception as a white colony. The most interesting, though, is the history of the 20th century. Our involvement in the first and second world wars and then the post-WW2 adventures with the US in South East Asia. The hardest chapters to read are those that deal with our relationship with Indonesia – and our involvement in the massacre of the Communist Party of Indonesia, where somewhere between 500,000 and 3 million people were murdered. This should be a source of shame, if anyone even knew about it. Our disgraceful treatment of the people of Timor, and as PM Paul Keating said on national television at one point, ‘We are not going to hock the entire Indonesian relationship on Timor. A Prime Minister’s duty, his first duty, is to the security of his country.’ This book makes for very painful reading.
I’ve been very surprised by our current government’s decision to undermine our country’s relationship with our main trading partner. We are told this is due to China's increasingly belligerent stance, but we have just announced that we are increasing our military budget in coming years by a quarter of a trillion dollars – and this at a time of economic recession. It beggars belief that we really need to defend ourselves against our largest trading partner – but this has been the main line of reasoning from both the right and the left in Australian politics. To be honest, I’m terrified the world is preparing for a war with China, a war that might end the planet. Surely, there has to be a smarter way to protect our security. The problem is that Australia remains ‘the lucky country’, rather than the smart country. The time when we will pay for our ‘luck’ looks to be fast approaching.
You might think that being surrounded by water, would make Australia feel safe. But unlike the Irish, who can sing:
The sea, oh the sea is the gradh geal mo croide (bright love of my life)
Long may it stay between England and me
It's a sure guarantee that some hour we'll be free
Oh, thank God we're surrounded by water.
Australians just see all that water as an easy passage for some other invasion party in a cruel repetition of the original invasion that we benefited from. Rather than freedom, the water is a source of our nightmares. There’s the rub, as my late, mate Hamlet might say. If we could destroy the most ancient culture on the planet to take over this land, well, what is to stop the teaming hordes of Asia from doing the same to us? Security, ladies and gentlemen, security, is the name of the game.
From the earliest days of European conquest of this island continent we have been obsessed with security. When Matthew Flinders discovered Bass Strait, cutting a thousand miles off the journey to Sydney, we tried to create a settlement where I now live in Melbourne so as to stop the French from doing the same and turning Australia into a kind of sunny Canada. And that has been the story, like a scratched LP record, for the last couple of hundred years. There are battlements at Queenscliff, at the mouth of Port Phillip Bay, that were built to defend us in the 1800s from the French, the Russians and, during the Civil War, from the USA. Almost always in Australia, fear comes from the north, and most likely from the Asian north, and not always rationally. There are so few of us and so many of them. One of the problems with this idea, though, is that Australia isn’t nearly as attractive as we like to think of ourselves. Most of Australia is a kind of waste land – made infinitely worse by our introducing rabbits and cows and sheep. If the teeming masses to our north want to invade, like us, they are going to need to cling to the shoreline.
Australia is as large as continental USA, but most of that land is desert. We are known as the ‘oldest continent’ mostly because we are geologically dead. With global warming (something our politicians deny is happening) even less of Australia will be habitable. Australia likes to call itself the ‘lucky country’, not even realising that this name was meant as an insult by the person who coined it. His point was that we ended up wealthy through luck. Our politicians are second rate (at best) and our business leaders have included people who wanted to use nuclear weapons to create ports and to finish the job of genocide against the Aboriginal peoples of Australia. Our current treatment of asylum seekers would hardly inspire a sense of compassion in any potential invader.
One of the first Acts of the new parliament of 1901 was to become known as the White Australia policy. That is, migration was to be limited to people defined as white from Europe. The reason for this wasn’t always expressed in terms of racial superiority, although, it often was. Rather it was also seen as a way to avoid starvation wages in Australia. The notion being that if non-white people were allowed to enter Australia it would drive down wages and destroy living standards. It was literally inconceivable that non-white people might receive the same wages as white Australians, even at a time when there was an Award system that fixed wages.
This book documents the role Australia played for its own ‘security’ from its inception as a white colony. The most interesting, though, is the history of the 20th century. Our involvement in the first and second world wars and then the post-WW2 adventures with the US in South East Asia. The hardest chapters to read are those that deal with our relationship with Indonesia – and our involvement in the massacre of the Communist Party of Indonesia, where somewhere between 500,000 and 3 million people were murdered. This should be a source of shame, if anyone even knew about it. Our disgraceful treatment of the people of Timor, and as PM Paul Keating said on national television at one point, ‘We are not going to hock the entire Indonesian relationship on Timor. A Prime Minister’s duty, his first duty, is to the security of his country.’ This book makes for very painful reading.
I’ve been very surprised by our current government’s decision to undermine our country’s relationship with our main trading partner. We are told this is due to China's increasingly belligerent stance, but we have just announced that we are increasing our military budget in coming years by a quarter of a trillion dollars – and this at a time of economic recession. It beggars belief that we really need to defend ourselves against our largest trading partner – but this has been the main line of reasoning from both the right and the left in Australian politics. To be honest, I’m terrified the world is preparing for a war with China, a war that might end the planet. Surely, there has to be a smarter way to protect our security. The problem is that Australia remains ‘the lucky country’, rather than the smart country. The time when we will pay for our ‘luck’ looks to be fast approaching.
June 4, 2013
Critical security studies have so much to work within Australian foreign policy, a field so structured around untested assumptions it doesn't even pass muster as an example of realism or liberalism. Since brief heady days at the end of WWII, even the most radical policy excursions have, in truth, been mere wobbles on a fixed, simplistic approach to the world. Fear OF security, from the name onwards, seeks to go back to basic security assumptions and fears that drive this policy, in particular a sense, stemming from over a century ago, that hordes of people from the north threaten the 'security' of the polity. The underlying thesis, common to European security theorists of the Copenhagen school, is the notion that traditional security approaches seek to make us secure at the expense of others, whereas we could seek to make ourselves secure through the security of others. That is, our security and that of our neighbours can be related, rather than alternatives.
As with most critical theorists he is guilty of the simplifications he accuses others of on occasion, in particular with the vast over simplification of Australia's relationship with Indonesia and East Timor. But this is a polemic of some originality, and such works are rarely perfectly balanced. A worthwhile read traversing under explored, but fertile territory.
As with most critical theorists he is guilty of the simplifications he accuses others of on occasion, in particular with the vast over simplification of Australia's relationship with Indonesia and East Timor. But this is a polemic of some originality, and such works are rarely perfectly balanced. A worthwhile read traversing under explored, but fertile territory.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews