Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to the First Edition
- Preface to the Second Edition
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Conceiving Foreign Policy
- 3 The Policy Process
- 4 The Foreign Policy Bureaucracy
- 5 The Executive
- 6 The Overseas Network
- 7 The Australian Intelligence Community
- 8 The Domestic Landscape
- 9 The International Policy Landscape
- 10 Australia's Place in the World
- 11 Australia's Security
- 12 Australia's Prosperity
- 13 Values and Australian Foreign Policy
- 14 Conclusion: The End of Foreign Policy?
- Appendix
- Glossary
- Index
11 - Australia's Security
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Preface to the First Edition
- Preface to the Second Edition
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Conceiving Foreign Policy
- 3 The Policy Process
- 4 The Foreign Policy Bureaucracy
- 5 The Executive
- 6 The Overseas Network
- 7 The Australian Intelligence Community
- 8 The Domestic Landscape
- 9 The International Policy Landscape
- 10 Australia's Place in the World
- 11 Australia's Security
- 12 Australia's Prosperity
- 13 Values and Australian Foreign Policy
- 14 Conclusion: The End of Foreign Policy?
- Appendix
- Glossary
- Index
Summary
A nation's security is its ultimate foreign policy priority. Because the powerful – and sometimes the powerless – often regard coercion as the most direct way of achieving their objectives, the possibility of being threatened with or subjected to force is a persistent attribute of relations among societies. In his 1651 masterpiece, Leviathan, the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes argued that the drive for security underlies all politics, because humans living in a persistent state of fear and insecurity are unable to fulfil any of the higher purposes of human existence:
In such condition, there is no place for industry; because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving, and removing, such things that require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
For any state, then, its security against coercion is an existential value: without security it cannot maintain any independence or work with confidence towards the values held to be important by its own society.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Making Australian Foreign Policy , pp. 233 - 249Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2007