The Institutional Setting

Abstract

The members of the Australian school considered in this book were, variously, scholars, commentators, and teachers; most of them also discharged policy roles for the Australian government or for international organizations. This chapter is devoted to sketching the institutions in which they pursued their activities. With the foreign policy functions of the government discharged by a rudimentary bureaucratic machinery, and universities and similar institutions slow to offer formal courses of instruction, other institutions often provided the context for the analysis and debate of foreign policy (Walter and Moore 2010: 161–2). By far, the most important of these was the Australian Institute of International Affairs (AIIA), to use the title adopted officially from 1933, although some of its component groups used it before that time. AIIA membership often overlapped with that of the League of Nations Union (LNU), which was more than an organization merely devoted to advocacy. A number of other organizations came into existence from the 1920s as instruments of policy advocacy, but few had a lasting impact on deeper questions of analysis. The teaching of IR, despite the novelty of the subject, did begin in the 1920s and contributed to the emergence of a community of scholars and commentators. The modest government structures devoted to international questions—augmented when the Department of External Affairs was reorganized in 1935—will also be considered. Finally, in discussing these structures, some notice will be taken of the significant role of foreign models and foreign funding. As well as providing important sources of support in an era where few resources, official or unofficial, were devoted to international affairs, these linkages also served to reinforce the transnational consciousness of the early IR community.