The last five years in bilateral relations between Australia and Japan have been intriguing. Despite the extraordinary depth of the relationship, a period of drift was discernible between the late 1990s and mid-2002. Japan was (and remains) preoccupied with domestic economic problems, the rising political and economic challenge from China, and taking an active role in the formation of an East Asian Community. For Australia the preoccupation was closer alignment with the USA. The period since 2002, however, marked a return to intense, and at times frenetic, activity between Australian and Japanese officials. At the governmental level efforts were made to invigorate existing commercial, political/security, and cultural aspects of the bilateral relationship. Three government-sponsored conferences were held (in 2001, 2002, and 2005) with the specific task of energising a wide range of connections at the national level and showcasing the relevance of the bilateral relationship in a changing environment.

Three themes permeate most discussions of Australia’s relationship with Europe. The first is that relations are marked by extreme asymmetry. On one side there stands a large and economically powerful group of states, increasingly organised within the European Union (EU); on the other, a middling power that belongs to no regional bloc and possesses limited international clout. The second is that Australia’s relations with Europe are largely driven by trade issues, especially issues in the agricultural sector. And the third is that Australia’s close bilateral links with Britain are still a central feature of its European policy.

In 1996, the parameters of the Australia–Japan relationship were set to change in a manner that few observers had predicted. In the world of foreign affairs, changes of government usually do not dislocate foreign relations or policies. The paramountcy of the national interest normally transcends partisan politics; trade and the business of managing relationships with other nations carry their own momentum and their own rationale. When Hashimoto Ryutaro took over the prime ministership of Japan in January 1996, and John Howard became Prime Minister of a Coalition government in Australia in March the same year, we could justifiably have expected the basics of the bilateral relationship to continue largely undisturbed. While the rhetoric on both sides conveyed the ’business-as-usual’ message, subsequent events were to deliver a different reality. The issue at the heart of this transformation was regionalism.

The trans-Tasman relationship matured in the 1990s as Australia and New Zealand assumed somewhat more distinct identities, while simultaneously forging a closer partnership on the periphery of the Asia-Pacific region. No one in New Zealand pretends that the relationship with Australia is one of equals. Each is a central but asymmetrical priority for the other in economic, trade, foreign and security policies. The momentous global changes of the 1990s affected the two countries in similar ways and produced many similar responses. Along with the abatement of the Soviet threat from Southeast and North Asia, this gave rise to some fears of the retrenchment of the United States from Asia and to a resulting instability in Asia. Australian and New Zealand concerns therefore focused more sharply on the creation of structures of confidence building and security dialogues in the Asia-Pacific region. Yet New Zealand’s geopolitical distance from Asia relative to that of Australia, as well as New Zealand’s dissociation from the Australia, New Zealand and United States (ANZUS) security alliance for fears of nuclear contamination, took Canberra and Wellington along some separate defence paths.

Australia’s relationships with the United States and the wider North American region were redefined in the era of intense international change following the Cold War and short-lived optimism about the so-called ’new world order’. The rise of the Asia-Pacific region as the dominant centre of global economic activities, along with the more fluid international environment that displaced the Cold War, reshaped the external policies and aspirations of both Australia and the United States. But these broad forces had very differential effects on the two states. Australia found increased political and economic latitude in the altered Asia-Pacific environment. In contrast, the United States adjusted uneasily to its declining status as the global hegemon, and found the promise of the post–Cold War world difficult to identify or manage. The long-dominant authority of the United States was compromised by the uncertainties of a more decentralised international environment. This change reduced Australia’s deference to its powerful Pacific ally, and permitted the Keating Government to exercise greater autonomy in pressing its separate interests abroad, especially in the economic arena.

An extraordinary development occurred in the Australian economy in the last quarter of 2008: for the first time since the first half of 1991, gross domestic product (GDP) declined. But even more extraordinarily – and despite the then Prime Minister Kevin Rudd’s assertion that ‘the worst global economic recession in 75 years means it is inevitable that Australia too will be dragged into recession’ – data for the first quarter of 2009 showed that the economy had resumed growth. Among the countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Australia alone avoided recession as conventionally defined (two consecutive quarters of negative growth in GDP).

In a global context dominated by the ‘war on terror’, and a domestic context of unprecedented governmental power, Australia’s traditional concern for human rights diminished in the period under review. The contradictions within Australian human rights policy, and the mix of positive and negative developments noted in the preceding volume, gave way to an unambiguous reality in which Australia’s respect for human rights was generally at a discount, both domestically and internationally. New schisms in public opinion were also created. Although the government and its supporters clearly regarded the loss of civic freedoms as primarily the product of the new environment of terror and the necessary price of enhanced national security, critics argued that the government’s human rights record before September 2001 had already been so mixed that the war on terror had merely exacerbated an already deteriorating situation.

The Island Pacific, and especially Papua New Guinea (PNG), occupies an important place in Australia’s international relations. In part this flows from geographical proximity and historical linkages, and considerations of security, trade, and investment. But in addition the Island Pacific is perhaps the only part of the world in which Australia can hope to exercise a significant influence over events, and in which it is generally regarded by the international community as having a responsibility for promoting political stability and economic progress. Australia’s regional responsibility was explicitly recognised in the 1997 foreign policy White Paper, In the National Interest. Yet while the importance of the region is often recognised in the rhetoric of public statements, and concretely in levels of development assistance and defence cooperation, mention of the Pacific frequently comes only at the end of foreign policy and defence analyses, and it is difficult to discern a coherent, long-term policy framework in Australia’s dealings with the Pacific Island states.