John Howard and the ‘Anglospherist’ reshaping of Australia

Abstract

The conceptual category of the Anglosphere never found explicit currency in John Howard's narrative when he was prime minister. While in office, he ostentatiously avoided ‘putting Australia into a particular sphere – Anglo or otherwise’. This article suggests instead that his endeavour to reshape Australia drew on an Anglospherist perspective. The reshaping of Australia he undertook when he won office rested on two pillars of Anglospherism: the rejection of multiculturalism and the alignment to countries with ‘shared values’ in Australia's external relations. The article traces how these two Anglospherist precepts found actual implementation in Howard's re-framing of ‘Australian multiculturalism’ and re-conceptualisation of ‘Australia's engagement with Asia’.

约翰·霍华德担任总理期间，英语圈的说法在他的叙述里并不通行。在他的官方官样文章里，他明确地避免把澳大利亚放进特定的圈子——英语圈也好，别的圈也好。霍华德在职的时候重塑澳大利亚的努力，其实是基于英语圈的视角。他赢得竞选时要重塑澳大利亚的事业，有两个英语圈的支柱：拒绝多元文化；对外关系中优先“持共同价值观”的国家。本文研究了霍华德如何将这两个英语圈思路落实到对“澳大利亚多元文化”的重新塑造、对“澳大利亚与亚洲关系”的重新思考中的。

Keywords:

• John Howard
• Anglosphere
• Australian values
• Australian multiculturalism
• engagement with Asia

Notes

¹Scholars have defined this in-built indeterminateness of multiculturalism in different ways. Hirst (1994: 30), for instance, makes a distinction between soft and hard multiculturalism, in which the latter ‘insists on shortcomings in Australian society’. This article prefers to emphasise the distinction between multiculturalism as ‘an empirical demographical and sociological fact’ and ‘as a normative concept’ to conceptualise Australian society (Lopez 2000: 3).

²This development was contemporary to the ‘civilisational’ turn proposed by Huntington, who rejects the notion of a ‘western-oriented, Anglophone world-culture’ having universal relevance (1996: 310). His civilisational framing and rejection of multiculturalism (1996: 305, passim), however, manifestly resonate with important traits of the Anglospherist perspective.

³Despite the lexical similarity, the title of the document – United in diversity – and the multiculturalist slogan ‘unity-in-diversity’ convey opposite messages. The latter seeks by means of hyphenation to mutually reinforce ‘unity’ and ‘diversity’, but the former, presenting the two concepts in formal juxtaposition, signals a will to frame them in binary opposition (Ang and Stratton 1998: 38).

⁴‘We have stopped worrying about whether we are Asian, in Asia, enmeshed with Asia or part of a mythical East-Asian hemisphere. We have got on with the job of being ourselves in the region’ (Howard cited in Hansard 1999, 10028, emphasis added).

⁵This was evident in some of the English-language commentary of the time (e.g., Fukuyama 1998: 24–7; Mallaby 1998; Mead 1998).

⁶Howard always implied a distinction between Asian countries and Australia's Asian communities. As Brett (2003: 151) reminds us, Asian-Australians were consistently presented as individuals instead of members of cultural groups. As such, and by virtue of the fact that they had brought in values like family, hard work and entrepreneurial flair – not coincidentally the restricted pool of ‘Asian values’ that overlapped with Howard's cultural outlook – ‘Australians of Asian descent’ could aspire to be ‘as honoured citizens as any other section of the Australian community’ (Howard 1996).This circumstance allowed the ‘integration’ of Asians as individuals maintaining the separateness from Asian countries from the identitarian point of view.

⁷In an interview with the Bulletin in 1999 (in which the notion of Australia as the ‘deputy sheriff’ of the US in the region was forged), Howard presented the East Timor intervention as follows: ‘We were defending the values we hold as Australians. We were willing to be in dispute with our nearest neighbour to defend those values’ (Brenchley 1999: 22).

⁸In a speech to the Heritage Foundation – often overlooked supposedly because it was given three years into his ‘retirement’ – Howard (2010: 5–6) stated that ‘the values that bind the United States, Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand … are deeper and more abiding … than the bonds between any other countries’ and that ‘one of the errors that some sections of the English-speaking world have made in the past few decades has been to confuse multiracialism and multiculturalism’, to conclude that ‘the English-speaking nations have made an enormous contribution  … in excess of any other grouping of countries – to the defence of liberty in the last two hundred years’. Howard thus appropriated the whole intellectual body underlying the Anglospherist perspective in its entirety.