Australianness as fairness: implications for cosmopolitan encounters

Abstract

This article provides an account of interwoven and often competing repertoires of cosmopolitanism and nationalism on which Australians draw when encountering diversity. Using interview and focus group data the article first explores how the notion of Australianness grounded in civic virtues such as fairness, openness and egalitarianism effectively enhances cosmopolitan outlooks. It identifies the mechanisms through which these same virtues are mobilized to rationalize the failure to actualize cosmopolitanism in everyday practice. We argue that Australianness understood as the popular ‘fair-go’ principle at times conceptually overlaps with cosmopolitan ethics. However, it also bears the potential to hinder cosmopolitan practices. Ultimately national and cosmopolitan ethical frameworks have to be interrogated simultaneously when applied to micro-level interactions.

Keywords

Australia cosmopolitanism encounters focus groups interviews multiculturalism nationalism

In past scholarly work cosmopolitanism and nationalism have frequently been treated as competing, even irreconcilable concepts where ‘open’ and ‘fluid’ cosmopolitan communities are juxtaposed with ‘closed’ and ‘homogeneous’ national ones (Beck, 2002; Nussbaum, 1994). This analytical distinction is increasingly debated. Drawing on moral, ethical and theoretical considerations Calhoun (2007, 2008) and others argue that rather than historical accidents that resulted in conflict over arbitrary affiliations, nations and nationalism matter for the creation of bonds of solidarity between strangers just as cosmopolitanism does (Calhoun, 2007; Moran, 2005). The nation as a community of strangers bound together through nationalism (Anderson, 1991) intersects with cosmopolitanism understood as a way to describe the contemporary world and as a normative program – with ambivalent outcomes. Fears of cultural loss in the light of uncomfortable closeness to strangers may result in the symbolic and physical fortification of boundaries and borders (Calhoun, 2008) rather than facilitate trust, openness and cosmopolitan values.

Little is known about how these values guide actions of individuals. Cosmopolitan ethics around fairness and justice have frequently been linked to political liberalism in the tradition of John Rawls’ thought (1986, 1999). As such, they have been interrogated at the level of institutions and fed into debates about the desirability and feasibility of a ‘world state’ and supranational governance bodies (Brock, 2013); or concerned the extent to which, and how, individual loyalties should and could transcend national boundaries as in the capabilities approach (Nussbaum, 2011). In the European context, Bhambra (2016) argues that some are unfairly excluded from a community defined in cosmopolitan terms and that a lack of acknowledgement of the colonial past may result in neocolonial conceptualizations of cosmopolitanism (2016). While we do not seek to develop a distinct Australian postcolonial approach to cosmopolitanism, the critique of access to practices understood as fair in Australia in its socio-historic context is central to our argument.

The significance of these concepts for day-to-day interactions between individuals and their embeddedness in national contexts has received little attention. For instance, Lamont and Aksartova demonstrate that cosmopolitanism is practised within national contexts and indeed inflected by particular nationalisms (2002). West and O’Reilly explore how national sentiments translate into humanitarian action by theorizing this in cosmopolitan terms to develop the concept of ‘national humanitarianism’ (West and O’Reilly, 2014). However, cosmopolitan ethics as a process is associated with a guiding moral perspective that is characterized by openness to others and inclusiveness within everyday interactions has not been empirically investigated within national contexts (Skrbiš and Woodward, 2013).

We add to this literature by interrogating Australian conceptions of fairness, analysing how they relate to a cosmopolitan disposition of openness and inflect everyday encounters with diversity. The authors define cosmopolitan encounters as ‘tangible, experiential and contextual encounters with cultural difference [in which] the everyday level of analysis of streetscapes, spaces, bodies and practices [is combined] with the macro dimensions of civil society, obligation, generosity and hospitality and belonging’ (Skrbiš and Woodward, 2013: 67). More precisely, we understand cosmopolitan encounters as contingent on the capacity of individuals to reflect on their position within social relations marked by inequalities. Further, within cosmopolitan encounters, individuals allow an ‘ethics of sharing’ to mutually shape their interactions to facilitate equality, reciprocity and economic balance (Plage et al., 2016). We conduct this analysis by applying and further developing the notion of cosmopolitan encounters to explore the relationship between national and cosmopolitan values, such as egalitarianism and their implications for interactions between individuals.

Cosmopolitan encounters in a multi-dimensional nation

Australian nationalism has been conceived distinctly depending on political creed and historical context. Narrow definitions emphasize Judeo-Christian and liberal legal traditions resulting from white European immigration recast in ‘mateship’ and ‘Australian values’ (cf. Dyrenfurth, 2007). Less conservative notions frame immigration as the cornerstone of the modern Australian nation, in which it is argued that no ethnic or social group can lay claim to original ownership and all share equally in its destiny (Elder, 2007). This narrative provides the baseline for arguments that describe an Australian ideal of unity-in-diversity (Markus, 2014; Stratton and Ang, 1994). These two narratives around ethnicity compete in Australian imagery and their implications for the ‘fair go.’ Both coexist to some degree and affect how diversity and difference are understood and negotiated. The latter situates Indigenous populations uncomfortably alongside other Australians as simply another group, and thus potentially undermines claims to Indigenous rights and the acknowledgement of historical injustice. As Bhambra (2016) reminds us, Eurocentric or neocolonial cosmopolitanism may normalize previous colonial relationships at the expense of Indigenous populations. While this study did not aim to explore how Indigenous Australians contest and reinsert themselves into narratives of Australianness, it unambiguously illustrates the omission of their identities and histories from national discourses.

To date, the relationship between nationalism and diversity from the perspective of individuals has mainly been conceptualized in identity-based approaches (Brett and Moran, 2011; Stratton and Ang, 1994). Brett and Moran (2011) maintain the significance of cultural diversity for Australian national identity, demonstrating that belonging to the nation does not by default preclude the embrace of cosmopolitan values but serves as an explanatory device to grasp the origins of diversity and settle anxieties associated with it.

Australian multicultural policy, likewise, mirrors how the Australian national community was imagined as a (multi-)cultural, (multi-)ethnic and economic community articulated through three policy principles: cultural identity, economic efficiency and social justice. Cultural identity espoused the freedom to maintain distinct cultural heritage and practices, economic efficiency promoted the use of all Australians’ skills and social justice incorporated equal opportunities regardless of individual background or ethnicity (Jones, 2000).

The principle of economic efficiency, that is, equal opportunities for all members of society and their reciprocation by lending their skills and resources to the national economy, is a key theme in Australian national discourse and historically precedes its formulation in the political discourse of multiculturalism. Egalitarianism as a national value serves to bridge class differences, thereby negating social and economic divisions. This is often summarized as the ‘fair-go’ principle (Elder, 2007: 58).

Australian multiculturalism is, however, made problematic through its incapacity to acknowledge and address the havoc wrought on Indigenous communities in the creation of the modern Australian nation, highlighting the inevitably postcolonial dimensions on which identity construction in this context rests and which conflicts with the cultivation of trust and openness (Maddison, 2012). Others observe that difference and diversity within Australian conceptions of multiculturalism have been conceived as additions to the national community instead of being part of its make-up (Keddie, 2014).

As a nation-building project, Moran (2011) argues multiculturalism served to reinvent a national identity that incorporated an unprecedented intake of migrants from a variety of backgrounds. Whether Australians feel pride about their belonging to a multicultural nation has been debated (Elder, 2007); Ommundsen (2010: 134) claims, it was ‘tolerated rather than actively embraced by the majority of the Australian population.’

This research analyses the interactions and intersections between cosmopolitanism and nationalism through a lens of social encounters rather than identities, paying particular attention to the multicultural narrative in Australia. We acknowledge that individuals are capable of simultaneously feeling attached to more than one social group, and that identities are not necessarily conceptualized rigidly and consistently among individuals belonging to the same community (Smith, 1991). In fact, individuals themselves may make sense of their identity in different contexts in different ways and do not always act in accordance with the outlooks and beliefs they profess (Plage et al., 2016). Consequently, we apply the cosmopolitan encounters framework to understand the context in which everyday interactions are situated, while closely investigating individuals’ performance of conviviality in encounters with diversity, and the motivations and reasoning behind it. We conceptualize encounters in diverse societies as providing rich cosmopolitan potential but offering uncertain outcomes.

Methodology

In order to explore the relationship between national and cosmopolitan values and its implications for interactions between individuals, we analysed data collected through semi-structured interviews and focus groups in ten locations across Australia. These are the cities of Darwin, Broome, Perth, Cairns, Ipswich, Melbourne, Bendigo, Toowoomba and the Brisbane suburbs of Moorooka and Nathan. These locations were carefully chosen to include those that are typically thought of as ‘cosmopolitan’ with vibrant cultural precincts but also those that are less commonly associated with cosmopolitanism, but historically have incorporated diverse populations. The intention throughout recruitment was to move beyond elitist and consumerist notions of cosmopolitanism to include participants from all types of socioeconomic backgrounds and regions. All participants were contacted through a company specializing in recruitment for social and market research. Selection criteria required people be aged 18 or over and proficient in English. Furthermore, we only recruited Australian citizens and permanent residents. In this research we draw on in-depth interviews with 84 individuals and 96 participants involved in 17 focus groups. The final sample of 180 individuals consisted of 101 males and 79 females.

A combination of individual and focus group interviews as well as semi-structured interviewing techniques was chosen to generate rich data revealing the reasoning and communicative practices associated with otherness and cultural difference (Calcutt et al., 2009). All interviews and focus groups were conducted in the presence of at least one facilitator from the research team and utilized an interview protocol with a set of pertinent topics to guide the conversation, such as individuals’ understanding of Australianness and national culture, narration of and reflection on encounters with diversity and the ethical reasoning guiding individuals’ performance of conviviality. In accordance with the principles of inductive research, the interview questions were constantly reviewed and updated as the data collection progressed. This flexible approach allowed us to develop lines of enquiry as they emerged while providing sufficient structure to be able to draw comparisons between cases. Data collection continued until all researchers agreed that saturation was achieved (Ritchie et al., 2014). All interviews and focus groups were audio-recorded, fully transcribed and analysed using NVivo10 software. All identifying participant information has been removed to ensure confidentiality.

As data collection was confined to interviews and focus groups excluding the direct observation of actual encounters, we draw on two analytical approaches while acknowledging that neither is ‘pure’. Our phenomenologically informed analysis allows us to conceptualize encounters as events that are experienced and made sense of in different ways by different actors (Smith and Pangsapa, 2007). We encouraged narration and reflection on encounters, also drawing on narrative analysis focusing on the individual as a whole to study how participants contextualize encounters themselves, and how they reconcile seemingly contradictory attitudes and behaviours (Ezzy, 2002). We did not triangulate these stories for this study as we were interested in the meaning making participants engage in. Participants chose what experiences they wanted to recount and how to frame those which provided crucial insights into the challenges, anxieties, ethical reasoning and imagery around cosmopolitan encounters.

Results

The Australian character: multifaceted conceptualizations of community

To gain insight into what values were shared by and considered constituent of the national community, we began by asking participants about their understanding of Australianness and what it means to be Australian. Almost all participants identified as Australian, some highlighted other identities that mattered to them, for example, Jewish, Italian, a world citizen, Indigenous. Even though often implicitly intertwined with and inflected by ethnic notions of being Australian, values such as fairness, egalitarianism and equal opportunity loomed large in how participants framed Australianness in economic, cultural and civic terms. Class differences and economic disadvantage were presented as insignificant.

it doesn’t matter whether you’re like a doctor or the garbage man person, they’re all to me equal. I treat everybody equally. Most general Aussies are the same. (Interview, Toowoomba)

The narrative exemplified above was shared and enhanced by the subsample of migrants – some of them recent and others having lived for many years in Australia or being born in Australia to migrant parents. They portrayed Australia as the ‘lucky country’ in which they or their parents made a home and a living for themselves – an opportunity that they felt they were not given in their respective countries of origin.

Freedom, independence. You can make whatever you want. If you want to be rich you can be rich…. If you want to stay in poverty you can stay poor.… Where we come from it was just a government and people couldn’t make money. There’s always poverty but here you’ve been given a chance, a choice. (Interview, Melbourne)

Narratives such as the above about Australia as a land of opportunity, prosperity and high living standards were accompanied by feelings of gratitude to ‘Australia’ as a prosperous, safe and fair country. The above excerpts highlight the appeal of the ‘fair-go’ narrative as well as its class and ethnic blindness among Australians of different backgrounds.

When asked what defines Australianness to gain a broad understanding of how participants think of themselves in terms of culture and belonging, characteristics identified as being typically Australian included traits such as friendliness, tolerance, openness, camaraderie and generosity. As McKay and West (2015) have found, Australianness, while often hard for participants to define, is nevertheless embraced in a range of taken-for-granted ways. This includes the symbolic performance of Australianness promoted to a global tourist market that draws on the appeal of traits such as mateship and being down to earth (West, 2006). Narratives around ‘mateship’ and generosity correspond with notions of egalitarianism (see Tranter and Donoghue, 2007).

the average person one-to-one is accepting and tolerant and helpful and friendly, regardless of who you are…. [T]he average Australian would just give everyone a fair go – give them a shot. (Focus group, Toowoomba)

being Australian is, it’s about being fair. Being fair and help your mate, but if he can’t do everything himself, definitely give him a hand up and help him, and never be afraid of doing that. (Interview, Perth)

Standing up for ‘the underdog’ is a trait associated with Australianness and the egalitarian sentiment that we have outlined above. Participants commonly held the idea that Australians are willing to give everyone ‘a fair go’, the saying itself long being ingrained in discourses of Australian nationalism and codes of national civility. The expression was applied beyond the socioeconomic context to performing egalitarianism in everyday encounters. In the context of cultural diversity, this included giving newcomers a chance to settle into the community. Such accommodation on the surface mirrors the cosmopolitan ethic of being open to cultural diversity and showing hospitality to strangers (Derrida, 2001).

While most participants felt a strong sense of belonging to Australia, they struggled to explain what makes Australia culturally distinct or to identify traditions or objects imbued with national meaning (see Beasley et al., 2010). It is here that competing narratives of Australia as a country of migrants and as a white nation surfaced.

I don’t think anyone can define Australian.… We can define Chinese, Greek, Italians, Germans, Russians.… you’ve got kangaroos and meat pies and the Holden car. But that’s all gone. … But in Australia you’ve got all these different cultures making up Australians. So you can’t define Australians, because we’re made up of all different countries. (Interview, Ipswich)

The values have changed since the Second World War…. Australia had their own identity at the time and there was a big influx of white Europeans and cultures.… Australia changed and then you had a lot of Italians and Greeks come in and what [it] was to be Australian had changed again and it’s just been the same all the way along.… The Irish and back in the Eureka Stockade days … what Australia is and isn’t has been in flux all the time. (Interview, Toowoomba)

The story of Australia as a nation of migrants was intertwined, complemented and sometimes contested by narratives defining Australianness in racialized and ethnicized terms.

What do you think is Australian – who is an Australian? …

… I don’t know. It’s hard now because it’s sort of changed but I guess if you were going to say it, you’d say … someone who was of European or British descent who – yeah, had probably tan skin, blonde hair. (Interview, Bendigo)

While many participants perceived Australia as a cultural blend of generations of migrants, those were often explicitly and implicitly linked to Whiteness and/or Britishness (see Meaney, 2003). The implications of this perception of Australianness were ambivalent, as we will explore in the next section.

Anxieties about change to the national fabric

In this section, we focus on the interactions of notions of fairness with cosmopolitan dispositions of openness, in particular conviviality among Australians from culturally diverse backgrounds and their capacity to accommodate and incorporate culturally distinct practices into their own. While most participants described daily interactions with people who were perceived as culturally distinct as normality, often the same participants expressed anxieties about seeing larger cultural changes and about their lives being changed as an outcome.

It’s not that I’m worried, I just get – the people that are coming … where we are going? … Really, what is Australia going to look like in 20 years’ time? Can please somebody tell me. (Focus group, Melbourne)

people coming into the country is great but … I don’t want them trying to change our way of life.… We’ve accepted them but I don’t know how many more we want here.… We are accepting them but don’t change us. … we are who we are. We don’t want to be changed. [Interview, Nathan]

In the comments of these two participants the notion of Australian national culture was accompanied by feelings of threat to what they perceived as essentially Australian. While some expressed vague feelings of uncertainty about the changes diversity may bring, others were more specific, linking anxiety about change implicitly and explicitly to conditional frameworks of fairness and Australianness.

Because Australians are she’ll be right Jack and everything, a bit lax, it will sneak in and infiltrate up and then one day we’ll go oh. The council … built a screen in the public swimming pool at a cost of $40,000 for six women who couldn’t be seen in a bikini. … Forty-thousand dollars. When have they ever spent $40,000 on me because I want to do something? (Interview, Nathan)

… What defines the Australian ethos and the Australian way of life? …

P 4:

Hard working, easy going, friendly.

P 5:

Fairness.

P 1:

… but that gets taken advantage of …

P 4:

It does, yeah.

P 1:

… now doesn’t it? We used to be 20 years ago but yeah, we get walked over now if we act like that. (Focus group, Bendigo)

The examples above illustrate how the notion of fairness was bound up with characteristics deemed by participants as essential, traditional and crucial to Australia’s cultural integrity while also acting to stave off more complex questions about the welfare of cultural minorities (see Turner, 2008). Instead, minorities were positioned by some participants of European/white Australian background as receiving preferential treatment while at the same time conveying a sense of their own marginalization as a consequence. Australianness as fairness was here a virtue turned liability. Fairness also became a self-interested and insular ‘protective’ device which stands in stark contrast to the outwardly directed protection of ‘underdogs’ and the ‘fair go’ for all. Examples of similar sentiments appeared frequently in the data.

However, there was also a significant number of participants for whom the nature of Australianness provided the discursive foundation for the capacity of a national community understood as multicultural to incorporate change.

there’s so many people here from different parts of the world … apart from Aborigines everybody here is a migrant of some sort or a descendant of a migrant. Nobody can really say I’m a real Australian. Aborigines are real Australians but we all live together now. So that’s what’s beautiful about this country. (Focus group, Ipswich)

Accounts such as this indicate, how the perfunctory acknowledgement of Indigenous Australians paints a picture of harmonious conviviality in the present but prevents a critical, uncomfortable and meaningful engagement with the past.

A fair go for whom?

In this section we seek to synthesize the intertwined nature of (multi)cultural, civic, economic and ethnic conceptions of the Australian national community, and explore the notion of fairness applied across these contexts and its implications for cosmopolitan dispositions. We suggest that reflexive engagement with Australia’s history combined with the idea that national Australian values emphasizing fairness have facilitated the formulation of Australia as a place of cosmopolitan openness towards migrants for some participants, as illustrated in the following comment:

The way I’ve grown up, the fair go … is technically ingrained in the cultural identity. I don’t think we are living it.… The Aussie battler is not about giving Aussies, as in white Australians, a fair go, it’s about getting the people who are now residing here, irrespective of where they’ve come from before, if this is where they now live they are now Australian and they are part and parcel. They’re not oh yeah, but you are from Afghanistan, you’re from Pakistan, you’re not really Aussies. How many of us were convicts, people shipped over here unwanted, invaded a whole bunch of other people who were living here already? I don’t think we’ve got a high horse to stand on with regards to sorry, you’re not from here. (Interview, Ipswich, italics added)

This quote and the one in the previous section reveal the complexity of engagement with Australia’s colonial history and the challenges for cosmopolitanism theory in postcolonial societies (Bhambra, 2016). Here, the participant interrogates taken-for-granted concepts such as the fair go and explicitly questions who is entitled to offer hospitality on appropriated Aboriginal land. Implicitly, however the problematic distinction between us (Australians of European/white descent) and them (Aboriginal and non-white Australians) is upheld. However, reflecting on one’s position in relation to those one perceives as different from oneself and openness towards negotiating how interactions with others should play out is the foundation for realizing the cosmopolitan potential of encounters (Plage et al., 2016).

Furthermore, it emerged from the data, that narratives about fairness and equal opportunity have the potential to lay the ground work for cosmopolitan values based on the notion of sharing Australian prosperity with others and allowing humanitarian arguments and unconditional acceptance to be voiced.

if you’re living in one of the wealthiest countries in the world, sitting on a tonne of resources, and you’re – you have the capacity, you’re morally obligated to respond to that [disasters overseas] and try and help people … to me, that would be a positive reflection of your humanity. (Focus group, Nathan)

Cosmopolitan practices and values, such as those expressed by this participant in Nathan, stemming from discourses of economic fairness were rare in the data as were participants who acknowledged pre-colonial Aboriginal history at all. Who, then, is given a fair go in Australian narratives about ethnicity and belonging and under what conditions? Most often narratives about fairness were employed to make the acceptance of migrants and cultural diversity conditional on certain expectations. While conditionality has been observed in previous critiques of multiculturalism (see Hage, 1998), these discussions have largely focused on cultural dimensions. We found that successful integration into and contribution to the Australian community defined in economic terms was the main issue for our participants:

There are a lot of ethnic people come to Australia and do a lot of good for it. There are a lot of people that come here and make our country a better country, but at the same time there are a lot of ethnic people that … come here and don’t work or don’t expect to work.… [I]f I was the leader of the country I’d open it up to anyone, but you would expect that they come and help in some way to move the country forward. (Focus group, Bendigo)

The sentiment described above is based on a notion of reciprocity that requires new migrants to give back to the community, mainly in economic terms. This conditional hospitality draws on national narratives of responsibility and often helped to alleviate the tensions participants perceived between their own culture and that of marginalized and ethnicized others. In other words, cultural idiosyncrasies were more likely to be tolerated under the condition of successful integration into a national economic community.

The majority I would say – again, percentage wise – 95 to 98 per cent across the board of all different nationalities are very hard-working people. Where they decide to settle, they make it home and they call it their own. Those who really feel for the homeland of their fathers, they will never let that go, and it should not be expected of them to let that go. (Interview, Cairns)

it’s fine to just stay within your own community and respect your own culture and your own religion and everything like that; but I just don’t think it’s up to the rest of Australia to pay for you to just do that without you contributing to the rest of society. Everyone who lives here does have the good of Australia, like the lifestyle that we have, but we all have to go to work; and we all have to earn our own money; and we all have to pay for our own house … that’s fair that everyone should have to do that. (Interview, Bendigo)

The narrative used by this participant reflects what might be described as a productive mix of the cosmopolitan and the national. However, this reinforcement of solidarity across cultures under the condition of economic success was mirrored by narratives in which economic failure results in rejection of both individual and the culture s/he is associated with.

Stories about unfairness highlight the precarious nature of the relationship between cosmopolitan hospitality and national narratives of (un)Australianness (see Smith and Phillips, 2001).

these detention centres they’re always racing into hospital and they use up facilities.… Of course these people they’re getting free accommodation, free food, and then they’re on the dole it’s all in their pocket. Now we’ve got to pay rent with our pension and everything, buy our own food and do everything else. They get it all given to them.… We sit there and say we served this country, we paid taxes since we were 15 years old and what’s in it for me? (Interview, Darwin)

there is really no real positive way of knowing who is the real refugee and who isn’t … and who is the one who’s coming here because they can’t make it, cash wise, business wise, whatever over there. They’re here for greener pastures to make a kill, and then when they’re good and ready they’re going to split the country and take all the money they can, drag it out of this country that helped them along. (Interview, Cairns)

Frequently, generalizations and stereotypes about welfare dependency were attributed to whole communities (‘Muslims are lazy’ while ‘Asians are hard-working’) and rationalized in civic terms, as is exemplified in the following account:

I do have this animosity towards Muslim women and men because I don’t find them at all friendly.… If you have a child, you’re paid … $5,000. These Muslim women all seem to have two kids and they’re pregnant. Most of them. The husbands don’t seem to be working.… I sometimes feel like stopping them and saying why are you here? How did you get here? What do you do for an income? … Asian people to me, they work, they’re taking over all the delis and things, but they are working, they’re supporting themselves.… They’re very polite. (Interview, Perth)

These participants grappled with what they perceived as differential treatment of welfare recipients. More precisely, they felt they were losing out in the competition for scarce resources and being denied having a ‘fair go’ themselves. A lot of these narratives were based on assumptions such as that Muslims did not work for their income or that ‘fake’ refugees received handouts, even those being detained without freedom of movement, placing on them the impossible burden to prove the opposite. Australian egalitarianism was expressed as a liability that can be taken advantage of by those not adhering to the same principles. Refugees and Muslims were portrayed as unAustralian in the sense that they were ready to exploit Australian generosity, refused to be grateful and ultimately would turn their back on the country. Asians, however, while no less excluded from the Australian cultural and ethnic community were at least admitted into the economic community, by virtue of their adherence to civic rules of engagement.

The feeling of victimization of white/European Australia is a role reversal in which the nation is imagined at the mercy of those threatening it from the outside and inside. Licence offered to migrants by white/European Australians to indulge in cultural idiosyncrasies is just as easily revoked as it is given. As demonstrated in these examples, the revocation is undertaken by making a link between those ‘othered’ and welfare dependency. The understanding that ‘we all have to go to work’ and expectations of ‘contributing to the rest of society’ by paying taxes, investing in businesses, or lending their skills to the labour force was associated with the extent to which culturally distinct practices were deemed acceptable, ultimately engendering a notion of cultural autonomy that is contingent on economic success. It was striking how both negative and positive stereotyping perpetuated the status of the targeted populations as separate from the core of the Australian community. They form an unequal relationship in which it is up to some to grant privileges and others to earn them.

Implications for encounters with diversity: an encounter vignette

While the story of Australia told by many participants characterizes it as a place of egalitarianism, enabling them to imagine strong bonds across diverse individuals within the population, this also distracts from, obscures and externalizes the deep and persistent economic disadvantage experienced by more recent migrants among the national community. This reinforced myths about fairness and economic success as key traits of Australian national culture while excluding some. Cultural diversity was almost always associated with migration and ‘being new to Australia’ rather than being a part of its national cultural landscape. Participants perceived themselves as disconnected from the cultural background of others. This implicitly reified the disjunction of conviviality and cultural diversity within the national community, in fact externalizing diversity from Australianness. This emerged from the interviews and focus groups alike. We will discuss the implications for everyday encounters using one striking account that exemplifies the anxieties about change, the limits of ‘mateship’ and the mechanisms of exclusion inflecting conviviality practices prevalent in our data. This narrative was shared by a participant who was born in a European country but grew up in Australia while maintaining strong links with the culture and community of her country of birth in Australia throughout her life.

he [man of Middle Eastern or Indian appearance] was cutting the grass with a pair of scissors outside his house.… I said ‘Are you new’ and he struck up a conversation…. He was a tenant and he had to cut the grass and they didn’t have a lawnmower. I wanted very, very much to lend him ours and when I got home and I told my partner that, he said I wouldn’t do that if I were you. He might think you’re lending him a lawnmower but you don’t know what he’s going to think because his views toward women talking to men are different to what you think.… This is terrible. This is Australia and 2014 and there’s a man on his hands and knees that’s moved into [the] area that can’t cut the grass because he doesn’t have a lawnmower and I can’t offer him my lawnmower … there’s a division there that somehow we’re not allowed to cross those boundaries; or maybe they don’t allow us to cross those boundaries because they won’t step and meet us half way. They want to retain that ambiguity that we don’t want here. We want to be open … (Interview, Melbourne, italics added)

The narration of this seemingly benign encounter revolved around the fair-go principle and notions of mutual help. A hand extended in friendship was immediately retracted because of the participant’s anxieties. Being open was perceived as risky and resulted in the failure to fulfil the cosmopolitan potential of this everyday encounter. The reason for this failure was externalized in the ‘other’ who was attributed stereotypical characteristics (e.g. sexism) based on his assumed cultural membership. These imagined essentialized traits were contrasted with supposed Australian commitments to gender equality, reinforcing a division between an imagined white Australian cultural community and marginalized cultural minorities.

Interestingly, the anxieties were triggered by the partner rather than the person experiencing the encounter as negative. This issue remained unquestioned even though it resulted in feelings of guilt and prompted the participant to avoid future interactions with the neighbour. This alludes to the subtle intersections between logics of gender and race. Importantly, the example above demonstrates anxieties and fears about communities within Australian society that are perceived as somewhat separate and incommensurable. These anxieties clash with perceptions of Australianness as giving everyone a ‘fair go’. We found that to make sense of encounters as the one described above, participants resorted to othering. ‘Core’ Australians were thus justified in their exclusion of those othered from the ‘fair-go’ principle because the Australian common cultural framework was deemed inapplicable. We observed this pattern mainly in participants with European background.

The Australian cultural character understood as laid back and open, giving everybody a fair shot, was experienced as a weakness exposing the individual to potential abuse. The encounter that this narrative is based on took was post hoc rationalized in civic nationalistic terms (see Fozdar and Low, 2015). This is indicative of a general trend in the data. Participants were more comfortable framing conditionality for cosmopolitan practices in terms of economic or civic notions of fairness rather than imposing explicit restrictions on who can be or become Australian in terms of culture or ethnicity.

Conclusion

We explored the relationship between nationalism and cosmopolitanism using a cosmopolitan encounters framework applied to the Australian context. Cosmopolitan ethics have loosely been defined as a disposition of openness to diversity which entails inclusiveness and appreciation of pluralism and mutual respect (Skrbiš and Woodward, 2013). These values are deeply relational and void of meaning if conceptualized only with respect to an individual’s outlooks or beliefs. Therefore, the focus of this research was to move beyond understanding national belonging or cosmopolitanism within the constraints of identity. We put emphasis on the investigation of performances and practices of hospitality and conviviality to gain insights into the ethical reasoning that guides action and results in cosmopolitan encounters.

Our findings are consistent with previous research into Australian nationalism and Australianness which identify its amorphous character (Beasley et al., 2010), the tense relations between narratives of Australia as a white British settler nation (Meaney, 2003) and a multicultural nation made up of diverse migrants (Moran, 2011). The ambivalent implications for Australia as a community surrounding these narratives are reflected in our results. We identified three distinct ways in which Australia was imagined as a national community. These corresponded to the policy dimensions articulated within the political discourse of multiculturalism: cultural, economic and ethnic justice (Jones, 2000). Cutting across and tying these different conceptualizations of belonging to Australia together was the popular notion of fairness. The way our participants described the ‘fair go’ revolved around being open, giving everybody equal opportunities and being ready to lend a hand to help each other out speaking to ideas about ‘mateship’ or the ‘battler’ bridging social strata (Elder, 2007). As such, ideas about what it means to be Australian correspond to the values associated with cosmopolitan ethics and, in fact, served the purpose of imagining bonds of solidarity between strangers.

However, a closer look at how Australianness as fairness inflected micro-level interactions with those perceived as culturally distinct revealed the tenuous relation in which cosmopolitanism and nationalism were situated. Narratives about Australianness were both mobilized to argue in favour of embracing diversity but also to set the conditions for hospitality and conviviality. Within these conditions others were admitted into the national community understood in cultural, ethnic/racial and economic terms. Although cosmopolitan dispositions were clearly articulated, they were moderated by conditions for acceptance and licence for cultural idiosyncrasies was contingent on performing economically. Rather than drawing on cultural or ethnic explanations, as has been shown elsewhere (Fozdar and Low, 2015), participants framed this conditionality in civic terms.

Our findings highlight the uneasy relationship between national and cosmopolitan values. On the one hand, this reinforces the importance of locating the cosmopolitan within the national and vice versa rather than keeping the two entirely separate. On the other hand, it serves as a note of caution not to conflate fairness as an aspect of national culture with fairness as justice in the cosmopolitan sense. We found that national and cosmopolitan values overlap only partially and national narratives often serve to rationalize boundaries rather than bridge experiences.

The results of this study have important implications for cosmopolitan studies. They raise questions about the distinction between cosmopolitanism as an empirical project and an ethical framework (see Roudometof, 2005). The way that cosmopolitan values interact with national values highlights the contextual nature of any ethical reasoning, casting doubt on the universal applicability of cosmopolitan ethics. This poses a challenge for cosmopolitan ethics if relativism is to be avoided.

This study is not without limitations. The contingencies of location, gender, individual ethnic or professional background were merely alluded to in this narrow perspective and present important starting points for more profound analysis of what shapes cosmopolitan encounters.

The findings have implications for arguments dismissing cosmopolitanism as an ethical framework instead highlighting its purpose as a political program (see Ossewaarde, 2007). In our data it was evident that Australian multiculturalism, as a political discourse and policy program that sought to deliberately foster a sense of belonging to a diverse community, was insufficient in and of itself to create the desired unity-in-diversity. The tensions with competing narratives of Australian nationalism as nativist, white or European were partially explained by participants drawing on deeply entrenched cultural values, such as ‘mateship’ that were projected onto and sometimes deemed non-applicable to those who were othered in their narratives. Cosmopolitanism as a critique of contemporary social exclusion and a process seeking to genuinely overcome boundaries between individuals needs to take this lesson on board.

Footnotes

Funding

This study was funded by a discovery project grant from the Australian Research Council (Project ID: ARC - DP130100283).

Author biographies

Stefanie Plage is a researcher currently working on ARC projects around cosmopolitanism, and the sociology of health and illness at the University of New South Wales.

Indigo Willing is a Fellow at the Griffith Centre for Social and Cultural Research at Griffith University. She researches and teaches in the field of sociology.

Zlatko Skrbiš is Vice-Provost and Professor of Sociology at Monash University.

Ian Woodward is Associate Professor at the University of Southern Denmark.

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