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August 27, 2005
Heinrich Hinze, Caught in the Middle
As part of his ongoing attempt to broaden his appeal to the Australian electorate in his eternal quest to become a future Prime Minister of Australia Peter Costello, the current federal Treasurer of Australia, made this this speech to the Australian American Leadership Dialogue Forum. It is part of a series of speeches tht have received a great deal of respectful airplay.
In this speech he asked: 'What are the sources of anti-American feeling in Australia?' Costello argued that one source of anti-Americanism could be traced to traditional leftism, which Costello said, had changed into anti-globalization. He says that the sentiment of anti-Americanism:
"... hasn't entirely disappeared---the Left in Australian politics is still there but has morphed itself into other names. One of the names you will find it takes today is "anti-globalisation". After all if the world is being subjected to exploitative economic forces where do you think those forces would be based and who do you think would be directing them? You guessed it--- the home of evil. Opponents of globalisation locate evil in the same place that their ideological soulmates from the days of the Cold War did. Left wing politics and its more recent variant---anti-globalisation--- operates in a fever of anti-Americanism.
This is a strange view given that economic globalization is commonly seen to be the view that nation states will virtually disappear under the imperatives of global companies and global institutions such as the World Trade Organization, with a self-organizing global market governing the world. That 1990's fundamentalist liberal utopian view is in tatters as nation-states assert their power to defend their borders and national security. And it is the cultural conservatives + market liberals, such as Treasurer Costello, who have led this charge.
They have done so in the name of the national security state that has undermined individual rights and freedoms, including protections from arbitrary arrest, through ongoing legislation and regulation, such as 2002 Terrorism and Australian Security Intelligence Organization Bill. Tougher legislation has been promised and the search for the enemy within intensifies.
The reassertion of an assimilationalist form of nationalism is associated with the national security state riding roughshod over individual liberty to counter the threat of Jihadist terrorism to a liberal polity.
This identifies itself with Australian values and specifically targets multiculturalism as a divisive diversity that breeds a radical fundamentalism that is at odds with the core values of Australia. The assumptions made are:
---that nations consist of homogenous, self–contained, and largely self–reproducing population groups. After all, what is a nation if it is not born of the like–spirited and like–bodied?
---that nationalism of all kinds is predicated on a monocultural understanding of the nation.
Hence we the conservative response to cultural clash or national crisis as one that highlights patriotism, unity, cohesiveness. Hence all the recent talk about Australian values that deny difference and heterogeneity.
Yet Australia is a multicultural society and there is no turning back from this history of immigration. Does the talk about the limits of multiculturalism (ie stopping imigration of asylum seekers from the Middle East mean a re-thinking multiculturalism?
Multiculturalism places an emphasis on cultural diversity, on a plurality (even relativism) of values at the expense of ideas of national cohesion and unified norms, and puts an "ethnic and identity politics" on the political agenda.
In 'Reframing multiculturalism' in New Matilda Laksiri Jayasuriya says that this is an earlier model of culturalist multiculturalism, which was framed within notions of 'cultural pluralism' following mass migration in the post World War II period. Laksiri sys thattThis model:
"...provided a strategic and highly successful, public policy model for managing diversity. Importantly, this entailed an equality of respect, the need for mutual understanding, and an acceptance or endorsement of cultural differences. This was achieved primarily by catering largely to the symbolic and expressive needs of the culturally different, especially the early waves of European immigrants.
But a major shortcoming of this orthodox model was that it led to an 'identity politics' built around ethnic groups conceived of as cultural groups or 'ethnic minorities'. And invariably, this identity politics based on a flawed, static view of culture privileged and celebrated cultural maintenance. The increasing tendency, among some migrant groups, towards diaspora nationalism (linkages back to cultures of the home country), has been viewed with suspicion by a mainstream society, already concerned about cultural ghettoisation and the emergence of a 'them versus us' attitude.
In response the new assimilationists have invoked so-called 'common Australian values' which have served to mirror the 'us and them' attitudes of culturalist multiculturalism.
He says that there has been scant recognition in this culturalist model of the material inequalities and the marginalisation of the 'different', flowing from structural barriers in society. In the light of our experience of multiculturalism over three decades, we need to distance multiculturalism from the sphere of cultural identity, and locate it more within the public institutions and practices of citizenship.
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Gary, Your last two entries on this site have been excellent. I have not left comments as I am nodding my head in agreement and dont have anything more to add.