The guiding theme of this book is the importance of exclusion in the modern state. To be more specific the assumption which underlies the book is that while exclusion played a foundational role in the formation of the modern state marking borders both internal and external to the state, in the state reconstructed on neoliberal economic terms exclusion has become pervasive. It exists not only at the border and demarcating those acceptable within the state from those, the mad, the bad and the shiftless, whom the state confined but there is now a circumstance where to a lesser or greater extent anybody, but especially members of certain marginalised groups, may find themselves excluded. The focus of this book is Australia. In their discussion on the long-lasting impact of Enlightenment values on Australian society, Baden Offord and his colleagues (2014, p. 2) remark that one of the consequences of the country’s settler origins is that ‘cultural priorities that persist rest on a deep fear of the other within (the indigenous) and the other without (generic Asia, the migrant, asylum seeker)’. Here we have a way of understanding why exclusion has been such a prevalent aspect of Australia’s social history even before its reinforcement by neoliberalism.
This book picks over the rubble left by official multiculturalism. As we shall see, multiculturalism in Australia functioned quite differently to the multiculturalism that is enshrined in Canadian law through an act of parliament. We can add that in both cases what has been described as multiculturalism is different again from what has passed for multiculturalism in Europe. Here is Alana Lentin and Gavin Tilley (2011, p. 13) writing about the turn against multiculturalism there:
multiculturalism is widely regarded as a violently failed experiment. The narrative goes something like this. The ‘multicultural fantasy in Europe’ (David Rieff ‘The dream of multiculturalism is over’ New York Times 2005) valorised difference over commonality, cultural particularity over social cohesion, and an apologetic relativism at the expense of shared values and a commitment to liberty of expression, women’s rights and sexual freedom.
In Europe, as Lentin and Tilley (2011, p. 13) go on to write: ‘In what would once have been read as extremist language, [multiculturalism] is regarded as cultural surrender’. Shared values were precisely the foundation of official multiculturalism in Australia and far from it being thought of as cultural surrender, multiculturalism was understood as broadening and deepening the Anglo-Australian culture which remained privileged but that, as a settler society, has always been thought of in Australia as in process.
Australian multiculturalism worked to produce diversity lite, a diversity that functioned in terms of shared values. When Australia sought to increase rapidly its population after the conclusion of World War Two, and achieved this by including in its intake members of national groups not previously considered white enough to gain entry to Australia, it did so with the conviction that, in fact, all these groups were really white. Whiteness was equated with cultural similarity. Multiculturalism’s emphasis on inclusion in the first place only impacted certain groups, those already identified as white. Official multiculturalism was a backwards-looking policy at a time when Australia was being forced by the winds of global change to end its White Australia policy, or what was left of it after it had become increasingly etiolated through the 1960s. Australia in the second decade of the twenty-first century has a very different and more radically diverse population mix from that during the height of official multiculturalism in the 1980s.
As a consequence of its neoliberal restructuring, Australia is now also a nation-state pervaded by exclusion and precarity. Surveillance as a population management technology has been normalised. The state has increasing power thanks to laws which in other circumstances would be associated with states of emergency. The border has become a site where decisions over entry are made in relation to a person’s economic usefulness in the state. Wendy Brown (2010, p. 22) has commented in general terms about the impact of neoliberalism on state governance:
Nation-state sovereignty has been undercut … by neoliberal rationality, which recognizes no sovereign apart from entrepreneurial decision makers (large and small), which displaces legal and political principles (especially liberal commitments to universal inclusion, equality, liberty and the rule of law) with market criteria, and which demotes the political sovereign to managerial status.
Within the Australian state the most excluded are those who least fit the long-established norm of Australianness, those who are identified as black, and Indigenous Australians are a special case as they always have been, and from a non-Christian religion, especially Muslims. In this neoliberal order those most excluded also include people without jobs and private sources of income, that is those reliant on the state for support. Included in this group, often lumped together as the underclass, because of their tendency to be excluded in the economic order, are many of the people identified as black, including Indigenous Australians, and Muslims.
The State and Exclusion
In Discipline and Punish Michel Foucault (1977) wrote about the great confinement that started in the mid-seventeenth century. Foucault’s primary concern was with madness. Roy Porter (1990, p. 47) provides a brief and useful description of Foucault’s argument:
Those whose lives affronted bourgeois rationality—beggars, petty criminals, layabouts, prostitutes—became liable to sequestration higgledy piggledy with the sick and the old, the lame and lunatic. Such problem people, though different from normal citizens, were identical among themselves. Their common denominator was idleness. The mad did not work; those who did not work were the essence of unreason.
We should note here the genealogy of the category Porter constructs through the early nineteenth-century idea of the dangerous class to Marx’s construction of the lumpenproletariat to the neoliberal formation of the underclass. What is confined is also excluded. The groups Porter, following Foucault, lists were all confined within the embryonic modern state. They were all, as Porter notes, different and as such were threatening to the homogeneity of population which characterised the ideological preoccupation with the national membership of modern states.
The new states themselves were sites of confinement, albeit represented increasingly as places of national expression. The Peace of Westphalia was concluded in 1648. It has often been cited as the key moment of transition in the establishment of the modern state, that is the state in which authority within clear borders is absolute and cannot be legitimately challenged by forces from outside the borders. As Derek Croxton (1999, p. 570) puts it: ‘In a system of sovereign states, each recognizes the others as the final authorities within their given territories, and only they can be considered actors within the system’. Sensibly critical of any claim that change occurred as a sudden transformation expressed in the treaties associated with the Peace of Westphalia, Croxton (1999, p. 591) nevertheless concludes: ‘Although no one yet conceived of sovereignty as the recognition of the right of other states to rule their own territory, the increasingly complex diplomatic milieu shows how a multi-polar system was able to develop’. To this we can add Foucault’s insight that confinement was becoming a guiding principle of social order. In terms of the state that involved identifying a homogeneous population, a nation and establishing borders which could be patrolled to manage entry and egress.
When in 1791 Jeremy Bentham compared building his new, disciplinary panoptic prison, founded on surveillance, as being preferable to the transportation of convicts to New South Wales, he was distinguishing two forms of exclusion, either confinement within the state or expulsion from the state. By the late nineteenth century, and especially in the settler colonies, the problem became one of exclusion from entering the state. Alison Bashford and Catie Gilchrist discuss the importance of the restrictive entry laws in the British settler colonies for the 1905 Aliens Act in Britain. The background was the immigration of large numbers of Ashkenazi Jews. As Bashford and Gilchrist (2012, p. 412) write: ‘Retaining distinctive linguistic and religious culture, East End Jewry was perceived by other Londoners as standing strangely apart from the native British population’. Here we find a theme which becomes constant through the twentieth century and into the twenty-first: the fear of difference, of the immigration of individuals who identify as members of a particular group other than that dominant within that particular nation-state. These migrants are felt to threaten the homogeneity of the national population. In Australia one of the first acts passed by the first federal parliament in 1901 was the Immigration Restriction Act. This act, the foundation of what became known as the White Australia policy, included the notorious dictation test which was adopted from a similar provision in Natal and had already been utilised in Western Australia. The dictation test was instituted as a form of racial discrimination disguised as a literacy measurement. The test could be administered at the discretion of the immigration authority. Anybody entering Australia could be asked to write fifty words in a European language of the administrator’s choice, later any language of their choice. In one notorious early case in 1909 the survivors of the shipwreck of the SS Clan Ranald in South Australia were made to take a dictation test which they failed: ‘The 20 lascar seamen, identified as “coloured”, were deemed illegal immigrants and sent to Melbourne to be deported to Colombo on SS Clan McLachlan’ (Tao 2018). The test was finally abolished when the migration policy was revamped in the Revised Migration Act of 1958.
One of the driving concerns of Australian federation was the fear of Chinese migration. Prior to federation individual states had passed legislation specifically limiting the numbers of Chinese allowed to enter. In 1855 Victoria passed An Act to Make Provision for Certain Immigrants with the aim of restricting Chinese immigration and in 1861 the New South Wales legislature pas...