Neoliberal Australia And Us Imperialism In East Asia

A critical analysis of Australia's neoliberal state and role in the American imperial project in Asia. In exposing the causal mechanisms for violence and prospects for more wars it argues for emancipatory alternatives to the existing dominant and anti-democratic neoliberal governmentality.

In his critical study of Australian imperialism, Erik Paul analyses the making, character and contours of the geopolitical state from the time of the British invasion and colonisation to the present, expanding the country’s continental political and economic power. War is the crucible for its hegemonic power, nationalism, and politics. The book exposes and dissects capitalist imperialism to control and manage a growing population and to impose the grand strategy of a US client state. The geopolitics in the partitioning of the earth and the exploitation of people and the biosphere continue to create major conflict, inequality, and human suffering. Australia plays an important role in the intensification of the struggle among major powers and in the outcome of an expanding global ecological and hegemonic crisis. But the existing Australian state of exception constitutes a major obstacle to a reconciliation with China and to a peaceful regional and world order.

This book is the first to establish the nature and causes of violence as key features in the political economy of Australia as an advanced capitalist society. Australia’s neoliberal corporate security state in seen to represent the emergence of a post-democratic order, whereby minds and bodies are disciplined to the dominant ideology of market relations. Locating questions of the democracy and of the country’s economy at the heart of Australia’s political struggle, the author elaborates how violence in Australia is built into a hegemonic order, characterized by the concentration of private power and wealth. Identifying the commodification of people and nature, the construction and manipulation of antagonisms and enemies, and the politics of fear as features of a new authoritarianism and one-party-political state, Erik Paul explores alternatives to the existing neoliberal hegemonic order. Positing that democratization requires a clearly defined counter-culture, based on the political economy of social, economic and political equality, the book draws out the potential in non-violent progressive social movements for a new political economy.

This book argues that Australia is vital to the US imperial project for global hegemony in the struggle among great powers, and why Australia’s deep dependency on the US is incompatible with democracy and the security of the country. The Australian continent is increasingly a contestable geopolitical asset for the US grand strategy and for China’s economic and political expansionism. The election of Donald Trump to the US presidency is symptomatic of the US hegemonic crisis. The US is Australia’s dangerous ally and the US crisis is a call for Australia to regain sovereignty and sever its military alliance with the US. Political realism provides a critical paradigm to analyse the interactions between capitalism, imperialism and militarism as they undermine Australian democracy and shift governmentality towards new forms of authoritarianism.

The book is a study on planetary realism in a critical analysis of Australia in the age of the Anthropocene. It contextualises Australia in the degradation of the biosphere deeply harmful to humanity’s wellbeing, accelerating the threat of nuclear war and the tensions of a declining democracy. The Anthropocene is a critical period, threatening the viability of the Australian nation-state. It involves the decarbonisation of the economy driven by domestic and foreign corporate power, and the geopolitics of world domination as a close ally of the US. Australia’s militarisation for war against China must be contested in the pursuit for a green and just new deal framed in the foreign policy of reconciliation with Asia, including a fully cooperative entente with China.

The Festival Cities of Edinburgh and Adelaide examines how these cities’ world-famous arts events have shaped and been shaped by their long-term interaction with their urban environments. While the Edinburgh International Festival and Adelaide Festival are long-established, prestigious events that champion artistic excellence, they are also accompanied by the two largest open-access fringe festivals in the world. It is this simultaneous staging of multiple events within Edinburgh’s Summer Festivals and Adelaide’s Mad March that generates the visibility and festive atmosphere popularly associated with both places. Drawing on perspectives from theatre studies and cultural geography, this book interrogates how the Festival City, as a place myth, has developed in the very different local contexts of Edinburgh and Adelaide, and how it is challenged by groups competing for the right to use and define public space. Each chapter examines a recent performative event in which festival debates and controversies spilled out beyond the festival space to activate the public sphere by intersecting with broader concerns and audiences. This book forges an interdisciplinary, comparative framework for festival studies to interrogate how festivals are embedded in the social and political fabric of cities and to assess the cultural impact of the festivalisation phenomenon.

Recognizing that climate politics has been an increasingly contentious and heated topic in Australia over the past two decades, this book examines Australian capitalism as a driver of climate change and the nexus between the corporations and Coalition and Australian Labor parties. As a highly developed country, Australia is punching above its weight in terms of contributing to greenhouse gas emissions despite rising temperatures, droughts, water shortages and raging bushfires, storm surges and flooding, and the bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef. Drawing upon both archival and ethnographic research, Hans Baer examines Australian climate politics at the margins, namely the Greens, the labour union, the environmental NGOs, and the grass-roots climate movement. Adopting a climate justice perspective which calls for "system change, not climate change" as opposed to the conventional approach of seeking to mitigate emissions through market mechanisms and techno-fixes, particularly renewable energy sources, this book posits system-challenging transitional steps to shift Australia toward an eco-socialist vision in keeping with a burgeoning global socio-ecological revolution. Accessibly written and including an interview with renowned comedian and climate activist Rod Quantock OAM, this book is essential reading for academics, students and general readers with an interest in climate change and climate activism.