Realism, Rationalism, Race: On the Early International Relations Discipline in Australia

Realism, Rationalism, Race: On the EarlyInternational Relations Discipline in

Australia

James Cotton

University of New South Wales at the Australian Defence Force Academy

The received view of the development of the international relations dis-cipline in Australia discounts its early history, maintaining that it onlycame into existence in the 1960s. It was then confined, according tothis account, within a realist-rationalist discourse. This article shows thatif realism-rationalism is the identifying feature of the discipline in Aus-tralia, then many exemplars can be found in the earlier period fromthe 1920s to the Pacific War. Problems regarding empire, obligationstowards the League of Nations, and Australia’s position in the Pacificregion were major concerns. Arguments in support of the League, orfor an emerging Pacific order, were often couched in rationalist terms;with the increasing international uncertainty of the 1930s, realist argu-ments became more prominent. There are also some examples of revo-lutionist theory. However, a major preoccupation across the spectrumof international thinkers was the issue of race and the exclusionaryWhite Australia immigration policy. It is argued that this theme cannotbe readily assimilated to realism-rationalism.

In what is still the most comprehensive survey of the discipline of internationalrelations (IR) in Australia, Martin Indyk (1985, 265–68)contends that the disci-pline ‘‘was only established ... after the Second World War’’ and then was con-fined within a ‘‘fragmented’’ and ‘‘derivative’’ intellectual framework, remaining‘‘firmly within the bounds of the Realist-Rationalist discourse.’’ Whether thefocus of IR scholars was upon system or process, ‘‘their unit of analysis was thestate’’ (Indyk 1985, 267). Indyk was content to employ Wight’s (still influential)trilogy of ‘‘traditions’’ (Wight 1991) but he discounted the third, ‘‘revolutionist’’(or ‘‘idealist’’), as inapplicable. Over time, Indyk’s assessment has becomecanonical. According to a recent textbook in the subject prepared especially foran Australian audience, one cannot speak of an International Relations disci-pline in Australia until the early 1960s (George 2007, 38). Its earliest practitio-ners, this text asserts, were characterized by ‘‘an English School realism, a ColdWar mind-set, and a general disinterest in matters theoretical,’’ in its initial man-ifestations ‘‘there was silence on the major theoretical controversies and debatesof the age’’ (George 2007, 39; c ⁄ f Reus-Smit 2003, 358).

Against this received view of the subject, this article advances two claims. First,if it is accepted that the realist-rationalist dichotomy or debate is regarded ascentral to Australian articulations of the discipline, then it is possible to speak ofa significant body of Australian IR in the interwar period. Second, if attentionis paid to the earliest practitioners of the discipline in Australia, then

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International Studies Quarterly (2009) 53, 627–647

‘‘realism-rationalism’’ does not account for many examples of Australianthinking. On the one hand, race was a central preoccupation in many of theircontributions; in addition, there are some clear examples of Wight’s thirdtradition, the revolutionist. For the purposes of the essay it is assumed (pace theconsiderable literature on the question) that Wight’s systematic distinguishing ofthe three traditions remains a useful heuristic or pedagogical device. It is furtherargued that a concentration upon race, while ultimately less than coherent fromthe point of view of theory, sits uneasily with either realism or rationalism.

Is a concern with origins of theoretical interest? Here there are both methodo-logical and specific historical grounds for the affirmative view. Regarding issuesof method, contributors to IR theory from Kenneth Waltz (1959), through HedleyBull (1966), to Richard Ned Lebow (2003) have developed their argumentsspecifically by way of a re-reading and a reinterpretation of earlier texts. There iscurrently a growing literature on the methodological implications of what hasbeen described as a ‘‘historiographical turn’’ in IR (Bell 2001), a trend relatedto the revival of a historicist view of the development of the entire discipline ofpolitical science (Adcock, Bevir, and Stimson 2007). Much of this recent work indisciplinary history shows that received narratives of the subject, though inappearance historical often functions actually to legitimize particular approachesor positions. As Brian Schmidt (1998, 29), a trenchant critic of what he haslabeled ‘‘presentism,’’ observes of Robert Gilpin’s account of the historical rootsof realism, ‘‘Gilpin is more concerned with validating contemporary neo-realismthan he is with understanding the history of the field of international relations.’’The classic case of this phenomenon is the ‘‘first debate’’ in IR during the1930s, the alleged outcome of which was instrumental in engineering the domi-nance of realism in the postwar discipline. Current scholarship is now interpret-ing this period in a somewhat different fashion (Long and Wilson 1995). Afurther example is the critical reassessment of the place of Grotius in interna-tional theory (Keene 2002); ‘‘Grotian’’ having served as a synonym for that very‘‘English School’’ the impact in Australia of which has already been noted. Thesource for the textbook quotation above provides a further illustration. Havingobserved the limitations of the earlier scholarship, it locates an indicator of ‘‘pro-found changes’’ (George 2007, 40) in the self-awareness of the Australian disci-pline in an edited book which appeared in 1988 and in which, perhaps notcoincidentally, the author (and textbook co-editor) has a contribution (George1988). If realism-rationalism exhausts the varieties of the subject, those who seethemselves as working outside of this dichotomy can be represented as tran-scending its (necessarily) narrow and constricting boundaries. And beyond theAustralian context, analysts of that ensemble of arguments that has becomelabeled ‘‘the English School’’ might discover that some, at least, of its key ideaswere held in combination before Manning, Wight, Bull, and Watson came topublish (Linklater and Suganami 2006). As Wight (1966, 32–33) himself wasfamously to maintain, ‘‘historical interpretation’’ provides the ‘‘coherent struc-ture of hypotheses’’ that is at the core of theoretical analysis.

This methodological contention leads to the historical impetus for this inquiry.If IR in Australia only emerged in the 1960s, then the dominance of Anglo-American theory, or, alternatively, subservience to the main propositions of ‘‘theEnglish School,’’ could be explained in the manner suggested. On this account,fully formed metropolitan ideas were being exported and applied to the hithertopre-theoretical periphery, thus explaining both their lack of critical edge andtheir subservience to the prevailing Cold War assumptions in their new location.However, if it can be shown that Australian IR both pre-dates this alleged histori-cal migration, and also that its original theoretical character did not entirely fitthe realism-rationalism mould (and was more interesting and more original thanthe standard textbook account would have us believe) then the relationship with

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the metropole must be reinterpreted. Before exploring the ideas of these figures,it is necessary first to consider who might be included amongst the thinkers inquestion, lest it be claimed that in the absence of appropriately labeled disciplin-ary and institutional locations, ignorance of their contributions can be justifiedand thus perpetuated.

Identifying Early Australian IR

Where is early Australian IR to be found? Here—bearing in mind that all period-ization incorporates an arbitrary element—the period prior to the outbreak ofthe Pacific War will be the focus, given that the fall of Singapore and U.S. entryinto the war challenged many of the essentials of the Australian internationalworld view. Indyk was concerned with academics writing in departments of politi-cal science and international relations; with the passage of time there has beenan accretion of error regarding his quite specific (and constraining) originalintention. His approach was consistent with the task exclusively to ‘‘survey’’ Aus-tralian ‘‘political science,’’ but to confine IR to the discussion of figures foundin appropriate academic departments is, of course, highly stipulative. It wouldeven limit global analysis, at its earliest, to the establishment of the School ofPolitical Science at Columbia in 1880 (under John W. Burgess—whose workinfluenced future Prime Minister Alfred Deakin and others during federation),or to the work of Paul Reinsch (1900) at Wisconsin. In Australia there would beno IR before the Department of Public Administration (now Government andInternational Relations), established at the University of Sydney in 1934, or theAustralian National University inaugurated the first IR department in 1949(Crozier 2001). Such an institutional definition would render IR a noveldiscourse shorn of its distinguished intellectual history.

In the period in question, in relation to Australia, the terrain of IR was occu-pied by practitioners, historians, jurists, demographers, and economists, as wellas a few political scientists, some of whom were located in academic depart-ments. Universities did play a part in providing an institutional context—thoughmore often in the form of Workers’ Educational Association and Extension pro-grams. In so far as there was any university teaching in IR it was focused, asGreenwood (1958, 76) later remarked, on either international organizations oron the British Commonwealth. However, other entities were far more important,though members of universities did play significant roles within them. As JohnLegge (1999) has shown, the Australian chapters of the Institute of Pacific Rela-tions and the AIIA (Australian Institute of International Affairs—formed in 1932from groups earlier affiliated with the Royal Institute of International Affairs)were the most important stimuli to debate and publication in international poli-tics. Though largely domestic in scope, the Institute of Political Science(founded in 1932) also sponsored volumes on foreign policy issues. Organiza-tions such as the League of Nations Union, the Round Table, and the Women’sInternational League for Peace and Freedom were also associated with originalthinking on Australia’s place in the world. Membership of these groups oftenoverlapped. Biographical study shows that most were males (though PersiaCampbell, Myra Willard, and Margot Hentze were distinguished exceptions) andmany had attended Oxford or the London School of Economics; further, thecurrent divisions between educators, commentators, and practitioners were muchless rigid. Aside from material published in Australia, there were early Australiancontributions to international journals of significance in the emergent disciplineat that time, including Foreign Affairs, International Affairs, Pacific Affairs, TheAnnals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, and Far Eastern Survey.

The IR community was of a modest size. Obvious suspects include FredericEggleston (politician, public servant, and savant), John Latham (politician and

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jurist), H. Duncan Hall, W. K. Hancock, Fred Alexander, and A. C. V. Melbourne(all historians); but also William Harrison Moore, K. H. Bailey (legal academics),I. Clunies Ross (veterinary scientist), Stephen Roberts (historian), E. L. Piesse(public servant), and P. D. Phillips (jurist). The only figures who were centrallylocated in political science ⁄ international relations academia were W. G. K.Duncan, the young W. Macmahon Ball, and (by virtue of a later brief tenure)Walter Crocker.

Realism-Rationalism in the Early Australian Discipline

Evidence for something akin to a realist-rationalist debate or series of debatestaking place in early Australian IR is not difficult to find. Following MartinWight’s understanding of the distinction between the two positions, while it ispossible to find some clear exemplars of each it is more usual to detect themboth in the arguments of a single author, most notably in works on the potentialand limitations of the League of Nations but also in studies of the Empire andof Australia’s place in the Asian region.

In a survey of 50 years of international studies in Australia since 1933, J. D. B.Miller (1983, 139) finds that the two main positions adopted by commentatorsin the earliest years were in relation to ties with Britain, and specifically whetherAustralia should pursue an independent foreign policy especially cognizant ofthe rising influence of Asia, or whether the country should remain specificallysubordinate in its foreign policy and economic priorities to the British lead. Bothof these positions can be seen as consistent with varieties of realism, but differingon the degree of reliance that could be placed on the British connection. Theemergence, however, of a ‘‘Pacific’’ school of thought in the later 1920s, stimu-lated by increasing trade interdependence with Asia in the context of a Washing-ton Treaty-based regional security and arms limitation architecture, bears astrong resemblance to the rationalist conception of a Pacific or Asia-Pacific coop-erative regional order which became fashionable in the 1980s (and in the theo-rizing of which Australians were again prominent). As a result of choosing thestarting date of 1933, Miller discounts the considerable discussion that wasunderway in Australia of the obligations imposed by membership of the Leagueof Nations. However this was a discussion largely to be terminated by what wasthen known as the Abyssinian crisis, which dispelled the hopes of most seekersof a ruled-governed (and thus rationalist) world order.

On the issue of the Empire, early Australian IR was concerned first withaccommodating Australia’s new status as a signatory at Versailles and as a mem-ber of the League, and then responding to the Balfour Declaration on the quasi-independent status of the ‘‘old’’ dominions; significantly, analyses of the Empirealmost invariably were concerned also with the League. In the 1930s the focusbegan to shift to the question of whether British and Empire associations weresufficient to guarantee Australia’s security or might rather expose the nation tounnecessary risks.

One of the most thoughtful works written on the empire following the worldwar was by H. Duncan Hall. He characterized his study as one of ‘‘internationalgovernment,’’ concerned to demonstrate how the path of the empire towards apolicy of ‘‘free cooperation of autonomous States’’ required a clear delineationof ‘‘the status of the Dominions’’ and their mode of future cooperation, andalso the future role of the British states in the League of Nations (Hall 1920,vi-vii). Hall’s careful analysis of these issues influenced Balfour; what is of impor-tance for this essay is the fact that though he was aware that the white dominionswere now, in effect, sovereign states and formulae needed to be found that rec-ognized this status, they nevertheless were bound by enduring interests both asthe ‘‘British group of states’’ and also by virtue of their individual membership


of the League. The actual formal machinery that embodied the former was quiteinadequate to explain the extent of cooperation within the group which there-fore clearly rested upon features other than formal institutions. Interestingly,Hall (1920, 372–78) includes a seven-page appendix on ‘‘Inter-Imperial Volun-tary Associations’’ the existence of which accounts (to use more contemporarylanguage) for some of the strong, albeit non-governmental transnational forcesand publics that maintain imperial unity. On the League, Hall (1920, 333)againsuggests that beyond the arrangements specified in the Covenant, cooperation ofa similarly informal kind will be required for the League to be effective, andhere some elements of the emerging practice amongst the British states has beenone of the inspirations influential on the League’s founders. On this evidence,Hall can be identified as a rationalist. Setting aside the claim of Charles HenryPearson (of whom, more later), he might also be regarded as the first Australianto author an entire IR text.

Between the wars the international role of the League of Nations was a majorpreoccupation of the emergent Australian IR community. Eggleston and Lathamhad both been at Versailles, and both wrote on the peace settlement in generaland on the League and its consequences in particular (Osmond 1985, 90–96).Even in 1920, Latham was more inclined to see the League in terms of its servicefor or threat to particular Australian interests, respectively in relation to the man-date awarded to govern New Guinea and to the ‘‘White Australia policy’’; how-ever he was also well aware that the existence of the League was a major newdevelopment in global politics and that, accordingly, there was now a necessityfor Australia to make much greater and self-sufficient efforts to make its positionand interests known abroad (Latham 1920). In his book on the Commonwealthwhich was largely a response to the Balfour Declaration, Latham (1929) developsa somewhat legalistic argument that exemplifies the same position. From thisperspective, Latham may be interpreted as standing towards the realist end ofthe realist-rationalist divide.

Eggleston’s expectations of international regimes seem, however, to have beensomewhat higher than those of Latham (Meaney 2005). He was particularly dis-appointed with the outcome of the Washington Conference of 1922; instead ofreal disarmament and recognition of China as an equal in the Pacific, ‘‘all theConference has achieved is a sort of balance of power in the Far East. The pow-ers will protect their interests there by armament, and there will be a ten yearsholiday’’ (Eggleston 1922, 13). His timing was of uncanny accuracy. By 1936,Eggleston (1936, 14) had formed the view that the League had failed because ofa systematic lack of commitment; not only were sanctions not adopted in thecase of Italian aggression against Ethiopia, but, more fundamentally, the Leaguehad never implemented its policies on armaments:

Nobody in the position of the League can exercise the control over a number ofhighly armed nations necessary to adjust their contentions. It is not a super stateor a world state, and if a world state were created it would not command suffi-cient obedience or force to give effect to its decrees. Disarmament was thus aparamount factor in the system of Collective Security as contained in theCovenant. It has completely broken down.

He then adds, ‘‘peace will only come when we realize that armaments are themain cause of insecurity’’: in the light of these sentiments, Eggleston appears tohave been a frustrated rationalist.

Two works were written specifically on the League and Australia under the aus-pices of the League of Nations Union, by A. D. Ellis (first edition 1922, third edi-tion 1927) and by J. C. Rookwood Proud (1936). Ellis was writing to promotethe activities of the League of Nations Union, but his rationalist reflections on

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the character of the League are worthy of note. He characterizes and thenrejects what might now be termed both realist and utopian views of the League;the former hold that such a project denies the fundamentals of an unchanging‘‘human nature,’’ the latter that it is a scheme of universal peace that has suc-ceeded in outlawing war (Ellis 1927, 68). Rather, given that the world is still inthe process of restoring ‘‘normal conditions’’ after a devastating conflict, if theLeague serves to reduce ‘‘international friction, and increases, even slightly,international understanding, it is a most promising sign’’ for the prospects ofconstructing order. In the longer term, its aim is to have states behave ‘‘in accor-dance with the ideals of justice and humanity and commonsense,’’ and it is areasonable expectation that ‘‘civilized nations’’ will honor their obligations (Ellis1927, 69).

The second sustained single-authored volume in the Australian IR disciplinewas by historian Fred Alexander. It still bears reading today, unlike Hall (or Pear-son or Latham) whose work is clearly that of a former era. As he argued in hisFrom Paris to Locarno and After: The League of Nations and the Search for Security,1919–1928 (Alexander 1928), the framers of the Covenant took ‘‘the opportunityof creating machinery which would be in the first place cooperative rather thanstrictly legal, and which would consequently look to persuasion by consultationand unanimous decision around a common council board rather than to persis-tent and interfering supervision and punitive action by means of the armedforces of the super-State’’ (Alexander 1928, 29). The fact that such a cooperativeapproach could be the basis for those policies of disarmament and arbitrationthat Alexander felt the League could provide for the security of Europe placeshim squarely in the ‘‘rationalist’’ camp. As Alexander himself was much later toremark to J. D. B. Miller, he was ‘‘captured by Wilsonian liberalism from thefourteen points onwards’’ (Miller 1976, 1, 1 ⁄ 4) while an undergraduate studentat Melbourne, and later in Perth, was a leading personality in the League ofNations Union. Hudson (1980, 188) in his study of the League characterizesAlexander (along with Eggleston, Harrison Moore, and A. H. Charteris) at thistime as a follower of ‘‘a Wilsonian kind of idealism.’’

The decade that separated the works of Ellis and of Proud had been onewhich had tested many of the supporters of the League. Proud (1936, 55) con-cedes that states, and not least Australia, have used the League for their own nar-row purposes; while affirming the principle of disarmament they havenevertheless relied upon arms for their own security. He also argues that thebreakdown of the Washington Treaty system after 1931 has seriously destabilizedthe Pacific. Yet even in 1936 he finds the best guarantee of Australian security tolie not in rearmament but rather in the ‘‘progressive disarmament in conjunc-tion with the elimination of fortified advance bases’’ (Proud 1936, 35). Nor doeshe reject the viability of a rationalist project to build world order. The League’sfailure ‘‘lies in its inability to deal with the racial hatreds and fears and theclashes of economic interests which are themselves the root causes of war’’(Proud 1936, 54). Interestingly, Proud records his debt to the first work to bewritten by C. A. W. Manning (1932), Policies of the British Dominions in the Leagueof Nations; indeed, it ‘‘provided the basis of this book’’ (Proud 1936, 3). Manningmay or may not—scholars differ on this point—have initiated the ‘‘EnglishSchool’’ while at the LSE, but he certainly represented advanced thinking on IRin Britain at that time. Proud also lists leading Anglo-Americans A. J. Toynbee,David Davies, Philip Noel-Baker, and Quincy Wright in his bibliography.

If Alexander’s book was the best work of IR in Australia in the 1920s, the mostnotable of the following decade was W. Macmahon Ball’s (1936) Possible Peace. Asummary cannot do it justice, but Macmahon Ball (1936, 16–17) is similarly criti-cal of the failure of the League to follow its own principles, while subjecting whathe takes to be the alternative mode of conducting foreign relations, ‘‘the


balance of power,’’ to scathing criticism: such a balance ‘‘can give no securityagainst war’’ since it rests upon continuous armed competition, it also does notprovide order as it ‘‘makes international justice impossible.’’ In order to forestallthe approaching crisis, Macmahon Ball (1936, 177) advocates what must be inter-preted as rationalist measures: public education, treaty revision, an end to thecurrent colonial system with the goal of ‘‘collective security based on a sense ofjustice.’’ Again, the work shows a good acquaintance with current British andAmerican IR including the work of Manning, the author having spent some timeat the LSE prior to its preparation.

A striking example of an internal realist-rationalist debate is found in someof the work of W. K. Hancock, of particular relevance to this essay as he showsa thorough knowledge of those many figures, from the Renaissance to theRisorgimento, now associated with the emergence of international theory.Hancock is perhaps the most highly regarded of Australia’s historians, makingmajor contributions to many fields, not least imperial history. One of his sub-sidiary interests was the history of ideas, and in his work on the developmentof the modern state, on which theme Hancock had planned and then aban-doned a book project while teaching at the University of Adelaide, it was clearto him that Machiavelli was a pivotal figure. In two essays published in themid-1930s (shortly after he moved to Birmingham) he mused on the extent towhich Machiavelli’s account of the logic of statesmanship supplies a standardboth for those who write about the historical record of policy making and alsofor contemporary policymakers (Hancock 1947, 18–40, 41–50). In retrospect, itcan be seen that Hancock concedes the analytic power of the realist position,but remains convinced that some elements of the rationalist position must beretained.

As Hancock was later to characterize his approach at that time, Machiavelli’s‘‘teaching was clean contrary to that of the League of Nations Union and ofinternational lawyers like Brierly or Lauterpacht; for to him the rules of law andalso those of morality were rules which princes and republicans imposedupon their subjects, but were themselves not subject to’’ (Hancock 1954, 112).Machiavelli’s insistence on the foregrounding of the interest of the state pro-vided a powerful analytic tool, ‘‘but we part company with him when he pusheshis theory of interest to the point of denying the existence of a society of states,bound together—no matter how tenuously—by obligations of law and morality’’(Hancock 1947, 39). In some respects Machiavelli is timeless: his ‘‘map ... revealsthe structure of international politics during the last hundred years no less faith-fully than it illuminated the politics of Renaissance Italy.’’ Yet his principles leadto ‘‘the war of everyman against everyman where nothing could be unjust’’(1947, 44, 47). Here, at least, Hancock is affirming the putative ‘‘timeless valid-ity’’ of realism which has so exercised more recent critics. But if the idea oforder cannot be abandoned, from whence is it to be derived? Here Hancock(1947, 48) notes an important contemporary intellectual trend:

A popular cry among English and American writers is ‘‘Back to Grotius.’’ Grotiusstood between two worlds of thought, between mediaeval idealism and modernempiricism: he understood the new political forces but he attempted to controlthem by the old standard of natural justice.

This passage was written in 1935, 5 years after Manning began to teach at theLSE and around two decades before Wight developed, in his celebrated lecturesat Chicago and then at LSE, that neo-Grotian position that was subsequently tobe elaborated by the English School. Wight, of course, was familiar withHancock’s work and specifically with the volume which contained these writings(Hall 2006, 44; Wight 1948).

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And there is a specifically Australian context for these ideas. In an essay, firstgiven in a seminar in Adelaide and initially published in 1933, Hancock arguedthat such a view applied to all human society, even to the Bounty mutineers. AsHancock (1954, 113) was later to describe this project:

In a paper called Politics in Pitcairn I told John Adams’s story, with my tongue inmy cheek, as a cautionary tale for Europe; here, in Pitcairn, was the microcosmof European history as interpreted by Machiavelli or Hobbes, the war of every-man against everyman culminating in a universal empire and a golden age whoseindefinite continuance could not, alas! Be predicted.

Search for a Social Philosophy by F.W. Eggleston (1941) was the most originalwork of social theory produced in Australia since Pearson. Completed by 1939 itwas not published until 1941 when, as the author observed, its argument in favorof ‘‘economic adjustment,’’ that is, ‘‘appeasement’’, as a means of easing thetensions that were leading to war already appeared dated (Eggleston 1941, 8).The book ranges widely over sociological and legal terrain, but as befits one whowas both a commentator and a practitioner in international affairs, one chapteris devoted to IR. Eggleston’s argument is surprisingly contemporary. In eco-nomic affairs state boundaries have long been transcended, and the prosperityof most nations is dependent upon global commerce. But in politics, the state isstill the dominant form, and as there is no international analog of the state,anarchy is the result. States therefore rely upon force, but in the acquiring ofthe instruments of force there is no equilibrium, with Eggleston (1941, 268)expounding a version of the classic security dilemma. Under modern conditions,the technology of force has become so destructive that its use is bound to beself-defeating. Two fundamental policies are required to address the root causesof the current crisis: free trade, so as to guarantee that free flow of resourcesand commodities that will guarantee the prosperity of all; and disarmament, todeal with that dangerous accumulation of destructive power that is threateningcivilization itself. A subsidiary objective would be to organize the capital neces-sary to industrialize the less-developed world. To realize these objectives, institu-tions are required, above all in Europe to bridge national differences. However,as a liberal, Eggleston expresses caution on the creation of any powerful institu-tion, lest power be misused. In short, Eggleston expounds an ambitious rational-ist project requiring a number of what would now be termed internationaland regional regimes to deal with the fundamental issues of trade, security, anddevelopment.

If realism is the default position of international relations analysis, then exam-ples of this approach should be readily available. Stark statements of realisminclude two somewhat alarmist books by journalist E. George Marks (1924). InWatch the Pacific he bemoaned the fact that the outcome of Versailles had beento entrench Japan within very easy reach of Australian territory. As this was anation that had been ruled in the current era according to the slogan ‘‘by rightof the strongest’’ (Marks 1924, 45), and as any limitations based upon Japan’sobligations to the League were in reality nugatory, Australia would be the subjectsooner or later of Japanese designs. He also articulates a characteristically realistview of international anarchy rooted in general propositions about human nat-ure: ‘‘human nature does not change very much; nations change very little intheir territorial ambitions—the insatiable desire for expansion’’ (Marks 1924,55). The solution for Australia was to populate the empty North, and build thestrongest armaments. In the 1930s, Marks (1933) returned to this theme in Paci-fic Peril.

By 1935 hope in the League was waning. During the debate on the possibleuse of sanctions against Italy, former Prime Minister William Morris Hughes


(1935) published Australia and War Today. His dismissal of the League, hisstark appeal to force, and his insistence that even economic sanctions amountedto war, generated so much embarrassment for the government of JosephLyons that he was forced to resign from the cabinet. His position was quiteuncompromising:

Wars arise from the same causes as quarrels between individuals. One nationwants what another has, or resents the attitude or conduct of other nationstowards it; especially if this places it at a disadvantage, economically or nationally.In the modern world nations – like individuals in society – are obliged – arecompelled to engage in a struggle for existence (Hughes 1935, 5).

A more bleak statement of Waltz’s ‘‘first image’’ of international relationswould be hard to find, especially from one who had once been the elected politi-cal leader of his country. A more thoughtful, but no less pessimistic, commentarycan be found in Japan and the Defence of Australia, a pseudonymous work by‘‘Albatross,’’ former intelligence officer E. L. Piesse (1935). Having been associ-ated with a relatively benign view of Japan’s intentions in the Pacific in the 1920s(Meaney 1996; Piesse 1926), Piesse had seen the foundations for regional orderprogressively eroded and forces unleashed within that country that made con-flict, as he saw it, virtually inevitable. Imperial defense could no longer be reliedupon, and the burden of his book’s message was the urgent need for Australiato acquire its own armaments beyond the current naval strategy. Piesse’s explana-tion for Japan’s expansionary policies includes the nation’s fear of Soviet attack,its pressing need for markets, and beyond these factors the influence of imperial-ist and militaristic ideology, and the absence of civilian control of the armedforces. The outcome of the Manchurian affair demonstrated the impotence ofthe League; in the absence of any regime of constraints Australia should preparefor the possibility of war.

The enormously industrious Stephen Roberts, professor of history at SydneyUniversity, after a program of fieldwork in Germany during which he interviewedmany important figures, published an immensely successful account of the emer-gence of the Nazi regime, The House that Hitler Built in 1937. As the crisis in Eur-ope deepened, the book appeared in no fewer than 10 editions by 1939. Robertsdevoted a fifth part of his work analyzing Hitler’s foreign policy where his realistpremises are clearly on display. Thus foreign policy is a matter of force (Roberts1938, 121–22), it has led to the division of Europe along the lines of politicaldoctrine in the manner of the era of the wars of religion (1938, 304), and inHitler’s own speeches on foreign policy he ‘‘solemnly endorsed a doctrine ofinternational anarchy in which the strongest power could fix its own code ofmorals’’ (1938, 305). In short, ‘‘Hitlerism leads to war’’; with such subject matterit is unsurprising that Roberts described himself as ‘‘a realist in internationalaffairs’’ (Roberts 1938, 354).

With war clearly on the horizon, and the crisis in Europe certain to preventBritain from exercising any real power in the Pacific, W. C. Wentworth wrote atract in 1939 calling for the most strenuous independent measures in Australiato prepare for invasion. He described a world in which the dissatisfied ‘‘Totalitar-ian Powers’’ were bound to engage in some major aggressive actions. The Lea-gue’s system of ‘‘collective security’’ is ‘‘decayed beyond repair’’ (Wentworth1939, 166) and as neither British nor, a fortiori, American assistance can beassumed in the face of the almost inevitable attack of Japan, the only appropriatestrategy in the current circumstances is self-help.

The idea that Australia had distinctive interests in the Pacific long pre-datesfederation. In Australian IR this argument began to be explored, as will beshown, when the nation formed a committee in order to participate in the affairs

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of the Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR). In some remarks at the first IPR con-ference (of which, more later), H. Duncan Hall, having reviewed the existingand deficient machinery for regional cooperation, states the case for a 1920sAPEC: ‘‘what is required in the Pacific is some sort of loose conference machin-ery which would bring governments together at regular intervals to promoteinternational cooperation in matters particularly affecting the peoples of thePacific’’ (Institute of Pacific Relations 1925, 138). The idea of a Pacific commu-nity became a significant element in the debate on policy in the Australian IRcommunity in the 1930s. In the AIIA publication, Australian Foreign Policy 1934(Dinning and Holmes 1935) the first book ever to appear with that main title,A. C. V. Melbourne argued vigorously for a distinctive Australian policy towardsAsia (Melbourne 1935), reprising his earlier empirical work (Melbourne 1932).Melbourne assumes, in broadly rationalist style, that greater familiarity andeconomic intercourse with Asia will tend to foster an understanding of sharedinterests. While the connection with Britain had its advantages, Australia’seconomic relations were being conducted increasingly with its geographicalregion, and its diplomacy and international posture should keep pace. In avolume edited by Ian Clunies Ross (1935), Australia and the Far East, the con-tributors explored further Australia’s distinct interests in the Pacific region, withthe editor identifying the possible bases for intensified exchange with Japan.

By 1938, the contest between those who found the current arrangements toguarantee Australia’s security satisfactory, and those who saw that the nationalinterest required a distinctive regional policy, became prominent (Harris 1938,121). In Australia’s Foreign Policy, R. G. Casey (then federal Treasurer) arguedthat the imperial connection served the national interest well: Australia was‘‘fully informed and freely consulted,’’ so much so that ‘‘British foreign policymay ... be regarded in a very real sense as Australian foreign policy’’ (Casey1938, 51). J. G. Crawford, on the other hand, insisted that the lack of orderin the region could only be dealt with by a new ‘‘collective system’’ in thePacific. Australia had special economic interests in the Pacific, not least itsburgeoning trade potential with Japan; attempts to constrain Japan’s furtherdevelopment not only prejudiced those economic interests but were also thefundamental cause of instability in the region. As an alternative, ‘‘economicappeasement ... might afford a basis for collective political agreement’’(Crawford 1938, 90). In developing this argument, Crawford (1938, 90) voicesa critique of the prevailing logic of ‘‘power politics ... on the basis of a balanceof armed forces.’’ If Casey can be seen as both somewhat conventional and arealist, then Crawford’s argument shows some rationalist traits. In JackShepherd’s (1940) Australia’s Interests and Policies in the Far East, the historicaland economic basis for Crawford’s argument was explored in very great detail,but by this time the signs of Japan’s militaristic expansion were rendering acomprehensive Pacific settlement unlikely.

What of Wight’s third category of theory? Setting aside the issue of race, itmust be conceded that while realism-rationalism captures much of the range ofAustralian thinking in this period there are nevertheless a few examples of whatmay be labeled a ‘‘utopian’’ or ‘‘revolutionist’’ approach to the subject. Laborparliamentarian Frank Anstey, after spending 1918–1919 in France and Britain,adopted (for a time) a position sympathetic to revolutionary Bolshevism. In abook appropriately entitled Red Europe (Anstey 1919) he developed the argumentthat capitalism could neither provide for the needs of ordinary people nor pre-vent war, and that only socialist revolution could achieve peace and progress.Anstey was not the only Labor pamphleteer to welcome the 1917 revolution(Maurice Blackburn was another), but occupies a special position by virtue of hisrole as patron to future Prime Minister John Curtin. While rejecting the classwar, Meredith Atkinson (1920), in The New Social Order. A Study of Post-War


Re-Construction, expounded a form of progressivism that expected domestic andinternational tensions alike to be mitigated if not eradicated by rational adminis-tration and appropriate policies of national education.

A revolutionist position of a very different kind was adopted by Sir GeorgeKnibbs, who in retirement after a distinguished career as Commonwealth statisti-cian turned his attention to the full implications of population growth. The glo-bal perspective of his neo-Malthusian position is striking. As his work, The Shadowof the World’s Future (Knibbs 1928), observes, issues of living standards, nationalcarrying capacity, migration, and birth-control are questions that ‘‘not only touchfundamentally the life and development of nations, but also the whole system oftheir mutual relations. They react profoundly upon the issues of peace and war’’(Knibbs 1928, 93). Knibbs is particularly insistent on the interconnectedness ofthese factors, and highly critical of the lack of any coherent policy. Though astrong opponent of the contemporary Soviet experiment, he abhors, neverthe-less, the effects of impersonalized and undirected agglomerations of capital onhuman prosperity and happiness. He is therefore of the view, ‘‘an internationalreview of all the greater questions affecting mankind seems now to be a sine quanon,’’ convinced that while the mass of peoples remain mired in sectional inter-est, the enlightened (their common opinions fostered by ‘‘international confer-ences and correspondence’’) will adopt the standard of ‘‘citizens of the world.’’Consequently, Knibbs (1928, 106–11) believed ‘‘great ameliorations in the statusof mankind are likely to arise.’’

To this point this essay has identified some contributions to Australian IR inthe period before the Pacific War. It has also shown that, bearing in mind thelimitations of the realist-rationalist distinction, as expounded by Wight andconsequently as employed by Indyk and his followers, something of the realist-rationalist tension or dialectic can be perceived in a number of those contribu-tions. It has also uncovered some examples of Wight’s third tradition, theexistence of which has not hitherto been noted by historians of IR.

Race as a Major Concern of Early Contributors to the Discipline

We now turn to the theme of race in Australian IR, a theme that will be readilynoticed through any thorough study of the literature. In assessing this theme, itis important to submit the evidence to a historical reading, giving the idea theimportance it had at the time (Vincent 1984). However, neither should it beassumed that, in the light of the frequency of references to race in connectionwith the exclusionary immigration measures of the White Australia policy, theidea had any particular coherence even to those who employed it. As MargotHentze (1935, 48) notes in a survey, ‘‘ [t]he reasons advanced in support of theWhite Australia Policy have a chameleon-like quality ... a comprehensive theory ofa ‘White Australia’ is still lacking.’’

Australia played an important role in the extension of the idea of race to inter-national politics. Australia’s first professor of history and political economy,W. E. Hearn (1879), later became Dean of Law at Melbourne University, andconsidered his book on historical and comparative legal systems, The AryanHousehold, as his most important work. It is heavily reliant upon the scholarshipof the time; what is noteworthy for this essay is the fact that Hearn used the term‘‘race’’ to refer to now widely distributed peoples who both shared historicalinstitutions and who were also all descended from occupants of a Central Asianancestral homeland. This usage is often encountered in the Anglo-Saxon trium-phalism of high Victorian historical writing, of which the books of EdwardAugustus Freeman are emblematic. Through the contribution of Hearn, thiselement of metropolitan thinking entered Australian discourse.

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An altogether more original contribution was made by Charles Henry Pearson.His National Life and Character: A Forecast (Pearson 1893) was written inMelbourne and undoubtedly reflected his extended Australian sojourn. Theo-dore Roosevelt wrote an adulatory review of the book and it also stimulatedinterest in Britain; Pearson’s death in the following year cut short a significantintellectual debate. As Marilyn Lake (2004) has shown, it was one of the mostinfluential books on the thinking of the federation generation, especially offuture Prime Ministers Barton and Deakin (the latter also having attended lec-tures given by Hearn). Pearson’s contentions that the rise of China was merely amatter of time, and that Australia represented the final opportunity to consoli-date white settlement in a whole continent were formative notions in the devel-opment of the White Australia policy.

As is generally acknowledged, race was so vital an issue to the federation gen-eration that the new Commonwealth emerged with powers to control races spe-cifically enshrined in the federal Constitution (Section 51, paragraph 26). TheImmigration Restriction Act and the Pacific Island Labourers Act, both of 1901,were the cornerstones of ‘‘White Australia,’’ the former not significantlyamended until 1958 notwithstanding complaints especially from Japan in theyears immediately following federation and again at the time of the Versaillespeace settlement. And the racial significance of these controls was not lost uponforeign commentators. As Frank Parsons of Boston University, writing in theAnnals for 1904 observes, the ‘‘Yankees of the South Pacific are determined toprevent race fissures, babel cities and debased admixtures in their common-wealth. They will not pollute the stream of life in the new world with the refuseof the old’’ (Parsons 1904, 211).

The major contribution of F. W. Eggleston to Australian IR has already beenmentioned. In 1921, The Round Table carried a piece on the White Australia pol-icy which provides a concise account of the rationale held at that time for restric-tive immigration. Eggleston rehearses the prevailing domestic arguments in favorof excluding non-British immigrants, but his implicit international doctrine isworthy of specific notice. British and European ‘‘races’’ need ‘‘further space’’ toguarantee access to the world’s resources without which their civilizations willnot prosper (Eggleston 1921, 318).

Two of the earliest examples of social science scholarship by Australians areconcerned with aspects of race; Persia Campbell’s (1923) Chinese Coolie Emigrationto Countries within the British Empire and Myra Willard’s (1923) History of the WhiteAustralia Policy to 1920. Campbell focuses principally upon domestic policy. Butshe does show that the possibility of imperial priorities overruling domestic senti-ment seeking to control Chinese immigration was an impetus for federation.Myra Willard’s (1923, 189) explanation for racial exclusion is straightforward; itsobject was ‘‘the preservation of a British-Australian nationality’’ and the founda-tion for ‘‘national unity, for true national life’’ was ‘‘racial unity.’’ As to theimplicit meaning and content of the term ‘‘racial unity,’’ Willard finds a varietyof interpretations, ranging from the argument that such unity was threatened bythe fact that members of other distinctive civilizations have proved unwilling toassimilate to the belief that persons of other races are inferior by virtue of bio-logical endowment. Fears of ‘‘racial division’’ and especially of what wasregarded as the unfortunate precedent of America (as represented, notably, inthe work of John W. Burgess) were especially evident, as she indicates, in theviews of Alfred Deakin. Hence the prevention of non-European immigrationbecame an issue of ‘‘the first national importance’’ (Willard 1923, 203) and tran-scended differences of party. This work, then, presents a view of the interna-tional system that foregrounds race, with the term understood according tovarious and overlapping biological and civilizational meanings. Nations of differ-ent races could not be expected to share the same understanding of institutions;


though unexpressed the clear inference of this sentiment is that there can be noconcrete meaning to the term ‘‘international society.’’ The basis Willard doesoffer explicitly for Australian policy is ‘‘the principle of nationality’’ which entailsa demand for ‘‘self-realization’’ and ‘‘the preservation ... of identity’’ (Willard1923, 207). On nationality, Willard refers to Eggleston’s (unsigned) piece in TheRound Table of 1921. Like Eggleston she concedes that this policy has arousedresentment and irritation, and cites the difficulties at Versailles over the racialequality motion sought by Japan. No better illustration could be found of theobstacles to the formation of international society—national expression overridesinternational obligation.

It is perhaps fitting that one of the first Australian contributions to whatmight be termed the nascent global literature of IR, that is produced in themetropoles, was an article by ‘‘Sydney’’ which appeared in Foreign Affairs, thehouse journal of the Council on Foreign Relations, in the 1925–1926 volume.From the modern vantage point this might be regarded as a somewhat eccen-tric or specialist subject for an Australian debut, but as Robert Vitalis (2005,161) convincingly argues, the pre-history of that eminent journal in the guiseof The Journal of Race Development under which title it appeared from 1910 to1919, deserves to be much better known. ‘‘Sydney’’ argued that the White Aus-tralia policy, while it was the source of international difficulties, was neverthe-less calculated to preserve the standard of life of the existing population,serving to exclude what would inevitably comprise an underclass unable to dis-charge the civic duties required by a democracy. In a passage with a strongcontemporary resonance, it is described as the means to avoid an internal‘‘clash of civilisations’’:

Pride of race, the belief that Australia must be kept as an out-post of the WhiteRaces and that Australians hold it as their trustees do not necessarily involve theidea of superiority. The two civilizations are evidently different, so different thatit will be impossible for a white democracy to admit an influx from the East with-out danger to its institutions and to the standard which it has painfully estab-lished. … [T]he clash of civilizations may tend either to destroy the morerestrained of the two or to provoke that which may bring about a return of bothto barbarism (‘‘Sydney’’ [psued.] 1925–1926, 105).

In all, if it was ‘‘an inextricable part of the social and political ideas of the Aus-tralian people’’ then White Australia expressed the apparently common view thata multi-civilizational domestic order was an impossibility (‘‘Sydney’’ [psued.]1925–1926, 111). If a single system of domestic political institutions could notcontain such diversity, by implication how much more difficult it would be toconstruct an international society with similar constituents.

Geographer Griffith Taylor was a major figure in his field in Australia wellbefore his appointment to a chair at Chicago in 1928. Though a prolific pub-lisher and publicist, and author of an authoritative geographical text on Austra-lia, Griffith Taylor’s magnum opus was his 1927 volume, Environment and Race,the outline of which was published in an article in The Geographical Review in theUnited States in 1921. Of no scientific value today, Griffith Taylor’s attemptedsynthesis of cephalic index data, language patterns, desertification trends, andfolkways is nevertheless breathtaking in its scope. This is not to say that even bypresent standards there are no still striking insights; as Griffith Taylor (1921, 95,97) observes (like Pearson) of the Chinese, they have only to master moderntechnology and they will be in the forefront of nations.

More to the point of this inquiry, Taylor’s work represents a view of the rela-tionship between the races which was undoubtedly influential in its day andwhich was the most comprehensive geographical and geopolitical approach

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developed in Australia. Griffith Taylor concedes the role of climate and otherenvironmental factors, but his key proposition is the major impact of cephaliccharacter and thus brain size. All peoples migrated from an Asiatic heartland;the earliest emigrations were undertaken by the most ‘‘primitive’’ dolichocepha-lics, the most advanced were the brachycephalic Aryans and Chinese, who werelate arrivals on the historical stage and who pushed aside earlier and less capablepopulations. Actual populations are very mixed, not least in Europe, but verybackward peoples are quite distinct:

The true Papuans and western Melanesians (who also speak Papuan), with a[cephalic] head index about 72, have all the character of the lowest Negroes.They are very excitable, voluble, and laughter-loving and even more cruel thanthe African Negro. In both cases it seems possible that early closure of thesutures of the skull prevents the growth of the brain (Taylor 1921, 75).

It should be recalled that as a colonial power and as a mandatory, Australiawas then in control of almost one million such individuals in Papua and in NewGuinea.

Taylor was ambivalent on the international implications of his larger doctrine,an ambivalence particularly evident in his assessment of China and the Chinese.His positive view of individual Chinese undoubtedly proceeded from his convic-tion that they were advanced brachycephalics; he was thus prepared to courtpopular odium by suggesting that some Chinese immigration should be permit-ted and that there would be advantages to a mixed race developing in Australia(Walker 1999, 193). On the other hand a modernized China, heir to the oldestcontinuous state formation, would not be content with the international statusquo:

When we realize that the Chinese have natural resources at their disposal whichare unrivalled (except in North America), it is obvious that only unremitting dili-gence, thrift, and sobriety will enable the white man to resist the ‘‘yellow peril.’’This is not a peril of military invasion, such as the Huns of old, but an economicperil for which I see few nations of the world educating themselves (Taylor 1921,97).

Doctrines of race inseparably entail conceptions of the international system.J. W. Gregory was appointed the first professor of geology at the University ofMelbourne in 1899, and published extensively on Australian themes during his5 years in residence. In later life he published Menace of Colour (Gregory 1925).There are affinities between this work and Lothrop Stoddard’s (1926) The RisingTide of Color Against White World-Supremacy. Stoddard, an American geographer,had been a proponent of the inevitability of race conflict for several decades; hisparticular distaste for mixed races and the ‘‘degeneracy’’ of civilization they werebound to produce has some parallels with Samuel Huntington’s more recentdevaluation of Australia, though on civilizational grounds, as a ‘‘torn’’ country.Gregory thought race conflict was not inevitable; like Huntington, he wasinclined to minimize sources of strife between races ⁄ civilisations through reserv-ing particular parts of the globe, notably including Australia, for the exclusiveuse of the white race.

Having participated in the occupation and annexation of German NewGuinea—in its effects, the new federation’s first assertion of its international per-sonality through military action—Jens Lyng (1919) authored the first survey ofthe newly acquired mandate under the title Our New Possession. In it we read thatdifferent racial types in New Guinea have different brain sizes; the Micronesians’possess ‘‘a brain capacity ranging them considerably above the Melanesians and


Papuans’’ (Lyng 1919, 139). Of the latter he asserts ‘‘mentally, the Papuans and Mel-anesians range with European children of about twelve years of age ... deceitfulnessand suspicion are the most outstanding features’’ (163). Quite apart from hisinfluence as the author of the first book on the new territory, Lyng played animportant role in establishing the first Australian administration in Rabaul,acting as government censor, publisher, and archivist. In the second of the IPR’sAustralian publications, F. W. Eggleston (1928, 6) takes seriously the very consid-erable tasks that assuming the mandate imposed upon Australia in discharging‘‘the responsibility of controlling a backward race,’’ discounting the strategicreasons for which it was sought by Prime Minister Hughes. However, for StephenRoberts (1928, 74) writing in the same volume, ‘‘the racial problem of theMandated Territory is in the presence of 417,918 natives, the majority of whomare under no effective control and the whole of whom are Stone Age savages.’’In dealing with what was perhaps the most important issue of foreign policy inits day, Australian opinion was decisively shaped by racial views.

As has been noted, early Australian IR was fostered largely through the patron-age of metropolitan institutions. The Australian chapter of the IPR was associ-ated with some notable publications with relevance to the theme, implicit if notexplicit, of race. There were six Australian representatives at the first somewhatad hoc meeting of the IPR in Hawaii in 1925, Stephen Roberts presenting apaper on the Australian perspective, and H. Duncan Hall an analysis of the regu-lation of immigration in the various Pacific countries (Institute of Pacific Rela-tions 1925, 59–64, 144–55). It is clear from the proceedings of the meeting thatimmigration was, from the beginning, no incidental matter for the IPR. Follow-ing the first meeting, organized national committees emerged and over a 2-weekperiod in July 1927, 137 delegates from across the Pacific convened again inHawaii for an exhaustive discussion of regional issues. In his remarks as leaderof the Australian contingent, Eggleston felt compelled to defend exclusionaryimmigration practices. Of the 11 round-table discussions at the conference, onewas devoted to immigration, where population pressure especially in the case ofJapan was highlighted. Of the 33 documentary chapters printed in the confer-ence proceedings, published by the University of Chicago Press, the two Austra-lian offerings were on geographical limitations to settlement (by Griffith Taylor)and on immigration laws (by legal academic A. H. Charteris), the latter devotingmost of his attention to the origins of the notorious ‘‘dictation test’’ which withits arbitrary choice of languages was effectively used to exclude immigrants ofunwanted races (Condliffe 1928, 483–95). In short, when the region was explor-ing new ways of enhancing exchange, the Australian contribution was to declare,on grounds of race, unrestricted immigration as a prohibited expedient.

As might then to have been expected, the first publication of the Australiangroup in the IPR was devoted to population (Phillips and Wood 1928). In hisforeword, J. G. Latham (1928, vi), at the time federal Attorney-General, statedthe view that the national objective should be to maintain Australia as ‘‘a free,white democracy,’’ and in order to achieve that end immigration should remaina domestic responsibility in which international organizations should have norole. Writing on the ‘‘population problem’’ P. D. Phillips finds that while thebasis for White Australia may be economic rather than racial, in the ‘‘popularbelief’’ the ground is more likely to be race. The book is also notable for thecontribution by Raphael Cilento (1928, 230–31) who offers an early expositionof the argument for which he became very well-known, namely, that a white pop-ulation could live in the Australian tropics, but only following ‘‘the exclusion ofraces with lower standards of life and higher rates of disease and reproduction.’’The contribution by economist F. C. Benham on the optimum size of populationargues, in the light of geographical and resources constraints, for a decidedlymoderate increase in numbers, provided a complementary amount of capital can

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be found to sustain national development. Such an increase should be consistentwith the White Australia policy which ‘‘is a policy of discrimination againstindividuals of markedly lower quality than the average Australian, or possessingsuch different characteristics that they do not become ‘assimilated’ into thesocial group’’ (Benham 1928, 271).

Two observations are in order on this book. First, its argument neatly resolvesthe two chief anxieties of proponents of an exclusionist immigration policy: thatAustralia’s ‘‘empty tropics’’ being unsuited to white settlement, could not orshould not be closed to Asian immigration, and the related argument that thecurrent small population could not reasonably monopolize the resources of acontinent entirely for their own benefit and enrichment. Second, it should berecalled that this was the first book publication of the Australian IPR, that localbranch of what was emerging as a serious attempt to generate what might nowbe termed an ‘‘epistemic community’’ dedicated to a constructivist project ofbuilding a common Pacific-rim consciousness. This book was Australia’s firstoffering to the project, and in subject and conclusions alike, it is extraordinarilyinward-looking. Its message, to simplify, was that there was not so much room asmight be supposed, and that was reserved for white immigrants.

The third Australian IPR volume (following the book on the New Guinea man-date, noted above) was Studies in Australian Affairs (Campbell, Mills, and Portus1928). It was a more diverse volume, but in his discussion of development andmigration, F. A. Bland (1928, 74) was compelled to observe that ‘‘Australia’spreference for specially selected types of Anglo-Saxons both limits the rate ofimmigration and creates situations in respect of aliens which may strain interna-tional relationships.’’

Perhaps the best regarded single volume on Australia of the time was by W. K.Hancock (1930, 59); as he noted of the White Australia policy, it ‘‘is the indis-pensable condition of every other Australian policy.’’ In his chapter on foreignpolicy Hancock (1930, 207, 218), in characterizing Australia’s major priorities,found it necessary to repeat his reference to the popular aspiration to remain‘‘ninety-eight percent British.’’ Elsewhere, Hancock (1933, 501) cut through thehypocrisy to underline the essential racism of the ‘‘dictation test’’ (as amendedin 1905—prior to that time the language tested had to be ‘‘European’’) used toexclude persons of unwanted color: ‘‘the language ‘prescribed’ was always one ofwhich the ‘colored’ migrant was ignorant.’’

David M. Dow, who worked for various commercial representatives of the Com-monwealth in New York from 1924, serving briefly as Acting Commissionerbefore his retirement in 1938, published (with Funk and Wagnalls) a popularaccount of Australia in the U.S. in the latter year. Of the aversion to racialadmixture, he says that ‘‘there is no single sentiment more generally held by allAustralians’’ (Dow 1938, 40); of the country’s prospects he writes: ‘‘for good orbad—the course of future development will be determined by the answer to oneproblem. Will Australia—against the will of her present population—be popu-lated by great masses from the overcrowded peoples of Asia’’ (251)? Similarracial anxieties can be found expressed in Paul Mcguire’s (1939, 144–45)Australia, Her Heritage, Her Future.

Australia’s first professor of IR at the Australian National University was WalterCrocker; with Crocker begins the kind of institutionalized academic pursuit ofthe subject analyzed by Indyk. After a brief period in academia, Crockerreturned to the world of diplomacy. Before his departure, he had prepared aninaugural lecture which was eventually published in 1956. The inaugural lectureof Australia’s first professor was on race. Crocker’s (1956, 8) key assertion wasthat ‘‘one of the hard lessons that the white races have to learn today is thattheir innings is over.’’


In choosing race as his inaugural theme, Crocker was reflecting on much ofhis personal experience but he was also returning to a much earlier concern,and one which falls within the historical period here under analysis. As aresearcher at Stanford, Crocker (1931) had written a monograph The JapanesePopulation Problem. Having noted the popular prognostication that the next worldconflict would occur in the Pacific, on the second page of the text he finds apossible basis for such conflict in the disproportionate share of the world’swealth and opportunity possessed by ‘‘the ‘White’ or European races’’ and,in particular, ‘‘the persistent resentment manifested towards the formerlydiscriminatory nature of the White Australia Policy’’ (Crocker 1931, 14). While adiscontented power, Japan’s capacity for aggression has been successfullyconstrained for the present by the Washington Treaty regime (Crocker 1931,19, 21). Nevertheless, the most destabilizing factor in the Pacific is thatcountry’s dense and growing population (Crocker 1931, 32, 214), and it is unsur-prising that, in relation to Australia, the knowledge that ‘‘a few million trans-planted Europeans’’ (30) command a whole continent can be understood tostimulate a demand for emigration rights. The cure for this problem, arguesCrocker, is not population movement but greater industrialization for Japan,with the guarantee of markets and spheres of influence (he approvinglymentions Manchuria, in a chapter published only months before the ‘‘Mukdenincident’’) so that the additional production will be absorbed. Crocker (1931,216) concludes with the observation that in the Pacific region ‘‘to a large degreethere is no international society at all. ’’ Japan has claims against those prevailingarrangements in the region, and without legal redress may have recourse toother methods.

Realism-Rationalism and the Accommodation of Race

So far it has been shown that Australian IR existed at least a generation beforeits emergence as recognized in the literature, and that a preoccupation with racewas a major aspect of writing in the subject. Given the influence of British andAmerican thinking, it is noteworthy that in Australia the focus on race was quitespecific, relating to migration and the place of the continent in Asia-Pacific geo-politics. By contrast, in Britain at this time, ‘‘race’’ was an issue overwhelminglyconcerned with the place of South Africa and India in the Empire (Rich 1986,70–91); in the United States race was generally conjoined with the analysis of thepolitical consequences of post-bellum Reconstruction.

Against the second claim advanced in this essay, it may still be alleged that‘‘race’’ is so far inferior (or diffuse) a category as compared to the other twokey organizing terms (however understood) employed here that the realism-rationalism dialectic nevertheless still captures the essential logic of the disci-pline in the period in question. It is necessary therefore to show—recallingthat Wight’s typology is of an ideal kind—that the holding of either realist orrationalist positions on the one hand, and using race as a powerful organizingidea on the other, introduces significant incoherencies in an argument con-structed from those essentials. And here Wight can be taken as a startingpoint since he himself recognized that race was difficult to appropriate unam-biguously to any of his three well-known analytical types. As he concedes inInternational Theory, ‘‘Realism about barbarians’’ is a common phenomenon,but such beliefs about race are to be considered as a ‘‘state of mind’’ or anaspect of ‘‘social psychology.’’ However, ‘‘when more sophisticated formulationoccurs, we are compelled to wonder if this is still Realism’’ (Wight 1991, 64).After considering the logic of Nazi ideology, Wight concludes that ‘‘Nazi racial-ism is on the border-line between Revolutionism and Realism’’ (Wight 1991,65). As Ivan Hannaford (1996, 325–68) has compellingly shown, once race

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becomes an organizing category in social and political theory it tends toexclude other categories, with the growth of the conviction that ‘‘race is all’’(a phrase echoing Disraeli and Gobineau) generating foreign and domesticpolicies accordingly.

The notion that race is a significant factor in international relations sits uneas-ily, then, with both realism and rationalism. For realism, whether its focus isupon the international system or upon its constituents, other states are actorsfrom which no absolutely settled pattern of policy can be expected and withwhich no necessarily enduring interests are shared. All, in short, are alike poten-tial allies and prospective antagonists. Actual practitioners of realism, of course,may modify that stark position with the admixture of other factors. In seeing theworld of states or civilisations through the lens of race, one particular policy orinterest is raised to a prominence greater than all others. States that are per-ceived to be populated by or dominated by congeners are presumed to sharefundamental interests; states of a dissimilar racial character are likely to take onthe guise of rivals or threats.

If the idea of international society is taken as the central assumption of ratio-nalism, then race is similarly an awkward concept. If a shared conception of rulesand forms of functional interdependence foster a weak but still pervasive senseof community, then states recognize other members of society by virtue of theirbehavior, not their racial or civilizational character. If the observance of rules islinked exclusively to certain civilisations, then this requirement tests the ostensi-ble logic of the Grotian idea, as recent scholarship has shown. The key concep-tion of the English school of IR, according to some contemporary scholars,actually incorporates ideas of systemic hierarchy which have hitherto evaded criti-cal scrutiny (Bain 2003; Keene 2002).

It may also be argued that the idea of ‘‘race’’ is as much a matter of‘‘imagined community’’ as is the idea of nation. Just as the notion of a British(or Anglo-Saxon) race was a 19th century construction of disparate elements,the claim that a ‘‘white race’’ was or should be in occupation of Australiawas a similar construct. A focus on the discourse of race, if it advances anyparticular grounds for regarding Wight’s analytic trilogy as incomplete,therefore suggests that the complement that is needed is a constructivistapproach.

It is worth noting, finally, that Wight was also himself aware of the WhiteAustralia policy. Having discussed in International Society Vitoria’s notion of the so-cietas naturalis, which he argued in the 16th century embraced all the peoples ofthe world, Wight observes that this proposition condemns alike ‘‘the hermitkingdoms’’ and also ‘‘White Australia’’ (Wight 1991, 70). For in reserving awhole continent for themselves (Wight omitting any mention of the indigenousinhabitants) Australia provides:

the best example of the protection of a numerically weaker society at theexpense of a universal right of settlement [through the] … White Australia pol-icy, where a mere ten million Australians have preserved themselves against theirmore numerous non-white neighbors to the north (Wight 1991, 70–71).

Having already suggested that realism and race were awkward partners, thischaracterization of Australia (indeed, Wight’s only Australian reference) main-tains that a focus on race is inconsistent with certain rationalist fundamentals. Inso far as race was a recurrent preoccupation in many of the contributions consid-ered in this essay, and setting aside examples of revolutionism, the realist-ration-alist dialectic, while a useful heuristic for much early Australian IR, does notcapture its full range.


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Documents

Realism, Rationalism, Race: On the Early International Relations Discipline in Australia