Australia's Foreign Relations [antikvár]

Preface PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION This bool< is about the kind of foreign policy Australia needs to have if we are to successfully position ourselves, and advance our national interests, in the world of the 1990s. A geographically remote country of seventeen million people in a world of five and a half billion should not get ideas above its station. But imaginative and effective diplomacy, of which Australia has shown that it is amply capable, can win for us a significant and respected place both in our own Asia Pacific region and in the wider international community. We can and should be able not only to pursue our own interests effectively, but in so doing to make a positive and constructive contribution to a more peaceful and prosperous world. The worid of the 1990s, it is already clear, will be one quite unlike that of any previous decade. The tumultuous events of 1989-91—the collapse of Soviet East Europe, the end of the Cold War, the beginning and end of the Gulf War—produced a great divide from which there is no going back. Any analysis of Australian foreign policy (and we use that term throughout to embrace both foreign policy narrowly defined and trade policy, for the two are now inextricably connected) has to have as its starting point the new international environment in which every country is now operating. We begin Part I with a discussion of that environment. The rest of this Part—on the dynamics of AustraUan foreign policy—deals vwth the processes and mechanisms by which Australian policy does, or should, adjust to its international setting: how this has been done in the past, how it is being done now, and how it should go on being done as the world continues to change around us. A central theme is that, for all the inherent uncertainties of foreign policy making, and for all the obvious limitations on the capacity of a country Uke Australia to impose its will upon the world, policy making can and should be an intellectually orderly process. Australia, like any other country, has national interests of its own: they can be defined, and should be pursued. The art of the process is to define national interests rigorously, recognise what is and is not achievable, and set priorities accordingly. An associated theme of this Part, and indeed of the whole book, is that AustraUa should not underestimate its capacity to achieve its own national interest objectives, and to do so in a way which benefits the whole international community. Our population size and location mean that we