The Long Search for Australian Identity

 In Australian discussions of current affairs one can often detect an element of doubt that strikes outsiders as odd. It is a vague but powerful amalgam of three overlapping questions: “Who, actually, are we?”; “Where in the world do we belong?” and “By what right do so few of us own this large continent?” It seems curious that this should surface in so many forms and in relation to so wide a spectrum of domestic and foreign relations, from Aboriginal policies at home to refugee issues to the politics of foreign alliance.

Not all these questions, or the fears they reflect, are new. From the time of first British settlement until after the First World War they did not really arise, as Australians saw themselves comfortably as part of a worldwide British family, their security guaranteed by Britain in general and the Royal Navy in particular. No doubt some of that was based on the fact that the British empire enjoyed something like global dominance. In any event, that Australia should become anything very different seemed inconceivable (except, perhaps to some Irish Catholics). Yet as early as 1905 the First Lord of the Admiralty in London remarked that if, for any reason, the Royal Navy should in future lose its supremacy in Asian and Pacific waters, the Australians would have no alternative but to turn to their American cousins. His name was Winston Churchill. Three years later, when the American “Great White Fleet” toured the Pacific, it was welcomed in Australia with universal enthusiasm.

Much of that persisted until long after 1945. In the 1920s and 1930s the Australian representative in London could claim a seat at British cabinet meetings. In 1939 Prime Minister Robert Menzies broadcast that “Great Britain has declared war … as a result, Australia is also at war.” Two years later the Australian Minister to Washington, Richard Casey, was by unanimous agreement of President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill appointed British Minister in the Middle East. As late as the 1960s the late Tom Millar recorded, “I recall being with two fellow officers of the Australian component of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force in Japan in 1946 when we were asked by an American: ‘Why don’t you break away from the British?’ We replied in chorus: ‘But we are British.’” In the 1960s many Australians still automatically referred to England as “home”.

There is no doubt, though, that the Second World War shattered many of the old certainties. In 1942 the Royal Navy was helpless to prevent the fall of Singapore and the Dutch East Indies to Japan or the consequent threat to Australia. In the same year it was the US Navy that defeated the Japanese, in the Coral Sea and at Midway, in the process securing Australia and its approaches. Under General MacArthur’s command, US forces used Australia as a major base for the subsequent US advance to the Philippines and towards Japan.

It was not just the war and the new American ascendancy that saw the role of Britain and “Britishness” in Australia sharply decline. The entire three decades or more of British history, starting with the fall of Singapore in 1942, were a story of rapid economic, political and imperial decline and, with it, of Britain’s diminishing relevance to the economy and major political interests of Australia. From the Singapore collapse to the British withdrawal from “east of Suez” in 1967 the loss of a British capacity to influence, let alone defend, Australian interests was all too obvious. So was Britain’s growing anxiety to join the European “Common Market”. To be sure, many important ties remained: in finance, trade, the theatre, the arts, in education and sport. But the relevance of “Britishness” shrank quickly, the more so given the postwar policy of immigration from non-British sources. Practical Australian interests, whether in trade or strategy, shifted progressively away from Europe and the Atlantic world; though winning a Test cricket series against England became, if anything, more satisfying than ever.

The decline of “Britishness” in Australia’s politics and consciousness came at many levels. The sixty years or so since 1945 have seen not just a tripling or more of Australia’s population to some 22 million, but at the time of writing there is lively discussion about a prospective population increase to anything from 30 to 40 million. It has meant the growth, as a percentage of the population, of numbers from racial, ethnic and cultural groups very different from the people of the British Isles who had created modern Australia in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This rate of growth inevitably brought huge increases to Australia’s major cities, promoted the growth of new industries and, with them, new economic and political interests.

The war also raised, or revived, many much older fears. One was the partly sub-conscious fear that had haunted Australians from the beginning: small Australia’s fear of “Asian hordes”. Together with that came ethnic and racial worries encapsulated in the old White Australia policy. Together they helped to produce the immediate postwar mantra of “Populate or perish”. That led to an explosion of immigration, not only from Britain but, at first, mainly from Italy and Greece. But in spite of the tripling of the country’s population by the end of the century, much of the sense of overhang remained as population numbers in Indonesia, India, Vietnam and, above all, China tripled too.

In domestic politics, the changes were also substantial. By the later 1960s the long Liberal ascendancy of Robert Menzies and his immediate successors was clearly drawing towards a close. A new generation of students began to emerge from the raft of new universities Australia created during the 1960s and went on creating for some time longer. Few of these students were interested in foreign relations. Instead, most of them were deeply concerned with Australian politics and reforms at home. Indeed, at one point in 1970 the three Victorian universities, Melbourne, Monash and La Trobe, had between them seven Professors of Politics or Government. All seven professed to be specialists in Australian Politics. Even more startling was the impression (no statistical assessment seems to exist) that for a time, in the early 1970s, very large percentages of the best masters and doctoral candidates in History and Politics appeared to be solely interested in studying topics in Australian Politics, leaving classical disciplines like Political Philosophy or Institutions or Diplomatic History neglected.

At popular and political levels this inward-looking trend largely continued. The Vietnam War, and Australia’s role in it, caused fierce controversy and stimulated anti-American opinion. So did the establishment of Joint US-Australian intelligence facilities in Australia’s north-west. But the bulk of the population remained content with the insularity of Australian political life and attitudes. As late as the 2010 federal election it was striking that no party so much as mentioned any concerns or issues beyond the country’s shores. Insofar as the outside world mattered, the country took it as read that almost the only issue, one that virtually constituted foreign policy, was trade. Here, the figures were instructive. By 2010 Australia’s three biggest two-way trading partners were China (13.2 per cent of Australia’s trade), Japan (12.3 per cent) and the USA (10.3 per cent).

Even so, after 1945 the Cold War almost immediately transformed the content and direction of Australia’s foreign political, trading and other economic links. It is not surprising that in such an environment of doubts and questioning there should have been, at least for a brief period, a number of suggestions—of greatly varying plausibility—about where Australia might find a new “home”. Some people even thought about the possibility of a “renversement des alliances” by abandoning the USA and Europe and allying Australia with China. Others again mentioned, more vaguely and only slightly more plausibly, a kind of membership of and dependence on “Asia” or a never clearly specified Asian community. 

Governments, foreign policy professionals and serious observers naturally took a very different view. Australia had to come to terms with sweeping changes in the entire strategic geography of the world. Both short and long-term strategic interests required one or more close and reliable friendships with powerful partners, and all Australian governments after 1945 built steadily on the friendship with the United States that the war had created and nourished. The wartime intelligence arrangements were continued and elaborated. The relationship was formally underpinned in 1951 by the ANZUS treaty and extended during the six decades that followed, by Australian-US co-operation in wars from Korea to Afghanistan, by diplomatic complementarity, by strong two-way investment, but also by a host of other common interests, from popular travel to the conclusion of a Free Trade Agreement in 2005. By then, what seemed to be emerging was nothing less than a fairly stable three-country block of the USA, Australia and New Zealand.

Before the end of this period the notion of “Britishness” had been virtually replaced by another idea, one much more appropriate for the new conditions: multiculturalism. Here was a notion evidently in accord with the flow of history. It would, for instance, parallel the Civil Rights movement in the USA and similar trends in Britain and parts of Europe. It had a number of practical advantages, too. It would help rapid population increase. It would greatly widen the pool of potential immigrants, especially ones with needed skills. It would therefore increase and improve the available workforce. It would widen the range of people, tastes and preferences in the general population, making Australia perhaps a livelier place. It would fit in with the new “globalisation” of economics and information and increase trade (even with those regions of the globe that enthusiastically practised their own ethnic separatisms). Much more importantly, the increase in Asian and African immigrants would distance Australia from an old White Australia policy likely to offend states and peoples in the Third World. By 1967 Australia started to abandon that policy as likely to attract hostility, especially around Asia. At the same time, emphasis on immigrants with the most desirable skills and knowledge turned out in very many cases anyway to mean people from the English-speaking world. It is said that Julia Gillard once described her parents as the “right” sort of immigrant.

The effect of these foreign and domestic pressures was that, on the one hand, Australia remained a solid member of the Anglosphere and its formal and informal connections. The senior policy-making classes, whether in politics or business, continued to be recruited, with few exceptions, from people of Anglo-Saxon heritage. But, on the other hand, the new and vocal dedication to “multiculturalism” and loud hostility to any kind of “Europeanism” quickly became a staple of Australia’s new ethnic sensibilities. They also, and conveniently, dovetailed with deep-seated Australian views about “equality”—of both opportunity and outcome—and were quickly elevated to the level of moral principle, to the point where even discussion of ethnic, racial and cultural differences, however carefully phrased, was liable to attract the label of “racist” and social ostracism.

However, multiculturalism, while providing an acceptably liberal moral posture, created various problems for private and public policies. There were three in particular.

First, what should be the proper balance between managed migration, based on the skills and aptitudes of migrants, and the country’s attitudes, on the grounds of human kindness, to the ever-growing streams of refugees around the world?

Second, what should be the balance between assimilation of new arrivals and freedom for them to nurture their own culture and habits? How does one manage the dictum of that poet, lifelong Francophile and founding President of Senegal, the great Leopold Senghor, who urged his people to “assimilate, not to be assimilated”? After all, people come to Australia for any number of reasons. Many but not all want to settle and become Australian citizens. Even some who do might change their minds and go “home” later. Others, even after becoming citizens, have a mobile or international lifestyle or profession that can make nationality a secondary matter. Others again might develop an Australian hyper-patriotism and come to oppose later streams of immigration.

There was a third problem that did not make its appearance for two or three decades. It stemmed from the fact that immigrants tended to congregate in or close to the major cities, especially Sydney and Melbourne. But among these immigrant groups, perhaps especially among non-English-speaking ones, the patterns of social expectations and political opinions turned out to be rather different from those of older Australians, as well as from each other. At the latest by the turn of the century those differences led political opinions and voting into directions measurably different from those in the rest of the country. We shall return to this point later.

All that came together with other, more subtle and perhaps more profound questions. Almost everywhere in the “advanced world”, and in the half-century after the Second World War, there were new and more urgent questions about the form, role and composition of that central political construct: “the state”. Almost everywhere, these decades saw an unprecedented growth in the role and power of the state vis-à-vis its citizens and in its intrusiveness into the smallest capillaries of society. That came together—whether as cause or effect—with the individualisation or fragmentation of large segments of society. That had many causes. One was the increasing variety of location of workplaces, especially for white-collar groups. Another was the replacement of older patterns of a single breadwinner per family by economic and taxation pressures for both parents to enter the workforce, which also tended to break up established family patterns. What emerged were more varied arrangements of partly or wholly separated or single-parent families, often depending on the state, whether for money or for child-caring. Together with the more varied careers and locations of work they also strongly contributed to the breakup of the old extended family.

To cope with this kind of, now inevitable, heterogeneity, Australia developed a growing and increasingly complicated system of laws, regulations and official social norms to ensure that, irrespective of sex, religion and so on, people would be treated appropriately and, in a general sense, equally. But life is not confined, or even always subject, to official regulations. If your parents came to Australia from Scotland or Sri Lanka you do not cease to be a Scot or a Sri Lankan simply because you went to an Australian school and some government official gave you a document called an Australian passport. What was always likely to matter much more was that the Scottish child was the heir or heiress, knowingly or not, of a European civilisation stretching from Socrates via Christianity and the Cinquecento to the Scottish Enlightenment, the French Revolution, Beethoven, Wagner and Picasso to the European Union, while the Sri Lankan was apt to have entirely different and largely incompatible religious ideas, assumptions, historical memories and, not least, languages imbibed at his or her mother’s knee long before the start of formal education. Given the deeply rooted assumptions, preferences and habits of established Australian society—not to mention the impact of Australian schooling on immigrant children—the balance was bound to tilt towards assimilation. And that was a process which the Scottish migrant was very likely to find easier and more comfortable than the Sri Lankan.

The historical record strongly suggests that those countries and empires where multicultural living had, for whatever reasons, long since become an unremarkable daily fact have been altogether more successful, most of the time, than those in which multicultural association has been a matter of political focus and debate. Media rhetoric about “celebrating differences” tends to disguise reality. If the differences are expressed by something as innocuous as a folk-dance or cuisine, they may be interesting or quaint but in any case harmless and without significant social or political consequence. But once they become a focus of political dispute and competing claims for money or status or land, they can become a source of friction and even hatred (as has clearly happened in the case of the Aborigines).

Official attempts to impose mutual good will, for instance by banning speech that might be thought offensive, are a sure way to stifle mutual accommodation, since the feelings so repressed will merely find expression in other and more subterranean ways. For example, the idea that only Jews are allowed to make jokes about Jews and only the Irish are allowed to mock the Irish, while no one is allowed to make jokes about Africans or Arabs, is plainly counter-productive. Strong official encouragement and top-down promotion of “multiculturalism” is quite unlikely to lead to genuine peace and harmony; and once mutual dislike between groups has reached a certain pitch, some social separation may turn out to be the only reasonably peaceful solution.

In the meantime it is pointless to try and wish away the profound differences among societies in culture and outlook. One may live in Japan for thirty years but will not thereby become Japanese. The Chinese Han certainly do not think they are at all the same as Tibetans, Uighurs or Manchus (or even as people in the next province). In Iraq and Turkey the Kurds continue to fight for independent statehood. So do the Pushtuns in Pakistan and Afghanistan. The point can be replicated all over Africa, Latin America and most of Asia, not to mention Europe. The weight accorded to ethnicity varies greatly between countries and, with that, the nature and subtleties of allegiance to state and government. From the point of view of social and state cohesion, the statement of Tariq Ramadan, an Oxford scholar who describes himself as “Swiss by nationality, Egyptian by memory, Muslim by religion, European by culture, universalistic by principle, Moroccan and Mauritanian by adoption” is wholly unhelpful. Differences between socio-economic groups and networks within existing states may also be hugely important.

The fact that Tariq Ramadan is the Swiss-born grandson of Hassan al-Banna, a founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, may not matter. But that he is a prominent academic is significant. Elites, including journalists and academics, almost never appreciate how eccentric (“off centre” in the original meaning of the word) their community is within society at large. They are constantly surprised by the evidence of their distance from general and mainstream public opinion. But the point goes far beyond such networks and is greatly strengthened by evident, and possibly growing, fragmentation of post-industrial societies and polities. It has to do with the decline of party or class or even wealth or profession as a guide or measure of political allegiance. Instead, political opinions and allegiances tend to vary much more between smaller and more separate social-professional networks, not only regional ones but those of doctors or lawyers, tradesmen or small business owners, actors or retirees, and certainly of immigrants, especially ones with separate racial and cultural origins and language. It is within such social groupings that opinions tend to develop and, most importantly, can become accepted as representing the views of the general “thinking” public. That alone is apt to make political differences more acerbic and uncompromising.

Such problems bear, perhaps critically, on the relationship between the state and “the people” it exists to govern and protect. It is hardly open to dispute that the modern, post-French Revolution state has almost everywhere been built, and maintained, on the basis that it encompasses and protects the “nation”. The national idea, as a large literature on the subject testifies, has many roots and almost innumerable subtleties and variants. But central among them has almost everywhere been a sense of racial, ethnic and often religious cohesion, the power of clan, of custom and tried affections, of kin patronage networks and the possession of a particular piece of land. These are ties from which modern Western societies often believe themselves to have been emancipated. They are usually quite wrong. Nationality therefore describes a quasi-tribal sense of cohesion and belonging that is a prerequisite for the creation of an acceptable state and its government, especially if that government is to have “democratic” forms (whatever that ambiguous term is taken to mean).

Ideas about “the nation” and “national identity”, however controversial, have undeniably been hugely powerful. Men have fought and died for these notions over the centuries. In Shakespeare’s Henry V the English army’s English, Welsh, Irish and Scots captains insist on their separate nationalities; and for their king “countryman” is a term of fellowship. As late as the Second World War large numbers of Irishmen fought in, and often commanded, armies that were almost everywhere casually referred to as “the English”. At the beginning of the French Revolution General François Christophe Kellerman saved the battle of Valmy against the Prussians by raising the cry “Vive la Nation!”; and Germany’s greatest poet and thinker, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who watched the battle, presciently told his colleagues “here begins a new era in world history”. Nor was this merely a European phenomenon. When the Taiping rebellion broke out in China in 1850, it was particularly directed against the foreign Manchus who were ruling the empire. One could go on.

The trouble is that nationalism is, almost everywhere, Janus-faced. In one case it can be a critically important part of the glue that holds a society together and establishes its claim to wider recognition as a separate community entitled to form its own state. But by the same token, its cohesion and existence can be challenged by minority groups, using the same criteria but anxious to establish themselves as separate entities in the eyes of the world. So it can be the driver of unity and cohesion, especially if the state is under some external threat. Or it can be the basis of a claim for independence, as in the case of Catalonia in Spain or Xinjiang in China or Chechnya in Russia.

In any event, national feelings and networks remain a fact of life, and their strength or weakness tends to drive the relationship between the citizen and the state. But it is hardly open to dispute that in the contemporary world, in Australia as elsewhere, the underlying principles have been seriously challenged by various kinds of trans-border travel and settlement. For instance, at the time of writing there are some 16 million Muslims living in the European Union, including three million Turks in Germany, an even larger number of North Africans in France and several hundreds of thousands in Britain. In major areas in several large cities people live in the accustomed styles of their old Indian, Pakistani or Bangladeshi regions, children are educated accordingly and the relationship with the surrounding regions, and especially the British or French state, tends to an uncomfortable extent to be merely a formal and legal one. In such cases, the notion that the processes of immigration will in time dissolve nationalism and tribalism, not to mention the anthropological illiteracy of the general population, can be merely wishful thinking. The point is, of course, not confined to Muslims or Hindus. It would apply equally to other strangers, whether Congolese or Chinese if they settled in large clusters. Or, for that matter, to the British in their cantonments in the old India.

But then, in the absence of a strong and shared sense of cohesion, based on the reality of a nation with its own faith, unspoken assumptions and language, and rooted in some particular place, what happens to the state? What seems to happen, among other things, is that what was an organic, even instinctive relationship tends to become supplemented, if not replaced, by a relationship altogether less profound and emotional. Laws are no longer obeyed because they are the legitimately devised laws of “our” community. This is a vastly important point, going far beyond the reach of Western or Christian civilisation. “Consensus” is, after all, one of the four canonical roots of Islam. Instead, laws are obeyed merely because they are called “laws” or “regulations” and failure to obey them might be punished. Custom is replaced by legal and regulatory texts. Not just one text, either, or a dozen, but a multitude of confusing and often contradictory texts which give to an increasingly impersonal officialdom a wide choice as to which line of what regulation is to be interpreted, in what way, in any particular instance. Especially given that officialdom is apt to be dismissive of people who are, all too obviously, not “one of us”. Even President Obama has spoken, in an unguarded moment, of “little people” and their “antipathy towards people who aren’t like them”.

That implies a subtle but important change in the relationship of state and citizen. The person who came to Australia from, say, Iraq two years ago may now be, in legal terms, a citizen with exactly the same rights and expectations as someone whose parents left Europe in the aftermath of the Second World War or a man whose great-great-grandparents created a New South Wales property in the nineteenth century that his family have farmed ever since. But what about non-legal ties and commonalities, especially for groups rather than just individuals? Have they ceased to matter? Can it be seriously argued that instinctive patriotism or, even more, a sense of patriotic duty, is likely to be found equally in persons of such different backgrounds? And what about the differences within and between migrant groups themselves? Do such considerations create pressures going far beyond the physical problems—housing, transport and the like—that come with immigration? Of course, such pressures, and the associated social changes, might be no bad thing for the promotion of economic growth in GDP terms, let alone for social engineering or the pursuit of egalitarian ideals. But they can contribute to a fairly radical change in the nature and practice of democracy since legal and even civic “equality” is unlikely to be enough to cement a community.

If Australia is indeed becoming a “Patchwork Nation”, what does or should hold it together beyond general talk about “values” or a “way of life”? Nor is that all. There have been growing demands that the membership of a parliament should, instead of merely representing territorial segments of society, mirror the composition, including the ethnic or gender “minorities”, of the population—not because gender or ethnicity has any particular connection with parliamentary or administrative competence, but because “justice” requires equality of representation. Might such ideas come to change the forms of representation in parliament? And, if so, might large clusters of migrants play a role in such reforms?

Obviously, the nature and scale of any change will be critically affected by the numbers involved. For Australia, the consequences of having one or two families from a non-English-speaking, non-Christian and non-European background settling into an average Australian environment are likely to be very different from those of having a substantial group of such migrants settling in a context they will find very odd, and whose outlook, customs and preferences may be very distant from their own. In the first case the families will, on average, find themselves on the road to integration, even assimilation, within a generation or, at most, two. In the second case the outcome may well be the development of a group ghetto. The sometimes unfortunate consequences of such developments have become apparent in many places, including France and the UK.

In Australia now, unlike the days of the 1950s, absorption can be made even more difficult by the creation of a welfare state. As the economist Henry Ergas has written: “nothing saps integration more than the welfare state, which can make it optional for migrants to find their way in the local society and labour market”. In any case, it is not obvious just what numbers of immigrants from any one ethnic or religious group might be acceptable for any one Australian township or suburb if the evolution of a ghetto is to be avoided. Nor is there only the question how such a ghetto might fit into the larger Australian community but how its presence—and any subsequent frictions—might affect Australian relations with the “home country” of the groups involved. In recent years India and Malaysia are only two of several countries that have expressed a supervisory interest in the fate of their citizens who are living, working or studying in Australia.

Amid these conundrums, migration policies have been reasonably cautious and pragmatic. They have recognised, in practice, Professor Judith Sloan’s point that “there are limits to a country’s annual capacity to absorb new migrants without undue adjustment pressures”; and, she might have added, without unduly alarming public opinion. Accordingly, immigration policies continue to give preference to utility: skills useful to Australian social and economic needs, with the unsurprising result that quite a lot of incoming migrants turn out to be members of the Anglosphere and all of them have had their trade training or post-secondary education elsewhere, at other countries’ expense. Even so, there is a limit on numbers which tends to allow for recurrent popular worries as well as practical feasibilities.

Moreover, the ethnic and political phenomena so briefly mentioned here are most unequally distributed within the Australian population at large. Until the Second World War the population of one part of Australia was not easy to distinguish from that of another. Economic development, migration and the problems of race and ethnicity have changed all that. New arrivals, and the advantages or problems associated with them, not to mention their voting patterns, are heavily concentrated in Australia’s few major cities. Discussion and debate about such developments are even more heavily concentrated in the media and intellectual elites in these centres—which adds a further element of division and dispute to the new Australia. No wonder the issue of “identity” preoccupies many who remember the “old days”.

These subtleties and complications cannot be briefly summarised, but a few concluding remarks may be in order. A relatively high rate of immigration will surely continue, for unavowed strategic reasons, as well as for avowed ones of staffing Australia’s expanding industries—and, perhaps most important, creating and staffing new ones in the interests of moving Australia away from undue dependence on raw materials and energy exports. Since past rates of growth have brought huge increases to Australia’s major cities, and changes in their population profiles, the days when different regions and towns of Australia were much alike are presumably gone for good. The social differences as well as differences of outlook between the major cities and the rural areas have increased, are increasing and ought perhaps to be diminished: a process which the internet and better transport might help to promote.

At the same time, signs of serious unease about the volume of immigration from non-European sources—and especially arrivals in non-authorised ways—have begun to appear. Some echo similar worries from earlier periods, for instance about Chinese in the nineteenth century. Impatience has also grown with the postmodern academic game of pretending that all cultures are equal and that the eye of the observer is the only true basis for value judgments. That is not to deny that immigration has been valuable. For instance, people of Indian or Chinese extraction seem sure to become even more prominent, especially in business, IT and medical areas (though some criminal gangs in Melbourne and Sydney will also continue to define themselves by ethnicity). But the country is likely to resist the formation of major ethnic ghettos and even more so any attempt to absorb the rules of other cultures into Australian law.

The days of an organic and instinctive sense of cohesion may have gone for good, especially in the major cities, to be replaced by something much more impersonal and mechanical. Social fragmentation will extend to socio-economic groupuscules of unpredictable shapes and sizes. Meanwhile governments at all levels, presenting themselves as “servants” and “enablers” of the citizenry, are sure to continue to try and expand their powers of detailed control, management and the shaping of society, just as the Commonwealth government will continue to try to undermine the powers and functions of the states. Yet governments will also have increasing difficulty in managing the increasingly self-willed bureaucracies required to manage the subtleties of a modern “patchwork nation” in the established Australian context. As the state and its bureaucracies continue to grow, they will also expand their own political constituency in the growing number of people who find their income, security, status and power in working for, or depending on, “the public sector”. Whether, in such a context, the creation or revival of a flourishing “civil society” can be hoped for and whether, if so, that might encourage amity or hostility between different ethnic micro-groups, is a matter of guesswork.

As the economy and the population of Australia have diversified, so has the network of the country’s foreign relations. That applies not just to formal diplomatic activities but also to the work of non-governmental groups, many of them formally or informally allied with government agencies. Foreign affairs will continue to be conducted at several levels: a leading Australian role in the south-west Pacific, good relations with archipelagic South-East Asia and so on. But the relationship with the United States is likely to go on conditioning Australia’s outlook and practices on much else, including the hugely important matter of peace and security in North-East Asia.

Of course, the state, national or otherwise, is not the only imaginable form of political organisation. Yet the revival or creation of major territorial empires seems unlikely. So are the claims to power by global business, media and celebrity elites. There is also a detectable yearning for some kind of global entity that would override states and contain and adjust frictions between them. That is also much encouraged by the media; a number of Australian undergraduates seem to believe that the United Nations is actually a world government. Yet such yearnings, quite apart from their lack of specificity, are almost everywhere those of a small, if often vocal and earnest minority. Which explains, among other things, the obvious fragility of so many international legal constructs.

But it is hard to believe that, as far ahead as anyone can reasonably look, the UN and other non-governmental instrumentalities will be more than instruments to be used, when needed, by the executives of sovereign states.

Harry Gelber is Emeritus Professor of Political Science and honorary Research Associate in the School of Government, University of Tasmania. He has been Visiting Professor at Harvard, Yale, Boston University and the London School of Economics, and his most recent book is The Dragon and the Foreign Devils (Bloomsbury).