Aside from a complete collapse of the East Asian security order (brought about, for example, by a catastrophic breakdown in China-US or China-Japan relations), the ‘nightmare scenario’ for Australia in the face of these developments is that it could become marginalised altogether from the region, or at least from its more influential and important institutions. The most likely avenue through which this could happen would be Australia’s exclusion from organisations built on a burgeoning ‘East Asian’ identity. Australia’s participation in the 2004 ASEAN Plus Three (APT) meeting and its membership of the EAS have gone some way toward assuaging these fears. That said, Australia is far from being a key player in either of these mechanisms. Residual apprehensions remain, with the jury still out on how far these emergent processes will go in advancing the potentially powerful notion of an East Asian Community.

It is important to bear in mind here that, at least in its relations with the East Asian region, Australia sees itself as a deeply vulnerable and insecure nation. In his classic 1979 book The frightened country, the former head of the Australian Department of Foreign Affairs, Alan Renouf, describes Australia as a country that literally lives in fear of its own neighbourhood. It is therefore, in Renouf’s view, a country that is unable to see the opportunities in the Asian region clearly and one that also exhibits a strong penchant for seeking out a ‘great and powerful friend’ to compensate for its perceived strategic insecurities.^[10] First it was Britain in the period up until the Second World War; then the United States through the post-war period and up until the present day. Further complicating this innate sense of insecurity, the late Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington has described Australia as a ‘torn country’, a society divided over whether or not it belongs to Asia.^[11] In his terms

Through its favoured ‘exclusivist’ approach towards East Asian security architecture, China has inadvertently reinforced Australia’s sense of isolation and vulnerability. This was most evident in the run up to the inaugural EAS, when Beijing reportedly preferred a gathering limited to APT members and did not actively support Australia’s attendance.^[13] Similar concern has been expressed in relation to the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation (SCO), which also excludes Australia, but whose members and observers represent half of the world’s population. Antipodean anxiety is even mirrored at the Track 2 level, where recent initiatives such as the Network of East Asian Think Tanks (NEAT) are regarded by some as a (Chinese-led) challenge to more established processes in which Australia is already a key player, such as CSCAP.^[14]

Canberra has responded to these dilemmas by continuing to engage with those processes through which the powerful idea of a distinctly East Asian Community appears most likely to materialise—namely APT and the EAS—even while conceding that Australia is unlikely to become a particularly influential or integral member of such groupings. At the same time, however, Canberra has indirectly balanced against the prospect of a more exclusive East Asian Community by throwing its weight behind competing mechanisms that exhibit a more inclusive communal ethos. Less than two months before the inaugural EAS in December 2005 (and against the backdrop of Australian euphoria at having been included in this fledgling mechanism), the then Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, described APEC as ‘undeniably the most important international meeting with which Australia is associated’.^[15] Subsequently, Howard pledged his support to a Japanese initiative to establish a free trade zone comprising of 16 Asia-Pacific nations.^[16] Simultaneously, Australia has supported initiatives comprising of those countries traditionally regarded as regional ‘outsiders’—namely the United States, Japan and India—who potentially have the most to lose from any realisation of the East Asian Community ideal. Australian support for US-led multilateral mechanisms with a regional focus, such as the controversial Proliferation Security Initiative (PSI) and the Ministerial-level Trilateral Strategic Dialogue (TSD) involving the United States, Japan, Australia (and potentially India), could be interpreted as a form of indirect balancing or ‘insurance’ against the prospect of its institutional marginalisation from the region. Indeed, so too can the March 2007 Australian security agreement with Japan.^[17]

From Beijing’s perspective, however, such initiatives can easily be interpreted as reflecting Australian support for a US (and possibly Japanese)-led campaign to constrain, if not completely contain, China’s burgeoning regional influence. To be fair, there is some basis to this perception, given the existence of a small, yet relatively influential, anti-China lobby within Australia.^[18] By and large, however, it is important to recognise that Australian views of China, and specifically its (re)emergence, are generally very different from those held in the United States and Japan. Of the three, Canberra is clearly the most sanguine on this issue. For Australia, China’s rise is seen as nothing short of an economic blessing. Canberra has come out consistently with statements such as that issued at the beginning of 2006 by the then Australian Ambassador to the United States, Dennis Richardson, suggesting that ‘the question for Australia is not whether China’s growth is innately good or bad; Australia made up its mind long ago that it was a good thing. China’s growth is unambiguously good for Asia and the United States’.^[19] In relation to the issue of China’s growing military capabilities, senior Australian officials are on record as describing ‘China’s expanding military expenditure as a process of modernisation, not destabilisation’.^[20] Even with regard to human rights issues, Howard publicly stated in July 2005 that the China-Australia relationship was ‘mature enough’ to ride through ‘temporary arguments’ in this area and that he remain[ed] ‘unashamed’ in developing Australia’s relations with China.^[21]

Yet perceptions often matter most in international politics. To an extent that has yet to be fully appreciated, the analysis contained in this section suggests that competing approaches to order-building in East Asia have the potential to create serious tensions in this blossoming China-Australia relationship. From Canberra’s perspective, Beijing’s apparent preference for a more exclusive regional architecture has exacerbated Australia’s longstanding vulnerability—to borrow from a former Australian Prime Minister, Paul Keating,—as ‘the odd man out’ in Asia.^[22] For Beijing, equally, the strategy that Canberra has adopted to ‘insure’ against its possible regional marginalisation has been (mis)construed as signifying support for a containment of China that would ultimately not be in Australia’s best interests. In the final analysis, therefore, because of the potential threat they pose to China-Australia ties, finding ways to allay these concerns will constitute an important task for the future sustainability of the Australia-China bilateral relationship more generally.

So what can be done? For Australia, greater attention clearly needs to be given to the ‘packaging’ or presentational aspects of its indirect balancing approach. The diplomacy surrounding the March 2007 announcement of the Australia-Japan security declaration and suggestions by Howard that this arrangement might evolve into a formal security treaty appear to have been largely targeted at an Australian domestic audience. Yet this is certainly not how they were read in Beijing. Greater transparency from Canberra in such instances would certainly not go amiss. Australia could also consider what scope there might be to lobby for the inclusion of China as an observer in some of the more exclusive arrangements to which Australia is a party, such as the TSD. Likewise, Beijing in return might be willing to consider some of the benefits of seeking Australian involvement in some of the more exclusive processes to which it is a party, working from the assumption that Canberra views a rising China very differently from Washington and Tokyo.

As Japan changes its international personality and seeks a greater degree of regional autonomy, and as ASEAN begins to question its own medium-to-longer term capacity to remain in the driver’s seat of regional architecture-building, might there also be merit in developing a Trilateral Security (as opposed to Strategic) Dialogue between China, Japan and Australia? Despite the recent thawing which appears to be occurring in China-Japan ties—as epitomised by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao’s short but highly successful April 2007 visit to Tokyo—the extraordinarily deep societal and historical tensions between these two countries cannot be underestimated. Issues of energy security also appear inevitable to complicate the China-Japan relationship in the years ahead, while (as the two historical great powers of East Asia) both countries have much at stake—and potentially much over which to disagree—in seeking to refine and then implement the notion of an East Asian Community. Not least because China and Japan are Australia’s leading trading partners, the prospect of spiraling tensions between them is of genuine concern to Canberra. To the extent that a new trilateral mechanism involving Beijing, Canberra and Tokyo could serve to avoid, alleviate or at the very least manage these tensions in the China-Japan relationship, it would be most welcome.

In theory at least, all of this should become more straightforward for Australia under the Rudd Government. Kevin Rudd is a mandarin speaker with a strong interest in China and in Asia-Pacific multilateralism. That said, the difficulties associated with executing a genuine and comprehensive process of China-Australia engagement should never be under-estimated. While the depth of Australia’s economic engagement with China can hardly be called into question, its engagement at other levels remains relatively shallow and under-developed. Engagement, of course, is a multi-layered, multi-dimensional process that also encompasses a wide spectrum of people-to-people contacts and personal linkages. Yet, in many respects, Australia and China remain very different societies: we speak a different language, our cultures are diametrically opposed, and our values are often in conflict. Trying to develop the same level of trust and intimacy that currently exists in the Australia-US relationship is therefore likely to be a long-term project, and one that will almost certainly encounter a good deal more trials and tribulations than has thus far been acknowledged in either Beijing or Canberra. Developing a sounder understanding of our respective priorities and perceptions in the realm of Asia-Pacific multilateralism therefore represents a relatively innocuous yet important way to begin that process in earnest.