Immigration, the Nation and Multiculturalism

Issues of population, multiculturalism and immigration have a recurrent tendency to boil up in political and media discussion. Which is curious because there is very little that is novel about the principles involved, although practical political choices, for instance about immigration, make some folk acutely uncomfortable.

The chief criteria for recognising a society as a nation or more particularly, as a nation-state, are reasonably well understood. In our world the concept of “nation” has for some three centuries or more revolved around the notion of ethnic and cultural homogeneity. In fact, homogeneous national cultures have become the norm for modern societies. There may, however, be argument about how, when and why these more specific ideas grew out of the beliefs about tribal, cultural and religious differences that have influenced personal and social life since the dawn of recorded history. For ethnic and cultural groups have always been in some measure intertwined and have shaded into one another, while even societies identifying themselves by a shared culture—itself a word with many and indistinct meanings—have been to some extent internally fluid.

So what happened to create the more cohesive and solid nation-state? There have been many attempts at explanation and illustration. The use of the word nation is not new, but the modern implication of united collectivity is. The best-known early appearance of the new “national” phenomenon was at the battle of Valmy in 1792, when the French citizen army defeated the invading Prussians who wanted to crush the revolution. At a critical point of the battle General Kellermann raised his hat and shouted, not “Vive le roi!”, but the warcry of “Vive la nation!” and the French troops went into battle singing the “Marseillaise”. Germany’s greatest poet, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who watched the battle, told his friends that they were seeing the beginning of a new era in world history.

Attempts at explanation and definition began almost at once. Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the founder of “German Idealism” saw the nation as reflecting a growing social unity of race, ethnicity and language—all criteria that continue in some measure to identify nation-states in our own day. What followed was a cataract of writings on the subject by historians, political scientists and philosophers, coming to a head in the years after 1945 when any mention of ethnicity was thought to raise the spectre of Nazism. Ernest Renan, in his famous Sorbonne lecture of 1882, saw the nation more simply as a group of people who wanted to live together; and stressed the importance of commonality of religion and language. Max Weber discussed the importance of the Protestant ethic. Karl Deutsch—to be sure, speaking in America in the aftermath of the Second World War—spoke more acerbically about a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbours. More useful was Hannah Arendt, who wrote perceptively as long ago as 1944 that “the real historical development of a nation does not take place inside the closed walls of a biological entity”. Hans Kohn, Eric Hobsbawm and Elie Kedourie tried to explain the phenomenon. Benedict Anderson famously spoke of the nation as an “imagined community”; although it is arguable that, while the national idea is indeed largely imagined (or dreamed?), since all “communities” are in some measure “imagined”, this is not a particularly helpful idea.

A more useful view is probably that of Ernest Gellner, who argued that it was a myth to suppose that modern nationalism was merely a kind of awakening of ancient social forces. Instead, it stemmed from new forms of social organisation promoted by revolutions. One, Gellner writes harking back to Weber, was the industrial revolution which replaced the existing “complex structure of local groups and folk cultures … by impersonal mass society with mutually substitutable atomised individuals”. Kedourie argued similarly that nationalism imposes homogeneity. The other revolutions, to which Gellner barely referred, were the American and especially French ones (later followed, of course, by structurally not dissimilar revolutions in Russia, Italy, Germany and elsewhere) which created unprecedentedly powerful mass armies of enthusiastic citizens in the service not of an empire or a king but of a national idea. 

The nation and the nation-state as unified and coherent constructs are, then, a fairly modern phenomenon. Nevertheless, a nation is now usually, though not always, based on one more or less self-consciously dominant ethnic and racial grouping. The history of the twentieth century has made that point especially and poisonously controversial almost everywhere in the European and Europe-descended world. Even in a country as far from Europe as Australia, an accusation of “racism” is probably the most deadly that can be launched against any politician, academic or business person. Yet the facts around the world are plain to see and not really debatable.

Japan and the Japanese distinguish sharply, in both language and behaviour, between proper Japanese on the one hand and visitors or migrants on the other. Chinese distinguish no less sharply, even if they do not say so publicly, between themselves and minorities like Manchus, Mongols, Tibetans and Uighurs, never mind Europeans and Americans. They are usually too wise not to “bend with the wind” of commercial or political necessity, but the ways in which they communicate among themselves reflect something else. No wonder that the last major revolution that China experienced before becoming a republic, the Taiping rebellion of 1850 to 1864, which cost some 20 million lives, was nothing if not a rebellion by Han Chinese against the Manchus and the Manchu dynasty. Very similar things can be said about Russian attitudes to the non-Russian elements of the former Russian empire.

One hesitates to use that incendiary word race but however hard it may be to define, it almost always plays a role in separating one group or society from another. Views about race help to explain majority British or French attitudes to their former colonies, especially in Africa and Asia. They play a critical role in persuading the Scots that they are not English, the Welsh that they are different from the Irish, the Arabs that they are different from the Jews (for all that both are Semites) and so on. More often than not, practical politics around the globe revolve around such perceived differences. Even in the United States, which claims with some justice to be the most successful in absorbing immigrants and making them into “Americans”, and which is so largely unified by a quasi-religious dedication to its constitution, it is notable how much of US politics is nowadays driven by racial and ethnic divisions and claims, for example between blacks and whites, or between “Hispanics” and others. In the last US presidential campaign it was noteworthy how many people praised Barack Obama simply for being black. It would be pointless to pretend that these divisions are irrelevant or can be ignored.

Nor is “nation” always and necessarily associated with a “state”. Jews, for example, sometimes refer to “the people” in a sense that includes the society of Jews in the world, irrespective of political boundaries. Per contra, North American Indian tribes (nowadays oddly named “Native Americans”, as if all babies born in the USA were not, by definition, “natives”) call themselves “nations”, as do the Chechens of the North Caucasus and the Kurds in seeking “liberation” from their areas of residence in Turkey or Lebanon or Syria.

In the great majority of cases, moreover, nations occupy, or have sought, a defined and contiguous territory. Hence the term “nation-state”. In general, Greeks means citizens of Greece even if they are living and working elsewhere, just as Australians means people with their roots and loyalties in and to Australia, while people are Brazilians if they have their personal or family roots in Brazil and so on.

Nor can territory and nationality be enough. To be an effective political entity in a world of nation-states, the nation has to have a single constitutional, legal and political system, or at least a wholly dominant one to which all lesser entities, however tolerated or even required, are beyond question subordinated. “All men equal under the law” is a basic criterion, even if it is occasionally violated by firms, local police forces or even judges. Claims for a separate legal system, as have sometimes been claimed in matters affecting Australian Aborigines, are by their very nature fundamentally divisive.

There has also to be a single or at least a dominant language that is current throughout the nation and nation-state. (This is one point at which a “nation” differs, often sharply, from one of the former “empires”.) The matter is not difficult. In China, people in or near Guangzhou are apt to change to Cantonese when talking to one another but will more or less automatically revert to the “national” Mandarin (which Mao Zedong tried hard to make universal throughout China) in the conduct of official business or discussion with strangers. In Wales, school pupils are required to learn Welsh but no one seriously doubts that any youngster who is not fluent in English will be seriously disadvantaged. In Australia, younger Greek people may well practise their (modern) Greek—especially with older relatives whose English may still be poor, but no one doubts that a command of English is essential for the conduct of a full, and especially a professional life.

There is also the issue of a “national culture”. Culture is a particularly useful word, largely because of its imprecision. Much depends on the society for, or within, which one speaks. In a small country town in the Australian back country, or in an English or French village, people can speak to each other in a local accent, or in broken sentences, because—even leaving aside questions of tone or facial and body-language—everyone knows what the other is trying to say and understands the context in which it is being said. Yet a Dordogne peasant may have difficulty understanding what a Parisian is trying to say to him. Nor is the point simply geographic. Young men or women who went to the same or even a similar English boarding school will use school slang or broken sentences even if they come from opposite ends of the country, just as young Chinese who have risen through the Communist Party training apparatus will have no difficulty in understanding each other’s faint hints and allusions or gestures. Moreover, in an increasingly interconnected world, people dip into each other’s cultures in various ways: through visits including holidays, through exchanges of cuisine, styles of art, clothing or hair. Nor can it be denied that cultures borrow from one another, whether in painting or music or styles of narrative or historical writing. Some Chinese musicians have achieved the highest ranks of excellence in performing classical and modern “European” music while Europeans have tried, though often in vain, to learn from Chinese mastery in the production of ceramics.

None of that makes cultures identical. No observer, however casual, would mistake a French for an English city or a Chinese for a Japanese one. A visitor from Mars, deposited at a dinner table and confronted by French or Italian wine, or on a high street near a café, would know instantly, without a word being spoken, that the café is in a German town and the dinner table is in an Australian city. People from different nations may wear the same clothes, but they often wear them differently and use different body language and hand movements while speaking. Japanese confront disaster with a stoicism of manner wholly foreign to South Koreans or Chinese. And, naturally, historical memories which are necessarily particular and national, rather than general and trans-national, can persist over generations. 

Against that background, what can one say about the odd concept of “multiculturalism”? Here again, a loose term covers a variety of individual and social attitudes of very different kinds and with different implications.

To begin with, there is “cosmopolitanism”. This is an often attractive habit of mind appertaining to individuals or small, intimate groups. It has to do with a mode of life and thought that can move easily and adaptively between one’s own country and that of some other peoples. It accepts, at least in outlines and general forms, the culture, art, language and forms of social behaviour of some other countries and their societies. (This category obviously does not include people who travel occasionally between home and “the old country”, usually for family reasons.) It is an attitude of mind that is often helpful in understanding other cultures and their relationship to our own. For instance, Malcolm Turnbull, one of the better-known public figures insisting on the virtues and benefits of “multiculturalism” in Australia, is largely right to remind us that to be leery of Islam per se would be absurd. Much of what makes Australia—and, indeed, the European and especially British worlds whose child Australia is—a modern society, from mathematics to medicine, geographic advances or poetry, has come down to us in one form or another through the Islamic societies of the Middle East and beyond.

A second category—which has much less to do with Australia—concerns people living in towns or villages that have for long been a mixture of peoples, religions and habits. Such places proliferated in the old Eastern Europe, the trading ports of China or parts of the old Ottoman empire. One is reminded of the well-known and documented stories of old women from Southern or Eastern European villages who, with their families, travelled to America around the beginning of the last century. At home, the tailor might have been Jewish, the priest Catholic, the butcher German and the policeman Ukrainian. But when they all arrived at Ellis Island the women were told, to their own huge surprise, that they were actually “Hungarians” or “Rumanians” or even “Serbs”.

A very different category has to do with migrants who arrive in a new country with a firm desire to become recognised as full citizens and who, and whose children, try from the start to adapt to the culture, habits and citizenship ideas of the society they have chosen to join—and locals who easily and often helpfully try to help with that adaptation. Much can depend here on the place in which such migrants settle. Migrants from Central or South Asia might, for instance, have greater difficulty in an Australian monocultural and Caucasian small country town than in a major city. Much can also depend on the local schoolchildren and whether they reject or bully the younger migrants or help them to adapt and simply become part of the scenery. Different but no less troublesome can be the situation in the major cities to which many new migrants gravitate. It can be all too easy for new migrants, and uncomfortable for the locals, if the migrants try to remain socially “encased” in their own tribal, national, religious and social groupings, sometimes in special quarters of the city or in particular trades and professions.

There is an indistinct but important line or area separating these considerations from social, religious or national groups claiming special treatment from the state they have joined or even, in some cases, seeking the right to be governed by their own social or religious laws. Such claims must be unambiguously rejected if the national society is to retain cohesion. There might be an occasional and minor exception, for instance with respect to a tribal group that lives a life physically separated from Australian society as a whole, perhaps by desert or water.

Yet a major difficulty does arise with respect to Islam, whose adherents often make the most extensive claims for special and separate treatment. Of the three major monotheistic religions, Jews have for many centuries accepted the limitations created for them by living in Islamic or Christian states. Even then, the special clothing of some Jewish groups, their need for special observances throughout the year—and, not least, their relative commercial and intellectual successes—have created or stimulated outbreaks of hostility in host societies, not least in the horrendous experience of Jews in twentieth-century Germany and the Soviet Union.

Christians in non-Christian states have more rarely experienced serious and systematic harassment. The great Mogul emperor Akbar was comfortable, even welcoming, to strangers from afar, from merchants to ministers of various religions. The greatest merchant and trading cities of medieval China flourished by welcoming sailors, merchants and anyone else from every quarter of Asia and beyond. The Ottoman empire also usually offered peaceful residence to Christian and Jewish people, as long as they did not offend against local political and Islamic rules. The results of less generous policies can be very painful. It can be argued that the Spanish rulers Ferdinand and Isabella did Spain a monumental disservice by driving out the Moors, including the last ruler of Moorish Granada, Mohammed XII. (Not that Mohammed’s tears at having to leave did any good. As his mother tartly observed: “Yes, weep like a woman for a city you could not defend like a man!”) Similarly, medieval France and England, and much more obviously twentieth-century Germany, not only did not gain but suffered severely from the expulsion or, in Germany’s case, killing, of their Jews. Per contra, the growing United States gained hugely from the twentieth-century flows of refugees and expellees, not least those from Europe.

In recent times peaceful, let alone fruitful, coexistence between Christian societies and Islamic groups has again become more difficult. The causes are many but certainly include two. One is the upsurge of stricter religious beliefs within both Islam and a Christianity that has by now become a minority belief in most of the “advanced world”, for all that it is flourishing in Africa, Latin America and China. The other is the greatly improved means of travel and communication produced by modern technology. Both have accentuated the tensions always inherent between a West in which the separation of church and state has become routine, and an Islam that has, often and for long, seen the two as indissolubly linked. Western liberal democracy and Islamic beliefs coexist uneasily in many places. Tensions can be further increased by growing disgust, especially among Islam’s true believers, not only with the West’s secular atheism but with some of the social behaviour and the often lasciviously intrusive “entertainment” all too prevalent in the West and broadcast worldwide by the internet and social media. It would be idle to pretend that basic differences of this sort can be quickly or simply resolved by Western social do-goodery of the usual superficial kind.

Ameliorations, if not solutions, are being sought in various countries. In France, for instance, President Sarkozy has brusquely reasserted French values in prohibiting the open display of religious symbols and introducing legal restrictions on the way in which Islamic women may drape themselves in public, especially in hiding their faces. “We cannot,” Sarkozy has said, “have in our country women who are prisoners behind netting, cut off from all social life, deprived of identity. That is not the idea that the French republic has of women’s dignity.” Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany has said similar things. In Britain, Prime Minister David Cameron has gone further and said that the doctrine of multiculturalism has failed and British Muslims should subscribe to mainstream values of freedom and equality. Some press commentators have argued that the burka and the niqab should be banned in Britain as “a barrier to integration, a statement of hostility to the host country”. In countries like the USA and Australia—so far—the wearing of Islamic or African tribal dress can simply be an insistence on looking and being different, even if the locals don’t like it and even if one is doing a good job in shopkeeping or politics or diplomacy. In diplomacy, perhaps especially, such an assertive demonstration of tribal loyalties may also be meant as a politically useful demonstration of “multiculturalism”. Certainly both American and Australian diplomats have at times labelled themselves in such ways.

Considerations of these kinds impinge, often decisively, on the immigration and refugee policies of modern states. The problems of refugees—individuals or groups seeking “refuge” from difficulties or oppression even in a place where the social and political markers that permit orientation in the world are alien and difficult to decode—are again very ancient and can be distinguished from the occasional mass migrations of entire peoples or tribes. But the shape and scale of the problem, and of national policies to deal with migrating refugees, have changed significantly in recent decades. Before the twentieth century, in Europe and North America, the problem was relatively minor. But then numbers grew, especially with families fleeing the Russian or Chinese revolutions and their aftermaths, or the Fascist revolutions in Italy and Germany or the Spanish Civil War. Few of the recipient countries were prepared to cope with the numbers trying to flee their homes. The stories, for instance, of rich Russian aristocrats after the 1917 revolution becoming taxi drivers in Paris, or those of Jews trying to escape from Nazi Germany and trying desperately to find a country—anywhere—that would grant them a visa are too well known to need rehearsal here.

Matters changed with the end of the Second World War, very roughly in two stages. What had been “refugees” mostly became “expellees” or, more usually “asylum seekers”. In both cases perceptions, among refugees themselves and also among host or recipient countries, changed markedly, perhaps especially after the 1951 UN pronouncements on the status of refugees. For one thing the numbers of people seeking refuge increased greatly as the number of extra-European conflicts and revolutions grew, and the technology of travel improved. For another, the numbers seeking not refuge but rather economic or social advantage grew even more strongly. And third, the ethnic and racial composition and social habits of the new wave of asylum seekers created new difficulties. In particular there were waves of asylum seekers from Asia and Africa, quite often seeking entry to the countries of their former colonial connection, Britain and France; or Latin Americans—for instance Cubans—seeking entry to the USA.

The USA has sharply increased controls on access in recent times, especially by patrols and even walls on its Mexican border. In Britain, France, Italy and elsewhere in the EU, public worries about immigration have risen to the top of electoral priorities. French leaders, and certainly the public, worry that France is now home to at least five million Muslims. In Britain, Prime Minister Cameron has pointed out:

When there have been significant numbers of new people arriving in neighbourhoods, perhaps not able to speak the same language as those living there, on occasions not really wanting or even willing to integrate, that has created a kind of discomfort and disjointedness in some neighbourhoods.

He went on to forecast major reductions in access to migrants from outside the EU. There are said to be whole quarters of some British cities in which English is a foreign language and the community is effectively governed by Islamic customary rules. There is no point in dismissing these kinds of concerns as “merely racist”. At minimum, racists are entitled to vote, too, and democratic governments have to pay attention to their needs—even if the first reaction is to devise policies and wording which deny that the government pays any attention to ethnicity or race. 

Australia has also been affected by these “First World” problems and, given the great sensitivities involved, the policies of successive governments have been designed with some care. Public and media discussion has by and large accepted that migrant access, as distinct from tourists and workers on temporary visas, should be regulated by Australia’s “points system”. The dominant criteria in determining entry to Australia appear to be two: the economic (and perhaps educational) needs of the recipient or host state and the needs of otherwise “disadvantaged” or endangered migrants. Plainly these are unacceptably wide and uncontrollable categories. The point can easily be demonstrated in a somewhat oversimplified way. Let us assume that the following question were put to any Australian city, state, or the country as a whole: “Should Australia accept 500 migrants from country X next year?” (X being any country with a demonstrated emigration flow, such as Nigeria, the Congo, Russia, India, Sri Lanka, Afghanistan). Most Australians would shrug their shoulders. “What about 5000?” There would be much more hesitation. “What about 50,000?” There would likely be serious resistance.

Nevertheless, Australian immigration policies, irrespective of the views of liberal intellectuals and media, seem to revolve mainly around these two major criteria. The first plainly has to do with qualifications related to the economy and the professions: the needs of Australian society and the economy for skills and knowledge that are in short supply (not least because of the much-discussed shortcomings of the Australian state education system). That means a range of skills from technical know-how to high-grade medical specialists. Not incidentally, such a policy also means acquiring for Australia men and women for whose education and training some other country has subsidised. A by-product of such a focus is major reliance on countries whose education and training systems can really provide for such skills, which means mainly the advanced world rather than, say, Africa or the Middle East. The ethnic composition of such an immigrant flow has therefore been, and is likely to continue to be, much more favourable to absorption and assimilation than a flow based on other criteria might be. This approach sidelines and avoids more focused discussion of ethnicity problems that might otherwise prove incendiary and divisive. The result so far appears to be that, of those Australians born overseas, much the highest proportion come from the UK, followed, in order, by New Zealand, India and China.

These considerations are also prominent in debates about asylum seekers, including non-legal migrants such as “boat people”. Many other factors are of course also involved, including the pattern of arrivals through the efforts of “people smugglers”, or the question of whether some “refugee” actually comes from the country where he says he was under threat, as distinct from comfortable residence in an intermediate place awaiting his transport to Australia. There is also the difficulty of deciding about migrants whose background cannot be checked—perhaps because they threw their papers away before landing—and the question of whether any unorthodox arrival does not unfairly disrupt the regular procedures for accepting overseas migrants who are queuing up for admission.

This is not the place for a detailed discussion of immigration policies, but a few other observations may help to illuminate the implied nationality policies. In the first place, the role of gross numbers of migrants from any one source is not by itself decisive. To put the point in another crude and oversimplified way, suppose Australia agreed to accept X Chinese migrants next year, what should the balance be between X who are English-speaking business managers, accountants and doctors from Hong Kong or Taiwan, versus X who are illiterate peasants from one of the backward provinces? Or again, the number of family members of a migrant can be a factor. It is not unknown for the admission of a migrant from certain geographic areas to mean admission to ten or a dozen individuals.

More important is the question of assimilation. There is the highly important matter of the migrant’s knowledge of English, or of access to competent English tuition—with which not every Australian school is well endowed—or even of another European language that would make the learning of English somewhat easier. In any case, ethnicity and appearance continue to have special importance. As the history of Greek and Italian migration to Australia in the period after 1945 amply demonstrates, Caucasian migrants from Europe and its civilisation have an altogether easier time assimilating to new Australian surroundings (and, it should be emphasised, making a helpful and constructive contribution to everything from Australian business and art to cuisine) than would be the case with migrants from Sri Lanka (for all that many of them are Christians) or most of sub-Saharan Africa.

In media and public discussion it has become fashionable to say that Australia has become part of what is lazily called the “Asian region”. It is true that for Australia, as well as many other countries, the economic importance of East, South and South-East Asia has enormously increased over the last couple of decades and this economic dependence might increase further. It is also true that the proportion of Asians in Australia’s immigration flows has greatly increased in the last ten or twenty years and may increase further. But the precise composition of migration flows is a more complicated matter. Many urban elites would do well to remember that the future is not preordained and it seems likely that in general terms, as the former Prime Minister, John Howard, put it—perhaps without great delicacy—it is Australians who will decide who comes here, when, in what numbers and on what terms. 

These issues, moreover, do not stand by themselves. They, and public attitudes about them, are deeply influenced by events in the wider world. Australians often talk as if the only issues beyond Australia’s shores that really matter are economic ones. Indeed, during the federal election of 2010 no major party seems to have talked about anything other than domestic affairs. That is a fundamental error. It leads to an avoidance of serious discussion of Australia’s social, political and even geo-strategic position, the meaning in the twenty-first century of Australia’s historic sense of vulnerability, and a proper balance between Australia’s domestic wishes and preferences and grown-up foreign and defence policies. All of that can have a decisive influence on Australian policies on population growth and migration, not to mention urbanisation, industry and education policies.

It is hardly necessary to rehearse, yet again, the sense of vulnerability that has so deeply influenced Australian life since the nineteenth century; the sense of a tiny population possessing a huge and potentially rich continent, but with populous neighbours of entirely different ethnic and cultural traditions. Neighbours moreover who, like Japan in the 1930s, had very great military and naval potential. Fear remained below the surface as long as Australia was a member in good standing of the British Empire with the relevant oceans under the command of the Royal Navy. For all the tweaks that someone like Billy Hughes occasionally gave to the British lion’s tail, no one questioned that alignment, except a few vocal Irishmen, and most even of them were glad to don uniform when push came to shove in 1914 and again in 1939. No one was much surprised by Prime Minister Menzies’s statement in 1939 that since Britain was at war, Australia was at war. No one either in London or in Australia questioned Stanley Melbourne Bruce’s role in sitting in on pre-1939 British cabinet meetings or Richard Casey’s seamless translation from Australian Minister in Washington to British Minister in the Middle East in 1942. For all of John Curtin’s famous 1942 broadcast reference to reliance on the USA, nothing much changed until well after 1945.

When change did come it came not from within Australia but from outside. It came in two main forms. One was the development of intercontinental missiles and, shortly afterwards, the irruption of communications and other mechanisms, and of human beings, into space. That naturally brought a sea-change to almost everybody’s geo-strategic calculations. The other was a twofold change in the course of the 1960s in the UK. On one side, and especially given Britain’s economic weaknesses, there was a growing desire to get rid of the burdens of empire. On the other side there was the determination of much of the British governing class, headed by Edward Heath who became Prime Minister in 1970, to join the European Economic Community (later the EU). For Australia this second decision, involving among other things an end to assured British markets for critically important Australian wool and food exports, was seen as not far short of a betrayal. Matters were made worse by the Wilson government’s decision in 1967 to remove the British military and naval presence altogether from “East of Suez”, thereby removing all remnants of the British protection on which Australians had relied from the beginning.

The reaction in Australia was a period of confusion. On the one hand the desire for a more “independent” Australia, especially among the young after the creation of a raft of new universities after 1960, gathered steam. But that clashed—amid much public and student anger—with the government’s more hard-headed consolidation of the alliance with the United States, by agreeing to the installation of an American communication and surveillance station in north-west Australia. Soon afterwards, especially during the prime ministership of the silver-tongued but frequently ham-fisted Gough Whitlam, ideas about other alliances—perhaps even with China?—surfaced. Meanwhile, links with Japan and Indonesia that went back to the 1950s were quietly strengthened. And population growth policies, which since 1945 had concentrated on immigrants from Europe, began cautiously to include migrants from further afield.

Altogether, since 1945 and perhaps especially since the 1970s, Australia has successfully extended and diversified its external links and relationships. It has fortunately been able to become a chief supplier of raw materials fuelling China’s remarkable growth as well as Japan’s industries. But there has also been steady progress in strengthening the links with the United States at every level. It is possible to argue that the links at non-governmental levels are even more important than the official ones. That goes far beyond the links in trade, banking and financial services, important though these are. The links in high-level scientific research are intimate. Australia, like everyone else, looks to the USA for innovations in information technology and communications. With the exception of Britain, the US university system is the most important overseas link for Australian academics and universities. The Australian media, almost without exception, draw critically on US productions and methods. Australian television might be lost without American sitcoms and other productions. Australian theatre and music draw constantly on American performances and performers while Australian actors, musicians, directors and supporting specialists more often than not take the USA as their point of reference and look to Los Angeles and New York for validation (as well as money).

Australia has also taken the greatest care for decades to establish and maintain intimate US links in defence and intelligence matters. It has expanded its Second World War role as a steady and reliable ally at America’s side in almost all of America’s wars from Korea through to Afghanistan. These Australian contributions have almost always been notably small, though not entirely without significance. That might change—not because of any particular Australian initiative but because the march of world events may make Australia’s geographic position more important, not only in relation to the Indonesian archipelago and the Straits of Malacca but also in that of the overall balance of forces in the Western Pacific and the Indian Ocean.

The Australian government has dropped hints about a greater American military presence in Australia in the future. But the Americans may well insist that any such deployment is conditional on Australia developing a more grown-up defence policy in place of military and naval forces that often appear to be not much more than pawns in the inter-departmental games of the Canberra bureaucracy and the verbal battles of the domestic media. 

What do all such external issues have to do with immigration and nationalism? Everything.

To begin with, every migrant and settler carries with him or her not just knowledge and skills but social or family connections and experience in some job or business or craft. A Chinese migrant settling in Australia may have, and want to maintain, connections with the village of his birth and, now, his cousins. An Indian migrant may have a nephew high in the administration of his former town or province. A Californian migrant may, because of economic fluctuations, have lost in Silicon Valley a highly skilled job that will make him and his connections highly desirable in Australia. Any immigration program will bring a myriad such connections as well as sometimes problems as the migrant looks for adequate schools for his children. As the migrant settles in and tries to move towards citizenship, his mastery of English may become an issue; especially if, as is sometimes argued, a knowledge of English should be made a precondition for granting citizenship.

Once migrants become citizens, their votes on Australia’s foreign relations, especially in matters affecting their country of origin, will start to count. One migrant may not matter, but some hundreds might change the balance of a constituency, or of several. Other questions might arise. Could, or should, an Australian SAS soldier be asked to go on a mission to North Africa if his parents were migrants from Ethiopia or Somalia? Could, or should, an Australian naval gunner reasonably be asked to open fire on a pirate boat in the Straits of Malacca if his grandmother migrated from Malaysia? Or, for that matter, how comfortably could an Australian army infantry company work next to, or even intermingled with, a company of US marines once the Australian unit included, as Prime Minister Gillard has threatened, a number of female soldiers? Even if that become a normal Australian military arrangement, and irrespective of the views of Australian commanders, would the Americans accept such a thing?

Other questions will arise. There is little doubt that American (and perhaps even British) intelligence activities, operations and especially the associated technologies and mechanisms, are more sophisticated and advanced than those of Australia. Even if, as is said to be the case, most of the American intelligence product is made available to Australian colleagues, and even if Australia’s special knowledge, especially in South-East Asia, is made available to the USA in return, any fuller integration will continue to be a very different business. The question of Australia’s relationships with countries of major migrant origin would inevitably arise. Questions of what levels of Australian security clearing methods would satisfy American requirements would be sure to surface in acute forms. Whether the children or grandchildren of migrants would be acceptable at all as personnel in the most sensitive areas would surely have to be decided on a careful case-by-case basis.

Very similar problems have arisen, and are sure to arise more frequently, on questions of technical and business confidentiality. These, too, can probably not be resolved in broad and general terms but will require case-by-case decisions. Recent events, ranging from widespread intellectual property theft in China, or the WikiLeaks fiasco, or the hacking of celebrities’ tele-phones by the News of the World and its agents, do not suggest that these are minor issues. Nor do they only affect civil affairs. It would hardly be surprising if it turned out that Australian persons or facilities were involved in the covert Israeli and American cyber-war on the Iranian nuclear program or on the business and intelligence affairs of Colonel Gaddafi in Libya; or the defensive campaign being waged by Western powers against Chinese cyber-intrusion.

Nor is the matter of individual or family migration the only cause of potential concern. Migrants also bring their ideologies and religions with them. Mention of one obvious problem here must suffice. All of Australia’s major cities now have Islamic establishments, including mosques and madrassahs, to cater for Islamic visitors or residents of the city. The question of who teaches what in which madrassah, or who preaches what kinds of sermons in which mosque, is bound to be of interest to some branch of the police and security services. As recent history has bloodily shown, it does not take many Mohammed Attas (one of the leaders of the 9/11 attacks in New York) to cause massive casualties.

So even if discussion of population issues has to start with ethnicity and culture and migration, the implications go far beyond cultural and educational matters and into almost all the major capillaries of what it means to be Australian in an “Australian nation”. But perhaps the matter goes deeper still. Perhaps we are seeing a historic shift, not only in Australia, away from the notion of a culturally and ethnically united collectivity of the kind that General Kellermann perceived in 1792, or that so strongly fuelled the war efforts of Japan, Germany and the Soviet Union in the twentieth century. Perhaps the construction of such a united and powerful entity was always going to be a merely temporary historical phenomenon, due to be followed by much more diverse arrangements, held together less by a sense of nationalism than by a strong central bureaucratic structure much more reminiscent of the successful empires of earlier periods. But that is another subject for another day.

Harry Gelber is Emeritus Professor of Political Science and honorary research associate in the School of Government, University of Tasmania. His most recent book is The Dragon and the Foreign Devils (Bloomsbury). He gratefully acknowledges the help of Professor Peter Boyce, Mrs Christine Green and Dr Matthew Killingsworth for their comments on an earlier draft of this paper.