The politics of Asian engagement: ideas, institutions, and academics

Abstract

The study of Australia’s Asian engagement — just as much as the history of the process itself — has been shaped by structural shifts in the international system and the global political economy as they reverberate through domestic political debates. As a consequence, ideas about Asian engagement tell us as much about the character of national political debates as they do about Australian policy-makers’ perceptions of the region. Understandings of Asia as a transnational political space are shaped by national conflicts and struggles over issues such as communism or national identity. Ideas and disputes over Australia’s relationship with Asia become closely aligned with conflict between conservative and radical academic approaches to Asia. With the end of the Cold War in the 1980s and 1990s, the triumph of neoliberalism and the waning of ideological politics of the 1960s were mirrored in academic approaches that adopted a policy or cultural approach to Asia.