APSA50: The jubilee conference of the Australasian Political Science Association

Timetable: Session 6
Thursday 3 October: 2.00-3.30pm

Session 1    Session 2    Session 3    Session 4    Session 5    Session 7    Session 8    Session 9    Session 10
Wednesday    Thursday    Friday

Communism and the Soviet Union II
Chair: Les Holmes

Professor Richard Sakwa, Department of Politics and International Relations University of Kent at Canterbury (UK)
The Australasian contribution to Soviet and Russian studies
In a brief analysis it is impossible to do justice to the richness of the contribution made by Australasian scholars to this field. Work by scholars from this region has been characterised by a robust independence, and thus it is impossible to categorise it as either belonging to the 'totalitarian' school or to the 'revisionist' camp. In the field of Soviet politics and government, for example, we have a number of specialists on the communist party and the state (e.g. T. H. Rigby, Lloyd Churchward, Graeme Gill, Stephen Fortescue, John Miller) whose work resists easy categorisation. Some have continued their work to cover the post-Soviet period and have become renowned specialists on post-communist Russian politics (Graeme Gill, Peter Lentini) or analysts of comparative communism and post-communism (Leslie Holmes, T. Harry Rigby, Graeme Gill). There has also been a diversification, with important specialists on Soviet and Russian foreign policy (Peter Shearman, Bob Miller and Bobo Lo). A particular strength has always been historical research, exemplified by the work of Stephen Wheatcroft , David Christian and Roger Markwick. We can also be confident that the potential is far from exhausted, with a number of younger specialists already making their mark (Emma Gilligan, Bobo Lo, David Lockwood, and others) so that we can be assured that the baton is being passed to a new generation. It should not be forgotten that at a crucial moment in the transcendence of the communist order Australia played host to a number of scholars from Eastern Europe. Notably, representatives of the so-called 'Budapest school' found respite for a time here (for example, Agnes Heller and Ferenc Feher). But can we identify something that could be labelled the 'Australian school' of Communist and Russian studies? This paper will argue that we can, and will develop the argument on the basis of a closer examination of the work of some exemplars of this 'school'. We will focus in particular on the work of a 'Sovietologist' (T.H. Rigby), a comparativist (Leslie Holmes), a historian (Roger Markwick) and a post-communist Russianist (Graeme Gill). Although very different in their work and approaches, there are certain elements that bring them together. It is these features that this paper will explore.

Stephen Wheatcroft, History Department, University of Melbourne
Seeing the Soviet experience in historical perspective
Stephen Wheatcroft's research has been aimed at applying social scientific approaches to help improve our understanding of the Soviet system and the Soviet experience. He was trained as an economic historian but has developed an interest in agricultural and demographic history, and more recently in the history of political systems. Much of his work is archival and quantitatively based. He approaches this subject having studied in some detail the history and the politics of the Soviet statistical system, which contrary to popular opinion was an extraordinarily competent system and has generally produced valuable statistical records. It is one of the ironies of the age, that the vast amount of good statistical data for a society undergoing amazing change has been so little studied. The statistical data has often been subject to gross political distortions, but if approached sensitively with an understanding of the circumstances and conditions in which the data was collected and processed, the data can yield remarkably valuable results. Wheatcroft believes that the Soviet archives contain one of the wealthiest untapped sources of significant social science data in the world, and he is actively involved in making these materials more widely available. Wheatcroft's major work includes a) explaining the courses and the significance of the agricultural depression of 1928-33 and the associated famine of 1932-3; b) understanding the nature, scale and chronology of the different type of repression in the Tsarist and Soviet system and explaining their development; and more recently c) understanding the nature of the Stalinist decision-making process through analyzing Stalin's institutional and less formal links with the political elite and how these changed over time. His paper will include prime examples from each of these areas.

The impact of feminist scholarship on Australian political science
Lisa Hill will introduce a discussion of the impact or lack of impact of feminist scholarship on Australian political science over the last two decades by reference to the Australian Journal of Political Science. Panelists:
Marian Sawer, Australian National University
Mary Walsh, University of Canberra
Liz van Acker, Griffith University

In 1999 Drs Chappell, Curtin and Hill conducted a gender audit of the Australian Journal of Political Science 1979-1998 and made a number of preliminary findings. It was intended as a follow-up to a similar audit that had been undertaken twenty years earlier by Marian Sawer. Our chief goal was to discover if there had been any change in the journal's record of publishing and reviewing the work of women in the discipline. In general, findings were fairly disappointing. Despite the growth of women and politics as a legitimate academic pursuit, a minimal number of works written by and about women and politics were being chosen for publication by AJPS. Despite an isolated period of improvement, the rate of articles written by women increased by only 1.8 percentage points in a twenty year period. Though the feminist challenge to the traditional paradigm of political science has definitely made its mark in Australia, it has not been as effective as its many of its hardworking promulgators had hoped. Participants will be asked to explore the reasons for lack of impact in this discipline and in this country.

James A Gillespie, Department of Politics, Macquarie University
Political settlements and global bulldozers: Institutional models of Australian political development
A consensus model of political development has dominated recent approaches to Australian political history. Breaking from models of politics driven by class conflicts or the development of national consciousness, the new orthodoxy asserts that during the first decade of the new federation a class compromise or, in Paul Kelly's words, an 'Australian Settlement' was framed. Based on an interlocking and mutually sustaining set of economic and political institutions: tariff protection, industrial arbitration, the White Australian Policy, the Australian Settlement, the benevolent defence provided by the Empire, underpinned by the intervention of a 'paternal' state. Variants of this model, some more sophisticated than others, have dominated political analysis of the history of economic and social policy. This model has importance beyond the influential political narrative - and rationale for 'free market' reform- constructed by Kelly. Transcending a particular choice of policy settings, it identified deeply embedded conventions of governance. The paper examines the strengths and weaknesses of variants of this consensus model: from Kelly's highly influential political journalism through Francis Castles' critique of the 'Working Man's Welfare State' and more recent attempts to posit an 'Australian Way', civilising the rigours of free markets without succumbing to the dirigisme of full blown socialist paths. It looks at the most substantial historical critiques: those who have argued that it neglects the 1940s as a decisive turning point in political history, counterposing rival Keynesian roads. Do these provide more than a modification of the Settlement model? Finally, it looks at alternative models of stability and conflict from federation to the 1980s -those based on the broader fiscal frameworks of the federal system and which turn attention away from national politics to the developmental possibilities of state government. What are the most plausible alternative models of political economic change? What implications do these have for the conventions of governance?

Geoff Stokes, Faculty of Arts, Deakin University
The 'Australian Settlement' and Australian political thought
Arguments for reshaping political agendas invariably begin from an appraisal of past errors and achievements. Paul Kelly's notion of the 'Australian Settlement', set out in his book The End of Certainty (1992), attempts just such a task. Kelly identifies a particular ideological and institutional tradition in Australian politics that dominated much of the 20th century and that is now deemed to have broken down. This 'Australian Settlement' is presented as a cluster of interconnected political ideas that became widely accepted among successive governments and their citizens. Kelly delineates five main components of the settlement, which he calls White Australia, Industry Protection, Wage Arbitration, State Paternalism and Imperial Benevolence. Although Kelly offers little more than a brief sketch of an Australian political tradition, his account has gained wide currency in analyses of Australian politics. This paper accepts that the notion of a settlement - which signifies a more or less enduring resolution of conflict - provides certain insights into the evolution of Australian political thought. Nonetheless, the paper takes issue with the specific content of Kelly's version of the 'Australian Settlement' and indicates how it may be reformulated. It is argued that, to the extent that we can speak of a settlement in Australia, it was one reached on a wider range of key conflicts or cleavages than those referred to by Kelly. In particular, it is contended that, Kelly's account ignores the significance of 'terra nullius', state secularism, and masculinism in the dominant tradition of Australian political ideas. Criticism is also directed against Kelly's use of the terms state paternalism, protection and imperial benevolence, as well as his treatment of democracy. By shifting our understanding of an Australian settlement, a somewhat different narrative of successes and failures can be given that, in turn, suggests an alternative program of reform.

James Walter and Tod Moore, Politics, Griffith University
The new social order? Australia's contribution to 'new liberal' thinking in the interwar period
From the outbreak of World War I, and in particular after the conscription debates of 1916, there was a middle class backlash in Australian political thinking against the intellectuals of the labour movement. In the work of writers such as Elton Mayo and Meredith Atkinson, there emerged an idealist theory of industrial efficiency and social solidarity, and an organic view of the state, coupled with a defence of the British Empire, and of Australia's role within it. Their hostility to labour can be partly explained by their intellectual adherence to the interests of the middle class, and also partly by their status as members of university-based intellectual groups who saw their mission as that of promoting incremental change to improve the established order. They gave a distinctive Australian inflection to 'new liberal' thinking in the interwar period. The closing years of World War I had been characterised by militant unionism and increasingly severe industrial disputes, as many workers sought to achieve better rewards through a policy of direct action against their employers, rather than through the arbitration system. The vision of an ideal egalitarian society that had been sustained by pre-war achievements in social policy rapidly dimmed; to many workers, the fall in real wages underscored the reality of social and economic disparities. In reaction, a sustained exposition of an anti-labour position was developed by a clearly identifiable group of writers, and what emerged from this in the 1920s was a relatively large cluster of similar texts. Like the liberal idealists of the Edwardian era, these writers stressed the national ideal of a unified and unselfish society dedicated to the highest good, and not to class-based self-interest. The revival of interest in things like civics education and national efficiency after World War I was marked by a distinctively modern expectation of deference to expert knowledge. Middle-class academics such as Meredith Atkinson, Elton Mayo and Frederic Eggleston presumed to know what was best for 'the workers'. Given wartime experiences, a strong emphasis on national obligation was to be expected. During and immediately after the war, an emphasis on the obligations of citizenship gained ground, partly due to ideas of national unity and common purpose engendered by the war itself. This became the foundation for an impassioned plea for a new harmonious social and political order, which this group of intellectuals posited as a response to concerns about class conflict, economic inefficiency and social inequality in Australia. For the purposes of this paper, the position of the group will be demonstrated through drawing on the writings of Meredith Atkinson, an English born, Oxford educated, Sydney academic with strong liberal-idealist leanings, who had been very active in the pro-conscription cause during the war. Whilst considerable social reform had been achieved, trade unions and workers had become morally lazy, Atkinson argued. They debased their right to vote by using the franchise simply as a mechanism to further their own interests. This selfish obsession with workers' rights was counterproductive, Atkinson claimed, because an equitable distribution of economic goods was dependent on a high level of economic production. This required greater industrial efficiency, which in turn required a more cooperative labour force. Emphasis is placed on the responsibilities of workers which, as will be shown, is characteristic of this type of argument. For Atkinson and the other intellectuals in this group, the crux of the problem was that workers had no civic conscience, no sense of idealism that would sustain a broader vision of the perfect social order. They needed to be shown how to take individual responsibility for ensuring the economic and social health of the nation as an organic whole. How do the ideas of this period compare with developments in liberal thinking elsewhere? What is their relation with post World War 2 liberal thought? And how do they feed into more recent concerns with citizenship, civic conscience and the appropriate roles of individuals and the state?

Leigh Gollop, School of Politics and International Relations, Flinders University
People's assemblies: Giving people a say in government
Independents and minority parties, many of whom support the introduction of citizen-initiated referendums, are gaining more political influence in Australia as electors increasingly turn away from the major parties. Because these MPs often hold the balance of power in hung parliaments they are in a powerful position to have aspects of their political agenda implemented, and some have already attempted to use their power to promote CIRs. Though none of these attempts has been successful to date, there seems to be real possibility that CIRs could become part of the Australian political landscape in the foreseeable future. This paper argues that such an outcome might not deliver the benefits the promoters of CIRs hope, and that the numerous objections many commentators make to CIRs are hard to overcome. However, the paper argues there is a way to meet the desire for greater public participation in decision-making, while meeting most of the objections that have been raised against CIRs. This is through the establishment of what the author has termed People’s Assemblies. These assemblies would operate in a similar manner to Deliberative Polls where 300 to 500 citizens, randomly but scientifically selected, are brought together to decide on issues after hearing the evidence for and against. The important difference would be that the decisions of the People’s Assemblies, like many CIRs, would be binding on the government. It is suggested that People’s Assemblies, with a rotating membership, could replace the Australian Senate and the Upper Houses in the states.

Sandra Grey, Political Science Program, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University
Can we measure the influence of social movements?
For three decades new social movements have undergone scrutiny from political scientists. Much has been written about why social movements exist and how they attract members. Within social movement literature there have been many assumptions about the influence of mass mobilisations, however, the literature provides few tools with which to measure that influence. I will argue that the influence of mass mobilisations on the political realm can be measured using discourse analysis techniques and by drawing on public policy literature.

Melanie Fisher, Bureau of Rural Sciences and Linda Botterill, BRS Fellow, Australian National University
Magical thinking: the rise of the community development model
In recent years the community participation model has become fashionable among Commonwealth Government agencies. Since the success of the highly acclaimed Landcare program, a number of Government agencies has developed programs based on collective action solutions to a variety of social, environmental and community development problems. Like all fashion, this is not the first time that community-based programs have been popular but like all trends they may not suit everyone. This paper explores the recent popularity of these policy approaches and discusses the limitations of collective action, volunteer failure and burn out, and the nature of participation. It then suggests lessons that policy makers can draw about the application of community participation models to particular policy problems.

International ethics II
Chair/Discussant: Richard Devetak

Brett Bowden, Political Science Program, Research School of Social Sciences, Australian National University
The democratic 'standard of civilization' in international society
Not so long ago anthropologists drew a clear distinction between what were thought to be 'savage', 'barbarian', and 'civilized' peoples. A similar distinction was also made in the realm of international law to determine 'whether a State was civilised and, thus, entitled to full recognition as an international personality'. This long-held distinction came to a rather abrupt end with the onset of WWII and the subsequent demise of the colonial era. Recently there has been a revival in both implicit and explicit calls for the return of a Œstandard of civilization' in international society. The human rights theorist Jack Donnelly argues that 'human rights have become very much like a new international standard of civilization'. John Rawls makes a similar argument in his Law of Peoples in dividing the world into a hierarchy of five distinct groups within two sub-sets, the Œwell-ordered peoples‚ and the 'not well-ordered‚. While Thomas Pogge and a number of noted jurists including W. Michael Reisman and Thomas Franck insist that an inherent 'democratic entitlement' determine 'the right of each state to be represented in international organs...' Putting theory into practice the US House of Representatives is presently considering a Bill before it titled the ŒResponsible Debt Relief and Democracy Reform Act‚ which ties the cancellation or reduction of debts owed to the US by foreign countries to democratic reforms. Likewise the EU seeks to encourage transitions to democracy via the ŒEuropean Initiative for Democracy and Human Rights‚. A range of other international regimes and intergovernmental organisations such as the Commonwealth and the Organisation of American States are also seeking to enforce their stated democratic membership criteria by expelling or suspending non-conformers like Zimbabwe. Out of these lines of argument this paper will argue the that the post-Cold War era has witnessed the gradual emergence of something akin to a democratic Œstandard of civilization‚ in international society.

Greg McCarthy, University of Adelaide
Hollywood politics: Attack of the moral clones
This paper argues that just as the novel was the moral basis of the British Empire so the film is the foundations for American 'imperialism' and Super-Power status. It will be demonstrated that Hollywood films have a dominant political trope which has at its essence a liberal individual who exudes a moral' goodness' that has been inculcated into him (or occassionally her) via his (her) American citizenship. The paper will show that there is an irony in the depiction of American liberal morality in that it is often portrayed as emanating from civil society and not its democratic polity. Rather American democracy is often depicted as flawed by the corrupting influences of power and money. Thus the international relations conceptualisation of American global reach being premise on the democratic mission is somewhat contradicted by the filmic representation of American politics as being deeply flawed. The paper will show how the resolution to this conundrum is found in indivudual acts of valour, where the force of goodness triumphs over that of darkness.

Siswo Pramono, School of Social Sciences, Faculty of Arts, Australian National University
An account of the genocidal state
The purpose of the paper is to discuss genocide as a state policy. One scholar described a genocidal state as a state that continuously pursues politics of annihilation "for an almost inexhaustible availability of victims." Genocide is inflicted on people by a state through a synchronised attack on certain aspects of life, including the political, social, cultural, economic, biological, religious, and moral aspects. As such, genocide is "planned" to assure the effectiveness of the (genocidal) policy and the impunity of the perpetrators. The questions raised in this paper are straight forward. First, why do some states -authoritarian and democratic alike- commit genocides while other do not? If a state resorts to genocidal policy, how is such a policy implemented? And the most daunting question, perhaps, is: when do states commit genocide. Among the best methodologies are those that are inter-disciplinary and comparative, which genocide study unfortunately lacks. A comparative study will help understand various levels of state-perpetrated (or sponsored) genocide. For the purpose of this study, this paper examines the symptoms of the genocidal state in various cases of genocide, including the Holocaust, the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda and Burundi. Genocide is too complex to be understood from the perspective of a single discipline. Since the paper focuses on study genocide in the realm of global politics, international theory (international relations, international law and sociology) will be used as the main reference.

Power and emotion and international relations
Chair: Jacinta O'Hagan

Greg Fry, Australian National University
Oceania's voyage: Reflections on the power of 'region' in world politics
While there is increasing support for the idea that regions have begun to matter in world politics, the political theory of 'region' has been limited by its generation in relation to European and to some extent North American experience. There is a tendency to associate the power of region with a highly integrated entity with coercive backing (that is, with the appearance of state-like attributes) and therefore to dismiss the power of region in post colonial contexts. Prompted by Oceania's long experience of 'region' this paper argues that this is to miss the presence of other important sources of power. It proposes a political theory of region that sees it as both a site of normative contest over community, identity and agency, and as mediator of the relationship between global processes and ideas and local societies and their practices. While such political roles are also performed by the state, the region takes a special role as a knowledge and policy category in global management -both colonial and post-colonial- and in local resistance to it.

Sarah Graham, Australian National University
America's soft power in international relations theory
The concept of hegemony is central to International Relations theory, connoting a world order consisting of relations of power based on consent and authority rather than coercively deployed material resources. Taking this definition as a starting point, I argue that soft power gives hegemony its qualitative distinction, particularly in relation to the US' dominant position within the contemporary world order. I intend to explore some of the theoretical difficulties associated with studying America's soft power, particularly in relation to key conceptual weaknesses of IR theory and the consequences of these weaknesses for empirically driven writings including those of Joseph Nye.

Gavin Mount, Australian National University
The global politics of emotion: All's fear in love and war
This paper draws upon recent interdisciplinary writings from sociology and moral philosophy challenging the assumption that rationality and emotion are necessarily antithetical to argue that International Relations theory has not provided an effective conceptual framework for understanding the salience of emotion in global politics. Conventional International Relations theories have eschewed the study of emotion in favour of claims about rational agency or a structural logic. While critical theories have challenged assumptions of rationality, they have also tended to avoid making claims about the role of emotion as an underlying dynamic of global politics. In practical terms, the failure of discipline to acknowledge the role of emotion in social and political life has meant that the field has been underwhelming in its attempts to analyse phenomena such as 'guilt' or 'pride' in national identity, 'fear' or 'compassion' in xenophobia or cosmopolitanism or 'mood' in the global market.

Wynne Russell, Australian National University
Hard feelings: Methodological challenges in the study of emotion in international politics
The discipline of International Relations has shown itself slow to acknowledge, interpret, or assess the role of emotion in international politics. To a large degree, this reluctance stems from the scholarly biases outlined in the previous paper. Even for those with an interest in emotion, however, the field of inquiry is littered with tiger traps. Some of the most obvious--the difficulty of isolating the importance of emotion in situations that are overdetermined, for example--will be of most importance to those dedicated to treating as a separate source of action from rationality. Even those who start from a concept of emotion and rationality as effectively inseparable, however, will find empirical investigation challenging. Drawing on a study of Russian-Baltic diplomatic exchanges after the collapse of the Soviet Union, this paper will outline some of the methodological challenges facing scholars of emotion and highlight some potentially useful strategies from the soci! ology and nationalism literatures.

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