Page 131 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

NEGOTIATING MULTICULTURALISM

a solution to the refugee problem. In short, the opening up of Australia to non-
European – especially Asian – new settlers and its dramatic implications for the
nation’s racial and ethnic make-up were in an important sense a not-quite-intended
consequence of international pressure; it was a sign of the impact of globalization,
of the increasing interdependence and entanglement of nations and states in the
integrated world system and ‘family of nations’ that were slowly emerging after
World War Two.
These developments took place without the existence of active popular
consensus. There was, at most, a grudging acceptance, a submission to powerlessless
in the face of overwhelming, external influences. Indeed, one of the most prominent
elements in the history of immigration in Australia has been the persistent unease
on the part of policy-makers and others about adverse ‘public opinion’, and the
perceived need not to ‘alarm’ the general public by letting ‘too many’ refugees and
other (Asian) immigrants in. In other words, the Australian people were constructed
as generally incapable of coping if the changes were introduced too rapidly –
a ‘fact’ corroborated by opinion polls which regularly asked people whether ‘too
many’ Asians were allowed into the country (see Mackie 1997: 13–18). Politicians
are ever mindful of a possible electoral backlash and therefore have generally avoided
exhibiting active political leadership on the issue. As a result, as Nancy Viviani
(1996: 11) has observed, ‘politicans and bureaucrats became hostage to their own
reinforcement of an adverse and divisive contest of public opinion’. As no credible
narratives were presented to people to come to terms with these developments,
those feeling uncomfortable were left to themselves in trying to understand why
their beloved, old ‘white Australia’ should be abandoned and why, for the matter,
their political leaders had abandoned them. By the 1990s, government officials and
the cosmopolitan elite more generally simply sang the praises of ‘cultural diversity’
and ‘tolerance’, and ignored popular disquiet which, as we have seen, was regularly
evidenced in opinion polls and popular controversies.
Benedict Anderson (1991: 6) once made the useful remark that national
communities are ‘to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the
style in which they are imagined’. To this we can add that some nations may, in
the course of their history, be compelled to change the style in which they imagine
themselves as a national community. Think, say, of modern Germany, where after
the humiliating experience of Hitler’s Nazism and the subsequent erection of the
Berlin Wall, not to mention the latter’s ‘fall’ many decades later, Germans had to
constantly readjust to new meanings of being German. Think, to give a very
different example, Taiwan, where the older idea of being part of a larger ‘Chinese’
nation has been replaced slowly by a much more vigorous and assertive sense of
being a separate, Taiwanese nation. Or South Africa, where the demise of apartheid
has ushered in a fundamental transformation of South African nationhood from
a white supremacist to a ‘multiracial’ imagined community. In Australia, a similar
transformation was designed in a less dramatic fashion, but it is fair to say that the
end of the White Australia policy signified a monumental, state-led change in
the style the Australian nation was to be imagined.

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