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Island Off the Coast of Asia: Instruments of Statecraft in Australian Foreign Policy
This book examines Australian foreign policy in multiple dimensions: diplomatic, military, economic, legal and scientific. It shows how the instruments of statecraft have defended domestic concentrations of wealth and power across the 230-year span of modern Australian history. The pursuit of security has meant much more than protection from invasion. It gives priority to economic interests, and to a political order that secures them. This view of security has deep roots in Australia's geopolitical tradition. Australia began its existence on the winning side of a worldwide confrontation. The book shows that the 'organizing principle' of Australian foreign policy is to stay on the winning side of the global contest. Australia has pursued this principle in war and peace, using the full arsenal of diplomacy, law, investment, research, negotiations, military force and espionage. This book uses many decades of secret files to reveal the inner workings of high-level policy.
- GenresPolitics
304 pages, Paperback
Published October 1, 2018
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June 18, 2020
One of the big fads in strategic analysis recently is understanding the link between economics and security. This is an important relationship whose exploration can mutually illuminate, but as this book shows, if taken too far you can lose sight of both.
In Island off the Coast of Asia the author advances two major and somewhat contradictory claims. First, that the Australian government has pursued economic interests via its foreign policy. At times this has achieved economic outcomes at the cost of foreign policy goals. It has also tended to enrich private interests at public cost. There’s something to this argument and it’s a useful critique to make.
The second claim is, in Clinton Fernandes words, that ‘the organising principle of Australian foreign policy is to stay on the winning side of the global contest’ (p.2). What is this contest? No less than ‘imperialism vs anti-colonialism, developed vs developing countries, liberal democracies vs the rest’ etc.
The biggest problem with this book is not so much what it argues, but how it does so. For a start, it can’t seem to decide which claim focus on or how they relate to each other. Many a section begin by identifying the first claim but ending with an abrupt assertions that therefore the second claim must be true. Even when the claims contradict or have little relationship to the material at hand, everything is jammed, however awkward the fit, into the second thesis.
What first drew me to this book, but a key to its flaws is the desire to cover 230 years of history. To sustain both claims, Fernandes has to show an Australia which always prioritises private economic gain over legitimate security concerns, and which always moved with and within the West.
Unexplored but central is the fact that both claims assert the primacy of economics over security.
In the first case, arguing specific Australian private sector actors (almost never identified) control the government for their own profit. In the second case, pointing the finger at a network of Western governments who built an empire to enrich themselves and have shaped all their foreign and military actions to maintain it. Demonstrating the absolute consistency of these two claims of economics over security and private/international over national interests, and over such a long period is achieved only by galling intellectual shortcuts.
The first shortcut used is to argue by definition. We are told that for Australia, security has always meant ‘the economic interests that have to be secured against foreign competition’, and these are defined not by government but by unnamed ‘private sector’ actors (p.2-3). Therefore, whenever some public figure is talking about a security concern or when security instruments are used it must – by definition – be for private economic gain. There’s no real attempt to justify this position, and every time a Menzies or Howard is quoted as discussing a security issue, the author portrays them as acting in bad faith.
The second way Fernandes seeks to sideline security as a motive for action is simply to ignore it. The Cold War we are told was actually about western efforts to crush the desire for economic independence shown by communist movements in Vietnam, Malaya, Indonesia etc. All post-WW2 context, nuclear arms races and security dilemmas are scrubbed from the picture. Now, like the first claim, there is certainly a kernel of truth that countries like the UK, having used imperial power to establish favourable trade relationships, did not like their possible loss. But this book bounds – evidence free- beyond this to claim that private enrichment this was effectively the only or underlying motive for decades of anti-communist struggle.
The net result is a book which is consistently frustrating in its handling of the material. Indonesia and America’s meddling gets a full chapter, but somehow the author has to beg a lack of space (footnote 2, p.104) for not discussing Konfrontasi. Even though this was perhaps the most consuming and difficult security issue Australia has faced since 1942.
Equally, the chapter on ANZUS concludes by declaring the alliance a failure and provides as evidence the following justification:
‘Australia remains relatively unimportant in U.S thinking. Only 1 per cent of US diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks related to Australia. Australia’s share of the world economy is also one percent. It’s population is about 0.33 percent of the world’s total. From March 2009 to March 2018, US President Donald Trump tweeted 37,100 times, but mentioned Australia only thirty times’ (p.49).
Got that? ANZUS is a seven-decade failure because Australia is mentioned in a non-random selection of diplomatic cables about equivalent to our GDP size. Plus, the US President doesn’t tweet that often about us and our population is small. There is no attempt at analysing the pros and cons of the alliance, just this assertion of failure. It’s hard to know whether to laugh or launch the book across the room.
There are other major periods of Australian history which are oddly handled, and for which you can only presume that the need to prosecute the book’s second claim prevented a better re-telling. Take the issue of slavery. While Australia was not a slave owning society like the US or UK, there was genuine slavery on this continent. Aborigines were kidnapped to be seal hunters in Northern Tasmania, pearl divers in WA and chained labourers on farms, and Pacific labourers were dragged across the seas to work Queensland's farms. These are shameful episodes which ought to be better known. But most of these cases were brought to a halt by national elites as federal control and -somewhat ironically- the passage of racist laws such as the White Australia policy were enacted.
Fernandes however wants to prosecute Australia’s elites, and so these cases of direct slavery run by the broader society are overlooked in favour of a convoluted chain of guilt by association. Australia is tarred with slavery in his eyes because some UK families held slaves prior to the legal ban in 1807 and after its passage these families were compensated. In turn, some of these families or their descendants came to Australia. Therefore he argues, ‘despite the [Australian Dictionary of Biography’s] ADB’s silences, state based economic intervention and the use or threat of force established Australia’s prosperity, and maintained it’ (p.15). Even if you accept that the compensation link as damning, there is no attempt to show it either established or maintained the nation’s prosperity. It’s just asserted.
Part of my frustration with the book is I honestly don’t know what the author thinks Australia ought to do in terms of economic policy, either domestically or abroad. He rightly attacks the close relationship between state and business that existed in the first 70 years post-federation history as encouraging cronyism and poor results for the public. But after the removal of tariffs and deregulations in the 1970s and 1980s he attacks the distance and gap between public and private interests.
The book also swings between condemning a vast conspiracy by the private sector to control the government and defraud the public, to lamely suggesting Australia should have followed Norway in extracting higher taxes on its natural resources. I too would have preferred such a path, but is it really the dividing line between a fair or a corrupted system? Then you get the jaw-dropping suggestions that maybe Australia could learn from the Chinese Communist Party about a better approach to elite management of businesses in the national interest. Either way, the only consistent analysis seems to be that whatever Australia’s leaders did was both wrong and undertaken only to profit unnamed private elites.
The book also regularly contradicts itself. The Cold War was apparently a ruse to invade countries who only wanted to develop their internal industries free from western economic exploitation. Except somehow the Asian tigers such as Singapore and South Korea (not to mention Australia itself) who also pursued protective economic policies of high tariffs and import-substitution not only escaped invasion but were celebrated by the West. (Although Fernandes does imply that South Korea deserved to be invaded by the North in 1950).
Similarly, we are told that the politicians ruse of talking about security and raising fear while actually pursuing economic gain is necessary since the Australian public could never be told the true economic intent of the nation’s foreign policy. Until he describes Menzies or Hawke winning elections based on their explicit pursuit of economic goals through foreign policy. Australian foreign policy is entirely about staying on the ‘winning side’, until suddenly it’s pursuing its own ‘middle way’ and arguing with the US and UK while adopting different paths. Finally, the book’s title and opening sentence is about geography and its impact on politics and economics. These themes are then almost entirely absent from the following 223 pages.
To be sure not all of the book is woeful. The chapter on maritime law and offshore energy is very different in style, moving away from the broad brush to provide specific and detailed analysis of a smaller period. In so doing, it provides a good case for the book’s first thesis, showing how the pursuit of economic interests has at times harmed Australia’s regional partners, undermined its regional standing and that governments have not sufficiently differentiated public and private interests. I would quibble with parts of the interpretation and strength of claims, but it is a valuable chapter. Indeed it demonstrates clearly just how much better the book could have been if this was its approach from the start. Instead it feels like a very rough attempt to jam the often unique case of Australian history into the somewhat outdated core-periphery theories of international critical scholars such as Wallerstien and Chomsky.
The relationship between Economics and Security is a topic very much worth exploring. But mastering two major fields and the case study material is a tough ask. All too often, analysts from one field simply cherry pick from the other to find support for their already held positions. This book goes further and asserts the absolute primacy of one over the other using theories that are never really explained, and applied to material for which the fit is uneven at best and rarely if ever justified at length. Had this been a study of undue economic influences in recent Australian foreign policy it would have been valuable. But instead we get a book which is distracted by the attempt to unquestioningly apply questionable international theories and when the material doesn’t fit or can’t be identified simply asserts and blusters its way through. A missed opportunity.
In Island off the Coast of Asia the author advances two major and somewhat contradictory claims. First, that the Australian government has pursued economic interests via its foreign policy. At times this has achieved economic outcomes at the cost of foreign policy goals. It has also tended to enrich private interests at public cost. There’s something to this argument and it’s a useful critique to make.
The second claim is, in Clinton Fernandes words, that ‘the organising principle of Australian foreign policy is to stay on the winning side of the global contest’ (p.2). What is this contest? No less than ‘imperialism vs anti-colonialism, developed vs developing countries, liberal democracies vs the rest’ etc.
The biggest problem with this book is not so much what it argues, but how it does so. For a start, it can’t seem to decide which claim focus on or how they relate to each other. Many a section begin by identifying the first claim but ending with an abrupt assertions that therefore the second claim must be true. Even when the claims contradict or have little relationship to the material at hand, everything is jammed, however awkward the fit, into the second thesis.
What first drew me to this book, but a key to its flaws is the desire to cover 230 years of history. To sustain both claims, Fernandes has to show an Australia which always prioritises private economic gain over legitimate security concerns, and which always moved with and within the West.
Unexplored but central is the fact that both claims assert the primacy of economics over security.
In the first case, arguing specific Australian private sector actors (almost never identified) control the government for their own profit. In the second case, pointing the finger at a network of Western governments who built an empire to enrich themselves and have shaped all their foreign and military actions to maintain it. Demonstrating the absolute consistency of these two claims of economics over security and private/international over national interests, and over such a long period is achieved only by galling intellectual shortcuts.
The first shortcut used is to argue by definition. We are told that for Australia, security has always meant ‘the economic interests that have to be secured against foreign competition’, and these are defined not by government but by unnamed ‘private sector’ actors (p.2-3). Therefore, whenever some public figure is talking about a security concern or when security instruments are used it must – by definition – be for private economic gain. There’s no real attempt to justify this position, and every time a Menzies or Howard is quoted as discussing a security issue, the author portrays them as acting in bad faith.
The second way Fernandes seeks to sideline security as a motive for action is simply to ignore it. The Cold War we are told was actually about western efforts to crush the desire for economic independence shown by communist movements in Vietnam, Malaya, Indonesia etc. All post-WW2 context, nuclear arms races and security dilemmas are scrubbed from the picture. Now, like the first claim, there is certainly a kernel of truth that countries like the UK, having used imperial power to establish favourable trade relationships, did not like their possible loss. But this book bounds – evidence free- beyond this to claim that private enrichment this was effectively the only or underlying motive for decades of anti-communist struggle.
The net result is a book which is consistently frustrating in its handling of the material. Indonesia and America’s meddling gets a full chapter, but somehow the author has to beg a lack of space (footnote 2, p.104) for not discussing Konfrontasi. Even though this was perhaps the most consuming and difficult security issue Australia has faced since 1942.
Equally, the chapter on ANZUS concludes by declaring the alliance a failure and provides as evidence the following justification:
‘Australia remains relatively unimportant in U.S thinking. Only 1 per cent of US diplomatic cables published by Wikileaks related to Australia. Australia’s share of the world economy is also one percent. It’s population is about 0.33 percent of the world’s total. From March 2009 to March 2018, US President Donald Trump tweeted 37,100 times, but mentioned Australia only thirty times’ (p.49).
Got that? ANZUS is a seven-decade failure because Australia is mentioned in a non-random selection of diplomatic cables about equivalent to our GDP size. Plus, the US President doesn’t tweet that often about us and our population is small. There is no attempt at analysing the pros and cons of the alliance, just this assertion of failure. It’s hard to know whether to laugh or launch the book across the room.
There are other major periods of Australian history which are oddly handled, and for which you can only presume that the need to prosecute the book’s second claim prevented a better re-telling. Take the issue of slavery. While Australia was not a slave owning society like the US or UK, there was genuine slavery on this continent. Aborigines were kidnapped to be seal hunters in Northern Tasmania, pearl divers in WA and chained labourers on farms, and Pacific labourers were dragged across the seas to work Queensland's farms. These are shameful episodes which ought to be better known. But most of these cases were brought to a halt by national elites as federal control and -somewhat ironically- the passage of racist laws such as the White Australia policy were enacted.
Fernandes however wants to prosecute Australia’s elites, and so these cases of direct slavery run by the broader society are overlooked in favour of a convoluted chain of guilt by association. Australia is tarred with slavery in his eyes because some UK families held slaves prior to the legal ban in 1807 and after its passage these families were compensated. In turn, some of these families or their descendants came to Australia. Therefore he argues, ‘despite the [Australian Dictionary of Biography’s] ADB’s silences, state based economic intervention and the use or threat of force established Australia’s prosperity, and maintained it’ (p.15). Even if you accept that the compensation link as damning, there is no attempt to show it either established or maintained the nation’s prosperity. It’s just asserted.
Part of my frustration with the book is I honestly don’t know what the author thinks Australia ought to do in terms of economic policy, either domestically or abroad. He rightly attacks the close relationship between state and business that existed in the first 70 years post-federation history as encouraging cronyism and poor results for the public. But after the removal of tariffs and deregulations in the 1970s and 1980s he attacks the distance and gap between public and private interests.
The book also swings between condemning a vast conspiracy by the private sector to control the government and defraud the public, to lamely suggesting Australia should have followed Norway in extracting higher taxes on its natural resources. I too would have preferred such a path, but is it really the dividing line between a fair or a corrupted system? Then you get the jaw-dropping suggestions that maybe Australia could learn from the Chinese Communist Party about a better approach to elite management of businesses in the national interest. Either way, the only consistent analysis seems to be that whatever Australia’s leaders did was both wrong and undertaken only to profit unnamed private elites.
The book also regularly contradicts itself. The Cold War was apparently a ruse to invade countries who only wanted to develop their internal industries free from western economic exploitation. Except somehow the Asian tigers such as Singapore and South Korea (not to mention Australia itself) who also pursued protective economic policies of high tariffs and import-substitution not only escaped invasion but were celebrated by the West. (Although Fernandes does imply that South Korea deserved to be invaded by the North in 1950).
Similarly, we are told that the politicians ruse of talking about security and raising fear while actually pursuing economic gain is necessary since the Australian public could never be told the true economic intent of the nation’s foreign policy. Until he describes Menzies or Hawke winning elections based on their explicit pursuit of economic goals through foreign policy. Australian foreign policy is entirely about staying on the ‘winning side’, until suddenly it’s pursuing its own ‘middle way’ and arguing with the US and UK while adopting different paths. Finally, the book’s title and opening sentence is about geography and its impact on politics and economics. These themes are then almost entirely absent from the following 223 pages.
To be sure not all of the book is woeful. The chapter on maritime law and offshore energy is very different in style, moving away from the broad brush to provide specific and detailed analysis of a smaller period. In so doing, it provides a good case for the book’s first thesis, showing how the pursuit of economic interests has at times harmed Australia’s regional partners, undermined its regional standing and that governments have not sufficiently differentiated public and private interests. I would quibble with parts of the interpretation and strength of claims, but it is a valuable chapter. Indeed it demonstrates clearly just how much better the book could have been if this was its approach from the start. Instead it feels like a very rough attempt to jam the often unique case of Australian history into the somewhat outdated core-periphery theories of international critical scholars such as Wallerstien and Chomsky.
The relationship between Economics and Security is a topic very much worth exploring. But mastering two major fields and the case study material is a tough ask. All too often, analysts from one field simply cherry pick from the other to find support for their already held positions. This book goes further and asserts the absolute primacy of one over the other using theories that are never really explained, and applied to material for which the fit is uneven at best and rarely if ever justified at length. Had this been a study of undue economic influences in recent Australian foreign policy it would have been valuable. But instead we get a book which is distracted by the attempt to unquestioningly apply questionable international theories and when the material doesn’t fit or can’t be identified simply asserts and blusters its way through. A missed opportunity.
December 28, 2022
An analysis of Australian foreign policies since 1788 with an emphasis on how economic factors often drive our foreign policy - an aspect of foreign affairs that is often overlooked.
Also shows how closely linked our foreign aid program is to economic and security interests and how Australian governments conspire to deceive the Australian public into thinking that their foreign aid budget is helping poor people in developing countries.
Also shows how closely linked our foreign aid program is to economic and security interests and how Australian governments conspire to deceive the Australian public into thinking that their foreign aid budget is helping poor people in developing countries.
August 15, 2021
Essential reading for Australians.
January 27, 2025
It is wonderful to open the first page of a book, and to come out of the last page with a new perspective.
Clinton Fernandes sets out to demonstrate to the reader what is the guiding logic behind Australia's foreign policy motions, from the time of Australia's founding to present day. His arguments are segmented into chapters focusing on the military, the economy, and key players in the Australasia region (Indonesia, Malaysia, etc).
The supporting research is extensive, and spans key moments in history that shaped Australia's prosperity, from the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar, to the Timor wire-tapping scandal exposed in 2013.
I will readily admit, there were moments in the book that I found a little dry, as I don't generally (ok, ever) elect to read up on the history of the UN's Law of the Sea, and I wondered where all this discussion of ocean depths was leading to. Well, it got pretty bloody engaging thereafter. I felt similar about the discussion of international trade and "gunboat diplomacy".
It also helps that Clinton is an adept writer. It is not just that he is articulate, comprehensive, and authoritative on a variety of relevant subjects (warfare, commodity markets, tax codes), but he is also funny, and chooses moments to bring dry wit to some otherwise dry subjects (e.g., describing certain intelligence leaks and legal snafus as "subjects that are better contemplated than expressed"). The behind-the-scenes action and contemporaneous quotes from Australian political titans (William McMahon, Malcolm Fraser, Gough Whitlam, Alexander Downer, etc) are also a highlight.
I would hope people not ordinarily interested in foreign policy read this book.
Clinton Fernandes sets out to demonstrate to the reader what is the guiding logic behind Australia's foreign policy motions, from the time of Australia's founding to present day. His arguments are segmented into chapters focusing on the military, the economy, and key players in the Australasia region (Indonesia, Malaysia, etc).
The supporting research is extensive, and spans key moments in history that shaped Australia's prosperity, from the 1805 Battle of Trafalgar, to the Timor wire-tapping scandal exposed in 2013.
I will readily admit, there were moments in the book that I found a little dry, as I don't generally (ok, ever) elect to read up on the history of the UN's Law of the Sea, and I wondered where all this discussion of ocean depths was leading to. Well, it got pretty bloody engaging thereafter. I felt similar about the discussion of international trade and "gunboat diplomacy".
It also helps that Clinton is an adept writer. It is not just that he is articulate, comprehensive, and authoritative on a variety of relevant subjects (warfare, commodity markets, tax codes), but he is also funny, and chooses moments to bring dry wit to some otherwise dry subjects (e.g., describing certain intelligence leaks and legal snafus as "subjects that are better contemplated than expressed"). The behind-the-scenes action and contemporaneous quotes from Australian political titans (William McMahon, Malcolm Fraser, Gough Whitlam, Alexander Downer, etc) are also a highlight.
I would hope people not ordinarily interested in foreign policy read this book.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews