World Class Anxiety

It’s an unpalatable fact that many of the intrinsic qualities of our cultural identity, which we like to think of as unique to ourselves, are imports; transplants that have flourished in a foreign soil as they withered at home. I’m not romantic but even I like to pretend that Australian colloquialisms like ‘dinkum’ are entirely our own invention, and that their roots—in this case in Lincolnshire—are too obscure to count.

I also like to think, for better or worse, that our desire for a distinct Australian identity has led us to embrace our perceived failings, as much as our strengths, as cultural traits worth defending. We would like to think we are as famous for our nationalist apathy and our inferiority complex as we are for heroism and sporting prowess. For me, nothing symbolises that inferiority complex more than the frequent occurrence of that wonderfully meaningless epithet ‘world class’ when describing anything okay and Australian, be it an education system, an artist or a station wagon.

Like ‘recyclable’, the approving invocation of ‘world class’ is an expression of boundless optimism and infinite potential. As with many statements of optimism, it is also freighted with naivete and unconscious irony: the idea that if we strive and excel, we might just achieve enough to belong with the rest of the world. Beneath it lies the anxiety that our best isn’t good enough.

In the Australian context, ‘world class’ has an attendant semantic miracle, being simultaneously more and less hubristic than the boast ‘best in the Southern Hemisphere’. (Take that, Johannesburg! In your face, Buenos Aires! Eat dirt, Niue!)

I had always thought that saying something was ‘world class’ was an implicit plea to sit at the grown-ups’ table; a distinctively Australian phenomenon. Imagine my surprise when I arrived in Britain to find the Mother Country bandying about the same uncertain boast. As in Australia, so in Britain: the term is common currency in the pronouncements of politicians, NGOs, pundits, and critics who should know better. Where did this phrase originate? Is it truly British, did they adapt it from Australia, or is it adapted from American marketing-speak?

Either way, the British have embraced it as their own. It suits their national stance of being somehow apart from the world, yet nebulously engaged with it in some discreet, behind-the-scenes manner: in other words, their relationship with Europe writ large. It reflects Britain’s alliance with the United States and neighbouring European trading partners, and its simultaneous view of them as rivals. The magic phrase reveals how, like Australia, Britain entertains thoughts of being self-sufficient, yet tacitly acknowledges that it has been left playing catch-up. How Britain sees itself is the mirror of Australia’s own dichotomous self-image: a small country subconsciously aware of its inadequacies while boasting of ‘punching above its weight’.

It could be expected that a newer country inherits much of its character from its former colonial master, but Britain is now in the unusual situation where its political leaders are talking of reversing the relationship. In March, former attorney-general Lord Goldsmith published his government-commissioned report on British citizenship, in which he suggested Britain could be more British by being more like Australia. As reported by the BBC:

Lord Goldsmith says a new British national day should be established by 2012 to coincide with the Olympics and what will be the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee. It could operate in the same way as Australia Day, which is a public holiday on 26 January and is used to celebrate what it means to be an Australian.[1]

Like Australia, Britain has been questioning its national identity. Also like Australia, British leaders seeking to affirm a single, national character have shown that they are unsure of their own country. They are unsure enough to look abroad for ways to bolster their sense of self. The British press and public response—almost completely derisive—to Goldsmith’s report has been focused mostly on his recommendation that feelings of national pride can be instilled by having school leavers pledge an oath of allegiance to the Queen. (Strangely, even people mildly in favour of a pledge suggested that instead of to the Crown, allegiance be pledged to the state, using Australian citizenship ceremonies as their model.)

The irony of affirming one’s country’s uniqueness by becoming more like another country was allowed to go largely uncommented, as was the idea of Britain’s national day being modelled upon a day commemorating another country’s annexation to Britain. As an Australian, I suppose I should be thankful that the idea of Britain being expected to emulate one of its imperial outposts was spared the general ridicule with which Goldsmith’s report has been greeted.

This bizarre idea that Britain should establish its own version of Australia Day also overlooks the fact that the holiday is not at all the unifying force the British naively assume it to be—geographically, socially or politically. This sticking point has not been noticed at all in the British media, neither in commentary against nor (less commonly) for Lord Goldsmith’s proposal. Yet it would inevitably become an issue in the newly devolved Union, where distinctions between what is universally ‘British’ and what is only English are already points of contention. One of the major factors for Goldsmith’s report being commissioned in the first place was the perceived fragmentation of Great Britain into four separate nations. It seems that Goldsmith has optimistically identified Australia as a single, quasi-British state for inspiration.

The proposed British National Day shares another feature with the ways in which Australia’s political leaders have sought to redefine their country. Beside the tenuous link to the monarchy (an institution just as remote from modern British values as it is from Australian), the national day also makes an equally tenuous connection with sport. In an attempt to find a common national ground that avoids any uncomfortable social, cultural or political debate, Goldsmith and his political cronies have resorted to sporting achievement as a stand-in for patriotism and national identity. This last concept is a relatively new one in Britain, at least compared to the extent to which it has been pursued in Australia. In Britain, the suggested substitution of sporting values for national values has been met with suspicion and revulsion, particularly among what the would-be populist public intellectual Professor David Flint has labelled in Australia ‘the elites’.

As for pledging allegiance, such oaths are regarded by most as an American import, as alien to modern Britain as they are to Australia. More generally, Britain’s true attitude to national identity is much the same as the one inherited by Australia. As a leader in the Times put it, ‘Defining Britishness is rather un-British.’[2]

In response to Goldsmith’s report, Alice Miles in the Times wrote: ‘The idea of a national motto (or “national statement of British values”, as they insist we call it) has already attracted derision on a glorious scale—and there’s nothing more British than the refusal to be defined. Times readers chose as their national motto: No motto please, we’re British.’[3] A few weeks earlier, Janet Daley had written in the Telegraph: ‘British national identity is becoming more and more like the weather: everybody talks about it but nobody can do anything about it. And come to think of it, it is especially like British weather: so tepid most of the time that it is difficult to describe.’[4]

What is most interesting about these objections to Goldsmith’s ideas—to an Australian at least—is that they come from the right of the political spectrum. British newspapers tending to the left or centre-left, such as the Guardian, gave a generally less reactive, more open-minded response to the questions of citizenship and identity raised by the report; whereas right-wing responses were unfavourable, effectively in defence of the laissez-faire attitudes towards national identity quoted above. In contrast, the Australian right has been busy for the last decade or so formulating an increasingly prescriptive idea of what ‘Australian’ means, a narrow definition centring on feel-good thoughts of diggers, battlers, bronzed Olympians, cockies and brave pioneers, the flag.

Since the 1990s, Australian governments and supporting institutions have served up this dumbed-down constructed identity, rejecting the conflicts and complexities that the world has brought to bear upon making Australia what it is today. Britain has built up a rich and nuanced understanding of itself, the legacy of a history of being good at accommodating such complexities. This makes it all the stranger to see Britain’s Labour government entertaining plans to borrow this Australian model and impose a banal hurrah for sport and monarchy as the best means to appreciate its place in the world.

But a motive shared by both nations can be found. It is the perceived need to further withdraw from the world, to deny the shaping forces of globalisation, immigration and multiculturalism, and become resolutely inward-looking—turning one’s back on the outside world while also loudly asserting one’s mastery over it.

Notes
1. Pupils ‘to take allegiance oath’, BBC News, 11 March 2008. Back to article

2. Leading article, The Times, 12 March 2008. Back to article

3. Alice Miles, ‘Citizenship: A British farce’, The Times, 12 March 2008. Back to article

4. Janet Daley, ‘We don’t need to define Britishness’, Telegraph, 18 February 2008. Back to article