The Australian-Asian Connection: from Alfred Deakin to John Howard
Introduction: Contextualizing Australia in Asia Several commentators have seized upon Aus tralia's recent entry to the inner sanctum of East Asian Summit as a turning point in Australia's relationship with its regional neighbours. This goes to the heart of what I have termed the 'Austral ian-Asian Connection', or as others have called it, Asian Engagement or Enmeshment. We indeed have come a long way since the historian John La Nauze dismissed Australia's proximity to Asia as something for the future. As we ponder the significance of joining the East Asian Summit, many questions come to mind: does this signify a radical change in Australia's view of itself? Is this the answer or a clue to the critical question of whether Australia sees itself as an Asian nation' with a firm link to an Asian regional hegemony, or that Australia now embraces more firmly a duality i.e., as an Asian nation as well as a European nation'. If, indeed there has been a change in how we comprehend the Australian-Asian connection, what underlies this sudden embrace of an Asian future' by none other than John Howard who in the past was forthright in his criticism of the regional policies in the Hawke and Keating era? This becomes a perplexing query, particularly when one recalls that Foreign Minister Downer has stated that Australia had no wish to be part of a new regional ism such as that portrayed by Prime Minister Mahathir of Malaysia and others. Downer went on to describe this as a form of'cultural regionalism' which Australia rejects. By contrast he identified a 'Practical Regional ism' as the model to which Australia was committed. The difference between these forms of regionalism was that one is built on 'commonalities of history, of mutual cultural identity', and the other strictly on the mutual benefits of cooperation in the pursuit of common objectives. In this context, does Australia's not just willingness, but even eagerness, to be a member of the East Asian
“Save our students”: contesting discourses of racist attacks against Indians down under
This paper seeks to understand the dominant civic discourses of accusation of racism leveled against the Australians as expressed by the victims of racist attacks and Indian Government officials in the Times of India and Outlook India news magazines. The aim of the paper is to understand how the logics of the discourses have constituted the racially motivated attacks on the Indian diaspora in Australia, and how the nationalistic sentiments are fostered among the diasporic Indians and the Indians in India. The paper argues that there is a mutual production of diasporic and homeland nationalism in the face of a crisis that hits the Indian diaspora in Australia. This analysis also brings to fore the ideology of multiculturalism in Australia.
The New Interventionists
NOT SO LONG AGO we could confuse the end of the Cold War with the end of history and entertain the possibility that we had survived the famous Chinese curse of living in interesting times. A new era of international security seemed about to dawn, where even the most protracted conflicts appeared solvable. International mediation in Angola, Cambodia and El Salvador led to negotiated settlements of long civil wars and revived the hope that ballots, not bullets, would finally determine the fate of peoples around the globe. But as Ralph Ellison cautioned in his masterpiece. Invisible Man, history is not an arrow but a boomerang. Just when the end of the U.S.-Soviet rivalry held out the promise that rationality and reason would triumph over ideology, the world wdtnessed the bloody dissolution of states in Yugoslavia, Somalia, Liberia and Ethiopia. So, too, came the revival of virulent nationalism throughout the former Soviet empire and genocidal campaigns on the fringes of western Europe. Even those successful cases of mediated civil war now hover on the brink of renewed bloodshed. The fortunes of history, it seems, have as much to do with the persistence of hatred and memory as with the vicissitudes of grand ideologies. Yet the end of superpower rivalry continues to entrance America with the chimera of a new world order. That illusion, alongside often violent disorder in many states, has produced a kind of "new interventionism." This outlook combines an awareness that civil war is a legitimate issue of international security with a sentiment for crusading liberal internationalism. The new interventionists wed great emphasis on the moral obligations of the international community to an eager-