Diplomatic divergence in the antipodes: Globalisation, foreign policy and state identity in Australia and New Zealand

This article compares the constitutive relationship between foreign policy and globalisation in Australia and New Zealand. Drawing upon insights from constructivist international relations theory we argue that foreign policy instantiates a state's social identity, its self-understanding of its role and moral purpose by projecting a distinctive image onto the global stage. We explore the differences and the similarities between Australia and New Zealand by examining how each country views international order, global trade, global governance and human rights and international security. Although both countries appear to be transforming themselves into more 'globalised' states, there are significant differences in the way each seeks to balance the competing strategic and normative demands. This diplomatic divergence, we argue, stems from different conceptions of state identity.

A rogue is a rogue is a rogue: US foreign policy and the Korean nuclear crisis

Two nuclear crises recently haunted the Korean peninsula, one in 1993/4, the other in 2002/3. In each case the events-were strikingly similar: North Korea made public its ambition to acquire nuclear weapons and withdrew from the Nonproliferation Treaty. Then the situation rapidly deteriorated until the peninsular was literally on the verge of war. The dangers of North Korea's actions, often interpreted as nuclear brinkmanship, are evident. and much discussed, but not so the underlying patterns that have shaped the conflict in the first place. This article sheds light on some of them. It examines the role of the United States in the crisis, arguing that Washington's inability to see North Korea as anything but a threatening 'rogue state' seriously hinders both an adequate understanding and possible resolution of the conflict. Particularly significant is the current policy of pre-emptive strikes against rogue states, for it reinforces half a century of American nuclear threats towards North Korea. The problematic role of these threats has been largely obscured, not least because the highly technical discourse of security analysis has managed to present the strategic situation on the peninsula in a manner that attributes responsibility for the crisis solely to North Korea's actions, even if the situation is in reality far more complex and interactive.

Tradition, myth and the dilemma of Australian foreign policy

For a middle power with a relatively short history of framing a self determined foreign policy, Australia has actively sought to engage with both its immediate region and the wider world. Elite agreement on this external orientation, however, has by no means entailed consensus on what this orientation might involve in terms of policy. Consequently, two, often conflicting, traditions and their associated myths have informed Australian foreign policy-making. The most enduring tradition shaping foreign policy views Australia as a somewhat isolated bastion of Western civilisation. In this mode Australia's myth is pragmatic, but uncertain and sees Asia as both an opportunity and a potential threat which requires the support and counsel of culturally similar external powers engaged in the region to ensure stability. Against this, an alternative and historically later tradition crafted a foreign policy that advanced Australian independence through engagement with a seemingly monolithic and increasingly prosperous Asia. This paper explores the evolution and limitations of these foreign policy traditions and the myths that sustain them. It further considers what features of these traditions continue to have resonance in a region that has become more fluid and heterogeneous than it was during the Cold War and which requires a foreign policy flexibility that can address this complex and strategically uncertain environment.

Hegemony, Institutionalism and US Foreign Policy: theory and practice in comparative historical perspective

This paper explores the theoretical and policy implications of contemporary American hegemony. A key argument is that the development of US hegemony generally, and the distinctive turn in US foreign policy that has occurred in the wake of 11 September in particular, can best be understood by placing recent events in a comparative and historical framework. The immediate post-World War II order laid the foundations of a highly institutionalised multilateral system that provided key benefits for a number of countries while simultaneously constraining and enhancing US power. An historical reading of US hegemony suggests that its recent unilateralism is undermining the foundations of its power and influence.

The pathogenesis of migraine - 17th to early 20th Century understandings

The modern understanding of the pathogenesis of migraine, based on the concept that it is a neurovascular disorder, is often thought to have emerged from the work of Harold Wolff in the period 1932-1962. However, over the preceding 300 years, from William Harvey onwards, various hypotheses of the pathogenesis of migraine had been proposed, a few bearing reasonably strong resemblances to Wolff's ideas, though based on less adequate evidence. Many of these earlier hypotheses regarded migraine either primarily as a vascular (e.g., Willis, Wepfer, Latham) or as a neural disorder (e.g., Harvey, Lieving and his 'nerve storms'). There were also variations around these two major themes and in the 19th Century a number of neurovascufar type hypotheses emerged assigning a major role in migraine pathogenesis to the autonomic nervous system. In addition, during the three centuries there were a number of other hypotheses based on different postulated pathogenic mechanisms, some quite ingenious, which had relatively brief vogues. No hypothesis has yet proved capable of explaining all the features of migraine satisfactorily. (c) 2005 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Issues in Australian Foreign Policy : January to June 2005

No abstract

Delivering demons punishing wives: False imprisonment, exoricism and other matrimonial duties in a late 20th-century manslaughter case

This article provides an analysis of R v Vollmer and Others, Australia’s most famous ‘exorcism-manslaughter’ case, in which a woman, Joan Vollmer, underwent an ‘exorcism’ performed by four people, resulting in her death. We examine how taken-for-granted distinctions were collapsed during the resulting trial - distinctions between crime and punishment, exorcism and punishment, church and state, the past and the present, law and religion, reason and unreason and between a demon and a woman. We show how the defence argument for the reality of demonic possession normalized the bizarre, while simultaneously exoticizing the mundane or ‘traditional’ criminal case involving a husband defendant and a dead wife. The apparent assumption on the part of the police and the media that this case was bizarre serves to veil the fact of its relative ordinariness. A wife is killed, and the lethal punishing violence inflicted on her body downplayed, to be reinterpreted in the legal context as somehow a consequence of something she herself precipitated. Our analysis of the Vollmer case provides a novel perspective on that always intriguing conundrum of crime and punishment.