From Commonwealth Responsibility to the National Interest: Australia and Post-war Decolonisation in South-East Asia
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This article re-examines the drivers of post-war Australian foreign policy in South-East Asia. The central argument is that the motive of Commonwealth responsibility has not been given sufficient explanatory weight in interpreting Australia's post-war engagement with South-East Asia under both Australian Labor Party and Liberal-Country Party (Coalition) governments. The responsibility expressed by Australian policy-makers for the decolonisation of the Straits Settlements, Malayan Peninsula and British Borneo Territories cannot be adequately understood within a cold war ideological framework of anti-communism. Nor can it be explained by the instrumental logic of forward defence. The concept of responsibility is theorised as a motivation in foreign policy analysis and applied to Australian involvement with British decolonisation in South-East Asia between 1944 and 1971. The article finds that in its approach to decolonisation, Australia was driven as much by normative sentiments of responsibility to the Commonwealth as it was by instrumental calculations of cold war strategic interest. This diminished with the end of Indonesia's ‘Confrontation’ of Malaysia in 1966 and subsequent British commitment to withdraw from East of Suez. Australia's policy discourse becomes more narrowly interest-based after this, especially evident in Australia's negotiations with Malaysia and Singapore over the Five Power Defence Arrangements from 1968 to 1971.
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The International History Review
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40
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4
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© 2018 Taylor & Francis (Routledge). This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in The International History Review on 28 Jul 2017, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/10.1080/07075332.2017.1357135
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Political science
Political science not elsewhere classified
Historical studies