Search

This article presents an examination of the dynamics of multilateral military alliances or 'coalitions'. Framed within the wider debate over the future security architecture of the Asia-Pacific region, it has the dual objective of both enriching the academic debate and offering guidance to policy-makers by investigating the theory and practice of coalition behaviour. The article expounds the case for the American-Japanese-Australian combination and analyses the issues that confront such an alliance-coalition using two competing theoretical perspectives of allied behaviour: 'balance of power' and 'intra-alliance politics'. The main propositions of these perspectives are empirically tested against policy statements based on American, Japanese and Australian foreign and defence policies and associated academic writings. The paper demonstrates the continued validity of realist-conceived approaches to security provision and concludes that both theoretical perspectives are useful tools of analysis in this case. Focusing on separate levels and therefore different aspects of allied behaviour, they can in fact be viewed as complementary, rather than competing, and clearly exhibit strong potential for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Extant accounts of the origins of ANZUS (Australia-New Zealand-United States) Pact have tended to situate it one a half-way point between America’s interest to enlist support in containing communism through regional pacts and (primarily) Australia’s interest to obtain a long-term security guarantee, underwritten by the superpower, against future Japanese and/or communist invasion. This paper considers the pact from the perspective of national identity. If ANZUS is an institutionalization of a set of shared historical, political, and racial/ethnic traits among its members, than the exclusion of Britain from the pact is puzzling. Why was Britain, despite an official request for membership, excluded from the club? To borrow from a venerable puzzle of International Relations (IR) theory, why is there no English-speaking NATO in Asia-Pacific? Neither interest nor identity offers a simple explanation of why an obvious friend and ally with a long-standing and continuing (colonial) presence in the region should be excluded from a multilateral arrangement with claims to collective defense. I will consider this question by analyzing the effect of the content and contestation of Australian and New Zealander identities on the drafting process of the ANZUS Treaty in 1951. My argument is that Australia and New Zealand â€" through contemporary foreign policy debates as well as the drafting process itself â€" clearly signaled that Britain would become a “shadow member” of ANZUS, partaking in anything from information-sharing to collective defense-planning in the region. I will conclude with a reflection on the absence of the identity variable in the institutional design research program in IR. ..PAT.-Unpublished Manuscript [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]