Rock of Ages: Tension Underlying Stability in Tonga

Abstract

This book is a response to a heightened perception that Australia’s security environment became markedly less comfortable in the early years of the new century. The discourse of insecurity has acquired a new prominence but whether the perception of insecurity is well founded either on regional facts or in the actual escalation of global terrorism may well be contested. If it implies that there was not a previous sense of insecurity then contemporary representations are false: there have been crisis scares since the middle of the 19th century. It is one of the constant features of Australians’ perceptions of their place in the world that they are isolated in a hostile corner, far from friends, and close to potential trouble. If the Dibb Report of the mid-1980s, referred to in the introduction to this volume, spoke of a benign security environment, then that was in contradiction of common perceptions. The current perception of crisis is not new, but merely an up-date. Considering only the years since World War II, Australia’s sense of insecurity is seen in a series of foreign policy and domestic events: membership of SEATO, sending forces to Korea in the early 1950s, to Malaya and Borneo in the late 1950s and 1960s, and to Vietnam in the 1960s and early 1970s, large-scale civil defence campaigns in the 1950s in expectation of nuclear war, widespread teaching of Indonesian language in schools in the 1960s because of confrontation with Indonesia, compulsory military training (“National Service”) in the 1950s, conscription between 1965 and 1972, excitement about the “Red Sails in the Sunset” Russian scare in the Indian Ocean in the 1970s, Russian fisheries agreements and Libyan diplomatic initiatives in the Pacific in the 1980s; and ever since the mooted independence of Papua New Guinea there have been fears of that state’s collapse into either anarchy or military tyranny. The first military coup in Fiji was, at the time of writing, 17 years ago, and took place amid much unjustified speculation of instability in the region. The 1990s were free of “cold war” alarmism, but not of the perception of the steady decline in the economic viability and quality of governance among its Pacific neighbors, the assertiveness of Malaysia, or the slide toward revolution in Indonesia. During this decade, Australia attempted to present itself as having an Asian identity. This was driven by anxiety about being perceived as different, not from a sense of identification and affinity. In other words, there has never been a time in recent history when Australians have not been concerned about some aspect of the so-called “arc of instability,” nor have 15. ROCK OF AGES: TENSION UNDERLYING STABILITY IN TONGA I. C. CAMPBELL