An Australian Outlook on International Affairs? The Evolution of International Relations Theory in Australia (original) (raw)

The 2012 TRIP Survey of International Relations in Australia: One Problem to Rule Us All

Australian Journal of International Affairs, 2013

This article analyses the results of the most recent and largest cross-national survey on the International Relations (IR) discipline. Completed by scholars in twenty countries, the survey covered the areas of teaching, research, foreign policy, the profession, and the relationship between policy and academia. From an Australian perspective, the key findings include the strong link between what academics teach and research; the narrowing epistemological gap between the United States and Australia; the curious pessimism of scholars on a wide range of foreign policy issues; and our ability to define research quality independently of other national settings. The most significant and alarming finding, however, concerned how the present structure of the field is undermining our attempt to forge closer, more influential ties with policymakers in Canberra. In fact, it is clear from the results that what we research and how we go about it is actually counterintuitive to this goal. The article concludes with three recommendations aimed at rectifying this problem.

Introduction to Round-table Review of James Cotton, ed. Documents on Australian Foreign Policy: Australia and the World, 1920-1930. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press for Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade, 2019. H-Diplo ROUNDTABLE XXII-26 (February 16, 2021), 2-9.

H-Diplo Round-Table Reviews, 2021

For Australia as for much of the rest of the globe, the First World War represented a key turning point, prompting a new sense of national identity that thereafter grew steadily stronger. The period extending from the peace negotiations following the end of this conflict to the outbreak of full-scale war between Japan and China in 1937 was a time when Australia began to assemble a corps of diplomats and bureaucrats specializing in international affairs, to create what would become a distinctive foreign policy trajectory designed to promote specifically Australian interests, and to face up to dilemmas that would continue to preoccupy and perplex Australian leaders throughout much of the twentieth century and beyond. The formation of the ‘Pacific Branch’ in 1919 in the Prime Minister’s office, managed by E.L. Piesse, followed by the more formal re-establishment within the Prime Minister’s Department in 1921 of the Department of External Affairs, marked the true beginnings of a discrete Australian foreign affairs agency. The appearance in 2019—coincidentally also marking the centenary of the Paris Peace Conference, where Australia’s Prime Minister William “Billy” Hughes was a notable personality—of the first of two volumes covering the years spanning the aftermath of the First World War to 1936 is therefore particularly welcome.