Comments on: The welcome demise of literary protectionism

By: Terje (tay-a)

Terje (tay-a) — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 04:49:17 +0000

AndrewE - not withstanding the fact that the two words have different meanings, near identical things will be described by either alternative depending on prejudice about which regionalism is superior. If you ran a campaign in NSW saying “buy NSW bananas, don’t let Queenslanders steal our jobs” then it would be called parochial more often than patriotic. However if you inserted “Australia” for “NSW” and “The Phillipines” for Queensland then I’d expect an inversion in the descriptor most often selected.

Likewise in the EU we see lots of criticism of the common currency as something that violates sovereignty whilst in the USA it is more likely seen as an essence of sovereignty. In my view there are more relevant ways to consider the idea in either domain but if upholding or undermining sovereignty spins an argument a certain way then people happily invoke it.

Ultimately nationhood is one of several institutional structures that we use to build functional societies. It is not to be trivialised but neither should it be raised up high above every other consideration of what makes for a just society.

By: Andrew Elder

Andrew Elder — Tue, 24 Jul 2007 03:46:05 +0000

David, the political activism surrounding Federation was very strong on the notion that being Australian = British. The most committed opponents of Federation were those who liked their Britishness neat rather than those wittering on about the wearing o’ the green, or those other nationalities so few in number they’d have been represented by asterisks if there were modern polling in 1901. Menzies (born 1894) was a man of his time in the way that Howard is often regarded as a man of the 1950s.
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Terje, parochialism and patriotism are not interchangeable, and to gloss over these different words is to confuse the difference between being simplifying and being simplistic. Its as the possessive of “it” doesn’t require an apostrophe - and no, you can’t deregulate punctuation because there is no state agency which maintains it.

By: Andrew Norton

Andrew Norton — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 23:24:46 +0000

DR - I didn’t say everyone. Britishness was powerful between European settlement and the 1950s, which of course covers the period in which federation occurred. It co-existed with a developing Australian identity for a long time, with the Australian identity becoming clearly dominant in the post-WW2 period.

By: David Rubie

David Rubie — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 23:09:30 +0000

Andrew Norton wrote:
In Australia, the sense of most people that they were all British also helped overcome parochial divisions.
Eh? At what point in our history did this happen? When did the Irish Catholics turn British instead of Australian? How about the Greek and Italian migrants? The Vietnamese? The Serbs? The Croats?

The Menzies, moist eyed, newsreel version of Australia might look British to her bootstraps, but the lived experience of the waves of migrants was vastly different - they became Australians in a very identifiable and culturally distinct manner. The phrase “pommy bastard” was invented here, after all.

By: Andrew Norton

Andrew Norton — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 21:32:53 +0000

Though nationalism has obvious logical tensions with the universalism often found in liberalism, in practice it can have positive effects in people changing their idea of who they think of as ‘foreign’ whose trade should be restricted. Arguably, it is easier to create national identity in immigrant countries like the US or Australia, where strong and distinct local identities have had less time to develop (though obviously there was an important north-south divide in the US). In Australia, the sense of most people that they were all British also helped overcome parochial divisions. Given the long-established identities in Europe, a European identity will take a long time to develop. But 70 years ago what we have now would have been hard to imagine.

By: Terje Petersen

Terje Petersen — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 14:37:33 +0000

But in the past it has been a genuine attempt to create a strong national identity that would replace or at least sit over local identities.

Was this a positive thing or just a different form of white elephant?

If somebody says that a policy or position is good because it looks after the interest of Queenslanders then they are being parochial. However if somebody says that a policy or position is good because it looks after the interests of Australians then they are being patriotic. We have this whole swag of spin words designed to denograte one form of regionalism in favour of another. We use these words to punish the out of favour regionalism and reward the preferred form of regionalism.

The deliberate forging of new regional identities is essentially social of cultural engineering. It may be a good outcome in some contexts and sometimes it will emerge spontaneously as an outflow of other events. However it is not really an end that I think governments should pursue merely for the sake of it. I think things probably work better when central governments expect that they will need to work hard to maintain our collective loyalty.

As it happens I think that the EU is forging it’s own identity much as the USA did in an earlier era. However I hope that they still manage to hold onto some of their parochialism.

By: Andrew Norton

Andrew Norton — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 11:25:27 +0000

Terje - These days nation-building is just another excuse to tax us to pay for white elephant projects. But in the past it has been a genuine attempt to create a strong national identity that would replace or at least sit over local identities. Many people in Europe would like that to happen there, but ‘Europe’ is still a geographic area and a bureaucratic entity, rather than something that secures the loyalties nations still secure. That’s why I think it is closer to globalisation, which breaks down trade and other barriers, while maintaining separate national identities, than nation-building.

By: Terje (tay-a)

Terje (tay-a) — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 09:23:53 +0000

I think you are quibbling over semantics. Surely “nation building” is just a slogan used to get the job done. All the US states opening up trade and enacting free movement with eachother was globalisation in my book even if those things can also travel under the banner of nation building. The EU simply chooses different semantics for the same thing because the concept of national identity is already well engrained in the EU. They just use alternate slogans to get the job done. And they have in many ways done a better job because much of the political power over taxation, spending and the military remains away from the centre and that decentralisation is more heavily institutionalised via the single state veto in these areas. Even the fact that there is no common national identity works well for the EU as nobody there complains about the EU minimum wage being zero whilst in the USA loads of commentators get excited about the federal minimum being too low.

Of course many EU nations are still burdened by the legacy of socialist thinking and it will take time for tax competition and free movement to work their magic.

By: Andrew Norton

Andrew Norton — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 07:37:50 +0000

Terje - Yes, though that was nation-building rather than globalisation. Ditto the unification of the six Australian colonies (though they remained part of the global British empire), and past unification of smaller European political units into the modern European nation-states.

By: Terje (say tay-a)

Terje (say tay-a) — Mon, 23 Jul 2007 07:02:46 +0000

It is the most advanced in the globalisation process, of ending artificial barriers between sovereign nations.

The USA ended most of the artificial barriers between it’s formerly sovereign states long, long ago. The people of California can drive all the way to New York without needing a passport of any form. And they can work or shop freely anywhere in between. And they have been doing this for eons.

However the EU is better than the USA in the sense that the EU still has decentralised defence forces (organised milita), little in the way of centralised taxation or spending, no centrally determined minimum wage, and veto rights for individual sovereign states to help prevent the central governing body ever having the power to implementing any of these things. Mean while they get the benfits of labour mobility, a common currency, free internal trade, and tax competition.