Last year, when we were debating the 2009 Defence White Paper at the National Press Club, Paul Dibb wanted to emphasise his dissent from my relatively ambitious view of Australia's strategic objectives in the Asian Century. 'Who do we think we are?' he asked rhetorically.
It was the right question to ask, but not rhetorically. Not far below the surface of every debate about strategic policy lurk questions of national identity, and Graeme Dobell, with his unerring knack for finding the tender spot in any position, has gone right to it with his second post about my recent Quarterly Essay.
In his rather different way, Greg Sheridan went to the same issue in his response to my essay over the weekend. As I've suggested in my response to Greg, I think what drives his evident discomfort with my argument is not simply a difference of view on specific issues. It is his discomfort with the idea that there could be any circumstances in which the US alliance would not be the foundation of Australia's foreign policy. In the end, this reflects his belief, shared by many people, that the US alliance is part of who we are as a country – part of our national identity.
To be clear, I do not argue for the end of the alliance in my essay. I do argue that the circumstances in which the alliance has been so good for us are changing.
We therefore have to reconsider how the alliance works, and whether it works, in the new circumstances we now face. That means we face big choices about the alliance's future, and this is where Sam Huntington and the Clash of Civilisations comes in. Graeme is absolutely right to draw attention to our tendency to conceive these choices in Huntingtonian terms, because it so natural to see the alliance, and Australian identity, through the lens of what Huntington called 'Civilisation'.
Huntington called Australia a 'torn' country in the early 1990s because he believed that, under Keating, Australia was trying to turn its back on its Western civilisational roots to join the Confucian civilisation of our neighbours. I think he was wrong about this – that was not what was happening under Keating.
But he was right to see that the tension between history and geography inherent in our circumstances has always been at the heart of our national story. Our confidence in our future has always depended on our confidence that we need not be torn between history and geography – that we can become a fully engaged part of our region and still retain all that we wish of our traditional affiliations with the North Atlantic world.
This confidence has been easy to sustain over the past few decades. But in my essay I suggest that this has been true only because America has enjoyed uncontested primacy in Asia. We have not had to choose between the US and Asia because our Asian neighbours have chosen the US too. China's rise, by challenging America's primacy, will make this much harder. As the US and China become strategic competitors, the question of whether we have to choose looms again.
As we consider those choices, the key question is not whether the ideas and values and history that we have inherited from the North Atlantic world are vital to our national identity. I take it that they are. The question is whether we can retain that aspect of our identity without being a US ally.
In other words, is the alliance essential to our Western cultural identity? Does cultural connection require strategic alignment? Is it possible for Australia to retain its Western cultural heritage without remaining a strategic dependency of larger Western powers? Would abandoning strategic alignment with the US mean abandoning the Western aspect of our identity?
Two or three decades ago – in the 1970s and 1980s – I think most Australian would have answered 'no' to these questions. Now it is not so clear. The idea of the Anglosphere – an alliance based on culture, or indeed on race — seemed a relic of history until it revived after 9/11. And it may be all too easy to see the emerging strategic competition between the US and China in cultural or civilisational terms, just as Huntington suggested we would.
I think that would be wrong. I think Huntington was mistaken in his basic premise that civilisation, not country, is the key focus of identity and loyalty in the post-Cold War World. I think that the mainspring of strategic competition between the US and China is not culture or civilisation but old-fashioned power politics between states.
The risk is that it remains so easy to dress up power politics in cultural terms. It will be very important to Australia's choices in a more contested Asia to be clear which it is. If the roots of strategic competition in Asia are genuinely cultural, then our alignment with the US is plainly central to our Western cultural identity. If they are national, then our alignment is more culturally neutral.
Australians have always been a little uncertain whether we really are a separate country or simply a branch-office of a broader western supra-national entity — which is how many people see the alliance today. The current idea that the alliance is central to our national identity thus has deep roots. This is what Keith Hancock meant when he wrote, back in 1930, that 'for Australians pride of race comes before love of country'. And what Donald Horne meant when he wrote in 1964, 'Australian nationalism — once strong – is now so hesitant that it no longer achieves self-definition. No one any longer tells Australians who they are...'
