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Book Review

Kosmas Tsokhas, Making a Nation State: Cultural Identity, Economic Nationalism and Sexuality in Australian History, Melbourne University Press, South Carlton, 2001. pp. vii + 376. $39.95 paper.

In telling a story of how Australia became a nation state — 1918 to 1941 — Kosmas Tsokhas challenges 'labour history' orthodoxy by casting four non-Labor Prime Ministers — William Morris Hughes (Prime Minister 1917–23), Stanley Melbourne Bruce (1923–29), Joseph Aloysius Lyons (1932–39) and Robert Gordon Menzies (1939–41) — as the leaders of the tendency he describes as 'economic nationalists'. His fifth chapter deals with each man in a brief biographical essay that seeks to show how he negotiated his Australian identity when visiting Britain. Their collective achievement was that they continually obtained 'concessions from the British over trade, tariffs and exchange rates', representing the interests of the Australian capitalist class vis a vis the capitalist interests represented by the British state.

This Australian interest was in three ways difficult for the non-Labor leaders to represent. First, capitalism in Australia was fragmented into agricultural, manufacturing, and mining sectors with different social structures and different relationships to the global market. Second, there were seven Australian governments. Tsokhas underlines the importance of the six States' agreement to overcome their competitive approaches to London financiers by forming the Loan Council — a borrowers' cartel that met for the first time in February 1924. Third, the constituency that elected these economic nationalists was Anglophile and deferential to the Mother Country. Tsokhas takes us behind the scenes where writers of political history have generally been content to remain; instead of accepting their focus on political institutions and events, Tsokhas presents us with 'the economic structures and social movements that constituted the foundations of political life'. He invites our attention to 'companies, business organisations, investment, borrowing and trade'. Once we change our focus in this way, we will not be deceived by the Anglophile style of the non-Labor leadership. In their negotiating stances these men defined the limits of British influence over Australian capitalism.

Tsokhas' first chapter outlines the many impulses towards national self-definition in literature, film, census-making, the conscription referenda of 1916 and 1917, and the remembrance of World War I through the Anzac story. This 'cultural context É encouraged governments to conceptualise and assert an independent Australian national interest'.

Australia came out of the Great War owing Britain money and needing to borrow more for economic development. The key agencies managing this problem were the Loan Council, the Commonwealth Bank (which became a central bank in 1924), the private banks (reduced in number by a wave of mergers in the 1920s), Treasury, and political leaders. When British government officials worried that Australia would be unable to service its growing public debt, Treasury turned to the capital market in New York, taking advantage of rivalry between London and New York financiers. British fears were justified; Australia did finance too much of public investment by overseas loans in the 1920s. During the Depression, nonetheless, Australian governments did not deflate as harshly as the British advised. In their quest for reductions in interest payable to British bond-holders, the Australian leaders were not only responsive to their voters' resentment, they also hinted at the risk of outright repudiation of repayments. In World War II, Australia drove a hard bargain with Britain over the rationing of sterling. The war left Australia a net creditor to a ruined Britain.

In trade negotiations with Britain, Australian governments sought to advantage all sectors by combining 'Imperial Preference' (favourable access by Australian exporters to the British market) with the protection of manufacturing from competitive imports (from Britain and the USA mainly). Tsokhas traces contending British understandings of 'Imperial Preference' and points to Australian trade lobbyist F.L. McDougall's encouragement of a line more tolerant of Australia's industrialisation. The Lyons government also negotiated industry protection in the 1930s. Australian negotiators exploited rivalries between British, US and Japanese exporters to Australia. Australia's receipt of British migrants in the 1920s was not always happy for the migrants but it extracted British development subsidies. Australian manufacturing developed further in World War II. In the trajectory outlined by Tsokhas, Australia became a stronger, and Britain a weaker, trading nation, 1918–45.

In military relations, Australian non-Labor leaders have often been presented as captive to delusions about Britain's protective power. Tsokhas highlights the alignment between J.G. Latham's and British Treasury's view that because it was beyond Britain's and Australia's capacities to oppose Japanese expansion into Asia in the 1930s it was better to negotiate trade and shipping deals with Japan. BHPs Essington Lewis also urged that Australia build up its defence, while trading with Japan. Although Australia banned iron ore exports to Japan in 1938, the general tendency of non-Labor thinking was to appease Japan, and to continue trading with it, while seeking to interest the USA in Australia's defence if push came to shove. The conservatives, Tsokhas insists, were under no illusions about Britain's defence priorities and capabilities. Menzies assessed, from the point of view of Australian (not Imperial) defence and of Australian commercial interests, the British tactics for dealing with the Germany-Japan alliance in 1940–41. Menzies' responses to British efforts to block supplies to Japan were also finely attuned to Australia's need to appeal to the Americans.

Tsokhas is convincing in arguing that Australia's non-Labor leaders had a conception of Australia's interests in which Australia's loyalty to Britain and membership of the British Empire were only two of several important considerations. In addition, his work on British materials (including in the Public Records office) makes him sensitive to divisions within the British political elite about the significance of Empire. The significance of 'Empire' in Australian political calculations emerges as contingent on dynamic domestic and global political economies. Tsokhas thus deepens our understanding of how Australian political conservatives thought and acted between the wars.

I offer two qualifications of his account of these 'economic nationalists'. One is that no matter how independently Australia's interests were conceived, the Australian governments' room for manoeuvre was slight. Australia remained a dependent nation, by virtue of its always problematic balance of payments combined with its defencelessness. Tsokhas is no doubt aware of the extremely narrow margin in which 'nationalism' could be deployed, but his emphasis is less on that than on documenting the leaders' pragmatic aspiration to realise the electorate's demands for prosperity and security by whatever means lay at hand.

My second qualification is that Tsokhas does not show us the political culture that supported these leaders. He might find that a surprising claim, as he devotes about 40 per cent of his book (Chapters 2, 6, 7 and 8) to 'culture'. However, it is not the culture of the conservative-voting public, but of writers and other intellectuals. There are many pages of short biography and plot summary, evocations of visual imagery, and paragraphs on the aspirations of publishers and other institution-builders. Tsokhas believes that by conveying a wealth of cultural activity, he has documented a 'national culture', the 'national culture' that nurtured the 'economic nationalism' of the four pragmatic Prime Ministers, their officials and their business allies. With one exception, I found these chapters unsatisfying; they do not trace 'structures of feeling' in which one can find a sense of an Australian interest or destiny. Rather what they show is the heterogeneity of concerns, genres, and idioms of intellectuals' responses to the 'modernisms' that were filtering through to them from the North Atlantic nations.

The exceptional chapter is 'Anzac, Sexuality, Otherness' in which Tsokhas traces a preoccupation, in Australian fiction about World War I, with an eroticised Britain. What did it mean to Australian soldiers to have sex with British (usually English) women? How did those encounters figure a fantasised Britain-Australia relationship? Tsokhas' question here is pertinent to his theme. In this chapter he does show a 'structure of feeling'. His other 'culture' chapters seem to me to have no theme other than a vague celebration of disparate cultural vitality. He is indebted to a conventional canon of writers and artists, as if to evoke the canon were to display a 'national' sensibility.

Tsokhas' investment in the category nation-state thus seems to draw on two quite different analytical traditions. One is Marxist, giving pride of place to the nation-state's continuing effort to represent a structurally differentiated ruling class in a dynamic global political economy. The other is a liberal nationalist teleology, a la Geoffrey Serle in From Deserts the Prophets Come or Leslie Rees' histories of Australian drama, in which, by incessant creative activity, each Dominion constructs an arena of institutional support and critical evaluation that need no longer refer, or defer, to the British point of origin. What the book lacks is a sense of the popular idiom of the constituency that preferred non-Labor to Labor leaders 1917 to 1941.


Australian National University	TIM ROWSE

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