Alan Dupont
East Asia Imperilled:
Transnational Challenges to Security
CUP, $39.95pb, 336pp, 0 521 01015 2

David Goldsworthy (ed.)
Facing North:
A Century of Australian Engagement with Asia Volume 1: 1901 to the 1970s
MUP, $59.95hb, 544pp, 0 522 84953 9

Nicholas Tarling
Southeast Asia: A Modern History
OUP, $59.95pb, 566pp, 0 19 558397 3

HERE ARE THREE useful books on Australia and its neighbours, covering the past, the present and the future — a good range, indeed. Facing North relates the history of Australia's 'engagement' with 'Asia' from Federation to the 1970s, with much lively material from diplomatic papers. Nicolas Tarling's thematic history of Southeast Asia provides a solid reference work. Alan Dupont's East Asia Imperilled combines an argument for expanding traditional security concepts to include concerns like environmental devastation, people smuggling, and AIDS, with a chilling picture of future scenarios.

Facing North, commissioned by Alexander Downer, comes out of the Historical Section of the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade. The eight contributors take a broadly chronological approach, with sub-topics and themes. The first three chapters go from 1901 to 1949. Chapter Four, on Indonesia's struggle for independence from 1945 to 1949, and Australia's involvement, is the only country-specific chapter. Chapters Five to Seven cover the Cold War, security concerns, 'forward defence', plus expansion of trade with Asia, and, from 1963 to 1977, Southeast Asian conflicts and Australia's active role. The White Australia Policy as a running sore is a constant theme; Indonesia as a pre-eminent concern is another. Broader public attitudes are regularly analysed, though not nearly as effectively as in David Walker's excellent, must-read Anxious Nation: Australia and the Rise of Asia 1850_1939 (1999). Chapter Eight examines significant shifts in Australians' perception of 'Asia' in the 1960s and 1970s. For a semi-official history, it is plain speaking. But, being mostly a summary and a narrative, it lacks the zing of a compelling, and preferably new, argument. Still, there are many sharp observations about failures and missed opportunities along the way. Four 'themes' are drawn out in the conclusion: sensible, but unremarkable.

It is lively in several ways. First, the use of material from official files — letters, telegrams, memoranda, submissions, handwritten notes in the margins — gives sharpness and immediacy to the narrative, presenting human beings wrestling with events over which they have little control as they try to create effective Australian policies. This adds greatly to the analyses of the 1936 tariff dispute with Japan, Australian support for Indonesia's Revolution, interventions in Indochina, Casey's failures in Cabinet, opposition to Indonesia's confrontation campaigns, changing policy towards China, and especially the twenty pages on Australia, Indonesia and East Timor. Second, there are substantial analyses of major departmental rivalries and feuds. Foreign policy development is much more than Foreign Affairs and the Cabinet, though it often seems hard to make students believe it. Here, it is done well. Third is the highlighting of many men (all men, it seems) who debated, struggled and shaped policy, often flawed, sometimes far-sighted: from Latham to Burton, Kirby and Critchley, Tange, Renouf and Jockel. Fourth, the book is handsomely produced, with many good photographs: good because they emphasise that 'engagement' with Asia requires human effort on all sides.

There is much about Australian diplomacy and diplomats here, but a glaring omission is a sociological look at who they were, at recruiting and training, and at how conservative career structures affected ambitions and ideals. Another omission is discussion of the contribution of Australian intelligence services. It's strange: I don't think Australians or 'Asians' would keel over if they knew Australia had spies, or that intelligence organisations fought hard to advance their own views. This is oddly prim and, by omission, deceitful. Maybe they're in the promised second volume.

Nicholas Tarling's history of Southeast Asia is massive. It covers nearly two thousand years, includes much compressed historical detail and analysis, few illustrations (just five maps), and feels like a house brick. It is called a 'modern history', although it starts from the first peoplings of the region. But then the bulk of each of its four main parts emphasises the last few hundred years, particularly the last century.

This history is elegant, the thematic structure exhilarating. There are four main theme chapters: Peoples and States; Environment and Economics; Societies and Commitments; Protest and Politics; each with thematic subsections. The way in which the colonial empires and the Japanese occupation are subsumed, merely as parts of the experience of the region, strikes me as an elegant form of organisation. Its structure sends a message about how to understand the histories of the many peoples in the region, and the nation-states they now find themselves caught up in. The Contents page, themes and sub-themes without 'Historical Periods', is a checklist for understanding the region.

The symmetry is seen in Part One, which begins with a section on the region's people's early attempts to form states, agricultural and commercial kingdoms, and ends with a section on 'regionalism', with their descendants, many centuries later, after various forms of outside influence and control, asserting a regional approach in a globalising, post-colonial world — and, again from that first section to the last in Part Four (separatism), where these same descendants are struggling with attempts to redraw the nation states, whose borders mostly come out of colonial rule. It is powerfully conceived.

With his second history of Southeast Asia, Tarling emphasises his comparative perspective across the region, and world history. I wish he had gone considerably further. Within his themes, there is substantial chronological history of what are now Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and so on. I found much of it hard going. There are so many facts! My head bulged with them, I dreamed of them at night, and wondered 'what are they for? who are they for?'. Such lucid compression is a skill, but I wanted less of it and more of Tarling's comparative reflections, and of world-history themes.

Tarling has a gift for the telling quote, whether from players across the centuries or from scholars. These are enlivening. He acknowledges scholars handsomely. He has a good wry turn of phrase on occasion.

Final gripes. There are not many women in this large work, except for cited scholars. In a work that attempts to enter people's minds across centuries — their identities, religions, obligations, political beliefs — it is a glaring omission to have no section on sexuality or gender. It is good to see East Timor included, but the treatment is spotty and unsatisfactory. And it really needs a good glossary: for example, mercantilist, cadastral, sodalities, dyarchy, apotropaic. Crikey!

The freshest material and views come in Alan Dupont's East Asia Imperilled. It's not necessary to buy into the book's argument about redefining concepts of security to include the fast-developing non-military transnational threat (for example, environmental devastation, drugs and people-smuggling, AIDS) that are detailed here so chillingly, although that issue is interesting too. It is the perils themselves — water wars, food shortages, crime links, government mismanagement — their interconnectedness, their transnational scale, and their likely effects, that amaze and alarm. Dupont argues:

a new class of transnational threats is emerging which will be increasingly influential in determining East Asia's strategic future … Environmental degradation, UPMs [unregulated population movements] and transnational crime are representative. Far from being peripheral or irrelevant to the security concerns of states, as realists maintain, their capacity to destabilise states internally as well as to aggravate relations between them is real and rising.

The main argument about these threats as 'security' issues is presented in the Introduction, Chapter One and the Conclusion, where Dupont argues for a 'three concentric circles' approach, a new template, and extended security. Dupont is good at summing up the 'realist' perspective, which 'has dominated ... Western thinking about security since the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648', and its alleged current 'conceptual parsimony'.

As he says, that's the background he came from himself. He anticipates how his new concepts will be challenged by realists, partly for fear that 'too broad an interpretation of security could distract them from their core business'. And partly because a causal connection needs to be established between these threats and conflict, for them to be regarded as security issues. It is not yet easily done.

There are ten 'empirical' chapters on resource scarcity, population growth, climate change, undocumented labour migration, drug-trafficking and AIDS, synthesising a host of studies. Dupont and his research assistant Jena Hamilton have done a big job, with seventy-six pages of notes.

I used to dislike the word 'transnational', thinking it should be restricted to railways. I am a convert now. These threats are transnational because of their sweep, because they are interconnected across East Asia, and because dealing with them is beyond the scope of individual governments, particularly those weaker in infrastructure, resources and political will.

There is much fine material in these chapters: deforestation, pollution, an energy 'gap', nuclear waste, environmental refugees, triads, yakuza, ethnic gangs, transnational criminal organisations linking drug trafficking and HIV infection. Dupont regularly assesses the likelihood of conflict, food crisis, water wars and so on, and positions himself as the reasoned midpoint between the realists, and 'Malthusians' and 'modern-day Cassandras'. Sometimes the detail is overwhelming, with too many acronyms (IDU, EEZ, GMO, IPCC, IUU, ATS, TCO). But, overall, it's chilling and riveting.

I have been editing these remarks in Jakarta, in January 2002, with record murky floodwaters climbing up from my soles to my knees, and sloshing through the kitchen to make a coffee. I'll endorse any nightmare scenario that Dupont can produce. Looking back over these three works, I am struck by their 'Australianness', with Australian authors, Australian concerns, and many of Tarling's scholars from Australian universities. I am frightened about the future. Most of these scholars are in their fifties. Asian Studies seems to be losing its clout in Australian universities, and Indonesian Studies has been poorly since the East Timor atrocities in 1999. Even after a hundred years, the engagement with Asia needs a newly invigorated commitment from government.