Anthony Burke, In Fear of Security: Australia's Invasion Anxiety.

Annandale, Pluto Press, 2001; Brian Galligan, Winsome Roberts & Gabriella Trifiletti, Australians and Globalisation: The Experience of Two Centuries, Oakleigh, Cambridge University Press, 2001.

Speaking on behalf of the people, Alfred Deakin in 1898 declared that `from the far east and the far west alike we behold menaces and contagion'. Just over a century later, Federal Minister for Immigration Philip Ruddock announced a `national emergency' because as many as 10.000 illegal migrants were planning to invade Australia from the Middle East. The more things change, the more consistent is the rhetoric.

Anthony Burke's book is a study of a central Australian paradox: how a nation-state of refugees, having dispossessed the aboriginal population, took turns in refusing entry to others. The main justification, he argues, has been and remains security: `Security has been central to the construction of powerful images of national identity and otherness, and central to their use in bitter political conflicts which were too often resolved in violent and anti-democratic ways'.

In practical terms, security `is a practice of exclusion: a practice of identity and being through exclusion'. The identity of Australians has been determined primarily by their difference from the `other', however identified. Burke's stated purpose is to refuse to `accept either security's meaning, or the politics of its realisation, at face value'. Instead his book `considers what it means to be secure in two ways: by interrogating the concept of security itself, and by considering the price of its realisation through Australian history and its impact on the possible forms of an "Australian" culture and community'.

This is a worthy objective and an important subject. Words like `security' and `national identity' are now being tossed about like Orders of Australia at the Melbourne Cup. A corrective of almost any sort is needed. Unhappily, our author starts from the one approach that is certain to eat its own tail. Or as Dr McKenzie Wark boasts in the Preface, this is International Relations meets Cultural Studies.

Some idea of the intellectual and moral confusion to which such a marriage leads may be found in the Introduction, where Burke lays out his theoretical game plan. The two critical concepts appear to be `truth' and `irony'. (He is clearly an habitual user of the dismissive inverted comma: whenever appropriate, truth becomes `truth' and the `the'.) Or, to put it in the author's own words:

   `How do we analyse a concept whose basic principle of reality is irony?
   Which seems to have universal appeal but no common meaning?'

Or this:

   `Perhaps security's power lies in the very slipperiness of its
   significations, its ironic structure of meaning, its ability to have an
   almost universal appeal yet name very different arrangements of order and
   possibility for different groups of people.'

Even better, we read about `the ironic terror by which the security of the West was for so long premised on the prosecution of an almost genocidal war in Vietnam or on a potentially world-destroying confrontation'.

When it comes to truth (or `truth') we are in deeper waters still. It is impossible to rely on `simplistic appeals to truth' if only because `security has no truth'. Hardly surprising, given that `(f)ollowing Michel Foucault, [Burke uses] a theory of language which sees security not as a stable category or state of affairs whose truth can be found and fixed for all time, but as a historically specific "system of truth" with intimate links to modern regimes of political, social and economic power'.

What is more, we can also see in orthodox thinking `the shadow of an "hegemonic masculinity" which portrays `international politics as an anarchic, congenitally disordered realm in which the amoral use of force and aggression are the best chances of order and security'.

On which ground Burke sees fit to censure the likes of Paul Keating, Richard Woolcott, Rupert Murdoch and political theorist R.N. Berki for their view that people on the whole cannot be trusted and that, especially in international affairs, self-interest rules. This Realpolitik Burke dismisses along with `epistemic realism' in favour of a `space of thinking and debate [which] remains permanently open, and in which the discursive constitution of problems themselves, prior to their "solution", is simultaneously up for grabs'.

This may or may not mean something. Such a consideration is anyway irrelevant, as, in the case of security, Burke wants `to set "meaning" aside, and instead focus on security as `a pervasive and complex system of political, social and economic power'. A simple minded person might be forgiven for thinking that this in itself comprises a specific meaning--or at least `meaning'--but then Burke's way with words is not subject to the usual rules of connotation, denotation and clarity. Or as he puts it himself: `Thus my concern to understand security in terms of the construction and narration of its ontological certainties, the limits of its modes of subjectivity, and the meanings it has applied to reality.' Sic.

The upshot is something of a dog's brunch, chips and Cultural Studies with everything. What on earth, for example, are `easily mapped and solved Cartesian problems'? Or this: `At the national and transnational level, the government's rhetoric was characterised by the same kind of Cartesian hubris to which Labor had earlier been victim.' (What, Howard and Reith triumphantly working out the exact position of the soul in hypothamalic preselection?) `Moral relativism' is decried as a failing on the part of those who espouse `epistemic' and political `realism', yet it is precisely the position to which Burke's own postmodernist pose leads. But perhaps most tellingly of all (that is, apart from the constant use of such signifiers as `space' and `ironic') he relies on italics in place of argument. Would anything be lost or added by the use of the following without the emphasis? `Ontology here refers to a discourse which concerns itself with the project of being--with its imagination, maintenance and perfection.' He's talking, by the way, about security policy.

There is, of course, no reason to discourage publication of this sort of thing, given that all should have prizes and scholarship is as good as push-pin. Nor is there reason to discourage Pluto Press from keeping Dr Wark and his acolytes in print. With intellectual boundaries superseded, ironic space has the right to, well, a `space'. It is also the democratic right of every idea-tied academic to pontificate as she chooses and mangle words and arguments in support of whatever cause she thinks or feels--above all, feels--should replace the prevailing hegemonic masculinity. A pity, nonetheless, about the unfortunate students who have to endure it.

With relief, one turns to Australians and Globalisation. While the authors' (and this reviewer's) sympathies are generally the same as Burke's, the contrast in approach could hardly be greater. For one thing, they write in clear language--while being well aware of the ambiguities and distractions that make language what it is. For another, they make their allegiances clear without compromising their responsibilities as scholars. This is not an innovation, but the mark of diligent historians in general and throughout the ages. The fuzzy perspectivism which people like Dr Wark think they have only recently discovered was known to the earliest writers and seems odd only to those non-scientists who are flummoxed by the notion of objective truth.

The purpose of Australians and Globalisation is comparable with, though different from, that of In Fear of Security. Its central argument is that `Australian governance and citizenship have been continually shaped by or in response to global influences and forces'. Perhaps more importantly, it rests on the proposition that `Citizenship is essentially a political construct and not a cultural or ethnic one'. At the same time, the authors' argument is that `being historical, our study also pays considerable attention to political culture and civil society and the broader context of citizenship and governance'.

What follows is a well researched and argued case for reconsidering the categories in which such notions as citizenship are used. If nothing else, the book, if read, will bring home to those in public life not only that globalisation has been around for rather longer than Australia itself and that Australia over the last two centuries has been an integral part of it. There is another lesson. More than most countries, Australia needs its historians.

Whether the authors succeed in their task is up to the reader. They state their objectives clearly and may be judged by them. The only useful thing a reviewer can say is that the case is cogently argued and deserves to be read. More so, that he is convinced by it and, in his dreams, trusts that our legislators will read it.

Nick Field-Johnson is a former diplomat and holds a doctorate in historiography.