Coral Bell, ‘The Changing Central Balance and Australian Policy’, IR Working Paper 1989/1, Canberra: Department of International Relations, Research School of Pacific Studies, Australian National University, August 1989.

This essay is a study of the current and prospective changes in the central balance of power, as they are likely to work themselves out in the 1990s, and towards the end of the century. It looks successively at the rise of four powers – Europe, Japan, China and India – and the levelling-down of the two superpowers, the US and the USSR. It then offers hypotheses as to the effect of this process on powers outside the central balance, especially Australia.