Does Australia have an identity problem?(Australia)

THIS IS A QUESTION that would have interested Robert Gordon Menzies, but would not have troubled him. That's one of the things I like about him. He was robust. In the events of 1956, in which he was involved, my sometime colleague Elie Kedourie was trying to analyse what had happened to the British ethos since its late great imperial days, and he hit upon the formula: "scrupulosity without scruple". A kind of finicky and self-indulgent moral sentiment had taken over from the solid moral certainties of earlier centuries. Even in 1956, the damp smell of moralism (that is, sentimental self-preoccupation with moral abstractions) was already eating into the solid oak of our inheritance.

Menzies balanced, as politicians must, morality and reality. It helped that he was amused by the world and quick-witted. A famous story illustrates the point: just after the 1949 election that took him back to the prime ministership, he was approached by a young journalist--"Please sir, now that you have won, will you be answerable to the vested interest that supports you?" "Young man," replied Menzies, "please leave my wife out of this."

My question might take us in a variety of directions. It might lead us to wonder whether Donald Bradman ever pondered his identity as an Australian? Or Gladys Moncrieff? Or great Australians like Phar Lap? But these would be absurd questions. I think of myself as an Australian yet I was born in New Zealand and have lived most of my life in London. So I am certainly not likely to be dogmatic about identity. In any case, my concern is with Australia's national identity, and the intellectual game I am playing is philosophical, philosophy being the discipline that searches for coherence amid the messy contingencies of our actual life.

Philosophy begins in irritation--yes, I know, the Greeks said "wonder" but irritation is often more powerful. I have been irritated by the tendency of modern politicians, publicists and journalists to instruct us about our national identity, and in this way to control the way we behave. "Britain is essentially European" or "Britain has a proud tradition of welcoming asylum seekers" or "Australia is an Asian country" or "The mark of a society or a civilisation is how it treats its most vulnerable people"--that sort of thing. This kind of remark is, of course, how we moralise children, communicating to them our attitudes to types of moral conduct identified as "friendly", "thieving", "lying" "courageous" and so on, but this kind of tutoring does not belong in political discussion.

We may set up the problem that concerns me as follows: individuals sometimes suffer from a disorder popularly known as an "identity crisis" and the result is that they can no longer function properly as persons. It might seem to follow from this that if they were able to recover their identity they would be restored to rationality. We might then by analogy transfer this situation to the national arena. In these terms, it might seem that disagreement about public policy--foreign relations, constitutional issues, multiculturalism--might be symptomatic of the dreaded identity crisis occurring not in an individual but in a state.

The Solution might then seem to be to face directly the question: What actually is the British, or Australian, or Iraqi identity, in national terms? And I have added "Iraqi" to this list in order to make a very important point about the concept. The Iraqis don't have a national identity in this sense, because they have no tradition as a state in which a government represents the national will. Indeed, nothing in Iraqi government corresponds to anything that could be described as a "national will" in Iraq. The same is true of many other newly minted states. National identity is thus a concept that has emerged over the centuries from the Westphalian idea of an international society.

Further, there is an interesting logical feature of identity statements. "A good man for a tiger shoot" was often a way of commending a man in the Indian raj, and it means a judgment that Carruthers would not fling down his gun in panic at the first appearance of a roaring tiger. But this characterisation could only be sensibly based on how Carruthers had actually conducted himself in earlier situations, or on a judgment about how he probably would. Identity statements are important to outsiders having to deal with the fact that people behave in different ways, and some are more reliable than others. We need to find something reliable about others, even if it is only David Niven's judgment about Errol Flynn: that the one thing you could rely on was that Errol would let you down. And self-ascriptions about identity are largely valueless. Carruthers saying "I am a good man for a tiger shoot" is not a good reason to embark on the adventure. The man who describes Iago as "honest" throughout Othello is Iago himself, not a good source of wisdom. The basic logical point about identity statements is thus that they are the consequences of action, not the cause of it. As Napoleon used to put it: on s'engage, puis on volt.