Global trends in the rich world, filtered through America’s unique two-party system, have transformed each party’s coalition and reinforced contrasting views of expertise. Although the rise of social issues and the rising importance of education are transnational, they raise unique challenges for each major American party. Each side has responded by shifting its agenda and public image. Democratic politicians have balanced their instinctive reluctance to alienate culturally traditionalist voting blocs against internal pressure from party members for a socially progressive, intellectually erudite, and demographically diverse party leadership. Republicans have been compelled to defer to a popular conservative media apparatus that promotes aversion to social transformation and hostility to claims of expertise by nonconservative authorities. Barack Obama (the wonky advocate of social change) and Donald Trump (the plain-spoken, nostalgic nemesis of experts) both personify their respective parties. These party leaders repel as well as attract, reinforcing our two-sided politics.

For the Australian economy, the 1980s were different from other decades. Many of the major differences between the 1980s and other decades reflected, or were reflected in, the Australian economy’s links with the global economy. Particularly important during the 1980s were the responses to structural changes taking place in the global economy that were a result of increasing economic interrelationships across national borders. This chapter examines these changes from three aspects. First, it describes briefly what happened to the Australian economy in its international dimensions during the decade; second, it analyses the major changes in the international economy that affected Australia; and third, it examines Australia’s response to these developments.

The 1980s brought far-reaching and often unsettling changes to Australia. In retrospect, it was a time of transition from the earlier postwar decades when Australia could, with little effort, bank on high international prices for its commodity exports and when its security seemed to be safely locked into the American alliance. It became increasingly evident that the accustomed benefits of isolation from international turbulence, and the comfortable economic and security margin over its Asian neighbours were all drawing to a close.

The economies in the 1970s were characterized by high inflation and low growth. Labor acquired great power that was used to increase wages and to reduce effort and labor efficiency. This was the beginning of a trend toward opening global markets and globalization. There was an assumption that opening of markets would increase global efficiency and standards of living. Enterprises with “global reach” become important. China joined the global economy at this time. There was significant change in favor of market-based policies and against high taxes and public spending, and the role of the market came to be seen more favorably and that of governments less favorably. There was a view that a free market can do almost anything. Pro-market theories become popular. Political elections were affected in several countries. Globalization left some industrial workers without work and without income and conservative governments were reluctant to assist them. In dealing with this problem, domestic markets work less well than expected from theory, while global financial markets grow significantly. There was the collapse of the Bretton Woods Agreements and the growing use of flexible exchange rates.

The introduction begins by demonstrating the importance of ‘modernisation’ for left-wing debates in the second half of the twentieth century. After recapping the key staging posts of Labour’s trajectory from the 1970s to the 1990s, it then argues that existing histories obscure the diverse meanings and appeal of ‘modernisation’ through their current use of the term. I suggest that this hinders our understanding of both New Labour and many of their left-wing critics, and too readily accepts a teleological reading of history. Following a brief discussion of the method of the book, the introduction touches on the wider historical significance of this revised understanding of Labour’s ideological debates. It questions the idea of an ‘age of neoliberalism’ and introduces other themes of the late twentieth century of comparable significance to market liberalism: the challenge to the nation state from above and below; the rise of post-1968 ‘liberation movements’; deindustrialisation; and constitutional agitation. It ends by outlining the chapters.

Unlike the Western Gastarbeiter, the GDR labor migrants were recruited later (the 1980s), fewer (no more than 200,000), from other countries (Vietnam, Mozambique, Poland), objects of secret service surveillance (by the Stasi), and portrayed not as labor migrants, but recipients of “brotherly” socialist solidarity. Yet the motivation for recruiting them (labor shortages) and their experience of living among Germans were similar: segregated from the general population; objects of paternalism, exoticization, hypersexualization, dehumanization, racist violence; and enticed to leave with – modest – financial bonuses when no longer needed (1983 in Western, 1990 in Eastern Germany). What was fundamentally different was that the GDR portrayed itself as an anti-racist internationalist society; that the countries of origin of the labor migrants deducted a large portion of their earnings and never returned it when the “contract workers” (Vertragsarbeiter) were forced out after the 1989 fall of the Berlin Wall; and that, consequently, the deported labor migrants often ended up living in poverty at the margins of their societies rather than reaping the benefits of their hard work in the GDR.

The arrival of 19,000 Vietnamese ‘boat people’ after 1979 came after nearly two decades of immigration restriction, when Britain was entering its deepest recession for fifty years and just as Thatcher’s New Right government’s marketisation and anti-statist policies were being enacted. If this signalled new and significant challenges facing these refugees to Britain, this chapter shows that the reception and resettlement of refugees from Vietnam also saw a number of significant continuities with earlier periods. Internationally, this included the continued importance of colonial and Cold War geopolitical considerations, which pushed Britain into reluctantly participating in the UNHCR-led Vietnamese resettlement programme. Domestically the reception programme emphasised the ongoing importance of voluntary action and revealed the persistence of housing problems, poverty and racism for the new arrivals. This all took place against the backdrop of the continued emergence of an ever more diverse – ‘multicultural’ – society where the state and refugee agencies alike were being reshaped by their own increasingly heterogeneous workforces. And yet, despite this apparent new openness, educational and linguistic disadvantages of the refugees themselves collided with limited state support and high levels of unemployment to ensure that the Vietnamese were often only able to establish lives for themselves at the margins of British society.

This concluding chapter emphasises the book’s principal findings, in particular with regard to the different forms of leadership within human rights activism, and the various social groups involved. The chapter then looks briefly at how human rights activism evolved under the very different conditions – both nationally and internationally – of the 1980s.

No Australian peacekeeping operation has aroused more public opposition than the contribution of helicopters to the Multinational Force and Observers (MFO) from 1982 to 1986. The deployment was in effect simply a continuation of Australia’s participation in the second UN Emergency Force (Unef II), described in chapter 20. The deployment of the MFO followed a peace treaty signed by the two parties, Egypt and Israel, in 1979, and was never likely to involve significant danger to Australian personnel. It followed soon after a far more dangerous deployment to Southern Rhodesia (see chapters 24–27), which aroused little criticism.