The people next door: Australia and the Asian crisis.

• Author: Jones, Eric

Australia is the nearest Western country to that great bonfire of the vanities, the Asian crisis. The fear is that it may also be the most combustible.

The extent of Australian dismay at this state of affairs can be understood only by reflecting on how Australia long ago set about repelling influences from Asia and denying its proximity to that continent; how comparatively recent it is that the country woke from its Eurocentric dreamtime; how uncritical fashionable opinion was in proclaiming the new dawn of Australia's intimacy, if not identification, with an emergent and dynamic Asia; and how ambiguous the new relationship has in fact proved to be. A brief recapitulation of some salient features of Australia's history over the last century will aid such understanding.

As Australians moved from being the inhabitants of a collection of colonies to being the citizens of an independent state, a run of shocks - lasting from the depression of the 1890s to the slump of the 1930s - drove in on themselves a people who had once been innovative and enterprising. Among the responses to these events was what historians have dubbed the "Australian Settlement", a tacit pact between labor and capital that institutionalized protectionism, high-wage unionism, and the White Australia policy. Dependence on Pacific Islander and Asian labor was forsworn. Australians schooled themselves to be oblivious to Asia.

Hence the Second World War found Australia thoroughly unprepared for Japan's drive into its backyard, and not solely in terms of material unpreparedness. There were few Australians who knew anything about Asia. As their lives had been devoted to a systematic denial of the fact that their land was located at the southern extremity of Southeast Asia, they were caught flat-footed. Victory in that war made surprisingly little difference to all this. Import substitution in manufacturing was promoted, but the country really lived, in the phrase of the time, "on the sheep's back." Good living standards were sustained by high prices for the minerals and agricultural commodities that Australia exported, notably to Britain. "Asia" remained scarcely more than a string of ports-of-call for P&O liners on the long voyage "home" to Southampton.

Profound awakening came only in the Whitlam years of the early 1970s. Among the many reasons for this was the urge of the young to participate in the radical social and cultural changes then taking place in Britain and the United States. Yet once Britain defected to the shelter of the Common Market in 1973, the only markets that could sustain the Australian economy were in the newly industrializing parts of Asia, notably Japan. Neither of these factors should obscure the genuine liberalization achieved by the Australian Labor Party government of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, who set about reducing tariffs and induced the unions - urban New Class voters were easier to persuade - to abandon remaining elements in the already-eroding White Australia component of the Australian Settlement.

From the mid-1970s on, Asian immigrants began arriving in some numbers, and students in far greater numbers than before, with no significant social friction. Today, one in twenty of the population is of Asian origin. Although older white Australians remain concerned about what they perceive as the unwillingness of Asian immigrants to assimilate, opposition to immigration was not politicized until recently, rising and falling with the rate of unemployment rather than the size of the intake. Australia's large cities became quite happily integrated, as they remain: a 1998 survey of 7,000 fifteen and sixteen year-olds has found fewer than 1 percent willing to express strong racial prejudices. Australian companies switched their trade to such an extent that Japan and South Korea became the country's first and second trading partners. The Asian affiliation of trade became gospel and subsequent Liberal (i.e., conservative) oppositions or governments did not reject it.

Fast forward now to 1991-96, when another Labor prime minister, Paul Keating, decided to make his government the vehicle for a crusade to "Asianize" the country. This campaign was curious. Keating's abrasive style and temperament could scarcely have been further removed from those of Asia's leaders. Nor - as it eventually transpired - could "becoming Asian" and accepting even larger numbers of Asian immigrants have been further from the minds of many older, less-educated, or rural Australians. As this has become clear, fear of an electoral backlash against the intended (or pretended) transfer of cultural allegiance from West to East has had the unintended and ironic effect of putting lead weights in the saddle bags of current policy toward Asia and Asian immigrants.

In reality, Keating's "Asianization" had less to do with the change mooted than with altering the balance of domestic political power. Almost certainly it was a partly heartfelt, partly opportunistic bow to the realities of the region and attractions of the growing markets to which Australia found itself neighbor. Beyond that, the move seems to have been an effort by left-wing city elites to part the country from its English heritage, which is felt to favor conservatism and the conservative political parties. A current example of the same radical project is the Republican movement, which, to judge from the almost laughably unspecific plans put to a Constitutional Convention in February 1998, is also a mixture of negative endeavor - anti-heritage - and elite power play rather than having seriously to do with removing the authority of the English Crown over Australians. Royal power long ago vanished. In similar fashion, as far as "Asianization" went, no one ever described in detail what was intended, and it is indicative that few who rode the bandwagon bothered to learn a single Asian language. If the program was, as I believe, more facade than reality, it would be easy to replace in its turn, though a full retreat from engagement with Asia is unlikely. Australia's alternatives to Asian markets are limited, and, after all, these markets have contracted, not collapsed. Beyond economics, too, there is no possibility of extrication from strategic involvement with the region.

The Paradox of Australian Culture

Cultural links are separate from trade links and herein lies the greatest Australian paradox. As some Asian leaders continued to insist, even during the Keating years, Australia's culture derives ineradicably from Britain, Europe, and the United States. Indeed, links with the rest of the West are likely to increase rather than dwindle in the immediate future - this because of the irony that, just when "Asianization" became the cry, the Internet and e-mail started to put Australia into instantaneous contact with the other English-speaking countries, dethroning the famous "tyranny of distance" that had hitherto dominated Australian history and constructing a new bridge back to the old homes of Western culture.

This bridge is the stronger in that the Australian uptake of new technologies is exceptionally rapid. Australians are among the world's heaviest users of the Internet and supply a disproportionately large share of editors of web sites. (According to The Economist, Australia is fourth from top of the list for Internet hosts per capita, after Finland, Norway, and the United States.) Meanwhile the costs of other forms of communication have been dropping too. The real price of airfares has come down far more than most prices, meaning that Sydney and Melbourne have...