Building Citizens: Empire, Asia and the Australian Settlement

Beyond the culturalist problematic: Towards a global social science in the Asian Century?

“…He argues that the 'powerful masculinising and racialising impulse in Australian nationalism would have been a great deal less intense, had it not been for the geo-political threat attributed to awakening Asia from the 1880s' (Walker 1999: 5). As I have observed elsewhere (Jayasuriya 2010), these cartographic notions of Asian engagement have become central to political projects of economic modernisation after the Hawke-Keating reforms of the 1980s and 1990s. In this political project, ' Asia' was seen in terms of the economic benefits-manifested in a growing middle class-that it could provide as the basis of continued Australian prosperity.…”

“…None of this is new in Australian public policy. This 'culturalist problematic', as Walker (1999), Jayasuriya (2010) and Beeson and Jayasuriya (2009) have argued, has a much longer provenance in twentieth-century Australia. A consistent theme running across various mission statements and public policies has been the idea of Asia literacy on research and teaching of Asian studies dating from the Auchmuty Report (Auchmuty 1971), followed by those of FitzGerald (1980) and Ingleson (Asian Studies Council 1989).…”

Can Australia save the world? The limits and possibilities of middle power diplomacy

“…Here, after all, was a government that prided itself on privileging bilateral ties and which regarded institutions like the United Nations as ineffective and in need of urgent reform. Nevertheless, for some observers, middle power status has been the defining quality of Australian foreign policy (Ungerer 2007), and an especially useful way of characterising the policy activism of the Hawke-Keating governments generally and the hyperactive initiatives of then Foreign Minister Gareth Evans in particular (Jayasuriya 2010). More tangibly, perhaps middle powers are thought to be able to defend their interests and negotiate with, rather than simply obey, great powers (White 2010).…”

Through a Glass Darkly: The Social Sciences Look at the Neoliberal University

“…It was in this context that John Dawkins introduced his university reforms. The Hawke-Keating reforms and modernisation project sought to achieve democratic objectives within this framework of market reform (Johnson 2000;Jayasuriya 2010a). In this vein, modernisation became a political project that sought to adapt social democracy or its particular Laborist variant to the convulsion of global capitalism that effectively undermined the postwar economic and political regimes and corresponding social foundations (Gamble 2006;Jayasuriya 2006).…”