Liberal nationalism and the Australian citizenship tests

Abstract

Scholars have debated whether citizenship regimes in Western democracies are tracking a liberal universalistic path or continue to follow distinctive national traditions. This essay argues that the Australian case does both through a distinctive liberal nationalist architecture. Increasingly since the 1970s, Australian citizenship acquisition and status have largely followed a civic nationalist or liberal universalist formulation. However, this has been executed within a broader liberal nationalist approach to national identity and culture that accommodates these aspects of national life. The essay discusses the idea of liberal nationalism as a political architecture of differentiated domains, Australia's construction of this architecture, and how Australia's two recent citizenship tests illustrate this framework in action. It concludes with some thoughts on the symbolic significance of citizenship tests for liberal legitimacy and the future of the liberal nationalist project.

Keywords::

• Australian citizenship tests
• liberal nationalism
• cultural nationalism
• civic nationalism
• national identity
• liberalism

Notes

^1. It should be noted that this ‘nationalist’ position is rather more sophisticated and nuanced than Brubaker's (1992) earlier work explaining the different approaches of France and Germany to citizenship in terms of their particular conceptions of the nation. Brubaker (1999) subsequently rejected this ‘Manichean’ way of construing citizenship regimes.

^2. ‘Mateship,’ another famed Australian tradition, is a more equivocal value politically, being, among other things, highly masculine.

^3. I draw here on points made by Levey (2012, 260).

^4. The controversial provisions in the Australian Constitution concerning the status of Aborigines would also require an unedifying debate about whether these meet Orgad's condition of being ‘just considering the state's circumstances.’ In this respect, it is noteworthy that a ‘national constitutional’ approach is not adopted in a position paper, coauthored by Orgad, outlining a strategy for Israel's immigration policy (Avineri, Orgad, and Rubinstein 2010). The stress on Jewish historical rights and Israel as the state of the Jewish people in the constitutive Declaration of the Establishment of the State of Israel of 1948 presumably does not make for easy endorsement by all those seeking entry or acceptance into Israel today.

^5. See www.citizenship.gov.au/ceremonies/affirmation/