INGS4003: Global Studies Seminar

SEMINAR SCHEDULE AND READINGS

 Week 1 (24 February-)

Introduction: Incoherence in International Affairs

Week 2 (3 March-)

Trump 2.0

How do we account for the rise to the White House of President Donald Trump in November 2016 and his return last year? What are the kinds of socio-economic, cultural and other factors that help to explain his appeal to the American ‘heartland’?  President Trump came to office with a virtual declaration of war on what so many believed were self-evident American truths, most particularly their concept of exceptionalism and universal mission. How and why is Trump a departure from post-war presidents on this question, and what did his approach to the American story reveal about the United States’ state of mood and mind in 2016 and beyond?

Essential Reading:

Francis Fukuyama, ‘American Political Decay or Renewal: The Meaning of the 2016 Election’, Foreign Affairs (July/August 2016), pp 58-68.

James Curran, ‘“Americanism, not Globalism”: President Trump and the American Mission’, Lowy Institute Analysis Paper, July 2018.

Kagan

Week 3 (10 March-)

New Cold War?

Week 4 (17 March-)

Cold War’s End

How did Francis Fukuyama and Samuel Huntington respectively interpret the significance of the Soviet Empire’s demise for the world’s future? Why should we give thought to these rather theoretical works about world history and the future of international relations? How do they each interpret the nature of history, the problem of history, the fault-lines of the post Soviet world? What are their implications for the contemporary discussion of foreign affairs today? Reflecting on the course of events since the time these essays were written, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which of the two interpretations has proved the more compelling? What is your response to Huntington’s claim, made subsequently in the book that emerged from this article, that Australia is a ‘torn country’?

Essential Reading:

Francis Fukuyama, ‘The End of History?’, The National Interest, Summer 1989, pp 3-18.

Samuel P Huntington. ‘The Clash of Civilisations’, Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993, pp 3-27.

Week 5 (24 March-)

Munich Forever

Since the Second World War the so called ‘Munich’ myth has cast a long shadow over the West’s thinking on international affairs. Post-war leaders, especially those in the United States (but also in Britain and Australia) have tended to accept the conventional wisdom that Hitler could have been stopped and world war averted if only the democratic nations had stood up to Hitler during the Munich conference over Czechoslovakia in September 1938. American leaders during the Cold War, confronted by a new set of international tensions, applied the ‘lessons’ of Munich in dealing with the Soviet Union and developed a global policy aimed at containing the spread of international communism. From these assumptions sprang not only a world-wide alliance system which encircled and isolated the communist camp but also American policy towards the Chinese revolution and the civil war in Indochina. The historian Neville Meaney once wrote that these ‘instant myths created out of the emotion of the moment exercise a tyranny over the mind. They put experience into a straitjacket and apply lessons indiscriminately’. With this statement in mind, let us look this week at how Paul Kennedy and others treat the influence of the Munich myth on world politics, including on Australia’s relationship with Indonesia in the second half of the twentieth century.

Essential Reading:

Paul Kennedy, ‘A Time to Appease’, The National Interest, No 108 (July/August 2010), pp 7-17.

David Chuter, ‘Munich, or the Blood of others’, in Cyril Buffet and Beatrice Heuser (eds) Haunted by History: Myths in International Relations (Providence: Bergham Books, 1998)

Frederik Logevall and Kenneth Osgood, ‘The Ghost of Munich: America’s appeasement complex’, World Affairs, Vol. 173, No. 2 (July/August 2010)

John Hirst, ‘In Defence of Appeasement: Indonesia and Australian Foreign Policy’, Quadrant (April 1996), pp 10-16.

Week 6 (31 March-)    

Strategic Failure

When in the wake of the 9/11 attacks on New York and Washington DC, the administration of George W. Bush sought to gain international support and approval to attack Iraq, the case he and his advisers presented to American allies and the world revolved around Saddam Hussein’s supposed cache of weapons of mass destruction. Whilst the ‘Munich’ myth was again invoked, the grand strategy of ‘democracy promotion’ became the central principle of Bush’s national security policy. Policymakers in Washington believed that the transformation of Iraq into a Jeffersonian beacon of democracy at the heart of the Middle East would provide the ultimate bulwark against a rising Iran. Indeed they believed that the cases of post war Germany and Japan – two cases in which the United States helped to create fully functioning pro-western democracies – were to be repeated in Mesopotamia. Of course, the war did not go as planned: not only did it unleash a violent and prolonged anti-US insurgency in the country, it unleashed rival sectarian, religious and ethnic hatreds amongst Sunni, Shia and Kurd. The war also spawned the rise of Islamic State.  How are we to come to terms with strategic failure of this kind?

Essential Reading:

Following two essays from Merrill and Paterson, Major Problems in American Foreign Relations:

John Lewis Gaddis, ‘Bush’s Bold Grand Strategy and mixed performance’

George C Herring, ‘Bush’s Ideological Excess and Scandalous Incompetence’.

Peter Feaver and William Inboden, ‘Looking forward through the past: the role of history in Bush White House National Security Policymaking’, in Brands and Suri, The Power of the Past, pp 253-81.

Jeffrey Record, ‘The Use and Abuse of History: Munich, Vietnam and Iraq’, Survival, Vol. 49, No. 1 (Spring 2007), pp 163-80.

The Secret Downing St Memo, 23 July 2002.

George W Bush, Second Inaugural Address, 20 January 2005.

John Howard, Address to the National Press Club, 13 March 2003.

Week 7 (7 April -)

The Essay

The Essay: During this seminar we will be discussing the major essay: how you are progressing in locating sources, thinking about the question, determining a structure. You are strongly encouraged to bring along a 1-2 page plan of your essay, setting out the major issues on which you intend to focus and the likely primary and secondary sources. The plan does not have to be comprehensive(and it is not assessable)  but it may help to clarify your thinking about the historical problem you are tackling and what sorts of material you should be looking at. Discussion in this tutorial will be given over to your plans and any problems you might be experiencing

Week 8 (14 April-)    Reading Week

Mid Semester Break 21-25 April

Week 9 (28 April-) 

Essay part 2

Week 10 (5 May-)                                                    

China’s rise

There is now a firmly established consensus that we are at least in the foothills of a new Cold War where the United States and China are locked in an existential, ideological struggle for respective survival. The Cold War analogy has been contested by scholars, but what is intriguing too is that Washington in the last few years has relinquished its once deeply held view that the more China liberalised economically the more likely it would be that democratic reforms would also follow. What does this debate tell us about American exceptionalist beliefs? Is it indeed a case of ‘China fever’, or one based around a fundamental ignorance of Chinese history and culture? What history should leaders in the US and the region study in dealing with China?

Essential Reading:

Odd Arne Westad, ‘The Sources of Chinese Conduct: Are Washington and Beijing Fighting a New Cold War?’, Foreign Affairs (September/October 2019), pp 86-95.

Fareed Zakaria, ‘The New China Scare: Why America shouldn’t panic about its latest Challenger’, Foreign Affairs (January/February 2020), pp. 52-69.

Kurt Campbell and Ely Ratner, The China Reckoning: How Beijing defied American expectations’, Foreign Affairs (March/April 2018), pp. 60-70.

Alistair Ian Johnston,  ‘The Failures of the “Failure of Engagement’ with China’, Washington Quarterly (Summer 2019), pp 99-114.

James Curran, ‘China Syndrome’, The National Interest (January 2019)

Week 11 (12 May-)

Australia’s China Fears

Australia’s political and diplomatic relationship with China is currently ‘stabilised’. The country remains, however, in the grip of a constant and intense debate about how to deal with Beijing. Newspapers routinely sensationalise a ‘China threat’, books warn of a ‘silent invasion’, security officials foam at the mouth over Chinese spy rings, politicians raise the spectre of ‘appeasement’ while vast numbers of Chinese students studying in Australia are allegedly foreign agents. A former Prime Minister claims that the country’s China policy has been overtaken by ‘nutters’ in the security agencies, and business leaders, though relieved by ‘stabilisation’, worry for how long that might be the case.  How to make sense of all this? Amidst this climate of growing anxiety about what China’s rise means for Australia, it is getting much harder to offer a balanced, grounded view of how Australia might manage this relationship into the future. And whether, in fact, it might become unmanageable. It has not taken long for old fears and phobias to surface. Amidst all the clamorous talk of a ‘new Cold War’ and ‘containment’, of China ‘challenges’ or China ‘choices’, of ‘strategic competition’ and ‘binary prisms’, surely the time is propitious for a sanguine and sophisticated debate about what this all means for Australia’s future and its foreign policy. Does Australia, as Geoff Raby argues, need a new ‘grand strategy’ for a new world order? Is the past relevant anymore or should we believe the commentators who say ‘China changed, therefore Australia’s policy had to change’?

Essential Reading:

Hugh White, Power Shift: Australia’s Future between Washington and Beijing, Quarterly Essay 39 (2010), pp, 1-5, 48-54, 60-71.

Clive Hamilton, Silent Invasion: China’s Influence in Australia (Melbourne: Hardie Grant Books, 2018), pp. 1-8.

Geoff Raby, China and Australia’s Grand Strategy (Melbourne: MUP, 2020), pp

Chengxin Pan, ‘Getting excited about China’ in David Walker and Agnieszka Sobocinska, Australia’s Asia: From Yellow Peril to Asian Century (Perth: UWAP, 2012), pp.245-67.

Woodard, Garry, ‘Australia’s China Policy of strategic ambiguity: navigating between big fish’, Australian Journal of International Affairs (vol 72, no 2 (2017). Pp 163-178.

Allan Gyngell, ‘History hasn’t ended: How to handle China’, Australian Foreign Affairs 7 (October 2019), pp 5-28.

Week 12

AUKUS

Week 13 (23 May-)

The need for nationalism?

Why did Australians in the late nineteenth century think of themselves as essentially a ‘British’ people? How did they come to identify with this intense form of Britishness, and what does this tell us about Australia’s response to the emergence of mass nationalism at this time? How did the idea of ‘Britishness’ compare with the radical nationalist bush myth? Did the love of the land replace the pride in being part of the British race? How has republicanism fared in Australia? Why has it failed to gain a hold on the imagination of the people? How have historians dealt with the legacy of Britishness in Australian history and historiography? How did Australian politicians give voice to the British idea?

Essential Reading:

-Meaney, Neville, ‘Britishness and Australian Identity: The Problem of Australian Nationalism in Australian History and Historiography’, Australian Historical Studies 116 (April 2001)