Country First
Democracy works best at the national level, the Prime Minister reminded us in a landmark speech. Globalists mistakenly equate this with xenophobia, says Nick Cater.
The Prime Minister’s timely defence of national sovereignty in an address to the Lowy Institute was bound to rattle the bars of his critics.
The Guardian accused him of “echoing Donald Trump,” which coming from that newspaper was not meant as a compliment.
Scott Morrison criticised “negative globalism,” the transfer of power from sovereign governments to unaccountable international bureaucracies. The Australian interpreted it as a shot at the UN and its push to set a global agenda on issues such as climate change and refugee policies.
“The world works best when the character and distinctiveness of independent nations is preserved within a framework of mutual respect,” Morrison said. “This includes respecting electoral mandates of their constituencies. We should avoid any reflex towards a negative globalism that coercively seeks to impose a mandate from an often ill defined borderless global community. And worse still, an unaccountable internationalist bureaucracy…
“Only a national government, especially one accountable through the ballot box and the rule of law, can define its national interests. We can never answer to a higher authority than the people of Australia.
“And under my leadership Australia’s international engagement will be squarely driven by Australia’s national interests. To paraphrase former Prime Minister John Howard, as Australians, ‘we will decide our interests and the circumstances in which we seek to pursue them.”
The trend among a subset of educated Australians to see themselves as citizens of the world rather than citizens of Australia has been rising steadily since World War II. In the simplified narrative of the left, the global conflict was driven by raw nationalism. In its crudest form, nationalism equates to xenophobia and racism. The promiscuous use of the word “fascist” by critics of President Trump and recently British Prime Minister Boris Johnson reflects a narrow world view that any world leader who appeals to national pride is playing with fire.
The divide between the elite world view and the rest was recently described by British social commentator David Goodhart as a conflict between “somewheres” and “anywheres”. Somewheres draw their identity from neighbourhood and nationality. Anywheres, by comparison, are members of the exam-passing classes who achieve their identities through education and career success.
In his renowned 1958 essay on the cultural cringe, A.A. Philips noted early signs of anywhere-ism in the estrangement of the Australian intellectual from the life of the country. “I regard the denaturalised intellectual as the Cringe’s unhappiest victim,” he wrote.
Today the phenomena has a far nastier tone. International treaties are promoted by some to be international law that should take precedence over our sovereign parliaments. In the case of the European Union, this is actually the case. Brexit or no Brexit, the law of Britain is now inextricably entwined with the rulings of the European bodies, notably the European Court of Human Rights.
International bodies are inevitably less demographic than national bodies. The decision makers in Europe are the bureaucrats of the European Commission. The European Parliament can merely influence legislation, it cannot initiate it.
The EU’s own research into the allegiance felt by citizens to neighbourhood, nation and the continent of Europe shows that the vast majority of people regard themselves as primarily or exclusive citizens of their country. A mere 2 per cent regard themselves as exclusively citizens of Europe.
Allegiance varies by country and, as we would expect, by age and education. In Britain, for example, 59 per cent of those who finished their education between the ages of 16-19 don’t think of themselves as European at all. A further 34 per cent see themselves as citizens of British or its constituent region first and Europe second.
For Britons who experience higher education, European identity takes on more significance. Barely a quarter (24 per cent) regard themselves as purely British. 62 per cent regard themselves as British first and European second.
The empirical evidence, then, supports the concept of an educated elite who value their nationality less than most of their compatriots or value it not all.
The point to note, however, is that they remain a small minority. Across the EU a mere 11 per cent of those with higher education see themselves as primarily or exclusively European.
A similar study in Australia would, we suspect, reveal the self-proclaimed global citizens to be a tiny minority of the overall population, and overwhelmingly members of the exam-passing classes.
As Saul Bellow once noted in words he attributed to the fictional academic Moses Herzog, “the best-treated, most favoured and intelligent part of any society is often the most ungrateful.”