Frank Cain ed., Menzies in war and peace.

Frank Cain ed., Menzies in war and peace, Allen and Unwin in association with the Australian Defence Studies Centre, Canberra, 1997, pp. 179, index, paperback, rrp A$24.95

In this collection Frank Cain has assembled nine essays on aspects of Robert Menzies' involvement in foreign affairs, including Australian policy towards "neutral" Japan, 1939-41; the departure of South Africa from the Commonwealth in 1961; attitudes to the changing Commonwealth of the late 1950s and early 1960s; the origins of Australia's military intervention against Indonesia's Confrontation with Malaysia and its absorption of west New Guinea (Irian Jaya); planning for global war with the Soviet Union as the underlying concern of policy in the early 1950s; de Gaulle's never-realised proposal for a neutral zone in French Indochina; and Menzies' imperial world view. Two arguments emerge: first, that the Menzies government's cold war partisanship made it unable to respond to the energy of south-east Asian decolonisation as anything other than a military threat; secondly, that, while it was not a puppet of Britain and the United States, it placed too much faith in Australia's relations with its great power allies.

The "imperial imagination", as Gregory Pemberton describes Menzies' world view, features prominently, and it is brought into focus most sharply in David Goldsworthy's essay on Menzies' attitudes to the Commonwealth in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Goldsworthy shows that right up to the departure of South Africa from the Commonwealth in 1961, following the Sharpeville massacre, Menzies continued to hope that some means could be found of keeping this old, or "white", dominion in the Commonwealth. Fearing that a precedent had been set for punishing another old dominion for its white Australia policy, Menzies and his colleagues looked on with unease as British priorities continued to shift from the old dominions towards Europe and a post-colonial Commonwealth.

Other authors emphasise the importance of Europe and the Middle East in Commonwealth defence planning in the early years of the Cold War. David Lowe contends that, in assessing the influence of the Second World War experience, historians have placed too much emphasis on Menzies' determination to avoid repeating the mistakes of appeasement. According to Lowe, Menzies was more apprehensive of the speed of the modern attack as demonstrated by the Nazi blitzkrieg and was concerned that Australia should prepare to resist a USSR that might advance across Europe and the Middle East even more quickly than German forces in 1939-40. Such was Menzies' preoccupation with Europe that, two weeks after the outbreak of the Korean war, he could note in his diary:

All these Asian adventures are diversions by the Russians

(a) to contain substantial democratic forces

(b) to create a psychology which will make countries like Australia unwilling to make commitments outside S[outh]. E[ast] Asia

(c) to try out weapons and techniques first as in the Spanish civil war.

(diary, 10 July 1950, cited p. 46)

As usual with international relations, these studies concentrate on the formation of policy within government and bureaucracy. They are based on extensive research in official archives in Australia and overseas and draw on the latest secondary literature. The authors have shown great energy in chasing the paper trail of top-level decision making. But with a few exceptions, such as Gregory Pemberton's brief discussion of the social background of Department of External Affairs cadets, little attention is paid to the domestic context of policy making.

It is also Pemberton who comments: "The post-Vietnam breed of foreign policy scholars and other commentators [have] tended to be uniformly critical of Menzies." (p. 155). The nine essays in this book largely bear out the truth of these remarks. Menzies in war and peace belongs in the tradition of "revisionism" in cold war studies. Its authors turn a critical eye on the West's complicity in creating the dangerous and costly tensions of the Cold War. These essays are tinged with regret that the relatively neutralist and independent-minded policies followed by the Chifley government in the late 1940s were replaced by a hardline Cold War partisanship.

This is not to say that the contents of Menzies in war and peace are entirely predictable. Wayne Reynolds makes the important and original point that the Menzies government hoped that the UK would give Australia the secrets of atomic weaponry in gratitude for the testing grounds in South and Western Australia. But to this reviewer the most original chapter is that of Christopher Waters on Menzies' attitude to a proposal advanced by President de Gaulle in the early 1960s to make Indochina a neutral zone. De Gaulle shared the Johnson administration's assumption that without US support the South would quickly be defeated by the North, but he contended that a unified Vietnam would be influenced more by traditional hostility to China than by the Leninist ideology both regimes had acquired. What is interesting here is not the Menzies government's predictable opposition so much as the plan itself, which has received little attention, at least in the English-language literature. For the most part, however, Waters' fellow contributors provide new detail on more familiar topics, and the main value of Menzies in war and peace is to bring together in one reasonably-priced volume recent research which has previously appeared only in journal articles and monographs.

* Andrew Lee was formerly on the staff of the Historical Research Section, Australian War Memorial. He is now working as an adviser to Senator Chris Evans.