The nation & the intellectual left.

In December 2005, some of Sydney's surfing beaches were sites of what politicians and the press called "race riots." After a gang of Lebanese Muslim youths had assaulted a volunteer lifeguard at Cronulla Beach, a gang of Anglo-Australian youths tried to assault a number of young Lebanese men, but police arrived in time to minimize the violence. The following night, a convoy of one hundred cars driven by Lebanese Muslim youths drove across the city to Maroubra Beach where they spent a considerable time vandalizing property and parked vehicles. Police arrested many of the Anglo-Australians but very few of the Lebanese rioters. Indeed, the police hierarchy told its officers not to interfere with the Lebanese motor convoy lest their actions inflame the situation. Nonetheless, the immediate police response at Cronulla did mean that the violence was contained to three days and never extended beyond the beachfronts of two suburbs. Compared to the riots by Muslim youths that swept across France last October and November, it was a minor and comparatively bloodless affair. From the point of view of most Sydney residents, its most disturbing feature was the obviously political decision by the police to adopt a hands-off policy towards Muslims who were clearly breaking the law.

You would get a different impression if you paid attention to the left-wing intelligentsia. In the op-ed commentaries in the press and the journal articles that followed, Australian academics largely echoed one another in condemning the Anglo-Australian youths involved and in arguing that their actions were yet another manifestation of the alarming and deeply-entrenched racist nationalism that has infected their country since its foundation. Writing in the Melbourne Age, the feminist historian Marilyn Lake compared the Anglo-Australians to "the lynch mobs in the American south." She mocked a statement by the Commissioner of Police that these youths were un-Australian. "What is un-Australian about calling for racial exclusion in the name of the nation?" she asked. "Is not racial exclusion a deep part of our heritage, as traditional an Australian value as mateship?"

This thesis is widely propagated among the academic Left. At a conference commemorating the centenary of Federation in 2001, the politics professor Robert Manne declared the nation created in 1901 was an expression of late nineteenth-century Western racism. For more than a decade now, the standard university textbook on Australian nationalism and multiculturalism, Mistaken Identity, has argued that Australia excludes from participation all those people who are not of British stock. Hence, this book's authors argue, "the concept of the nation has become ideological and exclusionary, failing to embrace most of the population." Indeed, to use the very adjective "Australian" to describe such a diverse population, they argue, is to deploy a term that is racist. "We do not need a new ideology of nationhood," they say. "We need to transcend the nation, as an increasingly obsolete relic of early industrialism. Our aim must be community without nation."

These authors are echoing an analysis that is now widespread among the academic Left throughout the world. The American historian Philip Yale Nicholson summed it up in his 1999 book Who Do We Think We Are? Race and Nation in the Modern World. Nicholson argued that the relationship between race and nation was the central political connection of the modern era. This combination, he wrote, has been responsible for all the major problems of the last two centuries: imperialist rivalries, foreign conquests, slavery, mass murder and every possible form of degradation and exploitation. Moreover, the destructive force of nation and race is still alive and well today. Nicholson writes:

 
   The nation is the modern tribe or gang; its 
   flag and race are its colors and clan; its laws 
   define it and separate its people among themselves 
   and from each other. There can be no 
   racism without nationalism, and no race 
   without a nation. Race is defined by national 
   law and depends on that law. 

Hence, he says- as long as there is no effective international law, all these problems will escalate.

Since the nineteenth century, the intellectual Left has consistently supported internationalism above nationalism. But there is a sharp difference between the traditional and the recent Left. The old Marxist Left thought the major social division was between classes. It believed the nation was the creation of the commercial middle classes. Marxism ...