Gregory Rodriguez: Australia's Identity Crisis Keeps Resurfacing
[Gregory Rodriguez is an Irvine Senior Fellow and Director of the California Fellows Program at New America Foundation, a non-partisan public policy institute.]
In the mid-1990s, Australia's then-Prime Minister John Howard sought to quash his nation's "perpetual seminar on … national identity" by insisting, as he later said, that his countrymen never really "had any doubt as to what their identity was." A little more than a decade later, however, there are plenty of signs that Howard overstated the case....
It used to be easier. From the time six separate British self-governing colonies formed the Australian commonwealth in 1901, the country's national identity was bound up with Britain's. Robert Menzies, Australia's longest-serving prime minister, famously described himself as being "British to his bootstraps."
But after World War II, with the decline and contraction of the British Empire, Australians began to see the United States as their main ally. By the early 1960s, forward-thinking business and political leaders were also reimagining an Australian future without any "imperial" protector. In 1962, the nation's leading business newspaper, the Australian Financial Review, went so far as to suggest that geography ought to play a larger role than colonial heritage in the national conversation. Australians "may have to stop thinking about Britain as 'home' and start thinking urgently about getting to know very much more of our Asian neighbors' needs."...
Read entire article at LA Times
In the mid-1990s, Australia's then-Prime Minister John Howard sought to quash his nation's "perpetual seminar on … national identity" by insisting, as he later said, that his countrymen never really "had any doubt as to what their identity was." A little more than a decade later, however, there are plenty of signs that Howard overstated the case....
It used to be easier. From the time six separate British self-governing colonies formed the Australian commonwealth in 1901, the country's national identity was bound up with Britain's. Robert Menzies, Australia's longest-serving prime minister, famously described himself as being "British to his bootstraps."
But after World War II, with the decline and contraction of the British Empire, Australians began to see the United States as their main ally. By the early 1960s, forward-thinking business and political leaders were also reimagining an Australian future without any "imperial" protector. In 1962, the nation's leading business newspaper, the Australian Financial Review, went so far as to suggest that geography ought to play a larger role than colonial heritage in the national conversation. Australians "may have to stop thinking about Britain as 'home' and start thinking urgently about getting to know very much more of our Asian neighbors' needs."...