Migration, Citizenship and Intercultural Relations

Looking through the Lens of Social Inclusion

Michele Lobo, Fethi Mansouri

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317096306
• Subtopic: Ethnic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Migration, Citizenship and Intercultural Relations reflects on the tensions and contradictions that arise within debates on social inclusion, arguing that both the concept of social inclusion and policy surrounding it need to incorporate visions of citizenship that value ethnic diversity. Presenting the latest empirical research from Australia and engaging with contemporary global debates on questions of identity, citizenship, intercultural relations and social inclusion, this book unsettles fixed assumptions about who is included as a valued citizen and explores the possibilities for engendering inclusive visions of citizenship in local, national and transnational spaces. Organised around the themes of identity, citizenship and intercultural relations, this interdisciplinary collection sheds light on the role that ethnic diversity can play in fostering new visions of inclusivity and citizenship in a globalised world.

PART I
Identity and Social Inclusion

Chapter 1
From Multiculturalism to Social Inclusion: The Resilience of Australian National Values since Federation

Giancarlo Chiro

Why is it that our society is constantly bombarded with views that come from absolute minority groups, who seem to think that the majority should have no say in the way we are ruled or how many foreign subjects arrive on our doorstep and then try to tell us how we should run the country?

The do-gooders as a whole seem to be hell bent on destroying the very fibre of our society, while bringing more and more queue jumpers into our midst.

One often wonders who is running the government. Is it Mr Rudd or the same old rabble who insist that they know better than the rest of us? This type of over-lobbying must stop and democracy be brought back. (Letter to the Editor, The Advertiser, 17 October 2009)

How do we begin to understand the pleas of the writer of this letter who is worried about the democratic future of Australia? The writer rhetorically supports his argument using a language akin to a war correspondent (‘bombardment’, ‘hell bent’), appealing to our sense of nationhood (‘the very fibre of society’) and pointing to the dangers of fifth columnists (‘queue jumpers in our midst’). He sets up oppositional binomials between us, the ‘majority’, ‘the rest of us’ and them, the coalition of ‘foreign subjects’, ‘queue jumpers’ and ‘do-gooders’, the ‘absolute minority’ who ‘tell us how to run the country’.

Unlike many other countries exposed to greater pressures from international migration and population movements, Australia has managed the arrival and settlement of refugees and asylum seekers in an orderly fashion (Castles and Davidson 2000: 165). Australia can also point to its relative success in incorporating into its social, political and economic fabric an impressive number of culturally and linguistically diverse immigrants.,1 Why is it then, that newspapers around the country are inundated by letters expressing roughly the same sentiments as those above? Why are talkback radio programs awash with callers who vent their frustration over the perception that their nation is taking a direction that the ‘silent majority’ do not favour? Why have ‘shock jocks’ around the country built careers on the basis of their outspoken views on multiculturalism, ethnic minorities, ethnic gangs, boat people, queue jumpers, Asians, Muslims, mosques and terrorists?

As Jayasuriya (2006a: 13) so pithily describes ‘the legacy, nay ghosts, of a White Australia and a British Australia, [is] a political narrative which continues to haunt all aspects of Australian public life’. The writer of the letter, like so many of the callers to talkback radio, often refer to themselves as the ‘silent majority’ or the ‘mainstream’ Australians who stand against the politically correct ‘do-gooders’ who are hell bent on destroying ‘our’ society. They are the descendants of the British nation, the carriers of the ‘crimson thread’ which firmly links them to their British heritage. It is this group that Pauline Hanson intended to defend when at the March 1996 election she was voted into the federal House of Representatives.2 In her maiden speech she claimed,

We now have a situation where a type of reverse racism is applied to mainstream Australians by those who promote political correctness … In response to my call for equality for all Australians, I am fed up to the back teeth with the inequalities that are being promoted by the government and paid for by the tax payer under the assumption that Aboriginals are the most disadvantaged people in Australia. I do not believe that the colour of one’s skin determines whether you are disadvantaged. (Australian House of Representatives 1996: 3860)

This chapter examines the values of mainstream Australians who feel threatened by multiculturalism and who feel the need to protect their national identity into the future.3 In so doing, it addresses the proposition that Australian multiculturalism has failed to alter the national values of the Australian mainstream forged in the lead up to Federation and summed up by Parkes’ allusion to ‘the crimson thread that binds us all’. It is argued that adoption of the social cohesion policies during former Prime Minister Howard’s tenure was an overt attempt to replace multiculturalism as the normative characterisation of Australian society. As Krongold (2006) has noted, this moment signalled the breach of trust which occurred within Australian society between its constituent groups and the proponents of a return to a mythical monoculture. Finally, the introduction of the universalistic discourse of social inclusion by the Rudd/Gillard governments since 2007 marks an attempted third way between the politics of multiculturalism with its implied recognition of ethnic/racial disadvantage and redistributive logic and the politics of national security and social cohesion associated with the national values of the Australian historical bloc.4

This chapter draws on a Gramscian understanding of the hegemonic organisation of social relations because of his insights into the often antagonistic and contradictory relations of force that occur within Western liberal democracies. Gramsci posed questions of culture and politics in national terms (Jones 2006: 34). His interest in the formation and transformation of national-popular culture and the role this plays in forging consent around national conservative/transformative projects is of direct interest to our understanding of the impact multiculturalism has had on national identities and on the maintenance of the dominant group’s power within nation-states. As Hall (1986: 8) asserts:

In the much neglected areas of conjunctural analysis, politics, ideology and the state, the character of different types of political regimes, the importance of cultural and national-popular questions, and the role of civil society in the shifting balance of relations between different social forces in society … Gramsci has a lot to contribute. He is one of the first original “Marxist theorists” of the historical conditions which have come to dominate the second half of the twentieth century.

Gramsci rejects as ‘vulgar infantilism’ the determinism of much of the Marxism of his day which considered that ‘every fluctuation in politics and ideology can be presented and expounded as an expression of the structure’ (Gramsci 1971: 407). Rather, as Cahill (2008: 206) notes, Gramsci believed that human history is not the unfolding of a universal logic. It is the contingent and unforeseeable outcome of conflict and contradiction between the various forces, institutions and structures within the ‘historical bloc’. As a result, close attention must be paid to the specific historical relationships within the social, economic and political spheres which bring about the dominance/leadership of a particular social class.

Reflecting on the failure of radical groups in Western nations like Italy, Germany and England to achieve revolutionary change, Gramsci posited the importance of adequate planning and preparation which he termed ‘war of position’ in which cultural meanings and values become the object of struggle for hegemony (Jones 2006: 31). Gramsci argued that

The “normal” exercise of hegemony on the now classical terrain of the parliamentary regime is characterised by a combination of force and consent, which counterbalance each other [si equilibrano], without force predominating excessively over consent; rather, it appears to be based on the consent of the majority, expressed by the so-called organs of public opinion. (1971: 80)

This is usually a peaceful process which is situated within civil society, ‘the ensemble of organisms commonly called “private”’ (Gramsci 1971: 12) and is therefore as much concerned with individual behaviour and values as it is of state apparatuses. In Gramscian terms, therefore, power is not imposed solely from above. Rather, the operations of power and its success depend on consent from below. Gramsci (1971: 12) asserts that the ‘spontaneous’ consent given by subaltern groups of the population to the general direction imposed on social life by the fundamental group is historically caused by the prestige (and consequent confidence) which the dominant group enjoys because of its position and function in the world of production. He used the term hegemony to describe the whole system of domination (coercion) and collaboration (consent) out of which the dominant group is able to construct a ‘common sense’ view about the way the world is (and how it cannot be changed) through a subtle blend of encouragement and intimidation.

Custom, tradition and culture are the central elements of this hegemonic ‘common sense’ which assembles a dominant historical bloc of social and political forces (Pearmain 2006: 2). In order to maintain their leadership and power, over time, dominant blocs seek to attract the consent of wider strata of society with a discourse which invariably connects with patriotic and nationalistic values. Together, these new social allies forge a national-popular identity and purpose, which becomes the new ‘common sense’ of the era, a ‘collective will’ as operative awareness of historical necessity, as protagonist of a real and effective historical drama’ (Pearmain 2008). A further condition of the continued hegemony of the fundamental/dominant bloc is that it is constantly refreshed with new personnel, energies and insights, especially from subaltern groups’ own elites and intellectuals (Pearmain 2008).

The political and cultural hegemony of the dominant group is exercised through the ‘hegemonic apparatus’ understood as the complex set of institutions, ideologies, practices and agents (including the ‘intellectuals’).5 The hegemonic apparatus provides the means by which a social group/class ascends to power through the domination of the intricate network of social relationships of civil society. This is a cultural and political process which must be renewed each day if the dominant social/class group is to maintain institutional power in a society. Indeed, according to Thomas (2009: 225), ‘a class’s hegemonic apparatus constitutes its Lebenswelt, the horizon within which its class project is elaborated and within which it also seeks to interpellate and integrate its antagonists’.

The Anglo-Australian Historical Bloc

Despite the stated policy of multiculturalism in the latter decades of the twentieth century, Australia’s prevailing ideology remains firmly tied to the cultural and political values of the dominant historical bloc which was forged mostly under the British flag. As Jakubowicz (2003: 1) argues:

Australia is an imperial state – its governments feel compelled to defend the land taken by force from its Indigenous owners, against other governments or cultural groups that may contest their taking, and they need to control the Indigenous people and new arrivals internally to ensure a continuing cultural, social and economic order.

From colonial times, Australians were worried that by weakening the country’s links with Britain their fears of being ‘swamped’ by Asians would become a reality.6 Hage (2003: 51–52) contends that a White colonial paranoia or fear of the Indigenous and foreign Other can be linked to the immorality of the genocidal practices of the colonial period, the awareness of the difficulty of fully colonising the natural environment and the distance from the ‘mother country’. Accordingly,

Australia’s early settlers, or at least those who had the power to shape the identity and culture of the settlements, constructed Australia as an isolated White British colony in the heart of a non-European (read also uncivilised) Asia-Pacific region. (Hage 2003: 52)

In the pages of The Bulletin, Australian ‘nativists’ in the last years of the nineteenth century had proclaimed a new force in Australia – a strident nationalism based on a racist vision.

All white men who come to these shores – with a clean record – and who leave behind them the memory of class distinctions and the religious differences of the old world… are Australians… No nigger, no Chinaman, no Lascar, no Kanaka, no purveyor of cheap, coloured labour is an Australian. (Australia for the Australians! The Bulletin, 2 July 1887)7

Protectionist laws, restrictive immigration policies and national security came to represent the ‘common sense’ view of the British Australian hegemonic bloc which won the consent of the subaltern (labouring) classes. Indeed, according to Jayasuriya (2006a), the cumulative effect of this overarching mix of national policy was to inculcate a ‘racial consciousness’ as a defining factor of ‘imagining Australia’.

The proponents of Federation and the political leaders who followed saw themselves as Australian Britons and upheld this ‘common sense’ view of Australian society irrespective of class differences and political allegiances. In the late nineteenth century, Australian concern with racial purity was nowhere better expressed than by Sir Henry Parkes, Premier of New South Wales and a leader of Federation who contended that:

if this young nation is to maintain the fabric of its liberties unassailed and unimpaired, it cannot admit into its population any element that of necessity must be of an inferior nature and character … we should not encourage or admit amongst us any class of persons whatever whom we are not prepared to advance to all our franchises, to all our privileges as citizens, and all our social rights, including the right of marriage. (in Jayasuriya 2006b)

Parkes’s declaration that ‘the crimson thread of kinship runs through us all’ became a catch cry for Federationists and overcame the reserve of other colonial leaders. Parkes meant two things by the ‘crimson thread’: first, a common British ancestry; and second, a commitment to British institutions – to British law and forms of government. What bound all Australians together, Parkes believed, was both a common origin (race) and common vision of a future Australian nation (Irving 2006). The maintenance of British heritage and ‘white’ domination formed the central planks of British Australian hegemony in the newly established state. Such heritage and racist discourses, together with the protectionist policies which gained the allegiance of subaltern working classes, proved fundamental to the achievement of the national project. They came to represent enduring national values or, in Gramsci’s terms, Australia’s ‘common sense’ view, which over the course of the twentieth century also came to span the denominational divide between British and Irish settlers.8

It is not difficult to discern the historical continuity of the elite moral imagination espoused by Australian political leaders following Parkes. For the best part of the twentieth century, the hegemony of the historical bloc was embodied in the national values of race, heritage and national security out of which Australian identity was constructed. Alfred Deakin was a barrister and journalist educated at Melbourne Grammar and Melbourne University.9 He was a member of the Protectionist Party and as Australia’s first Attorney General became the chief architect of the Immigration Restriction Act of 1901 (better known as the White Australia Policy) on which Deakin believed the national manhood, the national character, and the national future were at stake (Clark 1981: 201). For Deakin, the Japanese, Chinese and other races of colour were a threat to the newly formed Federation and it was this belief that led to legislation to ensure they would be kept out. Indeed, the united Australian race to which he refers (see quote following) is of course a mono-cultural British race which he argued would suffer biologically and ideologically from any sort of racial miscegenation

The unity of Australia is nothing, if that does not imply a united race. A united race not only means that its members can intermix, intermarry and associate without degradation on either side, but implies one inspired by the same ideas. (Deakin 1901: 4807)

Australia’s first Prime Minister Edmund Barton (1901–1903) was a barrister and judge who had attended Sydney Grammar and Sydney University and like Deakin was a member of the Protectionist Party. He argued strongly in support of the Bill stating:

I do not think that the doctrine of the equality of man was really ever intended to include racial equality. There is no racial equality. There is that basic inequality. These races are, in comparison with white races…unequal and inferior. (Barton 1901: 5233)

Forewarned in 1897 by the Secretary of State for the Colonies, Joseph Chamberlain, that any exclusion or discrimination based on distinction of race or colour conflicted with the principle of equality before the law of all members of the British Empire (Clark 1981: 200), the Barton government adopted the precedent established in the province of Natal by applying a ‘dictation test’ in any European language to keep out immigrants deemed to be of unacceptable character, nationality or race. With this ruse, the first Australian government successfully depoliticised the contentious policy and handed the screening of immigrants to bureaucrats who could decide at a whim who would be allowed in and who should be shown the door. There was never any doubt in the minds of British Australians at the time or later that the policy was intended to keep out Asians and other undesirables.

The need to ‘defend the white race and western values as the essence of a British Australian national consciousness’ (Jayasuriya 2006a: 14) became even more entrenched in the decades that followed until the Second World War.10 A succession of statements from Australian prime ministers underscored the bipartisan support for the discriminatory immigration policy which sought to maintain British hegemony, racial purity and secure national borders. At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, Prime Minister Billy Hughes fought strenuously against the Japan resolution to include a racial equality clause in the Covenant of the League of Nations. Japanese policy was critical of the immigration restrictions against Japanese (especially in the United States, Canada and Australia). Similarly Prime Minister Stanley Bruce (1923–1929), made the White Australia Policy a centrepiece in his campaign for the 1925 Australian Federal election as leader of the Nationalist Party.

It is necessary that we should determine what are the ideals towards which every Australian would desire to strive. I think those ideals might well be stated as being to secure our national safety, and to ensure the maintenance of our White Australia Policy to continue as an integral portion of the British Empire. We intend to keep this country white and not allow its peoples to be faced with the problems that at present are practically insoluble in many parts of the world. (Bruce 1925: 11)

At the start of World War II, Labor Prime Minister John Curtin (1941–1945) reinforced the message of the White Australia Policy by saying: ‘This country shall r...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Introduction: Social Inclusion: Exploring the Concept
• PART I: IDENTITY AND SOCIAL INCLUSION
• PART II: CITIZENSHIP AND SOCIAL INCLUSION
• PART III: INTERCULTURAL RELATIONS AND SPACES OF SOCIAL INCLUSION
• Bibliography
• Index