This chapter briefly surveys the Australian Electronic Dance Music (EDM) scene throughout the 1990s. It examines the impact of financial investments from major labels and how this provided a fertile ground for specialist EDM labels to create scenes that connected back to the techno, rave, and club communities. Brief histories of Sydney, Melbourne, Canberra, Brisbane, and Adelaide are provided, noting their different characteristics and prominent players in the field. Links between the post-punk electronic music scene and how they impacted the first wave of EDM creatives are also discussed. As one-half of Sydney techno band Itch-E & Scratch-E, the author (aka Paul Mac) provides a personal, practice-based, lived history of the period.

Global trends in the rich world, filtered through America’s unique two-party system, have transformed each party’s coalition and reinforced contrasting views of expertise. Although the rise of social issues and the rising importance of education are transnational, they raise unique challenges for each major American party. Each side has responded by shifting its agenda and public image. Democratic politicians have balanced their instinctive reluctance to alienate culturally traditionalist voting blocs against internal pressure from party members for a socially progressive, intellectually erudite, and demographically diverse party leadership. Republicans have been compelled to defer to a popular conservative media apparatus that promotes aversion to social transformation and hostility to claims of expertise by nonconservative authorities. Barack Obama (the wonky advocate of social change) and Donald Trump (the plain-spoken, nostalgic nemesis of experts) both personify their respective parties. These party leaders repel as well as attract, reinforcing our two-sided politics.

There were significant changes in the quality and direction of Australia’s relations with Southeast Asia between 1990 and 1995. These changes were symbolised by the new directions set out in Foreign Minister Gareth Evans’s statement on Australia’s Regional Security of December 19891 and at the end of the period by the signing of the Australia–Indonesia Security Agreement in December 1995. The signing of this agreement signalled a historic change in Australia’s relations with Indonesia and Southeast Asia, surprising observers in both countries. Yet the seeds of that agreement lie in the groundwork of the new approach to regional security set out by Evans in 1989, and in its antecedents in earlier ’moves to Asia’ of the 1970s and 1980s.

At the end of 1995, the global economic environment appeared far more favourable to Australia than at the beginning of the decade. The worst fears of the early 1990s had failed to materialise. The Uruguay Round of negotiations in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) had been concluded and GATT’s successor, the World Trade Organisation (WTO), established. With a successful outcome to the GATT negotiations, the threat of the global-trading system fragmenting into rival regional trading blocs largely receded. The establishment of the Single Internal Market in 1992 and the conversion of the European Community into the European Union with the Maastricht Treaty of the following year came and went with no evidence of adverse impact on its trading partners: ’Fortress Europe’ did not eventuate. Even agriculture, very much the orphan child of the world community’s postwar moves towards liberalised trade, was brought under WTO auspices; the requirement that barriers protecting agriculture be converted into tariffs by the end of the century promises to bring greater transparency in agricultural trade and, with it, the possibility of more effective pressure for liberalisation.

Before the events of the later 1990s, if there was one issue in Australia’s external relations on which there existed unalloyed bipartisan agreement it was East Timor. Governments of both persuasions had regarded the question of positive relations with Indonesia to be of far greater moment than the right to self-determination of the East Timorese, irrespective of the extent to which their Indonesian governors observed or denied their human rights. A Coalition government initiated the negotiation of the Timor Gap Zone of Co-operation Treaty, and a Labor government signed and ratified it. Though some thirty-two states indicated in one way or another that they accepted Indonesian sovereignty over East Timor, only the positive affirmation of that sovereignty by Australia in that treaty resulted in litigation before the International Court of Justice. Prime Minister Paul Keating had expressed the sentiment that there was no country more important than Indonesia to Australia, and later Foreign Minister Alexander Downer had repeated it. But by 2000, this constant in Australia’s regional posture had changed completely.

Australia’s international environment in the first half of the 1990s was heavily conditioned by global trends that had gathered force over the preceding decade. Among these trends were the internationalisation of production and of financial and commodity markets; the emergence of a technologically borderless world, characterised by new media, information and communication networks and symbolised above all by the World Wide Web; and within this context of globalisation, the rise of new centres of economic and technological power, very notably in East Asia. The increasingly widespread influence of free (or at least liberal) market ideology could be seen as concomitant with these changes, in part reflecting them, in part driving them. And interlinked with these phenomena at the geostrategic level there was the waning of the Cold War. While the Soviet implosion of the later 1980s might not have ushered in any new world order, it did signify the demise of certain verities – including superpower ideological rivalry, strategic bipolarity, and nuclear arms racing – which had done much to structure the pattern of international relationships for four decades.

The introduction begins by demonstrating the importance of ‘modernisation’ for left-wing debates in the second half of the twentieth century. After recapping the key staging posts of Labour’s trajectory from the 1970s to the 1990s, it then argues that existing histories obscure the diverse meanings and appeal of ‘modernisation’ through their current use of the term. I suggest that this hinders our understanding of both New Labour and many of their left-wing critics, and too readily accepts a teleological reading of history. Following a brief discussion of the method of the book, the introduction touches on the wider historical significance of this revised understanding of Labour’s ideological debates. It questions the idea of an ‘age of neoliberalism’ and introduces other themes of the late twentieth century of comparable significance to market liberalism: the challenge to the nation state from above and below; the rise of post-1968 ‘liberation movements’; deindustrialisation; and constitutional agitation. It ends by outlining the chapters.

This chapter traces the influence of second-wave feminist activism, scholarship, and fiction in the US on women’s fiction of the 1990s. The first half examines a selection of literary texts published between the late 1960s and late 1980s that attest to the innovative techniques that women and genderqueer writers developed in this period to articulate feminist ideas, record the movement’s reception by the public, and recuperate aspects of American history long overlooked by a male-dominated academy. The second half turns to two novels by women published at the twentieth century’s close, both of which move between the 1990s and the previous six decades: Whitney Otto’s How to Make an American Quilt and Paule Marshall’s Daughters. The narrative strategies these novels use to challenge universalist accounts of history are revealed. These two novels featuring female protagonists who abandoned PhD projects dismissed as trivial by their white male supervisors are representative of a broader tendency in women’s fiction of the period, which is best approached as a repository for the historiographic narratives rejected by a white male-dominated academy.

The end of the twentieth century saw a significant change – quantitatively and qualitatively – in refugees coming to Britain. As the post-Cold War world saw growing numbers fleeing a constellation of state collapse, civil war, environmental disaster and economic stagnation, 1990s Britain saw an absolute increase in the number of asylum applications. It also saw a shift away from the entry of distinct blocks of refugees towards the piecemeal entry of individuals seeking refuge. These two trends came together, combining with Britain’s continued restriction of extra-European immigration, to ensure two things. First, that Britain’s stated commitment to refugee rights via the Refugee Convention became undermined by a determination to reduce the number of successful asylum applications. Through repeated legislation, the burden of proof an individual needed to make a successful application became ever greater. Second, despite assertive grassroots activism, new measures – dispersal, detention and ever-more restricted access to welfare support and legal employment – all served to marginalise asylum seekers from the mainstream population. While these sought to underline the difference between, and the competing claims of, asylum seekers and the ‘hard working poor’, in fact both faced the consequences of a retreating state, shrinking affordable housing and the erosion of universal welfare.

By 1992, when Australia was asked to recommit to the US-led peacekeeping force – the Multinational Force and Observers (MFO) – more than a decade had elapsed since Israel’s withdrawal from the Sinai Peninsula, marking the transfer of the Sinai back to Egypt and the start of the MFO’s operations. Peace, a shaky proposition in the region – and absent on Israel’s other borders – had held. Mostly, as an Australian diplomat recognised, this was because of the ‘political will’ that Egypt and Israel, encouraged by US leadership, displayed in maintaining the underlying aims of the 1978 Camp David accords and the subsequent 1979 Treaty of Peace. But the MFO also played a role.