That it was a political achievement is undeniable, and the event has been useful as a point at which to uncover the buried history of national debates, especially around issues of free trade and protection. But it wasn’t an achievement of the political imagination in the same way as the American or French revolutions were, or any occasion of independence in which nationhood was wrested from an oppressor, or brought together by a fusion of demands and possibilities, of the real and the ideal. To unite six colonies founded by the same imperial power on a single continent does not begin to compete with the Bastille or the Long March, and people are well aware of the fact.

The event itself was the least disruptive sort of independence possible — the declaration of limited dominion status, with continued domination by Westminster on matters of trade policy and foreign affairs, and the persistence of the Privy Council as a final court of appeal. Even the timing of the event — the first day of a new century — makes it look more like an exercise in book-keeping rather than nation-making. What was widely understood at the time to be an act of continuity with the British Empire is being retroactively redefined as the first in a chain of events whose logical conclusion is the declaration of a republic.

The ‘Federalists’ are trying to revive a sense of nationhood in the political dimension, by reminding people that part of their identity is a politically constituted one. As global neoliberalism proceeds apace — to the point where it has taken on the neutralised term of ‘globalisation’ — and party politics flows towards a unitary centre, the realm of nationhood has been driven back into the purely symbolic, and attached primarily to sport. The double whammy — the retreat of national political and economic independence, and the expansion of purely symbolic nationalism to fill the vacuum — is far from uniform. The success of One Nation — and its potential rebirth — is indicative that there are social groups for whom a sense of national identity exists in the old style, as a concrete myth fusing political history and symbols in a continuous narrative. Yet their appeal has been largely confined to a rural white population, and they have had little success in gaining a base in the industrial working class (though this will change if there is an economic downturn of any seriousness later in the year).

The ‘branding’ of Australia began in earnest in the 1970s, as a correlate to multiculturalism and the dissolution of an anglo-Celtic hegemonic culture. As other commentators here and elsewhere have noted, the ‘branding’ form of nationalism drew on a number of alleged national traits — an easygoing character, an enthusiasm for the ‘fair go’, a familiarity with striking nature — rather than on an internalised and widely shared national story. In the last decade or so it has been fused with the tourism industry for the sake of international ad campaigns, and played up as a contrast to the revived nationalisms and ethnic myths of the post-Cold war era.

Australia is, in this account, the post-national nation, a respite from the world, a place where people can relate to each other with total transparency, having rid themselves of the baggage of their ethnicity, retaining only that which is pleasantly different, such as cuisine and customs. This sense of the place as a new world destination which — unlike the US — does not impose a history of its own was behind the giddy suggestion that Sydney become the permanent venue for the Olympics, Australia as a place where the world comes to get away from itself. It was an image that was achieved only by a marginalisation of the most concrete and tragic narrative of all, that of Indigenous Australians — the masterstroke of which was the faux-naif ‘wonderland’ style of the opening ceremony.

The world as Alice, fallen into the South, where everything is upside-down and nations mock and satirise their own history at triumphal occasions — it is this sort of thing that Don Watson dubbed the ‘post-modern republic’ during his tenure as eminence brune for Paul Keating. Watson called for an ‘aleatoric, bebop’ republic, an improvised and open-ended form of national self-understanding. Such a nation would go beyond the US in identifying its character with a liberal polity — unlike the US it would not seek to impose a specific type of liberalism on individual citizens, but would foreground pluralism and respect for diverse and divergent cultural ways. The ‘Federalists’ have added a political theme to that vision which, at its most exuberant, amounts to the identification of an ‘Australian genius’ for peaceful nation-making.

Alas, Minerva’s wombat forages at night. The achievement of a post-modern nationalism occurs by the grace of a historical process which dismantles the foundations of the Nation — and the best and worst it can offer — in a fashion more comprehensive than the new nationalists realise. The global neoliberal order and its flows of capital, labour and images intersects with the self in a way that makes possible the post-modern national citizen, someone who understands their particular culture as no more than one way of being human, the equivalent of a preference for strawberry over chocolate. Yet at the same time it creates a different form of relationship between person, society, culture and nation, one in which groundedness plays less of a role.

By ‘groundedness’ of course we mean the material nature of community, not the ideal myths of Nation or Race. Social interdependence, limits to mobility and the particular nature of the locality have historically been key sources of cultural meaning and social being. Crude myths of Nation have always been ‘reverse engineered’ — a unified community invented to legitimise an existing polity. The attempt to create a non-National nation from a fusion of actually existing cultural attributes and pluralist liberal hopes is a worthier project, but one more likely to be defeated by its own paradoxes.

The cultural space within which the new nationalists seek to build can no longer be seen as a ‘wedding-cake’ structure in which a local cultural ground is overlaid with external mediated influences, be they British or American. Many core elements of social and cultural development — mass culture, curriculum, consumption — are now oriented to the development of the person as pre-globalised. Particular national identity comes as a mediated form — one’s flavour — but the core psychological structures are general and universal, the necessary hardware for global mobility and flexible work patterns. Real access to global options may vary, but the principle itself dominates aspirations, meanings and values. In fact those who gain the greatest class mobility from the process — working class children who gain a professional education — are the least likely to have any attachment to particular origins, at least in the first part of their adulthood.

This process of social development yields many paradoxical results. Those most likely to politically sympathise with the aspirations of indigenous people are those least likely to have a real and incommutable relationship to country. Those most opposed to indigenous struggles are more likely to have a — comparatively vestigial — sense of place. The desire for a grounded culture throws up absurdities, such as the search for an ‘Australian’ cuisine, in the absence of bounded cultural practices which bring cuisines into being.

On the ground, the downside of such a process is becoming increasingly visible — the combination of social-economic redundancy and cultural-psychological dysfunction. Politically, it presents us with multiple possibilities and few probabilities. As many have observed, our federal system is a fluid and open-ended form, which could be conducive to the most imaginative political developments. Currently much attention is focused on union with New Zealand — a clear mark that the relationship between culture and politics remains little understood. But there is no reason why other possibilities — the creation of new states to promote a renewed focus on regional and local economies, for example — could not come into play.

Yet there is little chance that they will. The Australian political framework resembles a cicada. The popular enthusiasm that made a constitution have now died away, leaving a constitution resistant to change, ruling a population whose identity is by and large not defined within politics. Thus Australians will stir themselves to reject an elitist model of a republic, but no subsequent positive campaign for an independently elected president takes root.

The hopes that the centenary of Federation would provide a springboard for political renewal are overwhelmingly the hopes of those who still work and think within a mindset that sees politics and history as occupying the same space. That does not mean that campaigns to re-extend the reduced scope of democracy within Australian life will not have some successes. But the causes that will move a mass of people to politics will not only be different to those of a hundred years ago — they will be of a fundamentally different form.

At its most basic level, the republican model of government holds that a community should govern itself. The community is the highest court of appeal, not a distant monarch or deity. As such, its success depends upon citizens taking an active role in public debate. To do so, they must feel that their participation matters.

This was precisely where the ‘Yes’ case failed. Debate, such as it was, was reduced to simplistic sloganeering, a seemingly endless parade of celebrities repeating a sentiment that, if opinion polls are any indicator, the majority of Australians agree with anyway – i.e. that an Australian should be the head of state.

No doubt presenting the ‘Yes’ case in such simple terms was a tactical move, designed to allow for easy media consumption. But in confining debate thus, the republican cause ceased to be republican in anything but the shallowest sense. Absent was any sense of what it might mean to be a citizen in an Australian republic or indeed what sort of nation Australia should be as we enter the twenty-first century. This failure to engage was reflected in the voting patterns, which indicate, quite unequivocally, that the referendum divided Australians between those who feel their involvement in the life of the nation slipping away and those who are seen, rightly or wrongly, as being the ones wrenching it from them: a division that is expressed geographically in a gap between regional and rural Australia on one end of the spectrum and the city centres on the other. In the current issue of Arena Magazine Doug White explores the meaning of the referendum result further, interpreting it as a victory for those excluded from mainstream political processes, and, implictly, a vote in favour of more radical political change.

What was missing from the ‘Yes’ case was any sense of what Benedict Anderson recently referred to as the nation as a ‘common project’. Anderson’s understanding of the nation as a ‘common project’ suggests an idea of the active involvement of different groups in an ongoing process of dialogue and negotiation, through which the nation is continuously enacted and re-enacted, made and re-made. It is this shared involvement in the project of the nation that is held in common by its members.

Anderson contrasts this conception of the nation with another quite different idea: the nation as an ‘inheritance’, an unchanging ‘thing’ from the past to be preserved and protected. Where the nation is conceived as an inheritance, Anderson argues, the will to preserve it takes over as the prime expression of nationalism, often creating divisions and, all too often, violence among rival claimants. By contrast, the idea of the nation as a common project allows for diverse, even unexpected expressions of nationalism. Anderson suggests, for example, that shame at the actions of one’s nation can be an indication of a deep nationalist sentiment – the reason being that members of a common project are morally culpable for anything done in its name, even if they personally had no hand in it. In Anderson’s words:

No one can be a true nationalist who is incapable of feeling ‘ashamed’ if her state or government commits crimes, including those against her fellow citizens. Although she has done nothing individually that is bad, as a member of the common project, she will feel morally implicated in everything done in that project’s name.

 

In ‘official’ pronouncements of Australian nationalism and definitions of the national interest, shame is a scarce resource. Look no further than Paul Keating’s recent apologetics for the Indonesian Government. Keating argued that John Howard had single-handedly created the conditions for militia violence in Timor, by sending a letter to then President Habibie pressuring him to deliver greater autonomy to East Timor. So upset by the letter was Habibie, according to Keating, that he announced the referendum on independence prematurely, without consideration for the likely violent consequences. Keating claimed that Howard’s letter was motivated by populist opportunism, and in pressuring Indonesia thus, he had put the Timorese people and Australia’s ‘national interest’ at risk.

But whose interests are we talking about here? Certainly not the Timorese who, after years of oppression at the hands of Indonesian military forces, voted overwhelmingly for independence. Neither was Keating expressing the interests of the hundreds of thousands of Australians who over the years and months have worked and rallied in support of the Timorese cause, whose membership in the ‘common project’ of Australia has left them ashamed and angry at the role successive Australian governments have played in arming and training the Indonesian military forces whose links with militia forces are now beyond dispute.

The four thousand people who packed Melbourne’s St Patrick’s Cathedral in celebration of East Timor’s newly won independence, as described by Louise Byrne in the current issue of Arena Magazine, are a living embodiment of this common project, their differences in belief and politics overshadowed by their disgust at Australia’s record in Timor.

By contrast, Keating’s remarks demonstrate an unwillingness to be involved. His comments reflect nothing more than a desire to protect his own place in history, even if that means preserving the shameful legacy he and others have bequeathed to the nation. Moreover, the feebleness of Keating’s analysis suggests that it was borne out of desperation – an attempt to play down the contribution of two decades of Australian aid, training and support to Indonesian military forces in fuelling the current situation in East Timor, thereby absolving himself and his Government of any moral culpability.

The flip-side of Keating’s recalcitrance over Timor is his successor’s continuing inability to offer a genuine apology to the stolen generation. John Howard famously dismisses calls for an apology as the product of ‘a black arm-band view of history’. Considering Anderson’s view, however, the ‘black arm-band view of history’ that Howard holds with such contempt, suggests a deep commitment to Australia.

Howard’s unwillingness to enter into a more complex engagement with Australia’s past (and thus its present and future) stems from a shallow involvement with the nation. Howard’s view does not allow for questioning, or indeed shame at the dispossession and oppression of indigenous people, since this would tarnish and thus devalue the inheritance. All that can be permitted are a few carefully selected ornaments from Australia’s past to give the appearance of involvement: Menzies’ desk, ‘The Don’, or an Akubra at the weekend. Anything more substantive than this eternal parade of the national furniture is ruled out as un-Australian.

There are, however, other more productive ways of engaging with Australia’s past. Graeme Byrne’s careful deconstruction of the national mythology surrounding the Snowy River Hydro-Electric Scheme in the current issue of Arena Magazine suggests one example. Byrne’s analysis de-stabilises several of the cultural meanings associated with the Snowy, highlighting the exclusions of history, politics and culture upon which they are built. In complicating the Snowy Scheme’s place in Australia’s national mythology, Byrne’s analysis shows the darker side of the Scheme, particularly the shameful history of industrial and environmental exploitation. Far from destroying the place of the Scheme in national mythology, however, Byrne’s more complex interpretation suggests how it might be reinvented as an example of an alternative model of national development and nation-building in which both pride and shame have equal place.

What does all this have to do with the republic? Simply this: if an Australian republic is to be worthwhile, and seen as such, it must address the hard questions that come with deep engagement with Australia as a common project. Republicans cannot afford a surface encounter with the nation, limited to media-friendly slogans. The republic debate needs to encompass and address more difficult issues, from the dispossession of indigenous people to the reconstitution of local community by processes of globalisation. If it does not, the debate over the head of state will appear to most Australians, quite rightly, as a minor and largely irrelevant quibble between rival claimants to the national estate – the only difference between them being that one wants to instal a president where at present there is a queen.