WWW.Army.Gov.Au: 'First World' Militaries Imagining 'Third World' Civil Societies (2004)

This paper is part of a larger project on anti-Americanism in Australia, particularly as anti-American discourses have functioned in Australian media since September 11, 2001, in relation to issues of national defence and international security. In addition, then, to tracking critiques of US foreign policy and militarism suggested by some of those discourses, the larger project also analyses ways in which some anti-American discourse serves to supplant local critique of Australia's own militarism and the uses to which Australia's own military is put, as well as the ways its own militarism is imagined both by the military and by other Australian communities. My work on Australian anti-Americanism regarding strategic issues necessarily engages, then, Australia's military cultures. Specifically, as a scholar in film, media and cultural studies, I am methodologically drawn toward analysing the image of the military; and as a feminist scholar I find significant value in analysing the Australian Army's representation of human bodies--non-Australian and Australian bodies, women and men, people of colour and white--on the homepage of its website. In examining what Moira Gatens calls 'imaginary bodies,' I am looking for, in Gatens' terms, the '(often unconscious) imaginaries of a specific culture: those ready-made images and symbols through which we make sense of social bodies and which determine, in part, their value, their status and what will be deemed their appropriate treatment.' (1) In other words, I propose to examine the Australian Army's 'imaginary bodies' in order to offer a few heuristic observations about the 'specific culture' in which that army functions, as well as observations about the value, status and treatment that the Australian Army may be expected to deem appropriate for the various bodies it imagines. Of the now three- or four hundred students whom it has been my privilege to know and to interact with at Griffith University in Brisbane only a very small handful recognise the extent of the Australian Army's engagements in the last decade or so. In fact, at the beginning of the War in Iraq, many students based their anti-Americanist arguments on the flawed premise that East Timor was the only time and place that Australian boots had been on foreign soil since Vietnam. To the contrary, the Australian Army's mission, like that of many armies from western liberal democracies, has greatly expanded since the end of the Cold War as a result of the West's developing doctrine of humanitarian intervention. (2) And, again like many other Western armies, the Australian Army has used this expansion to re-package itself for public consumption. The image of the warrior has largely given way to the image of the peacekeeper; the mandate to kill one's enemies has, in public at least, given way to the mandate to help a stranger in need. This paper interrogates the Australian Army's imagining of two bodies: the body of the peacekeeper (the First World soldier) and the body of the stranger in need (the Third World victim), and it does this with the aim of critiquing the viability of the army's revised mandate, which is to help construct strong civil societies in once failed or failing states. I will conclude by arguing that in the army's imagining of particular bodies it imagines particular notions of citizens and citizenship, as well as of the civil society in which citizenship might take place. A brief history Before turning to actual images on the Australian Army's website, I will outline a brief history of the issues and debates that subtend this paper's concerns with a western army's imagining of citizens and civil societies. Contemporary intervention (or humanitarian intervention, military humanitarianism, humanitarian war) can, of course, be noted from the end of the Cold War, and formally since the 1999 UN document called An Agenda for Peace, a document in which the UN marked a significant shift in its approach to military force, a shift not only in the frequency of militarised missions, but in their mandates as well. …