Anglo-Australian Relations and the “Turn to Europe,” 1961–1972 (review)

Andrea Benvenuti’s book deals with a decade of “drastic change” (p. 2) in the relationship between Britain and Australia. Benvenuti recounts how this unusually close, indeed familial, relationship evolved into one in which the two countries related to each other as, in effect, foreign countries—still good friends, but pursuing different interests and interacting in essentially instrumentalist ways.

The principal changes discussed in the book flowed from the decisions and actions of the major power, Britain. The role of Australia, as the minor power, was to react. The British took the initiative in both the economic and the strategic realms. By the early 1960s policymakers in London had become convinced that Britain’s economic interest would be better served by building closer trade and investment links with its industrialized neighbors in Europe even if this meant reducing its historically determined trade and investment links with the agrarian south, a category that at that time still included Australia along with most other Commonwealth countries. Matters came to a head in 1961 when Britain applied for membership in the increasingly dynamic European Economic Community (EEC). Faced with losing preferential access to the British market, Australia protested, invoked kith and kin, and sought special dispensations for its farm exports, but to no great avail. In the strategic realm, change was driven largely by Britain’s growing unwillingness to maintain a colossally expensive world security role. The key decisions to withdraw militarily from east of Suez came in 1967–1968. Again the Australians protested. Although Australia’s main strategic ally by this point was the United States, Canberra saw Britain as important, too, chiefly because it had a substantial military presence at its Singapore base in the heart of the emergent—and politically turbulent—Southeast Asian region. Once again protests achieved little, although Britain’s and Australia’s accession to the Five Power Defence Arrangements, negotiated in 1971, did offer Canberra a minor consolation.

Meticulously researched and lucidly written, this book provides by far the most comprehensive account yet published of these developments in Anglo-Australian affairs. The general story is familiar enough, but Benvenuti brings a welcome dose of fresh thinking. For example, he takes Stuart Ward to task for pinpointing Britain’s first application to join Europe in 1961 as the event that signaled “the end of the affair” between Britain and Australia (p. 185). Benvenuti argues for a larger picture in which change is seen as the cumulative consequence of four distinct crises; namely, three EEC applications (1961–1963–1967, and 1971–1972) and one set of decisions to withdraw British military forces (1967–1968). His argument is plausible and well documented, but the two views are arguably reconcilable. To say that after 1961 “nothing could be quite the same again” is quite compatible with pointing to the compounding effect of subsequent crises.

Noting the tendency among earlier writers to focus on either the economic issue or the strategic issue, Benvenuti seeks to bring the two into a single analytical framework. He raises the question of how far the two British initiatives were seen and treated by policymakers as linked. If researchers were to rely purely on the archival record, he notes, they might conclude that London dealt with the two initiatives as distinct rather than interlinked issues. Arguably this illustrates the point that official documents do not always or necessarily reveal the full story of policymaking. At any rate Benvenuti makes good use of interviews, memoirs, and other such sources to help support his argument that each set of issues formed part of the policy context within which the other set of issues was treated. Both were aspects of the much larger narrative of Britain’s adjustment to post-imperial life. For their part, as he amply demonstrates, the Australians did believe that linkage existed and that it compounded their problems as they struggled to minimize the harm to their interests.

In addition, Benvenuti keeps in view the international influences and pressures...