Reviews in The Round Table

Dana Arnold (ed.) - Cultural Identities and the Aesthetics of Britishness

Annie E. Coombs (ed.)

Rethinking Settler Colonialism: History and Memory in Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand and South Africa

Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006, pp. xiii + 274, ISBN (hardback) 0-7190-7168-2

Dana Arnold (ed.)

Cultural Identities and the Aesthetics of Britishness

Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004, pp. xi + 205, ISBN (hardback) 0-7190-6768-5, (paperback) 0-7190-6769-3

From the point of view of Commonwealth Studies, the most heartening aspect of these two collections of essays lies in their methodology. One demonstrates yet again that the comparative approach can illuminate the past of disparate areas of European settlement around the globe, the other that the idea of “Britishness” can be used as a starting point for the examination and projection of identities. Rethinking Settler Colonialism brings together thirteen contributions, plus an overview from the editor, covering aspects of the past in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa, with a side excursion along the Oregon Trail. Their common theme deals with the creation and re-interpretation of human memory, especially through museums, exhibitions, monuments and origin narratives. An unusual feature is the inclusion of a short section of art work (reproduced in black and white) and a poem. Dana Arnold has assembled ten essays with an emphasis upon the uses of architecture and landscape to shape imposed cultural identities, but individual contributions range as widely as the Arthurian legend and the archaeology of Assyria. Case studies are taken from Australia, England, India, Ireland and Wales. Both volumes form part of the Manchester University Press “Studies in Imperialism” series, so it is hardly necessary to comment that they are handsomely produced.

Annie E. Coombs (ed.) - Rethinking Settler Colonialism

Annie E. Coombs (ed.)

Rethinking Settler Colonialism: History and Memory in Australia, Canada, Aotearoa New Zealand and South Africa

Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006, pp. xiii + 274, ISBN (hardback) 0-7190-7168-2

Dana Arnold (ed.)

Cultural Identities and the Aesthetics of Britishness

Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2004, pp. xi + 205, ISBN (hardback) 0-7190-6768-5, (paperback) 0-7190-6769-3

From the point of view of Commonwealth Studies, the most heartening aspect of these two collections of essays lies in their methodology. One demonstrates yet again that the comparative approach can illuminate the past of disparate areas of European settlement around the globe, the other that the idea of “Britishness” can be used as a starting point for the examination and projection of identities. Rethinking Settler Colonialism brings together thirteen contributions, plus an overview from the editor, covering aspects of the past in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa, with a side excursion along the Oregon Trail. Their common theme deals with the creation and re-interpretation of human memory, especially through museums, exhibitions, monuments and origin narratives. An unusual feature is the inclusion of a short section of art work (reproduced in black and white) and a poem. Dana Arnold has assembled ten essays with an emphasis upon the uses of architecture and landscape to shape imposed cultural identities, but individual contributions range as widely as the Arthurian legend and the archaeology of Assyria. Case studies are taken from Australia, England, India, Ireland and Wales. Both volumes form part of the Manchester University Press “Studies in Imperialism” series, so it is hardly necessary to comment that they are handsomely produced.

Frank Welsh - Great Southern Land: A New History of Australia

Frank Welsh

Great Southern Land: A New History of Australia

London, Allen lane, 2004,

pp. xxxviii + 720, ISBN 0-713-99450-9

Frank Welsh is a retired banker who has written an impressive number of general histories. The fact that he is an Englishman appears to be regarded as an issue in the authorship of this massive study of the Australian experience, although it is hard to see why this should be so. Predominantly this is a political history, with a solid component of external relations from the 1880s onwards, and indeed public affairs offer one of the few coherent frameworks for such a study. Each chapter is split into bite-sized sub-sections, a useful device for covering the ground during phases such as the later nineteenth century, when six separate colonies are motoring aimlessly forward, or the muddled inter-war period when the historian must squeeze in allusions to the Sydney Harbour Bridge and the Bodyline text-matches. One nuisance is the elusiveness of the referencing. Welsh’s endnotes list many sources and provide further acerbic comment. Some publishers use the running head to identify the relevant page numbers in the text. Others at least include the chapter title as a guide. This work grimly confines itself to chapter numbers for each section of endnotes, forcing the reader to leaf backwards to the start or flip hundreds of pages to the Contents list. Why?

At times, it is difficult to know which audience the book is aimed at. To explain, for instance, that Queensland has the population of Hampshire and Sussex in the area of western Europe presumably says more to British readers than to their antipodean cousins. On the other hand, it is Welsh’s opinions that form the most valuable element in the book, and these will make most impact on Australians themselves. Nor is he grimly predictable. True, he condemns Chifley’s plans to nationalise the banks, but on Vietnam and Aboriginal affairs, he is sardonically radical. He insists that the arrival of Europeans should be termed an ‘incursion’ not an ‘invasion’. He is sensible in dismissing the notion that ‘mateship’ is unique to Australian male culture, argues against the utility of compulsory voting and regards the country’s home-made honours system as ‘ridiculous’. He dislikes Westpac as the name of a bank, prefers Waltzing Matilda to Advance Australia Fair as a national anthem and regards the classic novel Such as Life as ‘barely readable’. On recent politicians, some of whom he has dealt with on business, he can be charmingly lethal. I am not sure that Malcolm Fraser was ‘a twentieth-century Gladstone’, but Arthur Calwell was certainly a ‘dinosaur’. Gough Whitlam had ‘all the qualities needed to succeed in politics, except that of judgement’, but his penchant for overseas jaunts made him only ‘a part-time tyrant’. Whitlam’s nemesis, the governor-general Sir John Kerr, ‘might have been a bastard but he was unmistakeably an Australian bastard’. Bob Hawke’s enemies regarded him as ‘a foul-mouthed drunken boor’, while his friends would quarrel only with the tone of the description. Andrew Peacock was ‘handsome, sporting and charming’, while John Howard was ‘none of the above’. 

Few of Welsh’s evaluations are neutral, and some seem off-beam. In Commonwealth terms, the American invasion of Grenada was tactless, but was it ‘unprincipled’? More to the point, why mention it all? This is a very discursive book, even ruminating on the mystery of national football codes and outlining the rules of cricket. Unfortunately, the text is not always accurate. Lord Grey’s committee of 1849 was not a parliamentary enquiry but an experiment in policy-making under the auspices of the privy council. Grey himself left office in 1852, not 1854, which was the year the Americans prised open Japan, not 1858. Except through the traditional form of quarter sessions, I do not think local government had become a training ground for national politics in Britain by 1850, and I am sure Disraeli, in the Hughenden graveyard, did not plan the 1887 Jubilee celebrations. New South Wales conservatives did not intend to create a hereditary upper house in 1853: the celebrated ‘bunyip aristocracy’ proposal went no further than providing for a possible future titled electoral college. John Hackett collected his knighthood two decades after he appears as ‘Sir John’ in 1890, J.X. Merriman did not become premier of the Cape for sixteen years after he appears in 1892 (fascinating man, but why mention him at all?). De Valera was not prime minister of Ireland (where I live we say ‘Taoiseach’) when he visited Australia in 1948, nor did Menzies break Walpole’s record for holding the office. Britain joined the EEC in 1973, not 1971, and the Queen presided over not five but sixteen Commonwealth realms at the time of Australia’s republican referendum. Whitlam’s tactical resignation as Labor leader in 1968 was directed against dictation by the extra-parliamentary National Executive and not designed to liberate him from the caucus. (Indeed his narrow victory tended to increase backbench control.) There was no joint sitting of the two houses of parliament before the 1974 election, since the constitution provides for such an eventuality only after an inconclusive double dissolution. Compass points and simple arithmetic are occasionally wayward. John Hunter sailed eastward to seek help from the Dutch at the Cape in 1788, not westward, and Admiral Somerville withdrew the Indian Ocean fleet in 1942 to Mombasa, not to west Africa. Thirteen years intervened, not ten, between the murder of Gordon in 1885 and the reconquest of the Sudan in 1898; twenty-four years, not fourteen, between the LBJ visit in 1967 and Bush senior’s tour in 1991. 

Welsh is also cavalier with names. Some figures in the Australian past are usually referred to by two forenames: William Charles Wentworth, John Hubert Plunkett, John Dunmore Lang and the pervasive New Zealander William Pember Reeves. Welsh democratically slices out their middle names in each case, while Sir Ronald Munro-Ferguson seems lucky not to have become plain ‘Fergie’. In other cases Welsh is oddly formal. I doubt if anyone has called New Zealand’s first woman prime minister ‘Jennifer Shipley’ since she left school, while the appearance of the Western Australian mining magnate as ‘Langley Hancock’ comes as a surprise to those who know him through the ancient Scottish folk ditty, ‘Old Lang’s Iron’. There are errors in the names of Watkin Tench, James Bicheno, Allan McLean and the Earl of Dudley ─ minor glitches in minor figures. Canada’s first prime minister, John A. Macdonald, and Ireland’s Charles Stewart Parnell are also casualties, the more regrettable as neither really needed to be dragged in at all. 

But if we put aside these blemishes, we can perceive a deeper question behind Welsh’s endeavour. He is impressed by Australia’s success, economically, socially and democratically, as confirmed in UN lifestyle league tables. Brazil had natural wealth but has struggled to create a decent society. Japan modernised but drew upon an integrated pre-industrial economy and a firm institutional basis ‘whereas Australians, to a very considerable extent, developed their own solutions’. How could they have done this in so short a time as two hundred years? In short, when does Australian history start? Now, your reviewer left Canberra in 1977 to work in Ireland and Britain. If the story cold-started in 1788 (and the opening scenes were hardly promising) then it follows that one-eighth of Australia’s history has taken place since I left. Conscious though I am of the ageing process, I cannot accept so impacted a timescale, the more so as much of the achievement was already well in place while I was there. Clearly, then, we need a mental framework that places the Australian past in a much longer context, one that still values European Australians for their adaptability, just as it honours the claims of Aboriginal Australians based on their prior occupancy and spiritual affinity to the environment. Herein lies one overwhelming challenge to the writers of general histories: how does one handle ‘the story so far’, the cultural baggage and institutional inheritance that Australians imported from the far side of the world? Almost equally perplexing is the corollary to the equation: is there a happy ending? There is for our author, since we leave him rejoicing in 2003 at England’s victory in the rugby world cup. In a tailpiece, he hopes that Whitlam, Fraser and Hawke might sit down with assorted ex-governors-general and Aboriginal thinkers to draft a blueprint, or Green Paper, that will unscramble the complicated federal system, accommodate a safe republic and usher in a brave new world of democracy, just like the federation movement a century ago. Alas, I challenge the comparison and I doubt the methodology. 

This is a lively and well-written book: I blenched at two uses of ‘aggravating’ to mean ‘provoking’ and winced at two examples of ‘inter’ being used for ‘intra’, a small enough haul of nitpicking in a quarter of a million words. And much can be forgiven the first general history ever, in my recollection, to cite that most delightful of all emigration pamphlets, Australia A Mistake: New Brunswick for the Emigrant, produced in 1855 before the Empire had come to be thought of as one big happy family.

Stephen Clarkson - Uncle Sam and Us

Stephen Clarkson

Uncle Sam and Us: Globalization, Neoconservatism, and the Canadian State.

Toronto: University of Toronto Press and Washington DC, Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2002.

viii + 534 pp. ISBN 0-8020-3758-5 (hardback) and 0-8020-8539-3 (paperback)

Stephen Clarkson has written an impressive book deploring the subordination of contemporary Canada to the United States. Fittingly, he holds a Chair with the splendid title of 'Political Economy', for only somebody with a grasp of both democracy and dollars could have achieved such an analysis. Yet this is no bloodless parade of trends and figures. As Clarkson points out, social science methodology elevates precision at the cost of significance. The statistic that Canada exports goods worth $360 billion to the United States has no inherent meaning, even though that represents forty percent of the country's gross domestic product. 'Grasping the significance of a fact involves making a judgment, and making a judgment invokes one's core values.' (9) An activist for Canadian national causes for forty years, his book was triggered by the simple query posed by a friend, 'Stephen, will Canada survive?' (407). Canada, he was sure, would continue to fill its space on the map, but what sort of country it would be? The result is a prolonged cry of pain, a combination of post-mortem and rallying cry.

A passionate book, but constructed around a social sciences definitional framework. Ottawa is located at the mid-point of five levels of governance, staggering beneath the emerging global and continental tiers above and dumping its responsibilities on the existing provincial and municipal spheres below. In 1971, Nixon refused to exempt his northern neighbour from an emergency import surcharge, so shaking Canadians in their comfortable Keynesian paradox that used the profits from cross-border trade to combine State support for industry with the provision of welfare services for the citizenry. Canadians now faced a clear choice, and being Canadians they adopted both policies, although not simultaneously. Down to 1984, Trudeau sought a more autonomous Canada, through diversified trade and multilateral diplomacy. This approach was already in the doldrums when the Conservatives swept into office. According to Clarkson, Brian Mulroney brought no fresh ideas and, consequently, he was temperamentally vulnerable to embracing the free trade panacea argued in the 1985 MacDonald Report. Thus Canada bounced headlong from insulated independence to the barely considered Plan B of continental integration.

At this point, enter globalization. In principle, the phenomenon goes back to Edison, if not to Columbus. Its terrifying modern form brings rapid and intrusive change: trans-national corporations, unsleeping stock markets, computerisation of cash and information, the imposition of hegemonic cultural norms. But Clarkson also discerns two accompanying concepts, global governance and globalism. For corporations to operate on a world stage, rule-making is required. By tackling this issue with regulations in phone-book bulk, the European Union flies in the face of globalism, which fights the very notion of regulation by governments. It would be flippant to dismiss Clarkson as yet another Canadian nationalist intellectual crying 'we was robbed' by the victory of free trade with the United States (CUFTA) in 1988. He is right to identify the novel feature of the Canada-US agreement as the opening of cross-border movement to services. Once locked into CUFTA, Canadians found, as they had been warned in 1891 and 1911, that they must follow Washington wherever it led. When the Americans opened trade talks with Mexico, CUFTA soon became NAFTA, and Canada was sucked into a new philosophy of continental governance. Investment is a service, and investors must be protected from expropriation by excitable Latins. Under NAFTA's Chapter 11, any investor, actual or even potential, can sue a sovereign government for obstructing trans-national corporations as they gouge environments and customers. Two years after NAFTA, in 1994, came the World Trade Organisation (WTO), and neoconservative corporate governance went global. (Ottawa, incidentally, has taken a WTO case against France for using health regulations to block imports of asbestos that are banned within Canada.)

Chapter after chapter chronicles the damage that Clarkson blames upon neoconservatism. Some of his arguments may be probed. Clarkson is a Torontonian, proud of a great city that faces environmental and economic problems, including loss of control over its powerful pan-Canadian banking sector. He argues that neoconservatives have hypocritically downloaded key public functions to the municipal level to weaken the role of government, as symbolised by the lethal epidemic caused by polluted drinking water in Walkerton, Ontari. But it does not follow that creation of a single municipality for Metro-Toronto fits part of the pattern, for all that Clarkson briefly labels the behemoth as 'glocalization'. The parallels with Margaret Thatcher are far-fetched: she hand-bagged big-city regimes. Nor is it cricket to cite Toronto Mayor Mel Lastman's demand for provincial status without noting that most Metro intellectuals regard Lastman's election as a sad loss to his previous calling of furniture retailing.

It is striking to note the virtual omission of concern about the Quebec issue. A decade ago, it was 'whither Canada?' that agonised such tomes. Now secession is silently dismissed, as the neoconservative challenge to the State prompts the question 'wither Canada?' Sometimes there is a tension between Clarkson proving that the State has been castrated and Clarkson hoping that it might be revived to protect Canadian values. To a Britain facing the challenge of the Euro, the Bank of Canada's autonomy, however constrained, and the country's ever-sinking dollar, may seem potent symbols of old-fashioned sovereignty. His suggestion that the dollar should 'float up to what is thought to be its true value' (thought by whom?) in order to 'raise the wealth of all Canadians' (416) sounds like the greatest piece of Voodoo economics since Harold Wilson reassured us about the pound in our pockets. (A stronger dollar would, as Clarkson says, make imports cheaper. It would also flood the country with American and Mexican goods, while increased export prices would force Canada back to a mere staple producer.)

Garrett Ward Shelton, ed. - Encyclopedia of Political Thought

Garrett Ward Shelton, ed.

Encyclopedia of Political Thought

 New York: Facts on File Inc., 2001, pp. ix + 342, ISBN 0-8160-4351-5 (hardback)

I learnt something from taking an undergraduate course in Political Thought. I learnt that I could not understand Political Thought. As I grappled with the set books, words loomed in front of me, big ones too. I laboriously disentangled them just as I had been trained by the Janet and John books. Sentences continued to swim while I drowned, first in incomprehension and finally in panic. The course accompanied the unfolding of the UDI crisis in Rhodesia.  This provided a provocative contemporary angle for the genial conservative who tried to teach me. Plato wanted the gold to rule; he would have been for the settlers. Aristotle restricted citizenship, Machiavelli and Hobbes were brutal about the use of power. No problem with Locke, for the white minority owned the property. Rousseau had no time for majority rule. By the time the exam came around, all I had grasped was that the white Rhodesians were unlucky not to have lived in the previous two millennia. Political Thought was not for me.

But, like it or not, we are all affected by political theory, perhaps most of all when we do not know enough to question it. I simply had to pick up some grasp of the subject just as I came to terms with other puzzling aspects of the human condition -  through instinct, deduction from knowing remarks and occasional fumbling experiments of my own. With the Encyclopedia of Political Thought, I finally hoped that I had could find answers to all those questions I had been too shy to ask. In semi-coffee-table format, with pages set in large type and double columns, its fine hard cover decorated with pictures, it brought back reassuring memories of the Beano Annual. Containing over 400 bite-sized entries in user-friendly form, this is definitely a volume for every reference library. Most entries have a note on further reading and there is a brief general bibliography, which includes most of the tomes that foxed me forty years ago.

Broadly, there are two sorts of entry, both of them showing some bias towards the United States. Some deal with concepts, such as abolition (of slavery), abortion, absolutism, activism, alienation. Others discuss people, including Nixon, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan ('noteworthy in political thought', but for his advocacy of conservative ideas rather than for originality, 254). There is no entry for 'Commonwealth', even though one version of the idea was influential in early America. Each entry is liberally cross-referenced, so that an enquiry about Plato may guide the reader to topics as various as justice, fascism and James Madison. Daringly, I read my way through the topics of that terrifying course of forty years ago, and found the material gently reassuring. Finally, I plucked up my courage to confront that naughtiest of all intellectual experiences: what on earth is all this business about Foucault? There he was, trailing the First Amendment and the Virginia apologist for slavery, George Fitzhugh. I read about his life, his sad death and his views on authority. There the clouds closed in: '… authority cannot be regarded either as a form of action opposed to power or as an institution that merely wields power, but as a mechanism of political management that is composed by the fluid exercise of power throughout society' (110). Professor Sheldon's team have evidently done their best to convey a simple meaning, but I wish they had told us what Foucault thought about the Rhodesia crisis.

Raymond Miller, Ed. - New Zealand Government and Politics

Raymond Miller, Ed.

New Zealand Government  and Politics

Auckland: Oxford University Press        

Revised Edition 2001 of New Zealand Politics in Transition (1997)

xxviii  + 572 pages    Tables 

Although democracy is our secular religion, its theology is opaque. Democracy is about majority rule, through free and fair elections. But the value of a vote depends upon the system of representation (first-past-the-post or proportional) and the effectiveness of the party system (multiple or cops-versus-robbers). Some voters choose a leader, others merely select a local lobbyist. Having voting, once every three-to-five years, citizens find themselves subject to powerful governments, which sometimes break their pledges and often impose unpopular policies. To add to the complexity, democracy has acquired two ethical aspects: it must respect the rights of minorities, and it must be honest.  These worthy add-ons place considerable strain upon two supporting institutions, the judiciary and the bureaucracy. The courts must act as umpires, while taking orders from the players. Civil servants must be both independent and accountable. Analysed in these terms, democracy may provoke the traditional response to the description of the giraffe: there ain't no such animal.

            But democracies do exist, and if the beast cannot be defined, surely its habitat can be identified. But if we reject monarchies and federations, both of which theoretically limit the principle of majority rule, the options narrow until we are forced to conclude that democracy is what they have in New Zealand. There the de facto head of state plays a ceremonial role, and the weak upper house is long abolished. Women have long had the vote, the majority speak in triennial elections, but the Maori minority have its guaranteed place. In return, for much of the twentieth their government gave them a welfare state and a command economy to insulate them from a cruel world.

Then, suddenly, it was no longer so. Twice in succession, New Zealand's electoral system failed to deliver: in 1978 and 1981, Labour outpolled National, but Muldoon took more seats. Worse, the country was living beyond its means. The revival of its founding document, the Treaty of Waitangi, sent shock waves through the system. Labour took office in 1984, but the bureaucracy seemed to retain power. The political system was overhauled, most notably in the adoption, from 1997, of "MMP", a form of proportional representation which made elections an efficient head-count but complicated the formation of governments.

As the earthquake subsides, the publication of New Zealand Government and Politics seems a timely moment to assess this renewal of democracy. The 48 contributors produce 47 essays arranged in eight sub-sections that cover a huge range of topics, including Cinderella subjects like local government. As a student textbook, each contribution ends with questions for discussion. (One invites undergraduates to debate whether MMP is "dog tucker".) Evolving from an earlier volume entitled New Zealand Politics in Transition, this collection conveys a sense of system that is still adrift. Thus the opening section deals with three macro-topics, national identity, globalisation and civil society, but it is not clear from the rest of the book whether they are fundamental or merely prefatory. In piam memoriam, we start with a combative squib from the late Bruce Jesson calling for the distinctive identity of a republic. That is hardly a live issue, but it is surprising to find little interest in the continuation of legal appeals to the far-away Privy Council. Brian Easton argues that globalisation is neither intrinsically neither good nor bad, and that it is hardly new: there would be no New Zealand without the refrigeration ships of the Victorian technological revolution. Barry Gustafson shows that civil society is not easily reconstructed. 500 pages later, the collection concludes on a different note, with three essays on neo-liberalism. Personally, I would have swapped these for an audit of democracy, a term that rarely appears in these pages. (It may be noted that specifically Maori issues merit just three essays, while the section on political parties contains no separate discussion of New Zealand First, the party that has spanned the Maori and Pakeha spheres.)

Has New Zealand democracy been strengthened by the innovations of recent years? MMP means coalition, coalition means consensus, and consensus means the end of presidential-style rule: for the first time in the twentieth century, MPs actually rejected a government bill in 1998. But who has the claim to form a government, the leader of the largest party, or the front-person of the largest grouping? As Jonathan Boston shows in his use of the concept of "negative parliamentarism", New Zealand ministries can be both installed and dismissed by a minority of the whole legislature - democracy with a random touch. Farcically, a minister with a multiple portfolio can be punished for failure by dismissal from part of the job without departing from the cabinet. The Public Services Commissioner splendidly declares that politicians are responsible for outcomes, bureaucrats for outputs. But when coalitions quarrel, are civil servants forced into decision-making? Then there is the Citizens' Initiated Referendum (CIR), usefully dissected by Helena Catt. Ten percent of registered voters can petition (and somebody must check each signature) for a national vote on any proposition. Why ten percent, when the threshold for party representation under MMP is only five? With New Zealand's media following the international trend towards dumbing down, how can the people make an informed decision, especially in isolation from the big picture of overall policy? In 1999, they voted overwhelmingly for tougher sentences upon violent criminals, but who decides how to meet the cost? Experts say that MMP cannot work with fewer than 120 MPs, but the people voted to cut the parliament to 99. Does democracy mean giving the people what they want, or deciding what is in their best interests? Since the CIR is merely advisory, it merely highlights the theoretical inconsistencies of democracy itself. And yet, as Alan McRobie points out, New Zealand is one of the few countries with a democratic heritage stretching back 150 years. It is worrying that the system should remain so theoretically muddled in a country that has deliberately modernised its institutions. This is a useful book, even an alarming one.

Jeremy Moon and Campbell Sharman, Eds. - Australian Government and Politics

Jeremy Moon and Campbell Sharman, Eds.

Australian Government and Politics: The Commonwealth, The States and the Territories.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003,

pp. xiv + 322, ISBN 0-521-82507-5 hardback, 0-521-53205-1, paperback.

If Nature abhors a vacuum, then surely the science of politics should overwhelm a federation. Sovereignty may be theoretically divisible, but it is impossible to believe in the constant and precise equality of power between centre and periphery necessary to maintain a true federal equilibrium. Indeed, three of the world's most enduring federations, the American, Australian and Swiss examples, all began in times when the outside world could be kept at arm's length, so that the central power could be deliberately emasculated. The Australian Commonwealth, remark the editors, was 'born of compromise and reared on opportunism'. The growth of an external affairs dimension, which barely existed in 1901, has formed an important element in the shift towards centralisation of effective power. In 1983, the Australian government pushed its foreign affairs powers to the length of preventing the Tasmanian government from building a controversial dam - but the island state has retaliated by quarantining Canadian salmon. After a century of federation, Australians are governed through a diverse assortment of parliamentary regimes - Canberra, six states and two territories - prompting the editors of this book to ask whether the continent has one political system or nine.

In the aftermath of the centennial, this collection of eleven thoughtful essays offers a timely review of Australian politics. First, a grumble. Contributors should begin with a note on population. Thus on Western Australia, the editors themselves helpfully indicate that they are talking about two million people, two-thirds of whom live within sixty miles of Perth. By contrast, we learn that Tasmania faces the loss of half its people in the next half century, but it is not until eighteen pages later that we are told that the island only has 470,000 of them to start with.

Australian academics accord to the Labor Party what in computers is called the default position. Moon and Sharman defend this emphasis on the conventional grounds that Labor pioneered mass membership and caucus control, forcing their opponents ('anti-Labor') to follow suit. Moreover, for long periods Labor has been the largest single vote-winning party. There is both paradox and myopia in this view. First, how was it that the Australian Commonwealth was designed without mass parties in mind at all? Here the population factor becomes important. Even today, the average ratio of voters to parliamentarians is 1:2250, small enough for politicians to maintain support through informal networks. Labor's structures make it is easier to study, but the mere fact that the party had to organise thus was as much a sign of weakness as of strength. Moreover, while Labor may have been the largest single party, much good did this do it in pursuing power. The editors argue that for seventy years after 1910, that is, in response to the irruption of Labor, Australian politics was characterised by conservative stability. Indeed, Canberra has only become a two-horse race since 1983 when the party substantially re-branded itself. To argue that Labor was 'unlucky' to lose so often is inadequate. The truth is that the 'anti-Labor' parties generally formed a coherent alliance and were more successful in winning majority support. These essays usefully demonstrate how the Country Party functioned as the right wing's rural safety valve, its variable strength across Australia providing much of the diversity that distinguishes the internal politics of the states. Sure, the coalition parties often disagreed, but open squabbles could be healed. When Labor quarrelled in the 1950s, the outcome was a split, indeed The Split, that left wounds for decades.

Perhaps the most striking feature of Australian democracy is that it accords unquestioning legitimacy to structures that hamper majority rule. The rules for voting have been altered time and again: compulsory voting favours Labor, obligatory listing of all candidates on the ballot helps the right-wing parties. Representation is still sometimes weighted to rural areas, penalising the urban strength of Labor, except in Western Australia, where the mining seats also benefited. Most surprising of all is the barely questioned entrenchment of the upper houses. At Commonwealth level, the Senate survived unscathed the crisis of 1975, although state governments can no longer change its political complexion when filling casual vacancies. The state Legislative Councils have pioneered the committee investigations that have so strengthened the work of all parliaments in recent years, part of Australia's hybrid 'Washminster' system. Few state assemblies number as many as 100 parliamentarians, so that a disproportionate number of the majority party will hold ministerial posts, hampering the scope for an active lower house committee system. Queensland, which scrapped its Council, and the Northern Territory, which does not have one, are not regarded as the most vigorous legislatures in the country.

Behind all this stands the conservatism of the Australian electorate. That most democratic of all devices, the referendum, actually helps to fend off change: only eight of the 44 proposals to amend the Commonwealth constitution since 1901 have succeeded. New South Wales voters are keener to make changes, but the Northern Territory voted against statehood in 2002. Australia prides itself on being one of the first countries to allow women to vote. But it was 1921 before a woman was elected, and 1990 before one formed a government, both in Western Australia. Not until 2001 did a woman lead an opposition into government when Labor's Clare Martin was 'stunned' by her success in the peripheral Northern Territory. Compulsory participation underpins continuity, and so democracy pays at the price of its own success. Elsewhere, Australians may not get the governments they deserve but they certainly seem to get the politics they want. It may not be only Tasmania that desperately needs creative vision but must rub along with opportunism and brokerage. In middle-class Canberra, the infant Australian Capital Territory executive experiments with relaxing cabinet solidarity, but is it symbolic that the ACT's most radical notion has been the attempted legalisation of euthanasia?

Even though each state is different, outsiders will be struck by the homogeneity of Australian politics. We hear in passing of a rogue legislator who called himself 'South Australia First' and of tiny local parties trying to break into the fissiparous legislatures of Hobart and Darwin. But, unlike Canada, Australia has no secessionist movements and its coast-to-coast party system is remarkably uniform. One system or nine? Moon and Sharman tackled the question with some advanced mathematics, and their answer is: yes and no. It seems an appropriately federal response.

Brian Galligan, Winsome Roberts and Gabriella Trifletti - Australians and Globalisation

Brian Galligan, Winsome Roberts and Gabriella Trifletti

Australians and Globalisation: The Experience of Two Centuries.

Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001,

pp. vi + 217, ISBN 0-521-81199-6 hardback, 0-521-01089-6 paperback.

As a historian, I have two problems with political scientists. First, they refine and define until they create a three-legged parrot of an idea, with beautiful plumage but impossible parentage. Secondly, too often they write about the past without a true historical sense, using it as a quarry for contemporary polemics. Here three political scientists from the University of Melbourne offer a sweeping reappraisal of the essence of Australian citizenship. Am I forced to abandon my prejudices?

On the conceptual front, Brian Galligan, Winsome Roberts and Gabriella Trifiletti are admirably clear. There is nothing new, they say, about globalisation, although they acknowledge that events now operate in 'instant time', whereas early Australia was left to its own devices for months -  a crucial point not prominent in  the subsequent analysis. They insist that there has been no clear review of the nature of Australian citizenship in the light of the demise of Empire, attacking the anodyne conclusion of the country's Citizenship Council in 2000 that the country has no distinctive political culture. They argue that Australian history has too often been interpreted through a simplistic colony-to-nation model, in which sovereign independence is equated with living happily ever after. Since there is no such thing as complete independence in the era of globalisation, such mythology implies that citizenship itself is devalued by the erosion of sovereignty. Rejecting this as a bogus yardstick, they emphasise that Australian citizenship predated political independence and has always been multi-layered, with supra-national (imperial/British Commonwealth) elements alongside sub-national (state and local) patriotisms. They are untroubled by the technical objection that there was no such beast as Australian citizenship until 1949, regarding the older term 'British subject' as merely a convenient survival born of the need to write the federal constitution into a Westminster Act. In any case, they insist upon a 'small-c' concept of citizenship, one of general social activity rather than of formal participation in the political process. In short, the future in which Microsoft rules the wires looks very like a re-run of the past in which Britannia ruled the waves. 'Post-modern globalism is reminiscent of Australia's past history.'

            How well do the authors handle that history? They argue, persuasively, that the Australian colonies developed a vigorous culture of citizen participation leading to, and further encouraged by, self-government - well before Australia either united as a 'nation' or became an independent state. The movement for federation generated an additional level of citizenship, supplementing a still larger-scale identification with the British Empire. In the first half of the twentieth century, Australia passed from Imperial Dominion to Pacific Nation, so that its notions of citizenship were already complex before the encounter with globalised challenges to the nation-state. There is some shaky history, but most of the glitches do not matter. The 1926 Balfour Report on Dominion status is best distinguished from the 1917 Balfour Declaration on Palestine. Ireland was not a Dominion in 1907. More serious is the statement that the 1898 New South Wales referendum on federation failed because the 'Yes' vote did not achieve 'the special majority of 10,000 that had been prescribed'. In fact, support for federation fell short of the required threshold of 80,000 votes. The error bears upon the implied purpose of the authors' portrayal of federation as a popular upsurge of pan-continental sentiment in favour of a new level of citizenship. It is possible to assemble any number of newspaper quotations about the inevitable triumph of the federal spirit in the hearts and minds of the people (the authors give one from 1874). These alone do not explain why federation happened, nor do they tell us why the process took so long. There is the standard allusion to the Australian Natives' Association, a friendly society of the locally-born who were commendably firm about their apostrophe. Certainly, the ANA provided the organisational backbone for the campaign in Victoria but, far from being the precursor of pan-Australian identity, it hardly existed in the other colonies.

            As British subjects, Australians, then, enjoyed the reality of citizenship without articulating the concept. A rare example of the terminology came from a group of German-Australians interned during the First War, who asked if they were 'still citizens of Australia'. The authorities assured them that they were indeed, and that since citizenship involved obeying the law, they would remain locked up. This poignant example highlights an issue of the balance between responsibilities and benefits in citizenship. As 'citizens' of the Empire, Australians gained in security - but they paid no taxes to London, endured few restrictions and, if they fought in imperial wars, they did so as volunteers.

            By 1999, Australia was a signatory to almost 3,000 international agreements, few of them scrutinised by legislators, a development that seemingly strengthened the executive and the judiciary rather than the individual. The 1995 Teoh case blocked an attempt to deport a non-national whose children had been born in Australia. The High Court ruled that in ratifying the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child, Canberra had created a 'legitimate expectation' that its provisions would be incorporated into law, even though Parliament had not done so. Here globalisation appeared to circumvent citizen participation in the framing of laws. But the authors also adduce the 1994 Toonen case, in which campaigners hauled Tasmania's ban on homosexuality before a UN Committee. Sadly, few citizens will have the determination to take a case to the United Nations, although in former times hardly any Australians ever appealed cases to the Privy Council. The difference lies in another aspect of citizenship, that of identification. Independent Australian Britons took pride in the Union Jack. I doubt if gays will take to the streets of Hobart wearing blue berets. Nobody will wish to denigrate any text that boosts the notion of citizen empowerment in a frightening world, and I am personally keen on reminding Australians of their imperial past. In this case, the conceptualisation has been uncharacteristically broad and the history over-optimistic.