NATIONS AND J O U R N A L O F T H E A S S O C I AT I O N AS

NATIONALISM
FOR THE STUDY OF ETHNICITY
A N D N AT I O N A L I S M EN

Nations and Nationalism 17 (1), 2011, 188–206.

Cosmopolitan nationalism: ordinary

people making sense of diversityn
JUDITH BRETT AND ANTHONY MORAN
La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia

ABSTRACT. This article challenges the theoretical opposition between nationalism

and cosmopolitanism with empirical research on the ways in which a group of ordinary
Australians talked about multiculturalism in the 1980s and again in the 2000s. It shifts
attention from identity work to the understanding of day-to-day social relations: it
finds that they are strongly nationalist and yet also display a cosmopolitan embrace of
the benefits of cultural diversity. They draw on the inclusionary resources of Australian
nationalism and its history to strengthen their cosmopolitanism and calm their
anxieties about living with diversity. Their commonsense conceptualising of Australia’s
contemporary multicultural society in terms of a mix of individuals rather than an
ensemble of groups is crucial to understanding why cultural diversity has been
embraced within the framework of the nation.

KEYWORDS: Australian nationalism; cosmopolitanism; cultural diversity; multi-

culturalism; ordinary people

Nationalism and cosmopolitanism

Nationalism is frequently conceptualised as the antithesis of cosmopolitan-

ism: the one particularistic, exclusionary and backward-looking; the other
universalist, inclusive and the cultural direction of the future in a globalising
world. This oppositional construction has been strengthened by the surge of
intellectual and academic interest in cosmopolitanism since the 1990s sparked
by Martha Nussbaum’s (1994) polemical essay ‘Patriotism and cosmopolitan-
ism’. Nussbaum’s argument for the ethical superiority of the universalist
cosmopolitan outlook over nationalism or patriotism was in part a response
to Richard Rorty’s (1994) exhortation to Americans in the New York Times to
renew their patriotism and attachment to broader solidarities that were
threatened by the divisive ‘‘politics of identity’’. Nussbaum argued that the
cosmopolitan outlook and a sense of being a citizen of the world was far

n
The research for this article was supported by Australian Research Council Discovery Grant
DP0343870, ‘Understanding a changing Australia: ordinary people’s politics’.

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 NATIONS AND J O U R N A L O F T H E A S S O C I AT I O N AS
NATIONALISM
FOR THE STUDY OF ETHNICITY
A N D N AT I O N A L I S M EN

Cosmopolitan nationalism 189

superior to particularist outlooks, such as those centred upon nations and

national identity.
Nussbaum’s opposition between nationalist and cosmopolitan outlooks
has a long history as the rise of nationalism challenged and, in many cases,
supplanted earlier forms of transnational identity and political organisation.
However, it has taken on new urgency since World War II. Institutions of
global governance have increased in reach and significance, mass migrations
have challenged the cultural homogeneity of Western nations, and new
technologies of travel and communication have transformed everyday tem-
poral and spatial frameworks. Within these various processes, one can
distinguish between political and cultural cosmopolitanism (Kaufmann
2004): the one driven by the development of transnational political institu-
tions that seek to subsume national sovereignty and to develop global political
communities (Held 1995); the other transforming the cultural context of
people’s everyday life and challenging nationally based identities (Beck 2000).
This article is concerned with the latter and with the debates about the role of
nationalist sentiments and identity in fuelling hostility to the cosmopolitan
embracing of cultural difference.
For example, Ulrich Beck (2000, 2002) lists nationalism as one of the
‘enemies’ of cultural cosmopolitanism and opposes the national ‘monological’
to the cosmopolitan ‘dialogical’ imagination. This opposition has an historical
dimension in arguments that, basic to nation formation, are processes of
exclusion and the construction of an other or others as foreign or alien to the
national self (Colley 1992). It has a contemporary sociological dimension in
the assumption that if people have a more cosmopolitan – and hence less
national and parochial – identity, then they will be more open to difference
(Mazlish 2005; Rundell 2004). Conversely, the more national they feel, the
more hostile they will be towards people who are different from them, and in
particular towards the new immigrants who are transforming once homo-
genous nations into complex multiracial and multiethnic societies. Because
the material discussed in this article is Australian, it is worth noting that this
assumption informs much of both the academic and public debate in
Australia, as does an historical position that puts an exclusionary white
Australian race consciousness at the centre of Australia’s historic national
identity (Castles et al. 1988; Hage 1998; Lawrence 2006; Stratton 1998). One
influential study (Betts 1999) contrasted university-educated cosmopolitans
with working-class parochials, whose inward-looking nationalism made them
wary of cultural difference and the social changes flowing from Australia’s
active migration programme. Betts argued that cosmopolitans distanced
themselves from what they saw as an old racist Australian nationalism in
favour of an internationalist outlook worn as a badge of superior moral
worth. The debate about the competing normative merits of nationalism and
cosmopolitanism intersects with a burgeoning sociological literature that sees
contemporary cultural cosmopolitanism as stimulated by the relatively unique
conditions of late modernity, including intensified globalisation (Brennan

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190 Judith Brett and Anthony Moran

1997; Roudometof 2005; Vertovec and Cohen 2002), and most likely to be
found among highly educated elites who are frequent travellers and cultural
omnivores (Hannerz 1996; Petersen and Kern 1996). The impact of globalisa-
tion on the consumption patterns of non-elite stay-at-homes is also starting to
attract investigation (Skrbis and Woodward 2007), but for the most part the
social attitudes formed in their bounded lives are put on the nationalist side of
the ledger.
These intersecting normative and sociological frameworks are questioned
by two different streams of research. The first problematises the assumed
theoretical opposition between nationalism and cosmopolitanism (Calhoun
2007a; Miller 1995). The second investigates forms of cosmopolitanism
beyond the elite form typically associated with mobile capital, intellectuals
and footloose middle-class travellers (see Calhoun 2002; Lamont and Aksar-
tova 2002; Pollock et al. 2000; Vertovec and Cohen 2002; Werbner 1999). This
article contributes to both of these streams of research by investigating how a
sample of ordinary Australians thinks about the ethnically diverse society in
which they live. It is based on interviews with people who could be described
as cultural cosmopolitans in that they are generally positive about the benefits
of living within a diverse society, yet they are also strongly attached to the
nation (in this case Australia) and generally take its political sovereignty for
granted. Further, they draw on the resources of Australian nationalism to
help them think about how to live with the increasing ethnic diversity of
contemporary Australia. Shaped by a settler society eager to attract new
citizens, Australian nationalism has always had a strong civic strand compet-
ing with a more ethnically based sense of nationality grounded in British
descent and native birth (Birrell 1995). Since the launch of the mass migration
program after World War II and intensified by the public repudiation of the
White Australia policy in the early 1970s, the civic strand of Australian
nationalism has strengthened greatly. The subsequent transformation has
resulted in Australia’s national identity becoming predominantly civic in
nature, favouring achieved (and hence achievable) rather than ascribed
characteristics (for example ‘feeling Australian’, having Australian citizenship
and respecting Australian political institutions and laws, rather than having
Australian heritage or being Australia-born) (Goot and Watson 2005).
As Calhoun (2007a) has recently argued, nations matter; to oppose
cosmopolitanism and nationalism too sharply is misleading. Nationalism is
also a project about binding different ethnic, regional and religious groupings
together into larger political communities, and civic nationalism employs
arguments that draw on the same universalist values and arguments as
cosmopolitanism. Among other things, such arguments underpinned the
development of democratic institutions and made possible the redistributive
policies of welfare states (Kaldor 2004; Miller 1993, 1995). As Every and
Augoustinos (2008) argue in relation to the Australian nationalism with which
this article deals, nationalist discourses are inherently flexible and their
symbolic resources can be used to support both inclusionary and exclusionary

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Cosmopolitan nationalism 191

purposes. Calhoun (2007b: 157) argues that, compared with the cosmopoli-
tanism exhibited by a small, privileged elite, ‘nationalism and democracy may –
together – hold more potential for providing political solidarity across lines of
cultural difference’. Beck (2006: 61–2) has himself warned that it is ‘ultimately
a mistake to accord too much prominence to the opposition between
cosmopolitanism and nationalism’, accepting that if nationalism can be
‘equipped with a ‘‘cosmopolitan eye’’’, it need not stigmatise others outside
the nation, nor minorities within. Black (2006) and Cheah (2006) argue that
cosmopolitan openness to others is best practised from the base of the
national home. And Appiah (1997) uses the term ‘cosmopolitan patriots’ to
distinguish between patriotic ‘sentiment’ (such as pride, love and shame in
relation to one’s nation) and nationalist ‘ideology’, and argues for the
possibility of a ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’.
Calhoun (2008) points to a tension in the concept of cosmopolitanism
between questions about identity and questions about social integration.
Lamont and Aksartova (2002), discussing the way ordinary people negotiate
racial boundaries and exclusions in their daily lives, argue for a shift of
theoretical attention away from identity work towards what they call
boundary work. They call for investigation of the ‘sociology of everyday
practical cosmopolitanism’, which attends not only to the processes whereby
social and symbolic boundaries are produced but also to the reverse process of
their deconstruction; not just to the solidity of boundaries but also to their
permeability. Amanda Wise (2005) explores the mundane ways people in
Australian rural and regional communities manage increasing ethnic, cultural
and religious diversity through forms of gift exchange and reciprocity. A
parallel shift of attention from identity to social process is argued for by
Soutphommasane (2005) in discussing the role of integrative values in debates
about multicultural citizenship. Political unity and belonging, he argues, must
be framed in terms of shared civic competence in negotiating difference rather
than in terms of shared political values.
How ordinary people think about the increasing ethnic, racial and religious
diversity in their national societies does, of course, raise questions about
identity and the balance of loyalties and attachments in the self. But it also
raises other, less investigated and more elusive questions. How do people
imagine society? What do they believe to be the basis of social order and
harmony? What do they see as the reasons for failures of social integration,
and what are the solutions? What role do they give to the state and to politics
in this, and what to the solidaristic processes of everyday life? And so on. Such
questions are particularly pertinent to Western countries that have experi-
enced large immigrations of people from non-Western countries over recent
decades (Castles and Miller 2003), and they are as much questions about
society as about a polity or nation. We will see in our respondents’ answers
that many people clearly distinguish their sense of what is happening on the
ground from the political debates in the media. In asking such questions we
are attempting to bypass the official public/political and the academic/

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192 Judith Brett and Anthony Moran

intellectual discourses to elicit the informal, commonsense models of society

and social processes that inform people’s thinking about living in a diverse
nation. Moreover, we are not investigating people’s attitudes towards
immigration or to asylum seekers. While opposition to immigration may be
motivated by fear of cultural difference it also draws on other fears, such as of
economic competition or loss of sovereignty.

Methodology

The interviews on which this article is based were undertaken from 1986 to
1990 and from 2002 to 2004 as part of a large project exploring people’s
images of Australia and their sense of how it had changed in the recent past
(see Brett and Moran 2006). Forty-two people were interviewed in the late
1980s, and twelve of these were interviewed again in the early 2000s. In the
second phase thirty-three new participants were interviewed, giving us
seventy-five participants in total. All interviews were fully transcribed.
Participants were all from the south-eastern state of Victoria, with the
majority living in the inner city and suburbs of its capital Melbourne
(N 5 60) and the rest residing in regional and rural towns (N 5 9) or on farms
(N 5 6). Many of our city participants had also lived part of their lives in the
country. The Melbourne and Victorian location of the sample is significant in
the Australian context: Victoria has a more liberal and progressive political
culture than much of the rest of Australia, and Melbourne has not experi-
enced the same degree of public conflict between ethnic groups as Sydney
(Jupp 1986). Women (N 5 42) outnumbered men (N 5 33) in our sample, with
an age spread between 20 and 80 years (20–29, N 5 24; 30–39, N 5 16; 40–49,
N 5 13; 50–59, N 5 11; 60–69, N 5 7; and 70–79, N 5 4). Fifty-eight partici-
pants were Australia-born, of whom thirteen were second-generation immi-
grants. Of the seventeen born overseas, five arrived in Australia as children
and twelve as adults. People of Anglo-Celtic background (N 5 46) out-
numbered those from non-English-speaking backgrounds (N 5 26) and there
were three indigenous Australians. The non-tertiary-educated (N 5 41) out-
numbered the tertiary-educated (N 5 34). Most (N 5 56) were engaged in
some form of paid employment (full-time, N 5 36; part-time, N 5 20). Those
not in paid employment (N 5 19) were retired (N 5 7), stay-at-home mothers
(N 5 4), unemployed (N 5 1), on disability pensions (N 5 4) or full-time
students (N 5 3). People were involved in a mix of white-collar (N 5 33)
and blue-collar (N 5 23) occupations.
Participants were interviewed multiple times (from two to five times in each
time period) in sessions lasting up to two hours. Interviews were semi-
structured, with the first session collecting life history and later sessions
canvassing views on the economy, politicians and government, settler–
indigenous relations, immigration and ethnic diversity, social change, the
distinctive qualities of Australia and its most pressing problems. Views on

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Cosmopolitan nationalism 193

immigration and multiculturalism were expressed in response both to parti-

cular questions about these issues and to general questions, such as ‘How has
Australia changed in the past twenty years?’ or ‘What are three things you
would tell someone about Australia?’ They also emerged in people’s life
stories, especially for first- and second-generation respondents of non-Anglo
background. We were interested in what people said of their own accord
about multiculturalism and migration (whether, for example, they offered it
up as one of Australia’s pressing problems or referred to ethnic diversity as
one of Australia’s distinctive features, which some did). Most of all, we were
interested in the way people talked about these issues, the sorts of arguments
and evidence they used to support their views, the doubts they expressed and
how they quieted them, and the timeframes in which they placed them. Some
of the discussions of multiculturalism were quite brief and did not supply
much data. Others were very long and considered.
The two interview phases coincided with periods of intense public debate
about immigration and its social and cultural consequences. In the second half
of the 1980s Australia woke up to the presence, for the first time since the
nineteenth century, of a sizable Asian immigrant group: the Vietnamese (who
had been resettled after the Vietnam War). In 1984, a prominent historian
Geoffrey Blainey (1984) warned in a speech to a provincial Rotary Club that
the rate of recent immigration from Asia posed a threat to Australia’s social
cohesion. The debate flared again in 1988 when a Labor-government-
commissioned report (Fitzgerald 1988) found low levels of popular support
for the current immigration programme; John Howard, then leader of the
opposition, raised the possibility of racial restrictions on Australia’s immigra-
tion intake in the interests of public cohesion (Brett 2003: 186; 2005). Various
prominent political figures joined the fray, including the President of the
Returned and Services League of Australia (Victorian Branch), Bruce
Ruxton, who stood for the rights of an old-style xenophobic nationalism to
say what it thought despite the strictures of the ‘political correctness’ that was
supposedly stifling its views (Macintyre and Clark 2003). The second round of
interviews occurred after the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New
York, when anxiety about Muslim immigrants was running high throughout
the Western world. For our purposes these coincidences were fortuitous,
giving us a great deal of material in which people were thinking about the
problems potentially posed by Australia’s diversity.
The word ‘‘Australia’’ can refer to a continent, a country, a society, a
nation or just a place, and in their talk about Australia people slipped around
among these meanings. Overwhelmingly, whatever the referent, they were
positive. Seventy-three of our seventy-five respondents expressed some sense
of attachment to ‘‘Australia’’, most of them strong. They loved Australia: it
was beautiful, the best country in the world, the lucky country, people were
easy-going and friendly, they wouldn’t live anywhere else. The two respon-
dents who were unattached to Australia were both immigrants: a 35-year-old
Scottish tradesman who had migrated as a child and was generally hostile to

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194 Judith Brett and Anthony Moran

Australia, and a 35-year-old East Timorese refugee who lamented that she
belonged nowhere. A few more were ambivalent about their attachment, and
two of these were cosmopolitan transnationalists. One, a 35-year-old Torres
Strait Islander artist interviewed in 1988, had travelled the world with her
Italian-Australian husband and their children and believed that it was going
to become more and more difficult for people to live unselfconsciously in a
familiar cultural national landscape: ‘Because the world is changing so much
now, to me there’s no more country you know.’ The second, a 45-year-old
New Zealand immigrant, thought that most cities the world over were the
same and that he could comfortably live anywhere.
These responses are consistent with findings from the Australian national
identity module in the 1995 International Social Science Survey Program,
which found that 94 per cent answered the question ‘How close – how
emotionally attached to Australia – do you feel?’ with ‘close’ or ‘very close’.
The 6 per cent who had little sense of attachment to Australia were
predominantly recent immigrants, and as the authors analysing the survey
have commented, Australia was one of the most strongly bonded of the
twenty-four nations surveyed (Pakulski and Tranter 2000: 209–14). Similar
levels of attachment to Australia were found in subsequent surveys of national
attitudes (Goot and Watson 2005: 188). Like the great majority of Austra-
lians, our respondents were nationalists, but only one (a 23-year-old male
sportsman interviewed in 1989) gave a response that unambiguously evoked a
racist and xenophobic Australian nationalism: ‘I’m a bit like Bruce Ruxton on
the Vietnamese. We should be getting rid of them. I used to live in Springvale,
it’s ‘‘spot your Aussie’’ out there. Ruxton says what others think.’ For the
rest, what we want to show is that their nationalism did not preclude them
from cosmopolitan orientations towards diversity and that they drew on the
resources of Australian nationalism to strengthen their cosmopolitanism.
They provide, perhaps, one example of what Beck’s (2006) nationalism –
‘equipped with a cosmopolitan eye’ – might look like.

Australian multiculturalism

Since World War II, Australia has had an active government-sponsored

migration programme that has transformed its demographic composition.
From a population in 1945 of just 7 million that was 90 per cent Australia-
born with 97 per cent identifying themselves as British (Batrouney and
Goldlust 2005: 18), in 2006 Australia’s population had reached 20 million,
with 24 per cent of its people born overseas and 26 per cent having at least one
overseas-born parent (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2008). Demographer
Charles Price (1999) estimated that by 1999 people of British descent made up
about 70 per cent of the population, followed by 18 per cent European, about
2.5 per cent West Asian and North African, 2.5 per cent Southeast Asian and
close to 3 per cent Northeast Asian. Of the many other source countries, each

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Cosmopolitan nationalism 195

accounted for less than 1 per cent. And with high levels of intermarriage, Price
estimated that at least 60 per cent were of mixed ethnic ancestry.
Non-English-speaking immigrants since World War II have come in
successive waves, beginning with refugees from the displaced-persons camps
of post-war Europe, quickly followed by migrants from West Germany, The
Netherlands, Italy and Greece (Jupp 2002). They settled for the most part in
the inner suburbs of the major capital cities, where their cafés and businesses
and their physical presence transformed social landscapes. Some also settled
in rural areas, where they participated in horticulture. Australia diversified its
sources of migrants during the 1960s, with migrants from Lebanon, Turkey
and Ceylon. The migration of Ceylonese Burghers was the first crack in the
White Australia policy, which, since 1901, had limited migrants to white-
skinned Europeans (Tavan 2005). Its restrictions were relaxed gradually, but
little of this was noticeable to the general public until Vietnamese refugees
sought resettlement in Australia (Viviani 1996). Over the past two decades,
sources of migrants have diversified even further until, in the often repeated
words of ex-prime minister John Howard, Australia’s population comes ‘from
the four corners of the earth’ (Howard 2002). Because of the large number of
source countries and comparatively small numbers from any one source,
Australia has not experienced large concentrations of particular ethnic groups
in specific locations to the extent of countries such as Britain and the USA
(Jupp 2002).
Migration has also made Australia more religiously diverse (National
Multicultural Advisory Council 1999). Although Christianity remains domi-
nant, adherents of Judaism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam have all
increased in number. Muslim migration grew in the 1970s during the Lebanese
civil war (Batrouney 2001), again after the Gulf wars and most recently with
migration from the Horn of Africa, Iraq and Afghanistan. Australia’s current
Muslim population is ethnically, culturally and linguistically diverse, with
almost 38 per cent Australia-born (Australian Government 2009). But for all
the prominence of Muslims in public debates on migration, they make up only
1.7 per cent of Australia’s population (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2008).
The term ‘multiculturalism’ was first used in 1973 by Al Grassby, Minister
for immigration in the Whitlam Labor government, to argue that Australia
needed to rethink its national image in response to the social and cultural
changes that had resulted from post-war migration (Grassby 1973). It was
subsequently taken up by all levels of government – federal, state and local –
as a framework for settlement policies for new migrants and for developing
government service delivery that would accommodate the linguistic and
cultural diversity of all Australian citizens and permanent residents. In
contrast to the previous policy rubric of assimilation, multiculturalism
recognised the rights of individuals and groups to maintain their cultural
identity after immigration, and the obligation of the state to support this.
While governments have adopted some public policies associated with
‘communitarian multiculturalism’ such as anti-discrimination law, funding

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196 Judith Brett and Anthony Moran

for ethnic associations and some public support for language maintenance
and religious schools (Jupp 1998), Australian multiculturalism has been
predominantly liberal in character – what Meer and Modood (2009) have
termed a secular ‘multiculture’ that celebrates diversity of lifestyle and culture
but invalidates or plays down group identities.
During the 1980s and 1990s, the term multiculturalism became politicised
in public debates and acquired a companion word, ‘‘multiracial’’, in response
to the large, visible Vietnamese migration. ‘‘Multiculturalism’’ was used by
the Hawke–Keating government, and by progressive intellectuals and cultural
activists, to describe not just settlement and service delivery policy, but the
nation itself (Kalantzis 2003). Australia was a multicultural, multiracial
nation, with its national distinctiveness lying in its successful embrace of
diversity. This construction of the nation was challenged vigorously by those
who saw the promotion of diversity as marginalising Australia’s British
heritage, making it one fragment (albeit a relatively large one) in Australia’s
rich cultural diversity (for example Blainey 1993; Chipman 1980; Hirst 1991).
John Howard agreed. Both as leader of the Liberal Party and later as prime
minister, he promoted the need for a unified national culture and shared
values, attacking what he saw as the claims of minorities for special treatment.
When he won government in 1996 he refused to use the ‘m’ word and argued
that Australians needed to focus on what they shared rather than on what
separated them. He was soon using the word again, however. There was really
no alternative (Brett 2003: 194–6; Jupp 2002). As one of our respondents, a
73-year-old Italian man, said in 2003, ‘Australia is a lot of migrants, a lot of
culture, what else can you suggest?’

Findings from our study

Almost all of our respondents used ‘multicultural’ and ‘multiculturalism’ as

straightforward terms of description for contemporary Australia: ‘we are a
multicultural race’; ‘we are a multicultural society’; ‘multiculturalism is the
new Australia’; ‘multicultural/multiracial, that’s what we are – how could you
not think that?’ Race, nationality, background, culture and lifestyle were all
used, often interchangeably. Only two of our interviewees explicitly expressed
unease with the term itself: men interviewed in the late 1980s who were strong
Liberal Party identifiers and hence sensitive to its contemporary politicisation
by John Howard. For the rest it was non-problematic and carried little if any
of the associations it had in elite debates. In particular it was not immediately
associated with the rights of groups, with arguments about cultural relativism
or rights to cultural maintenance, or even with government policy. While the
term was clearly introduced and popularised through official discourse,
actions and policies, it now has a life of its own as a widely shared,
commonsense description of the everyday social world of contemporary
Australia.

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Cosmopolitan nationalism 197

Reflecting the diverse sources of Australia’s immigrants, the most common

image people used when describing multiculturalism in Australia was of a
mix, a variety, of people: ‘a good sprinkling of everything’. Thirteen
respondents produced physical images to illustrate the diversity of cultures:
suburbs in which there was ‘a mix of nationalities and food’: Italian, Greek,
Vietnamese and Turkish restaurants all in a row; families of different ethnic
types in the houses in one’s street; a school classroom with different faces; the
passing parade of tram conductors; the faces in the street. This variety was
even located in that quintessential space of old male working-class Australia:
‘You go to a pub now, you walk into a pub and you see Turks, Irish, Poms,
Chinese, all standing up in the bar drinking, talking to each other’. A 46-year-
old working-class man of Italian background commented in 2002 on the new
ethnicities coming into the mix:

I’ve noticed some huge changes, like a lot of Filipino people, now we’re getting a lot of
Pacific Islanders as well, which is really nice, more Vietnamese, a lot of other
nationalities too, Indians and South Americans coming in as well. So in St Albans
there are a huge mix of nationalities.

Only a couple used the image of the melting pot, and none used the image of
the family – which was used in Al Grassby’s initial speech. A 23-year-old
Chinese-Malay woman said in 2003, ‘The face of Australia is not just your
typical Australian. It’s everyone now. It’s just a mix.’
Twenty-one respondents produced catalogues of ethnic types in their
friendship groups or family to illustrate the multicultural character of
contemporary Australia. A 54-year-old Italian woman who came to Australia
in her early 20s had ‘friends from everywhere. I’ve got French friends, friends
from Morocco, Spain, Chile, Argentina, Czechoslovakia, Yugoslavia, Chi-
nese, Japanese.’ For some, cultural diversity was found within the family
itself. A 72-year-old working-class Anglo man in a regional town reflected in
2003, ‘I sat down at Christmas dinner three or four years ago and there were
twenty-two of us and there was about eleven different nationalities. So
anybody comes to me and starts to whinge about multiculturalism I tell
them, hang on, this is my family structure and we’re all Australians.’ A 38-
year-old Anglo woman contrasted her parents’ 21st birthday celebrations,
which were ‘all Anglo with a few Germans’, with her own, which was attended
by ‘people from all over the world’.
Overwhelmingly, multiculturalism was described at the level of the social.
People did not immediately or particularly associate it to politics or to
government policies, but to the society they saw and experienced in their
day-to-day lives, on the street, at work, among friends and family. And,
contrary to the arguments that preoccupy much public political debate about
multiculturalism, it was not predominately thought about as a mix of cultures
or even groups but as a mix of people, or individuals, who ideally socialise
together and talk to each other. Nor were cultures imagined as abstract sets of
practices or values that had an existence independent of the individuals.

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198 Judith Brett and Anthony Moran

Diverse cultural differences were carried by individuals, families at most; only

one respondent, a 20-year-old Muslim woman born in Australia whose
parents migrated from Lebanon in the early 1970s, raised the problem of
language and cultural maintenance. No-one mentioned ethnic institutions or
organisations, apart from religious ones.
Overwhelmingly also, our respondents thought that Australia’s mixed
multicultural population was a good thing. Again, this is in line with the
findings of quantitative studies that the majority of Australians are generally
positive about the benefits of multiculturalism: an average of 77.8 per cent
over five surveys conducted between 1995 and 2003 agreed that ‘immigrants
make Australia open to new ideas and culture’ (Goot and Watson 2005: 186).
People mentioned a variety of benefits, including economic benefits from
migrants’ skills and hard work. A couple of older respondents thought it was
good for the health and vitality of the population (‘it mixes up the breeding’).
However, by far the most common benefit, mentioned by thirty-seven of the
respondents, was that an ethnically mixed population enabled one to know
about, experience and learn from different cultures; people saw this as a
benefit both for Australia as a whole and for themselves. This was expressed
with differing degrees of sophistication. One of the more complex responses
was from a 35-year-old Greek Cypriot man, interviewed in 1989, for whom
multiculturalism enables people, including migrants, to see that their own
culture is one of many. And then ‘they cannot pretend that people of another
culture are a different species’. A 43-year-old Palestinian man interviewed in
2004 welcomed the way that ‘people here forget about the disagreements back
home’.
Most responses were simpler. The accessibility of people from other
cultures made Australia a more interesting place to live in comparison with
more monocultural societies people had come from or visited. A 54-year-old
Italian-born woman reflected:

In Australia we have the whole world at our fingertips, we can be in contact with all the
different parts of the world, with the cultures. In fact, when I went back to Italy that’s
one of the parts of Australia that I missed terribly. Of course, in Italy everything is
Italian, there is the one culture which is fantastic, but that’s it, it’s limited.

Many people mentioned the variety of food and the restaurants. The
association of multiculturalism with food is so common in Australia that it
can seem a trivialisation of the task of learning to live with cultural difference
(Davidson 1997). But sharing food is a central form of cultural exchange and
reciprocity. Even if this is in restaurants or at market stalls, it embeds the
benefits of immigration in people’s everyday life like little else. For a 46-year-
old man of Italian parents living on a disability pension, food was a door to
different worlds:

I think we’re lucky here that we have all the world right in our lap. We can experience
the feelings of the people by talking to them, seeing what they wear, and what they eat,

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Cosmopolitan nationalism 199

and all that. Can go into a restaurant with music and almost feel as if you’re over there
. . . I don’t go to restaurants much, can’t afford it, but I love talking to people.
Another working-class man, this time a 28-year-old of Anglo background
who had had a very rough life, said, ‘I might never be able to get on a plane
and go overseas, but I can learn about places here – Turkey, India, China,
Japan.’ There are strong echoes in this enthusiasm for Australia’s contem-
porary cultural plenitude of Australia as the lucky country or the working
man’s paradise, indicating the way the embrace of cultural diversity has
attached itself to already-existing ideas about the nation (Brett and Moran
2006).
Our respondents showed the same enthusiasm for cultural diversity as elite
cosmopolitans, commenting on the moral and intellectual benefits of exposure
to different ways of living. Australia’s ethnically diverse population had
‘broadened outlooks’, ‘given us a chance to see how others live’, ‘made us
more tolerant’, ‘helped us see things differently’. A 52-year-old Australia-born
female law clerk said:
You get difference in thought, difference in attitude, and I guess they’re like these
jolting sorts of things that make you aware of new ways . . . It’s like a visible indication
that there are alternatives, alternative ways of thought, alternative ways of living.
A 22-year-old mother of part Spanish descent said, ‘You learn about all
different races, cultures. I think wow, there’s so many people live differently to
us. It’s great to be able to communicate with them.’
Only one of our respondents (the sportsman mentioned earlier) expressed
overt hostility to the ethnic diversity of contemporary Australian society.
Nevertheless, half did express anxieties about a range of problems associated
with it. As indicated earlier, the two sets of interviews took place during
periods of heightened public debate about multiculturalism and immigration
that were associated in the first set with the very visible increase in migration
from Asia and the development of distinctively Vietnamese suburbs in
Melbourne and Sydney, and in the second with the anxiety about Muslim
communities in the wake of the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center.
In both periods some respondents expressed worries and reservations about
particular aspects of these two communities. In the case of the Vietnamese
these were most associated with drugs and crime; in the Muslims with
religious intolerance and attitudes to women. Unlike the survey data that
give people fixed choices, our respondents were able to talk about their
anxieties at length. In analysing the interview transcripts we were struck by
how frequently the expression of an anxiety or negative attitude to some
aspect of Australia’s ethnic diversity would be followed by a qualification or a
counter-example – as if, having expressed an anxiety about the possible
negative consequences of an ethnically diverse population, the respondent was
now at pains to calm and contain it.
Most of the problems and anxieties concerned what we have called
‘groupness’: people sticking together in their ethnic groups and not mixing;

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200 Judith Brett and Anthony Moran

people not being able to speak English; residential concentrations; parents

who don’t orient their children to the wider society. Such problems were
raised by thirty-six of our seventy-five respondents. Some linked this to the
insularity of the ethnic groups themselves. A 21-year-old second-generation
Italian woman said that it was unfair of Muslims to keep to themselves
because then you can’t learn from them. This sentiment was echoed by a 30-
year-old Australia-born man married to a Chinese woman: ‘you don’t learn
by having people isolated in little groups’. A 33-year-old Anglo woman living
in the outer suburbs of Melbourne believed that interest in cultural diversity
had to go both ways: ‘I don’t like them not showing interest in our culture, or
making fun of the Australian skippies.’ A few linked failures in integration to
government policies that promoted subcultures. There was some sympathy
for the plight of newcomers who stick together at first for support, but this
was clearly seen as a transitional phase. If the benefits of an ethnically mixed
population were to be available to individuals then people had to mix. In the
first set of interviews, problems around ‘not mixing’ were most often
attributed to the Vietnamese; in the second set, to Muslims.
Time and again, people answered questions about groups and social
categories with answers about individuals. Not only did they interpret
multiculturalism as a mix of individuals and ignore the issues of group rights
and cultural maintenance that preoccupy much of both the political debate
and the multicultural literature, they actively resisted talk about groups and
social categories, as in this comment from a 24-year-old female Lebanese
Christian social-work student interviewed in 2003:

I’ve gotten over this idea of ‘these people’ – whether it’s city people, rural people,
Australian, some particular ethnicity. Any sort of categorisation you want to have,
there’s an even mix of good and bad. Though deep down there’s more good.

The same resistance to group-based generalisations was expressed in com-

monplaces such as ‘there is good and bad in all groups/races/cultures/nations’,
which shifted attention from generalisations about groups to the qualities of
individuals. This phrase was used by a number of respondents, as were
variations of it such as ‘you can’t talk about a whole race, only a few
unfortunate individuals’; ‘in every country in the world there are some lovely
and some horrible people’; ‘I don’t see slovenliness and disorderliness and
crime as belonging to any particular group . . . Australians can stand up to
anyone with regard to criminal activities’; ‘If you look for good qualities in
people you will find them wherever you look. If you want to find bad qualities
you will find them.’ Interestingly, such arguments were used both to resist
stereotyping of immigrant ethnic groups and to resist claims that Australia
was racist: ‘It goes both ways. All Australians are not the same,’ said a 54-
year-old Italian woman. The implication of such comments is that moral
qualities are properly ascribed to individuals and not to groups. This view is
also found in the widely held understandings of class in Australia that regard
it as morally illegitimate to judge a person in terms of their socioeconomic

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Cosmopolitan nationalism 201

status or class membership rather than their individual moral qualities or

personal character (Brett 1993).
The commonsense social imaginary (Taylor 2002) informing these com-
ments is a liberal one of a society composed of individuals and families mixing
in the day-to-day social world, in which cultural differences are attributes of
individuals and families, and institutions and structural constraints are of
little interest. There is an ideal of reciprocity evident in many of the
comments, an expectation of ‘learning from each other’ and of mutual
respect. In her investigation of the forms of universalism deployed by her
American and French working-class male respondents, Lamont (2000) argued
that there were subtle national differences in the universalist arguments and
cultural repertoires that her subjects deployed to assert the essential sameness
of people across racial and ethnic boundaries. French workers drew on
republicanism, socialism and Catholicism for solidaristic and egalitarian
concepts whereas American workers used more individualistic concepts and
appealed to the universalising processes of the market that established colour-
blind equivalences of worth (see also Lamont and Aksartova 2002). In
arguing that people should be treated as individuals first and foremost, our
informants are also drawing on cultural repertoires shaped by Australia’s
history as a relatively open, recently populated immigrant society with
egalitarian expectations of the ‘‘fair go’’ and an informality of manners in
face-to-face interactions. The capacity of individuals to mix with others from
all walks of life is valued highly (Hirst 1988). Where once it applied primarily
to the capacity to mix across differences of class and occupation, here it
applies to differences of culture/race/ethnicity/nationality. For our respon-
dents, if the cultural mix of contemporary Australia is to work people have to
mix. Particular histories of nation-building shape the strategies available to
people to develop their contemporary social understandings. All modern
nations have been built from differences of class, region, ethnicity and
religion, and how this has been done will shape the available political and
cultural resources for responding to the differences brought into the nation by
migrations.
Our respondents also drew on Australia’s national history in more overt
ways. People were well aware of the tenor of much of the public debate, and of
the racist views and actions of some of their fellow citizens. Various strategies
were used to limit or contain the import of this. Racism and prejudice were
frequently linked with ignorance – ‘the lowest common denominator’ or
‘trouble makers’ – and some felt that the media exaggerated their extent. In
the first set of interviews, thirteen of the forty-two respondents specifically
mentioned the views of Geoffrey Blainey, Bruce Ruxton and/or John Howard
in order to distance themselves from them or to blame the media for
exaggerating the degree of popular concern. But by far the most powerful
and frequently used calming strategy was the appeal to historical experience.
Twenty-five of our respondents produced unprompted arguments about
historical experience to present a picture of Australia as learning to live

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202 Judith Brett and Anthony Moran

with and benefit from diversity. A 48-year-old working-class Anglo Vietnam

veteran who was very worried by the racial tension of the late 1980s reassured
himself: ‘The old man said the Greeks and Italians would never mix, but
they’ve mixed well.’ In 2003, a 42-year-old working-class Anglo man living in
a regional town told us, ‘People used to be against the Vietnamese. Now it’s
the Muslims.’ ‘Muslims,’ said a 39-year-old woman of Croatian background
in 2003, ‘are the new kids on the block.’ A 59-year-old Italian man used his
experience as a migrant in the 1950s to understand the Vietnamese in the
1980s:

If I go back 35 years, we were looked at like a beast in the zoo. We were banding all
together. At that time you have hostility so you have a tendency to band together
because the pack give you strength.

Now he had only a few Italian friends among Australian, German and
Yugoslav friends, and he predicted that tomorrow some of ‘these Asiatics’
would become his friends – ‘but you’ve got to give time’.
Arguments for economic benefit were also put into historical contexts, such
as the role of migrant workers in Australia’s landmark post-war infrastructure
project, the Snowy Mountains Scheme. In a somewhat idiosyncratic variation
of the catalogue of ethnic types that was based in the agricultural sector, a 60-
year-old Anglo farmer explained the way different migrant groups had come
with different bags of tricks: the nineteenth-century Scottish with their sheep
and cattle skills, the Chinese and Italians with their talent for market
gardening, the dairying skills of the Dutch and Kiwis, and fishing skills of
the Greeks and Croatians. A couple of people mentioned the succession of
migrant groups working on Melbourne’s trams as drivers and conductors.
Others compared their own attitudes with those of their parents. Some older
Anglo respondents, who remembered the sectarian tensions of their child-
hoods, extended the narrative back to include the religious and ethnic
differences brought by immigrants from Ireland and the United Kingdom.
This historical extension was both to counter the idea that Australia had been
a homogeneous nation before the post-war migrations and to project an
historical process in which bitter and entrenched differences can become
things of the past. Some respondents also reminded themselves that in
Australia, apart from the Aborigines, ‘we are all immigrants’. The general
narrative was Whiggish, of a new group met with initial suspicion and
hostility and perhaps banding together defensively, but of both the hostility
and the defensiveness dissolving with the passing of time. What has happened
in the past – with sectarian religious differences, with the Greeks and Italians –
was then expected to repeat itself with the Vietnamese, the Muslims from the
Middle East, the new immigrants from Africa, and any future groups.
In his theorisation of the nation as an imagined community, Benedict
Anderson (1983) stresses the importance of the nation for helping people to
place themselves in time. He is interested in the way the language of
nationalism borrows from the language of family and of generational time.

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Cosmopolitan nationalism 203

Our informants also constructed the nation as moving through time. An

historically imagined nation was still the container of their narrative, but it
was able to contain a national narrative with multiple entry points, one that
did not evoke imagery of family or shared descent, nor even require a
particularly strong concept of citizenship. The narratives of the Australian
nation radically transformed by mass immigration were constructed by our
informants from personal memory and experience, family stories and from
public memory. The commonality of tropes in the interviews indicates that the
materials of this narrative are widely available.

Conclusion

While our interviewees can be described as cosmopolitan in that they embrace

cultural diversity for the most part, they use the category of the nation to
apprehend this increased diversity, and they appeal to the nation’s history to
contain their fears and anxieties about diversity’s consequences. This does not
mean that the idea of the nation cannot be mobilised as an exclusionary
political formation. Clearly it was in the White Australia policy and still is in
some uses of the Australian flag and slogans such as ‘I grew here, you flew
here’ in street-level violence such as the Cronulla riots in December 2005.
However, it is important when investigating the role of nationalism in
particular historical circumstances not to assume that nationalism only or
even mainly informs exclusionary practices and sets of beliefs, as is implied by
the assumed theoretical opposition between nationalism and cultural cosmo-
politanism. As our respondents demonstrate, an open, civic nationalism can
also be mobilised towards inclusionary ends – in this case to tell a story of a
once ethnically homogeneous society learning to live with and enjoy cultural
differences. For many of our respondents this had become an attribute of the
nation itself, one of the things they valued most about Australia, and the
opposition between nationalism and cultural difference had dissolved.
The different balances of exclusionary and inclusionary resources mobi-
lised in particular historical circumstances by different groups of people are
matters to be investigated rather than assumed, and to this end it is important
to develop better understandings of the inclusionary practices and strategies
developed in different nation-building projects. Shifting attention from
identity work to the work of day-to-day social relations can make these
inclusionary practices more visible by revealing how people adapt and learn to
get along, how they conceptualise the social world, and the cultural reper-
toires they draw on. For the Australian case we have argued that the
commonsense conceptualising of multiculturalism in terms of a mix of
individuals rather than an ensemble of groups – a ‘multiculture’ rather than
‘communitarian multiculturalism’ – is crucial to understanding why cultural
diversity has been embraced rather than rejected. If our respondents thought
multiculturalism was about the rights of groups, they would not support it.

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204 Judith Brett and Anthony Moran

But they do not. In this taken-for-granted individualism and hostility to

closed or fixed-status groups, our respondents are displaying an orientation to
the everyday social world apparent in other aspects of Australian social life
and drawing on cultural repertoires shaped by aspects of Australia’s history of
nation-building.
The nation remains the frame for the daily lives of most people in Western
societies, and is for most an object of deep and complex attachment. A
sociology and politics that argues that this attachment must be given up in the
interests of a higher morality, or that it is the expression of a backward-
looking parochialism and doomed to extinction, puts a barrier between
academics and intellectuals and the rest of their fellow citizens. Not only
can this lead to bad sociology, making it impossible to recognise the
inclusionary practices and discourses of everyday life, it can also lead to
bad politics in which the elites appear to reject ordinary people who in turn
can feel judged and misunderstood. Such a dynamic was evident in Australia
during the prime ministership of John Howard, as he accused his elite critics
of political correctness and they accused him of mobilising a racist and
xenophobic nationalism. Empirical research into the ways in which ordinary
nation-loving people make sense of, and embrace, cultural diversity helps us
to avoid such vicious political circles.

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