ABSTRACT
On coming to power in 1996, the Howard government was eager to distinguish its foreign policy style and approach from that of the previous Labor (ALP) government (1983-1996) and its foreign minister, Gareth Evans. Evans had embraced the idea of ‘middle power diplomacy’ and championed the notion of Australia as a ‘good international citizen’.2 For Evans, this meant a commitment not simply to participate in multilateral fora but to attempt to develop the normative basis of international society and provide some form of intellectual leadership in doing so. This style of diplomacy as a means of advancing Australian interests was particularly evident in Australia’s role in the Uruguay Round of talks on the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (1986-1994), post-conflict intervention in Cambodia (1992-1995), and Australia’s active role in the development of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change in 1992. In security terms, the Labor government had again emphasized the importance of strengthening the international institutional framework (through international leadership on nuclear disarmament, for example) as a means for advancing Australian security. Moreover the government pointed to the need for constructive engagement with those regional neighbors (in particular Indonesia) who had traditionally been viewed as a source of threat.3 The commitment to the ‘national interest’ under the subsequent Howard government was beyond an attempt to demarcate foreign policy styles from that of the previous government. For the Howard government, the ALP had allowed its commitment to ‘good international citizenship’ to move suspiciously close to a cosmopolitanism that rejected the ultimate primacy that governments should give the rights and needs of their own citizens. Both Howard and Foreign Minister Downer were of the view that under the ALP, the US alliance had been allowed to drift dangerously relative to a naive emphasis on defense selfreliance, a dubious attempt to identify Australia as part of the Asian region, and a commitment to work through multilateral fora that had provided tangibly little for Australia. By contrast, in launching the government’s second Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade White Paper – significantly titled Advancing the National Interest – Downer argued that:
A foreign minister is chosen and paid to look after the interests of his country, and not to delegate for the human race. We are not about trumpeting our own international good citizenry simply for the sake of it. That is a trap for the ideologues and the naïve.4
