East Asia is key to Australia's survival

East Asia is key to Australia's survival

Stephen FitzGerald argues that coming to terms with its Asian
future is perhaps the greatest challenge yet faced by Australia,
but one which Australians and their leaders have refused to do
thus far.

SINGAPORE: The March 1996 ASEM Meeting was a remarkable event,
for East Asia and for Australia. For the former, it was a meeting
multilateral in form but bilateral in essence, a meeting on equal
terms with the states of the European Union. For Australia, it
had a different significance. ASEM had required East Asia to
begin to define itself as a region, and because definition was
difficult, it came down to definition by exclusion. Australia
applied for inclusion in ASEM as part of the Asian side, but was
excluded.

Whether Australia is subsequently included in ASEM or not, the
portents of this exclusion are enormous: that part of the world
which is completely dominant in Australia's economic,
immigration, tourism, and education flows, and in political and
cultural influence in Australia's regional habitat, was closed to
Australia politically. To be denied participation in the critical
political councils of the region which dominates us economically
is comparable to a colonial status for Australia. Threatening to
Australia's capacity to determine its own future in the short
term, it will, if it persists into the longer term, diminish our
independence and extinguish some defining features of Australian
society.

Yet the challenge for Australia is much more extensive than
inclusion or exclusion in international councils. The challenge
for Australia is to come to terms properly with a region on which
it will depend increasingly in the future, but with which it
shares few cultural commonalities. This is not a matter of form
or comfort: it is a matter of survival.

* Australia and its region, the need for debate:

It is an enormous issue for Australian society, but it has
been barely debated in mainstream public discussion over these
past two decades in which our circumstances have changed so much
as to make Asia the most important fact in our international
relations. I mean debated. There have been policy statements of
course, there has been assertion and declamation, skepticism,
even opposition. But not anything which could be described as
intellectual debate. Any discussion that has occurred has been
almost entirely within the terms and definitions set by
governments, of both sides of politics, which have been for the
most part narrow and near-sighted.

An example is trade. When Australia finally started to make up
its mind in the mid-1980s that its fortunes were somehow tied up
in Asia, it was a decision driven by material concerns. It was a
decision that was easy to "sell", in part because it was
intellectually and emotionally lazy. It is not and will never be
enough to be interested in Asia only because that is where our
trade links lie. Australia's future in Asia needs to be thought
about, intellectualized, in all of its aspects: what Australia
needs to do, and what effect this future will have on Australian
society.

* A powerful East Asia: what place for Australia?

The first step we need to take is to focus on a time-frame
beginning now and extending over about 30 years, when Australia's
regional habitat will come to be dominated by confident,
assertive, "Asianized" East Asian states under the pervasive
influence of China. The United States will not be calling the
shots. China will. The U.S. will still be a major power, but the
balance is changing already, and the influence of China on the
rest of East Asia and on Australia will intensify. I am not
arguing that China should be seen as militarily threatening.
Without acquiring one more weapon or putting one soldier outside
its own territory, and even in the most benign mode, it will have
enormous influence on all of us, on our external environment, but
inevitably domestically. And it will use that influence, as all
countries do.

* This makes East Asia no longer a matter of choice for
Australia. In a sense, the question "Is Australia an Asian
Country?" will be answered by East Asia, not by Australia. The
decision about Australian participation is, whatever we think,
not ours to make. East Asian states will make the definitions and
judge whether Australia will be accepted as part of their club.
This is new for Australia, a country that has previously been
able to assume acceptance by the world's dominant powers. At the
same time, Australians have felt that Asia was something that we
could choose: how to deal with it, and where we found our place
in it. ASEM brought us face to face with the fact that at least
one answer to the question is that, by definition of the Asian
side in ASEM, Australia was not an Asian country. The region
which accounts for two thirds of our trade and is preponderant in
most of our external relations was not in this important context
prepared to accept us.

* Coming to terms with our region:

In another sense, there needs to be an Australian answer to
the question "Is Australia an Asian Country?". Australian society
needs to answer this strongly in the affirmative if it is going
to come to terms with its Asian future. I believe Australia has
already traveled a remarkable distance towards becoming an Asian
country. Asian immigration and the social harmony of migrant
settlement is one of the great success stories of modern
Australia. Australian opinion polls have often shown negative
views about immigration, but the remarkably high rates of
intermarriage tell a different story, as does the general public
acceptance of Asian people and influences at the personal level,
in mainstream Australia, without serious incident. In education,
with our blueprints for the study of Asia and Asian languages, in
our trade and investment, in our tourism, and many other facets
of Australian life, we are now as a community more explicitly
oriented to Asia than many in Asia who would claim this
distinction for their own societies. And we have been a good
regional citizen for half a century, sharing our ideas and
technology and opening our education to participation by people
who now dot the regional landscape and in some places dominate
the professions. In the totality of these things, our society has
done much to make the adjustment to Asia and made us something of
an Asian country.

For Australia, coming to terms with its Asian future will
naturally place society and identity under pressure. The
emergence of the race issue in Australia is a part of this and
is, first and foremost, a domestic, human and moral issue. It is
tragic for Australia if even one person of Asian or Aboriginal
ethnicity suffers one physical or verbal attack as a result. On
this, we need leadership which is quick and decisive in taking a
commanding position on such matters. The rejection of racism must
be sincere: it cannot be that we speak out only because it is
affecting trade or tourism. Why might it affect trade? Because
trade is done by people. The damage which is done to relations is
done to people, and not to statistics, and it is people also who
do politics, and who make decisions, including about us. Sadly,
most of the damage that has been done by the race issue has been
done to Asians in Australia who have rejoiced in their Australian
identity, and to our friends and supporters in Asia, the people
who support us and want us in the Asia club.

The Asia-Australia Institute, which I chair, is dedicated to
seeing Australia included in the Asia club, a job that has two
parts. One aspect is working in the region, with Asian partners,
to develop an intellectual infrastructure for a regional
community in which Australia can be an accepted, equal and fully
participating constituent. The other aspect is to work within
Australia, to help Australian society prepare for its Asian
future.

* The "Australianization" of Australia:

This is also a tough question. Let us be optimistic and assume
that Australia is included in a future East Asian Community.
There still remains a question of whether Australian society can
survive in an East Asian future. One of the reasons we need to
debate the questions of our engagement with Asia is that those
things about Australia's present and future international
circumstances which are entirely new, and for us unknown, raise
questions about the continuation of this society as we know it
now. Those characteristics which make this one of the most open,
tolerant, free, democratic, humanist and pluralist societies on
earth, should still be here and still be as strong in these
respects in the future. The beach on which we wash up on in the
2020s may not be full of unrelieved good. The future requires of
us on one hand a commitment to accommodate a dominant world which
is culturally totally different, yet without compromising what
makes this distinctly Australian democratic society. This is a
watershed in our history and we have to face these questions.

In coming to terms with our Asian future, there is no question
of wanting or needing to abandon these dimensions of Australia.
They are our strength. What we have to do is acquire an
additional, Asian dimension, and get it right - intellectually,
culturally and politically. I know of no Australian seriously
engaged in the pursuit of deeper engagement with Asia who is not
deeply committed to our political culture. I also know of no
Australian involved seriously in this endeavor who is not a small
"n" nationalist. This is partly why I refer to this Asian
dimension of the Australian search for identity as the
"Australianization of Australia". We have to Australianize
ourselves, becoming confident with who we are and how we address
the world, and, as part of this Australianization, "Asianize"
ourselves, in ways that do not compromise Australia.

Part of the task of Australianisation will be the acquisition
of Asian literacy by Australians. Australian leaders will have to
become specialists with specialist skills for dealing with
dominant powers whose history and cultures, languages, political
philosophies, values and ideas, they have not previously studied
in depth, and whose ideas about relations between states may also
be different. Because leaders in Asia have these skills in
respect of us, and this puts us at a disadvantage: we are not
giving ourselves an even chance. We have to start now to be
curious about Asia itself. Intellectually equipped with what we
learn from that, we will be able to address in an informed way
where the engagement will be good for us and where it will not,
where compromise is permissible, and where it is the first step
on a dangerous slope which leads to compromise of things
fundamental.

I believe the prospects for Australia are exciting beyond
imagination. But Australianisation will not just happen. To get
there we have to wrestle with the two sides of our character. We
have to start to be intelligent, intellectual, forward-thinking
and long-term, and not lazy, about ourselves, our values, our
institutions, or our region. We have to take up on our own what
is really hard about this, and not clutch at protectors or a
white man's world now gone or a past which cannot be retrieved.
We have to be a nation of bilingualists, of cultural proteans,
literate in Asia and in much else besides. We have to face hard
choices and make hard decisions about education and ethics and
the economism that eats at our humanism. We have to be Australian
and not European, we have to be quiet not strident, we have to
learn humility, and to listen in silence. We have to care
intensely about the future and survival of this democracy, one of
the oldest in the world, and the preservation of the innate
democratic instinct of its people. We have to find our pilgrim
soul.

Professor Stephen FitzGerald is Chairman of the influential
Asia-Australia Institute and member of the Trends International
Advisory Committee. He is a China scholar and a former Australian
Ambassador to China. He based the above article on his recent
book Is Australia an Asian country? published by Allen & Unwin,
Sydney, Australia.