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White Nation
Anthropologist and social critic Ghassan Hage explores one of the most complex and troubling of modern phenomena: the desire for a white nation. In this book, he asks whether that desire is indeed limited to racists. Drawing upon the Australian experience, Hage draws conclusions that might also be applicable in France, the United States and Great Britain, each being examples of multicultural environment under the control of white culture. Hage argues that governments have promised white citizens that they would lose nothing under multiculturalism. However, migrant settlement has changed neighbourhoods, challenged white control, created new demands for non-whites, and led to white backlash. This book suggests that white racists and white mulitculturalists may share more assumptions than either group suspects.
280 pages, Paperback
First published November 1, 1998
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About the author
Ghassan Hage
26 books42 followersGhassan J. Hage is a Lebanese-Australian academic serving as Future Generation Professor of Anthropology at the University of Melbourne, Australia.
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
February 22, 2016
I really can’t recommend this book too highly. There are times when I read a book and I can feel things falling into place, things making sense in ways they simply hadn’t made sense before, things that I would have just thought I had already down pat. And when that happens I’m often left with the feeling that I really ought to have known this stuff before, that it is so obvious it seems ridiculous that I’ve completely missed it.
And I particularly liked how he has constructed his argument here – really, the title of this one goes a long way to explaining that, but in ways I hadn’t quite anticipated.
We all know people who say, ‘I’m not a racist, but…’ This guy follows Spinoza and argues that instead of mocking such people, we should rather seek to understand them. And he starts by taking them more or less at their word. To be a racist is to consider yourself to be from a group of people that are somehow superior to other groups of people, more or less just by being born – however, lots of people I would generally refer to as racists are quite happy to say that they don’t believe that they are superior to other races of people at all, whether Asians, Blacks, Serbians, whatever. They just don’t want ‘those people’ in ‘their’ country. He begins by saying that these people should really be characterised as ‘nationalists’ than ‘racists’. It doesn’t mean they aren’t both, it is just that nationalist is a better way to understand their point. This relates to something else that I’d just taken as a nonsense argument before, that being opposed to Muslims doesn't make you racist, since Islam isn’t a ‘race’. All these people say they really want is to have some sort of control over who comes into ‘their’ country and how many of ‘them’ are allowed in – they aren’t necessarily ‘racist’, but for Australia to remain ‘Australian’ there needs to be some sort of containment of who comes here.
Australia has had a long history of actual racism in relation to its immigration policies. Prior to the late 1960s we had the ‘White Australia Policy’. Clearly, this was racist: hard to argue with that. But by the 1970s we started down the road to becoming a ‘multicultural’ nation. The author’s point is that while these two policies are seen as being diametrically opposed to each other (evil racism replaced by benevolent toleration), actually, the two views are not necessarily as different as they are often assumed. Both views are concerned with who can come into the country and on what terms. Both assume that the ‘real Australians’ are always going to be White Anglo-Saxon-Celts, and that ultimately they will be the ones to decide who can come and what ‘toleration’ will amount to and if and when such ‘toleration’ will be denied.
Real Australians are worried – Australia, like the rest of the ‘post-industrial world’ is facing a collapse of middle class jobs and a real (and lived) probability that the current generation will be worse off than the last one was. The young are being held out of the employment market, forced out of the housing market and are finding it increasingly impossible to form lasting relationships (which are often defined by first having access to a job and a house as criteria for ‘being an adult’). As such, finding people to blame – particularly other races who waltz into the country and take all of the best jobs, all the best university places and… – yes, we’ve heard this same story endlessly before. But what is interesting is that this isn’t a racist argument, really, but rather it is a nationalist one. As the author says, the person who rips the headscarf from a Muslim woman is staking our their claim about who does and who does not belong in ‘their’ country. The racism isn’t enough to explain this behaviour, you need to also notice that these people are saying something about the kind of ‘nation’ they believe they live in – and most importantly, about their rights within that nation.
One of the points he makes that I think is really interesting is that there is a battle going on between those who once effectively ruled Australia (those who considered themselves ‘British to their bootstraps’) and those more associated with the Irish, that is, those who originally made up the largest portion of the population, but that were often shamed by their ‘convict’ ancestry. Our previous Prime Minister said in a St Patrick’s Day message, for instance, “It’s been said of us that the English made the laws, the Scots made the money and the Irish made the songs”. Prime Minister Keating, years before, had said that if Australia did not choose to become a republic when given the opportunity, it would become a laughing stock still tugging at the coat-tails of Queen and Empire. He proved wrong, but this difference (not entirely linked to the two party system in Australia) is telling.
As the author says, this sense of shame at our convict passed was particularly true in Tasmania, but there is little doubt that for most of Australia’s history the people who ruled the place did so on the basis of the symbolic capital they had from being English and therefore part of a kind of ruling aristocracy. The shift away from this was mostly ‘over-determined’. England joined the common-market, England’s empire collapsed, and so on. It is hard to go on being ruled by people that don’t seem to want to rule you any more, and this all came as a bit of an embarrassing realisation. However, this preoccupation (with Australia seeking to become a republic and it being rejected in a referendum and now again being discussed) shows a particularly ‘white’ Australian preoccupation. Very few migrants from other than English or Irish ‘stock’ could really care less. Amusingly enough, white Australians have never felt like they completely belong anywhere. They certainly don’t feel they belong in England (even if, up until the 1950s politicians could still talk of England as being ‘home’), but they also never really have felt as if they truly belong here in Australia either. More recently, some politicians have sought to define us as an Asian nation – they point out that our future is more closely bound with Asia than with Europe, that Asia is the fastest growing economic region in the world, that Asia is our future, that the raising Asian middle class is our main hope. Except that, for those white Australians who are seeing their own access to the middle class either being removed from them or simply denied as even a hoped for pathway that might be available one day, even a possibility is vanishing and so talk of the opportunities that might be offered by the rising Asian middle class rubs salt in open wounds.
I’m not saying that there is no racism involved in any of this – clearly, racism helps to keep these wheels moving – but what is really interesting is not so much the ‘racism’ but rather the nationalism that is clearly much more important here, and potentially much more dangerous too. I think it is true that people can convince themselves that they are not being racist when they say that what they want is what they should not have to ask for in their own country – that is, access to the opportunities that have long been the core part of the Australian myth, the Australian dream.
Understanding the nature of the disappointments that encourage people to believe the things they do is much harder than just saying, ‘they’re all racists’, but it also provides ways of actually thinking about how to resolve these issues – something insulting people probably won’t achieve. What is really interesting at the end of this one is where the author discusses the fact that the white fantasy of being able to have ‘complete control’ over who will and will not be tolerated is basically just that – a fantasy. There are simply too many people who do not fit the idealised ‘white’ Australian that will not submit to having their rights taken from them. Most of the ‘problems’ that white Australians have with non-white Australians probably aren’t racist – rather, they are a kind of ‘mis-recognition’, where particular groups of people are identified as being the ‘cause’ of changes occurring here that are felt by everyone to have gotten ‘out of control’.
My favourite part of this, though, was his speculations on the relationships between nationalism and the domestication of animals. Honestly, this really is a book you should consider reading, if only for the sheer number of thoughts per page. Well, and for the remarkable photograph on the cover, obviously.
And I particularly liked how he has constructed his argument here – really, the title of this one goes a long way to explaining that, but in ways I hadn’t quite anticipated.
We all know people who say, ‘I’m not a racist, but…’ This guy follows Spinoza and argues that instead of mocking such people, we should rather seek to understand them. And he starts by taking them more or less at their word. To be a racist is to consider yourself to be from a group of people that are somehow superior to other groups of people, more or less just by being born – however, lots of people I would generally refer to as racists are quite happy to say that they don’t believe that they are superior to other races of people at all, whether Asians, Blacks, Serbians, whatever. They just don’t want ‘those people’ in ‘their’ country. He begins by saying that these people should really be characterised as ‘nationalists’ than ‘racists’. It doesn’t mean they aren’t both, it is just that nationalist is a better way to understand their point. This relates to something else that I’d just taken as a nonsense argument before, that being opposed to Muslims doesn't make you racist, since Islam isn’t a ‘race’. All these people say they really want is to have some sort of control over who comes into ‘their’ country and how many of ‘them’ are allowed in – they aren’t necessarily ‘racist’, but for Australia to remain ‘Australian’ there needs to be some sort of containment of who comes here.
Australia has had a long history of actual racism in relation to its immigration policies. Prior to the late 1960s we had the ‘White Australia Policy’. Clearly, this was racist: hard to argue with that. But by the 1970s we started down the road to becoming a ‘multicultural’ nation. The author’s point is that while these two policies are seen as being diametrically opposed to each other (evil racism replaced by benevolent toleration), actually, the two views are not necessarily as different as they are often assumed. Both views are concerned with who can come into the country and on what terms. Both assume that the ‘real Australians’ are always going to be White Anglo-Saxon-Celts, and that ultimately they will be the ones to decide who can come and what ‘toleration’ will amount to and if and when such ‘toleration’ will be denied.
Real Australians are worried – Australia, like the rest of the ‘post-industrial world’ is facing a collapse of middle class jobs and a real (and lived) probability that the current generation will be worse off than the last one was. The young are being held out of the employment market, forced out of the housing market and are finding it increasingly impossible to form lasting relationships (which are often defined by first having access to a job and a house as criteria for ‘being an adult’). As such, finding people to blame – particularly other races who waltz into the country and take all of the best jobs, all the best university places and… – yes, we’ve heard this same story endlessly before. But what is interesting is that this isn’t a racist argument, really, but rather it is a nationalist one. As the author says, the person who rips the headscarf from a Muslim woman is staking our their claim about who does and who does not belong in ‘their’ country. The racism isn’t enough to explain this behaviour, you need to also notice that these people are saying something about the kind of ‘nation’ they believe they live in – and most importantly, about their rights within that nation.
One of the points he makes that I think is really interesting is that there is a battle going on between those who once effectively ruled Australia (those who considered themselves ‘British to their bootstraps’) and those more associated with the Irish, that is, those who originally made up the largest portion of the population, but that were often shamed by their ‘convict’ ancestry. Our previous Prime Minister said in a St Patrick’s Day message, for instance, “It’s been said of us that the English made the laws, the Scots made the money and the Irish made the songs”. Prime Minister Keating, years before, had said that if Australia did not choose to become a republic when given the opportunity, it would become a laughing stock still tugging at the coat-tails of Queen and Empire. He proved wrong, but this difference (not entirely linked to the two party system in Australia) is telling.
As the author says, this sense of shame at our convict passed was particularly true in Tasmania, but there is little doubt that for most of Australia’s history the people who ruled the place did so on the basis of the symbolic capital they had from being English and therefore part of a kind of ruling aristocracy. The shift away from this was mostly ‘over-determined’. England joined the common-market, England’s empire collapsed, and so on. It is hard to go on being ruled by people that don’t seem to want to rule you any more, and this all came as a bit of an embarrassing realisation. However, this preoccupation (with Australia seeking to become a republic and it being rejected in a referendum and now again being discussed) shows a particularly ‘white’ Australian preoccupation. Very few migrants from other than English or Irish ‘stock’ could really care less. Amusingly enough, white Australians have never felt like they completely belong anywhere. They certainly don’t feel they belong in England (even if, up until the 1950s politicians could still talk of England as being ‘home’), but they also never really have felt as if they truly belong here in Australia either. More recently, some politicians have sought to define us as an Asian nation – they point out that our future is more closely bound with Asia than with Europe, that Asia is the fastest growing economic region in the world, that Asia is our future, that the raising Asian middle class is our main hope. Except that, for those white Australians who are seeing their own access to the middle class either being removed from them or simply denied as even a hoped for pathway that might be available one day, even a possibility is vanishing and so talk of the opportunities that might be offered by the rising Asian middle class rubs salt in open wounds.
I’m not saying that there is no racism involved in any of this – clearly, racism helps to keep these wheels moving – but what is really interesting is not so much the ‘racism’ but rather the nationalism that is clearly much more important here, and potentially much more dangerous too. I think it is true that people can convince themselves that they are not being racist when they say that what they want is what they should not have to ask for in their own country – that is, access to the opportunities that have long been the core part of the Australian myth, the Australian dream.
Understanding the nature of the disappointments that encourage people to believe the things they do is much harder than just saying, ‘they’re all racists’, but it also provides ways of actually thinking about how to resolve these issues – something insulting people probably won’t achieve. What is really interesting at the end of this one is where the author discusses the fact that the white fantasy of being able to have ‘complete control’ over who will and will not be tolerated is basically just that – a fantasy. There are simply too many people who do not fit the idealised ‘white’ Australian that will not submit to having their rights taken from them. Most of the ‘problems’ that white Australians have with non-white Australians probably aren’t racist – rather, they are a kind of ‘mis-recognition’, where particular groups of people are identified as being the ‘cause’ of changes occurring here that are felt by everyone to have gotten ‘out of control’.
My favourite part of this, though, was his speculations on the relationships between nationalism and the domestication of animals. Honestly, this really is a book you should consider reading, if only for the sheer number of thoughts per page. Well, and for the remarkable photograph on the cover, obviously.
Want to read
December 2, 2017
"For anyone following the White media's fascination with Pauline Hanson, it does not take long to realise that this fascination is well beyond the ordinary."
"I was born in a middle-class, Maronite Catholic and culturally conservative environment. I often heard around me racist and derogatory remarks directed against Muslims. Like most Christian families in Beirut, however, my parents and their friends had to deal, by necessity, with Muslim people."
"But it was in Australia that this ‘Beirut-ness’ revealed itself"
in: Eavesdropping on Bourdieu’s Philosophers
by Ghassan Hage, University of Melbourne, Australia
"When Trump says 'America First', only the most naive would think that before that declaration US foreign policy was 'America Second'. Of course it has always been 'America First'."
"2001 was a good year in Australia as far as opposition to ‘racism’ is concerned, and 2002 is looking better"
November 15, 2012
the main thesis here is that multicultural ~tolerance~ and white nationalism are two sides of the same coin. Both presume an Australia that is fundamentally white, where white people have and should continue to have the power to decide who is allowed to live here and how; they differ simply in the limits of their tolerance. it's pretty convincing and articulates a lot of what's wrong with the state of the fucking "immigration debate" (spew). plus ghassan hage is just a great, clear, likeable writer. read it.
February 17, 2024
Probably one of my most highlighted books of all time. So essential and important. So many things that I recognised but could not put into words in the precise, illuminating way it is done here.
November 1, 2019
Not much point reviewing a book that has been out over 20 years. So , very briefly it's brilliantly insightful and incisive. But I find this tempered by a tendency to rely on anecdote and interpretation of personal encounters that may simply not have been intended in the manner presented here
September 18, 2018
Confronting for everyone who is of European origin in Australia, Maronite Lebanese Australian Ghassan Hage analyses Australian life and politics and sees a White National supremacy behind both racism and multi-culturalism.
March 22, 2024
3.5 ⭐️
May 11, 2010
A different take on nationalism and multiculturalism. Still freakin' relevant, even 10 years later and after the height of Hansonism in public discourse.
January 7, 2013
Is there a punchier, sharper book of criticism about Australia? Ghassan Hage kicks so much arse. Whoah. Essential.
September 13, 2014
Too good! Essential reading.
Read
August 10, 2012Read very partially for school...which is almost, almost, almost done, so very soon I will be able to resume my practice of more substantially reviewing more of what I read.
Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews