Scott Morrison says he has been “revisiting” the 1930s, a period in which Australia faced an “existential threat”. The strategies of conservative policy makers of the 1930s are worth examining by today’s leaders so we don’t repeat the disasters of that time.
Conservative politicians of the 1930s and 1940s appear to have had a clearer view of the need for independent Australian action than they do now. They were wary of over-reliance on a Western ‘powerful friend’ and they accepted the reality that a dynamic Asian power would demand greater elbow room in the global order.
Are we being as realistic today about China’s growing role?
When last July the Prime Minister announced a major upgrade in Australia’s war-fighting capability, he offered a bleak reflection on history. “When you connect both the economic challenges and the global uncertainty, it can be very haunting,” he said.
The Prime Minister is wise to look back. The 1930s evokes powerful images – we endured the Great Depression and witnessed the rise of revisionist powers in Asia and Europe that challenged the global order. It culminated in the calamity of World War Two.
During the pre-War years of the 1930s, Australia was, as now, governed by an electorally successful conservative administration – led then by Joseph Lyons and including such prominent figures as John Latham, Richard Casey and Robert Menzies. Lyons won three successive terms between 1932 and 1939 – the years when Japan emerged to press its claims as Asia’s dominant power.
We know how that ended. But how did our conservative policymakers perceive the strategic environment and act to secure Australian interests?
Although Australia sought to avoid war, and failed, the way our leaders handled Australia’s international challenges might surprise some in the Coalition today. There was a desire to operate independently in the Pacific – and in its different initiatives the Lyons government reminds us that the conservative side of Australian politics has a serious heritage of positive engagement with the Asian region.
The Lyons government valued Australia’s relationship with its ‘great and powerful friend’ – at that time the UK. The ‘fear of abandonment’ – lying ‘deep in the history of European settlement in Australia’ – was certainly present. There was an anxiety that Britain might become too preoccupied with challenges in Europe to attend to Asian region issues.
There were also fears about entanglement – about Australia being drawn into a European war that it did not favour. Gaining influence over London’s foreign policy was a priority – but often frustrating, even when it concerned Australia’s region of the world. The Lyons government acknowledged that British and Australian interests in Asia differed. Menzies, so famous today for his British sympathies, felt the “British authorities [were] indifferent to the problems of the Far East and in particular to our own vital concerns to maintain friendly relations with Japan”.
The conservatives responded by spending almost twice the amount on defence as a share of GDP as our government delivers today. There also was an insistence that Australia needed a Pacific outlook, or a ‘Pacific Policy’, to use Alfred Deakin’s (some decades earlier). Deakin, who had laid down all “the foundational policies” of the Australian nation, saw that a Pacific outlook required Australia to act independently at times.
In 1934, Lyons caused surprise in Britain when he sent an Australian Eastern Mission to the Dutch East Indies, Singapore, Vietnam, the Philippines and China, as well as to Japan. Lyons explained it was the first “official visit” by Australia to the region. In foreign relations, he said, what mattered was to “understand one another’s point of view”. The government also hoped to expand Australia’s trade with Asia.
Already some 11 per cent of Australian exports were going to Japan – a low figure compared to today’s export levels to China, but it was one factor in Australia’s desire to avoid conflict with Japan. Lyons and others in the conservative elite saw that to avoid war there was a need to make space for a growing Asian power. Lyons argued the need to conciliate Tokyo “before any new alignments solidified into alliances”.
Another independent initiative of Lyons was the ‘Pacific Pact’ – intended to be a pact of “non-aggression and consultation among all the countries of the Pacific”, and one embracing “a general declaration of economic and cultural collaboration”. Lyons and his colleagues lobbied for this with representatives from Japan, China, the Netherlands and France – and with President Roosevelt.
This Pact endeavour qualifies the view that conservative approaches to foreign relations in Australia emphasise ‘power and alliances’ while Labor puts weight on ‘collective security and international institutions’.
This said, the proposal did not gain effective British support – which was one reason the Lyons government decided Australia had to have its own diplomatic presence in the key capitals of the region. The first representatives to the US, Japan and China were the pioneers of Australia’s diplomatic network across the Indo-Pacific.
Lyons, in his commitment to “international co-operation”, referred often to the need to understand the perspectives of others. Conservative politician and diplomat Frederick Eggleston – who had a philosophic interest in cultures or social ‘patterns’ – saw “the East awakening” and noted that British officials were too inward-looking to comprehend this.
A Lyons academic advisor, A.C.V. Melbourne, took a similar approach – suggesting it was crucial for Australian trade officials to establish close relations with “people of Japanese and Chinese race rather than with foreign residents”. Australia, he said, needed to see itself not as European but as a ‘Pacific country’. Eggleston and Melbourne would be horrified to learn of the decline of Asian studies knowledge in Australia today.
We should not draw too literally from history to understand contemporary events. The international rules-based order we have now was then less elaborate. The existence of nuclear weapons affects the calculus of war. Our economies were less deeply enmeshed.
Looking back to conservative approaches in the 1930s, however, we might ask whether we are inclined today to put too much trust in our great Western ally. Apart from enhancing our military capacity, might we also learn from the efforts of the Lyons government to accommodate a rising Asian power? And from the frustrations that government faced?
This is an edited version of an article published in Asialink Insights.
Anthony Milner is a senior adviser to Asialink at the University of Melbourne and a visiting professor at the University of Malaya.
Comments
12 responses to “Lessons from our diplomacy in Asia in the 1930s”
One thing that is never mentioned is that Australia had very little to do with provoking WWII in the Pacific.
It is always seen that the US came to save us, but in fact we ended up being targets of Japan because we were supporters of the US as allies, and we lived in the region that Japan sort to gain control over, simply because it needed Indonesian oil.
The story that is never told is that from Commodore Perry’s gunship diplomacy efforts to open up Japan for US trade in the early 1850s until Pearl Harbor, it was the USA-Japanese relationship which endured for almost 100 years that eventually soured.
The US gave support to Japan from Theodore Roosevelt’s time onward, and his writings confirm that. He supported Japan becoming the major imperialist-styled power in the Asiatic Region after its win against the Russians in the Tsushima sea battle in 1905 which destroyed much of the Russian fleet. Roosevelt also tacitly supported Japan’s invasion of the Korean peninsular and formal takeover in 1910. The US gave Japan the knowledge and technology that the country used to build its military forces. In America the people back home were told of the great Westernisation of Japan, their propensity to accept Christianity, and take on Western styles of dress. Australia was eager to supply Japan with iron, and did not appear to suspect what they might be using it for.
When the relationship with Japan turned sour and oil supply was cut off by the US, the Japanese then destroyed the US fleet in Pearl Harbor simply to give them power over the SE Asian region for access to the Indonesian oil.
It was for that very reason Japan came near to our region and we as US allies became potential targets. They never planned to invade Australia, just as they never planned to invade Hawaii, or the US. Despite Japanese nationalism and belief in its imperialist righteousness, they never had the forces to do it.
So what did we have to do with a war that was caused by a dwindling relationship between the US and Japan, and why are we always making out that the US were our saviours? In my view people like my father who ended up in New Guinea, were coming to the US’s aid after US diplomacy failed with Japan and a war was triggered. Japan went from favoured country in the region, to a Frankenstein that the US had in part created all by themselves.
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Full of very well made important points. And here we are again, spruiking on behalf of our American ally, and destroying our own future. China seemed to quite like us for a couple of decades or so, until we started nibbling at the hand that was feeding us.
If we could only correct the popular history lies driven by politicians !
George, thanks for another history lesson! I was aware of the oil embargo put in place against Japan by the US.
Since Japan had to have its oil, I wonder what the American leadership expected the Japanese to do with the oil cut off. Especially as the Americans themselves had supported Japan becoming an imperialist power. Maybe the Americans had expected the Japanese to just keel over and return to becoming peasants again.
Fast forward to 2021- we had better hope the USA does not expect the Chinese to fold if and when the US military starts a serious ‘poker’ game. [And the very last thing we need is for a gung ho Australia to egg on the Sheriff!]
Most of this is well covered in a book titled “Breaking Open Japan” by George Feiffer.
“The China Mirage” by James Bradley covers the support Theodore Roosevelt gave to Japan and the invasion of the Korean peninsular. It’s referenced so you can actually look up the writings of Roosevelt. I have checked this and found it to be accurate. It’s a book well worth reading because it also covers the American support for Chiang Kai-shek and Japan during the 19th and 2oth Centuries.
My view is that now that better accounts of history are surfacing, they serve as an excellent record to ascertain an improved view of the truth behind the events that led to outcomes that took place. It’s the ‘why’ that has been often hidden for political and other reasons. Unfortunately in the past, history taught in schools and sometimes in universities was so much flavoured with glowing patriotism and often sanitised to give a one sided view.
They do say that ‘history is written by the victors’, but it is good, like you say, that better accounts are surfacing. The more truth we have, the better chance we have, as communities and countries, to resolve conflicts and avoid violent confrontation. As for our more current truth-telling, it is a shame that our Fairfax media, which has been independent in many ways, has now degenerated into another channel for right wing ideology.
China learned its lesson from the British and other imperialist players in the 19th Century. It will never make the same mistake again. That’s why its defence capabilities are focussed on local conflicts and explains why the South China Sea is so important to their continued existence.
I don’t share your view of Lyons on the domestic front at least. Lyons was in the Labor Government of Jim Scullin, the PM who appointed the first Australian G-G, Sir Isaac Isaacs. “Red” Ted Theodore was the most capable Treasurer with years of experience about money-creation of banks, the City and Wall St, as the Qld. Premier. Their aim in 1929 was to provide unemployed people with benefits, and to spend on restarting manufacturing and hospitals etc, and thus jobs. That is, a stimulus, which had been common in Australia for previous Depressions. The CBA refused its duty to buy government bonds, taking a severe neo-classical austerity view, as did Lyons. Lyons split from Labor, and the in-coming conservatives slashed wages (we see wage suppression now). After the bank RC of 1938, which rebuked the right, the CBA and banks for their Bankers’ Ramp, showing this made the Depression far worse, at least Casey and some others in the conservative government tried to control the private banks, as had Theodore. Morrison is not learning from the example of Scullin-Theodore, but the opposite.
As documented in Tom Robert’s’ excellent book Before Rupert : Keith Murdoch and the Birth of a Dynasty’ , by the 1930s, Keith Murdoch had established himself as a powerful media proprietor in Australia, who had from the time of Billy Hughes as PM, had become an influential Prime Ministerial whisperer.
In particular, this seems to have been the case with Joe Lyons, and the symmetry between Murdoch’s views as expressed through his newspapers and Lyons’ polices increases through the 1930s.
The British were more strongly allied with the Japanese than the US, which saw them as a threat to their Philippines colony. The British were the source of much of Japan’s naval technology in the early 20th century. The first of Japan’s 1914 “Kongo” class battlecruisers was built in Britain, and the rest copied from “Kongo” in Japan. Reconstructed and more heavily armoured, they were formidable units of the Japanese navy in WWII.
Japan was condemned by the League of Nations for its atrocities in northern China in 1932, and in the following years went on with a full-scale barbarous invasion of China. All that was evidently of no concern to Australia, governed by arseholes then as it is now.
Lord Sempill in the 1920’s advised the Imperial Navy on the building of air craft carriers. He admitted to passing on military secrets under the Official Secrets Act and worked as a ‘consultant to Mitsubishi Heavy Industries from 1931 – 6. The next year he advised Australia on its navy. In 1941 Sempill was intercepted passing military secrets to Field Marshal Yamagata’s HQ in Tokyo. This was all before Pearl Harbor. The British never arrested him or executed him as a spy. He was just quietly “retired.” One of the merry band of fascist sympathizers along with Lyons and Menzies who were in charge of our defense in the 1930’s.
This reads well. I particularly like Milner’s last paragraph which is obviously referring to China, but in a balanced diplomatic way. We need to hear more such views from respected sources in public debate in Australia. The field must not be left to the Sinophobe hawks in ASPI and opportunist politicians like Dave Sharma, who definitely knows better.