As tensions run high between China and the us, Australia occupies a unique position in international affairs. A long-standing and enthusiastic member of the American sphere of influence, Australia’s economy is dependent on Chinese markets to fuel its own growth models. In 2022, the demands of Chinese steel production led to the purchase of 736 tonnes of Australian iron ore—80 per cent of Australia’s national export, amounting to A$124 billion in national income ($83 billion). This mutually advantageous trading relationship has posed little obstacle thus far for Australia’s ever-tightening alliance with the United States, a relationship that in 2021 culminated in the signing of the aukus security treaty between Australia, the uk and the us, at the heart of which is a deal to help Australia acquire a new fleet of nuclear-powered submarines equipped with long-range land attack Tomahawk missiles. This and a slew of other trilateral security arrangements have been pitched as a necessary response to China’s military build-up and its naval activities in the South Pacific, an argument repeated unceasingly across both benches of the Australian Parliament and in the press. Despite the far-reaching policy shifts that aukus heralds—the end of the country’s anti-nuclear settlement, a costly escalation in militarization and a forthright policy of containing the country’s main trading partner—few commentators have been willing to identify and interrogate the broader political dynamics that underpin it.
As a former military-intelligence officer, Clinton Fernandes is well placed to illuminate the mechanisms of Australian power. Born to Goanese parents in the early 1970s, he volunteered for the Australian Defence Force after school in Melbourne. He was first assigned to an infantry battalion, then spotted as ‘officer material’. The Australian Intelligence Corps singled him out while still in training and Fernandes went on to work for the Signals and Intelligence Corps across a number of domains: counterintelligence, analysis, tactics, operations and a general ‘watch-keeping’ post. In 1998, still in his twenties, he was sent to East Timor for analytical work. There, he had a front-row seat to observe Australia’s active support for Indonesia’s brutal military occupation of the half-island, both of which—Jakarta’s atrocities, in repressing the Timorese national-liberation forces, and Canberra’s logistical and diplomatic backing for them—had been going on since 1975, after Portugal had recognized East Timor’s independence. The experience was a watershed for Fernandes, who began working with Australia–East Timor solidarity activists (the book under review, like his earlier contributions, is dedicated to the memory of Andrew McNaughtan, a Sydney doctor who fought tirelessly for Timorese self-determination before his early death).
After fifteen years in the Army, with the rank of major, Fernandes switched to doctoral research at the University of New South Wales. In 2005 he published Reluctant Saviour, analysing the assiduous efforts by John Howard’s National–Liberal government—and Australia’s ‘Jakarta Lobby’ which, Fernandes argued, had a powerful voice within it—to block the 1998 East Timor independence ballot, even as Indonesia’s ongoing massacres there were made public. In 1999, amid mounting pressure, Howard reluctantly changed tack, and the Australian media rebranded the adf as the region’s peacekeepers during the transition to independence. A regular contributor to Arena, the Melbourne-based new-left journal, Fernandes has published a series of regional studies: Reluctant Indonesians (2008) described the struggle of the West Papuans; The Independence of East Timor (2011) was a multi-dimensional history of the liberation struggle; Island off the Coast of Asia (2018) examined the drivers of Australia’s foreign policy—crushing the Malayan resistance alongside the British; fighting with the us in Korea and Vietnam; backing the Suharto dictatorship in Indonesia.
His latest work, Subimperial Power, is the most theoretical to date. Its aim is to define Australia’s structural location within the inter-state system. The conventional description of the country as a ‘middle power’, Fernandes argues, offers little explanation, neither for Australia’s unique economic configuration nor the patterns of its military-force projection—nor, indeed, the domestic political structures that enable these. To define its role as ‘upholding a rules-based international order’, to ensure its own prosperity and security, merely begs the question of what that order is. For Fernandes, quite straightforwardly, it is the American-led imperial system—‘imperial’ in the sense defined by the former un assistant secretary-general and political scientist Michael Doyle in Empires (1986): ‘a relationship, formal or informal, in which one state controls the effective political sovereignty of others.’ Control, Fernandes emphasizes, requires neither occupation nor annexation; it may just as effectively operate through economic, political or cultural dependence, through the threat of force as much as the use of it. What then is Australia’s role within this structure—and why is the domestic political establishment so keen on ‘upholding’ it?
For Fernandes, Australia has long sought to align itself with imperial power, a strategic reflex that has its origins in its peculiar status as a British possession. By 1770, when James Cook sailed up the eastern coast of the continent and claimed it for the Crown, Britain had already battled its way to supremacy over the seas, defeating its old enemy, France, in the Seven Years’ War. The British East India Company was presiding over its largest-yet famine in Bengal, thanks in part to the rice requisitioned for its troops and their dependents. The British Parliament, nearly a quarter of whose members held East India Company stock, backed it with vast sums for naval and military operations to protect its acquisitions; the Company began exporting Indian opium to China that same year. For Whitehall strategists, Australasian settlement provided the chance to establish an intermediary base for its activities in India and China. New Zealand had plentiful timber and flax, useful for shipbuilding. A naval base could also interdict wartime French, Dutch and Spanish communications across the archipelagos of the Indian Ocean and the South Pacific.
In this sense, the Australian colonies were never just dumping grounds for Britain’s surplus population, though convicts did provide useful labour. Nor were they simply territories to be subjected to colonial extraction and exploitation. They were, Fernandes makes clear, important outposts of empire. The British authorities supplied the Australian settlers with rice, semolina, lentils, clothing, livestock and seeds from Bengal; by the 1840s, two ships a week were ploughing the route from Calcutta. The colonies flourished under the umbrella of British imperial power and Australia was the largest recipient of British foreign investment in the 1870s and 80s, benefiting from the immense drain of wealth from India. By the 1890s, Australia was beginning to flex its own muscles in the South Pacific, projecting its economic power over Fiji, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands and Vanuatu. The Sydney-based Colonial Sugar Refining Company (csr)benefited from labour imported from India on long-term indenture ‘contracts’. In this sense, Fernandes notes, Australia’s national formation had a ‘subimperial’ dimension from the start—‘subordinate to the imperial centre, but able to project considerable power and influence in its own region’.
The national-security structures, developed after the six colonies federated as the Commonwealth of Australia in 1901, were premised not on the basis of national defence—for the country faced no serious adversaries—but with a view to supporting the British Empire, which guaranteed Australia’s economic interests even as it reinforced its ‘subimperial’ identity. Culturally, the country saw itself as part of the multi-continental ‘Greater Britain’ comprised of Anglophone settler colonies around the world, defending the Empire against growing competition. This was fortified by belief in its essential benevolence, along the lines laid out by J. S. Mill in ‘A Few Words on Non-Intervention’, after the crushing of the 1857 Indian Revolt—Britain acting ‘rather in the service of others, than of itself’, even when ‘the aggressions of barbarians force it to successful war.’ The organizing principle of Australian foreign policy was to be ‘on the winning side’ in the worldwide confrontation between the Empire and the lands it dominated. To the country’s strategists, ‘for the Empire to be strong anywhere, it needed to be strong everywhere’, as the country’s official military historian Craig Stockings notes. Nearly half a million Australian troops enlisted to fight for Britain in the First World War, as Prime Minister Joseph Cook declared that ‘all our resources in Australia are in the Empire—and for the Empire’.