Page 144 - On Not Speaking Chinese Living Between Asia and the West

RACIAL/SPATIAL ANXIETY

established in a time when European imperialism was at the height of its world
hegemony, and when Australians could count on ‘a predominant European
influence interposed between themselves and “Asia”’ (Lowe 1997: 1). But clinging
to the idea of a White Australia became more and more untenable as the colonial
world was dismantled and Asian assertiveness became stronger. As Lowe (ibid.)
remarks, ‘What Robert Menzies . . . described in 1935 as a strong sense of “imperial
destiny”, came under pressure – not in any gradual or easily discernible way, but
with shocks and jolts which undermined assumptions about Australia’s role and
identity in international affairs.’ Little could Menzies have known that by the 1990s,
Australian elites would imagine national survival and prosperity not in terms of
protection from ‘Asia’, but in terms of becoming integrated with ‘Asia’!
The rising global importance of East and South-East Asia in the last decades of
the twentieth century has been of particular significance to Australia, especially
in economic terms. In this context governments have greatly welcomed the role
of Asian migrants within Australia, who are seen as human assets providing the
contacts, linguistic skills and cultural knowledge to promote Australia’s (primarily
economic) ‘integration with Asia’. There has been an overwhelming consensus
among economists, politicians and business leaders that Australia’s future ‘lies in
Asia’, something not diminished by the economic crisis which swept across the
region in the latter half of the 1990s. In other words, for Australia the globalization
of the world economy has primarily meant an ‘Asianization’: as global capitalism
operates increasingly through the creation of regional alignments, Australia found
itself excluded from ‘Europe’ (or the European Union), on the one hand, and
from ‘America’ (or NAFTA), on the other, Australia had no choice but to attempt
to define itself as ‘a part of Asia’ (as has been evidenced in Australia’s leading role
in the establishment of APEC, the Asia Pacific Economic Forum).
This geo-economic imperative has necessitated a fundamental transformation in
the way Australians perceive the place of their own country in the world. Australia’s
traditionally dominant self-image as a white European enclave, which implied a
denial and disavowal of its actual physical location at the edge of a world region
much more proximate in geographical terms, but alien, unfamiliar and generally
considered inferior in cultural terms, has gradually become an anachronism. It is
for this reason that the rising power of ‘Asia’ poses such a challenge for Australia,
not just in economic terms but, more importantly, in cultural and psychic terms.
After all, ‘Asia’ used to stand for that which was to be emphatically excluded from
the Australian imagined community, and whose otherness – that of its people,
cultures, its societies – was to be kept at bay at all cost, not allowed to contaminate
the white national self. To represent ‘Asia’ now as the inescapable destiny for
Australia, requires an enormous adjustment in the national sense of self. This is
a not ironic turn of events which most Australians have hardly come to terms with.
Indeed, it is the spectre of ‘Asianization’ – an ill-defined but widely used term
in Australian public debate whenever the future of the nation is discussed – which
is central to the politics of fear expressed in the discourse of Hansonism. As Hanson
herself succinctly put it: ‘I don’t want to be Asianised.’ The fear, then, is about

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