Ghassan Hage Against Paranoid Nationalism Searching for Hope in a Shrinking Society

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ntroduction

CH PTER 4

A brief history ofWhite colonial paranoia

So far in this work I have been concerned with the nature of thecurrent wave of paranoid nationalism in Australia and the rest ofthe Western world: a nationalism obsessed with border politics andwhere worrying becomes the dominant mode of expressing one sattachment to the nation. I have argued that this paranoidnationalism is primarily the produc t of the decline of hope in anera where the dynamics of capital accumulation no longer producesmere inequalities within society, but endangers the very idea of anationa l society. In Australia, however, these struct ural factors didnot create a culture of paranoia out of thin air. s I will argue inthis chapter, there is a history of White paranoia in Australianculture which has structured Australian nationalism from the timeof its birth. Since the early post-World War II era, however, therehave been economic and political forces which have increasinglyworked to relegate this paranoia to the margins of Australiansociety. What marks the current period is the emergence of acounter political tendency which has reactivated this colonialparanoia, successfully repositioning it at the core of today snational culture.

In the first part of the chapter I will give a very brief historicalaccount of the emergence of White colonial paranoia and of theway it has shaped Australia s society and culture from the time of

federation (independence) in 1901 until the rise of multicultural

47

Against Paranoid Nationalism: Searching For Hope in a Shrinking Society

Ghassan Hage

Annandale, Vic. : Pluto Press, 2003

ISBN: 1864031964

chapter 4 pages 47-66



8 AGAINST PARANOID NATIONALISM

policy in the early 1970s. I will then examine the period from themid-seventies to the mid-eighties, when the tendency wasmarginalised due to the political consensus that formed around theintroduction and consolidation of multicultural policy bysuccessive Australian g overnments.

The last part of the chapter examines the igniting of the debateson multiculturalism and indigenous land rights in the mid-eightieswhich signalled the re-emergence of White paranoia in thepublic sphere. As I will argue, to understand this process of reemergence we need to examine the economic, social and historicalcircumstances which made domi nant sections of the capitalist class,their political agents and the media develop an interest in thereactivation of White colonial paranoia and in bringing it back tothe fore as a potent politicaUcultural force. 2

White colonial paranoia in ustraliaSince its emergence as a British colonial-settler society, Australia'snational culture and identity have evolved in the shadow ofcontradictory colonial tendencies. On one hand, even more than is

the case with other colonial-settler societies of the 'New World',such as the United States, Australia's 'first world' wealth anddemocratic institutions are built on the decimation of thecontinent's Indigenous population and on the social, political andeconomic dispossession of those who remain. Theoretically, thisought to minimise the presence and effects of the paranoi ac colonialsensibility one finds in colonial-settler nations that are in constantfear of decolonisation. This sensibility is largely due to thecontinued existence of a colonised political will trying to reassertits sovereignty over all or part of the territory. This is the case inIsrael today, for example, as it was the case in apartheid South

Africa before decolonisation. But Australia's Indigenous people areno longer capable of engaging in any significant anti-colonialpolitical practices of this kind - that is, although there are manyIndigenous practices that can be seen as 'anti-colon ial', there is noserious Indigenous movement aiming to regain sovereignty overAustralian territory. And given the country's relative wealth andits stable democracy, one expects Australia to share with the UnitedStates the 'colonial fait accompli confidence that permeates thelatter's national culture. But this is not the case.

While traces of such a confidence were and still are present, aform of White colonial paranoia has remained part of Australian

culture long after the Indigenous populat ion had been decimated.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF WHITE COLON IAL PARANOIA 9

'Paranoia' denotes here a pathological form of fear based on aconception of the self. as excessively fragile, and constantlythreatened. t also descnbes a tendency to perceive a threat wherenone exists or, if one exists, to inflate its capacity t o ha rm the self.The core element of Australia's colonial paranoi a is a fear of lossof Europeanness or W h i t ~ n e s sand of the lifestyle an d privilegesthat are seen to emanate directly from that. t is a combination of

the frag l ity?f~ i t e . E u r o p e a n

colonial identi ty in general and theAustralIan SituatIOn m particular..Claude Levi-Strauss, in his famous UNESCO article on race,

pomts out that:

for huge. portions of the human species, and during tens of millennia,the n ~ t l O n[of humanity] seems to have been totally lacking.Mankmd stops at the frontiers of the tribe, of the linguistic group,and sometimes even of the village, to the extent that a great manyof the peoples called primitive call themselves by a name whichmeans 'men' . thus implying that the other tribes, groups andVillages have no part in human virtues or even human nature.4

In a not ~ od i s s i ~ i l ~ rway, and despite the existence of a generalc ~ t e g o r yof humamty denved from Christianity, the Europeantnbes of colonial capitalism constructed themselves as the idealtype .of what it means to b ~~ 'human being'. What the history ofthe nse of European colomahsm shows is how this 'being the besttype of human being' became associated with being WhiteE u ~ o p e a n .In Chapter 1 w.e examined part of the process throughwhich .the ~ r o p ~ a nworkmg classes stopp ed being constructed as

; s ~ e n ~ l a l l ym f e n o ~a ~ d:-vere g i v e ~access to. humanity and todlgmty and hope wlthm the natIOn. As AlIstair Bonnett has

shown, this. process also involved a historical 'bleachin g' of thesesame workmg classes. t was a continual process of historicalchange that led. the British working classes from being perceivedas on a par 'With monkeys' to the point where Lord Milner atthe battle of the Somme in 1918, is supposed to have said, 1

never knew tha t the working classes had such white skins.'5As Bonnett has also shown, while historical accounts of nonEuropean Whites were quite abundant in the pre-colonial era, theemergence of European Whiteness involved the slow work of 'dew h i t ~ n i n g 'everything that was non-European so tha t 'the category"white E ~ 6 r o p ~ a nb e c ~ m eboth a tautology and a group beyond

compare. ThiS IS the history of the construction of Whiteness into




a racial category. t involved both a Eu ropean monopolisation ofcivilised humanity and a parallel monopolisati on of Whiteness asits marker. Finally, the two are combined in what is the quintessential colonial racist logic: Question: why are Europeanscivilised and superior? Answer: Because they are White. This is howWhiteness became a valorised racial causal category. But this is alsowhere an anxiety specific to colonial Whiteness emerged.

At the basis of this anxiet y is the simple fact that when we speakof the racist social and historical construction of Whiteness, weare not implying that every single European individual had thesame degree of Whiteness constructe d for them. What was sociallyconstructed at a macro level was a general aspirational modelspecific to various social and historical conditions. Clearly, someWhite Europeans were capable of living up to the civilised idealsof White Europeanness with greater success than others - hereclass remained as important a marker as ever Whiteness was themeans of accessing the ideal, but it gave no promise of achievingtotal identification with it. It only meant that one could hopeand aspire towards such an ideal. It is in this sense that racialWhiteness operated, as we have seen in Chap ter 1, as a mechanismfor the distribution of hope. But not everyone hoped with equalconfidence. The members of the upper classes claimed a naturalaristocratic access to high civilisation. The working classes, onthe other hand, were generally less secure in their possession ofWhiteness; it was often a promise of a bet ter life wit hout thatactual better life ever materialising. So the working classes werethe ones who most needed the reinforcement of hope provided bycolonial racism. Like the phallus in Freud s theory, it (Whiteness)was a symbolic possession that created an expectation that greatthings could be achieved. At the same time, it , as a supposed

causal power, was so fragile and uncertain and dependent on aninter-subjective desire for it that it created a structural anxiety anda consta nt fear of not really having it or of losing it : a castrationcomplex, a constant fear of losing what gives life a sense ofdistinction .

Likewise, the more the Europe an worki ng classes were deprivedof material access to the Whit e civilised lifestyle, the more theyrelied on their symbolic access to Whiteness and the future promi seof civilised life it embodied. Whiteness, like the paranoidnationalism I examined in the previous chapters, became the triggerof unrealistic hopes. Such hopes, as I have argued, by being against

life , become the generators of anxiety, since they have to be

A BRIEF HISTORY OF WHITE COLONIAL PARANOIA 5

protected from empirical reality, because empirical reality worksto negate them. t is in this sense that the colonial Whiteness of the

u r o p e ~ nworking l ~ s s e sembodied a structural tendency towardsparanOla: can I ever lIve up to the standards of my Whiteness andb e c ~ m eas c i v ~ l i s e das it promises it should make me? Will myWh1teness delIver 1ts promises? White colonial paranoia wasstructured by an unconscious fear that the answers to these

questions are simply: no. This Whiteness lives under the constant~ h ~ e tof not realising the potenti al it supposedly embodies because1t 1S su.bverted by the reality of class. As such, it is always ready~ o project onto external factors the threatening impulse that ismherent to it. t s this structural tendency, with its class specificity,that the AustralIan settlers brought with them to the continent.This class-based anxiety about living up to Whiteness continues tomark Australia even today. One would think that the successfulcolonisation of the continent and the creation of a society whichfor more than one hundred years has provided its Whiteinhabi tants with a decent civilised lifestyle would be enough tobury this colonial paranoia. But it hasn t been enough. This iswhere we come t o the specificity of Australian colonialism.

First, it should be noted that whatever traces of colonialc o n f i d e ~ c eexisted in Australia are built o n genocidal practices, andso remam haunted by these constitutive deeds. The fact that nopost-colonial pact has ever been reached (no treaty with theInd1genous people yet exists, for example) has left Australianculture with a continuous sense of unfinished business, and hasopened the way for a continual struggle by the remaining Indigenous population for some form of moral redress as well asmaterial compensation. Thus despite their relative weakness andthe f ~ c tthat they are hardly ever concerned with challenging WhitepolIt1cai sovere1gnty, the struggles of Indigenous Australians actas a constant reminder of the uglier aspects of the colonial past _even for those most determined to forget them or deny theircontinuing relevance.

Another factor which has bred colonial uncertainty is anAustralia-specific sensitivity to and awareness of the impossibilityof fully colonising the natural environment. The relativelyundomesticable nature of the Australian outback and the aware

ness of a constantly present and sometimes mystically definedundomesticable remai nder even within domesticated spaces? have

given Australia s colonial culture a sense of its own fragility whichseems to be missing from the confident fronti er culture that marks




U colonial history. Awareness of one s fragility is usuallyconsidered healthier psychologically than denial of it, and it couldbe argued that this awareness has helped shape some of the betteraspects of traditional Australian culture, including its t rademarkself-deprecating sense of humour. However, when it is added to thenationalist drive to domesticate everything , it transforms into theanxiety vis a vis undomesticated cultural otherness which has

marked the Australian psyche from the very beginning.Finally, as is well known, because of its distance from themothe r country and because of its geographic location, Australia s

early settlers, or at least those who had the power to shape theidentity and culture of the settlements, constructed Australia as anisolated White British colony in the heart o f a non-Europ ean (readalso uncivilised) Asia-Pacific region. Here Australia shares withcountries such as White South Africa and Israel a fear of beingswamped by what is perceived as a surrounding hostile anduncivilised otherness. From the far east and the far west alike webehold menaces and contagion ... sta ted the Australian leaderAlfred Deakin in 1898. 8 This is not just a fear that the uncivilisedother can end up taking over the country through militaryinvasion. t is also a fear that through the pressure of sheernumbers, the uncivilised others slowly end up penetratin g the placeand their different cultural forms and norms slowly end uppolluting colonial society and identity. The coloniser is hereexpressing his fear of losing the civilised cultural identity thatpropelled the colonial proj ect and gave rise to the natio n in the firstplace. However, it should be remembered, as Albert Memmiexplained long ago, that behind all this is an often unconscious fearof losing the social and economic privileges gained from one sstruct ural p osition as a coloniser.9

Around the time of Federation, when Australia was movingtowards becoming an independent nation, many Australiansworried that by weakening the country s links with Britain theirfears of being swamp ed by Asians would become a reality. Thephallic fear of losing one s Whi teness (and the privileges that camewith it) was as prevalent as the hopes unleashed by the newlyinaugurated era. t meant that Australia was peculiarly - andcharacteristically, as history has shown - timid for a nation abou tto gain its independence. This timidity gave birth to the foundation al White Australia Policy. On one hand, this policy reflectedthe hopes of the founding fathers that Australian society would

be a projection of a White racial identity, that Australia would

A BRIEF HISTORY O WHITE COLONIAL PARANOIA 53

remain an e x p r e . s s i o n . ~ fa constitutive Whiteness and an exampleof h ~the White Bntlsh race could achieve. On the other hand,the poltcy expressed the fear that this constitutive Whiteness wasunder threat and e e d e ~to be protected by a stringen t racial policytha.t worked to maIntaIn the White racial character of the nation.This b a s ~ c a l ~ ymeant having a domestic policy geared towardsthe contInUIng extermination of the culture of the colonisedI n di g e ~ o u s

peo ple and an immigration policy geared towardsexcludIng non-Whites from Australia and from Australiancitizenship. o Ideologically, then, White paran oia was stru ctured bythe following discursive logic:

1

2

3

4

5

British civilisation is the highest of all civilisations in termsof ideals and achievements. While, as already mentioned,European colonialism had monopolised Whiteness andcivilisation in general, there was fierce nat ional comp etitionbet,:,een European countries as to which national European~ h l t e n e s s(French, English, etc) embodied the highestIdeals of civilisation.

British civilisation is a racially determined civilisation. Thatis, ~ s d e ~ i ~ e dwithin the logic of developmental racism,White Bntlsh racial identity is causal. Its possession allowscertain people to create and/or be committed to societieswhich express t he high values of British civilisation.Those who are not White are by definition unable toappreciate or to commit themselves to, let alone createsocieties which uphold the British values of democracy;f ~ e e d o m .etc. The sheer presence of non-Whites ends upeither dehberately or accidentally undermining those valuesand the culture based on them.

Being all locat ed in poor countries, non-Whites are generallynot used to high standards of living and are happ y to acceptl < > ~.wag es. Thus b y migrating to the West they undermineclVlhsed culture and the civilised high stand ard of living ofWhite workers.11The more a White society is penetrated by non-Whiteelements the less it is capable of expressing the values ofWhite civilisation, therefore it is imperative to maintain aWhite society that is as racially pure as possible.

The White Australia Policy did not just keep Australia homogeneously White; it actually worked at making it even more

homogeneous than it was at the time of Federation. According to

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historian Andrew Markus, the demographer Charles Price hasestimated that in 1891, [Australia] was 87 per cent Anglo-Celticand 6 per cent north European. Eastern and southern Europeanscombined came to less than 1 per cent, Asians 1.9 percent, andAborigines 3.4 per cent. By 1947 ... the Anglo-Celtic componenthad increased to 90 per cent, the northern European wasunchanged, and the combined total for Aborigines and Asians had

fallen to 1.1 per cent. 12 As the history of Australia for most of thefirst half of the century was a his tory of rising living standards, theWhite Australia Policy worked to actually further ingrain - in apopulation already predisposed to believe it - the racial causal logicthat links White racial identity and high civilised standards of

living.

From the White Australia Policy to multiculturalism therepression of colonial paranoiaThe White Australia Policy prevailed well into the 1960s. However,from World War II onward it was slowly eroding, both as apopulation/immigration policy and as a ~ c i lconceptua.lisationof society. From an ideological point of VIew Markus pomts outthat as the si xties app roached, it was becoming increasingly unacceptable internationally to retain the racial tenets of the WhiteAustralia Policy.13 They were now decried as forms of racistideology. From an immigration point of view, fears of decliningpopulation an d acceptance of the n eed to lo ok for sources of largescale migration other than Britain had been being expressed byacademics from as early as the 1930s. 14 These fears began to beshared with the rest of the popu lati on when they were given publicprominence during and in the aftermath of World War II This wasa time when the possibility of a Japanese invasion of Australiahighlighted the need to populate or perish . 15 Notwithstandi ng theabove, the most important support for an increase in the rateof immigration came from Australia s industrialists, who were atthe time facing a shortage of labour that could threaten theirexpanding industries.

After World War II Australia committed itself to a 1 per centimmigration-based annual population growth. Given that immigrants from Britain were not enough to sustain such a rate, theAustralian government began accepting relatively large numbersof non-British migrants. While to begin with it accepted thedisplaced persons from Northern and Eastern Europe, there werenot enough of them, and it soon had to recruit its immigrants from

A BRIEF HISTORY OF WHITE COLONIA L PARANOIA 55

the darker shade of White regions of southern Europe and theMediterranean. Despite the fact that the immigration programcontinued to give overwhelming preference to British migrants,and to finance recruitment campaigns in Britain, this change indirection was bound to worry a population whose sensibilitiescontinued to be shaped by the White Australia Policy and itsstructural White paranoia. This populatio n was now torn between

the phobic war fantasy populate or perish and the racial nonWhite immigration fantasy populate and perish .The government s policy of assimilation , launched in the wake

of the new immigration program, was in many ways directedtowards soothing this paranoia more than towards being asettlement prog ram for the new immigrants. Assimilation carrieda clear message to the White population: migrants will not perturbor change Australia s Anglo-Celtic culture. It is the migrantswho have to change to fit into it. For the incoming migrants,assimilation was more a general ideological directive tooassimilate

than a set of assimilationist institutions provided to produce adesired outcome.

Despite all this, the new non-White immigration and theideological nature of assimilation dented the racial structure ofWhite paranoia described above. t dented it first through thesettlement of the not so White Greeks, southern Italians andLebanese, whos e mere presence in Austr alia s cities signalled amajor change in Australia s urban visual culture - the everydayfaces one met in the street were no longer as homogeneously white,although they were never entirely so anyway. Racial Whiteness wasalso dented in a more fundamental way through the puncturing ofthe causal racial logic that underlay it. t was not possible tomaintain the belief that Australia s British culture and civilisationwere a direct result of racial Whiteness and still argue that nonWhites could be made to assimilate into this culture. This is whyassimilation created a fundamental split around the way thisparanoia expressed itself. One part of the population adapted toassimilation by moving from a racial to a cultural formulation oftheir fears.

The changes were minor but important ones. Australia s colonialcivilisation was increasingly perceived as European rather thanstrictly British. This was done more through an emphasis on theEuropean aspects of Britishness than through an oppositionbetween the two. It was still, though, a civilised culture threatened

by uncivilised barbarians. The threat, however, was no longer

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6 G I NST P R NOID N TION LISM

purely racial. t was increasingly perceived as c ~ l t u r ~ l.This b e c ~ e

the ruling ideology on both sides of the p o l I ~ l c a ldlVlde. T h ~ sm1959, the Minister for Immigration saw hlmself as enactmg apolicy that would attrac t the types of peoples ~ h ocan mostreadily be absorbed, so that we can mould AustralIa mto an AngloEuropean community embodying the old and t h ~new .16

Because certain races , such as Asians , were sttll fundamentallyperceived as unassimilable and thus dangerous, t h ~ r ewas now afurther division - between assimilable non-Whltes and nonassimilable ones. Thus the threat to Australia s White culture wasno longer non-Whites as such but non-assimilable non-Whites. t

was this developing shift of emphasis from race to c u l t u r ~thatmade assimilation and the White Australia Policy ideologlcallycompatible in government circles and amon g those who supportedthe policy. . .

Because all the dominant political, economic and ldeologiCalforces embraced this shift, those who still clung to a totally racialconception of Whiteness and a more strictly r i t ~ s hc o n c e p t ~ o nofAustrali an civilisation, tho ugh t hey remained a slzeable sectlOn. of

the population, found themselves for the first time on the margmsof the debates that shaped Australian identity. So much so thatassimilation was intro duced with very little public debate. As MarkLopez points out:

There was a relative consensus of approval for the program amongpolicy-making elites in the public service, major socialisinginstitutions (mass media, education system), and all levels ofgovernment. This dramatically reduced the scope for political debateto substantially challenge the policy, despite the existence ofwidespread popular opposition to most aspects of the policy exceptBritish immigrationY

This was an import ant shift. For the first time, there was no se-rious political force in Australia willing to or capable of proppmgup the racial expressions of White paranoia and give thet?a privileged position in public space or take them as the baslsfor formulating policy. It was a shift that became a feature ofAustralia s immigration an d settlement politics well into the 1980s.Like taxatio n, immigration and settlement policy became thoug htof as something that ought to be worked out by politicians,preferably through bipartisan politics. t was not to be decidedthrough public debates, as it was clear where such debates would

BRIEF HISTORY OF WHITE COLONI L P R NOI 7

lead. f governments were to tax according to the will of thepeople, taxatio n would be minimal, and this would be against theinterests of the nation. It would be likewise with immigration, itwas believed.

What characterises this period, then, is not the disappearanceof the racial strand of White paranoia but rather its increasedmarginalisation. While it remained alive in some parts of the

tabloid media and in places such as the RSL (Returned ServicesLeague) clubs, the business/quality media/politi cal class consensusthat formed around immigration and settlement policy meantthat no political force was willing to take up that racial approachand use it for their political advantage. This consensus, which sawitself as reflecting the more enlightened and adaptable part of thepopulation, was powerful enough to survive the slow abolitionof the White Austral ia Policy, which by the mid-sixties was almostuniversally recognised as offensive 18 But perhaps the better proofof its power and durability was its survival through the shift froman assimilationist to a multicultural settlement policy, and itscapacity to carry large sections of the population with it throughthat change with minimum public debate.

Since World War II and the rise of assimilation, Australia ssettlement policy had been a response to the effects of its immigration program. By the late 1960s the effects of the postwarimmigratio n period were being felt, and as Australia s immigrationprogram was beginning to recruit even darker shades of White ,it was becoming clear that assimilation did not just happen .That is, postw ar migrants - the Lebanese, the Greeks, the Italiansand the Yugoslavs, and even the Whi ter ones, such as the EastEuropean Jews, the Poles and the Germans - had not simplybecome Australians . They did not shed their previous culturalpractices and they did not become indistinguishable from thepopulation of British origin. At least not as quickly as expected.Moving in Australia s cities, one could witness the formation ofethnic streets and enclaves,19

The government responded by abandoning assimilation andshifting to an integrat ionist settlement policy. The latter, likeassimilation, was heavily directed at soothing the cultural paranoia(still alive and well) of the White people who had found assimilation acceptable. Integ ratio n , it was argued, meant that itwas unreasonabl e to ask newly arrived migrants to become li keus . They will always maintain their cultural practices and habits.Their sons and daughters, however, were the ones who had to




be worked on, to ensure that they became fully A u s t r a l i ~ n s .

Integration was a way of saying that a s s i m i l a t i ~ ntook mO.re tImethan expected, and it was an request to the W:h.Ite p o p ~ l a t l O nnotto panic in the face of the now visible non-BntIsh ethmc presencein publ ic spaces. .

However, integration also prefigured u l t i c u l t u r a h s ~m that Itwas the first state/bureaucratic recognition that AustralIa was no

longer a homogeneous White European society; it i ~ n?w cont.ainnon-English speaking communities (the n o n - a s s I m t l a t e d . t ~ r s t

generation) whose needs required special g o v e r n ~ e n tpolI.Cles.Ultimately, the fantasy of a White European Australia as ~ n Idealthat Australia yearned to maintain continued to be the basIs of allgovernment policies - and the conceptions of Australia .that wentwith them - until 1973, whe n the newly elected left-wmg Lab?rgovernment of Gough Whitlam, the first Labor g o v e ~ n m e n t

23 years, began to advance the first timid conceptIOns of amulticultural Australia. 2

The specificity of ustralian multiculturalismSince it has become associa ted with the processes of globahsatlOntoday, the word multiculturalism has u?dergo?e a par.a?oxicalhomogenisation of its meanings and Its SOCIa s I g l l l f t c a ~ c e

a homogenisation primarily based on its Amencan m e a n I l l ~ :

cultural pluralism and identity politics. That is mostly what Itmeans in Australia today, but this has not been always the ~ a s e .

When it was introduced into Australian society, multiculturalIsmdefined a number of social and political realities. It is impossibleto understand the debates around it without examining thetransformations it has undergone.

Australian multiculturalism embodied a set of differences

reflecting the complex realities in w ~ i hit w.as g r o u n ~ e d ~ n ~the diverse social forces that had an mterest m advancmg It

Firstly, multiculturalism was perceived as both a d e s ~ r i p t i v e~ n d

prescriptive concept. Descriptively, m any insisted, u l t i c u l t u r a ~ I s m

was not a govern ment choice; multi culturalism merely e s n ~ e d

the inescapable fact that Australia s immigration progr am, whIChhad become even more diversified throughout the 1960s, hadcreated a society with more than a hundred different minorityethnic cultures that existed with but also transformed - and werein turn transformed by - Australia s Anglo-Celtic culture.Prescriptively, multiculturalism w as t h ~set of o l i c i ~ s.ad?pted by

the state to govern this in escapable realIty. These polIcles mvolved


not just accepting that cultural difference exists and mus t be cateredfor, b ut also celebrating it as a positive aspect of society that oughtto be promoted.

Second, and closely related to the above, was the differencebetween multiculturalism as a mode of governing ethnic culturesand multiculturalism as national identity. This was and still is asubtle difference. The difference is perceived as that betweenmulticulturalism as a marginal reality in a mainly Anglo-CelticSOCIety and multiculturalism displacing Anglo-Celtic culture tobecome the identity of the nation. In the first, the culture of theethnic minorities is imagined as contained, and having little effecton a still largely European Australian mainstream culture. In thesecond, the migrant cultures are seen to be actually hybridising withthe European Australian culture, creating a new multiculturalmainstream.

Third, there were the differences between multiculturalism aswelfare and multiculturalism as a structural socio-economicpolicy. Both these multiculturalisms were less about culture and

more about access to the institutions of Australian society. Bothwere concerned with the fact that most non-English speakingbackground migrants to Australia were positioned in the mosteconomically unfavourable po sitions in society.22 But while the firstwas mainly concerned with facilitating access to the state, in theform of interpreting services or in the provision of state help toethnic communities via specific grants, the second had a moreradical conception of the role of the welfare state: it saw it as atool for dealing with the structural class inequalities producedaround ethnicity.

Fourth, there were the differences between multiculturalism as

social policy described above and multiculturalism as culturalpolicy. This was what Brian Bullivant nicely called the differencebetween life chances and lifestyle multicultu ralism. 23 While the firstwas concerned with socio-economic issues, the second was theclosest to the forms of cultural pluralism that are most identifiedwith multiculturalism today. It was more concerned with culturaltraditions and practices. Its core element was the shedding of theethnocentric claim that Anglo-Celtic culture was the most desirableculture to aim for a nd the accepting of a cultural relativism whichrecognised that no culture was superior to another, that all hadenriching elements that could be incorporated into Australiansociety. This version of multiculturalism was crucial for the ethnic(non-Anglo-Celtic) middle class, who, to compete against the

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traditional Anglo-Celtic middle class, needed a recognition of theworth of their cultural traditions and backgrounds more than theyneeded welfare and English programs.24

Life chances multiculturalism had only a fragile beginningduring the years of the Whitlam government (1972-75). Thegeneral onslaught on whatever claims the Australian welfare statehad to being a tool for dealing with structural inequality began

in 1975, with the conservative government of Malcolm Fraser,and has been continued by every government thereafter. Indeed,as Castles et al. point out, the Fraser government promotedmulticulturalism (in its cultural pluralism and managing culturaldiversity sense) in order to promote a culturalist version ofAustralian society ahead of a class one. t was: a key strategy in aconservative restructuring of the welfare state whose main purposewas the demolition of Whitlam-style social democracy .25

Along with the rise of Asian immigration, the great est taboo ofthe White Australia Policy, it is the movement - within a period ofless than ten years - from a descriptive multiculturalism perceived

primarily as a form of welfare and of cultural government to amulticulturalism that is more prescriptive and perceived to beprimarily about national identity which signalled the re-enteringof White Paranoia in both its cultural and racial garbs into thesphere of public debate.

he rise of identity multiculturalism and the resurfacing ofWhite paranoiaThe most important ideological shift between the conservativeLiberal/Country Party government of Malcolm Fraser (1975-83)and the right-wing Labor government of Bob Hawke (1983-91) is

the move away from multiculturalism as cultural government andtowards multiculturalism as national identity. The differencebetween the two, mentioned above, can be restated as the difference between saying, We are an Anglo-Celtic society with anumber of diverse non-Anglo-Celtic cultures that we (the AngloCeltics) strive to manage and saying, We are an Anglo-Celticmulticultural society because we have been transformed by theexisting diversity of culture.

The first formulation clearly embodied a multiculturalismthat was not radically incompatible with the old conception of aWhite Australia. Australia was still primarily a White nation, andits Whiteness remained unaffected by the existence of ethnic

minorities. t just happened that it had a multicultural program to


m a ~ a g eits diverse ethnic minorities. It was just like having anIndigenous pr.ogram to manage the Indigenous minority; it did notmake Austraha more or less of an Indigenous nation. This versionof multiculturalism, with its images of contained ethnicity ,managed to c a r r ~with it some parts of the population steeped inthe White a r a n O l aof the assimilationist period - these people hadbeen conftdent enough, especially because of the favourableeconomic conditions at the time, to accept the change.

The second formulation, however, was a far more radical brea kwith the Australian identity of the past. t entailed an Australia thatwas still Anglo-Celtic, but one that had been fundamentallytransformed by its immigration program. So much so that it nowhad a different identity. Here multiculturalism was not a kind offeature on the side in an Australia that was still an Anglo-Celticsociety. It involved a new conception of Australia, in whichmulticulturalism represented a kind of higher type of AngloCel tic c i v i l ~ s a t i o nThis version appealed to the growing numberof mcreasmgly well-travelled and cosmopolitan middle-class

Australians who wanted to shed the image of Australia as a racistc o l o n ~ a lbackwate r and appe ar in a more symbolically competitivel t g ? ~ the. eyes of nationals of other places. In emphasising aumfted natlOn of diverse cultures it also provided a nationali d e o l ~ g i c a lcounterpart to the corporatist economic ideology ofumfymg labour and capital being advocated by the Hawkegovernment. But it was also a version of Australia that alienatedmany White Australians who had found multiculturalism ascultural management acceptable; it revived in them the oldparanoid fears of cultural extinction. They found this too radical astep to take, and from that moment on they began to move closer

to the till now historically marginalised section of the populationwho were still holding on to a racially defined White Australia.Many other factors worked during the late 1980s and early

1990s to further intensify White paranoia. First, the eighties sawworsening economic conditions for large sections of traditionallybetter-off Australians (such as farmers and small business people).Second, now that immigration policy was freed of the ideologicals h a c k l e ~of the White Australia Policy and its remnants,Australta was witnessing its biggest flow of Asian migrationsince the goldrushes of the 19th century. Like the Eastern andSouthern Europeans before them, but even more noticeably so,given their visibility to the Western colonial eye, they were seento form non-Anglo-Celtic enclaves in the cities and the suburbs

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where they settled. And despite both the move towardsmulticulturalism and the successive waves of non-White migration,the Asian still played the role of a kind of primordial threat inthe White Australian psyche. All this anxiety was exacerbated bythe Labor government s moves towards the creation of anAustralian republic; this severing of Australia s last symbolic tieswith the British monarchy brought back to life fears similar tothose that had arisen at the time of Federation. This was especiallyso since the move towards becoming a republic was accompaniedby an Australia in Asia campaign whose basis was the idea thatAustralia s future lay in its being a part of Asia. Finally, there wasthe government s drive towards settling the colonial question bygranting the Indigenous people some form of land rights whichlater culminated in the Mab0 26 judgement. This revived, amon g themost vulnerable Whites, irrational fears of territorial decolonisation, such as losing their homes to Indigenous people whowere going to grab the land back . t was this climate of economicuncertainty and reinvigorated internal and external traditionalthreats that sent White paranoia into overdrive and laid thefoundations for the long era of debating multiculturalism thatthen began.

ebating multiculturalism in the shadow of White decline 7

Before examining the general cont ent of Australia s multiculturaldebates, we need to briefly ask the question: what is this socialphenomenon called public debate ?

One important question raised by the notion of public debateis: who has the power to express an opinion?28 Clearly not everyonehas the power and knowledge necessary to access the media. Thisis influenced not only by class but also, and most importantly in

this case, by variables that often relate to ethnicity - in this case,something as basic as fluency in English or as peculiar as thecapacity to talk over the phone knowing that what you are sayingis being publicly broadcast. This has often meant that multiculturaldebates in Australia are often bout migrants rather than wit

them. But the capacity to express an opinion is meaningless, ofcourse, without the existence of a media ic predisposition to represent it. But even that is not enough.

As pointed out above, the appearance of White paranoid viewsin tabloid newspapers and on some radio stations has always beena part of Australian culture. At the same time, articles by right

wing cultural pluralist supporters of multiculturalism replied to in

A BRIEF HISTORY OF WHITE COLONIA L PARANOIA 6

follow-up articles by leftist advocates of a structural/egalitarianm u l t i ~ u l t u r a l i s min the quality press have also existed througho utthe hIstory of multiculturalism. Neither in themselves creates ageneralised feeling of there being a public debate. The latter onlyh a p ~ e n s: he n a sense of communication among different media _not Just wIthm each one of them - begins to happen. Thus readersof qualIty newspapers might never listen to talk back radi o butsuddenly t h e i ~n e ~ s p a p e rstarts reporting the views express:d bytalk back radIO lIsteners and publishing letters to the editorsupporting or disagreeing with those views. These letters are takenup in turn by the radio station and by commercial television.Inevitably, politicians and other well-known people are asked - orvolunteer - to join in the fray. Th eir views are more likely to bepr,ominently r e p o r ~ e dthan relegated to an obscure newspaper smIddle pages and, m turn, they foster more debate. A full mediacircuit of ideas and counter-ideas begins to take place: this is whena sense of a debate occurs.

S o for a debate to occur there must exist in the media a generalIsed culture and a predisposition (among editors and reporters)to make an issue out of what is to be debated. In the Australiancontext that means remembering that journalists, despite the~ u p p o s e dethos of objectivity that prevails among them, were notImmune to the resurfacing of feelings associated with Whitep a r a n o ~ aAs a group of predominantly White workers, they toowere CrIsscrossed by the cul tural c urrents that affected other Whitew o r k e r ~The rise of feelings of White paranoia in the generalAustralIan population, particularly in the White middle class was~ l w a y slikely to be accompanied by similar trends a ~ o n gJournalIsts. As soon as the rate of Asian migration increased andthis group, had a higher rate of middle-class migration t h a ~anywave of mIgrants before i t / 9 some middle-class White Australiansswung straight into the traditional working-class mode ofperceiving non-Anglo Australians as competition. This fear wascompounded by the fact that many of the sons and daughters ofthe mainly peasant/working-class Southern European migrantswere moving into middle-class jobs as well. 30

But even the existence of this journalistic disposition to makean issue of multiculturalism is not enough to explain the return ofWhite paran oia to centre stage. As I argued in the previous section,its marginalisation from the mid-1950s to the mid-1980s was aresult of the agreement between quality newspapers, business and

politicians not to activate it either politically or as a subject of




debate. t was the falling apart of this consensus, more thananything, that allowed White paranoia to re-enter the sphere ofpublic debate .

Labor s economic strategy of opening the economy to theprocesses of globalisation through massive deregulation and theirpolitical strategy (described above) generated an unusual amountof opposition. First, imp ortant sections of the mining industry, acentral sector in Australia s economy and associated with manyother business interests, including media interests, adopted a strongoppositional stance towards the government s commitment togrant Indigenous people some form of land rights . This alsohappened at a time when the wet supporters of multiculturalismwithin the conservative Liberal Party were losing to the dry sideof the party, led by John Howard, one of the few ideologicallydriven monoculturalists in Australian politics. All of this led to abreak in the long consensus around multiculturalism and aroundthe isolation of the White p aranoid tendency from public space.Suddenly, the latt er s ideological tenet s were being mut tered bypoliticians as if they d never been said before, and thei r mutterings ,as well as the muttering of those who had not been heard for along time, began to reappear in promi nent positions in the media.

Thus when the first full-scale multicultural debate tookAustralia by storm, ignited by the reporting of an address made inMarch 1984 by well-known populist historian Geoffrey Blainey,what created the storm was not that what Blainey said was new.He and many others before him had expressed their opposit ion tomulticulturalism and Asian migration well before that date. t was,as many analysts have suggested, the fact that a speech given in acountry town was put in the most prominent of positions in themedia, plus the willingness to continue putting the views expressedaround it in similarly prominent positions, that signalled thecoming of the new era. Hardly a year has passed since withoutAustralians engaging in or at least witnessing a multi cultu raldebate that is highly predictable in form and content and thatbegins with some expression of White paranoia.

The first ideological cornerstone of the resurfacing paranoi a isthe sense of White decline I analysed extensively in White Nationa sense that being White Australi an no longer yields the nationalprivileges or opportunities or promises that are perceived to haveexisted in a previous era. This sense of decline is built on two coreideological constructions: first, a conception of the self as

representing the average , the mainstream , the ordinary national


(this lends a deep legitimacy to one s grievances), and second, aheightened perception of minorities , migrants and Indigenouspeople as a threat to one s own wellbeing.

An important outcome of such a construction is a crisis ofidentification with the nation-state based o n the perception of abias towards minorities and migrants on one hand and globalbusiness interests on the other. This is made most explicit in theclaim that is the trademark of the discourse of decline: that theordinary people of the White dominant culture are suffering from

reverse discrimination.Underlying this paranoi a is the idea that government (mainly

the Labor Party), along with the multicultural lobby, theIndigenous lobby and elitist intellectuals , 1 are all working atundermining Australia s core culture, which the White declinerstrongly asserts its existence as if it is under attack. The problem isthat when you go through the history of multiculturalism and ofthe debates around multiculturalism, it is very hard to find anyone,except some intellectuals with no significant social or symbolicpower, arguing that Australia doesn t have or doesn t need a coreculture. On the contrary, all multiculturalists have gone out of theirway to assert that cultural pluralism is not a negation of the needfor a core culture. What some multiculturalists have argued is thatAustralia s core culture is no longer Anglo-Celtic in a traditionalsense. This was the basic idea of the multi cultural ism as nationalidentity advocate d by Bob Hawke (and Paul Keating after him). t

is as if what White paranoia is expressing is fear that the newmulticultural order threatens the old assimilationist dream of anunquestionably European Australian culture, but given thecensorship that now disallows use of such ethnocentric language,this fear is expressed in terms of the loss of any core culture.

Here we come to an interesting dimension of White paranoia.In his well-documented history of the origins of multiculturalism,Mark Lopez points to something important about assimilationistideology. Originally, he argues, it was a strategy for the preservation of a predominantly Anglo-Celtic society. But as Australiansociety changed demographically, culturally and socially, hangingon to the idea of assimilation involved the rather radical proposition of changing society back to what it had been 32 Unless, ofcourse, one managed to convince oneself tha t nothi ng had changedand it was just a case of too many people not fitting into an AngloCeltic society that still existed. If one is to maintain such

assimilationist beliefs today, one still has to sustain this fantasy,



AGAINST PARANOID NATIONALISM

even though that society has clearly disappeared. So the very ideaof debating assimilation, whether on the for or the against side,works to produce the fantasy of a society that no longer exists. Thedebate helps shield the assimilationists from the reality they needto avoid if they are to maintain their fantasy constructions: thatthey are the ones who have not assimilated to a changing society.This is precisely the closed-circuit logic that the White paranoid

fantasy needs if it is to be able to reproduce itself.This is why debates around this subject are structured in anexceptionally predictable way, as I have already pointed out. Theyalways consi st of people expressing forms of White paranoia andothers trying to present either statistical or historical evidence orlogical arguments to prove that there is no basis for the paranoidviews expressed. More often than not, because of the closed circlelogic in which it is grounded, the counter argument leads to areinforcement of the paranoid view, which feeds on a sense thatthings are so bad because so many people can t even see what is

happening and end up creating images of dark conspiracies thateveryone has fallen victim to except for the paranoid onesthemselves.

So perhaps debate is a misnomer as far as multiculturalism isconcerned. What actually happens is more like a parallel presentation of differing points of view. Because forms of socialparano ia refuse inter-subjectivity and have to feed narcissisticallyon their own truth to survive, they are not something one argueswith, especially when they are positioned prominently within thepublic sphere. One either works at relegating them to the marginalspheres of society where they belong, or exploits them politicallyto reach one s political goal. This was the road chosen by JohnHoward s conservative side of politics.

Osama is coming to get you Debating Australianmulticulturalism after September 11Given the nature of the White paranoia that has shaped Australia sdebates about mult iculturalism, these debates have always centredaround the construction of an un-integrated other and thesubsequent debating of the necessity, possibility and desirability oftheir integration. Australia s historically favourite other hasalways been the Asians . The White Australi a Policy was designedwith Asians in mind, and in 1996 Pauline Hanson was still beingswamped by Asians . In the last couple of years, however, probably

to the relief of Asians , White paranoia has shifted its gaze towards


a more global threat: Muslims and Islam .The emergence of the Muslim as the Australian other did not

really begin until the Gulf War, althou gh Austral ian culture shares,:,ith other Western cultures the oriental ist legacy of colonialism.

Smce the late 1990s the Muslims have become the main recipientsof the problems with multiculturali sm discourses.

The debate began to seriously heat up around the topic of

ethnicity and crime , due to a police/media construction of aLebanese ethnic gangs problem in Lebanese Muslim suburbs(these are usually suburbs where up to 20 per cent of the population~ of . r ~ b i c s p e a k i n gbackground). The debate became particularlymtenslfIed With reports of Lebanese gangs target-raping AngloAustralian girls. This led to a they re raping our daughters -typedebate in which all Lebanese/Arabs/Muslims became the newthrea t to Australia s Western civilisation.

Adding fuel to the Muslim question was the debate aroundAustralia s treatment of asylum seekers, who are mainly Muslim.This was highlighted by the ampa affair, in which Afghan asylum

seekers rescued by a Norwegian ship were refused the right to havetheir claims for refugee status assessed on Australian soil. To winthe ideological battle against those claiming that the governmentwas acting inhumanely, the Minister of Immigration and the PrimeMinister began to actively promote t he idea that the asylum seekersmight be criminals and that they were doing unspeakable things totheir children, such as starving them and throwing them into thesea, in order to win the right to seek asylum here. This led to theusual endless sessions of debate in which paranoia ruled andeveryone on the other side was a member of the treacherous clubof intellectual elites.

September 11 sealed the position of the Muslim as the unquestionable other in Australia today. f one listens to - and believes- t he now regularly reported musings of the White paranoid mindMuslims are capable of doing everything that Asians did and o r ~

(such as committing terrori st acts). Muslims are moved by a singleessence, and whenever one of them does something good he orshe is unusual. Whenever one of them does something bad, he orshe is proof that all of them are bound to do it sooner or later. Thisis unlike u s , of course: when one of us does something bad, he orshe is a bad apple, and when one of us does something we are proudof, he or she is the proof that we are all great.

According to this logic, Muslims are a community of people

always predisposed towards crime, rape, illegal entry to Australia




and terrorism. And interestingly, Australia declared itself apossible victim of terrorism, even though it s most probable thatnot many terrorists training with Osama bin Laden would know itexists Amazingly, the names of the prominent people andjournalists now expressing expert opinions on Lebanese and Arabculture in the pages of the newspapers are the same ones whothrilled us with their expertise on the Asian threat sometime during

the last 15 years or so. Suddenly, they are exhibiting their geniusagain, with virtuoso knowledge of the threatening nature of Islamicculture. This s unlike the 'elitist intellectuals', who are obviouslystruggling to keep up with reality. They are shown to not knowmuch and are now regularly accused of the revived McCarth yistcrime of being 'anti-American'.

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