Justifying Multiculturalism: Social Justice, Diversity and National Identity in Australia and New Zealand
Multiculturalism has been criticised for emphasising cultural recognition over resource redistribution for minority cultural and ethnic groups. Moreover, critics argue that cultural diversity fails to provide enough common ground upon which to sustain civic nationalism. This paper examines the development of multiculturalist and biculturalist policies in Australia and New Zealand, and argues that these have in fact been justified in terms of a negotiated balance between two civic values: the value of diverse cultural expression, and social justice understood in egalitarian terms. The tension between these values has shaped the debate around multiculturalism in both cases. Both the social justice and value of cultural diversity arguments are deployed to reinforce conceptions of national identity in Australia and New Zealand.
The Politics of Identity in Australia: Immigration and National Identity: Multiculturalism
National governments have usually had first claim on the right to form national identities. In seeking votes or public support for their policies, political leaders have commonly made reference to national identity, as it was thought to be or as it could become. For example, in April 1993, newly elected Labor Prime Minister Paul Keating (1993e) argued that ‘Australia will be taken more seriously as a player in regional affairs if we are clear about our identity and demonstrate that we really mean to stand on our own feet practically and psychologically’. The first Australian prime minister to advocate a republic, he related his position to those demographic changes producing an Australia ‘where a growing proportion of the population has few if any ties with the United Kingdom; where our future increasingly lies within our own region; and where our identity as a nation is no longer derivative but our own’ (Keating 1993e). This eminently rational approach does, however, beg the question of whether governments can develop a clear and coherent identity in a society with many origins, and whether indeed they ought to do so. Australian governments have typically sought to shape and reshape national identity by two means. First, they have set restrictions and conditions upon foreign immigration into the country. Second, they have set criteria for granting citizenship and have framed domestic policies around such principles as integration or assimilation by which it was hoped to achieve social harmony, or even social justice.
German Ideology: From France to Germany and Back
This volume is based on Louis Dumont's many years of research into the development of individualism in Western culture. A sequel to "From Mandeville to Marx", in which Dumont established the primacy of economic ideology in European society, the book turns to the different national forms of the modern ideology of economic individualism. By means of a detailed comparison of France and Germany, it demonstrates that the French and German notions of individualism are far from equivalent. Dumont focuses on the question of whether personhood or national ideology is the defining character of the individual. He carefully studies the development of German nationalism and individualism in the work of Troeltsch, Thomas Mann, Goethe and others, and compares this with the French ideas of equality and individualism formed during the Revolution. For the French, Dumont demonstrates, an individual is a person first and, by virtue of being a person, a Frenchman second. For the Germans, on the other hand, an individual is a member of the German nation above all, and only by virtue of being German is one a person. Although the immediate comparison is between France and Germany, Dumont's comparative anthropological approach also seeks to shed light on European culture as a whole and offers a reinterpretation of Western ideology and the notion of the individual.