This post is interesting since it spells out why a former social democratic became a social and political conservative. The historian John Hirst gives a number of reasons for this shift, one of which is a recoil from multiculturalism. This confirms one of my arguments that Australian conservatism is structured around the old governance policy of assimilation. What we have is a shift from liberalism to conservatism---or so I will argue.
Hirst says:
"I was a critic of multiculturalism. Not because I was an opponent of immigration. I was opposed to multiculturalism when, as was often the case, it was presented as a program for the total reshaping of Australian society. Australia was to be remade by the contributions from all its ethnic groups. Old Australians were recast as one ethnic group among many, though the most despised and suspect, and they were certainly denied the status of the host culture."
John Hirst is doing more than preserving his cultural identity as a member of the host culture; just looking after his own kind in the face of cultural change from the flows of immigration that undermines their sense of place and home. It is more than a sense that their Australia is going in a globalised world. Hirst wants to defend Anglo-Australian culture as the host or hegemonic culture of the Australian nation state. John Hirst actually dislikes, or is hostile to, the substance of a strong multiculturalism as opposed to a life-style or salad bowl multiculturalism. The substance is the idea of cultural diversity, transforming Australia's legal and political structures around citizenship and seriously questioning the ethnic nationalism of Anglo-Australia.
But why the recoil from a substantive multiculturalism? Was it because the liberal state turned its back on core liberal values that made a continent a nation? Was it because multicultural, represented a big threat? Hirst is clear that there was no threat to his Anglo-Australia.
"Thankfully, the official statements on multiculturalism were free of this insult and danger [to old Australia]. They declared that there were core values, institutions and practices: the English language, the rule of law, parliamentary democracy, equality of men and women."
For the liberal state multiculturalism posed no threat to the national culture of the liberal state. Australia may be a nation of immigrants, but it had Anglo-culture, liberal institutions and practices. What happened with multiculturalism is this liberalism was civilized. There is a great post on the civilizing influence of multiculturalism on a difference-blind Australian liberalism by Tim Dunlop.
Civilizing here means awakening liberalism to its blindness to cultural difference. The uniform legal framework of equality before the law was blind to the exclusion of the indigenous peoples to citizenship; then blind to the way it homogenized difference, blind to the way that it gave support to, or maintained, a traditional Anglo-Australian culture whilst treating other cultures with contempt and disrespect. Civilizing means that minority cultures should be recognized and protected because the particular commitments and attachments are important for human wellbeing and development.
If Hirst acknowledges that multiculturalism posed no threat to the national culture of the liberal state, then why the recoil from multiculturalism? Why embrace conservatism? Why leave liberalism? It's a bit of a puzzle since a lot of the ethos of multiculturalism amounts to little more than being a fair go for different migrant cultures. So why the recoil?
Hirst is quite clear on why he recoiled from multiculturalism. Politics is the reason since the practices of multiculturalism represent a challenge to assimilation. Hirst writes:
"But such was the set against integration, let alone assimilation, that migrants were regularly told they could belong to Australia and maintain their own culture - even though there was much in the culture of migrants that was at odds with core practices and institutions."
There you have it. Hirst recoiled because in embracing Australia as a multicultural nation the liberal state struck at the heart of integration or assimilation. Assimilation is the touchstone of the paleoconservatism of old Anglo-Australia.
Those core practices and institutions are the heart of conservative Anglo Australia, the core of its national identity. Conservatives say that these core practices and values are seen to be the heart of the nation. They were forged at federation and are the soul of national sentiment that brought about the statecraft that produced the new Commonwealth in 1901. Old Australia forged the nation, and federation that gave birth to the liberal nationalist project of progress and harmony that would bind the divisions of the nation.
I take it that Hirst sees the radicals, the left, the multiculturalists as denigrating the nation. They highlight its seamy side, its exclusive character (eg., the exclusion of indigenous people) and racist foundations of White Australia that embodied racial purity as a national ideal. So the radicals want to tear assimilation out of the heart of the nation and replace it with the ideal of diversity. In doing so they undermine the harmony and cohesion of Anglo-Australian nationality and national cohesion.
In his defence of multiculturalism as civilizing Australian liberalism Tim Dunlop challenges this reading. He says that the practices of assimilation are different from a liberal multicultural Australia and that the core liberal values are tolerance, respect and recognition. The "left" are actually defending the core values of liberalism, whilst John Hirst has left liberalism and shifted to conservatism.
Hirst's conservatism demands that immigrants and their descendents assimilate to the core values of Anglo-Australia. Assimilate here means more than aculturation; it is to be absorbed or incorporated into the values and practices of the dominant political and social group. The migrant groups could not belong to Australia and maintain their own culture. This is more than some practices in the culture of migrants being at odds with core practices and institutions. It is a merging of cultural identity so that the migrants have the same cultural identity as Anglo-Australia, and they acquire the cultural practices belonging to the tradition of old Anglo-Australia.
Tim is right to seperate liberalism from assimilation as a mode of governance. There is a slide from the core values of old Anglo-Australia to the core values of the liberal state and nation. It is a slide because liberalism is based on a common framework of equal rights and opportunites to citizens in a liberal state. This does not require any commitment to assimilation. Liberals allow individual citizens in a liberal democratic state to observe different customs, emphasize different values, spend their leisure time differently and cluster in communal affinities and cultural life. If liberalism tolerates difference, then the only assimilation that liberals should countenance is the legal framework of just institutions that enables free choices.
Hence in requiring migrants to shed their cultural identity and assimilate to the culture of old Anglo-Australia John Hisrt has embraced conservatism. Conservatism deliberately seek to ensure that this assimilation happens and it does so in the name of established political authority. That authority should not be weakened. Multiculturalism threatens to do so and so it must be contained. Secondly, the inherited standards,values and social position of Anglo-Australia ought to be protected because they play a major part in public affairs run by a governing elite.
Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at July 7, 2003 01:47 PM | TrackBack