Nationalism and National Integration

NATIONALISM AND NATIONAL INTEGRATION By the same author Federalism, Finance and Social Legislation Small-Town Politic...

Author: Anthony Birch

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NATIONALISM AND NATIONAL INTEGRATION

By the same author Federalism, Finance and Social Legislation Small-Town Politics Representative and Responsible Government The British System of Government Representation Political Integration and Disintegration in the British Isles

NATIONALISM AND NATIONAL INTEGRATION

Anthony H.Birch University of Victoria, British Columbia

London

UNWIN HYMAN Boston

Sydney

Wellington

©Anthony H.Birch, 1989 This book is copyright under the Berne Convention. No reproduction without permission. All rights reserved. Published by the Academic Division of Unwin Hyman Ltd, 15/17 Broadwick Street, London W1V 1FP, UK Unwin Hyman Inc., 8 Winchester Place, Winchester, Mass. 01890, USA Allen & Unwin (Australia) Ltd, 8 Napier Street, North Sydney, NSW 2060, Australia Allen & Unwin (New Zealand) Ltd in association with the Port Nicholson Press Ltd, Compusales Building, 75 Ghuznee Street, Wellington 1, New Zealand First published in 1989 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Birch, A H (Anthony Harold), 1924– Nationalism and national integration. 1. Nationalism I. Title 320.5ⴕ4 ISBN 0-203-40005-4 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-70829-6 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-04-320180-6 (Print Edition) ISBN 0-04-320181-4 pbk Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Birch, Anthony Harold. Nationalism and national integration/Anthony H.Birch. p. cm. Bibliography: p. Includes index. ISBN 0-04-320180-6 (alk. paper).—ISBN 0-04-320181-4 (pbk.: alk. paper) 1. Nationalism. 2. National state. I. Title. JC311.B478 1989 88–31365 320.5ⴕ4ⴕ091712–dc 19 CIP

Contents List of Tables

page ix

Acknowledgements

xi

PART I: Theory and Principles

1

1 Concepts and problems

3

2 The origins and nature of nationalist theory

13

3 Nationalism and its critics

25

4 National integration

36

5 The question of minority rights

52

6 Minority nationalist movements and the question of secession

63

PART II: Practice and Experience 7 National integration in the United Kingdom 1 2 3 4 5

The British state Wales and Scotland Ireland Coloured minorities National integration and nationalism

8 National integration in Canada 1 2 3 4 5

The Canadian state Anglophones and francophones Ethnic diversity and multiculturalism The indigenous peoples National integration and nationalism

9 National integration in Australia 1 2 3 4 5 6

The Australian state Ethnicity and immigration Multiculturalism The integration of immigrants The indigenous peoples National integration and nationalism

10 Conclusions

75 77 77 81 96 111 130 138 138 143 167 172 178 183 183 189 196 200 208 214 221

Bibliography Index

239 248 v

List of Tables

7.1 7.2 7.3 7.4 7.5 7.6 7.7 8.1 8.2 8.3 9.1

Specialization of employment in regions of the UK in 1966 page The growth of electoral support for Welsh and Scottish Nationalists Proportions of British people showing racial prejudice in 1964 and 1981 Unemployment rates by ethnic origin: 1982 Occupational attainments among the coloured workforce Educational achievements in six inner-city areas in England, 1978–9 Percentages of Asian adults speaking English ‘slightly’ or ‘not at all’ in 1982 National self-identification of Quebec francophones Support for Quebec independence by region and ethnicity Ethnic origins of the Canadian population in 1981 Australian public opinion about the number of Asian

vii

82 89 116 119 120 121 124 158 162 169

9.2 9.3

immigrants 192 Ethnic origins of the Australian population 195 Commonwealth expenditure on services to immigrants, 1985–6 199

Acknowledgements

I have been very fortunate in writing this book. My thanks go to the Rockefeller Foundation for appointing me Writer-in-Residence at their study centre on Lake Como, where I wrote some of the theoretical chapters in surroundings of great natural beauty. I am grateful also to the Australian National University for appointing me to a Visiting Fellowship, which provided me with excellent facilities for research and stimulating intellectual companionship. I must also thank the University of Victoria for several travel grants. At a personal level, I am grateful to Don Aitken, Frank Castles, Barry Dexter and Charles Price of the Australian National University, and to Ian McAllister of the Australian Defence Force Academy, all of whom were generous with their time and advice. My warm thanks go to Colin Bennett of the University of Victoria for his thoughtful comments on the manuscript. In addition, I should like to express my appreciation of the valuable work done by Richard Rose and his colleagues at the University of Strathclyde on matters relating to national integration in the United Kingdom. Of course, none of these colleagues bears any responsibility for my mistakes and misinterpretations. Finally, I should like to thank my wife Dorothy for her constant support and, as ever, her invaluable help. Anthony H.Birch Victoria, B.C.

ix

PART I

Theory and Principles

1

Concepts and problems

Nationalism is the most successful political ideology in human history. In the two centuries since its first formulation in the writings of European philosophers, it has caused the political map of the world to be completely redrawn, with the entire land surface (apart from Antarctica) now divided between nation-states. Nevertheless, nearly all of these states contain ethnic or cultural minorities within their borders that are only imperfectly integrated into the national society. The process, problems and frequent failures of national integration are issues of central importance in the contemporary world. The main object of this book is to relate the theory of nationalism to the practice of national integration. Chapters 2 and 3 contain an outline of the way in which nationalist theory emerged together with an analysis of the criticisms that have been levelled against it. Chapters 4 and 5 explain the processes that are summed up by the term ‘national integration’; examine the normative arguments that have been advanced in support or criticism of these processes; and discuss the vexed contemporary question of the circumstances in which cultural minorities within a national state can reasonably be said to have rights. Chapter 6 discusses the further question of whether such minorities, if territorially concentrated, can ever have the right to secede; and includes a set of hypotheses to explain why minority nationalist movements have become more prominent in the past two decades. The second part of the book is devoted to case studies of national integration in the United Kingdom, Canada and Australia. The fact that these three countries are all liberal democracies with similar traditions of parliamentary government facilitates the task of making comparative generalizations about their differing experiences in respect of social, economic and political integration. However, the case studies also illustrate some of the problems of integration that are experienced in states with widely differing systems of government. As a preliminary to this analysis, the present chapter will deal with questions of definition. 3

4

Nationalism and National Integration

Defining nationalism One of the problems faced by all students of politics is that the terms they use are also used, in ways that are often confusing, by politicians, journalists and members of the general public. This is conspicuously true of the term ‘nationalism’, which is commonly used in a great variety of ways. It is sometimes used to describe loyalty to the state, for which the proper term is patriotism. It is sometimes used to describe the belief that one’s own culture and civilization are superior to all others, for which the proper term is chauvinism. It is sometimes used to describe feelings of national identity, which is not so much an incorrect usage as an understandable but loose usage. Scotsmen in England who make a habit of wearing the kilt and eating haggis might well be described by their neighbours as ‘real Scots nationalists’. However, Scotsmen in Scotland would only be described in that way if they supported the creation of a Scottish National Assembly and the eventual secession of Scotland from the United Kingdom, and this second way of using the term is more correct. Properly used, the term nationalism refers to a political doctrine about the organization of political authority. This doctrine is generally expressed in terms that are specific to particular communities, but it can and should also be expressed in terms of a general theory about good government. The specific versions of nationalism take two slightly different forms, of which one is ‘the Ruritanian people ought to be united under a single Ruritanian government’ and the other is ‘the Ruritanian people ought to be liberated from foreign domination so that they can govern themselves’. The general theory has been neatly summarized by Kedourie in the three propositions ‘that humanity is naturally divided into nations, that nations are known by certain characteristics which can be ascertained, and that the only legitimate type of government is national self-government’ (Kedourie, 1961, p. 9). The central thrust of this doctrine, which has inspired numerous movements for reform or revolution, is that political authority exercised by principalities, city-states and empires is illegitimate. It is a European doctrine, that emerged at the time of the French revolution, and has since been exported to or copied by politicians in other parts of the world. It is not always a helpful guide to the practical problems of government in the various areas in which it has been adopted, and indeed Kedourie is one of those who believe that the emergence and influence of the doctrine has been deeply unfortunate. Nevertheless, it is the most popular


5

and influential political doctrine ever promoted, and it has transformed the political map of the world. There are two main sources of ambiguity about the character of this influential but sometimes misunderstood doctrine. The less important of these is that most nationalist writers and leaders, from J.G.Fichte to Yasser Arafat, have been concerned with making a case for the independence of a particular nation rather than with nationalism as an abstract and generalized doctrine. Whereas socialist and liberal propagandists have commonly drawn particular lessons for their societies from universal principles about good government, proponents of nationalism have tended to be more parochial. Fichte emphasized the special virtues of the German language and culture. When Mazzini was promoting the cause of Italian unification and self-government he spent much of his time writing about the glories of the Roman Empire and the historic virtues of Italian civilization. When the Parti Quebecois campaigned for the secession of Quebec from Canada, it based its case largely on French-Canadian grievances about their treatment by the anglophone majority and the belief that the French language and culture could only be protected in North America if Quebec became self-governing. All of these claims rested upon the generalized belief that a society with a distinct language and civilization is entitled to govern itself, but in these and other cases the student of nationalist ideas has to extract the generalized argument from a mass of particular arguments of purely local relevance. The second and more important source of ambiguity about nationalism is the extreme difficulty of defining the social unit which, according to nationalist principles, is entitled to govern itself. If one claims that every people or society has this right, one is immediately in trouble. How many peoples or societies are there in the world? How are their boundaries to be defined and charted? If one says that only a national society has this right, how is one to define a national society without falling into the circular argument that it is a society that governs itself? How, in fact, can one define a nation? The problem can be illustrated by tabulating three groups of concepts, one sociological, one cultural and the third institutional. The concepts in these three columns all refer to entities which can be identified by consulting documentary sources or by charting personal relationships. The difficulty about the concept of nation is that it seems to spread across all three categories. Ideally, it might be (and has been) said that a nation is a society which has a distinctive civilization and also possesses its own state. However, as a general

6


Sociological Concepts

Cultural Concepts

Institutional Concepts

Family Clan Tribe Community Society

Religion Language Literature Culture Civilization

Municipality County Province State Empire

definition this has the crippling disadvantage of rendering the proposition that every nation ought to have its own state purely circular. What is wanted is a more modest definition that would identify the characteristics a society needs to support a claim to be a national society. Various authors have tried to do this in terms of such qualities as a common language, a common religion, or a common ethnic identity. In practice, however, the real world presents such a variety of social bases for nationhood that no one of them can plausibly be singled out as either sufficient or necessary. A territory is necessary, but that is a geographical requirement rather than a social basis. The social bases of nationhood have included culture and history in France, language in Germany, ethnicity in Japan, and religion in Pakistan and Israel. It is just not possible to define nationhood in terms of any one social or cultural criterion. The French theorist Ernest Renan fell back on the purely subjective definition that a nation is a group of people who believe themselves to be a nation, but this is not very helpful. It is true that there are elements of subjectivity in the establishment of national identity, but neither individuals nor groups have a free choice in this matter. Group identity is established by the situation and the observers at least as much as it is by the individual or collective self The present author, for instance, is identified as a Londoner when in the north of England, an Englishman when in Scotland, a European when in Africa, a Canadian when crossing the 49th parallel, a white when in Harlem, and a middle-class male almost everywhere. He does not have much choice about these ascribed identities. If the search for a purely social or cultural definition of nationhood is ultimately fruitless, there is no alternative to that of adding a political ingredient. A nation is best defined as a society which either governs itself today, or has done so in the past, or has a credible claim to do so in the not-too-distant future. This lends a degree of circularity to the definition of nationalism quoted above, which in logical terms is most regrettable. Unfortunately, logic and historical


7

reality are somewhat incompatible in this instance. The pure theory of nationalism supposes the existence of nations before they acquire political expression, but in reality nations have to be created by a process which is at least partly political. Objection may also be taken to the insistence on credibility in regard to nationalist aspirations, but this is by no means an insuperable objection. What makes a claim to self-government credible is an empirical question rather than a conceptual one, and it will be discussed later in this book. There are two other sources of confusion or difficulty about nationalism that may appropriately be mentioned at this point. One is a purely intellectual confusion, caused by writers who have linked the doctrine of nationalism with other contemporary doctrines, producing such categories as conservative nationalism, liberal nationalism and socialist nationalism. This is a mistake, for nationalism is a doctrine about the proper relationship between society and the political regime which can be held simultaneously with any one of the various doctrines about the proper extent and nature of government policies. People are not conservative nationalists or liberal nationalists; they are nationalists who may happen also to be either conservatives or liberals. Another kind of difficulty in understanding nationalism arises from the fact that it is a European doctrine which has spread to other parts of the world where circumstances are different. Because the United States, for instance, is populated by immigrants from a variety of ethnic backgrounds and cultures, American nationalism cannot have quite the same character as German or French or Polish nationalism. It is not easy for Americans, brought up to believe that all men are equal, to understand fully the feelings of ethnic and cultural pride that underlie nationalist sentiments in most parts of Europe. Even more clearly, in tropical Africa nationalism is an alien doctrine, adopted by governing elites to enhance the legitimacy of their rule, but not easily compatible with the reality of tribal loyalties and rivalries. The language and message of nationalism has spread round the globe, but the political forces described as nationalist differ from one region to another.

National integration The most inconvenient fact about the world for nationalist theorists or propagandists is that the number of communities and cultural groups far exceeds the number of states that either exist or could reasonably be established. The first of Kedourie’s three propositions, while accurate as a summation of the logical foundation of nationalist

8


theory, is at complete variance with historical truth. Humanity is not naturally divided into nations. For most of human history, for at least 60,000 years and possibly for twice that period, humanity was divided into small tribes. As populations increased and communications improved, these tribes merged into larger social groupings, but nations are relatively recent and relatively artificial creations. Very few of the national societies that now exist are completely homogeneous in a social and cultural sense. With a handful of exceptions, modern nations are an amalgam of historical communities which possessed a fairly clear sense of separate identity in the past but have been brought together by various economic, social and political developments. The process by which they are brought together is known as political integration, and when it takes place at the national level (as distinct from the regional or international levels) it is best described as national integration. The elements of the process are not difficult to identify. Let it be supposed that a group of political leaders acquire power over a designated territory and its inhabitants. Their first step will be to consolidate political control of the area, by quelling internal rivals, setting up frontier guards, establishing police and courts to maintain order. Their second step, commonly known as administrative penetration, will be to establish machinery for collecting taxes and implementing laws through the area, which will involve the appointment of bureaucrats and the creation of a register of taxpayers. These steps constitute the process of statebuilding, which has occurred in European states from the twelfth century onwards, in the United States, Canada and Australia in the nineteenth century, in the new states of the third world since the Second World War. Until the last two centuries in Europe and North America, and until very recently in most other parts of the world, the demands made by the state or empire on its citizens were so small that no active sense of loyalty was required for the governmental system to operate. Taxes were minimal; government services were minimal; laws and regulations left people without interference in their normal lives; and wars were fought by volunteers and mercenaries. In this kind of situation, state-building was enough to make the governmental system work. In recent generations, the development of the positive state has transformed the situation. Citizens are now expected to comply with a myriad of laws and regulations; they are required to surrender a large proportion of their income through taxation; they have to accept conscription in times of war and to endure bombing and other


9

hardships if they are not conscripted. For all this to be possible, the regime requires an active sense of loyalty on the part of the overwhelming majority of its citizens. They must feel that it is their government whom they are obeying, their country for which they are making sacrifices. They are unlikely to feel this kind of loyalty except in a society that both governs itself and has experienced a process of national integration. The essential steps in this process can be listed. One of them is the creation of symbols of national identity, such as a head of state, a flag and a national anthem. Another is the establishment of national political institutions which bring all citizens under the same laws and are also seen to be representative of the various sections of society. It is not essential that members of these institutions should be elected, except in those western societies where free election is now regarded as the only proper way of choosing representatives. What is required for the legitimation of the regime is simply that the main governing bodies should contain members to speak on behalf of, and possibly drawn from, the main divisions of the nation. In the Soviet Union the Central Committee of the Communist Party owes part of its authority to the fact that it contains representatives from the Ukraine, Siberia, Georgia and the Muslim republics. In Nigeria the cabinet is expected to contain members of at least the three largest tribes. In Canada the cabinet is made up of a nicely-calculated mixture of anglophones and francophones, Protestants and Catholics, and representatives of the various regions of the country. A third essential step in the integrative process is the creation of an educational system which gives children a sense of national identity, teaches them about their common history, and (directly or indirectly) inculcates patriotism. The control of the educational system is an instrument of socialization which no modern state can afford to neglect. The first political leader to realize this was Robespierre, who stated as early as 1793 that ‘the nation alone has the right to bring up its children; we cannot confide this trust to family pride and individual prejudice’. Numerous nationalist spokesmen since that time have echoed these sentiments, and school curricula everywhere have been shaped to serve nationalistic and patriotic ends. In some countries, such as the United States, a deliberate attempt is made to teach civics, while in others, such as Britain, national awareness is imparted simply through the teaching of history. But since a neutral version of history is unthinkable, the result is very similar. The importance of education in this context is dramatically illustrated by the example of Northern Ireland, where communal conflict has been exacerbated by the fact that the Protestant schools

10


have taught mainly British history, in which Ireland appears as a nuisance, while the Catholic schools have emphasized Irish history, in which Britain is depicted as an enemy. In most, if not all, societies the activity of extracting an historical narrative from the multitudinous events of the past is an exercise in national mythmaking which serves the end of national integration. A fourth element, which to some extent follows on from the third, is the development of national pride. If people are to feel that their country is worth special sacrifices they have to feel that it embodies special virtues. The French are proud of their civilization and their cuisine; the Germans of their efficiency; the English of their tolerance and sense of humour; the Americans of their democratic institutions. A regime which feels the need to bolster the morale of its citizens may even make a deliberate effort to create a focus for national pride, as the German Democratic Republic did in the 1970s by its highly successful program to train world-beating athletes. The main obstacle to the development of national integration is the existence of ethnic or cultural minorities within the state who resist integrative tendencies. If a handful of city-states are disregarded, nearly all modern states contain such minorities. Japan is socially homogeneous; Portugal, Sweden and the Irish Republic are almost homogeneous; but these are the exceptions. Cultural minorities are partially integrated into the larger national community by two types of process, one unplanned and the other resulting from deliberate decisions. The unplanned process, generally known as social mobilization, is a consequence of industrialization. The need to leave the land to find employment in industrial areas causes personal mobility, which breaks the social bonds of local communities. The development of mass markets, rapid transport facilities, and mass media of communication tends to standardize tastes and values. The planned measures to integrate cultural minorities normally begin with the adoption of a single official language for political, legal and commercial transactions. This immediately forces the elite of the minorities to communicate in the language of the majority and quickly acts as an incentive for ambitious members of the minorities to become fluent in that language. The official language soon becomes the dominant language among educated members of the minority. Since bilingualism is an unnatural state of affairs for human beings, there is an inevitable tendency for the dominant language to drive out the second language, except in so far as it is kept alive by the schools.


11

The second step is for the state to insist that the official national language should be the only language of instruction in schools and universities. This makes sense on utilitarian grounds as well as in terms of national integration. A further step, taken by many governments at crucial stages in the integrative process, is to ban the teaching of the minority language and even to institute punishments for children heard talking to each other in that language in school buildings and grounds. By measures of this kind the French almost stamped out the speaking of Breton, the lowland Scots rendered Gaelic extinct on the Scottish mainland, and the English drove the Welsh language into decline. State control of radio and television, which is the norm except in North America, also requires an essentially political decision about the language or languages to be used. The state may be blind to differences of colour among its citizens, but it cannot be deaf to differences of language. There has to be an official language and the inevitable consequence of this is to drive other languages into decline. A minority language can be protected if the state adopts two official languages, but the experiences of Belgium and Canada indicate that the political costs of this policy can be very high indeed. There are several other kinds of planned integration, but it is unnecessary to multiply examples at this stage. The point of mentioning these matters in this introductory chapter is to indicate that the process of national integration poses some interesting general questions. There is a set of normative questions about the extent to which integration can be justified. Is it right for a state to embark on policies which will condemn a minority language, valued by a local community and said to be essential to the preservation of that community’s culture, to the certainty of decline and the possibility of eventual extinction? On what grounds can such policies be attacked and defended? If defenders of local cultures claim that cultural minorities have rights that national governments are morally obliged to recognize, what philosophical problems are involved in such a claim? There is also a set of sociological questions, relating to the conditions which determine the rate of decline of a minority language, the problems of bilingualism, and so forth. There are rival sociological models of the integrative process, one maintaining that the assimilation of minorities is an inevitable concomitant of modernization, and therefore by implication desirable, the other maintaining that the process involves exploitation of the minorities by the majority and can appropriately be described as internal colonialism.

12


A third model, not yet so well articulated, depicts the cost of social mobilization and national integration as being not so much exploitation as isolation. According to this view, these processes replace local bonds of community membership that were organic and meaningful by a sense of identification with the national society that is weaker because it is induced and artificial. The result is either an atomistic society or a society that has real meaning to members of the core community but only a superficial significance for members of what were once peripheral communities but are now little more than peripheral areas. There are also questions, both normative and sociological, about the development of minority nationalist movements and the measures which national governments should or can take either to frustrate these movements or to meet these demands. And if national governments fail in this endeavour, there is a question about whether and in what circumstances the minority could reasonably claim a right to secede from the state. All these questions will be discussed in

later chapters. The logical first step, however, is to trace the emergence of nationalism as a political doctrine.

2

The origins and nature of nationalist theory

Unlike most other political doctrines, nationalism lacks a founding father whose ideas have served as inspiration and model for his successors. There is no nationalist equivalent of liberalism’s John Locke, conservatism’s Edmund Burke, or communism’s Karl Marx. It is, however, possible to trace the intellectual origins of nationalist doctrine in the reactions of several late-eighteenth century writers to the universalistic assumptions of the philosophers of the Enlightenment. To put this reaction into perspective, it will be helpful to give a brief indication of the nature of some of these assumptions, in so far as they relate to politics. The thinkers of the Enlightenment were individualists and favoured republican forms of government because such forms gave individual citizens a degree of control over their political leaders. They were also universalists in the sense that they regarded individuals as essentially similar in their basic characters and needs and as being swayed in similar ways by historical forces. As Friedrich Meinecke observed, Enlightenment thinkers regarded individuals as rather like leaves in a forest, all moved together by the prevailing wind. They were also universalists in the sense of believing that republican forms of government were best for everyone and would be a blessing if adopted throughout the world. The two great political events that embodied Enlightenment ideas were the American Declaration of Independence and the French Revolution, and it is no accident that the French and the Americans have been the two peoples most optimistic about the power of reason to fashion human progress and most confident that their forms of civilization and their concepts of good government were suitable for export. Napoleon’s armies took French political ideas to other parts of Europe. Later French governments conferred the benefits of French education and civilization on their colonial subjects in ways that were not emulated by Britain and the other 13

14


colonizing powers of Europe. The US government exported American institutions to the Philippines and the Americans showed great determination and relative success in their attempts to Americanize Germany and Japan in the aftermath of the Second World War. A survey in 1970 showed that 51 per cent of American teenagers thought that American political institutions were suitable for all countries, compared with only 11 per cent of British teenagers who regarded British institutions as suitable for export (Dennis, Lindberg and McCrone, 1971). Nationalist theories have a different foundation. They are based on the belief that man is a social animal, deriving his character and aspirations from communities that share a common culture. They further hold that government can only be good government if it is based upon such communities. To extend Meinecke’s analogy about the leaves in the forest, it could be said that nationalists see individuals as being more like flowers than leaves, having characteristics that are particular to their species and flourishing best if gathered together with others of their own kind and nurtured in the way that is most suitable for them. Roses grow best in a rose garden, watered and fertilized in ways appropriate to roses and protected from the corrupting competition of weeds. If this analogy illustrates one of the great strengths of nationalism, namely an understanding of humanity that is more profound than the understanding shown by individualists, it also reveals one of the dangers implicit in nationalism, for Hitler likened Jews and gypsies to weeds.

J.J.Rousseau The first political theorist to adumbrate a theory that can be called nationalist was Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He has this distinction because he was the first to suggest that a society whose members shared common customs was the best, and indeed the only satisfactory, foundation for a political society. In the Discourse on the Origin of Inequality he suggested that human beings, having evolved from a state of nature into communal living based on shared customs and a single way of life, could be expected to feel affection only for members of their own societies, not for the whole human race. (See Barnard, 1983, p. 26.) This was very different from the universalistic view that all human beings are equal and deserving of equal affection. In later works he went on to suggest that such communal groupings could naturally (by which he meant ideally) be turned into political societies with their own institutions of

Nationalist theory

15

government, but he did not think that this would happen as a matter of course. In Rousseau’s view the creation of an ideal political society was not a matter of natural evolution or spontaneous combination but the work of a political leader, whom he called a legislator. In The Social Contract he asked what people were fit for legislation. His answer, in part, was a people ‘already united by some common bonds of origin, interest or convention’ (Rousseau, [1762] 1953, p. 53). Moreover, ‘the wise legislator does not begin by drawing up laws which are good in themselves, but first investigates whether the people for whom they are intended is capable of bearing them’ (Rousseau, (1762] 1953, p. 46). The spirit of this assertion is very different from the spirit that motivated the American Declaration of Independence; it is the spirit of a nationalist rather than that of a universalist. The ideal system of government would derive its character and its main lines of policy from the general will of its citizens, so that by obeying the edicts of their government they would be submitting only to the implementation of decisions in which they themselves had participated. However, Rousseau was not so optimistic as to believe that citizens would have the degree of unity necessary for this ideal polity without some kind of civic education. He therefore emphasized the importance of both education and what he called ‘civil religion’. The kind of education he thought valuable differed from that admired by the Encyclopedists, the writers and philosophers who dominated French intellectual life in the later part of the eighteenth century. They conceived the main functions of education to be those of stripping the mind of acquired prejudices and training it in the exercise of abstract reason. Rousseau, on the contrary, believed that education should develop the character as well as the mind, and should do so in a way that would pass on to the younger generation the moral standards that had developed in their national society. He made his views perfectly explicit in his Considerations on the Government of Poland. It is education that must give souls a national formation, and direct their opinions and tastes in such a way that they will be patriotic by inclination, by passion, by necessity. When first he opens his eyes, an infant ought to see the fatherland, and up to the day of his death he ought never to see anything else…At twenty, a Pole ought not to be a man of any other sort; he ought to be a Pole…From this you can see that it is not studies of the usual sort, directed by foreigners and priests, that I would like to have children pursue. The law ought to regulate the content, the order and the

16


form of their studies. They ought to have only Poles for teachers. (Rousseau, [1782] 1953, pp. 176–7) Rousseau also had distinctive ideas about the role of religion in his ideal state. It should be a civil religion that could encourage good citizenship and would not set up an authority which rivalled that of the state. He observed in the final chapter of The Social Contract that Judaism and Christianity had both been disruptive influences in a political sense, a characteristic that had understandably led to the persecution of Jews and Christians in some historical periods (Rousseau, [1762] 1953, pp. 144–5). The influence of the Roman Catholic Church had ‘resulted in an unending jurisdictional conflict which has made any sort of good polity impossible in Christian states’ and Christianity was ‘contrary to the social spirit’ because it detached the hearts of citizens from the state (Rousseau, [1762] 1953, pp. 145 and 149). The ideal state would therefore banish organized Christianity, along with any other religion that was fundamentally intolerant, and replace it by ‘a purely civil profession of faith whose articles the sovereign is competent to determine, not precisely as religious dogmas, but as sentiments of sociability, without which it is impossible to be either a good citizen or a faithful subject’ (Rousseau, [1762] 1953, p. 153). This is not only the first statement by a political philosopher of a nationalistic attitude to religion but also one of the most forthright. Its implication is that, in modern parlance, a state should use the influence of religion to socialize its citizens into compliance with political authority.

J.G.Herder The second theorist to contribute to the doctrine of nationalism was J.G.Herder, who was a theologian, historian and literary critic (the teacher of Goethe) as well as being to some degree a political philosopher. Herder’s greatest achievements were as the main founder of historicism as a philosophical outlook (being much more influential than his predecessor, Vico) and one of the founders of the German romantic movement. In both of these achievements he set German thought on a path that distinguished it sharply from both French rationalism and British empiricism. His contribution to nationalist theory was essentially a by-product of his historicism and his romanticism, his beliefs in tradition, custom and emotion rather than in the pure play of the rational mind. Inevitably, his views and the manner in which he expressed them were partly shaped by the situation in which he was writing. Whereas

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Rousseau wrote as a Frenchman, in a country with a long history of political independence and unity, Herder wrote as a German, a people divided between over one hundred jurisdictions. Germans were governed by a multitude of petty principalities and the German educated classes were profoundly conscious of the fact that France was the dominant power in Europe, not only in the sense that it was the most populous and powerful state but also in the sense that French intellectuals were the leaders of the Enlightenment and the French upper classes were the leaders of fashion. As a German, Herder resented the French assumption that they were the leaders and bearers of a civilization that had universal validity. In opposition to this he developed the view that humanity had its roots in and derived its values from a number of national cultures, each of which had its own virtues and no one of which could rightly lay claims to universality. Isaiah Berlin has observed that when Herder visited France he ‘suffered that mixture of envy, humiliation, admiration, resentment and defiant pride which backward peoples feel towards advanced ones’ (Berlin, 1976, p. 180). However that may be, Herder caricatured the spirit of French cosmopolitanism with a fine spirit of irony: All national characters, thank God, have become extinct! We all love one another or, rather, no one feels the need of loving anyone else. We associate with one another, are all completely equal— cultured, polite, very happy! We have, it is true, no fatherland, no one for whom we live; but we are philanthropists and citizens of the world. Most of the rulers already speak French, and soon we shall all do so. And then—bliss! the golden era is dawning again when all the world had one tongue and language! There shall be one flock and one shepherd! (Quoted in Ergang, 1931, p. 96) In opposition to French cosmopolitanism, Herder insisted that every people and every age had ‘it’s own outlook and way of thinking and feeling and acting’ and could ‘be truly understood and judged only in terms of its own scale of values…and not those of some other culture: least of all, in terms of some universal, impersonal, absolute scale’ (Berlin, 1976, p. xxii). Each culture was shaped by the physical environment in which it developed, by the language of its people and by the forms of education through which customs, traditions and values were passed on to younger generations. Herder used the term Volk to describe each community that had an identifiable culture and he was willing to apply this name liberally to communities of the most varied sizes and characteristics. He insisted, moreover, that

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each Volk had its own special qualities and virtues, to be understood and appreciated rather than weighed in the balance of contemporary values and found wanting. In his Reflections on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind he devoted immense labour to a discussion of the varied virtues of the Persians, the Hebrews, the Greeks, the Arabs, the Germanic tribes, the Venetians, the Provençals and sundry other communities (See Herder, [1812] 1961, passim.) Every Volk in history, it seemed, had contributed something of value. Herder believed that the only rational form of government was a national state based on a Volk. He detested imperial forms of government and wrote of them with contempt as ‘patched-up contraptions appropriately called state-machines’ (quoted in Barnard, 1983, p. 247). He also believed, however, that the artificiality of empires would condemn them to fall apart in the fullness of time. Whereas Rousseau had conceived of human language as merely a means of communication, Herder believed that languages had intrinsic value as the expression of Volk cultures. He wrote in regretful terms about the German language ‘which, overloaded as it is with foreign ornaments, strikes us as small and unimpressive for all its size’ (quoted in Gillies, 1945, p. 8). However, there was a latent genius in German culture which could be expressed again if the language could ‘recapture the latent emotional and poetic content it had so far had no chance of exploiting owing to Latin and French domination’ (Gillies, 1945, p. 31). These views do not amount to a full theory of nationalism. Herder was, after all, a philosopher of literature and of history rather than of politics. His main contribution to political ideas, apart from having apparently coined the word Nationalisms (see Berlin, 1976, p. 181), was to have emphasized the emotional importance to human beings of their membership of a distinct cultural group, and the desirability of basing political authority upon such groups. However, this was a novel and significant contribution. His ideas had a great influence on later generations. Goethe said that ‘the multiplicity of suggestions put into currency by Herder had so far sunk into the consciounsess of the German people that they were taken for granted and the debt due to their originator rarely paid’ (McEachran, 1939, p. 86). This influence was by no means confined to Germans. Manuel has said that: ‘As intellectuals in Central Europe read Herder, they found in his work a justification for the existence of the embryonic nations to which they belonged, and he became the chosen philosopher of the new cultural nationalism that destroyed the Habsburg empire’ (Manuel, 1961, pp. xvii– xviii).

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He also influenced Mazzini’s thought and therefore had an indirect influence on the future unification of Italy.

J.G.Fichte Fichte was a less profound thinker than Herder, but he has an essential place in any account of the development of nationalist thought because he contributed elements of national pride, verbal aggression and messianic political vision that were to find expression in the ideas and activities of so many subsequent nationalist politicians. Fichte was a liberal and a republican, a great admirer of the French Revolution for its achievement of sweeping away the privileges of the nobility and establishing the equality of all citizens under laws passed by the National Assembly. In his early years he was also an individualist with political beliefs that were more cosmopolitan than nationalistic. After the defeat of Prussia by Napoleon’s armies in 1806 his outlook changed. In the winter of 1807–8, in his capacity as first Professor of Philosophy at the University of Berlin, he delivered a series of public lectures that were explicitly nationalistic in character. Subsequently published under the title Addresses to the German Nation, they were evidently designed to raise the morale of his audience and to inspire the German people, or at any rate German intellectuals, with a sense of nationalistic mission. As G.A.Kelly has observed, the Germans of that period were like the ancient Greeks in that they had a language and a culture but no state (Kelly, 1968, p. xxii). Fichte followed Herder in maintaining that language was the most proper basis for nationhood; and he stated this view in more emphatic terms than the reflective and somewhat circumlocutory Herder had done. ‘It is true beyond doubt’, Fichte declared, ‘that, wherever a separate language is formed, there a separate nation exists, which has the right to take independent charge of its affairs and to govern itself (Fichte, [1845] 1968, p. 184). The Germans therefore had the right to become a self-governing nation. Moreover, the German language was not any language, to be given equal value with all the other tongues spoken in Europe and elsewhere. On the contrary, it had special qualities that contributed to the special character of German culture. It was a pure and natural language, that had been spoken by the Germans throughout the history of their race, and this purity gave both the language and the German people an advantage over peoples who spoke languages derived from Latin, like the French, the Italians and the Spanish, as well as over people who spoke bastard languages like English. This claim, it must

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be noted, marked a distinct step away from the tolerant historicism of Herder, who had maintained that no universal criteria existed by which languages could be evaluated. Fichte went on to claim that there was a link between language, culture and achievement. In medieval times the German burghers had been remarkable in their achievements. If one left out of account some districts of Italy, ‘the German burghers were the civilised people and the others the barbarians’ (Fichte, [1845] 1968, p. 89). More recently, the Germans had again shown their superiority by leading the way in the reformation of the Church. This emancipation from external authority had liberated German philosophical thinking, which had found its highest expression in the work of Leibniz and Kant, so that by 1807 ‘philosophy has been perfected’. Not everyone realized it, so ‘one must be content for the present with stating this as a fact, until an age comes which comprehends it’ (Fichte, [1845] 1968, p. 86). Fichte’s contemporary and sometime friend Schiller had a similar view of German moral and philosophical thought: ‘Sundered from politics, the German has founded…an ethical greatness…independent of any political destiny…Each people has its day in history, but the day of the German is the harvest of time as a whole’ (quoted in Kelly, 1968, p. xxii). Having made these claims on behalf of German culture, Fichte also set out his vision of the future. ‘The next step forward that we have to make in the plan of eternity is to educate the nation to perfect manhood…If only because the German has hitherto brought to completion all the steps of culture and has been preserved in the modern world for that special purpose, it will be his work, too, in respect of education’ (Fichte, [1845] 1968, p. 88). His view of the form education should take was somewhat authoritarian. ‘The new education must consist essentially in this, that it completely destroys freedom of will in the soil which it undertakes to cultivate, and produces on the contrary strict necessity in the decisions of the will’ (Fichte, [1845] 1968, p. 17). This vision was a far cry from the idealistic view of education Rousseau had developed in Emile. The German who could be thus educated would be a superior person endowed with spirituality and nobility beyond the reach of other peoples, imbued with a mission and ready to die for its sake. His belief and his struggle to plant what is permanent, his conception in which he comprehends his own life as an eternal life, is the bond which unites first his own nation and then, through his nation, the whole human race…He who does not

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first regard himself as eternal has in him no love of any kind and, moreover, cannot love a fatherland, a thing which for him does not eixst…But he to whom a fatherland has been handed down, and in whose soul heaven and earth, visible and invisible, meet and mingle, and thus, and only thus, create a true and enduring heaven—such a man fights to the last drop of his blood to hand on the precious possession unimpaired to his posterity. (Fichte, [1845] 1968, p. 116–17) In his final lecture Fichte developed his rhetoric about the German spirit and his earlier hint that its benefits could be spread from Germany to the whole of humanity. ‘It is for you’, he told his audience, ‘to justify and give meaning to our sacrifice, by setting this spirit to fulfill its purpose and to rule the world. If this does not come about as the final goal to which the whole previous development of our nation has been tending, then the battles we fought will turn out to be a vain and fleeting farce’ (Fichte, [1845] 1968, p. 226). In the thinking of these three writers, it is clear, the character, the virtues and the dangers of nationalism as a political doctrine were all set out. From Rousseau’s insistence that a free self-governing state could only be achieved if it were based on the consensus of a community, through Herder’s historicism and claim that each culture had its own virtues, to be nourished by the protection of political nationhood, we moved to Fichte’s extraordinary claims about the special virtues of German culture and his vision that the Germans of the future might impose these virtues on the entire world.

Later nationalist thinkers Fichte’s immediate successor was Hegel, both in the philosophy Chair at Berlin University and in the advocacy of German nationalism. Hegel was of course a much more profound and ambitious philosopher than Fichte and in this context it would be otiose to attempt any summary of his thought. However, it is relevant to note that in two respects his attitude to nationalism was significantly different from that of his predecessor. In the first place, Hegel’s emphasis was on the virtues of the national state as a form of political organization rather than on the importance of culture. Hegel placed his faith in the state as a means of improving the lot of mankind, which included extending human freedom, properly interpreted, and he thought that in some circumstances the rulers of states would be

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morally justified in actions taken on behalf of the state that would be immoral if taken on behalf of individuals. In adopting this position Hegel has been said to have provided a new justification for the Machiavellian doctrine of raison d’etat, a doctrine that had for long been out of favour among liberal and progressive thinkers. Meinecke observed that in Hegel’s writings ‘Machiavellism came to form an integral part in the complex of an idealist’s view of the universe, a view which at the same time embraced and confirmed all moral values.’ It was, he said, ‘almost like the legitimisation of a bastard’ (Meinecke, 1957, p. 350). While this was a perceptive comment on the intellectual history of that period, it should not be taken to imply a lack of moral sensitivity on Hegel’s part. Presumably everyone who is not an anarchist would now agree that in some circumstances the state can rightly do some things (like putting people in prison) that no individual could rightly do. The second novel feature of Hegel’s version of nationalist theory is that he replaced Fichte’s vision of what the future might hold by a belief in historical inevitability. The unfolding of the world spirit was taking humanity, step by step, towards its destiny of being organized in national states. Whereas Fichte detested Napoleon and wished he had never been born, Hegel viewed the Napoleonic empire as just one more stage in human progress, to be replaced in turn by another and presumably more advanced stage. In this way the historicist outlook was transformed from the moral and cultural relativism of Herder, through the inconsistencies of Fichte, to the moral certainties of the Hegelian dialectic. Subsequent nationalist thinkers bore the character of users and diffusers of nationalist theory rather than that of producers. Louis Kossuth’s campaign to gain political autonomy for the Hungarians, Palacky’s activities on behalf of the Czechs, and Mazzini’s endeavours to stimulate the Italians into creating a united Italy were all examples of nationalistic campaigns by intellectuals who had been deeply influenced by the nationalist doctrine generated by the theorists we have mentioned. There were other examples in nineteenth-century Europe, and though it is always difficult to credit specific intellectuals with changing the course of history, there can be no doubt that the cumulative effect of nationalist ideas was to undermine the authority of the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires. A conspicuous feature of any catalogue of nationalist thinkers and propagandists would be the absence of Anglo-Saxon names. The reasons for this are fairly obvious. The English themselves had a secure national state from the eleventh century onwards, thus having no need for a nationalist doctrine or movement. The

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Canadians, Australians and New Zealanders secured their independence from Britain by mutual agreement, without the aid of nationalism. Only the Americans engaged in a struggle for independence, and they justified their actions in universalistic rather than nationalistic terms. The American colonists had no clear sense of cultural difference from the British, only a set of specific complaints about taxation and representation. Their Declaration of Independence began by appealing in the most general terms to the rights of man and moved from this vein to a catalogue of particular grievances, without passing through any intermediate arguments about the character, needs and rights of Americans as Americans. All four countries have had to cope with problems of national integration, which will be discussed in later chapters, but the AngloSaxon experience of nationalism as a doctrine has been limited to their reactions to nationalistic demands put forward by partially integrated communities within their states such as the Irish, the Welsh, the Scots and the French-Canadians. In spite of their apparent distaste for nationalist doctrine, the Americans have contributed in a highly significant way to the course of world history by their propagation of the principle of selfdetermination. The strongly-held American view, derived from their own history, is that imperialism is an unquestionably bad form of government. People should be free to govern themselves and foreign rule is always illegitimate. This was not a nationalist doctrine because Americans never produced a definition of what comprised a nation and tended to look with disfavour on the view that ethnic and cultural unity was the essential basis of nationhood. This attitude was entirely natural in view of the multi-ethnic character of the American people, but the consequence was that self-determination has had the character of a slogan rather than a doctrine. When practical difficulties arose about the borders of proposed new states, the American tendency was to urge the individualistic device of a referendum or plebiscite to resolve such difficulties. Woodrow Wilson’s attempt to redraw the frontiers of Europe according to the principle of self-determination was, as everyone now knows, the most disastrous piece of policy-making ever engaged in by a well-intentioned politician. However, since 1945 the principle has proved an ideal tool for the political leaders of colonized peoples wishing to rid themselves of European rule. Because colonial boundaries were imposed without regard to the boundaries between ethnic groups, very few such leaders could use nationalist doctrines with any sense of conviction. In sub-Saharan Africa, Jomo Kenyatta was the only leader to do so. In Asia, Mahatma Gandhi used

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nationalist doctrines in his efforts to build Hindu self-consciousness and to persuade the British to leave, only to be rivalled and partially defeated at the very hour of victory by the rival nationalism of Mohammed Ali Jinnah, based on the Muslim religion and leading to the creation of Pakistan as an Islamic state. But these were the exceptions. Most of the ex-colonies acquired statehood without any real pretence that it was built upon nationhood. As Julius Nyerere said in 1964: ‘nations in any real sense of the word do not at present exist in Africa. None of our nations is made up of people bound together by a single language or heritage common to them but not to the people of a neighbouring nation’ (quoted in Shafer, 1982, p. 165). Such states were launched into existence with a flimsy framework of political authority resting insecurely on a social foundation of tribal rivalries and conflicts. Nobody should be surprised that liberal democratic institutions proved unsuitable to the task of government and that political power has passed mainly into the hands of dictators able to enforce compliance by the use of the army. Though the entire world is now divided into national or supposedly national states, nationalist ideas continue to be influential in many areas. Most obviously, they influence sub-state nationalist movements formed by ethnic or cultural minorities claiming political autonomy. Some want political devolution and partial autonomy while others want secession and national independence. The movements vary immensely in character, from the Sikhs of India and the Kurds of Iraq to the Basques of northern Spain and the Quebecois of Canada, but the ideas and propaganda are based on the theories developed by the European philosophers discussed earlier in this chapter. In a less direct way, nationalist ideas and slogans are also used by politicians seeking to regenerate their people and direct their energies into different channels. The most common usage of this kind is by leaders wishing to modernize their nations, such as Kemal Ataturk in Turkey, Chiang Kai Shek in China and Gemal Nasser in Egypt. However, the Ayatollah Khomeini of Iran has recently used nationalist slogans for the opposite purpose, namely to turn his people away from modernization and recover their traditional devotion to religious practices and customs. Such uses of nationalism will not be discussed

in this book, for they are tangential to its themes, but they provide one more illustration of the force and vitality of the theories first developed in the latter part of the eighteenth century.

3

Nationalism and its critics

For all its limitations and problems, nationalism has proved to be the most successful political doctrine ever promoted. At the time of the French Revolution, there were only about twenty of what we would now recognize as national states, the rest of the world consisting of sprawling empires, unexplored territories and a host of tiny independent principalities. Now the entire inhabitable surface of the globe is divided into 175 national (or supposedly national) states, each of them legally sovereign within its territory. Only a handful of tiny colonies, like Gibraltar and New Caledonia, remain of the empires; only Antarctica remains free of state sovereignty; and Monaco is the sole principality to retain, under French protection, the semblance of independence. The transformation has occurred in only two centuries. As is well known, this great development in human history took place not as a gradual process but in stages. In the nineteenth century the most important were the break-up of the Spanish-American empire in the first half of the century, the unification of Italy and Germany in the second half. In the twentieth century the most important have been the breakup of the Russian, Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian Empires immediately after the First World War, the achievement of political independence by virtually all European colonies in the twenty-five years following the Second. It is unnecessary to recount the history of the developments in detail; this has been done in several excellent books, of which the best are Shafer (1972), Seton-Watson (1977) and Breuilly (1982). What needs to be emphasized, though it is obvious enough, is that very few of the present 175 states correspond to the ideal model of political organization sketched out by the theorists of nationalism. Most of the states of the Third World have artificial boundaries, established by their former colonial rulers on the basis of exploration and conquest, but having little relationship to the boundaries between ethnic groups. India, for instance, could well be 25

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described as a multinational state, since it contains within its borders peoples, like the Tamils and the Sikhs, who have most of the attributes of nationhood and have the capacity to govern themselves. Most African states south of the Sahara could be described as multi-tribal in character, since tribal identities and loyalties are still more important to most of their citizens than national identities and loyalties. Even the oldest states are rarely as homogeneous in their populations as nationalist theory would seem to require. Japan, Sweden and Portugal are pretty homogeneous, to be sure. But Britain has nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales; Spain has a militant nationalist movement among its Basque citizens together with feelings of cultural distinctiveness among Catalans and Andalucians; and France, so often described as ‘the one and indivisible republic’, has ethnic minorities in the shape of the Bretons, the Basques, the Alsacians and the Corsicans. In these circumstances it is not surprising that nationalism has had critics and opponents as well as advocates and supporters. In the middle years of the nineteenth century, Lord Acton was the most famous and influential of its critics. In the aftermath of the Versailles Treaty, international lawyers like Alfred Zimmern and historians like Alfred Cobban said the doctrine was likely to have tragic consequences. In the aftermath of decolonization, Elie Kedourie mounted an intellectual attack of considerable force on the very foundations of nationalist thought. It is instructive to consider these criticisms of the doctrine and to make some attempt to assess their validity. A preliminary point, though obvious, ought to be made: namely, that a good deal of opposition to nationalism came from spokesmen for groups whose interests were threatened by the spread of the doctrine. The aristocratic ruling classes of the Hapsburg Empire, for instance, opposed the spread of nationalism because, quite rightly, they saw it as a threat to their power. Leaders of the Roman Catholic Church regretted and opposed the spread of nationalism because, quite rightly, they regarded it as a threat to the authority of a church claiming to be universal. Their opposition was naturally strengthened by the fact that one of the achievements of the Italian nationalists was to destroy the position of the Church as ruler of the Papal States of central Italy, following a brief campaign during which Garibaldi and his men marched on Rome. The Church refused to recognize the legitimacy of the new Italian government, and urged Roman Catholics to boycott Italian elections from 1871 until 1913.


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After 1919, nationalist theories were blamed by many European writers for the Versailles Treaty, in which the map of Europe was redrawn in an attempt, deeply unfortunate in its consequences, to apply the nationalist principle of self-determination. After Hitler’s rise to power, nationalist theories were held by several American and British writers to be partly responsible for the character of German fascism, which drew on some of the sentiments expressed by German nationalists in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. These criticisms of nationalism are entirely understandable, but they are open to the counter-attack that a theory of universal significance cannot be discredited by criticisms based either on special interests or on particular historical events which, however unfortunate, had many causes other than nationalist theory. For criticisms presented at a higher level of generality it is appropriate to refer to the work of two more detached scholars, namely Acton and Kedourie. Of the two, Acton, cited in a thousand footnotes, has to be counted the more famous, while Kedourie is clearly the more sophisticated.

Acton’s contribution Acton’s essay on ‘Nationality’ was first published in 1862, and has been reprinted on numerous occasions since that date. For such a famous essay, its contents are surprisingly slender. The first part, seventeen pages in length, is a somewhat superficial review of certain historical developments, offering reflections in turn on the partition of Poland, the French Revolution, the Roman Empire, the barbarian invasions, the fall of Napoleon, the Holy Alliance, and the career of Mazzini. The remainder of the essay, comprising twelve pages, denounces the doctrine of nationalism as ‘a retrograde step in history’ (Acton, [1862] 1949). Acton’s arguments in this second part of his essay rest on the assumption that the protection of individual liberty and the progress of civilization are the two most important criteria by which political ideas and institutions should be assessed. While his arguments are not couched in the form of logical propositions, they may be summarized in the following points. 1 Loyalty to a state is morally better than loyalty to an ethnic group, for while such groups pertain ‘more to the animal than to the civilised man’, the state ‘is an authority governing by laws, imposing obligations, and giving a moral sanction and character to the natural relations of society’ (Acton, [1862] 1949, p. 188).

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2 The principle of nationalism would lead to the oppression of ethnic minorities. The dominant group within a state could not admit them to a position of equality without contradicting the principle, so they would inevitably be ‘exterminated, or reduced to servitude, or outlawed, or put in a condition of dependence’ (Acton, [1862] 1949, p. 193). 3 A multinational state or union, on the other hand, would help to preserve and advance civilization. Inferior races are raised by living in political union with races intellectually superior. Exhausted and decaying nations are revived by the contact of a younger vitality. Nations in which the elements of organisation and the capacity for government have been lost…are restored and educated anew under the discipline of a stronger and less corrupted race. (Acton, [1862] 1949, p. 188) 4 A multinational state or union would also help to protect liberty. The presence of different nations under the same sovereignty…provides against the servility which flourishes under the shadow of a single authority, by balancing interests, multiplying associations, and giving to the subject the restraint and support of a combined opinion (Acton, [1862] 1949, p. 185). Reducing Acton’s arguments to propositions in this way has the disadvantage of destroying the rhetorical effect of his prose style, but the merit of enabling comments to be brief and pointed. The first and second of these propositions seem, by implication, to be somewhat contradictory. If loyalty to ethnic groups is as undesirable as Acton suggested, it is not clear why he should have objected to such groups being put into a condition of dependence. It is perfectly reasonable to criticize nationalism on the ground that the national state tends to bear hardly on ethnic minorities caught within its boundaries, but only if the cultures and group loyalties of the minorities are thought worthy of preservation. The force of Acton’s argument is also weakened by the fact that his somewhat dramatic list of alternatives for ethnic minorities within a state did not include integration, which, to a greater or lesser extent, has been their most common fate in the advanced states—or, as he would put it, the advanced civilizations—which he so much admired. Since he had spent most of his life in Britain at the time he was writing, why did he ignore the integration of the Cumbrian and Cornish minorities into English society and the substantial integration of the Welsh and


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Scottish peoples with the English into the British state? Why, equally, did he ignore the integration of the Burgundian, Savoyard and Provençal minorities into French society? The third proposition could very well have been put forward by a nationalist writer seeking to justify the integration of a cultural minority. It sounds remarkably similar to Hegel’s view of one of the consequences of the unfolding of the world spirit, which makes some groups civilized but leaves others as barbarians. ‘The civilised nation’, declared Hegel in 1821, ‘is conscious that the rights of barbarians are unequal to its own and treats their autonomy as only a formality’ (Hegel, [1821] 1952, para. 351). This kind of cultural arrogance was not uncommon among advanced thinkers in nineteenth-century Europe, imbued with the heady belief in inevitable progress. The practical difference between Hegel and Acton on this issue, it would seem, is that Hegel wanted to see the barbarians assimilated by the civilized nations, and thereby impoved, whereas Acton wanted to see them left in their uncivilized condition. According to Acton, a state which makes efforts to assimilate such backward groups ‘destroys its own vitality’ (Acton, [1862] 1949, p. 193). The fourth proposition is strikingly reminiscent of James Madison’s arguments in favour of the proposed constitution of the United States in The Federalist Papers. The ideal state, in Madison’s view, would provide a constitutional framework within which diverse and rival groups would campaign for various lawful objectives. However, Madison’s view was made coherent by his strong belief in the virtues of representative government, which Acton gave no sign of admiring. Some of the puzzles created by his arguments are cleared up by a fifth proposition which is to be found towards the end of the article, in the following sentence. If we take the establishment of liberty for the realisation of moral duties to be the end of civil society, we must conclude that those states are most perfect which, like the British and Austrian Empires, include various distinct nationalities without oppressing them. (Acton, [1862] 1949, p. 193) It emerges here that his ideal form of organization was not the state but the empire. When he praised political unions of a multinational kind he was thinking of authority structures based on conquest and coercion, not on accommodation and balance. When he wrote of

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inferior races and ethnic groups he was thinking of Africans, Indians and Bulgarians, not of Scots, Bretons or Basques. It was quite reasonable in the 1860s for a writer to produce a defence of imperialism, and was indeed not uncommon. However, in this celebrated essay attacking nationalism Acton did not do so. He gave no plausible arguments, indeed, virtually no arguments of any kind, to support his claim that empires protected liberty ‘for the realisation of moral duties’, whatever this vague phrase was intended to convey. In truth, Acton’s article was not much more than a piece of journalistic rhetoric, of very limited value as a contribution to intellectual debates about nationalism. It has been taken seriously in these paragraphs only because it has so often been cited by scholars.

Kedourie’s contribution Elie Kedourie’s critique of nationalism is of a different intellectual order. It combines an analysis of the philosophical foundations of nationalist doctrines with eloquent comments on what he takes to be the unfortunate consequences of these doctrines. His main theme is the misleading nature of nationalism as an ideal. Like other ideals that European thinkers have developed since the Enlightenment, it has disrupted traditional modes of thought and established forms of political organization. It has also led to violence, revolutions and warfare, and all to no good purpose. ‘The attempt to refashion so much of the world on national lines has not led to greater peace and stability. On the contrary, it has created new conflicts, exacerbated tensions, and brought catastrophe to numberless people innocent of all politics’ (Kedourie, 1961, p. 138). More specifically, Kedourie points to the geographical untidiness of ethnic divisions in the modern world. This world is ‘much too diverse for the classifications of nationalist anthropology’ (Kedourie, 1961, p. 79). The boundaries of the Polish nation-state, for instance, ‘were not palpably more “national” than if the nationality principle had never been invoked’, in view of the numerous minorities included within its boundaries (Kedourie, 1961, p. 121). There are always areas of mixed population within state borders, and ‘nationalism in mixed areas makes for tension and mutual hatred’ (Kedourie, 1961, p. 115). What about the view, held by most liberals in the twentieth century, that nationalism, self-determination, representative government and


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liberty all go together? Kedourie rejects it entirely. The experience of Central and Eastern Europe after 1919 shows it to be mistaken: What can be said with certainty is that the nation-states who inherited the position of the empires were not an improvement. They did not minister to political freedom, they did not increase prosperity, and their existence was not conducive to peace. (Kedourie, 1961, pp. 138–9) The experience of the Middle East demonstrates that national governments could not be expected to safeguard the liberty of minorities, and have indeed treated some minorities more harshly than they were treated under the Ottoman Empire or under British mandate. The experience of Africa and Asia in general suggests that ‘nationalism and liberalism, far from being twins, are really antagonistic principles’ (Kedourie, 1961, p. 109). What about the basis of state authority in the absence of national sentiments? Here Kedourie has a novel and subtle viewpoint. He believes that states have necessarily to exercise authority, but should not be permitted to disguise it as the popular will. Political authority is the power of rulers to command the obedience of their subjects, and it is better that this should be naked and external than that it should involve the hearts and minds of the people. This view found very brief expression in Nationalism, but was developed fully in a later work, where his line of reasoning led him to the conclusion that there was much to be said for imperialism as a form of government; a viewpoint similar to Acton’s but based on a subtle argument rather than on mere assertion. Government by foreigners has, then, this advantage at least, that rulers cannot—as they would if they were native—pretend to ‘feel with the people’; cannot use the complicities of affection and the comforting illusion of affinity to establish and maintain despotism. No foreigner, we reflect, could have founded and maintained the despotisms which Europe has seen in the last few decades and those which have now taken over from European rule in Asia and Africa. (Kedourie, 1970, p. 135) These arguments reveal a profound scepticism of outlook. In an age marked by violence, dictatorship and the desperate plight of millions of political refugees, such scepticism is understandable. Nevertheless, it is possible to suggest some conflicting arguments, from both rightwing and left-wing perspectives.

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From a right-of-centre perspective, it may be observed that nationalism has proved to be a defence against communism. If workers cannot be excluded from the political process (and in most countries they cannot be) it is better that they should be mobilized by nationalistic propaganda into accepting the leadership of social superiors in their own countries than that they should develop feelings of class solidarity with workers elsewhere. It has been common in the postwar period to assert that affluence is the answer to communism, but the working classes of Europe did not enjoy much affluence before the 1950s and it would be hard to deny that in the six or seven previous decades feelings of national solidarity played a vital part in maintaining the social order. In this regard, Sigmund Freud provided a perceptive comment: The narcissistic satisfaction provided by [a national culture]. . . can be shared not only by the favoured classes, which enjoy the benefits of this culture, but also by the suppressed, since the right to despise those that are outside it compensates them for the wrongs they suffer in their own unit. No doubt one is a wretched plebeian, harassed by debts and military service; but, to make up for it, one is a Roman citizen. (Freud, 1962, p. 9) From a left-of-centre perspective, it is relevant that the modern state provides its citizens with educational services, medical services and various forms of social security, all of which are expensive and hardly any of which were provided in the Ottoman or British Empires. Because of this, the modern state demands infinitely more of its citizens than the empires demanded of theirs. It requires not only that citizens should keep the peace but also that they should pay heavy taxes, comply with innumerable regulations and participate in certain institutions. If people did not feel that the state was their state, which in the modern world means their national state, it is doubtful whether the regime would enjoy enough authority to secure voluntary public compliance with all these demands. Dictatorial regimes can enforce compliance, but liberal regimes would find it difficult. It may be objected that the regimes now in power in former colonies provide few social services and are not generally noted for their liberalism. Both these objections have some validity, but they are not completely valid. In the former British and French colonies of West Africa, for instance, public education is more widespread now than it was under colonial rule. Medical services, while still very poor by the standards of Europe and North America, are better


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than they were three decades ago. In purely political terms liberty may have diminished, but in tropical Africa education and health services may perhaps be more important to the average citizen than political liberty. This is admittedly a dangerous argument, but not one that can be ignored. The colonial state was essentially a minimal state, and had to be in view of the great difficulty in collecting more than minimal taxes. Self-governing states, despite their tendencies to dictatorship and corruption, offer the possibility of social improvement. Another country that illustrates the benefits of national selfgovernment is India. In the 1950s India appeared fated to suffer repeated famines, as the apparently inevitable expansion of population outstripped the available food supply. In the 1980s this fear has evaporated and India has actually become an exporter of food, thanks to the energetic, sometimes drastic measures by the Congress Party government to curtail population increases and improve agricultural techniques. No international agency could have secured the compliance of the Indian people with these radical measures; only a party and leader supported by nationalistic feelings of loyalty could have done it. To make these criticisms of Kedourie is not to refute his arguments, because in the end it comes down to a question of values. Kedourie prefers individual liberty to governmental authority and would presumably sacrifice social services to maintain that liberty. Nobody can say he is wrong, but one can appreciate why his is a lonely voice in the modern world. Lonely but not unique, however; he has support from a surprising but telling source in the person of Saunders Lewis, founder of the Welsh nationalist party, Plaid Cymru. It is paradoxical to find a practising nationalist among those who dislike nationalist doctrines. However, Lewis made himself perfectly clear on the matter. In a lecture to the party’s first summer school, he declared that ‘the thing that destroyed the civilisation of Wales and ruined Welsh culture, that brought about the dire plight of Wales today, was—nationalism’ (Lewis, [1926] 1975, p. 5). In medieval Europe, he asserted, Welsh civilization was secure even though Wales did not have its own state, for in medieval times ‘it did not occur to the rulers of a country to destroy the characteristics of another land’s civilisation, even when they conquered that land’ (Lewis, [1926] 1975, p. 5). But in the sixteenth century, the century of Luther, Machiavelli and Henry VIII, a new political philosophy developed that exalted the role of the state and held that the assimilation (and therefore, in Lewis’s view, the oppression) of cultural minorities was justified as a

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means of strengthening the power of government. It was the consequent drive for uniformity, initiated by the Tudor monarchs, that destroyed Welsh civilization by trying to obliterate the differences between Wales and England. The aim of Welsh nationalists should not therefore be the creation of an independent Welsh nation-state, for to advocate this would be to accept the principle of nationalism which had caused so much harm. The aim should be ‘a return to the medieval principle’ and with it ‘a denial of the benefits of political conformity’ (Lewis, [1926] 1975, p. 9). By ‘a return to the medieval principle’ Lewis meant a return to a complex system of government in which no single authority claimed sovereign power over its citizens. His conception of the ideal political order was that it should be a community of communities, linked inevitably in some kind of geographical hierarchy, but without the means for any one community to impose its will on others. In this way he sought to escape from the dilemma of how to organize government in the contemporary democratic world without basing authority on national loyalties. His solution was to postulate a political order in which authority would be minimal, the implication of his ideas being that each community would have the right to opt out of policies agreed upon by higher echelons of government if the community found these policies objectionable. In this fashion he avoided the charge of inconsistency at the price of advocating an ideal that most people would think impractical. Whereas Kedourie was prepared to sacrifice governmental authority to preserve individual liberty, Saunders Lewis was prepared to sacrifice it to preserve local cultures.

In conclusion The critics so far mentioned have all been on the side of the small battalions; the individual against the state, the ethnic minority against the national majority, the Welsh language and culture against the British government. It is also perfectly possible to mount a criticism of nationalism from the other flank; to say not that it oppresses minorities but that it holds up progress towards a new international order. Indeed, many scholars have taken just this view. The arguments for and against this position are complex and mainly speculative. I will discuss them, very briefly, in the final chapter of this book, in the context of some comments about the future of the nation-state. However, the main focus of this book is on the practical problems of nationalism in the world as it is, rather than


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the world as it might be. The main such problems, in my view, are the problems posed by the existence of minorities, whether they be ethnic, cultural or regional, within the territory of the national state. These are the problems with which state governments have constantly to grapple, as minorities clamour, ever more vociferously, for their rights, their special interests, their partial autonomy and even their independence. They are pressing problems, to which various

theoretical arguments are highly relevant. Accordingly, I shall move in the following three chapters to discuss the problems of national integration in general and theoretical terms, after which I shall present three case studies showing the successes and failures of national integration in practice.

4

National integration

As Karl Deutsch has observed on more than one occasion, the story of mankind in its social and political aspects can be regarded as the story of how small groups became amalgamated into larger units. In this book, however, we are concerned neither with the way in which kinship groups became amalgamated into tribes nor with the way in which nations may become merged into international communities in the future. Our concern is with the way in which ethnic and cultural groups have become wholly or partly merged into national societies so as to support the political organization of the national state. This is a process common to virtually all national states, for only a handful of them are ethnically and culturally homogeneous in the way that seems to be assumed or implied by nationalist theory. Japan, Sweden and Portugal certainly qualify as homogeneous. However, some states with the longest history of institutional unity within their present borders, such as France and Spain, have minorities that are not yet, or were only recently, fully assimilated within the national society. And the majority of states have sizeable ethnic or cultural minorities among their citizens. These include the three states chosen for case studies in this book as well as Belgium, Switzerland and Yugoslavia in Europe, the USA and nearly all the countries of Latin America, and every state in Africa. The process of national integration is a common feature of the recent history of the great majority of countries. As a process, national integration is partly a by-product of other social and economic developments, partly the result of deliberate government policies. The unplanned component of integration is commonly called social mobilization. It is basically the process by which industrialization induces workers to leave their native villages so as to seek work in the new industrial areas, thus eroding the social communities of rural areas and mobilizing the workers for absorption 36


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into the larger national society. Kinship links become weaker, local languages or dialects give way to the dominant national language, local cultures and customs lose their hold. As small industrial concerns are swallowed by larger ones, as means of transport are improved, the process continues. The improvement of means of transport is accompanied or followed by the development of the mass media of communication, organized on a national basis, so that members of what were once distinct communities become gradually merged into the national whole. The process does not always work as smoothly as the above sketch suggests, but the sketch serves as a model of what has happened to some extent in most industrial societies and is assumed by some theorists to be an inevitable process. Karl Deutsch and his colleagues have suggested that compiling an index of personal transactions between people of different regions, including correspondence and telephone calls as well as face-to-face contacts, can provide a guide to the extent of social integration in the wider society of which the regions form a part. Up to a point this has been confirmed by experience, but the process is not always straightforward. Thus, the greater rate of communication between Quebec and the rest of North America in the 1960s strengthened separatist sentiments in the province, because Quebec nationalists realized that their language and culture were being threatened. The other component of national integration consists of government policies designed to change people’s attitudes and loyalties. By developing national institutions and exploiting tactics of political socialization, the attempt is made to replace local and sectional loyalties by an overriding sense of national loyalty. This process is known as nation-building. Some examples will be given later, but before considering these processes in practice it is important to take note of the normative arguments that are always present, even if not always acknowledged, in discussions of the topic.

The arguments for national integration Four arguments have been advanced over the past two centuries in favour of the process of national integration. The first, in terms of its origin, is an argument about historical necessity. In Hegel’s view the future of mankind lay in the organization of national states and any process that advanced or facilitated this development could therefore be justified as being part of the unfolding of the world

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spirit or march of history. The integration of cultural minorities into larger societies might or might not be welcome to the members of those societies, but civilized nations, by which term Hegel meant nations that were in the forefront of progress, would be justified ‘in regarding and treating as barbarians those who lag behind them in institutions which are the essential moments of the state’ (Hegel, [1812] 1952, para. 351). Marx and Engels held views that were closely related to this one, although expressed in different terms. There is no space in this book to elaborate on the complexities of Marxist attitudes to nationalism and related questions, which have been authoritatively explained by Walker Connor (Connor, 1984). However, it may be said that the common thread running through these attitudes was to regard nationalist movements in instrumental terms, to be given approval or disapproval not for their own sake but in so far as they seemed likely to aid or hinder the development of progressive tendencies in history. Nationalist movements within the Austro-Hungarian Empire were welcomed as that empire was seen as an obstacle to progress, but no sympathy was wasted on movements within national states defending the rights of small cultural minorities whose fate, as Marx described it, was to be consigned to the rag-bag of history. Not to be outdone, Engels described such minorities as remnant peoples and national refuse. A second line of argument, more acceptable to the Anglo-Saxon mind than these Teutonic pronouncements, was developed by nineteenth-century British liberals. This was the argument that integration, in the form of social assimilation, would be beneficial to the minorities who were assimilated. They might not welcome it, but in the long run it would be good for them. In 1839, for instance, Lord Durham made the following points in support of his contention that a primary purpose of British policy in Canada should be to assimilate and anglicize the French-Canadian community. The language, the laws, the character of the North American continent are English; and every race but the English…appears there in a condition of inferiority. It is to elevate them from that inferiority that I desire to give to the Canadians our English character. I desire it for the sake of the educated classes, whom the distinction of language and manners keeps apart from the great Empire to which they belong…I desire the amalgamation still more for the sake of the humbler classes…The evils of poverty and dependence would merely be aggravated…by a spirit of jealous and resentful nationality, which should separate the working class


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of the community from the possessors of wealth and employers of labour. (Durham, [1839] 1912, pp. 292–3) A similar argument was put forward in 1847 by the Commissioners on Welsh Education, in regard to the desirability of anglicizing the Welsh community: ‘The Welsh language is a vast drawback to Wales, and a manifold barrier to the moral progress and commercial prosperity of the people…It bars the access of improving knowledge to their minds’ (quoted in Coupland, 1954, pp. 188–9) In 1861 the same general point was made by John Stuart Mill in his book on representative government. Addressing the problem of national minorities, he declared himself in favour of their assimilation: Experience proves that it is possible for one nationality to merge and be absorbed in another: and when it was originally an inferior and more backward portion of the human race the absorption is greatly to its advantage. Nobody can suppose that it is not more beneficial to a Breton, or a Basque of French Navarre, to be brought into the current of the ideas and feelings of a highly civilized and cultivated people—to be a member of the French nationality, admitted on equal terms to all the privileges of French citizenship, sharing the advantages of French protection, and the dignity of French power—than to sulk on his own rocks, the half-savage relic of past times, revolving in his own little mental orbit, without participation or interest in the general movement of the world. The same remark applies to the Welshman or the Scottish Highlander as members of the British nation. (Mill, [1861] 1946, pp. 294–5) A third argument in favour of integration was also put by Mill. This is that representative government should be based on feelings of national unity and would be difficult to operate if those feelings had not been developed. Linguistic differences among the population would accentuate the difficulties. In Mill’s words: Free institutions are next to impossible in a country made up of different nationalities. Among a people without fellow-feeling, especially if they read and speak different languages, the united public opinion necessary to the working of representative government cannot exist. (Mill, [1861] 1946, p. 292)

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This point, put rather casually by Mill, would be better expressed in the proposition that representative democracy can only work in a society with a body of floating voters ready to change their partisan support in response to changing party policies and political conditions. If the society is divided on ethnic or religious or linguistic lines to such a degree that membership of these communal groupings determines partisan loyalties, then there is likely to be no alternation of political power, no readiness to compromise and no acceptance of majority rule by the minority. Northern Ireland is an obvious example and the point seems to be proved by the failure of democratic institutions throughout tropical Africa, where tribal loyalties have largely determined political support. This argument, which in its pure form cannot be denied, has been taken by both European social democrats and American exponents of modernization theory to mean that economic issues are the only proper issues to divide the parties and form the content of electoral debate, ethnic and cultural loyalties (sometimes described as ‘primordial loyalties’) being undesirable hangovers from more primitive stages of political development. However, hangovers cannot be wished out of existence. A fourth and final argument in favour of national integration is that it is the only secure basis of political authority. This argument, already mentioned in Chapter 3, is frequently neglected in discussions by political theorists but rarely forgotten by those who wield power in divided societies. These arguments, which would be disputed by many liberals in the 1980s, reigned almost without challenge from the 1850s to the 1960s. A few conservatives regretted the loss of local customs, but liberals and socialists regarded assimilation into a national society as a necessary aspect of progress. Nation-building was looked upon as an incontrovertibly desirable activity.

The practice of nation-building The steps taken to promote nation-building can be divided into two categories. On the one hand, there are direct initiatives taken to foster integration and a sense of national identity and pride. On the other hand, there are reactive measures taken by governments to minimize the political effects of ethnic and cultural cleavages within society.


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An obvious initiative is the creation of symbols of national identity. Flags, anthems and uniforms all serve this purpose. Sports teams may also do so, particularly if successful in international competition. In recent years new states have thought it important to establish national airlines, sometimes at great expense, to symbolize both the independence and the modernity of their nations. As Minogue has pointed out, new names for towns, new buildings and even new capital cities have been thought necessary parts of what he calls ‘the equipment of a proper nation’ (Minogue, 1967). A second and more important feature of nation-building is socialization through the educational system. That earliest of nationbuilders, Napoleon, put the matter as follows in 1805: There will be no political stability so long as there is no teaching body based on stable principles. So long as children are not taught whether they must be republicans or monarchists, Catholics or free thinkers, etc., the state will not constitute a nation but will rest on vague and shifting foundations, ever exposed to disorder and change. (Quoted in Herold, 1955, p. 118) This far-sighted remark is put into historical perspective by the fact that during the last three decades of the nineteenth century French state schools were teaching their pupils the virtues of the Republic while Catholic schools were recommending the advantages of a monarchy, as a hangover from which national disputes about the case for giving state grants to Catholic schools continued until as late as the 1950s. In practice all state educational systems socialize their pupils regarding the virtues of the nation to which they belong, though some do so more openly than others and the virtues stressed naturally vary. American schools are the most open, with their requirement that children salute the national flag every morning, in each classroom, and their practice of preaching the virtues of American democracy at every opportunity. British schools are much more discreet, but the message about British national achievements is certainly put across in history lessons. Canadian schools have a more ambiguous task, for the history of their country is one of division rather than unity, but there is now a good deal of propaganda about the virtues of bilingualism and multiculturalism. How far this contributes to a sense of national identity and pride is not entirely certain. Another aspect of nation-building is the establishment of political institutions seen to represent all sections of society. In liberal

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democracies this is done by the institution of competitive elections for office, with the peripheral regions sometimes being accorded more-than-proportional representation to make them feel less dependent on the centre. Thus, Scotland and Wales have more Members of Parliament than England, in proportion to their relative populations, while Ireland was heavily over-represented when it was an integral part of the United Kingdom. In Canada and Australia the upper houses of Parliament give disproportionate representation to the smaller provinces and states, while in Canada there are also elaborate conventions that assure the peripheral areas representation in the federal cabinet. In the United States the coincidence of several elections on the same day enables the parties to nominate ‘balanced tickets’ in areas of mixed ethnic origin, so that each ethnic group will find familiar names on the list of candidates. In states without competitive elections, such as Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union, care is often taken to ensure that decision-making bodies contain well-advertised representatives of ethnic or regional minorities. Institutional arrangements of this kind give peripheral regions or ethnic minorities influence on the input side of the governmental process. This influence is likely to be integrative in its effects if the regions or minorities are represented by national parties, but disintegrative if they are represented by regional or communal parties, as is now the case, for instance, in Belgium. This is a factor that cannot always be planned for by nation-builders. On the output side, efforts are made to ensure that minorities gain financial benefits from the activities of the national government. In a centralized political system, the poorer regions benefit automatically from the fiscal redistribution that occurs as a consequence of the provision of uniform public services. The wealthier regions contribute more per head in taxation while the poorer regions receive more per head in the form of public expenditure. In so far as ethnic minorities are concentrated in poorer regions, this process helps ethnic minorities. Sometimes this automatic equalization process is bolstered by deliberate government policies, as in the United Kingdom where Northern Ireland is heavily subsidized through transfer payments and Scotland does somewhat better than would be expected. In decentralized systems where many public services are provided by provincial or state authorities, fiscal redistribution of an automatic kind will be more limited in scope, but may be supplemented by a deliberate policy of redistribution. In Canada the Tax Equalization Scheme has this effect while in Australia the policies of the Commonwealth Grants Commission achieve the same end in


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a more radically egalitarian way. While the manifest function of such measures may be to promote economic welfare and achieve approximately equal standards of social service provision across the country, their latent function is to demonstrate to residents of poorer regions that the national state brings them positive benefits. A different kind of nation-building activity occurs when national governments take steps to reduce the impact of ethnic, religious or linguistic cleavages in society. Ethnic cleavages cannot be reduced directly by governmental action, but insistence on unsegregated schools and legal bans on ethnic discrimination may lead in time to the erosion of ethnic barriers, to intermarriage and to a situation in which ethnic consciousness diminishes. This is part of the process envisaged by the American view of their society as a ‘melting pot’. Religious cleavages are intrinsically less permanent than ethnic cleavages in that they can be eroded by conversion or the growth of agnosticism. People cannot change their ethnic identities, though these may become less salient to them, but they can change their religious affiliations. It is sometimes forgotten that many states have at some stage in their development discouraged minority religions. In eighteenth-century England only members of the Church of England were enfranchised, and it was not until the second half of the nineteenth century that all religious barriers to membership of the House of Commons were removed. In the United States Mormons were forced to leave the eastern part of the country for a position of relative exile in the Rocky Mountains. In the Sudan, members of predominantly Christian tribes have been penalized in the 1980s by the imposition of Islamic rules of evidence on courts throughout the country, whereby judges are forced to give more credence to the evidence of Muslims than to that of infidels whenever there is a conflict of evidence. Examples could be multiplied but the general point is clear. Irrespective of government action, religious faith in western societies has been sharply eroded in the twentieth century by the growth of industrialization, urbanization and affluence. Large cities like London, Paris and Frankfurt have become essentially irreligious, or de-Christianized as the Catholic Church in France puts it. This development has enabled these countries to resolve issues such as aid to church schools, divorce laws, abortion laws and censorship that posed difficult political problems in the not-so-distant past. Only the United States and, to a lesser degree, Canada have escaped this trend, the price of continued religiosity in America being indicated

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by the fact that in 1986 twenty-eight abortion clinics there were bombed by Christian zealots. In countries where religious faith has not declined, the existence of religious cleavages sometimes creates difficult political problems. In Northern Ireland the Protestant and Catholic communities live side by side in a condition of mutual hostility punctuated by sectarian violence and assassinations. The existence of Protestant and Catholic schools, both enjoying state support, keeps the children apart and leads to their being socialized into hostility by the different versions of history that are taught. In India an uneasy truce between Hindus and Sikhs has been broken in the 1980s by violent behaviour by Sikh nationalists, while Mrs Gandhi paid with her life for her symbolic gesture of appointing Sikhs as her personal bodyguards. In the Middle East there is a conflict between Sunni Muslims and Shi’ite Muslims. In situations like this there is little that governments can do except try to divert religious passions away from politics into more innocuous activities like festivals. Linguistic cleavages pose problems of a different kind. They are more certainly divisive than religious cleavages, since they directly hinder personal communication and nobody can turn a blind eye to them. They also involve the state in a more necessary way, for the government has to designate an official language whereas it can avoid designating an official religion. On the other hand, minority languages are more certain to fall into disuse, if given no official encouragement, than minority religions are. It is psychologically and mentally costly for people to be bilingual, because the human brain is reluctant to store a multiplicity of labels for a single object or concept (see Laponce, 1987, Ch. 1). The consequence is that, in any given territory, there is a general tendency for one language to become dominant and the other to fade away. This process may be delayed if the minority language has a functional sphere in which it is unchallenged, as Welsh was unchallenged for many years as the language of the Methodist church in rural Wales, but it is rare for two languages to survive in general use in the same territory for more than a generation or two. To say this is not to say that the decline of a minority language will necessarily be a painless process. People tend to be attached to the language of their forefathers and to resent its decline, particularly if this threatens to involve the loss of a considerable body of literature. Protests about the matter may create political conflict, as in Wales since the early 1970s. When faced with a multilingual society, government leaders have three possible lines of policy to pursue. First, they can designate


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the majority language as the only official language and hope that minority languages will gradually fall out of public use, possibly hastening this process by measures such as banning their use in schools. After the Highland Rising of 1745 the English and the lowland Scots took active steps to discourage the use of Gaelic in the Scottish Highlands, with the result that the language became virtually extinct on the Scottish mainland, although it still survives in the Western Isles. French authorities in the nineteenth century encouraged the decline of the Breton language in north-west France, punishing children heard using the language to each other on school premises and adding insult to injury by putting notices on official buildings reading ‘Spitting and Breton forbidden’. The English prohibited the use of Welsh in schools for some years. Measures of this kind involve a cultural loss for a political gain, any overall assessment of their merits being dependent on personal values as the loss and the gain are different in kind. Who can say, in a way likely to command authority, whether England is better or worse off for the extinction of the Cornish language in the southwest and the Cumbrian in the north-west, Scotland better or worse off for the extinction of Gaelic on the mainland, France better or worse off for the virtual extinction of Occitan and Provençal? A second possible line of policy is to divide the country up into linguistic areas, with one language in each area being designated as official but the national government required to be bilingual or trilingual. This is the policy pursued with marked success in Switzerland, where German, French and Italian are official languages in distinct areas of the country. To ensure that this tidy arrangement is not disturbed by personal mobility, Swiss state schools teach only in the official language of the area, apart from a few small bilingual districts where instruction is offered in two languages. In some parts of Switzerland the language of instruction in private schools is regulated with the same social and political purpose; thus, a French-Swiss family moving to Zurich can have their children educated in French at a private school, but only up to a maximum of three years. All subsequent education has to be in German (McRae, 1983, p. 148). Citizens may communicate with the federal government in any of the official languages, though the working language of the Swiss Parliament and the federal public service is German, the majority language among the population as a whole and the dominant language of the area in which the national capital is situated. Belgium is another country that operates largely on the same principle, known as the territorial principle of bilingualism. That it

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has not worked so smoothly in Belgium is largely due to the fact that the national capital has French as its dominant language although it is geographically situated within the half of the country that has Flemish as its official language. At the insistence of Flemish leaders, Brussels has been made officially bilingual and much political energy is devoted to protecting the rights of Flemish-speaking residents of the city. As Laponce has noted, the territorial principle of bilingualism can be harsh in its application if citizens are not so neatly divided by geography as the Swiss are. A case in point is the University of Louvain, which had to abandon its bilingualism in the face of Flemish insistence that all courses given within Flanders should be given in Flemish, forcing its francophone professors and students to move elsewhere (see Laponce, 1987, p. 175). A third possible line of policy is for the government to apply the personality principle of bilingualism, as it is known. This is to specify that both majority and minority languages should be official throughout the country, with citizens able to do business in either when communicating with public officials and with steps taken to protect the rights of language groups who happen to be in a minority in their area of residence. This is the choice made in Canada, with increasing efforts being made since 1969 to ensure that the policy is reflected in practice. Whereas applying the territorial principle can in some circumstances be harsh, applying the personality principle is invariably expensive. It is expensive for government agencies, compelled to operate in more than one language; expensive for commercial firms, compelled (at least in Canada) to print bilingual labels and instructions; expensive in terms of lost job opportunities for those people (in Canada the great majority) who are wholly or substantially unilingual; expensive in educational costs if serious efforts are made to ensure that most people become bilingual. Partly for these reasons, it tends to be an unpopular principle in areas of the country that remain substantially unilingual. The politics of language in Canada will be discussed further in Chapter 8. For political leaders concerned to build a sense of nationhood, the choice between these three policies is sometimes quite difficult. Any choice is likely to upset some citizens and linguistic rivalries have caused political tensions in countries as varied as Britain, Canada, India, Malaysia and the Soviet Union.

Arguments for social pluralism


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Since the 1960s, much liberal opinion in the west has swung away from the belief that the assimilation of minorities is a necessary process in the building of a nation, towards the view that a pluralistic society is in some circumstances more desirable. While the main reasons for this change of emphasis have been practical, some quite reasonable theoretical arguments can be adduced in its favour. For instance, J.S.Mill’s arguments for assimilation as the best basis for democratic government, though impressive, are not watertight. There is some inconsistency between Mill’s treatment of majority interests and minority interests. The majority interest is viewed as a collective interest, in the smooth running of representative institutions and the accompanying development of a more civilized and progressive society. The minority interests are individual interests, in the possibility of each individual improving his position. There is no consideration of what might be regarded as the collective interest of the minority, to preserve a distinctive culture and way of life. At a more material level, it seems clear that the process of integration invariably benefits some members of each cultural minority more than others. It benefits the middle classes more than the workers, and benefits people engaged in commerce and industry more than those engaged in agriculture. It is for this reason that the Welsh nationalist leader Gwynfor Evans described English as ‘the language of getting on in the world’. It is not a coincidence that the extension of the franchise to Welsh and Scottish citizens who had not got on in the world, in 1867 and 1884, was followed by protests about Anglicization and centralization that had not been heard earlier. The change in liberal attitudes towards integration did not spring from reflections of this kind, however, so much as from mounting evidence that the significance of ethnic and cultural divisions was not withering away in the manner that had been predicted. The first well-publicized piece of evidence was perhaps the study of New York City published in 1963 under the title Beyond the Melting Pot. This was a descriptive study of five of the six main ethnic groups in New York (Anglo-Saxons excluded) by two sociologists, which made an impact on public opinion because its title challenged one of the basic assumptions of American society and the book was written with considerable verve. The authors concluded the book by saying that ‘religion and race define the next stage in the evolution of the American peoples’ (Glazer and Moynihan, 1963, p. 315). A second and more important milestone in the change of liberal opinion was the realization, forced upon the American public by the race riots of the late 1960s, that racial conflict between blacks and

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whites was going to cause immeasurable damage to American society unless it could be contained by clear changes of policy leading to a modification of black attitudes. The Kerner Report (Kerner, 1968) recommended just such a change and American attitudes to racial problems within their society have not been the same since it was published. Outside America, other developments pushed home the same lesson, that ethnicity was a vital force in political life that could not be dismissed as obsolescent. In Africa, tribal rivalries destroyed one infant democratic system after another, while Nigeria plunged into a protracted civil war following the attempted secession in 1966 of a region governed by a tribal group excluded from national power. In western Europe, minority nationalist movements became unexpectedly prominent, with the Scottish and Welsh nationalists winning elections and the Basque and Breton nationalists setting off bombs. In Northern Ireland, the simmering conflict between Catholics and Protestants exploded into bloodshed in 1969, starting a prolonged period of sectarian evidence that reminded observers not to underrate the political significance of religion. The lesson was rammed home by the increased tension in the Middle East. All in all, the main political development of the late 1960s and the 1970s was the upsurge in ethnic and cultural conflict. Political scientists, having entirely failed to predict this development, reacted to it in various ways. In 1968 Lijphart’s book on The Politics of Accommodation, while basically an account of politics in the Netherlands, carried the more general message that political scientists should question the assumption that social homogeneity is necessary for democratic institutions to flourish (Lijphart, 1968, Chs 1 and 10). In 1972 and 1973 Walker Connor published influential articles on the political significance of ethnicity, including one about the loss of minority cultures with the pointed title ‘Nation-Building or NationDestroying?’ (Connor, 1972). In 1974 McRae edited a book entitled (and advocating) Consociational Democracy (McRae, 1974), while in the following year Hechter used the phrase ‘internal colonialism’ to describe the position of ethnic minorities within the national state (Hechter, 1975). These and similar works created a minor revolution in thinking about the process of national integration, based upon the propositions that the assimilation of minorities was not taking place in the way previously imagined, was not necessary to the stability of the state, and possibly was not even desirable.

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It is not necessary to accept these propositions in full, for the world contains many examples of former minorities that have been assimilated into larger societies and, as noted in connection with the decline and death of languages, there are no overrriding values that would enable us to pronounce this desirable or undesirable. What is involved is the replacement of a large number of folk cultures by a much smaller number of high cultures, each embracing a larger population and covering a wider area (on this, see Gellner, 1983, Ch. 4). This process can be admired or regretted, according to the outlook of the observer. The change of emphasis in recent thinking makes it appropriate, however, to break down the concept of integration into smaller categories. Irrespective of personal values, it was clearly too simple to equate integration with assimilation, just like that. It may be noted, first, that both economic and political integration can be distinguished from social integration, though they are of course related to it. Secondly, it is helpful to distinguish three patterns or degrees of social integration. A peripheral community may become completely assimilated into the larger society, accepting the values and customs of that society while losing the distinctive values and customs it once had. It will be convenient to reserve the word ‘assimilation’ for this process. An alternative is for the peripheral community to become merged into the larger society, while contributing its distinctive values to that society so that the resulting values and customs are a blend. The American term ‘melting pot’ signifies this process, for the American view was that their successive waves of immigrants should all contribute something to the new American identity and way of life. Another possibility is for the peripheral community to remain culturally distinctive, while yet being part of the larger society in terms of government, free trade and communications. Rural Wales, for instance, was in this relationship to the rest of Britain at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the Welsh language was still the most common medium of speech in the rural areas. Australian Aborigines are in this situation today, in all but a few areas of the largest cities. So are the various tribal groups in the former British colonies of Africa, though some of the former French colonies appear to have a detribalized elite. The Malay and Chinese peoples of Malaysia are in a somewhat similar position, culturally distinct though without any implication of superiority of one over the other. The condition can conveniently be called cultural pluralism.

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In respect of economic relationships, it is helpful to distinguish between full integration and partial integration. Full integration is to be found where there is no significant correlation between ethnic (or cultural) origins and occupation or income. If a chart is imagined in which the vertical axis indicates levels of occupation and income while the horizontal axis indicates ethnic identity, the lines separating ethnic groups will be vertical in a situation of full integration. In conditions of partial integration, the lines separating ethnic and cultural groups will be sloping, showing that members of some groups have a significantly better chance of economic success than members of other groups. If the lines separating ethnic and cultural groups turn out to be horizontal, so that no members of the underprivileged group achieve superior economic positions, this would indicate a society characterized by economic segregation. In practice it is difficult to think of a society other than South Africa that is in this position, but it clearly deserves a separate category even though the category may have only one member. In respect of political relationships, there are four categories. A condition of political assimilation is found in societies where ethnicity is of no political significance, with candidates for political office being chosen irrespective of their ethnic origins and government policies having no bearing on the status or relationships of ethnic or cultural groups. As an example, the Jewish community in Britain is in this position. Being Jewish or gentile has no significant bearing on a person’s candidature; nobody notices how many Jewish politicians secure ministerial office; and there are no laws or policies that have special relevance to Jews. It is perhaps noteworthy that the appointment of an MP of Lithuanian Jewish origin as Secretary of State for Scotland in 1985 was accepted without criticism and almost entirely without comment; it was important that the office should be filled by a Scotsman, but a Lithuanian Jewish Scotsman qualified as well as a clansman from the Highlands. A very different situation exists when there is general awareness of ethnic and cultural differences and a policy of accommodation is pursued so that members of minority groups shall not feel left out or discriminated against. In this case parties make a point of considering ethnic origins when nominating candidates, as in the practice of choosing a balanced ticket in the larger American cities. Government policies and appointments will also take constant account of ethnic or cultural differences if accommodation is the name of the game. A third possibility is that the ethnic groups will be in a state of political conflict, with parties organized on ethnic lines, little readiness


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to co-operate or even to reach compromises between them, and government policies having a strong bias in favour of the winning group. This was the situation in most African states during the short periods of democracy that followed their independence. It was also the situation in Northern Ireland when the province had its own Parliament. Finally, there are some political systems in which particular ethnic groups are completely excluded from the normal channels of power and treated only as objects of policy. This is clearly the situation of blacks in South Africa, which is the extreme case. However, Australian Aborigines, North American Indians and Canadian Inuit are in substantially the same position politically, in that they exert virtually no influence through the normal process of elective representation. They are treated much better than South African blacks and are increasingly consulted about policy, to the point of being negotiated with over some issues, but their channels of influence are segregated from those of white citizens in the same country. It will be appropriate to call this situation one of majority control. It follows that we can draw up a list of categories that will serve as a broad conceptual framework for the analyses of experiences of national integration that will be presented in Part II of this book. Social integration

Economic integration

Political integration

Assimilation The melting pot Cultural pluralism Full integration Partial integration Economic segregation Political assimilation Accommodation Ethnic conflict Majority control

Before we turn to the case studies, however, it is important to examine two other theoretical questions, of a normative rather than a sociological character. One is the question of whether ethnic and cultural minorities within a state can reasonably be said to have rights, and if so what these rights may be. The other is the question of whether geographically concentrated minorities can be said to have a right to secede from the state in certain circumstances, accompanied by some discussion of the conditions that lead such minorities to make this claim. These theoretical questions will be examined in Chapters 5 and 6.

5

The question of minority rights

Nearly all countries contain ethnic or cultural minorities whose members make claims on the wider society, whether these be claims to equal treatment or claims for special privileges or exemptions. In recent years it has become common in western societies, following a trend started in the United States, to use the language of rights when discussing such claims. The object of this chapter is to examine the types of rights that are commonly claimed on behalf of minorities and to discuss the circumstances in which such claims may be regarded as reasonable. Following the example of the United Nations Special Committee on the Protection of Minority Rights, we shall be concerned only with ethnic, religious or linguistic minorities. No attempt will be made to discuss the problems of class relationships in society or the problems of particular categories of people such as women, children, old people or the illiterate. Such problems are important but are not closely related to the issues of nationalism and national integration. For economy of expression, the term ‘cultural minority’ will be used to cover the three types of minority whose claims are examined. Now, to say that a cultural minority has a right to something is to make a much stronger statement than to say that it has an interest in something. All organized groups and most individuals have interests in this, that and the other. This is what politics is about. But a right implies an obligation. If I have a right of action, my fellow citizens and my government have a clear obligation to let me act that way without hindrance. If I have a right of recipience, the relevant government agency has an obligation to provide me with the cash or service specified. It is a mistake to talk about rights without being very clear about their nature and their basis.

Types of rights The language of rights was applied to the activities and claims of individuals long before it was applied to the activities and interests of groups. Hobbes and Locke discussed the natural rights of 52

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individuals. The American and French revolutionaries issued declarations about the rights of man. In the nineteenth century the language of rights fell out of favour, but it was revived after the Second World War with the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (proclaimed in 1948) and the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights (proclaimed in 1950). In both cases the rights enumerated were individual rights, not group rights. Since we are on familiar ground when dealing with individual rights, it will be helpful to summarize their nature and basis, in brief outline, as a preliminary to a discussion of group rights. Individual rights can be divided into five distinct categories, each of which has a different basis and scope of applicability. A summary follows. Type of right

Basis

Contractual rights Positive rights

An agreement or treaty Law

Moral rights Political rights

Human rights

Scope of applicability

The parties involved Residents in the relevant jurisdiction A moral code or Communities sharing religious faith that code or faith Either custom (traditional Citizens of the state or political rights) or reaso members of particular (speculative political groups within the state rights) The essential needs of All human beings human beings

If the rights claimed by cultural minorities are considered in terms of these categories, there are no conceptual problems in the case of contractual rights and positive rights. But suppose the rights have not been established by contract or law, but are merely claimed. Should they be regarded as human rights, moral rights or political rights? Van Dyke’s view that the rights of cultural minorities can be equated with human rights is not at all convincing (see Van Dyke, 1985). Individual human rights have their basis in the common needs of all human beings, on which all people of liberal outlook can agree. The UN Declaration was swollen by the addition of several ideologically-inspired items put in by the United States and the Soviet Union; but if these are subtracted there remains a group of items—the first twenty articles—that are beyond reasonable controversy. The items in the European Convention are also items that all liberals can easily support. However, cultural minorities

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rarely have common needs that are generally agreed upon by members of the larger societies within which they live. Spokesmen for the minorities may not even agree among themselves about what their needs are. As an example, in 1986 spokesmen for the Indian tribes of British Columbia had the opportunity to make a case for the needs of their peoples to an official commitee of inquiry. Their submissions varied enormously, from some who wanted better secondary schools so that their children could compete effectively for jobs in the Canadian economy, to others who wanted a greater degree of municipal self-government or greater protection for their fishing rights, to others again who wanted independence from Canada and representation at the United Nations. When minority spokesmen disagree so widely about the real needs of their peoples, and this is far from being a unique example, it does not make sense to say that these needs should be accorded the status of human rights. If it is inappropriate to talk in terms of human rights, it is also inappropriate to talk in terms of moral rights. These are based upon shared moral values, and the whole point about many cultural minorities is that they do not share the moral values of the dominant groups in society. The Islamic faith permits men to have four wives, but Muslims living in predominantly Christian societies are not allowed to do this. British residents of Pakistani origin sometimes wish their children to enter into marriages arranged by post with partners from Pakistan, but this conflicts with the dominant values of British society. In the absence of shared moral values, it is impossible to secure agreement upon moral rights. What we are discussing, therefore, is the case for various kinds of political rights, that may be customary rights as in the case of indigenous peoples or speculative rights (to use Edmund Burke’s useful terminology) as in the case of immigrant minorities. The basis of the first is tradition while the basis of the second is reason. The distinction between the categories does not, of course, always coincide with the distinction between the groups involved. Many indigenous groups want the same kinds of right, for example to equal opportunities in education, as immigrant groups want. But it makes the argument clearer if the rights are distinguished by category, and I shall deal first with speculative rights of various sorts and leave customary rights until later. Speculative rights can be usefully divided into two sub-categories, namely rights to full and equal opportunities in society and rights to special ways of protecting the cultural identity of the minority group in question. Black citizens in the United States, for instance, were

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demanding equal opportunities in the 1950s, which involved the abolition of segregation in schools and discrimination in employment and in the political system. When these objectives were largely achieved, black spokesmen, aware that formal equality of opportunity was not leading to substantive equality of achievement, demanded special privileges for blacks in the form of affirmative action or positive discrimination. Such demands, largely granted in the 1970s, amounted to a claim that special measures, presumably of a temporary kind, were needed to give reality to the concept of full and equal opportunities. The claim was an extension of the demand for the abolition of segregation and discrimination, but it had the same object in view. That object was the social, economic and political integration of black citizens into American life. The claim that school and college curriculums should include programs of ‘black studies’, also made in the late 1960s and 1970s, was different in kind. This was a claim that American blacks, considered as a community, had a distinctive cultural identity that was threatened by integrative developments and deserved protection. Moreover, it was a claim that blacks had a right to this protection, even though it might require educational changes that imposed costs on the majority. It was a claim to preserve differences from white society, as distinct from a claim to eliminate differences. The coincidence of both types of claims raises questions about their compatibility. Is there what some scholars have called ‘an ethnic trap’, whereby the preservation of cultural distinctiveness makes the achievement of economic equality more difficult? (See Wiley, 1967 and Kringas, 1984.) There is scattered evidence from various countries that this may be the case. It has been shown, for instance, that the devotion of a substantial period of schooltime to the teaching of Gaelic in Irish schools had a detrimental effect on the educational progress of Irish children in other subjects. For this reason, the amount of time devoted to Gaelic has been reduced in recent years, even though it is one of Ireland’s two official languages. In Canada, Porter’s authoritative study of social mobility showed that the FrenchCanadians, though the first to colonize the country, had consistently held an inferior economic position there, being poorer not only than British Canadians but also than some ethnic minorities who arrived much later than the French. Porter attributed this to education, saying that ‘the more French and Catholic education has been, the less has it been adequate for the French to improve their position in the modern economy’ (Porter, 1975, p. 98, italics in the original). It is clear from these and other studies that there may be an ethnic trap in respect of language maintenance, although the

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evidence is not conclusive. In the period relevant to Porter’s study French-Canadian schools placed a good deal of emphasis on theology and classical studies as well as on French, the combined effect of which was presumably to reduce the time available for subjects of greater utility in the North American economy. Recent studies of students from English-speaking backgrounds who have attended French immersion schools, where French is the main language of instruction, suggest that the students have benefited from the experience. However, here also there are factors at work other than language training, as the immersion schools tend to have smaller classes and better-trained teachers than other public schools in Canada and to draw their pupils mainly from educated middle-class families. Moreover, it is one thing to give training in a minority language to students whose fluency in the majority language is assured, another to maintain minority languages among groups whose knowledge of the majority language is insecure. The evidence about the effect of extensive training in a minority language on subsequent performance is therefore somewhat mixed. However, it is clear that measures to maintain minority cultures are conceptually different from measures to promote equality of achievement and may in some circumstances be dysfunctional in respect of the latter objective. The two types of claim will therefore be considered separately.

Measures to promote equality and integration (1) It may be taken for granted that all citizens need to be fluent in the language of commerce and government of their country if they are to be able to participate fully in its economic and political life. It is therefore fair to assume that immigrants have a right to the provision of language training for themselves and their children. In practice this might be objected to on the ground that some of the immigrants were uninvited and may even be unwelcome to members of the host society. Although understandable, this argument is difficult to sustain. In all modern states immigration is subject to government control, so that logically the government ought to take responsibility for measures necessary for the integration of immigrants into society. In the case of adult immigrants with no knowledge of the language of the host society it is highly desirable for language training to be provided by teachers who can speak the native language of the immigrants, which may sometimes create practical problems.

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However, a government that admits such immigrants can be held to have a duty to do its best in such cases. (2) Members of cultural minorities, once they attain citizenship, are entitled to equal opportunities with all other citizens. They therefore have a right to protection by laws banning discrimination, whether this be in the labour market, the housing market, or the provision of government services. (3) If members of cultural minorities persistently occupy inferior positions in the economic system and it can be shown to be caused by their group identities, rather than by inferior qualifications, it would be reasonable for them to ask the government to promote measures of affirmative action (these being voluntary) or positive discrimination (if backed by legal sanctions) to raise their level of achievement. However, it would be difficult to maintain that they have a right to such measures, for several reasons. First, it is inherently difficult to establish the reasons for inferior economic performance on the part of a group of people. Numerous factors may contribute to this result. Second, such measures infringe the liberal principle of equality before the law and are directly costly to members of the majority. In some situations the measures might be challenged in the courts as unfair discrimination against members of the majority, as happened in the Bakke and De Funis cases in the United States. In other situations the measures might cause a backlash among the majority that would damage community relations, as might be the case if a British government legislated for positive discrimination in favour of coloured minorities and would certainly be the case if a French government took similar action in respect of North Africans living in France. In view of these possible problems it would be naïve to advance as a general principle the proposition that cultural minorities suffering from a disadvantageous position in the labour market should be entitled as of right to demand measures of positive discrimination from their government. All that can be said is that when spokesmen for disadvantaged minorities make a plea for this kind of assistance, the government has an obligation to consider the question in a sympathetic manner. (4) It is obviously desirable for established political parties to open their doors to members of cultural minorities and to adopt some of them as candidates for elective office. This is not a matter that can be legislated for, but it would be logical for national parties that preach the virtues of national integration to do what they can to further this objective within their own organizations. (5) Spokesmen for cultural minorities often maintain that their groups should not only have the opportunity to participate

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equally with other groups through the electoral system but should also be assured that they are represented in rough proportion to their numbers in the civil service and other official bodies whose activities have a direct bearing on the lives of citizens. It is, however, very difficult to ensure that this happens unless the government institutes some kind of quota system for senior positions, which would conflict with the principle of promotion by merit and might in some cases be to the national disadvantage. Quota systems are likely to cause bad feeling within administrative agencies and might lead talented officials to seek their fortunes elsewhere. One clear barrier to microcosmic representation of this kind is educational inadequacy. Native Indians and Aborigines are not fully represented in the top ranks of the Canadian and Australian bureaucracies and presumably cannot be so represented unless or until their educational attainments improve markedly. Another obvious barrier is language, and this tends to remain a barrier even if a government is officially bilingual. Administrative agencies cannot easily afford the expense of keeping all their records in two or more languages, and the language chosen for records will inevitably give an advantage to officials who have it as their first language. Canada has been officially bilingual at the federal level since 1867, but because government records were kept in English it was not until the 1970s, and then only as a result of a most determined campaign, that French-Canadians were represented in the federal civil service in proportion to their numbers in the population. Another agency in which the issue of microcosmic representation can be critical is the police force, with consequences that will be mentioned in later chapters.

Measures to preserve cultural identities Under this heading it has to be emphasized that most of the measures needed to preserve the cultural identity of a minority can be taken privately, without any need for government action. This is true of family relationships, childrearing practices, the celebration of births, baptisms, birthdays, weddings and religious holidays. It is true of the choice of literature and newspapers, of television viewing, of films and videos. People are not so dependent on the state as sometimes seems to be assumed. However sometimes, like the tip of an iceberg showing above water, these habits and customs cause political controversy.

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Examples include the question of whether Sikhs should be exempt from the law requiring motorcyclists to wear crash helmets (an issue of the past two decades in Britain, the United States and Canada); whether Sikhs should be permitted to wear ceremonial but sharp daggers when being prosecuted in court or when in prison (an issue raised in 1986 in Canada); whether westerners should be allowed to drink alcohol in countries where this is generally banned (a recent issue in Kuwait and one or two other predominantly Muslim states); whether westerners should be permitted to kiss in public in countries influenced by Islamic fundamentalism; and whether Hindus should be permitted to cremate their relatives on funeral pyres in their back yards (an issue raised briefly in England in the 1960s). The only general principle that can be endorsed in such cases is that the majority has an obligation to be tolerant. There is a case for evading a direct clash over such issues wherever possible, such as by allowing Sikhs not to wear crash helmets on condition that they pay higher insurance premiums or get reduced compensation for head injuries. It should be noted, however, that an obligation to be tolerant does not necessarily confer a right on the minority. Rights always create obligations but the reverse does not hold. If I see a girl drowning in the surf or about to be seized by a crocodile I have a moral obligation to rescue her if I can, but she does not have a right to be rescued. I have to weigh my obligation to help her against my swimming abilities and my obligation to stay alive for the sake of my wife and children. Similarly, a government has to weigh its obligation to be tolerant about minority customs against its duty to protect the interests of the majority, if these are real interests and not merely expressions of prejudice. Occasionally, issues arise in which public authorities have to weigh their obligation to be tolerant of minority customs against their duty to protect the rights of individuals. The Canadian authorities do not permit Sikhs to wear daggers in prison, lest these be used against other prisoners. British authorities do not permit Hindus to cremate their relatives in their back yards, lest the widows of men being cremated find themselves under pressure to throw themselves on the pyre as well, which is a Hindu custom. In England a number of teenage girls of Pakistani origin have applied to become wards of court, so as to escape from their parents’ pressure or orders to enter into arranged marriages with men whom the girls disliked or had not even met, and in some cases the English courts have acceded to these requests. In the United States the courts have sometimes agreed to requests from hospitals to authorize medical treatment to save the

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lives of children whose parents, being members of certain religious sects, had refused to permit the treatment. A related but rather different question is whether governments should feel obliged to take positive measures to protect the cultural identities of minorities. Should they, for instance, teach minority languages in schools, teach ‘black studies’ or similar subjects in schools, subsidize minority religions, or produce radio and television programmes catering for minority interests? In this context the question of a possible ethnic trap is directly relevant. It would be unreasonable for state schools to be expected to provide courses in minority languages and cultures if it seemed likely that one overall effect of such courses would be to make it more difficult for the students to attain equality in the economic sphere. Whether this would be the case depends on the circumstances. There should, for example, be no objection on this ground to teaching Italian instead of French to the children of Italian immigrants in Australia. Italy and Australia are trading partners, there is a demand in Australia for staff with a knowledge of Italian, and in any case a person who has learned one Latin-based language can easily learn another. It would be more difficult to defend a proposal to teach Turkish to the children of Turkish immigrants in Australia. It would also be more difficult to defend the suggestion that Italian should be substituted for French in the case of the children of Italian immigrants in Canada, as a knowledge of French has a special advantage there that it does not enjoy in Australia. As a point of principle it seems clear that there cannot be any general right for members of cultural minorities to receive this kind of state assistance in the maintenance of their cultural identities, though it might be desirable in some circumstances. This question will be discussed further in Chapters 7, 8 and 9.

The special case of indigenous peoples Indigenous peoples have to be put into a separate category because their problems tend to be different from those of other cultural minorities and it can well be argued that they have a stronger claim on the majority for tolerance and assistance. People who migrate voluntarily to a different country can be expected to make adjustments in their lifestyles that are necessary to success in their adopted home. People who were conquered may not only have lost the freedom to govern themselves but may also find themselves unable, through no fault of their own, to make a living in their

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traditional way. If they want to become integrated with the majority they deserve special help in the form of measures to equip them for the modern labour market. If they prefer to save what they can of their original ways of life it would seem reasonable for the majority to help them with this also. The problem is that neither of these objectives is at all easy to attain. The history of attempts to integrate American and Canadian Indians and Australian Aborigines into the modern labour markets of those countries is very largely a history of failure. Canadian Indians have been the least unsuccessful of the three, in that a proportion of them have displayed entrepreneurial talents and have successfully organized logging companies, trucking companies, hotels and even a small airline. But the majority of the Canadian Indians who have attempted to prosper in the Canadian economy have ended up in menial or low-paid occupations. American Indians have been less successful and Aborigines have been dismally unsuccessful, the cultural gap between the latter and white society being greater than that between North American Indians and white society. At the same time, indigenous peoples have found it difficult to maintain the standard of living they once derived from hunting and similar activities, partly because the development of their country by white men has changed the environment and partly because they have lost many of their native skills. The buffalo no longer roam across the plains of North America and there is no way that they can be brought back. The establishment of cattle and sheep stations in the Australian outback has reduced the land available for foodgathering and hunting by Aborigines. Indians are no longer good with a bow and arrow and most Aborigines have lost the delicate skills that once enabled them to survive in an arid land, where many early white explorers died of thirst. In these circumstances there is no easy answer to the problems of indigenous peoples. In all three countries government policies have moved from conquest to attempted integration to the provision of social welfare. In all three the latest phase is the attempt to give partial autonomy to groups of indigenous peoples and to find ways of helping such groups to become at least partially self-sufficient, pursuing some of their traditional activities even though they have to be subsidized by welfare payments and special grants. The policies adopted in Canada and Australia will be outlined in Chapters 8 and 9, but it can be said now that the most profitable way ahead lies not in the assertion of old grievances, serious though these may be, but in the negotiation of arrangements most likely to give practical help

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to the groups concerned. Indigenous peoples have a right to citizenship and, as citizens, they have the same right to social security benefits as anyone else. In addition, it seems clear, as a matter of social justice, that when groups of indigenous people prefer not to enter into competition in the white economy they deserve government support to protect what remains of their native culture and lifestyle.

6

Minority nationalist movements and the question of secession

The ultimate step for a cultural minority wishing to maintain or strengthen its identity is to attempt to secede from the state within which it has minority status. This is, of course, only possible if the minority is territorially concentrated, a fact that excludes a fair number of minorities whose members feel disadvantaged in their present situation. However, it leaves a fair number that have produced nationalist parties demanding secession or, if not complete secession, at least a large measure of autonomy. In 1988, secessionist parties or groups are to be found among the Scots, the Welsh, the Quebecois, the Corsicans, the Basques of Spain, the Kurds of Turkey, the Sikhs of India, the Tamils of Sri Lanka and the Ambonese of Indonesia, to name only those that have achieved a degree of prominence in the world news. For reasons that will be examined, the last third of the twentieth century has been a period in which minority nationalist movements have multiplied and flourished. Three rather different questions may be asked about political movements of this kind. The first, following our discussion of minority rights, is the normative question of whether proposals to secede from an established state can be justified in terms that liberals would accept as reasonable. The second is the empirical question of what conditions lead to a growth of secessionist movements. The third is the question, also empirical, of what policies state governments can pursue if they wish (as they usually do) to protect the territorial integrity of their state.

Justification for secession Secessionist parties invariably base their claims on a list of grievances. Their people are exploited economically, ignored politically, treated as cultural inferiors, deprived of basic rights, or 63

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any combination of these. However, temporary grievances, no matter how strongly felt, cannot plausibly be put forward as a justification for breaking up an existing state, so long as that state provides some mechanism for the peaceful adjustment of its policies and the replacement of its governing parties. Liberal systems of government could not be sustained if any minority with a temporary grievance used this as a reason for opting out of the system. The grievance has to have a history, and be likely to persist indefinitely, if proposals for secession are to seem justified to observers from outside the minority in question. Any discussion of justification has to rest upon normative assumptions of one kind or another. In the following paragraphs I shall suggest conditions that might reasonably, in the eyes of liberals, justify the claims of a geographically concentrated minority to secede from an existing state. Since the assumptions are liberal, it is not to be expected that Marxists or supporters of the authoritarian right would agree with the argument. First, secession might well be thought justifiable if the region had originally been included in the state by force and its people had displayed a continuing refusal to give full consent to the union. There must have been a history of reservations about the union, even if not one of active protest. This condition would have given the people of the Roman Catholic countries of Ireland the right to secede from the United Kingdom at any time between 1801 and 1921. It would have endowed the people of Algeria with a similar right to secede from the French state. It would give the Ambonese people of the South Moluccas the right to secede from Indonesia, as they attempted to do in 1950, even if Indonesia had not ceased to be a democracy. (On the Ambonese, see Young, 1976, p. 354.) The hard cases under this condition are the indigenous peoples of lands conquered by settlers. In the majority of instances, their territories have been invaded by settlers, and members of the indigenous tribes so dispersed, that there is no longer a territory that can be clearly demarcated in which tribal members constitute a majority of the population. Where there are such territories, as in the tribal reserves of North America, the Indians usually depend on government subsidies to maintain their living standards, so that secession would have little attraction. There is undoubtedly a sense in which these indigenous peoples have suffered cruelly from the white man’s invasion, but it would be romantic to suggest that secession is now an appropriate answer to their problems. A second condition that would seem to justify secession would obtain if the national government had failed in a serious way to

The question of secession

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protect the basic rights and security of the citizens of the region. This failure must either have been continuing or, if not continuing, be so drastic that a reasonable person in the region could be expected to feel fearful for his future security and freedom. This condition would have given the Ibo people of the Eastern Region of Nigeria the right to secede from the federation in 1967, following the complete failure of the Nigerian regime to prevent the massacre of Ibos carried out by groups from the Northern Region, and by units of the Nigerian army, in May, July and September-October 1966. A third justifying condition would obtain if the political system of the country had failed to safeguard the legitimate political and economic interests of the region, either because the representative process was biased against the region or because the executive authorities had contrived to ignore the results of that process. For this condition to apply, it would be necessary to show that the failure was prolonged and likely to continue, that it had resulted in relative deprivation of some kind for the region, and that the politicians in power could be held responsible for the adverse consequences that had followed. It would not be enough to show that the region was economically backward or affected by industrial decline, like southern Italy or Scotland, for in these cases the causes of relative deprivation are not political and the national government has shown itself sensitive to the problem by pursuing policies specifically designed to help the region in question. For the condition to apply, there has to be systematic distortion of what could be expected to be the normal pattern of democratic influence, either through peculiarities of the representative process or as a result of manipulation by national leaders. A rather extreme example of this condition would be the case of the Bengalis of East Pakistan. The refusal by national leaders to accept the normal democratic consequences of an electoral victory by the party supported by most East Pakistanis turned the accumulated resentment of the Bengalis into a flame of anger, leading to the secession of what became Bangladesh in 1971. This secession was clearly justifiable in terms of the principles here proposed. A much more marginal case is that of Western Australia in 1933. That state proposed to secede from the Commonwealth because its leaders believed that its economic interests were being largely ignored by the Commonwealth government, dominated as it was by the more industrialized eastern states. However, Western Australia was not suffering from any great deprivation, its people did not have a culture of their own that was markedly different from that of other Australians, and the proposal to secede was quickly dropped when

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the state was offered better financial terms by the commission responsible for fixing the level of federal grants. This was an example of a not-very-passionate minority nationalist movement, based upon a rather weak argument for secession. A fourth justifying condition, rather more difficult to recognize than the three so far mentioned, might pertain if the national government had ignored or rejected an explicit or implicit bargain between regions that was entered into as a way of preserving the essential interests of a region that might find itself outvoted by a national majority. The paradigmatic case is that of the southern states of the United States, whose leaders were probably entitled to feel outraged and threatened when Congress broke the convention that new states would be admitted to the union on the basis of one free state for one slave state. When northern politicians decided to ignore the warnings that John C.Calhoun and others had expressed on this issue, they provoked a secession by southern states whose leaders felt that the move jeopardized their essential interests and the future structure of their society. In terms of the liberal principles here proposed, this attempted secession was probably justifiable. The case of Quebec, though clearly different, may be thought to fall into the same category. The hope of the leaders of the FrenchCanadian community in the early years of Confederation was that the new Canadian state would embody a partnership between the two founding peoples, whose interests and rights would be equally protected in the years to come. This hope rested on shaky foundations and in practice the Canadian state has not proved to be an equal partnership of the kind envisaged. The western provinces that were subsequently settled and established as units of the Canadian state did little or nothing to protect the French language, so that francophone citizens have been forced to learn English to find employment and have seen their children and grandchildren gradually adopt English as their first or only language. When politicians in Quebec realized that the dominance of the French language and culture was not secure even in that province, for reasons that will be explained in Chapter 8, the result was the growth of the Quebecois nationalist movement with separatist ambitions. In terms of the fourth type of justification for secession here suggested, Quebec appears to be a marginal case.

Conditions leading to secessionist movements It is possible to argue that this discussion of how secessionist movements can be justified misses a central feature of the situation.


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Scotland, for instance, would not appear to be justified in claiming independence from the United Kingdom under any of the headings mentioned. Yet Scotland was once an independent nation and it has its own legal system, its own established church, a significant literature and a history of contributions to world thought that includes the writings of David Hume and Adam Smith. To the true Scottish nationalist this is undoubtedly enough to establish the case, without any need to argue about broken bargains. To the true Welsh nationalist, it is enough that Wales has its own language and culture, even while lacking many of the advantages that Scottish nationalists may claim for their country. As the 1972 Manifesto of the Welsh Language Society declared: ‘To that astonishing question, “Why do you want to keep up the Welsh language?” the true Welshman need only answer, “That our fathers be not shamed”’ (Planet, 1974/75). This declaration points firmly to another aspect of the situation; that the dyed-in-the-wool nationalist is a romantic, not a rationalist. He is a communitarian, not an individualist. He thinks in terms of the spirit and culture of his people, not in terms of bargains and calculations. He will fight for his case despite any number of rational arguments showing it to be unjustified. However, this aspect of the situation, though highly important, does not render our discussion of justifications irrelevant. Romantic nationalists may not be impressed by the arguments, but romantic nationalists are few in number. They can create minority nationalist movements and keep them alive, but they cannot win widespread support in their community unless they can point to broken promises, material disadvantages suffered, or the prospect of tangible gain. Poetry may inspire the few, but the masses need to be persuaded of actual losses and potential benefits. To explain why minority nationalist movements wax and wane, we need to examine the material factors that lead to their growth and decline. Various theories have been put forward in recent years that bear on this question. The best known is probably the theory of internal colonialism, first advanced by Latin-American writers and expressed in systematic form by Hechter. The essence of this theory is that the relationships between members of the dominant or core community within a state and members of the minority or peripheral communities are characterized by exploitation. The dominant community uses its economic advantages to ensure that its industrial base is diversified, leaving the peripheral areas with more specialized and therefore more vulnerable economies. The dominant community also regulates influential roles and positions in the state in such a

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way as to favour its own members and leave members of the other communities in subordinate roles (Hechter, 1975, pp. 9–10 and 38–40). Members of the peripheral communities, remaining conscious of the cultural differences between themselves and the majority, will inevitably resent the exploitation to which they are subjected and can be expected to support minority nationalist movements when this resentment reaches a certain level. Hetcher illustrated his model by taking the United Kingdom as a case study and it is therefore unfortunate that the contemporary situation in this country gives scant support to the theory. The relations between Britain and Ireland certainly conformed to the internal colonial model in the period up to Irish independence in 1921, but the relations between England on the one hand and Scotland and Wales on the other are very different. The Scottish economy is not highly specialized, the statistics showing it to have less specialization of employment than any other region of the United Kingdom (Birch, 1978, p. 330). The Scots and Welsh have not been excluded from influential positions in the state and neither have the citizens of Northern Ireland. These three territories, comprising only 17 per cent of the population of the United Kingdom, have contributed at least their fair share of political leaders and top civil servants, as will be shown in Chapter 7. In Canada a similar enquiry would reveal that Quebec has a more diversified economy than many of the Anglophone provinces and that French-Canadians have played a dominant role in the Liberal Party, which itself has governed Canada for most of the past sixty years. A theory that fails to explain either the Scottish or the Quebecois nationalist movement cannot be regarded as a very useful guide. Somewhat similar comments can be made about Nairn’s attempt to compensate for what he rightly calls the failures of Marxism by producing an explanation of nationalist movements (of all kinds, representing national majorities or minorities) in terms of the uneven development of capitalism (Nairn. 1977, Chapter 9). Some territories, like Scotland and Wales, are slightly poorer than their immediate neighbours; others, like the Basque country and Catalonia, are slightly richer than theirs; the whole of the Third World is underdeveloped in comparison with the western world, and the result in all cases is the growth of nationalism. The real origins of nationalist movements, according to Nairn, are to be found ‘in the machinery of world political economy’ (Nairn, 1977, p. 335). This theory has to be looked at sceptically. It is not clear that capitalism is responsible for uneven economic development. The world has been unevenly developed since people first farmed its land,


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and it seems likely that it always will be. There is uneven development in and among socialist states just as there is in and among capitalist states. The German Democratic Republic is richer than Poland, Hungary is richer than Bulgaria, and the area around Moscow is richer than Uzbekistan. If the reference to capitalism is dropped, there may still be some truth in the suggestion that uneven development contributes to nationalist rivalries, but the explanatory value of this suggestion seems rather small. Polish nationalism is fairly intense not because Poland is poorer than neighbouring states but because the Germans and the Russians have taken turns to invade Polish territory. The people of the Soviet Islamic republics harbour nationalistic feelings vis-à-vis ethnic Russians not because the latter live in a richer part of the country but because of the religious and linguistic differences that divide them. Nairn’s emphasis on economic factors is best regarded as an unconvincing attempt to rescue neoMarxists from the failure of Marxism to predict the continued relevance of cultural issues in politics. In his painstaking sociological approach to the problem, Rothschild arrives at another generalization that has some similarity to Nairn’s. ‘Politicised ethnic assertiveness today’, he maintains, ‘appears to be keenest among those who have been least successful and those who have been most successful in meeting and achieving the norms, standards and values of the dominants in their several multi-ethnic states’ (Rothschild, 1981, p. 137). The former are resentful at their failure while the latter are resentful because their economic success is not reflected in full social and political acceptance. Rothschild gives no examples to justify this last part of the argument, and it is not at all clear that Jewish-Americans, German-Americans and Irish-Americans (to take only his own country) are at a disadvantage in the political sphere even when they are successful in economic terms and in meeting the social norms of American society. This might have been said in the past, but it does not seem credible in the 1980s. The ethnic origins of Kennedy, Kissinger, Reagan, Schulz and Weinberger do not seem to have done them much harm. My own view is that structural explanations of these kinds go only a very small way towards explaining minority nationalist movements. I think it more helpful to attempt an explanation in terms of one constant factor and two groups of historical (as distinct from structural) variables. The constant factor is the determination of romantic nationalists to demand measures of autonomy to protect the cultural identity of their community. Ethnic and local loyalties are enduring features of

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social life. People invariably retain an attachment to their own ethnic group and the community in which they were brought up. For many, often for most, people these attachments become overlaid by loyalty to the wider national society and its institutions, but for some the ethnic or cultural community remains the chief object of their political passions. Such romantic nationalists may keep the banner waving over long periods when their cause seems hopeless. Armenian nationalists are still holding demonstrations to protest about the disappearance of their country as an independent entity in 1920 and the still earlier massacre of their people by Turkish troops. Irish Republicans are still fighting to undo the decisions embodied in the Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921. Cornish nationalists in the 1980s are busily struggling to reconstruct the Cornish language, which actually became extinct in the 1930s. It is this constant factor that explains why minority nationalist movements have great survival power even though their rate of success is rather low. The first group of historical variables is both general in scope and secular in nature. My proposition is that, for reasons that will be enumerated, conditions in the 1970s and 1980s have made minority nationalism more attractive and more plausible than did conditions earlier in the century. The factors involved are as follows. 1) The impact of television on cultural minorities has been different in kind from the impact of other media. It is different because it brings a majority culture, often in its least attractive form, right into the living room. It is different because it captures the imagination and sympathies of children to a much greater extent than written material. Television also differs from the printed word in its enormous costs of production, so that minorities cannot support their own channels in the way that they support their own publishing firms. It is therefore not surprising that the impact of television often provokes an angry reaction from the defenders of minority languages and culture. People who would do nothing to prevent the gradual erosion of their language and culture over the generations may be stirred to protest if they see them threatened with extinction within their own lifetime (see Birch, 1977, p. 174). 2) Since the Second World War industrial rationalization has led in many economically advanced countries to a greater concentration of business headquarters in metropolitan centres such as London and Paris. People in peripheral regions tend to resent the fact that this concentration reduces their control over regional economic affairs while it strengthens that of the dominant community (see Esman, 1977, pp. 375–4). 3) A remarkable feature of recent years is the growth of political


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impatience. In an era when talk about the future is dominated by predictions of nuclear warfare, world famine and the exhaustion of energy resources, people are no longer willing to accept a situation that displeases them in the hope that things will be better for their children or grandchildren. There has never been a period in history marked by the impatient demands that characterize our present era; when groups are campaigning for women’s rights, gay rights, students’ rights and prisoners’ rights it is only to be expected that spokesmen for cultural minorities will become vociferous too. The rapid spread of higher education has contributed to these developments and enlarged the pool of ready recruits for nationalist organizations. 4) The changed nature of the international system has increased the security of smaller states, so that secession seems less risky than it would have done in earlier periods. The size of a country’s population no longer bears a close relationship to its expectation of being able to resist invasion. The people of Belgium and Luxembourg are protected just as effectively by the NATO alliance as are the people of France and the United Kingdom. Size is also less important than used to be the case in diplomatic disputes. The medium-sized states are so constrained by the web of international relationships that they may have no more freedom of manoeuvre than small states. These changes in the international order have removed one of the main benefits to be derived from membership of a sizeable state (see Birch, 1977, p. 173). 5) The development of supranational organizations like the European Community, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund gives citizens of small states some of the economic advantages that were previously enjoyed by citizens of large states. These include access to a large market, access to capital not directly controlled by another state, the reduction of financial instability caused by local economic difficulties and the opportunity for geographical mobility by members of the professional classes (see Birch, 1977, p. 173). 6) The development of television news programs has proved to be of incalculable benefit to the propagandist activities of minority nationalist movements. Whereas such movements in the past had to hold meetings and distribute pamphlets to reach a few thousand people, contemporary movements can command an audience of millions by any activity that attracts the television cameras. In 1976 the very small and previously obscure South Moluccan nationalist movement, which wanted Indonesia to grant independence to South Molucca, got an international television audience of tens of millions

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by hijacking a suburban train in Holland. The example is an extreme one but the factor is of general relevance. The second group of historical variables consists of factors, entirely local and particular in character, that change people’s perceptions of their situation in such a way as to rally large numbers of them to the nationalist cause. For nationalist fervour to turn the masses away from their existing allegiance to other political parties and institutions, there has to be an eruptive factor of some kind. The nature of this factor varies greatly from one movement to another and is difficult to predict. For the Zionist movement, which laboured for so long with little support, the eruptive factor was the Holocaust. For Scottish nationalism, previously led by romantics, it was the discovery of oil in the Scottish part of the North Sea and the accompanying realization that an independent Scotland could be extremely wealthy. For the Quebecois, it was the impact of the ‘Quiet Revolution’ of the 1960s, to be discussed in Chapter 8, together with the realization that the arrival of non-French immigrants in large numbers posed a potential threat to French culture in Quebec. It is impossible to generalize about factors of this kind. It is vital to realize that nationalist movements need an eruptive factor if they are to capture mass support, but it is difficult in advance of its occurrence to predict what this factor may be or when it may develop. It may be a social or economic factor, like foreign immigration or the discovery of new natural resources. It may be a purely political factor, like the brutal treatment of a minority, the sudden suppression of activities that had previously been tolerated, or an election result that seems to threaten the interest of a particular ethnic group. It was an election result that aroused Fijian nationalism in 1987, when the native Fijians, actually a minority in their own country, reacted to the perceived threat by a military coup. However much they may prefer generalized explanations, social scientists have to accept that local, contingent and often unpredictable factors are apt to play a large role in the growth of nationalist movements. There was no social-scientific way of predicting that Sikh nationalism, after simmering for so long in India, would suddenly become militant in 1986, or that Tamil nationalism in Sri Lanka would do the same in 1987. Such developments have to be explained in particularistic historical terms.

Tactics of system maintenance Historically, the most common response to secessionist movements has been suppression. Governments rarely take kindly to threats to


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the integrity of their territory and the only examples of peaceful secession, by agreement, are those of Belgium’s secession from the Netherlands in 1830 and Norway’s secession from Sweden in 1905. Elsewhere, separatist parties have commonly been harassed by the police, while actual attempts at secession have been met with force. The secession of the Confederate States in 1860 was crushed in a long and bloody civil war. The Irish insurrection of 1919 was met with force by the British, though the latter sent armed police rather than troops and eventually conceded the issue. The independence movement in Algeria in 1956 was met with attempted suppression by the French, who sent half a million troops there before giving up. The secession of Biafra from Nigeria in 1967 was crushed in a civil war. The secession of East Pakistan in 1971 was met by armed force, though the intervention of Indian troops on the side of the East Pakistanis resulted in the creation of Bangladesh. Other ways of maintaining the existing regime are the accommodation of grievances and the device of holding a referendum. When Western Australia proposed to secede in 1933 this was headed off by the offer of generous grants from the federal government. When the Scottish and Welsh nationalist parties gained strength in the 1970s this development was met by the offer of devolved systems of government, combined with referendums to ascertain whether nationalist aims had the support of the majority of Scottish and Welsh voters. When Quebecois nationalists proposed to take Quebec into independence, the Canadian government fought a vigorous referendum campaign to persuade Quebec voters that they would be better off if they remained in Canada. These three examples will be examined in the three following chapters. The three cases will show that a national government wishing to resist the claims of a secessionist movement has more weapons at its disposal than rifles and tanks. Moreover, in these three cases the tactics of system maintenance all succeeded, whereas in the Irish, Algerian and Pakistani cases armed forces failed, while the American and Nigerian federations were preserved intact only at a horrendous cost in lives and human suffering. It is appropriate to add here that the three countries chosen as case studies to illustrate the problems of national integration in Part II of this book have many similarities in their political and economic systems though they have significant differences in the composition of their societies and the policies adopted to integrate cultural minorities. They are all liberal democracies with similar systems of parliamentary government. They all have legal systems that are largely based on the British system of Common Law and they all have a

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long history of concern for the liberties and rights of citizens. They are all advanced industrial societies with a high standard of living and near-universal literacy. These basic similarities facilitate the task of making comparisons and generalizations regarding their problems and patterns of national integration. If countries like Nigeria or the Soviet Union were included as case studies, comparisons and generalizations about national integration would be vitiated by the existence of basic differences in political and economic structure and conflicting assumptions about the liberties and rights of citizens. In methodological terms, this study follows—if only loosely, because national integration is a broad subject—what J.S.Mill called ‘the method of concomitant variations’ (Mill, [1843] 1893), Przeworski and Teune called ‘the most similar systems design’ (Przeworski and Teune, 1970) and Lijphart called ‘the comparable cases strategy’ (Lijphart, 1975). However, it is hoped that the conclusions emerging from the three cases will also throw some general light on the universal problems of national integration, which I believe constitute the central dilemma of nationalism as an ideology.

PART II

Practice and Experience

7

National integration in the United Kingdom 1

THE BRITISH STATE

The United Kingdom is a somewhat untidy state, neither federal nor completely unitary, that has no formal constitution and can only be understood in historical terms. It was created in stages, by the expansion of England to take in Wales, Scotland and Ireland, but then suffered a process of partial disintegration by an insurrection in Ireland leading to the partition of that country and the independence of the greater part of it. It offers a fascinating example of political integration and disintegration. England itself was unified in the eleventh century and its Parliament has a history of continuous existence since 1275. Members of the landowning classes, anxious to expand their domains, invaded and partially conquered Wales in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. That country did not have a unified government of its own before the English invasion and it was ruled in only a loose and patchy way for some centuries after the invasion. In 1536, however, it was formally united with England by an Act of Union passed by the English Parliament. From then onwards Wales has been governed as if the Welsh counties were part of England, save for some slight administrative differences in the earlier part of this long period and a degree of administrative decentralization that has been established since 1964 in response to Welsh pressure. The history of Scotland is quite different. Scotland was an independent state for several centuries before it was united with England by the Act of Union of 1707. This was a voluntary union, supported by a majority in the Scottish Parliament, which thereupon ceased to exist. Other Scottish institutions remained intact, however, including a distinctive legal system, a distinctive (and rather advanced) educational system and the Presbyterian Church of Scotland. With this history, it is not surprising that the Scottish people have a secure sense of national identity, which has survived nearly three centuries of political union with England and is now the 77

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basis of a lively nationalist party that seeks to regain Scottish independence. Ireland was partially conquered by English landowners, operating on a free enterprise basis, in the twelfth century. By the late sixteenth century it had become, in effect if not in law, an English colony, and from then onwards troops were sent across the Irish Sea from time to time to impose order. The Irish Parliament that met in Dublin was essentially a parliament of the conquerors and settlers, with a strong bias against the Roman Catholic majority in the Irish population. In 1798 there was an Irish revolt, easily suppressed but nevertheless worrying to the English because of the possibility that the Catholic Irish might welcome an invading French army, as indeed they had done in 1689. Largely in response to this, Ireland was formally united with England, Scotland and Wales in 1800 to constitute the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. The United Kingdom, once established, constituted a populous free trade area with freedom of movement for labour and capital. This facilitated the growth of industry, prosperity and similar living standards throughout the mainland areas, though Ireland was always poorer and only the area around Belfast shared in the industrial growth of the mainland during the nineteenth century. Throughout the latter part of the nineteenth and the whole of the twentieth century there has been a great deal of internal migration, with Welsh, Scottish and Irish people flocking to England to improve their economic positions and with a reverse migration from England to south Wales when coal-mining and industry were developed there. Some significant cultural differences remain, but it is vital to realize that the differences within and between each of the nonEnglish territories are as important as the differences between England and the others. As Rose has pointed out, those who lump the non-English peoples together as Celtic are guilty of ‘a major error’ (Rose, 1982, p. 14). The Welsh are divided between the anglicized majority who do not speak Welsh and the largely rural minority who do. The Scots are divided between those of Irish origin in the north and west, who used to speak Gaelic, and those of Anglo-Saxon or Norse origin in the south and east. The Irish are bitterly divided between Catholics and Protestants. The whole Kingdom can reasonably be described as a multinational state, but the cultural and social relationships within it are not homogeneous within national borders. Partly because of this, there has never been

Integration in the United Kingdom

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any possibility of the non-English peoples forming any kind of alliance against the English. The United Kingdom state, normally known as the British state, was not only created by the English (with a little help from the Scots), but has also been largely managed by the English, who form 83 per cent of the current population. Over the years the English have devised several strategies for managing the periphery, which will now be briefly summarized. (1) The peripheral territories are given full access to the centre of government in London and full representation in Parliament. Indeed, they have generally enjoyed over-full representation since the Reform Act of 1885. Ireland had 105 seats in 1918 although representation by population would have entitled it to only 63 seats. Scotland now has 72 seats although its population entitles it to only 57. Wales has 36 seats instead of 31. The object is not only to prevent grievances arising but also to persuade the non-English political elites that they have a good chance of helping their territories through action in London. The strategy failed in Ireland during the First World War, but it had been successful for many decades before that. (2) Politicians and administrators from the periphery are not excluded from leading positions in British politics and government, as internal colonialist theory would suggest, and are not even at any clear disadvantage there. One-third of British Prime Ministers in the twentieth century (6 out of 18) have been Scottish, Welsh or Irish. An analysis made in 1977 showed that the non-English territories, comprising 17 per cent of the population, contributed 22 per cent of Members of Parliament, 18 per cent of Cabinet ministers, the Speaker of the House of Commons, the Leader of the Liberal Party and 21 per cent of the top officials (the Permanent Secretaries) of government departments (Birch, 1978, pp. 327–8). In 1987 three of the four national parties had Welsh or Scottish leaders. The peripheral territories also contribute at least their fair proportion of judges and top army officers. (3) Public expenditures by the national government are slanted towards the peripheral territories. A Treasury publication has revealed that expenditures are consciously related to a calculation of regional needs corrected by a political factor reflecting the degree of political influence exerted by the territory in question. (4) In terms of culture and national symbols, the English policy has been to discourage minority languages, seen as divisive, but to encourage various other symbols of cultural differences, seen as harmless and possibly useful. The various Acts of Union all established English as the only official language of government and courts. The use of Gaelic was forbidden for a time in Scottish schools, so that the

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language is now spoken by only 1.5 per cent of Scottish people, almost entirely living on offshore islands. The use of Welsh in Welsh schools was also forbidden for a rather shorter time, with the result that the proportion of Welsh people claiming a knowledge of the language has fallen to 21 per cent. The Irish language was discouraged by various means and a knowledge of this is now claimed by only 27 per cent of people in the Republic and a much smaller proportion in Northern Ireland, with no more than 2 per cent of the Irish actually in the habit of using the language. On the other hand, the Union Jack is an amalgam of English, Scottish and Irish symbols; each country has its flag, anthem and songs; care has been taken to retain distinctive Scottish, Welsh and Irish regiments, with all their regalia; the kilt, once used only by Scottish Highlanders, has been adopted as a general symbol of Scottishness; and the four territories all compete separately in the Commonwealth Games, in international rugby football and (most importantly) in international soccer competitions such as the World Cup and the various European cups. Arrangements of this kind provide symbolic satisfactions to the non-English peoples that are not available to the residents of Canadian provinces or Australian states, though in other ways these countries, being federal, are more decentralized. (5) Detailed administration has been hived off from London whenever this seemed to be politically appropriate. In Ireland, administration was controlled by a British Governor-General in Dublin from 1800 until the bulk of Ireland became independent in 1922. In Northern Ireland, administration was in the hands of a separate bureaucracy, supervised by a separate Parliament, from 1922 until 1972. Although that Parliament adopted the great majority of British laws without significant changes, its existence enabled the British government and Parliament to wash their hands of the province’s tiresome internal conflicts, at least until British troops had to be sent there to quell disturbances in 1969. In the case of Scotland, the extension of the franchise in 1884 was followed by demands for some kind of devolution to make the administration more accessible to the people. In 1885 the Scottish Office was established, with a minister who has had a seat in the Cabinet from 1892 onwards and has acquired responsibility for education, health, roads, law and order and various other services in Scotland. In 1964 a Welsh Office was established on a similar pattern, with fewer responsibilities at first but becoming more and more like the Scottish Office as the years passed. In 1972 a Northern Ireland Office was set up, with a similar structure.


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These very flexible arrangements go a fair way towards satisfying local demands to be treated differently from the English, while still retaining all control over policy issues in London. Bulpitt’s distinction between ‘high politics’ and ‘low politics’ is very relevant here (Bulpitt, 1983). According to Bulpitt, it is an age-old principle of British statesmanship to keep central control of high politics, such as issues relating to defence, foreign affairs, finance and the economy, while devolving day-to-day control of other matters to a variety of regional and local agencies. It is noticeable that although the three offices for the peripheral territories have extensive responsibilities, they have no control whatever over taxation or economic policy. These are matters of high politics and are reserved for the Cabinet and the Treasury in London. The following sections of this chapter will deal with Scotland and Wales, where these integrative strategies have been largely successful; with Ireland, where the strategies have been entirely unsuccessful; and with the coloured minorities within Britain, to whom the strategies cannot be applied because the minorities are not territorially concentrated.

2

WALES AND SCOTLAND

Political integration with England brought gains and losses of different kinds to Wales and Scotland. To Wales it brought organized constitutional government for the first time, with Welsh representation in Parliament and a regular system of courts and justice. On the other hand, integration started a long process whereby the greater part of Wales became progressively anglicized, with the Welsh language displaced by English, at first as a language only of government and commerce but eventually as the dominant language of communication and education. To Scotland, political integration meant the loss of Scotland’s status as a sovereign state together with the loss of the Scottish Parliament. On the other hand, the Acts of Union with England safeguarded the positions of the Presbyterian Church of Scotland, the Scottish legal system and the Scottish system of education. Having the independence of these three institutions guaranteed by the English saved them from attacks that might otherwise have been mounted on them in retribution for the Highland rebellion of 1745, when clansmen marched as far south as the English Midlands in an attempt to put Bonnie Prince Charlie on the English throne. Moreover, it is arguable that these institutions were more important

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for the Scottish sense of national identity than the Scottish Parliament was, given the very limited franchise that existed in 1707. In economic terms, both Wales and Scotland benefited from having the large English market open to their products and having English capital available to help develop their mines and manufacturing industry. In social terms, the educated classes of both countries gained from having wider opportunities open to them, in business, in government service and in the professions. Unless an exceptionally high value is attached to the Welsh language, the only reasonable conclusion is that the benefits of integration far out-weighed the losses, for Wales and Scotland as well as for England.

Economic integration The British economy is highly unified. There are no barriers to internal trade and transport costs form only a low proportion of the total costs of production. All three countries are highly industrialized and urbanized, with the proportion of the male workforce engaged in agriculture varying only from 3 per cent in England to 5 per cent in each of Wales and Scotland. Proponents of the theory of internal colonialism have argued that the peripheral areas of industrialized states are likely to have more specialized economies that will therefore be more vulnerable to trade fluctuations and technological change than the economies of the central areas (see Hechter, 1975, pp. 9–10). There is, however, very Table 7.1

Specialization of employment in regions of the UK in 1966

Source: A.J.Brown (1972).


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little evidence to support this hypothesis in the British case. The figures in Table 7.1 show the coefficients of specialization of employment of the standard regions of the United Kingdom in 1966, the coefficient indicating the minimum percentage of each region’s employed population that would have to change from one type of industry to another to make the regional distribution coincide with that of the whole United Kingdom. These figures give little or no support to the internal colonial model. Of the three non-English regions, Northern Ireland is highly specialized, Wales has a coefficient that is close to the regional mean of 13.9, while Scotland is the least specialized of all. In terms of prosperity, Wales and Scotland have suffered since the 1930s from the relative decline of certain staple industries, namely shipbuilding and coal-mining in Scotland, steel manufacturing and coal-mining in Wales. Parts of northern England have suffered in a similar way from the decline of the textile, shipbuilding and mining industries. Energetic efforts by postwar governments to encourage industrial expansion in these areas have prevented the difference from growing, but have not succeeded in eradicating it. In 1964 the regional figures for gross domestic product per head, given as percentages of the UK figure, were as follows: South East England, 113; West Midlands, 109; Yorkshire, 99; North West England, 98; East Midlands, 98; Wales, 88; South West England, 88; East Anglia, 87; Scotland, 86; Northern England, 85 (Birch, 1978, p. 330). In 1979 the figure for Wales was still 88 per cent of the UK average but that for Scotland, aided by North Sea oil, had risen to 97 per cent (Rose, 1982, p. 22). The overall figure for England in 1979 was 102 per cent. These differences in prosperity are small—much smaller than the regional differences in Canada, for instance—and the differences in the average weekly earnings of an industrial worker in the three nations are infinitesimal as a consequence of the mobility of labour and capital and the pattern of industrial relations. There are very few trade unions that are purely English, Welsh or Scottish in their memberships and the pressures from the unions have always been in favour of uniform wage rates throughout Britain. In 1979 the index figures for average weekly industrial earnings were 100 in England, 99 in Wales and 98 in Scotland (Rose, 1982, p. 22). Disparities in material standards have also been kept low by the centralized character of British government services. The basic principles involved here are quite simple. In a common market, with free movement of labour and capital, there are always likely to be regional differences in economic achievement. If there is no central administration to compensate the poorer areas they may be worse

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off than they would have been if they had remained outside the market. Thus, it has been shown that the East African Common Market brought large benefits to Kenya, marginal benefits to Uganda and a substantial loss to Tanganyika (Ghai, 1965). In a federal system the poorer states benefit to some extent from federal public services, but the standard of state services is likely to vary from state to state unless it is equalized by federal grants. In a centralized system of government the provision of uniform public and social services over the whole country means that the wealthier regions automatically subsidize the poor regions through the fiscal system. This is certainly the case in the United Kingdom, where residents of poorer regions contribute less than average to government revenues but enjoy public services that are more expensive than average. Research carried out for the Royal Commission on the Constitution showed that in 1968–9 central government expenditures per head on local services were 42 per cent higher in Scotland than in England and 30 per cent higher in Wales than in England (Royal Commission on the Constitution, Research Paper 10, 1973, p. 9). However, since the Scots contributed more per head to central government revenues than the Welsh did, the net ‘profit’, being beneficial government expenditures minus tax contributions, was actually greater in the Welsh case than in the Scottish case (Royal Commission on the Constitution, Research Paper 10, 1973, p. 72).

Communications and culture In terms of personal communications, it is relevant that the most populous areas of Scotland are separated from those of England by a tract of sparsely populated country, whereas the most populous areas of Wales are adjacent to the English border. As is sometimes said, Wales is ‘sideways on’ to England. Partly because of this, the volume of cross-border traffic is greater in the Welsh case than the Scottish case. Estimates made by the author in 1977, on the basis of statistics provided by British Rail and the airlines, indicated that passenger traffic across the Welsh border by rail and air was then about 50 per cent greater than it was across the Scottish border, while the volume of freight (including road freight) crossing the borders was about twice as great in the Welsh case as in the Scottish case (Birch, 1977, pp. 38–40 and 46–7). Communication by mail and by telephone was also heavier between Wales and England than between Scotland and England (Birch, 1977, p. 40). If allowance is made for the fact that Scotland has approximately twice the


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population of Wales, it is clear that Wales is much more closely integrated with England in terms of communications than Scotland is. In fact, comparisons with figures for communication between various parts of England suggest that Wales could well be regarded as just another English region, no more self-contained or separated from London than Yorkshire is. A similar conclusion is suggested by figures from newspaper circulation. Britain has eleven national morning newspapers, all edited in London, that are delivered to the doorstep in Scotland and Wales just as they are in England. Their combined daily circulation in 1988 was 14.5 million copies. The only Welsh daily morning paper is the Western Mail, with a circulation of only 80,000 that is small compared with a circulation of about 600,000 for the London-based papers in Wales. Scotland, on the other hand, has three important morning papers of its own as well as several smaller dailies; and the total circulation of the Scottish-based dailies is just about the same as the circulation in Scotland of the London-based dailies. These data confirm the conclusions that can be drawn from history, namely that Scotland is a much more self-contained nation than Wales is. However, there is an important distinction to be drawn within Wales between the largely anglicized majority and those—sometimes known to the English as the Welsh Welsh or the very Welsh—who can speak the Welsh language and attach great value to the cultural traditions of rural Wales. The members of this minority tend to support Plaid Cymru (the Welsh Party, literally) and the Welsh Language Society. Pressures from this minority, supported by a Gandhi-like fast by the President of Plaid Cymru, induced the British government to agree in 1980 that the proposed fourth television channel should broadcast in Welsh rather than English. This development, together with the growth of Welsh language teaching in schools, has halted the decline of the Welsh language and traditional Welsh culture that had been taking place from the 1870s to the 1970s. It is a significant exception to the general trend that can be discerned in the past century of increasing cultural homogeneity within Britain, brought about by modern communications and mass media.

National feelings and nationalist movements The Welsh and the Scots, like the English, have two compatible national identities. They are Welsh and Scottish in terms of their cultural identity and British in terms of their political identity.

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Surveys indicate that 57 per cent of the Welsh and 52 per cent of the Scots choose their cultural identity when asked to give just one identity (Rose, 1982, p. 14), but it is clear that they are aware of both identities. If we turn from feelings of national identity to feelings of national pride, it is necessary to draw a distinction between the two nations. The Scots were a self-governing nation for several centuries before Scotland became part of Great Britain. Scotland has long had its own institutions, its own aristocracy and its own intellectual leaders. In the latter part of the eighteenth century it could stand comparison with England and France in intellectual terms, with thinkers like Adam Smith, David Hume and the philosophers of the Scottish Enlightenment. In the industrial age it has produced a series of scientists, engineers and medical specialists who have been in the forefront of technological advance. The average Scotsman may not be familiar with Hume’s philosophical writings but he knows that a Scot invented the steam engine and that another Scot invented television. The Scots have much to be proud of and they commonly give the impression of being a proud people. This does not make them nationalists in a political sense because the great majority of them regard the union with England as being to Scotland’s advantage. It does, however, help to explain why the nationalist party that has become significant in recent years is pragmatic rather than emotional in character. Modern Scottish nationalists are not clamouring for the recognition of Scotland as a nation but argue, in an essentially rational way, that the Scots could manage their own affairs better if they were independent of the English. The Welsh situation is very different. Wales has not had its own national government, has never had an aristocracy and has not produced leaders of thought or technology or medicine. As a Welsh historian has pointed out, in the latter part of the nineteenth century most Welsh landowners were anglicized and a fair number were actually English migrants. Welsh bishops could not speak Welsh. Wales had no agreed border with England and no agreed capital city. It was governed as if it were no more than a group of English counties, with most English politicians reluctant to recognize it as a distinct nation (Morgan, 1970, Ch. 1). In these circumstances it is not surprising that the nationalist feelings that emerged were somewhat emotional and resentful in character. It has been observed that in the nineteenth century national feeling in Wales was ‘a struggle against contempt rather than physical oppression, a campaign for national recognition’ (Morgan, 1970, p. 16). The development of national feeling was


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closely related to the growth of the nonconformist churches, which used Welsh rather than English in their services. A movement grew for the disestablishment of the Church of England in Wales, with the first parliamentary motion seeking this change being introduced in 1870 and the reform actually being achieved, after several false starts, in 1920. There is a striking contrast between the speed with which British governments have usually been willing to promote legislation in response to Scottish grievances and the slowness with which they responded to this Welsh grievance. And although Wales now has agreed borders and an agreed capital, contemporary nationalist feelings retain a good deal of emotional content, including a passionate wish to establish and protect the Welshness of Wales and the distinctiveness of its culture. The present nationalist parties in the two countries both have their origins in the 1920s. Plaid Cymru was founded in 1925. The National Party of Scotland was founded in 1928, merging with another group to become the Scottish National Party (henceforth SNP) in 1934. In their early years both parties were strong on theories and rhetoric, but weak on organization. Their members could well be described as romantic nationalists, and the parties had no real success in electoral terms until the mid-1960s. They then began to attract widespread support, rising to a peak in the elections of 1974 but declining again after the referendums on devolution held in 1979. Despite this parallel progress, however, the parties are so different in their motives and objectives that they must now be discussed separately. Plaid Cymru has as its main objective the preservation of the Welsh language and culture. In the absence of an institutional basis for nationhood, nationalists regard the language as essential to the preservation of their society; they echo the view of a nineteenthcentury writer that ‘if once we lose the Welsh language, that will be the end of us as a nation’ (quoted in R.T.Jones, 1974, p. 134). They argue that the decline of the language in the twentieth century has deprived most Welsh people of a literary heritage and folk-culture of songs and verse. They regard the English mass media as an everpresent threat to the language and they also dislike what they think of as the materialism and frivolity of modern English social values. They well know that Welsh is only used as a medium of communication by a small minority of people in rural areas, but this makes them all the more determined to preserve the traditional way of life in these areas. This determination has led to several conflicts that the pragmatic English simply fail to understand. One such conflict was over a plan

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to build a large reservoir in a Welsh valley inhabited by only seventy families, a small number to be rehoused in a crowded society like Britain. The reason that the nationalists’ opposition was so passionate, as explained to me by the President of Plaid Cymru, was that these were not just Welsh families but Welsh-speaking families. Demonstrations and protests held up the plan for over a year before it was finally approved by Parliament. Another conflict arose over the proposal to build a new town in central Wales to rehouse 50,000 people from Birmingham. As Welsh spokesmen had complained vigorously about the depopulation of this area, it was expected that they would welcome the proposal, that had been approved by the Welsh Office. Instead of welcoming it, nationalist leaders attacked it as a plan to commit cultural genocide. It was explained to me that a plan to swamp a Welsh-speaking area with so many English people could only be regarded as a plot to destroy Welsh culture in that part of the country. The opposition was so vociferous that the plan was finally abandoned. The Welsh nationalists, unlike the Scots, are not particularly concerned about economic issues. They naturally regret the growth of unemployment and the closure of industrial plants in Welsh towns, but they do not claim that self-government for Wales would bring greater prosperity. Indeed, some of them admit that a self-governing Wales might be poorer in strictly material terms, though better off in terms of culture, democracy and the preservation of traditional communities. The nature of its program gives Plaid Cymru a degree of committed support among Welsh-speaking groups, but limits its appeal among other Welsh voters. As only 21 per cent of the population claim a knowledge of Welsh, the chances of Plaid Cymru winning a sizeable number of parliamentary seats have always been slender. Non-Welshspeakers are bound to have reservations about a party that would like a knowledge of the language to be a requirement for posts in the public service. Such a proposal is inevitably regarded as a proposal for ‘jobs for the boys’. The growth of electoral support for the party in the mid-1960s and 1970s was almost certainly related to two political developments that affected voting behaviour all over Britain. One of these was the decline of traditional class loyalties, leading to greater electoral volatility and a weakening of the Labour Party’s hold on the support of working-class voters. The other was a certain disillusionment with the two main parties, following their evident failure to promote economic growth at a rate commensurate with that of Britain’s industrial rivals. In England these developments led to an electoral


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revival for the Liberal Party, while in Wales and Scotland they contributed to a growth in support for the two nationalist parties as well as for the Liberals. Plaid Cymru won a parliamentary by-election in 1966 and the SNP did the same in 1967. The record in the three following general elections is shown in Table 7.2. Table 7.2

The growth of electoral support for Welsh and Scottish Nationalists

The years immediately following the 1974 elections were dominated by debates over a plan drawn up by the British government to devolve a certain amount of political authority to new national assemblies in Wales and Scotland. The main object of this exercise was to ward off the challenge of the SNP in Scotland, but an assembly with somewhat fewer powers was also proposed for Wales. In March 1979 a referendum on this proposal resulted in a resounding defeat for it in Wales, even though it was officially supported by the Labour Party as well as by Plaid Cymru. When it came to the point, only 11.9 per cent of Welsh electors were willing to vote for the establishment of a Welsh Assembly, the remainder either thinking it superfluous or fearing that it would give an advantage to politicians and public servants who spoke Welsh. This result was a major setback for Plaid Cymru from which it has never recovered. Electoral support decreased in the general election of 1979 to 6.4 per cent of the Welsh vote, with only two MPs elected, and has remained at about that level in subsequent elections. If Plaid Cymru seems firmly set as a party of a small minority, it would be wrong to conclude that it has had no influence on policy. On the contrary, its efforts, supported by those of the much smaller but more militant Welsh Language Society, have almost certainly saved the Welsh language from continuing the decline registered in successive censuses from 1871 to 1961. It looked in the 1950s as if the language would become extinct some time in the twenty-first

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century. However, the proportion of people able to speak Welsh has now stabilized, it is being much more widely taught in schools, and it is in conspicuous use on road signs and railway station signs. Its use on direction signs has been a highly contentious issue, for a reason that readers unfamiliar with the language may not appreciate. This is that place-names in Welsh are in most cases unrecognizable to those who speak only English. Cardiff is certainly recognizable as Caerdydd, but Swansea becomes Abertawe, Neath becomes Llanatwg, Bridgend becomes Pen-y-bont ar Ogwr and Holyhead becomes Caergybi. It took a considerable effort to get these and similar names on road signs all over Wales; and they serve as a constant reminder to motorists that Wales has indeed got a language and culture of its own. However, the English names are printed underneath, so this development is not seriously disintegrative. The Scottish National Party differs in many respects from Plaid Cymru. In the first place, it has no interest in defending or promoting the idea that Scotland has a distinctive language or culture. Some of the romantic Scots nationalists of the early years of the century were concerned about the virtual extinction of the Gaelic language and wanted to promote a Celtic revival (see Hanham, 1969, pp. 120– 45), but since 1945 the leaders of the SNP have been modernisers rather than traditionalists, concerned with economic and social policies rather than with culture. Secondly, and in line with this, modern Scots nationalists have none of the animosity towards the English that affects many Welsh nationalists. When this author attended the annual conference of the SNP in 1975, he found that the general feeling among delegates was that they wished England well, regretted that its economy was in trouble, but were sure that Scottish politicians could manage things better. A desire to control the Scottish economy and related matters was the most important of the several factors leading to the phenomenal growth in popularity of the SNP between 1966 and 1974. These were years when British weaknesses in economic management were most conspicuous. The ‘national plan’ drawn up by the Labour government of 1964–6 had been abandoned within a few months of its completion. Labour’s attempts to control inflation had led first to the highly unpopular wage freeze of 1967 and then to the withdrawal, because of internal dissent, of the government’s 1969 plan to regulate industrial relations. The incoming Conservative government’s Industrial Relations Act of 1971 was effectively sabotaged by the trade unions, while the subsequent attempt to moderate wage increases by agreement was wrecked by the National Union of Mineworkers. The British rate of economic growth lagged far behind


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that of its European competitors and the mass media referred constantly to Britain as ‘the sick man of Europe’. The Conservative strategy of relying on free enterprise proved no more successful than the Labour strategy of drawing up plans and the government had to make what the media called ‘a U-turn’ in its policies in 1972. The unemployment rate began to grow and it was twice as high in Scotland as in England. In these circumstances the advantages to Scotland of being governed from London seemed less obvious than they had seemed in earlier years when Britain was Europe’s leading economic power. The loss of empire also had a certain effect on Scottish attitudes. It was one thing to be in partnership with England when Britain ruled a quarter of the world; another to be a junior partner in an offshore island beset by problems. The eruptive factor that turned the rising tide of support for the nationalists into a flood was the announcement in 1971 of the discovery of a large oilfield off the Scottish coast in the North Sea. It quickly became clear that an independent Scotland in possession of this oilfield would experience rapid economic growth and become one of the world’s richest countries in terms of national income per head. It also became clear that under existing constitutional arrangements the British government would simply add the oil royalties and profits to general revenue, without any intention of earmarking a proportion of them for the special benefit of Scotland. The way in which the SNP exploited this factor is well illustrated by the following extracts from a pamphlet entitled England Expects— Scotland’s Oil. England expects Scottish oil to help pay for the third London airport,…the Channel Tunnel, a re-equipped Polaris submarine fleet, the ever-rising Common Market levy and the colossal bill for Concorde. These projects damage the Scottish economy by concentrating even more jobs and prosperity in the south of England. England expects the Scottish people to be grateful for handouts from London or Brussels when we could be the wealthiest nation in Europe if we controlled our own resources… England expects Scotland to stand back and allow hasty uncontrolled exploitation of our oil in order to help the English balance of payments problem, even if this causes unnecessary damage to local communities in the front line of the oil rush. Above all England expects that we the people of Scotland will sit back and allow our country to be exploited without taking

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action. The London establishment simply assumes that it has an absolute right to our wealth and resources without our consent and that, as always, the Scots will passively accept lower wages, higher prices, worse housing, more unemployment and high emigration. Let’s prove them wrong. The great strength of this line of propaganda was that the arguments put forward were irrefutable. The assessment of English expectations was largely correct. The SNP did not rely on this kind of argument alone, however. It also set out some fairly detailed statements about the policies it would promote if it were the governing party in an independent Scotland. In the manifesto for the general election of October 1974 only 20 per cent of the space (as measured in column inches) was devoted to the case for independence and the history of the party, as compared with 10 per cent to the policies regarding external affairs and defence that the SNP advocated for an independent Scotland, 14 per cent to policies regarding oil and other energy resources, and the remaining 56 per cent to policy on domestic issues such as housing, agriculture, pensions and economic development. This readiness to be judged on the policies it would promote after independence distinguishes the SNP from most other minority nationalist movements of the twentieth century, which have directed a high proportion of their propaganda to emphasizing the value of their people’s culture and the iniquitous nature of their treatment under the existing system of government. Whatever its failings, the SNP must be rated as a remarkably practical and constructive nationalist party. The rapid growth in electoral support for the SNP in the early 1970s was of particular concern to the Labour Party. The pattern of party support within Britain is such that the Conservative Party normally wins a majority of English seats and the Labour Party depends largely on its greater support in Wales and Scotland to tip the overall balance in its favour. Of the six postwar elections that have yielded Labour victories, only two (those of 1945 and 1966) have produced Labour majorities in England. The growth of nationalist parties in Scotland and Wales therefore threatened the Labour Party in a way that it did not threaten the Conservative Party. Successive public opinion polls in the early 1970s showed that the Scottish nationalists had one great strength but one marked weakness. The strength was that the great majority of Scottish electors wanted the Scots to acquire greater control over their own political affairs while the weakness was that only a small proportion favoured


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complete independence. The exact figures varied from one poll to another, but the range was between 15 and 21 per cent in favour of independence compared with between 55 and 70 per cent in favour of some decentralization of political power. It was therefore entirely logical of the Labour Party to prepare plans for the creation of a Scottish Assembly that would handle many Scottish affairs while still remaining subordinate to the British Parliament. This could be presented as a democratic response to popular demand as well as being in Labour’s electoral interest. The initial reception of this proposal by the Scottish branch of the Labour Party was hostile. Many Labour leaders in Scotland were wedded to the traditional view that the best thing for Scotland was to have a Labour government in London pumping money northwards. In June 1974 the Scottish executive committee of the party rejected their national leaders’ proposal for a Scottish Assembly by six votes to five. To get around this, it was necessary for the national executive to call a special one-day Scottish conference at which the decision was reversed by the weight of trade union votes. After the general election of October 1974 the Labour government prepared detailed plans for the creation of a Scottish Assembly with certain legislative powers, together with a Welsh Assembly that would only have executive powers. This anomaly in the plans was by no means the only odd thing about them. A more serious anomaly was that there was no provision either for an English Assembly or for regional assemblies covering the various regions of England. It was proposed that English domestic legislation, on matters that in Scotland were devolved to the Scottish Assembly, would be dealt with by the United Kingdom Parliament, where the balance of power might be held by Scottish members. This arrangement would have been so manifestly unfair to England that it was a certain prescription for political conflict. Given the nature of the partisan balance in the three countries, the proposed division of powers automatically ensured the hostility of the Conservative Party to the whole proposal. Yet another anomaly in the plans was that the Scottish and Welsh Assemblies were to have only limited control over economic affairs and no power at all to levy taxation. This would have meant that a Scottish government, faced with criticism of its policies and its public services, would have been able to transfer the blame to the British national exchequer for not giving Scotland enough money to do better. It was another prescription for political conflict. These proposals were pushed through Parliament, at the second attempt, by the exercise of strong party discipline within the

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Parliamentary Labour Party and with the help of support from the nationalist parties and the Liberal Party. However, to quell backbench dissent from English Labour MPs, which had ensured the abandonment of the first legislative attempt to make the change, the government promised that the Acts to establish the Assemblies would not come into force unless Scottish and Welsh voters registered their approval of the changes by voting for them in referendums. When the Bills were debated in Parliament opponents of the plans managed to secure agreement on an amendment whereby a majority in the referendums would not be counted as support for the changes unless at least 40 per cent of the electors registered affirmative votes. In the end it was this 40 per cent rule that ensured the failure of the government’s plans in Scotland, their failure in Wales having been certain from the moment that the government agreed to a referendum. The campaign over the devolution proposals in Scotland was fiercely fought. Those in favour argued simply that the plan would give Scottish people more control over Scottish affairs and that it followed the desire for decentralization repeatedly expressed by the majority of Scottish respondents in public opinion polls. Those opposed campaigned under the slogan ‘Scotland is British’. The campaign committee contained Labour Party activists as well as Conservatives and businessmen. The opponents stressed the many benefits that they said Scotland derived from membership of the United Kingdom and they also stressed the manifest weaknesses and anomalies in the devolution proposals. The judgement of most observers was that the opponents got the better of the argument. As against this, the proposals were officially supported by three parties and opposed by only one. Because of this disparity of numbers, the television companies were banned by court order from giving each party time to present its position. Instead they had to rely on news coverage of the debates, giving each side (but not each party) equal weight in their presentations. As the campaign developed, it became clear that the opponents were far more united in their opposition to the proposals than the parties officially favouring the proposals were united in their support of them. The SNP was lukewarm about them, realizing that they would not give the Scottish Assembly much actual power whereas they might give it enough of the appearance of authority to satisfy floating voters. The Labour Party was divided on the issue, with some feeling that constitutional change was a diversion from the class struggle and some resentment that the views of the Scottish executive committee had been circumvented as the result of


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decisions taken in London. In Edinburgh, Labour Party pamphlets in favour of devolution were actually distributed by SNP canvassers because most Labour Party members were unwilling to distribute them. For all these reasons, the opponents of devolution gained in strength during the course of the campaign. When the votes were counted, it emerged that 32.8 per cent of the electors had given an affirmative vote, 30.8 per cent had given a negative vote and the remainder had abstained. It therefore transpired that the plan to establish a Scottish Assembly had to be abandoned because of insufficient support from Scottish electors. The result was greeted with jubilation by all those who believed in the advantages of national integration and centralized government in the United Kingdom. The impact of this result on the SNP was rather devastating. In the general election held a few weeks later the SNP vote declined from 30.4 per cent of the total Scottish vote to 17.3 per cent, while its representation in Parliament was cut from eleven to two MPs. After this result the party was hit by internal dissention and in subsequent general elections it has fared badly, gaining only about 11 per cent of the votes in 1983 and 14 per cent in 1987, while winning two seats and three seats respectively. The overall consequences of the growth of Welsh and Scottish nationalism have therefore been limited. In Wales the nationalists have never looked like gaining the support of more than a fifth of the electorate, but their campaigns appear to have saved the Welsh language. In Scotland the nationalists became much more popular and came near to bringing about a major constitutional change, but in the end the reform efforts failed and the Scottish nationalists have actually made less difference to Scotland than the Welsh nationalists have made to Wales. The whole episode illustrates how difficult it is to bring about significant constitutional changes in a well-established system of democratic government. Most politicians have a vested interest in the status quo while most electors are concerned with bread-and-butter issues rather than with constitutional questions. The defenders of the status quo have many weapons in their armoury, of which a popular referendum is one and a 40 per cent hurdle in a referendum is another. It is highly unlikely that any further constitutional change of the character discussed here will be promoted in the United Kingdom without a referendum; and if constitutional conservatives wanted to make change more difficult they could always raise the hurdle to 50 per cent or extend the area of the referendum to include the votes of the English.

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3

IRELAND

The story of England’s relations with Ireland is a story of political failure. It has involved not only a failure of political integration but also a failure of sympathy and an intermittent failure, on both sides, of simple understanding of the other side. It is important to appreciate the reasons for this. The first reason is that the English conquest of Ireland did not lead, as the English conquest of Wales led, to the emergence of an anglicized middle class from among the conquered. The Irish were an exceptionally poor and backward people, among whom only the priests had any education. The bulk of the Irish were always despised by the English landowners who conquered them, while the priests and their Church were thoroughly disliked. This contempt was magnified into a stronger feeling by the events of 1689 and 1690, when the Roman Catholic Irish rallied to the cause of the exiled Catholic King of England, James II, and joined his army of French troops in supporting his attempt to make Ireland a base from which he could recapture the English throne. In the fighting that followed, most notably the Battle of the Boyne, James and his supporters were defeated by William of Orange and his force of Protestants. By fighting against the newly-crowned King of England in this way, the Catholic Irish branded themselves as enemies in English eyes. These events were followed in the eighteenth century by a determined attempt by the English settlers, who controlled the Irish Parliament, to suppress the Catholic Church. Under the ‘Penal Laws’, Catholic priests were forbidden to celebrate mass and Catholics were not permitted to send their children abroad to be trained for the priesthood. Furthermore, Catholics were not permitted to buy land, except on a fairly short-term basis, and were not permitted to bequeath their land by will. When a Catholic landowner died his land was divided equally between all his sons, which in a country of large families ensured the fragmentation of Catholic estates. As Ireland’s only university (Trinity College, Dublin) was confined to Protestant students, the Irish Catholics were effectively prevented from developing an educated class. The Irish position was essentially colonial, with all positions of influence in society occupied by immigrants and the indigenous population turned into lawbreakers if they practised their religion. In the north-eastern corner of Ireland the situation was significantly different. In that area lands confiscated from Irish landowners who had moved to the Continent at the beginning of the seventeenth century had been distributed among about 150,000 Protestant settlers


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from Scotland and 20,000 from England (Rose, 1971, p. 78), who were brought across the Irish Sea to establish what was called the Ulster Plantation. They were followed by other Protestant settlers, also mostly Scottish, who bought land from Irish landowners. In consequence the six north-eastern counties came to have a Protestant (and largely Presbyterian) majority, whose presence was deeply resented by the Catholic minority. In the nineteenth century Scotland and Wales shared in the industrial revolution that had started in Manchester and Birmingham, benefiting greatly from this development. In Ireland, however, industry was developed only in the mainly Protestant city of Belfast. The Catholic counties of Ireland remained agricultural and extremely poor, for in general the land was poorly farmed. Tenants tended to fall behind with their rents, their Protestant landlords evicted them with little compassion, emigration rose to high levels and there was a good deal of rural lawlessness. Though Ireland was now an integral part of the United Kingdom, in constitutional terms, it was by no means integrated with the rest of the Kingdom. The quasi-colonial character of its social and economic relationship with Britain was to some extent reflected in the fact that, although legislation for Ireland was enacted in London, executive powers were concentrated in the hands of a colonialstyle Governor-General in Dublin instead of being shared among the British ministers for trade, agriculture and so forth. Despite the poor relationships between the British and most of the Irish, there was little sense of Irish nationalism before the 1890s. For nationalist sentiments to develop among a people, being poor and downtrodden is not enough. The people also need to have a positive sense of national identity and pride to form the basis for the belief that national self-government would improve the situation. Moreover, they need leaders. The Italian nationalist leaders, Mazzini and Cavour, both visited England in the 1840s and wrote about the Irish question. Both sympathized with the plight of the Irish people but could not see in Ireland the basis for a nationalist movement. The Irish did not have a distinctive culture, lacked a sense of national mission and were not well enough educated to be nationalists (see Mansergh, 1975, pp. 88–100). In 1856 Engels, who actually visited Ireland, described the Irish as ‘utterly demoralised’ (quoted in Mansergh, 1975, p. 109). Irish folk-songs of the period certainly seem to confirm Engels’ judgement. (For some examples, see Birch, 1977, pp. 52–3.) This situation changed in the last years of the century. That period saw a great flowering of Irish literature, which gave the Irish much

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to be proud of. In England, Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw were dazzling London society with Irish wit. More important, in this context, Dublin saw the emergence of a brilliant group of poets, playwrights and novelists who included George Moore, J.M. Synge, W.B.Yeats, George Russell, James Joyce and Sean O’Casey. At the same time, the Gaelic League (founded in 1893) was winning converts in its attempt to restore Gaelic as the first language of the Irish nation, while the Gaelic Athletic Association (founded in 1884) was promoting traditional Irish sports at the expense of important British sports. It was in line with these developments that Ireland’s first nationalist party, Sinn Fein (literally, ‘ourselves alone’) was established in 1905. In London, the Irish MPs were campaigning first for agrarian land reform and then for political decentralization, known as home rule. Land reform was granted by the Conservative government in 1903, in the form of a sweeping measure that provided government financial aid for the wholesale transfer of farms and estates to the ownership of their tenants. Home rule was promised by the Liberal government of 1910–18, but the promise could not be turned into reality because of the determined opposition of the Ulster Protestants to a measure that would transfer many powers to an Irish Parliament in Dublin that would be dominated by Catholics. That the Protestants would fight tooth and nail to prevent such a development had been clear since 1886, when Gladstone had first committed the Liberal Party to the idea of home rule. When the Home Rule Bill of 1912 was introduced the Protestants campaigned vigorously against it and threatened to plunge Ireland into civil war if the Bill were enacted. By 1914 the Liberals had become reconciled to the idea that Ireland would have to be partitioned if a Dublin Parliament were to be established, but the outbreak of the First World War then terminated the discussions and the whole issue was put on ice for the duration. This was done with the agreement of the Irish Party at Westminster, whose leaders called on their followers to support the British war effort. While many of them did so, volunteering in large numbers to join the British army, the leaders of Sinn Fein had quite different ideas. In 1916 a small group of them launched the revolt in Dublin that has gone into history as the Easter Rising. It was a small-scale affair, with only about 1,200 rebels facing the Irish police and the British army, and the result was never in doubt. Its suppression proved, however, to be a pyrrhic victory for the British authorities. The two men who had planned the Easter Rising, Patrick Pearse


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and James Connolly, knew that it would be defeated and predicted that they and other leaders would then be executed for treason. The purpose of the Rising was not to capture Dublin but to provoke the Irish people into a wider rebellion by providing martyrs for the nationalist cause. The British authorities duly played their part by executing sixteen of the leaders (Pearse and Connolly among them); Irish poets then played their part by writing stirring verses about the affair that were published throughout the country; and from that time onwards Irish nationalists, in increasing numbers, were fired with revolutionary spirit. In 1918 they successfully sabotaged the British attempt to impose conscription on Ireland and in 1919 they launched a general insurrection.

The Irish insurrection The Irish insurrection of 1919–21 was cleverly conducted by the Irish Republican Army (henceforth IRA). The insurgents are said not to have had more than 15,000 men under arms and not more than 5,000 on active service at any one time (Lyons, 1973, pp. 416– 17). The British were in the process of demobilizing an army of three million men, experienced fighters after their long struggle against Germany. If the British had been willing to use their army against the IRA the struggle would have been one-sided. However, the Irish people were British citizens and the British government did not think it right to use the army against them. In any case, the government was still in favour of home rule for the Catholic counties of Ireland and had no real will to fight a war to keep Ireland British. The government therefore confined its efforts to sending volunteers to help the Irish police maintain civil order. The IRA used terrorist tactics to demoralize the police. Individual police officers were assassinated in front of their families, a move that successfully deterred potential recruits from taking the place of the dead men. The maintenance of order therefore came to depend more and more on the British volunteers, a somewhat undisciplined force who retaliated against the guerilla and terrorist tactics of the IRA by fierce reprisals that included arson and looting in areas inhabited by IRA supporters. These reprisals got the volunteers— known as the Black and Tans because of their uniforms—an extremely bad name in the world’s press and among sections of the American public. American politicians voiced their sympathy with nationalist aspirations in Ireland while Irish-American supporters sent financial help to the IRA.

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By the beginning of 1921 the armed struggle in Ireland had reached deadlock and both sides were willing to discuss the terms for peace. Agreement on a peace treaty was, however, held up for some time by disagreement on two issues. One of these was very important, the other purely symbolic. The important issue was the future of the six north-eastern counties of Ireland. Nationalist leaders regarded them as an integral part of the Irish nation and thought it essential that they should become part of an independent Ireland. The British could not possibly agree to this proposition, for it would have meant handing over the Protestant majority in these six counties to a government in Dublin which they would not have regarded as legitimate and against which they would be prepared to take up arms. Ulster Protestant feelings in this matter are well captured in one sentence by their leader, Edward Carson. Referring to the constant loyalty to Britain that the Protestants had shown, he asked: ‘Is it our reward that we are to be turned outside the United Kingdom; that we are to be put in a degraded position in the Empire; and above all that we are to be handed over, bound hand and foot, to those who have ever been Your Majesty’s enemies and ours?’ (quoted in Williams, 1966, p. 91). The British attitude was encapsulated in the following comment by Lloyd George, who was Prime Minister from 1916 to 1922. You had to ask the British to use force to put Ulster out of one combination in which she had been for generations into another combination which she professed to abhor and did abhor, whether for political or religious reasons. We could not do it…You have got to accept facts. The first axiom is that whatever happened we could not coerce Ulster. (Quoted in T.Jones, 1971, pp. 129–30) In 1920, while the fighting in Ireland was in progress, the British Parliament put Ulster’s fears partially at rest by passing an Act to authorize the establishment of two Parliaments in Ireland, one in Belfast for the six north-eastern counties and the other in Dublin for the other twenty-six counties. When negotiations with the nationalists opened in 1921, therefore, the fact that Ireland would be partitioned was already decided in British minds. With great reluctance, the IRA spokesman eventually accepted this and it was an essential clause of the treaty with Britain which they signed. What was deeply unfortunate for the Irish is that some of the leaders of the IRA who had not taken part in the negotiations refused to accept it, thus dividing the nationalist forces and precipitating the Irish civil war


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that followed the peace treaty. What is unfortunate from all points of view is that, nearly seventy years later, the contemporary successors of the IRA still refuse to accept the legitimacy of partition and are willing to kill and maim thousands in a fruitless struggle to bring it to an end. The other issue that divided the nationalists was the largely symbolic question of whether a self-governing Ireland would be an independent republic or a member of the British Commonwealth. The British insistence on the latter was also accepted by the Irish negotiators and the new Irish government that was established as soon as hostilities ceased, but rejected by the dissident nationalists, led by Eamon de Valera, who plunged the new state into civil war. In this way romantic nationalism had tragic consequences. The Irish civil war and the subsequent internal affairs of Ireland are not the concern of this book. Since Irish independence was such a contentious issue, achieved only at the expense of many lives, it is, however, worth pausing to attempt some assessment of its costs and benefits. To the Irish, independence brought the political satisfaction of running their own government without dictation, or even interference, from the British. It also brought them the benefits of neutrality in the Second World War. In cultural terms, independence has made little difference. Ireland is officially bilingual, as a gesture to traditionalists, but less than 2 per cent of the population actually use Irish in normal communication (O’Cuiv, 1969). In terms of public services, the Irish are not so well off as they would be if they were still in the United Kingdom, when they would be subsidized through the fiscal system by the wealthier regions of the country, as the people of Northern Ireland are. In economic terms, independence has enabled Ireland to develop its own policies for industrial development, which it did with some success in the 1960s, but it has not enabled it to catch up with the British standard of living. European Community statistics show that in 1980 the gross domestic product per head of the Irish Republic was only 58 per cent of that of the United Kingdom (Chubb, 1982, p. 345). In terms of trade and communications with Britain, the Irish have lost very little, as the British have not erected tariff barriers against Irish exports and there are no immigration controls. (For a statistical analysis of movements and transactions, see Birch, 1978, pp. 343–4.) When staying in Britain, Irish citizens are entitled to all the privileges of British citizenship, including the right to vote. The fairest overall verdict is probably that the Irish are a little poorer but a good deal happier as a result of political independence. For the British the secession of the greater part of Ireland has

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been wholly advantageous. First, they have not had to put up with a large contingent of Irish MPs affecting the balance of power and the conduct of business in the House of Commons. Secondly, they have not had to worry about Irish poverty or to subsidize Ireland through their fiscal system. Thirdly, they have not had to listen to protests from the Irish Catholic Church about liberal British policies on divorce, birth control and abortion. In retrospect, the decision to grant independence to Ireland seems to have been one of the better diplomatic moves Britain has made in the twentieth century.

Northern Ireland The partition of Ireland left the six counties as a province of the United Kingdom, possessing their own Parliament and administration but ultimately subject to the overriding decisions of the British Parliament and government. The population of the six counties comprises approximately one million Protestants and half a million Catholics, divided not only by religion but also by their political loyalties. The Protestants are united and fiercely nationalistic, with a nationalism that has a different basis from the nationalism of the Catholic Irish. The bases of Irish nationalism are geographical and ethnic. Ireland is seen as a self-contained entity, an island created by God as the home of the Irish people. Irish nationalists have generally been willing to accept the Ulster Protestants as Irish, since they have lived there for so many generations, and they think that the Protestants, as democrats, should be willing to accept that government would normally be controlled by the Catholic majority in the island. The overall population comprises approximately 3.5 million Catholics and 1 million Protestants, so that if Ireland were united the Protestant minority would be large enough to exercise considerable influence. The bases of Ulster Protestant nationalism, in contrast, are religion and loyalty to the Crown. The Ulster Protestants not only dislike Catholicism, they also look down on it. J.B.Woodburn expressed a widespread view when he cited religion as the main reason why the north-eastern counties were more prosperous than the rest of Ireland. ‘The religion of the North’, he said, ‘is one that incubates freedom of life and conscience, and must produce a more robust race of men than the South with its traditional and enervating Catholicism.’ He went on to quote Lecky’s opinion that Catholicism ‘weakens the character, and it produces habits of thought and life not favourable to industrial activity’ (Woodburn, 1914, pp. 399–400). In the early


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years of the twentieth century the Ulster Protestants were not unique in assuming a relationship between religion and industrial growth, for this was the period in which Weber wrote The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. They were, however, unique in basing nationalistic feelings of communal superiority on this assumption. The Protestant feeling of superiority has continued right up to the current era. A social anthropologist who did her field work in Ulster in the 1950s and early 1960s has reported that: While Ulster Catholics tended to ascribe their…poverty to the machinations of the Protestants, the latter believed it to be the inevitable consequence of the Catholics’ adherence to a church that imposed heavy financial burdens on its members, prevented them from limiting their families sensibly, and sought to keep them docile through ignorance. (Harris, 1972, p. 177) Echoes of these sentiments can still be heard in the speeches of Ulster politicians in the 1980s. The other basis of Ulster nationalism is loyalty to the Crown. This dates from the battles of 1689 and 1690, when Irish Protestants fought against Irish Catholics to secure the position of William of Orange on the throne of England. The belief that Irish Catholics are inherently disloyal has been reinforced in the twentieth century several times. At the turn of the century nationalists from the southern counties supported the Boers in their fight against British forces in South Africa. In 1916 the Easter Rising was staged at a time when regiments from Ulster were suffering heavy losses in the Battle of the Somme. In 1918 the Catholic Irish successfully obstructed the imposition of conscription on Ireland. Eight Protestant leaders subsequently sent an open letter to Woodrow Wilson in which they expressed their shame, as Irishmen, about this obstruction, and blamed it partly on the Catholic Church: The most active opponents of conscription in Ireland are men who have been twice detected during the war in treasonable traffic with the enemy, and their most powerful support has been that of ecclesiastics, who have not scrupled to employ weapons of spiritual terrorism which have elsewhere in the civilised world fallen out of political use since the Middle Ages. (Quoted in McNeill, 1922, Appendix B) In 1940–1, when the war was going badly for Britain, members of the Catholic minority in Northern Ireland defaced walls with the

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slogan England’s extremity—Ireland’s opportunity’, while at the end of the war the Irish Prime Minister sent the German government a telegram of condolence on the death of Hitler. All of these incidents increased the level of Protestant contempt for the Irish Catholic community. From the beginning of Northern Ireland’s existence as a distinct province of the United Kingdom, Protestant leaders have regarded the maintenance of that status as more important than any other political objective. As none of the British parties has ever established a branch in Northern Ireland, the parties there are distinct and confined to the province with the one exception of Sinn Fein, the political wing of the IRA that also operates in the Republic. The Protestants called their party the Ulster Unionist Party and, by campaigning almost entirely on the constitutional question, they won a comfortable majority in each election of the Northern Ireland Parliament from 1922 until its demise in 1972. Although that Parliament had substantial powers to introduce variations on British legislation, these powers were used very sparingly so as to prevent a division of the Protestant vote on leftright lines. The Ulster Unionist MPs in London had an informal working alliance with the British Conservative Party, but their colleagues in Belfast adopted Labour legislation without demur when Labour governments were in power in London. This strategy was entirely successful and the Unionists monopolized political power in Northern Ireland throughout the fifty-year period. It has to be said that they used this power with scant regard for the feelings and interests of the Catholic minority and without correction by ministers in London, who were generally happy to disown responsibility for administration in Ulster. During the years of the Belfast Parliament (commonly known as the Stormont Parliament after its location, just outside the city) the level of political integration between Northern Ireland and the rest of the United Kingdom was very uneven. At the partisan level, as noted, there was virtually no integration. The informal alliance between the Ulster Unionists and the Conservatives operated only in Westminster, while there was no alliance between the Catholic parties in Ulster and any of the British parties. At the level of economic and social policy, integration was almost complete. The British health service and national insurance schemes were adopted in Ulster without change. Economic policy-making was largely concentrated in London, though Belfast had its own Department of Commerce that tried to attract industry to Ulster. At the fiscal level, integration was also almost complete. Taxes in Ulster were the same


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as in Britain. Northern Ireland received a substantial subsidy from the national exchequer for the administration of public services, but the size of this subsidy was determined by a complicated formula devised by the British Treasury; it was not the subject of open bargaining or debate. At the level of municipal government, the institutional forms were similar in Ulster and Britain, but the practice was significantly different. The Ulster Unionists used their permanent domination of administration in Northern Ireland to gerrymander some of the municipal electoral boundaries, most notably in the city of Londonderry. The franchise for municipal elections, being confined to ratepayers, tended to favour the Protestants. Unionist majorities on municipal councils tended to discriminate against Catholics in employment and in the allocation of subsidised municipal housing, as well as to upset Catholics by closing municipal playgrounds and golf courses on Sundays on the ground that Christians ought not to play games on the sabbath. The Catholic minority in Northern Ireland therefore had certain specific grievances under the system of devolved government that operated from 1922 onwards. However, their general unhappiness with their situation in the province can only be partially explained in these terms. The essential trouble with Northern Ireland is the lack of social integration between the two communities. Nearly all schools have a religious affiliation so Protestant and Catholic children are segregated. The kind of history taught differs as between the two school systems so that children are socialized into feelings of communal conflict rather than into feelings of social unity. The schools organize different sports, so Catholic and Protestant children rarely meet on the sports field. There is a large degree of residential segregation and of segregation in pubs and clubs. There is little intermarriage and a good deal of segregation in employment. The two communities lead largely separate lives, in a rather small geographical area. In this kind of situation comparisons of success are inevitable; and the Catholic community has always come out rather badly from such comparisons. There are proportionately fewer Catholics in high-income occupations. In 1978, 10.5 per cent of the Catholics were engaged in professional or managerial occupations, compared with 17.8 per cent of the Protestants (Moxon-Browne, 1983, p. 83). Among industrial workers, the Catholic unemployment rate has generally been higher than the Protestant unemployment rate. In 1978, the overall unemployment rate was 14 per cent among Catholics when it was only 7 per cent among Protestants (Moxon-

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Browne, 1983, p. 83). In rural areas, the average Protestant farmer has better land than the average Catholic farmer. The police force has always been over 90 per cent Protestant in its composition. This is partly the responsibility of Catholic politicians who discouraged Catholics from joining the force in the early years of its existence, but this historical fact does not lessen the feeling among Catholics that they may be discriminated against by the police. In 1969 nine-tenths of the lawyers holding posts in the judiciary were Protestants, a fact that was alleged to result from bias on the part of those making judicial appointments (Harbinson, 1973, p. 119). In all these and other ways the Catholics have felt that they occupied an inferior position in a province dominated by Protestants. This does not mean that most Ulster Catholics have wanted an end to partition. In spite of being, on average, poorer than Protestants they are, on average, better off in material terms than they would be in the Irish Republic. Whereas the gross domestic product per head in the Republic was only 58 per cent of the United Kingdom figure in 1980, in Northern Ireland the equivalent proportion was 78 per cent. The social services in the North, being subsidized by the British taxpayer, are substantially better than the services in the Republic. It is probably for these economic reasons that only a minority of Catholic electors have come down in favour of the unification of Ireland in the several polls that have been conducted on this topic. The actual proportion has varied according to the timing of the poll and the organization conducting the poll. A 1979 survey by the Economic and Social Research Institute of Dublin may be a more reliable guide than most; it showed that 39 per cent of Catholics in Northern Ireland favoured unification while 49 per cent preferred to stay in the United Kingdom (O’Brien, 1980, p. 81). In view of this, it is unfortunate that all the Catholic political parties of Northern Ireland have espoused unification as the only acceptable solution to the problems of the Catholic community. In the first elections to the Stormont Parliament the Ulster Unionists won forty seats and their opponents won twelve, these being equally divided between Sinn Fein and a new (and slightly less extreme) Nationalist Party. All these twelve refused to take their seats on the ground that they refused to acknowledge the legitimacy of partition and therefore of the new Parliament. This attitude naturally enhanced the tendency of Protestant politicians to regard Catholic politicians as basically disloyal. In subsequent elections Catholic parties have varied between boycotting the elections, participating


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in the elections but boycotting Parliament, and actually taking their seats when elected. The Social Democratic and Labour Party (SDLP) that was established in 1970 committed itself to full participation, but as the Stormont Parliament has not met since 1972 the SDLP has not been able to achieve much through this channel. All in all, it has to be said that the Catholic parties and politicians of Northern Ireland have done little to improve the position of the Catholic community. Since 1968, Northern Ireland has been plunged into political violence. It is unnecessary here to recount the history of ‘the troubles’, as the long-suffering people of Ulster describe the situation. Suffice it to say that the violence began with conflict between Catholic demonstrators and Protestant mobs and has been continued since 1970 by a campaign of terror waged by the IRA. Protestant paramilitary groups have added to the casualty list by assassinating Catholics and the British army has had to maintain a force of between 10,000 and 15,000 men in Ulster to help the police maintain security. The casualties between 1968 and 1988 amounted to just over 2,700 deaths and many thousands of people injured. Because the British government felt that it had to take charge of policy in Northern Ireland once the army was heavily involved there, and also because it was dissatisfied with the advice on security issues emanating from the Northern Ireland government, that government and the Stormont Parliament were abruptly suspended in 1972. Since then the province has been governed directly from London, apart from a four-month period in 1974 when there was a power-sharing executive in Belfast. There is a Secretary of State for Northern Ireland who is a member of the British Cabinet and commutes between London and Belfast. The policies adopted by the British government can be summarized under four headings, as follows: (1) (2) (3) (4)

An attempt to remedy the legitimate grievances of the Catholic minority. An attempt to minimize violence and to put those responsible for it in prison. An attempt, so far unsuccessful, to persuade Protestant and Catholic politicians in the province to share executive power. An attempt to secure the co-operation of the government of the Irish Republic in fighting terrorism and improving the political atmosphere in Ulster.

British efforts to remedy Catholic grievances began in 1969. The local government franchise was extended to all adult citizens. The

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government of Londonderry was transferred to a bipartisan commission. The control of public housing was taken out of the hands of municipalities and given to a new province-wide Housing Executive, that has been largely free of sectarian bias even though it has become unpopular because of its red tape (see Scott, 1977, Ch. 3). The Royal Ulster Constabulary was put under the command of an English Chief Constable and turned gradually into a much more professional force than it had been. The reserve police force known as the ‘B Specials’, greatly distrusted by Catholics because of its Protestant bias, was disbanded. Once they accepted responsibility for administration in Ulster, the British acted quickly and fairly. It was, however, beyond their powers to change the social structure of the province so as to end the diffuse feelings of dissatisfaction that affected a great many Catholics. The attempt at pacification has also been partially but not entirely successful. The security forces got on top of the IRA by 1976, after six years of extreme violence and bloodshed. In the 1980s changes in the judicial system have made it easier to secure convictions against suspected terrorists, large numbers of whom are now languishing in prison. Protestant thugs have been imprisoned as well as IRA members, so that the number of sectarian murders has fallen to low levels. Whereas deaths from political violence occurred at the rate of over 400 a year in 1971 and 1972, they have been reduced to under 100 a year in the 1980s. Whereas Belfast was in a state of siege in the early 1970s, with barricades and body searches every few yards in the city centre, daily life in the city has now returned to a more normal state. However, it is not possible to defeat the IRA completely, so long as it can attract recruits and provide its members with training and safe houses. It has been in business as an underground army for seventy years and is not likely to give up the struggle. Every defeat produces martyrs who can be compared with the original martyrs of the Easter Rising and serve as an incentive for new recruits to join. If there is a temporary shortage of martyrs, IRA members in prison can starve themselves to death, as ten did in the early 1980s. The IRA has suffered so many losses in the past few years that its leaders may call for a pause in the campaign, but it is not likely that the organization will fade away. It is not short of funds and it has overseas suppliers of arms. Having committed itself to two quite unattainable objectives, namely the unification of Ireland followed by a revolution in Dublin, it will always have a cause to go on fighting for. It would be foolish to regard it as other than a permanent actor in Northern Irish politics.


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The attempts to induce Protestant and Catholic politicans to share executive power have failed. In 1974 some Unionist leaders were persuaded to try this experiment, but they were immediately disowned by the majority of Unionists and the experiment was quickly brought to a halt by a general strike of Protestant workers in Belfast. When electricity supplies, water supplies and sewage disposal were all on the point of being cut off, the power-sharing executive simply capitulated. The attempt to involve the government of the Republic in Northern Irish affairs has been much more successful. The Anglo-Irish Agreement, signed by Margaret Thatcher and the Irish Prime Minister, Garret Fitzgerald, in 1985, contained a declaration by the British government that Northern Ireland could be united with the Republic if a majority of its citizens voted for this course of action, together with a declaration by the Irish government that it would only want unity with the North if this was desired by a majority of northerners. The Agreement also established a liaison body known as the Intergovernmental Conference that meets in Northern Ireland to discuss ways of improving the political situation there. The Conference makes recommendations to the British government that the latter may accept or reject. In practice the liaison body has served as a valuable channel through which proposals emanating from the Catholic minority in the North can be supported by representatives of the Republic and passed to London for consideration. Some of these proposals have been rejected, but the majority have been accepted and acted upon. In consequence, Catholics are now permitted to fly the Irish tricolour and to display other flags and emblems as they wish; there are improved procedures for dealing with complaints about police behaviour; and active steps are being taken to reduce or eliminate religious discrimination in employment. The long-term consequence of the political violence that has tragically scarred life in Northern Ireland since 1968 has therefore been, somewhat paradoxically, a closer integration of the province with Britain. Instead of having its own Parliament and government, Northern Ireland is now subject to direct British rule in the same general way as Wales and Scotland. Its education system differs from those of England, Wales and Scotland in that the great majority of schools are segregated by religion, with both denominations qualifying equally for state finance. Its legal system is like that for England and Wales rather than independent, as the Scottish legal system is, but it differs in that trial without jury is authorized in terrorist cases in which juries might be subject to intimidation. Its

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local government system is the same as the English system except for the fact that there are special arrangements, as noted above, for municipal housing. Because the Stormont Parliament no longer sits, the representation of Northern Ireland in the British House of Commons has increased from 12 seats to 17 seats, to bring it in line with the rest of the country in terms of the ratio between seats and population. This arrangement for the government of Northern Ireland is likely to continue for the indefinite future. Though it is disliked by Ulster politicians, because it renders them largely redundant, it is acceptable to most citizens. Surveys reveal that although few people put direct rule as their first choice for the province, nearly everyone prefers it to the first choice of the other community (see Moxon-Browne, 1983, pp. 113–14). It is a form of government that most people, apart from IRA supporters, feel they can live with. Direct rule is not very popular with either the British government or the British people, but it is accepted as the most viable of the three alternatives. The British will not restore the system of developed government in Northern Ireland unless the political leaders of the two communities there agree to a form of power-sharing whereby each ministry would be controlled by a partnership of Protestant and Catholic ministers. As Protestant political leaders are vehemently opposed to such an arrangement, and were able to sabotage it in 1974, this possibility can be ruled out for the foreseeable future. The other theoretical possibility, that the British would hand Northern Ireland over to the Republic, can be ruled out even more firmly. This is not because Britain has any vested interest in maintaining control of Northern Ireland, which is a liability rather than an asset. The reason, not always understood by Canadian or American commentators, is that such a course would be grossly undemocratic. The unification of Ireland is opposed by nearly all Ulster’s Protestants and by about half of Ulster’s Catholics, making a total of between 75 and 80 per cent of the electors who are against it. The British could no more transfer Ulster to the republic in these circumstances than the United States could transfer Texas to Mexico against the expressed wishes of 75 per cent of Texans. Democratic states do not behave like that. If the two alternatives to direct rule have to be ruled out for the foreseeable future, it follows that direct rule is almost certain to continue. To say this is not to say that it is an ideal arrangement. As Rose has pointed out, the Secretaries for Scotland and Wales in the British Cabinet are by convention normally Scottish and Welsh, but the Secretary for Northern Ireland has never yet been Irish (Rose,


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1976, p. 154). As the Northern Irish parties are separate from the British parties and not allied to any of them, it is not politically possible for a Northern Irish MP to be included in the British government. This inevitably makes the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland a somewhat alien figure to the people he is governing and for this reason direct rule cannot be equivalent to full political integration. At the present time, however, there is no apparent way to escape from this dilemma. It may reasonably be asked whether there is any hope of reducing the communal tensions that now make Northern Ireland such a difficult province to govern. In this author’s view, the only way ahead that offers much hope would be to try to change the attitudes of the next generation. To achieve such a change, it would almost certainly be necessary to establish integrated schools in place of the denominational schools that now socialize children into segregation and conflict. This change would be controversial but would not be generally unpopular. In 1967 and 1968, two surveys found that integrated education was favoured by about two-thirds of the adult population, while a 1978 survey showed that 82 per cent of Protestants and 84 per cent of Catholics regarded it as not a bad idea (Moxon-Browne, 1983, p. 134). The British government began in the 1980s to encourage non-denominational secondary schools and by 1988 seven were operating successfully. It remains to be seen whether they will become common and how far they will in fact change public attitudes. It does seem, however, that integrated education offers the best hope for the future in an otherwise depressing situation. One final reflection seems appropriate. This is that the situation in Northern Ireland raises considerable doubts about the virtues of educational segregation in plural societies. It has been advanced by some as appropriate for English cities with sizeable coloured minorities, a topic that will be addressed in the following section. It may indeed be appropriate in some situations and some forms, but the experience of Northern Ireland should serve as a warning to social and educational planners about its potential dangers.

4

COLOURED MINORITIES

Immigration Since 1955 the arrival of large numbers of Indians, Pakistanis, East African Asians and West Indians has created coloured minorities in

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English cities amounting to two and a half million people by 1987, a figure likely to rise to about three and a third million by the turn of the century. About 70 per cent are of Asian extraction and the remainder are of Afro-Caribbean origin. This development has given rise to so much social tension and sporadic violence that it would be foolish to pretend that it has been other than disintegrative, at least in the short run. The problems arising from it may be resolved with the passage of time, but they cannot be ignored. The arrival of the Saxons in the Dark Ages is the only other example of mass immigration into Britain. It is therefore all the more remarkable that immigration since 1955 was not the result of a deliberate government policy but the accidental by-product of policies formulated for quite different reasons. The crucial decisions were taken in the years 1946–8. In 1946 Canada became the first Commonwealth country to introduce its own citizenship, as distinct from British subjecthood, an example that was followed by India and Pakistan after they achieved independence in 1947. As it was decided in 1947 that nearly all of Britain’s colonial territories would be prepared for political independence as soon as this seemed practicable, it would have been logical for the British government to accept that the British Empire was on its way out and to abandon the whole concept of a British subjecthood to which all colonial residents were entitled. In the event, the British Labour government, with the full support of the Conservative opposition, decided that the Empire should be transformed into a multiracial Commonwealth and that all its citizens should remain British subjects as well as being citizens of their own countries. In retrospect, it is clear that these decisions were based on unrealistic assessments of the future and were disadvantageous in their long-term effects. They played a major part in shaping Britain’s fateful decision not to join the European Economic Community at its inception in 1957, when Britain would have been a welcome and influential member and could probably have prevented the Community from adopting the extravagant agricultural policy that now weighs heavily upon its (and British) finances. The decisions also had unforeseen consequences in respect of immigration. As a lawyer generally sympathetic to the Labour Party has observed: ‘By preserving…imperial and increasingly outmoded concepts of citizenship, the Attlee government perpetuated confusion about who “belonged” to the United Kingdom’ (Lester, 1985, p. 277). The decision that all citizens of Commonwealth countries would remain British subjects meant the continuance of a discriminatory


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immigration policy, whereby Commonwealth citizens were allowed to enter Britain as of right whereas everyone else had to apply for a permit. That this could pose grave and even insoluble problems was obvious, in view of the fact that Commonwealth countries had over five hundred million citizens while Britain was already overcrowded. In 1948 an interdepartmental working party of civil servants warned of the dangers involved in large-scale immigration from colonial territories (Layton-Henry, 1984, p. 20). In 1949 the Royal Commission on Population reported that large-scale immigration ‘could only be welcomed without reserve if the migrants were…not prevented by religion or race from intermarrying with the host population and becoming merged with it’ (quoted in Layton-Henry, 1984, p. 22). Sir Winston Churchill was reported as saying in 1954 that ‘Immigration is the most important subject facing this country but I cannot get any of my ministers to take any notice’ (quoted in Layton-Henry, 1984, p. 32). In 1955 an interdepartmental committee of civil servants recommended that Commonwealth immigrants should be subject to the same controls as aliens (Layton-Henry, 1984, p. 33). All these pieces of advice were ignored. In the mid-1950s Commonwealth immigration, mainly from the West Indies, increased sharply, from about 2,000 in 1953 and 11,000 in 1954 to over 42,000 in 1955. From then onwards there were increasing complaints about the social problems created by the reception of these immigrants, most of whom arrived without jobs or accommodation arranged and with little or no money. Many were a burden on the social services, with the Department of Health and Social Security eventually having to set up an office at London Airport to arrange accommodation and provide cash benefits for new arrivals within hours of their arrival. Municipal authorities reported that schools in some areas faced the problem of having to teach children, particularly from Pakistan, who spoke no English. Backbench MPs from both Labour and Conservative parties urged the government to take some action about the situation. In August 1958 things took a turn for the worse with the outbreak of racial violence between young white people and West Indians in both Nottingham and the Notting Hill district of London. The disturbances lasted four days and involved hundreds of people in London and up to four thousand in Nottingham. In October the Conservative Party annual conference passed a resolution asking for immigration to be controlled. In December a nationwide poll showed 79 per cent of people to be in favour of immigration restrictions (Layton-Henry, 1984, p. 36).

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In all these circumtances, that no steps were taken to check the flow of immigrants until late 1961 reflects oddly on the ministers responsible. Their behaviour illustrates the importance of Bulpitt’s distinction between ‘high politics’ and ‘low politics’ (Bulpitt, 1983). Commonwealth relations were high politics whereas housing and education were low politics, so the cabinet took little notice of the latter. When ministers at last grasped the nettle they did so in a way that perpetuated a degree of confusion. Instead of deciding that all prospective immigrants would be dealt with on their merits, without discrimination according to country of origin, they produced a Commonwealth Immigrants Bill (to become the Commonwealth Immigrants Act, 1962) that gave the appearance of discriminating against people from the Commonwealth while actually permitting the continuance of immigration on a very substantial scale. Throughout the 1960s Asian and West Indian immigrants continued to arrive at the rate of about 50,000 a year, with the rate falling to between 30,000 and 40,000 in the 1970s. Many of these were dependants of immigrants who had arrived before the 1962 Act came into force. That the situation would have been disastrous without the Act is made clear by the fact that between July 1962 and October 1963 over 300,000 people, mostly in India and Pakistan, applied for immigration vouchers, with applications in the second half of 1963 ‘accumulating at the rate of 10,000 a week’ (Layton-Henry, 1984, p. 56).

Attitudes of the host society The two main parties in Britain did not and do not differ substantially about the problems created by this immigration, though they have differed in timing and emphasis. In 1961 Labour opposed immigration control but by November 1964 the new Labour government had come round to supporting it and in August 1965 a White Paper was published indicating the government’s intention to tighten the controls by administrative means. In 1965 also Parliament passed a Race Relations Act, with support from all parties, aimed at eliminating racial discrimination in public places and housing and promoting conciliation in cases of dispute. This legislation was extended by a further Act in 1968 that banned discrimination in employment, the sale of goods, the sale or rental of business premises, the provision of services, and membership of trade unions and professional associations. If this legislation is compared with American legislation on race


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relations, from which the British copied a good many provisions, three comments can be made. First, the British moved more quickly on this point. As an American lawyer observed, the legislators acted ‘very promptly by American standards, precipitously according to British tradition’ (Claiborne, 1979, p. 11). Secondly, the 1968 legislation was more sweeping than its American equivalent, for American laws do not cover the sale and rental of business premises, do not cover all commercial transactions and do not ban discriminatory advertisements. Thirdly, the British make less use of criminal sanctions than the Americans but more use of conciliation. This was in accordance with the wishes of the Campaign Against Racial Discrimination, a group acting on behalf of immigrants that persuaded the government to drop criminal sanctions (included in the first version of the Bill) on the ground that these would cause too much resentment to be worthwhile. The Acts have eliminated all forms of overt discrimination but have not eliminated covert discrimination in respect of employment. It is illegal for a Chinese restaurant to advertise for a Chinese cook and this law is enforced, but it is almost impossible to prevent Chinese applicants being favoured. It is invariably difficult to establish discrimination in particular cases and the British approach has emphasized conciliation and education rather than legal tussles over individuals. The 1965 Act established a national Race Relations Board to improve race relations, assisted by numerous local boards. The 1968 Act added a Community Relations Commission and in 1976 these two bodies were replaced by the Commission for Racial Equality, with wider powers. There are also numerous local councils and groups with similar objectives, so that altogether there is a small army of people working for the improvement of relations between the host society and the immigrant communities. However, the results of their efforts are generally regarded as disappointing. In regard to the attitudes of the general population to the minorities, some distinctions need to be drawn. It has become common in the 1980s to use the term ‘racism’ when describing these attitudes. This is a pity, because the concept of racism, as used, can cover anything from active racial prejudice to the mere belief that members of different races tend to have different cultural characteristics. In outlining British attitudes to coloured minorities, it is better to ignore this elastic term and to concentrate on the three distinguishable phenomena of attitudes to immigration, the extent of racial prejudice, and offensive behaviour. On the first issue, it is clear that the overwhelming majority of white British people regret the arrival of the immigrants in such large

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numbers. Over the crucial years, numerous surveys and polls asked people whether they welcomed large-scale immigration or thought it would benefit the country. The proportions replying in the negative varied between 79 and 90 per cent, with some ‘don’t knows’ and only a handful who gave affirmative answers. At the time of the 1974 election 69 per cent of voters felt strongly that there were too many immigrants in Britain, compared with 14 per cent who believed there were too many but did not feel strongly about it, 13 per cent who thought there were not too many and 5 per cent who had no view (Fox, 1975, p. 168). Secondly, there are poll figures giving a crude indication of the level of racial prejudice in society. At various times, random samples of the population have been asked whether they would object to having coloured people as friends, to working alongside them at the workplace, or to seeing their children have coloured children as schoolmates. On the assumption that an affirmative answer to any one of these questions indicates racial prejudice, the polls have shown that about 15 per cent of the British people were prejudiced in the early 1950s, that the proportion rose to over 30 per cent in the 1960s, but that it had fallen back to about 15 per cent by the late 1970s. This statement is based on several polls. Table 7.3 compares the results of a poll conducted in 1964 with a similar poll conducted in May 1981. The question asked whether people would ‘be pleased to have, not mind having, rather not have, or strongly dislike having coloured people as friends, fellow-workers, or schoolfellows to [their] children’. The 1981 poll was conducted immediately after three days of racial rioting in Brixton, south London, a fact that may have reduced the number of respondents willing to contemplate friendship Table 7.3 Proportions of British people showing racial prejudice in 1964 and 1981

Source: Gallup Poll, May 1981.


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with coloured people. In May 1982 another Gallup Poll, asking what kinds of people respondents would dislike having as next-door neighbours (and permitting multiple answers), revealed that only 11 per cent would dislike having members of racial minorities living next door. All racial prejudice is ugly and the evaluation of these figures can only be somewhat subjective. There is no truly objective way of choosing an adjective to describe each figure. However, it is important to note that the development of large coloured minorities in Britain resulted in only a temporary increase in racial prejudice, not a lasting increase. Thirdly, a small minority of white British people have reacted viciously to the presence of coloured minorities, either by abuse or violence directed at coloured citizens or by offensive demonstrations demanding that they be deported. Racially motivated assaults on members of the coloured minorities or their property began to be a feature of English life in the late 1960s and to grow in frequency during the 1970s and 1980s. The attacks have been mainly conducted by young whites, while the victims have mainly been Asians. In the late 1970s such attacks appeared to be taking place at the rate of over 3,000 a year (Layton-Henry, 1984, p. 116) and in the 1980s they have been much more common. The great majority have been attacks on property rather than persons, but several Asians have been killed and in a few areas, such as parts of east London, Asians go in fear of street violence. It is a distressing development that encourages members of the minorities to live in geographical concentrations for mutual protection, a tendency that clearly hinders their integration into British society. It also sometimes leads spokesmen for the minorities to accuse the police of not doing enough to protect them, though numerous whites have been prosecuted for these assaults and it is not clear, given the random nature of the attacks, that the police could have done much better. At the political level, the 1970s were marked by the rise and fall of the National Front, a racist party whose only point of appeal was its repeated attacks on immigration policy and its demands that coloured immigrants should be repatriated. It had other policies, anti-semitic and neofascist in character, but these were vote-losing policies and the Front gave little publicity to them. The Front contested four general elections from 1970 to 1979, without ever getting more than a derisory number of votes, and then disintegrated. At that level of activity it was never a serious problem. What was much more serious was its habit of holding public demonstrations and marches that provoked counter-demonstrations

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by elements of the radical left and led to violence. As the Front employed the tactic of getting advance police permission for its demonstrations, most of the fighting occurred between radical leftwingers trying to break up the demonstrations and police who were bound by law to protect the demonstrators. Of the three people killed in these fights, two were radicals and one was a police inspector. These events were very ugly, but the publicity gained for the Front did it no good in electoral terms and the demonstrations ended when the Front disintegrated in 1979. The violence and publicity surrounding the National Front were therefore of limited duration and have had little lasting effect on race relations, except in so far as they may (and this can only be a matter of speculation) have turned the attention of teenage thugs to racial minorities as well as to spectators at football matches. Nasty as the Front’s activities were, the British can take consolation from the shortness of its life and the fact that it never gained anything approaching the support secured by its French equivalent, the Front National, which got 9.2 per cent of the votes in the French parliamentary election of 1986 and 14.6 per cent of the votes in the first round of the presidential election of 1988. The largest number of votes accumulated by National Front candidates, in 1979, amounted to only 0.7 per cent of the total votes.

Integration and non-integration The racial, cultural and religious gulfs between the host society and the coloured minorities in Britain have made assimilation difficult in the short run, though it may come with the passage of time. The melting pot model of integration seems inappropriate, as the white majority have shown no signs of wishing to learn anything from the immigrants apart from (among young people) a certain interest in reggae music. The most appropriate model is probably that of cultural pluralism and the best definition of the goal of successive Home Secretaries was that given by Roy Jenkins when he described it as ‘equal opportunity, accompanied by cultural diversity in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance’ (quoted in Layton-Henry, 1984, p. 66). The dimensions of the process whereby this goal might be achieved are economic, cultural and political. In the economic sphere the coloured minorities have suffered variously from being concentrated in inner-city areas of high unemployment, from poor educational qualifications, from having ployers. They have mostly been employed in the less skilled (though


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not actually in the least skilled) occupations, a fact that has made them vulnerable to unemployment because a high proportion of redundancies have occurred in occupations of these kinds. The sharp growth of unemployment in the early 1980s affected ethnic minorities more seriously than whites and had a particularly hard effect on Asian women, because of their disproportionate involvement in the declining textile industries. Unemployment rates in 1982, the year of maximum unemployment, are shown in Table 7.4, with minorities classified according to their family region of origin, whether they were born there or in Britain. Table 7.4 Unemployment rates by ethnic origin: 1982

Source: Field, 1986, p. 31.

The overall picture revealed by Table 7.4 is very discouraging, but two facts have to be borne in mind when interpreting the figures. One is that the difference between white and coloured unemployment figures is not so great within particular areas as over the whole country, part of the overall difference resulting from the fact that a disproportionate number of the coloured citizens live in decaying inner-city areas where unemployment among all groups is rife. Such people are caught in a classic poverty trap with consequences that are not directly related to their ethnicity. The other relevant fact that has to be noted is that, among males, the differences between the various minorities are greater than the difference between the position of the whites and the position of the average coloured person. Among the men, the Indians were hardly less well off than the whites and the East African Asians were only a little worse off. These differences between minorities appear to be related partly to the social background, before immigration, of the groups concerned, partly to their fluency in the English language, partly to educational achievements in Britain. The exceptionally high unemployment rate among Bangladeshi women is partly explained by the fact that 76 per cent of them had little or no knowledge of English (see C.Brown, 1984, p. 138).

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Field also presents figures showing the proportions of the ethnic workforce at the top of the occupational ladder, in professional and managerial posts, and at the bottom, in semi-skilled and unskilled work. These figures are encouraging at the top of the ladder, for they show that bright Asians, and to a lesser extent bright blacks, significantly narrowed the gap between whites and themselves in the eight years between 1974 and 1982. Indeed, it is reported that ‘among male workers under 25, more than twice as many Asians as whites are in professional and managerial jobs’ (Field, 1986, p. 31). However, the figures are discouraging at the bottom end of the ladder, for the proportion of coloured workers in poor jobs fell only a little in the same period. The figures are given in Table 7.5 In this table and in what follows people of Afro-Caribbean origin are, for convenience, described simply as blacks. The average earnings of male coloured workers were between 10 and 15 per cent less than the average earnings of white male workers in 1982, a differential very similar to that which exists in Canada but much smaller than the differential in the United States, where ‘black workers earn about one-third less than whites’ (Field, 1986, p. 32). Table 7.5

Occupational attainments among the coloured workforce

Source: Field, 1986, pp. 31–2.

The evidence that well-educated young coloured people, particularly Asians, are improving their positions quite rapidly calls attention to the importance of education in economic integration. Britain is a country where success at school is crucial for future careers, to a greater extent than in North America, where people are sorted out a little later in life. A government report published in January 1988 showed that the overall unemployment rate among young people who passed four O-level examinations at age 16 (a good but


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not exceptional achievement) was only 2 per cent, whereas the rate among young people who left school without any qualifications was 42 per cent (Sunday Times, 17 January 1988). In view of this, the figures in Table 7.6 assume particular importance. Table 7.6

Educational achievements in six inner-city areas in England, 1978–9

Source: Swann Report, 1985, p. xviii.

This table shows a striking difference between the scholastic achievements of young whites and Asians, on the one hand, and young people of West Indian origin on the other. The difference is all the more remarkable because for many of the Asians English is a second language whereas for all of the blacks it is a first language, even though in some cases their parents may speak in a dialect rather than in standard English. The difference cannot be explained in terms of genetic differences in intelligence, even though black children tend to perform less well than others in IQ tests. Research has established that, when social and environmental factors are held constant, there is little significant difference between the intelligence of white, black and Asian children in England (Swann Report, 1985, pp. 71 and 81). What, then, is the explanation of the lamentable performance of black children in schools? The answer is that there is no single explanation, but a complex mixture of relevant factors. One is that most of the black immigrants come from poor backgrounds in the West Indies, whereas the backgrounds of the Asian immigrants, though in many cases poor, were more mixed. The importance of this factor is shown by the fact that the small Bangladeshi community in England, coming from very poor rural backgrounds and with little knowledge of the English language, produce children whose scholastic attainments are way below the Asian average. Another factor is the nature of

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black family life, with a large proportion of single-parent families and also with a tradition that the father leaves most of the responsibility for guiding the children of a marriage to his wife. In this connection it is suggestive that twelve independent studies of black children in school all found that the girls were more successful than the boys (Tomlinson, 1983, p. 41). The relevance of this kind of factor for achievement is also indicated by the fact that Muslim girls, often brought up to expect subservient roles in adult life, are less successful in school than Muslim boys and also less successful than Sikh boys (Tomlinson, 1983, p. 57). A third possible factor, very difficult to establish or to refute, is that some teachers may have low expectations of black pupils and communicate these expectations, perhaps unconsciously, to their classes. A fourth factor is that blacks, as a group, have been slower than Asians to appreciate the close relationship between scholastic success and future job opportunities. A study in the early 1970s revealed that Asian teenagers displayed about the same match as white teenagers between their educational achievements and their personal career ambitions, whereas black teenagers were wildly unrealistic (Phizacklea, 1975). Fifteen-year-olds who had failed every school examination harboured ambitions to be doctors or lawyers or architects. A senior youth employment officer interviewed by the author in 1978 said that he and his colleagues were well aware of this problem, but when they tried to educate black parents on the subject they were frequently met with the retort that it was mainly racial discrimination that prevented young blacks from entering professional careers. The consequence of poor scholastic achievement among young blacks is that a high proportion of them are fit only for unskilled or semi-skilled jobs. Unfortunately, it is at this level that, because of the spread of automation, unemployment is highest. Also unfortunately, racial discrimination by employers is more common at this level than in respect of jobs involving greater skill (Smith, 1977, p. 110). The report already cited (Sunday Times, 17 January 1988) revealed that the unemployment rate among young people without any scholastic qualifications was 42 per cent; other reports indicate that the rate among black youngsters without qualifications was 60 per cent or more. In Brixton at the time of the 1981 riots, the overall unemployment rate among blacks between 16 and 18 was 55 per cent (Scarman, 1982, p. 27). It is no wonder that many young blacks regard their position in British society as hopeless. The reasons why Asian children do better than blacks at school, in brief, are closer family ties, more parental guidance and


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encouragement, a more realistic understanding of the economic importance of education and a tendency to stay at school longer. Studies have shown that Asian children are apt to be behind white children of equivalent social background in their early years at school, but tend to catch up later (Tomlinson, 1983, Chapter 4). They are less likely than white children to be socialized into acceptance of a working-class lifestyle, more likely to be ambitious. Their efforts are rewarded by a fair measure of success in the marketplace, at least for the brighter ones among them. The economic integration of the minorities is therefore very patchy. Many Asians and a smaller proportion of blacks are doing well, occupying professional or managerial positions or doing skilled manual or white-collar work. A fair number of Asians are selfemployed, owning shops or other small business concerns. However, a rather high proportion of both groups are doing unskilled or semiskilled work or are unemployed. The response of British governmental authorities to these problems has been two-fold. First, a good deal of research into the education of ethnic minorities has been sponsored and educational experiments have been conducted in various areas. Secondly, the national government has launched the Youth Training Scheme, a massive program of technical education for all young people between the ages of 16 and 18 who do not have jobs and are not pursuing full-time educational courses. The scheme is not specially designed for ethnic minorities, but it will clearly benefit them, along with young whites. The scheme provides students with various technical skills, with a wage, and also with a period of work experience in industrial and commercial firms who accept trainees for a few months at a time. Some critics have alleged that the scheme has been introduced to reduce the unemployment figures, and it is certainly true that nobody in Britain under the age of 18 is now classified as unemployed. However, the whole scheme, now involving about 750,000 trainees, is an ambitious innovation that is calculated to raise the morale of otherwise unemployed young people as well as to equip them with basic transferable skills of a technical nature. What the British government has not done is to launch a campaign against racial discrimination in employment. The Home Office, which is the government department mainly responsible for race relations, has been slow to take initiatives in this field, just as it was slow in the 1950s to recognize the problems of mass immigration and has been slow to tidy up British legislation regarding citizenship. The Home Office has a miscellany of responsibilities, including police, law and

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order and prisons as well as citizenship, immigration and race relations. It can be argued that Britain would do better to have a ministry specially responsible for race relations. As it is, these problems are left to the Commission for Racial Equality, which does not have a ministerial head to promote its objectives and whose record was severely criticized by the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee in 1981–2 (see Banton, 1985, pp. 95–8). At the cultural level, integration has also been patchy. Many of the Asians still have a serious language problem, the overall proportion who could speak English only slightly or not at all in 1982 being 21 per cent of Asian adult men and 47 per cent of Asian adult women (C.Brown, 1984, p. 137). However, the differences between Asian communities are very marked, as is shown in Table 7.7 Table 7.7

Percentages of Asian adults speaking English ‘slightly’ or ‘not at all’ in 1982

Source: C.Brown, 1984, p. 138.

In view of these figures, it is not surprising to find that the proportion of Asians who were married to or living with whites was very low in 1982, though the proportion of blacks who had set up house with white partners was quite substantial. Outside of the areas of high black concentration, 26 per cent of the adult blacks who had set up house with a member of the opposite sex had a white partner, while the figure for all areas was 15 per cent (C.Brown, 1984, p. 33). Religious differences sometimes pose problems, but these have been slight in the case of Hindus, Sikhs and the older West Indians. Greater problems have arisen between the host society and Muslims, concerned about some aspects of the educational system, and those younger West Indians who have adopted the Rastafarian creed. The concerns of Muslims have revolved around their desire to have their children taught some of the main features of Islamic culture and their apprehension that teenage Muslim girls will be introduced to western ideas about sexual relationships by attending


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coeducational schools. The question of lessons in Islamic culture is difficult because what is granted to one ethnic group can hardly be denied to others. By and large, British schools have neither the qualified staff nor the time in the curriculum necessary to offer instruction in a variety of religions. Most children get two periods of non-denominational religious instruction a week and it is now quite common for these periods to be devoted to a survey of world religions rather than to be concentrated on Christianity. In some areas with a high proportion of Muslim students the schools focus mainly on Islamic studies, but no general right to expect programs of this kind has been conceded by the education authorities. In some areas, but not all, Muslim spokesmen have protested about the impact of coeducational schools on Muslim girls. They specifically object to mixed swimming lessons at which girls wear scanty swimsuits, but some of their concerns are much wider than this. In Bradford they have urged the city council, without success, to transform the educational system by going over to single-sex schools at the secondary level. These varied concerns have led to the growth of private Islamic schools, in some cases funded by Saudi Arabian money, but the number of pupils at these schools is not yet large. The growth of the Rastafarian creed among young blacks is an entirely different story. The creed emerged in Jamaica during the 1920s and it is a creed of underprivileged, sometimes despairing, black people in a world dominated by whites. The essence of the creed is that blacks in western societies came from Ethiopia and will eventually return to that country, idealized as a ‘promised land’. The creed takes its name from the family name of the former Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, Ras Tafari. White society is described as corrupt as well as oppressive and is known to Rastafarians as ‘Babylon’. The message of the creed is that Babylon will eventually collapse under the weight of its own corruption, when blacks will become triumphant and return to Africa. In the meantime, blacks should avoid contamination by Babylon. In practical terms, this means that they should not work in the white economy, should have contempt for white institutions and should smoke marijuana to induce the right kind of passivity while awaiting the great day. For a full account of the creed, see Cashmore’s scholarly study (Cashmore, 1979). This creed became popular among young blacks in London and Birmingham in the late 1970s, subsequently spreading to other cities. It is a reaction to unemployment and a clear sign of alienation from British society. It is hard to think of a creed that would be more

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disintegrative in its consequences. It has led young blacks to abandon the search for work, to take drugs and deal in drugs (heroin and cocaine as well as marijuana), and to adopt hostile attitudes towards authority. Its growth has contributed to the street crime and violence that has developed in black neighbourhoods and to numerous conflicts with the police. In addition to these specific developments, there are general questions as to whether England has become, is becoming or should become a multicultural society. These are questions, however, to which no meaningful answer can easily be given. England has a very strong and distinctive culture and there are consequently strong pressures towards the assimilation of minorities. The Scots, Welsh and Irish people living in England have long been assimilated. The Russian Jews who arrived in the early years of the present century, the Poles who settled in England in 1945 and the Hungarian refugees who arrived in 1956 have all been very largely assimilated. Assimilation can probably be expected of those blacks and Asians who set up home with whites, of those who acquire post-secondary education and of those living in areas where coloured people are thin on the ground. Liberal opinion in England is somewhat divided on the desirability of assimilation. Older people tend to favour it while younger ones are more likely to favour multiculturalism. That bastion of liberalism, the BBC, was in the early spring of 1988 devoting only forty minutes a week of television time to a specifically multicultural programme, entitled ‘Network East’ and directed at Asian citizens. In other periods of the year there is a similar program, entitled ‘Ebony’, directed at black citizens. At the same time, the BBC makes a point of employing coloured newsreaders, program presenters and actors. It has established six scholarships to provide professional training in television reporting for Asian and Afro-Caribbean candidates, the training to extend over a two-year period. It has an Equal Opportunities Officer and has adopted the practice of ‘ethnic monitoring’ in respect of staff appointments at all levels. The assumptions underlying these policies would seem to be more assimilationist than multicultural. On the other hand, in January 1988 the two Asian presenters of ‘Network East’ were dismissed for being in different ways too well integrated into English society. The older of the two was dismissed because she had become publicly identified with the Labour Party, having been elected as a Labour councillor in one London borough and being employed as a legal adviser by another London borough with a Labour majority. The younger of the two was dismissed


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because older Asian viewers complained that she had a strong Birmingham accent, could not pronounce Asian words correctly and wore fashionable clothes such as a miniskirt. She seemed to some viewers to be just a Birmingham girl with a brown skin. The two presenters, who happened to have the typically English first names of Valerie and Samantha, were replaced by three newcomers whose names were Shahnaz, Fatima and Sudha. The second generation of coloured citizens is now reaching adulthood, clearly subject to pressures from society to assimilate and pressures from their parents to retain their cultural distinctiveness. It will probably not become clear whether assimilation or cultural pluralism is to be the more common pattern until the third generation reaches adulthood. At the political level, members of coloured minorities all enjoy the right to vote, join political parties and stand for political office. Statistical analysis shows that the level of electoral participation in a constituency is depressed by the presence of coloured minorities, apart from Indians, who have no effect on turnout, and Asians from East Africa, whose turnout rate appears to be higher than that of whites (McAllister and Studlar, 1984, pp. 145–6). Nearly all blacks who vote support the Labour Party and so do most of the Asians, but the reasons for their voting behaviour are to some extent different. A survey has shown that black support for Labour can be explained almost entirely in terms of class identity whereas 31 per cent of the Asians said that they supported Labour for ethnic reasons (LaytonHenry and Studlar, 1985, p. 311). However, as the constituencies with sizeable numbers of coloured voters are safe Labour seats in any case, it cannot be said that ethnic voting has any perceptible effect on the electoral process at the parliamentary level (McAllister and Studlar, 1984, pp. 147–8). Until 1987 there were no coloured MPs, but in that year three blacks were returned as Labour Members in London constituencies and one Asian, also Labour, was elected in Leicester. One of the black MPs said immediately after his election that he intended to form a black section within the Labour Party, notwithstanding the Party’s refusal to accept organization on ethnic lines, but it is not yet clear whether he will be able to do this. The Conservative Party has no objection to ethnic sections and has formed an association for Asian sympathizers. At the municipal level there were 150 Labour councillors and 20 Conservatives in 1985, out of about 25,000 elected councillors in the country as a whole (Layton-Henry and Studlar, 1985, p. 314). At one time it appeared possible that Indian political organizations

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might become quite active in municipal politics, but they have been inhibited by the fact that it is very difficult for councillors in Britain to provide favours for their supporters. As Banton has pointed out, immigrant communities in the United States moved into local politics on the basis of being about to help members of their ethnic groups, but political ethics and procedures make this almost impossible in Britain (Banton, 1972, p. 144). Politically active members of the coloured minorities in Britain tend to be interested in ethnic issues and to find working in pressure groups more relevant to their concerns than participating in party politics. There are several ethnic pressure groups campaigning at any given time and the various official bodies charged with improving race relations contain coloured members. This has proved to be the most constructive field of political activity for the minorities, though their satisfaction with it has been limited by the failure of the official bodies to eliminate racial discrimination in employment. The other form of political activity engaged in by members of the black minority, though not by Asians, is participation in protests and demonstrations against the police. In England’s largest cities, and most particularly in London, young blacks have taken to various forms of street crime such as mugging, picking pockets and snatching handbags. The police have responded to this by stopping people on the street and searching them. Blacks complain that the police do not do this on a random basis but discriminate against young black males, an allegation that is undoubtedly correct. One police answer to this has been to publish statistics showing the high incidence of crime among young black males, an action that was greatly resented. In recent years the spread of drugs among the black communities has also led the police to raid black cafes where drugs are sold. The difference between the proven crime rates of blacks and Asians is illustrated by the fact that a 1983 survey of London and the SouthEast found that ‘although young Asian males outnumbered young blacks in the population by two to one, young blacks in penal establishments outnumbered young Asians by 22:1’ (Layton-Henry and Studlar, 1985, p. 317). The consequences of bad relations between young blacks and the police are known to anyone who has a television set. There have been repeated riots in the Brixton area of London and the Toxteth area of Liverpool, with shops looted and burned, police cars overturned and many hundreds of policemen injured. In July 1981 there were riots in twenty-seven urban areas, with unemployed white youths joining in the looting and violence. In 1985 there was a riot in the Handsworth area of Birmingham in which two Asian


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shopkeepers died in a shop burned down by blacks, followed by a riot in Tottenham (north London) in which a policeman was hacked to death with a West Indian machete while two other policemen and three journalists were injured by gunfire. Nobody expects that these will be the last of such incidents.

Government policies Bulpitt’s thesis about the British way of separating high politics from low politics is largely but not entirely confirmed by governmental reactions to the problems resulting from the presence of a large coloured minority. The great exception to Bulpitt’s rule is the Youth Training Scheme, a vast enterprise conceived and organized, very rapidly, by the national government. Apart from this scheme, national governments have certainly tried to pass the main responsibility for dealing with the problems to other bodies. The prevention of racial discrimination is in the hands of the Commission for Racial Equality, the Community Relations Commission and the local community relations councils. Education is in the hands of local authorities. The 1988 Education Reform Act will make it possible for schools to opt out of local government control, if this move is supported by a majority of parents, in order to become self-managing, subject to overriding control over the curriculum and educational standards. In some mixed residential areas it is possible that this will lead to the segregation of all-white schools from all-coloured, particularly allAsian, schools. Such a development would resolve some problems while creating others that might be more serious. It would hinder the cultural and social integration of the minorities involved, and the example of Northern Ireland indicates that in some circumstances it could lead to social conflict. The maintenance of public order is firmly in the hands of the police, with no involvement at all by municipal authorities and only general guidance by the Home Office. The government has made it clear that the police can use tear gas and plastic bullets if they think it necessary, but with the one exception of tear gas in Liverpool in 1981 the police have so far preferred to rely on fists and batons. The police are the focus of conflicting pressures that makes their lives very difficult. They are pressed by public opinion, reinforced by their own sense of duty, to keep the crime rate down; are advised by the Scarman Report to put the preservation of public order before the prevention of crime (Scarman, 1982); are urged by Asian spokesmen

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to police areas of mixed ethnicity more thoroughly; and are urged by black spokesmen to police such areas more lightly. The police are occasionally clumsy, but in this situation it is unfair to expect miracles of them. When all the problems are weighed in the balance, the most serious of them is unemployment. If Muslim communities remain somewhat isolated, that is unfortunate in terms of social integration, but if they give priority to their culture and religion this is not a serious problem for the rest of society. If coloured voting turnout remains low, this does not really matter. Violent attacks on the police do matter, but they are highly local and sporadic. Long-term unemployment is soul-destroying, however, and the bitterness it causes is sharpened if it is perceived as partly caused by racial discrimination. There is a case for believing that the national government should take a more vigorous stand against discrimination, but beyond that there is little that the government can do to reduce coloured unemployment, as distinct from unemployment in general. No political party or sizeable group in Britain wants to see positive discrimination in favour of coloured people enforced by law. This is mainly because of a strongly-held British principle that all citizens should be treated as equal in the sight of the law, reinforced in this case by the fact that racial differences in unemployment are not all that great if geographical factors are held constant. The problem of white unemployment in the inner-city areas is almost as serious as that of coloured unemployment. In 1982 a survey of the inner-city areas of England’s three largest cities (London, Birmingham and Manchester) revealed male unemployment rates there of 23 per cent among whites, 26 per cent among Asians and 29 per cent among blacks (C.Brown, 1984, p. 192). These decaying urban areas constitute a wretched problem from which Canada and Australia are fortunately free, but in Britain there is no quick or easy solution to this problem.

5

NATIONAL INTEGRATION AND NATIONALISM

National integration The United Kingdom, as a state, has been outstandingly successful in creating a political identity on top of three distinct cultural identities. England, Scotland and Wales all have their own poets, novelists, songs and distinctive styles of humour. The Welsh comedian


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and folk-singer, Max Boyce, reflects the Welsh self-image in his engaging innocence, nostalgia and enthusiasm for rugby. His Scottish equivalent, Billy Connolly, reflects the Scottish self-image in the tough, resilient, sardonic personality he projects. The self-deprecating humour of English comedians reflects the confidence and complacency of the English people, for it takes people who are basically pleased with themselves to be publicly self-deprecating. When British people think of their national identity, they most commonly think of themselves first as English, Welsh or Scots. At the same time, there is rarely any doubt about their being British. As we have seen, the slogan ‘Scotland is British’ proved a winner in the campaign to persuade Scottish electors not to express in the referendum vote the view for which most of them had previously shown sympathy in public opinion polls, that it would be to Scotland’s advantage to have a Scottish Assembly. Welsh voters did not even need a slogan; they knew. If protest votes and local issues are taken into account, the voting figures at recent elections suggest that less than 10 per cent of Welsh electors and no more than about 15 per cent of Scottish electors favour secession from the United Kingdom. If a campaign were waged on the issue, this author’s guess is that the proportions voting in favour of secession would be even smaller. Loyalty to the British state is therefore very secure on the British mainland, and it is noteworthy that the Scottish and Welsh nationalist parties are entirely constitutional in the means chosen to pursue their objectives. Whereas the Breton nationalists in France and the Basque nationalists in Spain have resorted to bombs and the Sikh nationalists in India to a campaign of assassination, the Scottish and Welsh nationalists try to win seats in the British Parliament. The position of Northern Ireland is more complicated, for this is a society divided in terms of national loyalty as well as in terms of religion and culture. Members of the Protestant majority have three identities, as Ulstermen, Irish and British. Logically, they are British by law and either Ulstermen or Irish by inclination and feelings of cultural identity. A 1978 survey revealed that, when asked to name one identity, 67 per cent called themselves British, 20 per cent called themselves Ulstermen or women and only 8 per cent called themselves Irish (Moxon-Browne, 1983, p. 6). The English, Scots and Welsh are more likely than this to think of Northern Irish Protestants as Irish, less likely to think of them as British. This pattern of attitudes reflects the common feeling that all the Northern Irish, whether Protestant or Catholic, differ from the ‘real British’, being more religious, less tolerant and more inclined to violence. However, there is no doubt

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about either the British legal identity or the British loyalties of the Ulster Protestants. As one of them told a Guardian reporter in an early stage of the troubles, ‘We’re going to stay British, whether you bloody English like it or not’. This was a precise and perceptive summation of community attitudes. The Northern Irish Catholics are more reluctant to identify themselves as British. In the same survey only 15 per cent did so, compared with 69 per cent who identified themselves as Irish, 6 per cent who called themselves Ulstermen and 10 per cent who gave mixed or uncertain replies (Moxon-Browne, 1983, p. 6). This is an understandable response from people who strongly dislike their Protestant neighbours and also dislike the English who control their government. Whether or not they actually want to join the Republic, and 49 per cent of them thought that ‘the Irish government should stop talking about the goal of reunification’ (MoxonBrowne, 1983, p. 21), they feel more sympathy with their coreligionists south of the border. This attitude is not always reciprocated, however. A large-scale academic survey of Dublin residents found that 59 per cent of respondents agreed and only 28 per cent disagreed with the proposition that ‘Catholics in Northern Ireland have more in common with Northern Protestants than they have with Catholics in the Republic’. The reason for this attitude would be well understood by the English. Fifty-five per cent of Dubliners agreed and only 37 per cent disagreed with the proposition that ‘Northerners on all sides tend to be extreme and unreasonable’ (MacGreil, 1977, p. 377). What about feelings of identity among the coloured minorities in England? While no survey of their feelings of political identity has yet been conducted, it seems fair to assume that they would mostly identify themselves as British. It is because of their British passports that they or their parents were able to move to Britain as immigrants. A much more interesting question is whether those born in England would identify themselves as English, but to this it is difficult to give even a speculative answer. The discussion of national integration in the previous sections of this chapter has shown that economic integration within the United Kingdom is almost complete. Northern Ireland is more dependent on agriculture and poorer than the rest of the country, but the gap is getting smaller, not wider, over the years. The gross domestic product per head in Northern Ireland has moved from 66 per cent of the United Kingdom figure in 1966 to 72 per cent in 1971 and 78 per cent in 1980. That this should be so despite the violence that has plagued the province since 1968 is a testimony both to the economic


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policies of the British government and to the determination of the Northern Irish people. Social and cultural integration is also virtually complete among 93 per cent of the population, though with three groups standing out as largely unintegrated. The Northern Irish Catholics (about half a million strong) comprise one such group; the Welsh-speaking Welsh (about half a million) constitute another; and the coloured minorities (2.5 million) comprise a third. The more important of the various reasons for their social and cultural separation have been mentioned and need not be recapitulated. The question of how far this cultural separation is desirable raises the whole issue of the case for cultural pluralism, now commonly called multiculturalism, within a national society. This is an issue on which dogmatism is quite inappropriate, though unfortunately not uncommon. Thoroughly respectable arguments can be mustered on each side of the question. On the positive side, it is clearly right that religious minorities should be able freely to practise their religion and pass it on to their children. It is desirable that minority languages such as Welsh should be preserved, even if not widely used, rather than allowed to die out. There is a literature and a body of songs in Welsh that would be lost for ever if the language were to become extinct. The Hindu and Muslim minorities in Britain have a cultural heritage as well as a religion that they generally want to pass on to the next generation. It would be a very narrow view that these minorities should be pressed into assimilation to the culture of the majority. On the other hand, the Northern Irish example shows clearly how dangerous it can be for minorities to be segregated in their schools and their social life. It would be unfortunate if the existing smallscale development of private Islamic schools should mushroom into a tendency to segregate the racial minorities in state schools. Early in this century, the Jewish immigrant community decided as a matter of policy that they would organize Jewish schools only for religious instruction on the sabbath, sending their children to unsegregated state schools for general education. The very successful integration of Jewish people into English, Scottish and Welsh society, without any loss of their religion, suggests that this is the example that should be followed by the coloured minorities—as up to now it has been, with only a few exceptions. Classes on multiculturalism in state schools also raise questions. Since it is important for racial tolerance and harmony for each group to know a little about the religions and cultures of other groups, it would seem desirable for classes to be mixed rather than for children

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to be divided up for Islamic studies, Hindu studies, Afro-Caribbean studies and so forth. In practice this can sometimes be difficult to organize, which perhaps justifies the absence of any clear national policy on the question. In terms of language maintenance and communication, the main problem among Asian immigrants is not any present threat to Urdu or Hindi but the fact that so many Asian women immigrants have only a very sketchy knowledge of English. There are plenty of classes in English available, but the statistics on language suggest that British governments have been remiss in not organizing a well-publicized national program for teaching English as a second language. People who cannot speak English fluently are bound to be both isolated socially and at a disadvantage in the labour market. As dependents are still arriving from Asia, this is a problem that the government clearly ought to address. In this and other respects, the British government’s policy of leaving the main responsibility for the racial minorities with local authorities and quasi-autonomous organizations is open to question. The policy is well-intentioned and is understandable in terms of British political traditions, but there is a real possibility that some of the minorities will become like the Catholics in Northern Ireland: culturally cut off from the majority, occupying an inferior economic position in society, wielding very little political influence and drifting into a condition of alienation. This need not happen, but the danger is there and government leaders ought to do more than stand by and let it develop. The political integration of Wales and Scotland is almost complete, with both countries contributing leaders to the British national parties. It is historically understandable but now rather unfortunate that the Northern Irish parties are separate, as it effectively bars Irish MPs from attaining ministerial office in British governments. There is, however, no sign of either the British national parties wishing to establish branches in Northern Ireland or of Irish people being keen to join them if they did. Instead, the British parties have all treated Northern Irish affairs in the way that they treat foreign affairs, namely as matters on which the parties should try hard to maintain the appearance of unity. Direct rule in Northern Ireland therefore falls short of full political integration with the other constituent parts of the United Kingdom.


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Nationalism The nationalist sentiments and movements that are reported in the mass media are invariably examples of aspiring nationalism on the part of groups wishing to change the political order. British nationalism has never had that character; it is and always has been a possessive form of nationalism wishing to preserve the political order. Possessive nationalism is a phenomenon made up of three constituent elements that can be defined. The first is national consciousness, namely the consciousness on the part of the people of a given territory that they have a certain national identity, over and above their consciousness of belonging to various churches, linguistic groups and classes. The second is national cohesion, the objective fact (conspicuous by its absence in Northern Ireland) that the people of that territory have a degree of social and political unity that overrides the various factors that divide them. The third is national loyalty and pride, shown by the readiness of members of the national community to defend it from outside criticism, commercial aggression or physical attack. British nationalism is essentially a development of the nineteenth century that grew out of English nationalism, which is much older. English nationalism is thought by most historians to have been a development of the sixteenth century. It had been awakened by the Hundred Years’ War with France and was consolidated by the commercial success of the Tudor period, by the cultural triumphs of the Shakespearian era, by the break with the Roman Catholic Church and by the defeat of the Spanish Armada. One historian has said that ‘Philip II could not possibly appeal to his subject peoples to fight for the Spanish Empire as Elizabeth could appeal to the English people to fight for England’ (Coupland, 1954, p. 10). The sense of national cohesion built in this period was disturbed but not shattered by the revolutions of the seventeenth century. The outcome of these revolutions was the establishment of the most liberal political order in Europe; and the English added a pride in their liberal institutions to pride in their cultural achievements, their commercial successes and their naval victories. The subsequent development of the world’s first industrial system and the world’s largest empire inflated the English sense of national pride into the extreme chauvinism of the late nineteenth century. It was the success of the industrial revolution that persuaded the Scottish and later the Welsh middle classes to merge their loyalties with those of the English into a new loyalty to the British nation. Among the Scottish bourgeoisie it became fashionable for a time to

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refer to their country not as Scotland but as North Britain. The financiers and engineers who built the first railway in Scotland called it the North British Railway, and to this day the massive North British Hotel stands in central Edinburgh as a monument to that mode of thought. As the nineteenth century wore on the concept of being British spread to all classes in Scotland and Wales, not as a substitute for their Scottish and Welsh identities but as an addition to them. British national loyalties were intensified by the Boer War and then made complete by the First World War. That the latent strength of British nationalism is as great as ever was demonstrated dramatically in 1982, when Argentina’s invasion of the Falkland Islands united the country in a determination to recapture the islands from the invaders. The Falklands are economically worthless and there are no material considerations that could have justified the cost in lives and money of the ensuing struggle. Despite this, the campaign was waged with enthusiasm and without any serious opposition from critics. One disputable question is that of how far the English retain a sense of English nationalism that is distinct from British nationalism and potentially hostile to Scotland and Wales. They certainly pay little attention to national symbols that are distinctively English. They do not celebrate St George’s Day as the Scots and Welsh celebrate their national days. They rarely fly the English flag and it is not certain that most English people would even recognize it. They tend in conversation to use the terms English and British as if they were interchangeable. When the Royal Commission on the Constitution reported in 1973, the six members who supported the main recommendations (two Scotsmen, two Welshmen, one Ulsterman and one Englishman) suggested a division of legislative powers between the proposed Scottish and Welsh Assemblies and the British Parliament that they acknowledged would amount to ‘a serious injustice’ to the English people. However, for some unstated reason, presumably an assumption of English political apathy, they did not think the English would raise practical objections to this (Royal Commission on the Constitution, 1973, p. 344). The other English members of the Commission dissented from this recommendation but were divided among themselves about what they preferred. In the event the Labour government put this proposition about English apathy to the test by proposing the arrangement that would be manifestly unfair to the English people. The consequence, as already noted, is that English MPs refused to support the reform unless it was dependent upon a favourable vote in a referendum,


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and then added the 40 per cent hurdle that effectively prevented the referendum from providing an endorsement. It may therefore be concluded that English nationalism, though latent rather than obvious, can be awakened by a threat to English interests and is then likely to dominate the outcome by force of numbers.

8

National integration in Canada

1

THE CANADIAN STATE

The Canadian state was created by the British North America Act (henceforth BNA Act) of 1867. This was an Act of the British Parliament that had been drafted, in all its essentials, by political leaders from the colonies of Canada, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia. The leaders of Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island, who had participated in the first round of the negotiations, withdrew before the final round. The Act created a federal union of four provinces, with Canada being divided into Ontario (formerly Canada West and essentially anglophone) and Quebec (formerly Canada East and essentially francophone). Manitoba was subsequently admitted as a province in 1870, followed by British Columbia in 1871, Prince Edward Island in 1873, Saskatchewan and Alberta in 1905, and Newfoundland in 1949. As a constitution for a federal state, the BNA Act was in several respects less than satisfactory. The first and most serious of its weaknesses was a lack of clarity about the division of legislative powers between the federal and provincial authorities. In each of the other classic federations, namely the United States, Switzerland and Australia, the federal powers are set out in a list and it is provided that all other legislative powers reside with the states or cantons. In the BNA Act it was stated that the provincial legislatures would have power to legislate in sixteen defined areas but that power in all other fields would rest with the federal Parliament. This suggested that as the years went by Canada would become a highly centralized federation, consequent upon the federal power to legislate in all the new fields of government activity as the scope of government increased. This had been the intention of the anglophone promoters of federation from Canada West and seemed to be implicit in the description of the constitution as providing for a ‘legislative union’. However, the BNA Act allowed for confusion over this question in two ways. 138

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First, ‘for greater clarity’, it enumerated twenty-seven specific areas in which the federal Parliament could legislate; secondly, one of the sixteen fields reserved for the provinces was defined as ‘property and civil rights in the province’. This ambiguous wording permitted the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council to take the view in the 1890s that most matters not included in the enumerated federal powers affected property and civil rights in the provinces, a line of interpretation that provided for increasing decentralization rather than increasing centralization and thus changed the whole balance of the constitution. A second weakness of the BNA Act was that it did not establish a court to adjudicate in cases of constitutional dispute. Appeals under the Act were simply referred, like other colonial questions of adjudication, to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London. This body was certainly impartial, but it had neither the composition nor the status to act as a branch of the Canadian government in the manner of the US Supreme Court. It treated the BNA Act as just another statute, without enquiring into the intentions of those who drafted it and without consciously shaping its interpretations to fit changing social circumstances. It therefore never engaged in the creative jurisprudence that has characterized both the American Supreme Court and the Australian High Court. Since 1946 the Canadian Supreme Court has taken over the role previously filled by the Judicial Committee, but the Canadian court has proved to be similarly cautious in its behaviour. A third weakness of the BNA Act was that it provided for a Senate whose members were to be nominated by the federal government, rather than elected, and that did not give equal representation to each province. In America, Switzerland and Australia the upper houses of the federal legislature are based on the principle of equal representation for each state or canton, thus giving the smaller states some security that their interests would not be overwhelmed by those of the larger states. The failure to do likewise in Canada, combined with the fact that Senators have normally followed the party line of the government that appointed them, has meant that the smaller provinces have not been able to look to the Senate to represent their interests in the federal law-making (and therefore policy-making) process. A consequence of this, in combination with the exceptionally rigid party discipline that prevails in the Canadian House of Commons, is that the smaller provinces—and, over the years, all provinces—have tended to rely on the provincial premiers to look after provincial interests by a process of bilateral bargaining with

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Ottawa. As, for different reasons, federal-provincial financial relationships have also depended on bilateral bargaining, direct negotiations between provincial and federal ministers have acquired an importance that is not paralleled in any other federation. This has impeded the development of national integration, for it means that electors look first to their provincial governments to protect their interests, sometimes regarding the national government as an alien body that must be guarded against or struggled with. A fourth weakness of the BNA Act was that it failed to specify any procedure for its own amendment. As an Act of the British Parliament, it has simply been amended by further Acts of that Parliament, on Canadian request but without any settled procedure for agreement between the federal and provincial governments about the request. Nor is there any provision for direct participation by the electors in the amending process, as is provided for in the American, Swiss and Australian constitutions. This omission from the Act was corrected in 1982, when a formula for future amendments, to be carried out entirely within Canada, was enacted by the British Parliament. Unfortunately this formula was arrived at by a process that can only be described as shabby. A different formula had been proposed in 1980 by the federal government, but was opposed by eight of the ten provinces. Astonishingly, the federal government, led by Pierre Trudeau in his most truculent mood, asked the British Parliament to pass the proposed Bill notwithstanding provincial opposition. This opposition led the Foreign Affairs Committee of the British House of Commons to reach the unanimous view that the Bill should be rejected, which it would have been had the Trudeau government not been forced into second thoughts by the judgement of the Canadian Supreme Court that the procedure embarked upon flouted constitutional conventions. A conference of provincial premiers was then called to consider the issue. After failing to reach agreement in a formal session, the anglophone premiers then hammered out a compromise at a private meeting in the evening to which the Premier of Quebec had not been invited. This compromise was subsequently embodied, in a slightly revised form, in an Act that the British Parliament agreed to pass, under the title of The Constitution Act 1982. The Quebec government protested both about the way the formula had been reached and about its failure to give Quebec a veto over future constitutional amendments. This arrangement lasted only five years. In 1987 the premiers and the new Prime Minister, Brian Mulroney, agreed on a revised formula that gave Quebec a veto. The price of this compromise,


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however, is that all the other provinces have also been given a veto, so that the smallest province, containing less than one per cent of the population of Canada, is now in a position to block any proposed constitutional amendment. A more likely scenario, given the tradition of bargaining that has been established, is that the province or provinces with the least enthusiasm for any proposed amendment will be able to extract a sizeable bribe from the federal authorities as the price of agreement. The overall consequence of these weaknesses and lacunae in the BNA Act, combined with subsequent constitutional developments, is that the Canadian state has moved in the opposite direction from that of most other federations. Whereas they have become progressively more centralized over the years, the Canadian state has been progressively decentralized. Another feature of the Canadian state that must be mentioned at this point is that federal-provincial financial relationships have proved to be a source of lively controversy. The BNA Act gave the most valuable revenue sources to the federal government, so that from the beginning the provinces were heavily dependent on federal grants. As each new province entered the federation a separate financial deal was struck with it, while after only seven years two of the original four demanded and received ‘better terms’. (See Birch, 1955, Chapter 3.) This way of dealing with fiscal issues established a tradition of political bargaining over financial matters that has both strengthened the role of provincial governments and led to a less tidy system than is to be found in other federations. It has also led to feelings of grievance on the part of people who believe, rightly or wrongly, that their province or region is not getting a fair deal. In recent decades the people of the four western provinces have felt somewhat exploited by eastern Canada, in fiscal and economic terms. The four Atlantic provinces have gained greatly from the Tax Equalization Scheme, which has increased the revenue of their provincial governments by over 50 per cent (Norrie, Simeon and Krasnick, 1986, p. 113). Quebec has gained from tax equalization and in recent years has also gained from federal subsidies paid to declining or threatened industries, such as textiles. Ontario has gained from Canada’s protective tariff and the large internal market for Ontario manufactured goods. The western provinces, being dependent on the export of primary products while having relatively little industry, would be better off without the protective tariff; they have not benefited from federal subsidies to industry; and two of them (Alberta and British Columbia) have lost heavily from the tax equalization arrangements. They also have grievances about railway

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freight charges and about a national energy policy that forces the western provinces to sell oil at below world prices to eastern consumers and gives the federal government 27.5 per cent of oil revenues. Two economists have calculated that British Columbia, Alberta and Saskatchewan are all clear losers from federal economic policies (Whalley and Trela, 1986, p. 10). The political effects of all these grievances have been enhanced by the fact that in the long years of Liberal dominance at the federal level the western provinces have contributed only a small number of MPs to the governing party. Since 1945 the majority of western seats have been divided between the Progressive Conservatives and the New Democratic Party in every Parliament save the one elected in 1949. The west has been seen to be supporting the federal government, in a partisan sense, only in the years 1949–53, 1957–63, and 1984 to date, plus the six months of the Clark government in 1979. In the forty-two years of the period 1945–87, it was on the right side for less than fourteen years. This is in sharp distinction to Quebec, that contrived to get a majority of its MPs on the governing side for over thirty-nine years in the same period. The combination of a series of grievances with a feeling of political impotence at the federal level has led many westerners to a degree of scepticism about the federation. In 1980, when this scepticism was at its height, a poll of 1,200 westerners revealed that 84 per cent thought the west was not getting a fair deal from confederation, 53 per cent thought they had more in common with the USA than with eastern Canada, and 28 per cent agreed that ‘We get so few benefits from being part of Canada that we might as well go it alone’ (Roberts, 1980, pp. 3–6). Early in 1981 a survey conducted by the Gallup Poll found that 25 per cent of people in the prairie provinces and 20 per cent of the people in British Columbia believed that ‘Canada would break up’ (Conway, 1983, p. 214). In the same year a survey conducted by the Canada West Foundation found that 84 per cent of westerners agreed that ‘the west usually gets ignored in national politics because the political parties depend upon Quebec and Ontario for most of their vote’, while 36 per cent of them agreed that ‘western Canadians get so few benefits from being part of Canada that they might as well go it on their own’ (Conway, 1983, p. 215). These surveys are clear evidence of western alienation. Several separatist movements have emerged, including Western Federation, United West and (in the 1980s) the Western Canada Concept. However, none of these has polled more than a derisory number of votes in an election. It seems that there is a large gulf between


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agreement with the proposition that western Canada might as well ‘go it alone’ and readiness to vote for a party that actually proposes secession. The reason for this gulf is undoubtedly the absence of any clear cultural factor that unites the west and divides it from the east. Westerners believe that their rulers frequently ignore western interests, but they do not think that they are governed by foreigners. The importance of cultural and ethnic factors in nationalism is indicated very clearly by the fact that the Quebec separatist movement came within sight of success in 1980, even though an independent Quebec would be poorer than Quebec within the federation, whereas western separatist movements cannot get off the ground, even though an independent state of Western Canada might reasonably be expected to be wealthier than the west within federation. Western alienation has strengthened the forces making for the decentralization of power, but it has not threatened the integrity of the federation as Quebecois nationalism has done. To understand this latter phenomenon it is necessary to put it into the context of English-French relationships in Canada, which will be the subject of the next section.

2

ANGLOPHONES AND FRANCOPHONES

Canada was originally a French colony, the flag having been raised there by Cartier in 1534 and the first successful French settlement, in what is now Quebec, having been established in 1608. It was conquered by the British in 1760, but British settlers were considerably outnumbered by the French until the American War of Independence of 1776, following which substantial numbers of settlers in the American colonies moved northwards to maintain their loyalty to the Crown and the British Empire. In 1838 the British government sent out Lord Durham to make a report on the future of British North America. Durham was a man of progressive liberal convictions, with views about representative government and the need to assimilate cultural minorities that exactly paralleled the views of J.S.Mill that have been discussed previously in Chapter 5. He proposed that the anglophone colony of Upper Canada should be united with the francophone colony of Lower Canada and that a system of representative and responsible government should be established in this large colony. He was also quite clear that one object of British policy should be to anglicize Lower Canada by immigration and by dominating the French.

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It must henceforth be the first and steady purpose of the British Government to establish an English population, with English laws and language, in this Province, and to trust its government to none but a decidedly English legislature. (Durham, [1839] 1912, pp. 288–9)

I repeat that the alteration of the character of the Province ought to be immediately entered on…that in any plan which may be adopted for the future management of Lower Canada, the first object ought to be that of making it an English Province; and that…the ascendancy should never again be placed in the hands of any but those of an English population. (Durham, [1839] 1912, p. 296) Durham believed that in the long run anglicization would be to the advantage of the French-Canadians, and that in any case it was inevitable in view of their geographic situation. ‘In these circumstances’, he said, ‘I should be indeed surprised if the more reflecting part of the French-Canadians entertained at present any hope of continuing to preserve their nationality’ (Durham, [1839] 1912, p. 295). He was of course quite wrong about this, but his report was nevertheless acted upon by the British government. In 1840 the two colonies were united and in 1848 a system of responsible government was introduced. As the populations of Upper and Lower Canada were about equal, they were given equal numbers of representatives in the legislative assembly. There were rather more British settlers than French, but as the British were divided between two parties it was not possible for them to exclude the French from government. What developed was a system of concurrent majorities by which the British and French communities had roughly equal power in the government of the colony. By the 1860s the population of what had been Upper Canada had become appreciably greater than that of Lower Canada, though each continued to get equal representation in the Assembly. The desire on the part of the British settlers to secure complete control over the government of Upper Canada led them to suggest a redivision of the colony. This was one of the motives underlying the moves towards the establishment of a federal system that would include not only the two Canadas but also two or more of the anglophone colonies of the Atlantic seaboard. In the BNA Act (now rather confusingly retitled the Constitution Act) it was provided that the Parliament of Canada and the


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Legislative Assembly of Quebec should both be bilingual, that Acts passed by these bodies should be published in both English and French, and that either language could be used in the federal courts or the Quebec provincial courts. No mention was made of language in respect of the other provinces. Another provision relevant to the cultural division between the English and French communities was that there should be no interference with the rights and privileges of any denominational schools existing in a province at the time of union, particular mention being made of Roman Catholic schools in Ontario and of both Catholic and Protestant schools in Quebec. As anglophone Canadians were then largely Protestant, while francophone Canadians were almost entirely Catholic, this section of the Act apparently entrenched the right of the linguistic minorities in the two provinces to have their children educated in the language of their choice. For the first eighteen years of confederation the leaders of both the anglophone and the francophone communities were reasonably content with the new system of government. John A.Macdonald, Prime Minister of Canada for nineteen of the country’s first twentyfour years, would have preferred a unitary state to a federation, but he had accepted the impossibility of achieving this and believed that the federal system would become more centralized over the years as a consequence of the allocation of residuary powers to the federal Parliament rather than to the provinces. The French community included many who still resented the British conquest of 1760, but this resentment was tempered by the knowledge that if New France had not been conquered by the British, it would almost certainly have been sold to the Americans at the time of the Louisiana Purchase. Many French-Canadians also doubted whether the British could be trusted to protect the French language and culture, but these doubts were kept within bounds by the constitutional provisions mentioned above. This condition of relative contentment was undermined by a series of events which began in 1885, the cumulative effects of which were to give French-Canadians a substantial feeling of grievance in regard to the behaviour of the anglophone majority and to strengthen the sentiments of French-Canadian nationalism.

French-Canadian grievances The first event that seriously upset French-Canadians was the execution of Louis Riel in 1885. Riel was the self-appointed leader

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of the Metis (a community of mixed Indian and French blood) whose way of life on the prairies was seriously threatened, and eventually destroyed, by the arrival of large numbers of English-Canadian settlers and administrators who ignored the traditional farm boundaries of the Metis (as well as their traditional hunting habits) when dividing up the land for legal settlement. In 1885 Riel led an uprising of Metis which was doomed to failure and was quickly crushed by the police and military. When Riel was sentenced to death for treason FrenchCanadians launched a movement for his reprieve, essentially because he was seven-eighths French in his ethnic origins and was a staunch Roman Catholic. Macdonald refused to yield to this campaign, declaring that ‘he shall hang though every dog in Quebec bark in his favour’. Riel thereupon acquired the status of a martyr among many French-Canadians. This event may be likened to the execution of the fifteen leaders of the Easter Rising in Dublin. To English-Canadians Louis Riel was a traitor, of wild ambitions and unstable disposition (he had spent two years in an American mental hospital) who clearly deserved his punishment. They did not anticipate his subsequent elevation to the status of martyr any more than the British authorities in 1916 anticipated that the leaders of the Easter Rising would achieve that status in Ireland. The reason was the same in both cases; that the British, not having been conquered since 1066, find it impossible to understand the depth of resentment harboured by peoples who have been forced to submit to British domination. The stakes were not so high in Canada as in Ireland and the consequences not so dramatic, but Riel’s execution nevertheless had a lasting effect on FrenchCanadian attitudes. According to Verney, ‘it was the most important factor in the re-emergence of a French-Canadian nationalism dormant since 1837’ (Verney, 1986, p. 262). The second event which contributed to French-Canadian feelings of grievance was the 1890 decision by the government of Manitoba to establish a system of non-denominational schools, accompanied by the withdrawal of grants to church schools. When Manitoba had been established as a province in 1870 it had a francophone majority, and had then decided both that the province should be officially bilingual and that grants would be given to both Protestant and Catholic schools. By 1890 the province had an anglophone majority, whose decision to discontinue grants to church schools meant, in effect, that parents who wanted their children to be educated in French would have to pay for their education in Catholic schools as well as contributing through their taxes to the maintenance of provincial schools where the language of instruction was English. In the same


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year, Manitoba passed an Act making English the sole language for use in the legislative assembly, the courts and the provincial administration. The Manitoba Schools Act raised issues of greater weight than the execution of Louis Riel, because the Act deprived Catholics (and therefore francophones) of rights that appeared to have been guaranteed by the constitution of the province adopted twenty years earlier. It was the subject of two legal appeals, both of which went to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London. The first appeal failed. The second succeeded, but instead of invalidating the Act the Judicial Committee merely authorized the Canadian Parliament to pass remedial legislation, which that Parliament failed to do. In 1896 the federal government reached an understanding with the Manitoba government whereby instruction in French, and in the Catholic faith, would be given in some of the provincial schools. However, this understanding had no legal basis and some years later the Manitoba government decided to ignore it. As Verney has pointed out, the most significant aspect of this dispute was that it demonstrated what English-Canadian politicians had always assumed to be the character of the Canadian constitutional system, namely that it was a system dominated by the principle of majority rule except in so far as the British North America Act contained explicit guarantees for minority rights. This ran counter to a different interpretation common amongst French-Canadian politicians, namely that the bilingual principle established in Quebec and in the activities of the federal government would be extended westwards across Canada as new territories were settled and new provincial governments established there. This latter view now seems like a romantic dream, but Verney has made the pertinent comment that at the time ‘it was no more unrealistic than the American southerners’ dream of extending the Mason-Dixon line to the Pacific Ocean’ (Verney, 1986, p. 262). While this is undoubtedly an appropriate comparison, it is fair to observe that the southerners had somewhat more justification for their dreams than did the French-Canadians. For about two decades before the Civil War, western states had been admitted to the Union on the basis of ‘one slave, one free’, but there was nothing equivalent to this convention in Canada. Nevertheless, what happened in Manitoba in the 1890s has to be regarded as the first step in a painful process by which French-Canadians were forced to realize that, far from being equal partners in Canada, they were destined to have the status of a cultural minority except in the single province of Quebec. Other grievances accumulated over the years. In 1899 the

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Canadian government sent a contingent of troops to fight alongside the British in South Africa, though many French-Canadians sympathized with the Boers and most would have preferred neutrality. In 1905 Saskatchewan and Alberta were admitted to the federation as unilingual provinces, with no provision for instruction in French in their schools. Canadian immigration policy favoured British immigrants, and ‘out of the two million people who came to Canada between 1901 and 1911, only 30,000 were French-speaking’ (Levitt, 1972, p. 8). In 1912 the Ontario government banned teaching in French beyond grade 3 in its public schools. In 1916 the Manitoba government eliminated teaching in French entirely. In 1917 there was the first conscription crisis, which infuriated French-Canadians who were unwilling to be ordered to fight ‘Britain’s war’. By 1918, all Canadian provinces except Quebec had become officially unilingual. In the Second World War there was the second conscription crisis, resolved in a way that led to charges of betrayal being levied against the national government. It is indicative of the character of French-Canadian feelings that in both wars the United States government found it easier to mobilize German-Americans to fight against Germany than it was for the Canadian government to mobilize French-Canadians to fight on the side of France. The French-Canadian community is somewhat introverted in attitude, feeling isolated in an Englishspeaking continent and harbouring grievances against the majority of their fellow-citizens that have been sedulously cultivated by their religious leaders and politicians. It is noteworthy that whereas car licence plates in other provinces bear innocent advertising slogans like ‘Beautiful British Columbia’, ‘Friendly Manitoba’, or ‘Alberta: Wild Rose Country’, licence plates in Quebec carry the message ‘Je me souviens’. And what people are expected to remember is their long history of defeat and alleged injustice at the hands of ‘les maudits anglais’.

French-Canadian nationalism Almost inevitably, this accumulation of grievances led to the articulation of theories about the position of French-Canadians in relation to the federation that can reasonably be described as expressions of French-Canadian nationalism. The first of these theories, that emerged in the first years of the twentieth century, holds that the Canadian polity is or should be based on an equal partnership between two nations, the French and the English. The


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man who produced the most coherent account of this view was Henri Bourassa, one of the founders of the Ligue Nationaliste in 1903. Bourassa had excellent qualifications for his role, being a highly articulate speaker and writer who was the grandson of Louis-Joseph Papineau (leader of an unsuccessful rebellion against the British in 1837) and who had himself resigned from his seat in the Canadian House of Commons in 1899 in protest against Canadian participation in the Boer War (though he had been re-elected five months later). Bourassa’s version of what became known as the ‘two nations theory’ can be reduced to the following set of propositions. (1) Canada was formed as a union of two equal nations, confederation being ‘the result of a contract between the two races in Canada, French and English, based on equality and recognizing equal rights and reciprocal duties’ (quoted in Cook, 1969, p. 141). To suggest that under the authority of the 1867 constitution the rights of French language exist only for Quebec is to say that the pact of 1867 was a trap, that Cartier, Macdonald, Brown, Howe and all the authors of this magnificent constitution were in league to deceive the people of Lower Canada! As for me, I do not believe it. (Cook, 1969, p. 136) (2) English-Canadian politicians had failed to honour this original contract, not necessarily from malice but more as a consequence of their ‘ignorance of history’, their ‘absence of any philosophy’ and their ‘habit of colonial servitude’ (Cook, 1969, p. 141). (3) The French race and culture will disappear in Canada if the French language is not maintained, in the way that ‘by losing their language…the Scottish race has disappeared as a race and become simply one of the constituent elements of the British people’ (Cook, 1969, p. 133). Education using French as a medium of instruction must therefore be available to French-Canadian children throughout the country. (4) Bilingualism is not an appropriate objective. I do not believe it possible or desirable for the mass of our people to learn and to speak English. A man of the people can generally make use of only one language. The spread of the English language on the popular level would…be the surest way towards the annihilation of our nationality. (Cook, 1969, p. 121) (5) As a logical consequence of propositions (3) and (4), there should be little French-Canadian enclaves all over Canada, ‘given their own schools and French-speaking priests so that they could set up

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their own parishes and they would be like so many small provinces of Quebec’ (Cook, 1969, p. 143). These enclaves would be economically backward by comparison with the English-speaking areas surrounding them, because they would reject the American pursuit of profits and wealth in favour of a more cultured way of life. (6) In the fullness of time the French language will ‘have its revenge’ because English-Canadians everywhere will feel compelled to learn French for the sake of the moral and intellectual benefits which only this language can confer. When this happens ‘the AngloSaxons in Canada will bless us for having preserved the French language, the immortal seed of modern Christian civilization, through so many mishaps and struggles that often occurred because of their ill will’ (Cook, 1969, p. 145). It will be helpful to comment on these propositions one by one. The first seems to involve a misreading of history. There is very little in the debates on confederation to suggest that the founding fathers intended the principle of bilingualism to be extended across the western territories. The Canadian Parliament was to be bilingual, but this did not imply that Canada as a country was to be bilingual. If the first proposition is historically incorrect, the second has no substance. Bourassa’s third proposition is weakened in force by the comparison he drew with Scotland. Gaelic was never the language of the whole Scottish people but only the language of the Highlanders, who had originally migrated from Ireland, and the fact that Gaelic had become virtually extinct on the mainland of Scotland had not led the Scottish people to ‘disappear as a race’. On the contrary, the Scottish people have a very clear sense of national identity which does not in the least depend on language. Whether a government has a moral or political obligation to provide education in a minority language is a question that has been addressed previously in Chapter 5. The answer arrived at there is that in general there is no theoretical foundation for such an obligation, though in particular situations the provision of such education might be desirable. Bourassa’s fourth proposition has a good deal of substance. As Laponce and others have shown, it is not natural for people to be bilingual and the practical consequence of an admixture of languages within the same territory is invariably that the stronger language drives out the weaker (see Laponce, 1983). In certain circumstances, however, linguistic islands may develop and be maintained. ‘Since the learning of a second language is psychologically, neurophysiologically and socially costly, people group themselves in physical space according to their dominant language’ (Laponce, 1983, p. 2).


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Statistics show that in all provinces except Quebec, the number of Canadians who speak French at home is appreciably lower than the number who have French as a mother tongue, while the number who speak French at work or in commercial transactions is lower still. In the whole of Canada, there are only two areas where the population is substantially bilingual, namely a sizeable area straddling the border between Quebec and Ontario, running in a north-westerly direction from Montreal, and a small strip of land along the east coast of New Brunswick, which was the heartland of the original territory occupied by the Acadians (Laponce, 1983, Figure 1). The proposition that French-Canadian enclaves would be likely to lag behind the surrounding territories in terms of economic growth and prosperity seems to have been borne out by the limited experience that we have. As noted in Chapter 5, Porter has shown that FrenchCanadians have persistently ranked lower in social and economic status than English-Canadians and most other immigrant groups. Another study, also made in the 1960s, showed that of the fourteen ethnic groups identified in Quebec, ‘the French ranked twelfth with respect to the mean income of male wage earners’ (Waddell, 1986, p. 89). Bourassa’s final proposition displays an astonishing degree of intellectual arrogance, rather charming if taken lightly but apt to be thought irritating or threatening by those English-Canadians who have taken it seriously. Bourassa’s speeches and writings from which the above quotations were taken date from a period between 1902 and 1912. From then until the 1960s numerous other French-Canadians endorsed his theories, but they added rhetoric rather than logic to what Bourassa had said. For this reason they need not be quoted here. EnglishCanadians have been virtually unanimous in rejecting the two nations theory, for various reasons. One is that they believe it to be historically inaccurate in its assumption about the intentions of the founding fathers. Another is that they have been and are reluctant to define themselves as hyphenated Canadians. Meisel reported in 1977 that between 80 and 90 per cent of anglophone Canadians refused to give themselves an ethnic identity; their self-ascribed identity was as Canadians pure and simple (Meisel, 1977, p. 16). There is in consequence a distinct lack of symmetry between the feelings of national identity held by French-Canadians and the feelings held by other Canadians. In sociological terms, Canada is emphatically not a country composed of two nations. It is a multiethnic society with a single political identity, within which one substantial minority defines itself as a distinct nation in cultural and linguistic terms.

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New federal policies In 1963 an anglophone Prime Minister took the surprising decision to change the direction of national policy and commit the federal government to the complete acceptance of the two nations theory, with all its contradictions. Lester Pearson did this when he established the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism, whose terms of reference instructed it to ‘inquire into and report upon the existing state of bilingualism and biculturalism in Canada and to recommend what steps should be taken to develop the Canadian Confederation on the basis of an equal partnership between the two founding races’ (italics added). Moreover Pearson appointed as the Commission’s executive director and co-chairman a French-Canadian nationalist called André Laurendeau, a disciple and son-in-law of Bourassa who had vigorously opposed Canada’s entry into the Second World War. The Royal Commission worked at what now seems to have been a leisurely pace and did not produce its report (in six volumes) until 1967–9. However, its recommendations were radical. After examining the situation in Belgium and Finland, where the proportions of the population claiming to be bilingual were about the same as the proportion in Canada, namely 11–12 per cent, the Commission rejected the policies adopted in those two countries. In Belgium and Finland, as in Switzerland (which has a higher proportion of bilingual citizens), language policy is based on the ‘territorial principle’, whereby the country is divided into unilingual areas but the equal status of each language is recognized and reflected in the conduct of the national government. For Canada the Commission recommended the ‘personality principle’, whereby linguistic minorities were given equal rights with the majority, wherever they happen to live. To give effect to this principle the Commission made a large number of recommendations, the most important of which are listed below. (1)

(2) (3)

The federal public service should provide more and better opportunities for francophone officials and should greatly increase the use of French in official communications and records. Ontario and New Brunswick should declare themselves to be officially bilingual. Any other province with an official language minority comprising 10 per cent or more of the population should declare itself to be officially bilingual.


(4) (5)

(6) (7) (8) (9)

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All provinces should permit the use of both official languages in their legislative assemblies. Bilingual districts should be established throughout Canada, the areas to be determined by negotiation between the federal and provincial governments. Elementary and secondary school education should be provided in both official languages in all bilingual districts. The Canadian armed forces should be reorganized so as to recognize the equality of the two official languages. Large firms operating in Quebec should use French as their language of work. Any Canadian firm having extensive markets or facilities in Quebec should develop bilingual capacities and appoint bilingual senior executives.

In this way the whole of Bourassa’s slightly improbable agenda was translated into a set of official recommendations. A hundred years after confederation, measures were proposed that would appear to meet all French-Canadian complaints. Getting these proposals implemented was another matter. At the federal level, the Liberal government had the political will to implement those recommendations that concerned activities within federal jurisdiction, and in some ways it went even further to satisfy French-Canadians than had been proposed. However, the provinces did not step into line so quickly. Within the federal public service, a number of agencies now conduct their business and keep their records in French, while numerous posts have been classified as requiring fluency in both languages. This policy has automatically favoured francophone officials, who are far more likely than anglophone colleagues to be bilingual. Changes in recruitment policies have had a similar effect, with the consequence that the proportion of francophones in the higher ranks of the service increased from 13.4 per cent in 1971 to 23.7 per cent in 1987 (Wardhaugh, 1983, p. 50). A salary bonus is paid to bilingual officials. At the provincial level, implementation has been patchy. New Brunswick has become officially bilingual but Ontario has not. Most provinces have agreed to permit the use of French in their legislative assemblies but Newfoundland, Alberta and British Columbia have declined to follow suit. The proposal to designate districts all over the country as bilingual, stated by the Royal Commission to be ‘the cornerstone of our proposed system’ (Innis, 1973, p. 27), has not been implemented except in the national capital district.

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Teaching in the French language has been provided in virtually all areas with sizeable concentrations of francophone residents, but for the most part this has been done quietly, where and when provincial governments and local school boards have deemed it to be appropriate, rather than in the open and well-publicized way that the members of the Royal Commission would have liked. In British Columbia, an unpublished government survey of parental attitudes produced the interesting revelation that many francophone parents want their children to be educated in English while many anglophone parents like the idea of having their children educated in French. The first group want their children to become fluent in the language spoken by 99 per cent of the province’s residents while the second group want to improve their children’s chances of careers in those occupations, like the federal civil service, where it is an advantage to be bilingual. While these preferences are entirely sensible, the proposal to create French immersion schools for the sake of a largely anglophone clientele has created problems in some areas. These schools are expensive and it is not always easy to persuade taxpayers to pay extra to improve the career opportunities of the children of certain (largely middle-class) neighbours. By the time the report of the Royal Commission was published, Pearson had been replaced as Prime Minister by Pierre Trudeau, whose government quickly passed an Official Languages Act in 1969. This Act authorized lavish expenditure on language training and translation services: in 1981–2 the direct cost of the Act was estimated to be $448 million (Wardhaugh, 1983, p. 55). It was also provided that all goods sold in Canada must have bilingual labels and instructions, the overall cost of which to manufacturers and importers must be substantial. Another line of policy pursued by Trudeau was to remove British or ‘Imperial’ titles from official institutions, on the grounds that these displeased French-Canadians. A significant move towards neutralizing the symbols of the Canadian state had already been made by the Liberals in 1965, when the new national flag was designed and adopted amidst much controversy. At that time numerous designs were debated, many of them including a small Union Jack in the corner to symbolize Canada’s origins as part of the British Empire and some of them also including a fleur-de-lys to symbolize the French contribution to Canadian society. All such designs were rejected in favour of the simple maple leaf design, that is devoid of political symbolism. It was apparently more important to French-Canadians to exclude a British symbol than to include a French symbol. Further moves taken after Trudeau


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became Prime Minister included the replacement of the term ‘Royal Mail’ by ‘Canada Post’ and the merger of the Royal Canadian Navy, the Royal Canadian Air Force and the Canadian Army into a body with the less-than-inspiring title of the Canadian Forces, whose members were all equipped with similar green uniforms. These and similar changes deprived Canadians of British origin of some of their sources of symbolic gratification without doing anything positive to gratify French-Canadians. Trudeau and the Liberal Party lost public support among anglophone Canadians as a consequence of these policies and this was one of the reasons why the party lost its overall Parliamentary majority in the 1972 general election. Trudeau’s biographer has said of this election that ‘not since the Khaki Election of 1917 had the country been so polarized politically on language lines’ (Gwyn, 1980, p. 138). The Liberals lost seats to the Conservatives in every province except Quebec. It was only because of the massive French-Canadian support in Quebec that the overall result gave the Liberals 109 seats to the Conservatives’ 107, with 48 seats going to the smaller parties and two independent candidates. In the next Parliament more than half of the Liberal MPs came from Quebec, and as the Liberals continued in power as a minority government the federal government was actually dominated by representatives from just one of the ten provinces. As the Trudeau era wore on, linguistic tensions increased, particularly in the four western provinces where French-Canadians are thin on the ground and are considerably outnumbered by Canadians of German and Ukrainian origin. It is arguable that the language policies adopted should have been adopted a hundred years earlier, but implementing them in the 1970s was bound to cause resentment and there developed certain signs of a backlash among the anglophone majority. A survey conducted in Calgary in 1974 showed that 62 per cent of respondents believed that FrenchCanadians outside Quebec ‘should speak English like the rest of us’ (Gibbins, 1977, p. 371). A scaremongering book entitled Bilingual Today, French Tomorrow (Andrews, 1977) ran through ten printings in the thirteen months after its publication, and was also serialized in the Toronto Sun. On Canada Day, 1978 the capital of British Columbia was plastered with federal posters depicting a small boy and a small girl holding hands with lines underneath saying ‘I love you’ and ‘Je t’aime’. Many of the cars in the same city sported bumper stickers reading ‘One country, one language’. If the period since 1963 is considered in historical perspective, it has clearly been the occasion of a massive attempt to remedy the

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grievances among French-Canadians that flowed from the downgrading of the French language outside Quebec that occurred between 1890 and 1918. The political costs of this have been considerable. However, the benefits have also been considerable. On the one hand, the policies have improved career opportunities for French-Canadians and have made those living outside Quebec feel more at home in their environment. On the other hand, the policies, by remedying long-standing grievances, may have reduced the attractions of secession for those living in Quebec. This second point is open to dispute, however, for the Quebecois nationalists were not too concerned about the rest of Canada. As Smiley has noted, their leaders ‘tended to equate Quebec with French Canada, and were for the most part indifferent to the recognition of cultural and linguistic duality in federal institutions or in provinces and areas of Canada outside Quebec’ (Smiley, 1980, p. 221). It is to the phenomenon of Quebecois nationalism that we must now turn.

Quebecois nationalism What happened in the 1960s is that a sizeable and increasing proportion of French-Canadian nationalists in Quebec changed their self-ascribed indentity. Having once described themselves as ‘les Canadiens’, and then as ‘les Francais’ or ‘les Canadiens-francais’, they adopted the term ‘les Quebecois’, which in earlier periods had usually been confined to residents of Quebec City. The implication of this change was that their loyalties had contracted in spatial terms from the whole of Canada to the province of Quebec, while also becoming more intense and involving the belief that Quebec should seek greater political autonomy. The idea of autonomy or even independence for Quebec was not entirely new. Over the years a number of romantic nationalists, in the sense defined in Chapter 6, had advocated a development of this kind. In 1895 V-P. Tardivel had written a highly political novel, Pour la patrie, that envisaged the establishment of a French state on the banks of the St Lawrence. In 1922 Father J-M-R. Villeneuve, who later became Cardinal Archbishop of Montreal, declared that an independent French state would be the best way of ensuring the survival and health of French civilization in North America. ‘Canada is bound to split up’, he said, and ‘a French state of smaller but more sensible proportions would be…the best means of serving the universal interests of the entire race’ (quoted in Cook, 1969, pp. 204–5). Confederation had been ‘nothing but a miserable


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bankruptcy, a bitter, humiliating deception’, whereas an autonomous French state in Quebec ‘would inspire thinkers whose work would be elevated because Latinate, and gestures that would be civilizing because Catholic’ (Cook, 1969, pp. 211 and 212). In 1924 Antonio Perrault, one of the founders of a group called Action franchise, wrote of ‘the persecution of the French in Ontario’ and described the Canadian confederation as ‘a fool’s market’ (Cook, 1969, p. 218). Thirty years later Michel Brunet took a similar line, though expressed in more moderate terms. Like the romantic Scottish and Welsh nationalists mentioned in Chapter 7, these writers were concerned mainly with their national culture and their thinking contained a considerable element of nostalgia. They envisaged their hypothetical state as one dominated by rural and religious values, a modern replica of the French settlement that had been conquered in the eighteenth century. Villeneuve, for instance, complained that confederation ‘imposes upon us divorce and women’s suffrage and imperial conscription, all principles of social dissolution fatal to a race’ (Cook, 1969, p. 211). These thinkers kept the flame of nationalism alive over the years, but in the absence of an eruptive factor to produce mass support they could not inspire a significant political movement. The eruptive factor in Quebec was a set of social and economic changes, occurring in the 1960s, that have been given the collective name of the Quiet Revolution. The developments that made up this revolution need not be detailed here in chronological terms, for this has been done in a score of works, most notably in the excellent study by McRoberts and Posgate. Instead, the main features of the revolution will be outlined, very briefly, under the four headings of economic, religious, psychological and political. The economic development of the 1950s and 1960s was that the extent of industrialization in Quebec was greatly increased. Between 1950 and 1960 the number of jobs in manufacturing industry doubled. Quebec universities extended their provisions for training scientists, engineers and accountants, and there was a widespread determination on the part of the francophone élite in the province that Quebec should catch up with Ontario and other industrialized regions of North America. The provincial government set up a public corporation to provide capital for French-Canadian industrial ventures. The general public became more ambitious in their material expectations. The religious change was a decline in church attendance, combined with the secularization of the schools. The decline in church attendance is a widely-experienced concomitant of growing

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industrialization and prosperity, that has also occurred in such Catholic societies as France, Belgium, Italy and Spain. The takeover of church schools was brought about by the Liberal administration in 1964, without serious opposition from the church. There was also a notable relaxation of film censorship and a growing permissiveness in public attitudes towards sexual behaviour. The psychological development that accompanied these changes was a growing discontent with the traditional self-image of the Quebecois people. During the first half of the twentieth century, the French-Canadian view of the differences between themselves and anglophone Canadians was that French-Canadians were more cultural and spiritual, less materialistic and less advanced in the field of technology. As Charles Taylor was the first to point out, the stereotypes resulting from this view jarred with the growing Quebecois image of themselves as a go-ahead people determined to improve their economic position (Taylor, 1965; see also Clift, 1982, pp. 87–8). A wish to modify the way in which they were perceived added impetus both to the drive for the modernization of Quebec society and to the transition of their self-ascribed identity from FrenchCanadians to Quebecois. As might be expected, this transition was much more marked among younger people than among older people. Once one becomes middle-aged, one does not easily change one’s feelings of identity. Table 8.1 shows the results of a 1977 survey on this topic. Table 8.1

National self-identification of Quebec francophones

Source: Blishen, 1978, p. 130.

The political aspects of the Quiet Revolution took two forms, of which one was a remarkable strengthening of the provincial government and the other a growing resentment at the dominance of the anglophone minority in the private sector, particularly in the commercial enterprises of Montreal. Between 1960 and 1965 the number of people employed in the Quebec civil service grew by 42.6 per cent while the number employed in public enterprises grew


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by 93 per cent (McRoberts and Posgate, 1980, p. 109). In the private sector, however, nationalists were upset by the reluctance of the anglophone minority in Quebec to learn French, coupled with the advantages enjoyed by anglophones in securing senior positions in industry and commerce. A detailed analysis of 1961 census data showed that only 33 per cent of the difference in income between anglophone and francophone employees in Montreal could be explained by the lower educational level of the francophones, with 6 per cent resulting from differences in age structure and the remaining 60 per cent being ascribed to the ‘preference of anglophone employers for English-Canadian candidates’ for managerial posts. A 1971 study showed that in a sample of business head offices in Quebec ‘francophones constituted 35 per cent of the employees receiving less than $10,000, but only 15 per cent of those earning over $22,000’ (McRoberts and Posgate, 1980, pp. 127–8). As the language of work in most of the major corporate enterprises in Montreal was English, this cultural division of labour need not be explained in terms of prejudice; managers are apt to work more effectively in their first language than in a second language. However, the situation was naturally a source of annoyance to ambitious francophones, and could only be remedied by government action to change the language in which business was conducted. A further source of anxiety and grievance was that the new postwar wave of immigrants whose mother tongue was neither French nor English were choosing to send their children to schools where they were taught in English rather than to schools using French, because the parents believed that a training in English would bring greater economic advantages in future life. This choice was particularly offensive to francophones in the aftermath of the Quiet Revolution, because it seemed to represent a judgement by European immigrants that francophones were doomed always to be underdogs. Resentment about this development was another factor in attracting followers to the nationalist groups that emerged in the 1960s. The most dramatic of these groups was the Front de Libération du Quebec (FLQ). In March 1963 the FLQ published the following manifesto. Notice to the Population of the State of Quebec The Quebec Liberation Front (FLQ) is a revolutionary movement of volunteers ready to die for the political and

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economic independence of Quebec. The suicide commandos of the FLQ have as their principle mission the complete destruction, by systematic sabotage, of: (a) (b) (c)

(d)

all colonial (federal) symbols and institutions, in particular the RCMP and the armed forces; all the information media in the colonial language (English) which hold us in contempt; all commercial establishments and enterprises which practise discrimination against Quebecois, which do not use the French language, which advertise in the colonial language (English); all plants and factories which discriminate against Frenchspeaking workers.

The Quebec Liberation Front will also attack all American cultural and commercial interests, natural allies of English colonialism. All FLQ volunteers have on their persons during acts of sabotage identification papers for the Republic of Quebec. We ask that our wounded and our prisoners be treated in accordance with the Geneva Convention on the rules of war. Independence or Death The dignity of the Quebec people demands independence. Quebec’s independence is only possible through social revolution. Social Revolution means a Free Quebec. Students, workers, peasants, form your clandestine groups against Anglo-American Colonialism. (Regush, 1973, pp. 91– 2) In the next seven years the FLQ exploded over eighty bombs in Montreal together with a few in Quebec City, killing six people and injuring many more. It was a small group, tiny and amateurish in comparison with the IRA, but difficult for the police to deal with because it was organized on a cellular basis, with members of one cell not knowing the members of others. Several cells were detected and their members imprisoned, but other cells remained operative. In October 1970 the FLQ staged its most dramatic event, that brought it worldwide publicity but also resulted in its demise. One cell kidnapped a Quebecois cabinet minister and subsequently murdered him; another cell kidnapped a British consular official, who was released after several weeks, but with permanent damage to his health. The Quebec government, supported by the Mayor of


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Montreal, asked the federal government to send troops to the city and Trudeau invoked the War Measures Act to legalize this. The Act also gave draconian powers to the police, who misused them by harassing and arresting radicals, some of whom were not even Quebecois nationalists. However, the FLQ kidnappers were sent to Cuba (a condition for the release of the British official), some of its supporters became police informers (see de Vault, 1982) and the organization disintegrated. Public reactions to this crisis were overwhelmingly supportive of the government. A survey showed that 89 per cent of EnglishCanadians and 86 per cent of French-Canadians approved of the invocation of the War Measures Act (Morchain, 1984, p. 73). On the other hand, there was clearly much support for constitutional change, though not for terrorist tactics to bring it about. In October 1967 several leading Liberals, notably René Levesque, left the Liberal Party to form a movement in favour of ‘sovereignty association’ for Quebec, defined as political autonomy for the province while retaining an economic union with the rest of Canada. In 1968 Levesque formed the Parti Quebecois with this objective, attracting to itself most members of two minor separatist parties that already existed. In 1969 a crowd estimated at 50,000 demonstrated against a government bill that guaranteed the continuance of both English-language and French-language schools in Quebec, with immigrants being entitled to choose between them (McRoberts and Posgate, 1980, p. 162). From 1970 onwards the Parti Quebecois contested provincial elections with mounting success, winning a majority in 1976. René Levesque and his colleagues thus canalized nationalist emotions into support for a party that proved to be entirely constitutional in methods and democratic in spirit. The party drew most of its early support from younger voters in Montreal, but as the years went by support was diffused throughout the province, particularly among better educated elements of the population. There was a negative correlation between frequency of religious attendance and support for the new party, which in itself indicated how far Quebec nationalism had changed in character from the earlier versions that had been articulated by clerics like Groulx and Villeneuve (Hamilton and Pinard, 1976, also Blais and Crete, 1986). Despite its democratic character, the party’s victory in 1976 sent shock-waves across the country; only nine years after the celebrations marking the centenary of confederation, the second-largest province seemed bent on secession. Public reactions across Canada to this proposition are shown in Table 8.2, based on a survey conducted in 1977.

Support for Quebec independence by region and ethnicity

Source: Ornstein, Stevenson and Williams, 1978, p. 160.

Table 8.2

162 Nationalism and National Integration


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In two respects the reactions of English-Canadians are interesting. One was that only 58 per cent of the voters were definitely opposed to the secession of Quebec. Opinions about the matter were varied, but there was no overwhelming opposition to the proposition that Canada might, in some circumstances, be partitioned. The other interesting finding is that the second most common response was that of favouring Quebec independence, but only if there were no economic agreement between Quebec and the rest. The most likely reason for this response was that Canada imposed high customs duties on some goods, notably clothing and furniture, for the purpose of protecting industries that were mainly located in Quebec. If Quebec were to secure political independence, people in the rest of Canada might be best served by a reduction or abolition of these duties so as to import the goods from wherever offered the best buy. A secondary reason may, of course, have been a natural if slightly spiteful feeling that Quebec should not be permitted to have her cake and eat it too. However, when asked whether the rest of Canada should be prepared to negotiate an economic agreement with Quebec if the province actually achieved independence, slightly more than half the English-Canadian respondents gave an affirmative answer. In view of these relatively tolerant responses to the prospect of secession, it is not surprising to find that only 14 per cent of respondents favoured the use of force to prevent secession. There was never any possibility of armed conflict over this issue in Canada, as occurred in the United States in 1860–5 and in Ireland in 1919–21. After securing office in 1976, the first major decision of the Parti Quebecois government was to introduce a Bill regulating the use of language in the province. Bill 101 was not only the first but also the most important piece of legislation to be passed by this government. Its provisions, in outline, were as follows: (1) (2)

(3) (4)

Quebec was to be officially unilingual, with French the only language of legislation, administration and the courts. All enterprises with fifty or more employees were to adopt French as their language of work, though with the possibility that national firms with head offices in Montreal, but most of their workers outside the province, might apply for exemption. All public signs and advertisements were to be in French only. Access to English-language schools was to be confined to children of parents of whom at least one had been educated in English in Quebec.

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One or two large commercial firms objected in principle to the provisions about the use of French and moved their head offices to Toronto. After the dust had settled, however, it became clear both that the Bill would remedy several long-standing grievances of the francophone majority and that its implementation would not be excessively hard on the anglophone minority. Anglophone managers and business executives did not lose their positions as a result of the Bill, though they had to make the transition to conducting their business in French. After ten years, the only provision of Bill 101 that remained contentious was its least important provision, that all public signs should be in French. As noted earlier, it is natural for people to become irritated by enforced changes of language which seem to serve no functional purpose. When a sign advertising ‘Joe’s Restaurant’ had to be changed to ‘Restaurant Joe’, on the ground that the French language contains no apostrophe, people whose first language was English were annoyed every time they saw the sign. When a Liberal government replaced that of the Parti Quebecois in 1985, this provision of the Bill was the only one that they sought to change, not by legislative action but by encouraging an appeal to the Quebec Supreme Court. The appeal was successful, but a bomb was exploded in a store that put up bilingual signs and in response to threats of further bombs the owners of the store (which is part of a chain) immediately agreed to go back to French-only signs. This episode neatly illustrates the emotions that can be aroused by the symbolic use of language. The other major initiative taken by the Parti Quebecois government was the organization of a referendum to decide whether or not the provincial government should enter into negotiations with the federal government to establish a form of sovereignty association. Levesque had promised at the time of the 1976 election to make no moves towards this objective without first having it endorsed by popular vote, and he kept his word. The referendum was held in May 1980 and was organized with scrupulous fairness by the provincial government. Following the example of the British 1975 referendum on membership of the European Community, campaign committees were established for both sides of the issue with the provincial administration not directly involved. On the ‘yes’ side, the Parti Quebecois conducted an educative campaign, organizing innumerable meetings and discussion groups on the issue. On the other side, the opponents of change received substantial support from outside as well as inside the province. Liberal MPs distributed propaganda produced in Ottawa explaining


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the advantages that Quebec derived from federation. The nine anglophone premiers all announced that their provinces would be opposed to an economic association if Quebec were to secede, thus raising the stakes. The federal Ministry of Health chose the campaign period to launch a drive against excessive drinking, so that the hoardings of Quebec were plastered with federal posters bearing the words: ‘Non, merci’. Pierre Trudeau, then prime minister, spoke to a mass meeting in Montreal urging people to vote against the proposal. All this outside intervention mitigated against an affirmative vote, as did the realization by some (if only a few) electors that an independent Quebec might be involved in diplomatic conflict with the rest of Canada. Quebec government agencies had published maps showing Labrador to be part of the province, although the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council had ruled in 1927 that Labrador was within the jurisdiction of Newfoundland. Some of the more extreme nationalists suggested that an independent Quebec would lay claim to part of the Canadian lands in the Arctic, and should be prepared to take this issue to the United Nations. This suggestion raised the possibility that an independent Quebec might be in conflict not only with Canada but also with the United States, which had a large air base in Labrador and a strategic interest in the Arctic. The result of the referendum was defeat for the proposal by a margin of 60 to 40. As virtually all anglophone voters were opposed, it was clear that francophone voters had split almost exactly 50–50. This was a grievous blow to the Levesque government, but one that did not diminish its popularity, for in the 1981 election it was returned to office with an even larger majority. There were fierce debates within the party about its reaction to the referendum result, as there had been among Scottish and Welsh nationalists following their referendum defeats in 1979, but Levesque secured firm support for his preferred policy of accepting the verdict of the electors and dropping secession from the party’s program. During the campaign Trudeau declared that a negative vote would not imply an absence of constitutional change, as his government was formulating plans for constitutional revision. While he was not in any way specific, the inference was drawn by many that he hoped to amend the British North America Act in ways that would benefit Quebec. In the event, this inference proved false. The complex negotiations and arguments about Trudeau’s proposed constitutional revision were finally resolved at a private meeting of

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the nine anglophone provincial premiers and the formula that was agreed upon for future constitutional amendment did not give Quebec the veto power which Quebec politicians of all parties had always regarded as essential. In consequence, the Quebec government refused to endorse the accord and the Quebecois felt betrayed once again.

In conclusion Anglo-French relationships in Canada have clearly undergone many vicissitudes since confederation. It is possible to believe that the basis has now been laid for better relations. Outside Quebec, the measures taken since the report of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism have removed virtually all the bases for FrenchCanadian grievances. Many anglophone Canadians have been irritated by some of the measures that have been taken, but these irritations are dying down with the passage of time. Within Quebec, Bill 101 has ensured the survival of the French language and culture and removed the bases for the resentments and fears from which many Quebec citizens previously suffered. The younger members of the anglophone community have either decided to move out of Quebec—the choice made by most in the 1980s—or are becoming effectively bilingual. Census figures showed that the proportion of anglophone Quebec residents who were bilingual increased from 37 per cent in 1971 to 53 per cent in 1981, and it has undoubtedly increased since 1981. It is therefore possible to be optimistic, but Anglo-French relationships are so delicate that confidence about this would be misplaced. In the first four months of 1988 several developments sharpened debate about linguistic issues. The government of Quebec appealed against the decision of the Quebec Supreme Court that bilingual signs should be permitted. Pending a resolution of this issue by the Canadian Supreme Court, bilingual signs were banned. The Commissioner for Official Languages stated in his annual report that the actions of the Quebec provincial government had humiliated the sizeable anglophone minority in Quebec. The Quebec Legislative Assembly responded to this attack by passing a unanimous vote of censure on the Commissioner. Outside Quebec, the Canadian Supreme Court declared that Saskatchewan and Alberta were still bound by a law passed for the North-West Territories in 1886 insisting that all legislation should be published in both French and English and that both languages


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could be used in court hearings. The Saskatchewan Legislative Assembly promptly repealed the 1886 law and the Premier of Quebec congratulated the Saskatchewan Premier on this action, while other French-Canadian spokesmen deplored it. The conflict between the territorial principle of bilingualism and the personality principle of bilingualism was thus brought back into the forefront of political debate. In this situation it is difficult to make any prediction about future relationships between the two main language groups.

3

ETHNIC DIVERSITY AND MULTICULTURALISM

A surprising fact about Canada is that, although the country is populated almost entirely by immigrants and their descendants, there has been very little debate about immigration policy. As the historian of that policy has said: ‘Canada has had no settled view of immigration. No common convictions about it exist among Canadians’ (Hawkins, 1972, p. 33). In this respect Canada is quite unlike the other three English-speaking societies composed mainly of immigrants, the United States, Australia and New Zealand. Immigrants have arrived of their own volition; some have been more welcome than others and some have been turned away at the gates; but there has not been a clear national policy arrived at after open debate, let alone a national plan to compare with the plans for attracting immigrants to Australia. To say that there has been little public debate about immigration policy is not to say that there has been no policy, as was very largely the position in the United Kingdom before 1962. The civil servants and ministers responsible for dealing with prospective immigrants have certainly had policies. They were firmly and openly opposed to the admission of Chinese immigrants up to 1956. They were quietly opposed to the admission of blacks, who were commonly turned away on the ground that their health would not stand the Canadian winter. They were secretly opposed to the admission of Jews, showing a callous disregard for the plight of German Jewish refugees in the 1930s and 1940s that made Canada the least willing of any western democracy to accept them (see Abella and Troper, 1982). Since about 1960 these prejudices have been largely eliminated. However, officials responsible for issuing immigration visas have a very large measure of administrative discretion. Their concern is to admit immigrants who will help the Canadian economy, not be a burden on health or other social services and not threaten Canadian

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security. They are much more selective than British immigration officers and somewhat more selective than their Australian equivalents. Applicants have to provide evidence of their education, financial standing and fluency in English or French. They have to have a job waiting for them unless they are the last remaining members of families otherwise in Canada. They have to have a thorough medical examination and their police records (if any exist) will be examined. Security checks disqualify applicants thought likely to be supporters of the Communist Party and a lengthy interview with an immigration officer may result in the applicant being rejected as unlikely to adjust to Canadian society. The extent of administrative discretion is such that an academic critic has described Canadian immigration policy as ‘a secret policy, secretly administered’ (Whitaker, 1987, p. 25). The result of Canada’s immigration history and policies is a population much more mixed than that of Britain or Australia. The first census after confederation showed that there were about two million settlers whose place of origin was the British Isles; about one million French settlers; and about a quarter of a million others, the great majority of whom were of German origin. Forty years later, in 1911, there were four million of British or Irish origin, two million of French origin, and one million others, the largest contingents being German, Scandinavian and Ukrainian. The rate of immigration then slowed until 1945, but the postwar period has been marked by an influx from various parts of Europe together with a good many Asian immigrants, now admitted without discrimination. The ethnic origins of the population in 1981 are shown in Table 8.3. The non-British and non-French immigrants did not distribute themselves at random over the provinces of Canada. Very few settled in the Atlantic provinces, which remain overwhelmingly British and Irish in composition apart from the French element in New Brunswick. Few settled in Quebec until after 1945, when sizeable numbers of southern Europeans moved into Montreal. But by 1971 this ‘third force’ of immigrants constituted 29 per cent of the population of Ontario, 47 per cent of the population of the prairie provinces and 34 per cent of the population of British Columbia. A recent development of some importance is the arrival of sizeable numbers of black immigrants from the Caribbean. They have settled in eastern cities, with over 100,000 now living in the Toronto area. Unfortunately, young members of this community have shown exactly the same tendency to underachievement in the educational system that young blacks in Britain have shown.


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Table 8.3 Ethnic origins of the Canadian population in 1981

Source: Canadian Census, 1981. Note: 1Most of the Other Europeans are of mixed European origin and some are Jewish (not distinguished in the census by country of origin).

Starting in 1984, some Ontario school boards have been sending groups of teachers and educational psychologists to work in West Indian schools for a period, in the hope that they will find ways of improving the performance of blacks in Canadian schools. It is too early to say whether this strategy will be successful. As in British cities, there have been cases of inter-racial assault. However, the unemployment rate is lower than in Britain, the housing situation is not so bad and there have been no racial riots. Canadian attitudes towards the third force of immigrants have to be divided into French-Canadian and English-Canadian attitudes. The French-Canadian attitude was indifference mixed with suspicion until after 1945, when these feelings were replaced by hostility because the increasingly cosmopolitan character of Montreal was viewed as a threat to the dominance of French culture there. This hostility was communicated to the federal government and it exercised a ‘substantial influence on immigration policy of a negative kind for almost twenty years’ (Hawkins, 1972, p. 79). English-Canadians have passed through three phases, from a firm belief that the immigrants should be assimilated to British culture through a half-hearted belief in the sociology of the melting pot to an acceptance of cultural pluralism. The belief in assimilation faded away in the inter-war period, when it became clear that the non-

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British and non-French settlers were too numerous and too geographically concentrated for assimilation to be a practical proposition. The idea of Canadian society as a melting pot was propagated in the inter-war years but it never really caught on. In part, this was because it was an American idea and American ideas (as distinct from American habits) have always been suspect in Canada. In part, it was because it did not seem as plausible when applied to the Ukrainian and Scandinavian farmers scattered over the prairies as it did when applied to crowded cities like New York and Chicago. In part, it was because Canadians of British and Irish origins showed little inclination to learn from the newcomers or to absorb elements of their cultures. The basic ambition of Anglo-SaxonCeltic Canadians was to continue as they were without change, not to create a new culture blended from the contributions of diverse immigrant groups. In consequence, English-Canadian attitudes drifted in the 1950s and 1960s towards an acceptance of cultural pluralism as the notundesirable character of Canadian society, at least from Ontario to the west coast. The word most commonly used to describe this character was ‘mosaic’. America, they said, forced people into a melting pot, but Canadian society was a mosaic of differing cultures. The term ‘multiculturalism’ was not used until 1971, and then only as an accidental by-product of the Royal Commission on Bilingualism and Biculturalism. The title of this commission caused some offence among Canadians of neither British nor French origin, and it was in response to this that Trudeau proclaimed in 1971 that Canada, though officially bilingual, was multicultural rather than bicultural. The term was used not only to describe a state of affairs, a social fact existing alongside what Canadians insist on calling ‘the French fact’, but also to describe a new government policy. Since 1971, the federal government has had an agency devoted to multicultural affairs with a modest budget for helping ethnic organizations. Grants are provided for training in English or French, for community centres organized on ethnic lines, and for cultural exchanges and ethnic festivals of various kinds. This policy has not proved to be controversial in the way that a British government declaration that England is now a multicultural society would be, or as the Australian government’s multicultural policies are. It is simply accepted by the majority of Canadians as a gesture to the ethnic minorities that gives them some satisfaction and causes no harm to anyone else, apart from a relatively small cost to taxpayers.


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For some anglophone Canadians, a degree of symbolic gratification is apparently gained from the definition of Canadian society as multicultural. A sociologist has put the matter as follows: In the absence of any consensus on the substance of Canadian identity or culture, multiculturalism fills a void, defining Canadian culture in terms of the legitimate ancestral cultures which are the legacy of every Canadian: defining the whole through the sum of its parts. (Weinfeld, 1981, p. 94) As Breton puts it, more pointedly, multiculturalism ‘helps to define a distinct collective identity and thus to differentiate Canadians from Americans’ (Breton, 1986, p. 50). Among some spokesmen for ethnic minorities there is a tendency to make much more of multiculturalism than this, in fact to turn it into a kind of ideology. The House of Commons Standing Committee on Multiculturalism shares in this tendency, declaring in its 1987 report that it wants original language usage to be preserved, cultural diversity to be enhanced, a minister of multiculturalism to be appointed and all cultural agencies in Canada (including the CBC and the Canada Council) to be placed under this minister’s jurisdiction (Multiculturalism Report, 1987, passim). As an example of what might be promoted as a result of reforms along these lines, a former top official of the federal multicultural agency told me that the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra should include Chinese music in its concerts as a gesture to the Chinese minority in that city. The view seems to be that cultural diversity should be regarded as a positive advantage for society and therefore encouraged by the state. Not surprisingly, this view has been poorly regarded by many sociologists. Thus, Porter has argued that it encourages ethnic separation and, if acted upon, would perpetuate what he calls the vertical mosaic and others have called the cultural division of labour, maintaining and perhaps strengthening barriers to upward social mobility (Porter, 1975 and 1979). Brotz has alleged that the ideology and policy of multiculturalism corrupt liberal-democratic and egalitarian ideals ‘by projecting the ideal of Canada as some kind of ethnic zoo where the function of the zoo keeper is to collect as many varieties as possible and exhibit them once a year in some carnival where one can go from booth to booth sampling pizzas, wonton soup and kosher pastramies’ (Brotz, 1980, p. 44). Kallen has stated that multiculturalism does not meet the real needs of Canada’s ethnic minorities:

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It does not support the kinds of mobilization of corporate ethnic group interests necessary for the equalization of access by immigrant ethnic minorities to political, economic and social power in Canadian society. In effect, by stressing the particularistic, expressive functions of immigrant ethnocultures, the multicultural policy shortchanges the goal of national unity; and by ignoring the instrumental functions of ethnic collectivities it shortchanges the goal of ethnic equality. (Kallen, 1982, p. 169) These very pertinent comments suggest that multiculturalism, if turned into an ideology, may not be so harmless as many Canadians seem to believe.

4

THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLES

The 1981 census showed that the Canadian population included 313,655 native Indians, 76,520 Metis (of mixed Indian and French blood) and 23,200 Inuit (the official term for Eskimos). This made a total of 413,380 persons classified as indigenous. In addition there were 78,085 persons of mixed Indian and European (mainly British) origin, who were not so classified. In Chapter 5 the point was made that indigenous peoples have a special claim on society not shared by other ethnic minorities. Through no fault of their own, their means of sustenance and their traditional cultures have been partly destroyed by white settlers; by all liberal standards, they deserve sympathy and help. It is generally agreed that Canadian Indians and Eskimos received better treatment from the white man than American Indians and much better treatment than Australian Aborigines. In view of this, it is somewhat paradoxical that the legal and political uncertainties surrounding native rights are more complex in Canada than in either of the other countries. In this section space forbids more than a very brief indication of the relationship of the Indians to Canadian society and Canadian governments. The Inuit, who are few in number, will not be dealt with. As Indian land rights are now a pressing problem, it will be helpful to sketch their history. When white settlers moved into the St Lawrence valley, they found Indian tribes there who were farming part of the land. Treaties were concluded with these Indians whereby they retained title to some areas but ceded all claims to the rest. As the settlers moved westwards into the great plains of Canada, they


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entered territory where the Indians were hunters rather than farmers, nomadic in that they followed the herds of buffalo and therefore not having a concept of land ownership that the white man could recognize as such. The Canadian government nevertheless entered into treaties with them, partly to avoid the violent clashes that had occurred in the American west and partly out of an ambition to turn the plains Indians into farmers. This was a well-intentioned ambition in view of the fact that the government could anticipate the imminent arrival of large numbers of settlers, determined to farm the land themselves and therefore certain to clear the forests and kill off the buffalo herds. The treaties made were not ungenerous by European standards. The Indians were given title to land equivalent to 160 acres per family—a sizeable plot—together with agricultural implements, the promise of medical and educational services and ongoing grants of so many dollars per head per year. The settlement of the west nevertheless meant the inevitable destruction of the lifestyle of the Indians, a fact that many still resent. These arrangements left the northern parts of Quebec, Ontario and the prairie provinces uncovered by treaties. The greater part of British Columbia was also uncovered. That province had been settled directly by sea rather than by westward expansion; its Indians were not farmers but fishermen on the coast and hunters in the interior; and over most of the territory the white newcomers wanted not to farm the land but to engage in fur-trapping, gold prospecting and, later, forestry. In these circumstances it is not surprising that the question of land ownership was left unsettled, but in the 1980s it is the subject of complex legal disputes. From the 1880s right through to the 1960s the government’s attitude towards the Indians was paternalistic. They were encouraged to live on reserves and farm the land, an activity in which they were not very successful, while the federal government gave them services and subsidies. They were not entitled to vote unless they left the reserves and applied formally to be enfranchised, an irrevocable decision by which they lost their official status and their entitlement to subsidies. If they took this step they became ‘non-Status Indians’, entitled to the same services as any other citizen but not to any special grants or protection. In the 1960s policy changed. By this time a fair number of Indians had left the reserves to find work in the cities, sometimes giving up their official status but more usually not doing so. The government decided on a policy of rapid assimilation. In 1960 all Indian adults were enfranchised. Expenditures on health, welfare and educational

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services were greatly expanded. Little importance was attached to preserving Indian languages or traditions. The intention was to help the Indians achieve something like equality in Canadian society. A government statement issued in 1969 stated clearly that earlier policies had ‘kept the Indian people apart from and behind other Canadians’, whereas the new policies were designed to recognize the Indian right to ‘full and equal participation’ in Canadian life (quoted in Asch, 1984, p. 8). In line with this, the government would not entertain the view that indigenous peoples had land rights surviving from the period before European settlement. Within a few months of becoming Prime Minister, Trudeau made his views on this topic crystal clear. Speaking in Vancouver in January 1969, he said this: Our answer is no. We can’t recognize aboriginal rights because no society can be built on historical might-have-beens. If we think of restoring aboriginal rights to the Indians well what about the French who were defeated at the Plains of Abraham? Shouldn’t we restore rights to them? And what about the Acadians who were deported? Shouldn’t we compensate for this?…What can we do to redeem the past? I can only say as President Kennedy said when he was asked about what he would do to compensate for the injustice that the negroes had received in American society. We will be just in our time. That is all we can do. We must be just today. Within four years, however, a judicial decision had reopened the whole question of aboriginal rights. The Nishga Indians of British Columbia claimed ownership of a large tract of land on the ground that they had always owned it and had not ceded it by treaty. The trial judge and the BC Court of Appeal both dismissed the claim on the ground that there was no evidence of land ownership by the Nishgas that could be recognized under Canadian law. The Canadian Supreme Court was divided, however. Three judges took the view that the Nishgas had once owned the land but had had their title extinguished by colonial ordinances before British Columbia joined the federation. Three judges took the view that the Nishgas still owned the land. The seventh judge held that the claim must fail because the case had been brought under an incorrect procedure. Quite clearly, another such case could easily go the other way. Following this decision, the federal government embarked on a new policy of reaching comprehensive agreements with all tribes that had not entered into treaties. In 1975 an agreement was made concerning the whole northern half of Quebec, under which the


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Indians and Inuit got exclusive use of 5,408 square miles of land, hunting, trapping and fishing rights in a further 60,000 square miles, the right to be consulted over future developments and a cash grant of $225 million, to be paid over a long period (J.Wilson, 1977, p. 29). Negotiations have continued with other organizations representing Indian tribes and sections of the Inuit people, but progress has been painfully slow. At the end of 1985, after twelve years of negotiation, the position was that three comprehensive agreements had been signed, six potential agreements were under active negotiation and fifteen further claims awaited negotiation (Living Treaties: Lasting Agreements, 1985, p. 13). By the end of 1987 the position had not changed, except that the number of claims awaiting negotiation had gone up to eighteen. By March 1987 102 million dollars had been lent to claimants (of which 20 million had been repaid) and a further 34 million dollars had been paid in grants to the Indians for the costs of developing and presenting their claims. In the 1970s there was also a parallel development of significance, namely a tendency to give the Indian Band Councils greater power to manage their own affairs. It should be explained that there are over five hundred Band Councils in Canada, each elected by the members of the Band and responsible for the Band’s collective affairs on the reserves. In 1973 the government accepted proposals made by the National Indian Brotherhood for Indian control over schools on reserves, for a special effort to train Indian teachers and for the revision of the curricula in Indian schools to eliminate the white man’s derogatory image of native peoples and to pass on the values of tribal culture to the next generation. Another step has been the development of certain forms of municipal independence, on an ad hoc basis, to Band Councils. As a small example, where the road from Victoria to Victoria Airport passes through a small Indian reserve there are large advertisement hoardings on each side of the road, the Indian Band in question being exempt from provincial regulations banning such hoardings. There is also a very cheap motel, able to offer low prices partly because its owners were exempt from certain building regulations that applied outside the reserve. In small ways, official opinion began to move away from the ideal of assimilation towards the idea of self-management, which was what spokesmen for the Indians most wanted. In 1982 the political atmosphere was considerably changed when the constitutional amendment that included the Charter of Rights and the new amendment formula also included a paragraph guaranteeing the rights of aboriginal peoples. This was inserted after determined and militant lobbying by Indian pressure groups, not

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because any of the Canadian governments wanted it but as a way of keeping the Indians quiet. The clause was actually added by the federal government in January 1981, immediately after the Foreign Affairs Committee of the English House of Commons had recommended that the proposed constitutional amendment be rejected. In the first week of November 1981, when the provincial premiers reached agreement on a revised draft of the amendment, the clause about aboriginal rights was deleted. At the end of November, following intense Indian pressure, the clause was reinstated, the premiers being prepared to accept it on condition that the word ‘existing’ was added to qualify the rights that were guaranteed (Sanders, 1983, pp. 314– 21). The actual wording of Section 34 of the Constitution Act, 1982 is as follows: 34 (1) The existing aboriginal and treaty rights of the aboriginal peoples of Canada are hereby recognized and affirmed. (2) In this Act, ‘aboriginal peoples of Canada’ includes the Indian, Inuit and Metis peoples of Canada. The extraordinary feature of this new provision is that nobody knows what the existing rights of the aboriginal peoples are. The democratic constitutions of the world are full of ambiguous clauses, but this is perhaps the only one that entrenches a blank cheque. To fill out the cheque, it was agreed in 1983 (and added as Section 37) that a Constitution Conference would be held in 1984 to identify and define the rights in question. When this conference met, the federal government tabled a document stating that the aboriginal peoples have ‘the right to self-governing institutions’, subject to agreements to be negotiated with the federal and provincial governments. Issuing this statement proved to be a major tactical error. On the one hand, the words ‘self-governing’ encouraged spokesmen for the Indians to make extravagant claims about their inherent rights to political independence. On the other hand, the statement upset several of the provincial premiers, both because they had not been consulted and because they were quite unwilling to agree that the Indians had a right to independence, overriding provincial and perhaps even federal authority. The 1984 conference was a somewhat unmanageable body with seventeen participants: the Prime Minister, ten provincial premiers, the chief ministers of the North-West Territories and the Yukon, and spokesmen for four associations of native peoples. A consensus was never likely and nothing like a consensus emerged. All that could be agreed was to meet again in the following year. In fact the conference


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was convened twice more, in 1985 and 1987, but failed to reach agreement on either occasion. The attempt to define the rights of the aboriginal peoples has therefore been abandoned and Article 34 of the Constitution Act remains a somewhat empty declaration. The whole story emphasizes the stupidity of raising nationalistic aspirations that cannot be satisfied. Nationalism is too powerful an ideology to be trifled with. This lesson was underlined in May 1988, when the chairman of one of the Indian associations—a body with the somewhat pretentious title of the Assembly of First Nations— said that the upcoming generation of Indians would turn to violence and terrorism if Indian claims to land rights and self-government were not settled by negotiation between governments and the present generation of Indian leaders. On the following day an armed group of Mohawk Indians blockaded a main highway leading out of Montreal. A central problem for negotiators is that the social situation of Indian peoples is so varied that it is almost impossible to agree upon any formula that is generally applicable. At the end of the 1970s there were 573 Indian Bands occupying 2,287 reserves, with a population approaching 300,000. Forty-eight per cent of the Bands had populations of under 300 people; 39 per cent had populations of between 300 and 1,000; and only 13 per cent had populations of over 1,000 (Gibbins and Ponting, 1986, pp. 242–3). The Bands are to some extent artificial creations of the federal government, their generally small size resulting in the division of the tribes that once had a sense of social and political unity. In the southern regions of Canada it would not be feasible to reunite these tribes, so that the only sensible solution of the issue is to extend the kind of municipal quasi-autonomy that many of the Bands already enjoy. In the sparsely-populated northern regions of Canada there is more tribal unity and there are large areas of land that could feasibly be designated as under tribal control. The main problem in those regions is the control of natural resources. It is an established fact in Canadian law that natural resources belong to the provinces, i.e. to the Crown in Alberta, or wherever. Provincial governments may be willing to agree that Indian tribes should be given fishing and hunting rights over sizeable areas, together with control of education and other services necessary to the preservation of Indian culture, but may not be willing to surrender their ownership and right to exploit mineral resources in these areas. In British Columbia there are also many tracts of land, now claimed by Indians, where white residents have established legal ownership or where the right to cut timber was transferred to lumber companies by legally

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binding agreements made many years ago. Such issues are not easily resolved. In this situation Hawkes is almost certainly correct in saying that ‘no single approach or model will meet the needs or aspirations of all aboriginal peoples. A universal formula is doomed to failure’ (Hawkes, 1985, p. 23). A universal formula is, however, what many Indian spokesmen want. At this stage no predictions are possible. What is clear, however, is that policy towards the indigenous peoples of Canada has moved decisively away from the objective of integrating them into Canadian social and political life, towards the objective of giving them as much cultural and political autonomy as is compatible with the interests of the rest of the population.

5


The level of national integration in Canada is clearly lower than in the United Kingdom. As will be seen, it is also lower than in Australia and it may well be lower than in any other advanced democratic state. The most important of the reasons for this is the cultural duality between anglophone and francophone Canadians. Language cleavages inevitably create a social gulf, which in this case has been deepened by religious differences and political grievances. For the whole of the period up to the Second World War, francophone Canada was entirely Catholic while anglophone Canada was primarily Protestant. This led nationalists like Villeneuve to believe that they were defending their faith as well as protecting their language. The political grievances have been mentioned earlier in this chapter and need not be recapitulated. It is noteworthy, however, that some of these grievances, such as those relating to Riel, the Boer War and conscription, have made French Canada’s relationship to English Canada more like Ireland’s relationship to Britain than like Scotland’s relationship to England. Another aspect of the situation is that there is little cultural exchange between the two communities, whose relations are well captured by the novelist’s phrase ‘the two solitudes’ (MacLennan, 1965). They do not read the same books or watch the same television programs. The English-Canadian cuisine has been hardly affected by the French-Canadian cuisine, to the great loss of English Canada. There is often a failure to understand the attitudes of the other community. There are two distinct intellectual élites, with only a handful of individuals able to bridge the gap.


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This lack of social integration between the two main ethnic groups in Canada is supplemented by multicultural attitudes that somewhat divide anglophone Canadians and by the almost unbridgeable gulf between the white population and the indigenous peoples. Canadian society is clearly characterized by cultural pluralism. The Canadian economy is also less well integrated than that of Britain or, as will be seen, that of Australia. The various regions of Canada differ greatly in their economic resources and activities. Policies that help one region may be costly to another. Thus, the protection and federal subsidies given to the textile and clothing industries help Quebec at some cost to consumers and taxpayers elsewhere. The Free Trade Agreement between Canada and the United States that was negotiated in 1987 would benefit most of Canada but is seen in Ontario as a threat to that province’s industries. The placing of federal contracts is widely viewed by Canadians in terms of regional gains or losses. For example, the 1986 decision to award the contract for the maintenance of a new fighter aircraft to a firm in Montreal rather than to one in Winnipeg, though the latter offered lower prices for the same degree of technical efficiency, was generally regarded as a federal attempt to buy political support in Quebec at the expense of the west. In ways like this, issues of economic policy tend to divide the nation rather than to unify it. At the same time, the various ethnic groups in Canada differ appreciably in their degree of economic success. This was demonstrated clearly by Porter’s analysis in the 1960s (Porter, 1965). Since then, the francophones of Quebec have improved their position considerably, but there is no evidence of a general trend towards ethnic equality in terms of occupation and average incomes. Canadians of British extraction are still firmly at the top; the indigenous peoples are still at the bottom; Canadians of Asian and West Indian origin are still next to the bottom; and people of French, German, Ukrainian, Scandinavian and Italian origin are still ranged in intermediate positions. Political integration suffers from the long-standing tendency of Canadians to vote one way in federal elections, another way in provincial elections. The lack of a clear ideological gap between the two main parties partly accounts for this, but in some provinces voters have supported parties at the provincial level that are quite different from the national parties. This is conspicuously true of Quebec, which has had Union Nationale and Parti Quebecois governments in the postwar period; it is also true of British Columbia, where the Social Credit Party has ruled for most of the time since 1952.

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In terms of political attitudes, the most significant tendency is for Canadians to put a certain distance between themselves and the national government. Provincial governments both provide them with many of their social services and defend provincial interests in relation to Ottawa. The federal government tends to be somewhat unpopular. In the autumn of 1982, after the Liberal government had succeeded in its efforts to patriate the constitution and give Canada a Charter of Rights and Freedoms, only 25 per cent of a national sample of electors said they were satisfied with the government’s performance, compared with 73 per cent who were dissatisfied (Birch, 1986, p. 114). In December 1987, after the Conservative government had succeeded in negotiating a free trade agreement with the United States, the Prime Minister’s ratings showed that only 21 per cent of the population thought him the best person to fill that post (Toronto Globe and Mail, 31 December 1987). It is the lot of federal Prime Ministers and ministers to be unpopular, to a far greater extent than provincial premiers and ministers. Repeated public opinion polls also show that Canadian electors are sceptical about the national representative process, the proportions saying that Parliament (or MPs) soon lose touch with electors varying between 63 per cent in 1965 and 75 per cent in 1981 (Birch, 1986, p. 113). The main feature of Canadian nationalism is that the sense of national identity is weaker in Canada than in most other developed states. Canadians have neither a common language nor a common culture to bolster nationalistic feelings. All groups have been substantially influenced by American culture, with even the Quebecois eating chauds chiens, but that weakens rather than strengthens the feeling of being Canadian. Furthermore, in contrast to the Swiss and the Belgians, Canadians do not have a shared history to unite them. The history of Canada is a story of communal rivalries and conflicts, not a story of unity against the outside world. This story has always come in two different versions, an English version and a French version, not very similar in content. It is not certain whether it is better or worse for national unity that in many Canadian high schools history has in any case disappeared as a separate subject, being subsumed under the heading of social studies and frequently taught with American textbooks. The consequence of this is that many young Canadians know more about American history than about the history of their own country. These facts raise the question of how Canadians identify their society and its characteristics. The answer for anglophones is that they identify it in terms of its differences from the country to which


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it is most similar, namely the United States. The similarities are obvious. As long ago as 1887 it was being argued that Canadians preferred American books and journals to British ones (Chaiton and McDonald, 1977, p. 14). In 1938 the historian Arthur Lower argued that Canada was ‘overwhelmed’ with American movies, magazines, fashions, foods, comic strips and so forth. ‘In other words’, he said, ‘the day-to-day expressions of Canadian life are completely American’ (Anderson, 1938, p. 8). This is even more true today, when many Canadians spend their evenings watching American television. What other people, it may be asked, habitually watch television news programmes broadcast in and for another country? The differences lie not in culture but in social and political attitudes. In a word, Canadians are more conservative than Americans. This goes right back to the United Empire Loyalists, who moved northwards into Upper Canada because they could not accept the liberalism of the American revolutionaries. In modern times, Canadians are more conservative in a social sense, being more reserved, more patient, more puritanical, less enterprising. They are also more conservative in a political sense, being less individualistic, more law-abiding, more willing to accept authority and more apt to admire the police. It cannot be denied, however, that the differences are getting smaller all the time. English-Canadians have become very largely Americanized and in some respects French-Canadians are becoming Americanized too. The question of whether this matters is one to which widely different answers are given. The conservative philosopher George Grant thinks it matters a great deal. His book, Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (1965), is very well summarized by its title. On the other hand, Pierre Trudeau appears to think that it is unimportant. This is not because he has any positive wish for Canada to be Americanized, but because he believes that nationalism is an unfortunate ideology. Like Acton and Kedourie, he is opposed to nationalism on principle, but while Acton preferred empires and Kedourie appears to do the same, Trudeau looks forward to a world in which national pride will disappear and multiculturalism will be universally accepted. In such a world the state would be merely a mechanism for providing services, not an object of loyalty and passion. Canada is just such a state, and could be an example to the polyethnic states of the Third World. More than that, even: ‘Canadian federalism is an experiment of major proportions; it could become a brilliant prototype for the moulding of tomorrow’s civilization’ (Trudeau, 1977, p. 179).

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The historian Ramsay Cook takes the same line. In Canada, he asserts, ‘we have had too much nationalism, not too little’ (Cook, 1977, p. 7). In answer to the question of what can hold Canada together in the absence of nationalism, he says this: The nation-state serves the practical purpose of organizing groups of people into manageable units and providing them with services which they need and which they can share: a railway, a medicare system, a publicly owned broadcasting system, an art gallery, an experimental farm, a manpower retraining program, a guarantee of equality for linguistic rights. (Cook, 1977, p. 8) What gives this formulation away is that the last ‘service’ is hardly on a par with the others. The first six functions ascribed to the state could all be carried out by a reasonably competent team of bureaucrats, whereas the seventh requires political leadership, statesmanship and authority. As soon as these qualities are needed, it becomes necessary to have some degree of nationalism to give political leaders the authority they require to carry out their tasks. If Trudeau and Cook are unconvincing guides, it may nevertheless be possible to accept the verdict of Mildred Schwartz, a political sociologist. Writing of Canada, she has observed that ‘the satisfaction of material needs and the provision of political stability provide, as it were, alternatives to a high level of consensus’ (Schwartz, 1967, p. 248). This is just about right. Canada is a prosperous and spacious country, secure in democratic freedoms and essentially stable in spite of the problem of Quebecois nationalism. It has several advantages over its southern neighbour, including a much lower level of personal violence and the relative absence of slums. It is a country that EnglishCanadians are quietly content with, though a diffidence born of disunity and proximity to a more powerful and self-confident neighbour inhibits the development of chauvinism. Feeling chauvinistic is one of the minor pleasures of life that the British and the Australians enjoy in full measure, the Canadians hardly at all. But it is not one of the major pleasures of life.

9

National integration in Australia 1

THE AUSTRALIAN STATE

Unlike the United Kingdom and Canada, the political entity called Australia was created at one fell swoop, by agreement among the six colonies that came together to form a federal union in 1900. Though varying a little in their historical origins, these colonies were strikingly similar in terms of their social composition and their level of economic prosperity. They had been internally self-governing for some time before uniting. Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia and Tasmania all secured responsible self-government (subject to the overriding British control of foreign affairs) in 1856; Queensland separated from New South Wales and gained equal status in 1859; and Western Australia reached the same constitutional position in 1890. The establishment of federal union between these six colonies was the result of the development of nationalist sentiments, focused on Australia as a whole, in the last two decades of the nineteenth century. These sentiments first found positive expression in the labour movement (which from that period onwards has exerted more political influence than the labour movement of any other country); they were then expressed through literary journals; and they were sharpened by economic ambitions and international developments. Australian trade unions first combined across colonial boundaries in 1876, when the seamen’s unions of Melbourne and Sydney joined forces to form the Federated Seamen’s Union of Australasia. Their first action was to launch a successful strike against the employment of Chinese seamen on Australian ships. In 1879 an International Trade Union Congress was held, with delegates from all six colonies, this initiative being repeated in 1884 and subsequently followed by annual or biannual congresses. The policies adopted by the first two congresses included the imposition of a maximum working day of eight hours in the six colonies, improved legislative control of factory conditions, the adoption of protective tariffs in those colonies that 183

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did not have them, and the prohibition of Chinese immigration. In 1886 the miners followed the example of the seamen by founding the Amalgamated Miners’ Association, with branches in all six colonies, and in the same year the Amalgamated Shearers’ Association was established (Greenwood, 1955, pp. 154–7). The unionists believed that, in a continent where capital and labour were becoming more mobile, amalgamation or federation was a necessary step to enhance union influence. Another significant development was the establishment of the Sydney Bulletin in 1880, followed by the Brisbane Boomerang seven years later. Both these journals were self-consciously nationalistic, featuring articles, short stories and poems by Australian writers on Australian themes, preferably written in a direct and distinctively Australian style. The Bulletin, which survives to this day, was particularly influential, achieving a wide circulation throughout the six colonies within a few years of its foundation. Its slogan was ‘Australia for the Australians’. In the visual arts, the 1880s saw the emergence of the ‘Heidelberg School’ of Australian painters, a group of artists, influenced by the French impressionists, who set out with great success to capture the unique qualities of Australian light and the Australian landscape. Their first exhibition was held in Melbourne (of which Heidelberg is a suburb) in 1889; they brought immediate pleasure and pride to their viewers; and their paintings are now prominently featured in public art galleries in all major Australian cities. The painters as well as the writers played a part, though a smaller part, in the raising of national consciousness. At the explicitly political level, the move towards unity was stimulated by the desire to create a common tariff and common market; by alarm at the German seizure of most of New Guinea in 1884; and by the view that the Australian colonies shared interests in the South Pacific area that could best be protected by the creation of a single Australian state with unified defence forces. A convention was held, without success, in 1891. However, this was followed by a further convention, in 1897–9, at which delegates from the six colonies reached agreement on a draft federal constitution. This document received popular approval by referendum in each of the colonies, was submitted to the United Kingdom, and was enacted by the British Parliament without significant change in 1900. The Commonwealth of Australia then came into existence in 1901. The constitution followed the American example quite closely. The federal Parliament was given a list of legislative powers, with all other powers assigned to the states. The rights of small states were

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protected by the establishment of a Senate, composed of an equal number of representatives from each state and enjoying equal legislative powers with the House of Representatives except in regard to financial matters. These rights were further protected by a provision for constitutional amendment that required any proposed change to be approved by a majority of the voters both in the Commonwealth as a whole and in at least four of the six states. The factors working for political unity in the federation have been strong and can be simply enumerated. These include a similarity of history, political institutions and political traditions in the six states; a marked degree of ethnic and cultural homogeneity from the early settlements until the late 1940s; the early growth of a system of highly disciplined political parties that dominated the Senate as well as the House, thus making the Senate largely ineffectual in its intended role as a protector of the rights of smaller states; and the development of a powerful Labour Party that has seen federalism as a barrier to some of its economic plans and has called for the replacement of the federal system by a unitary system of government. The factors making for the continuance of state powers are slightly less obvious but equally effective. One of them is geographical. Each of the Australian states is dominated by its capital city, which serves also as its main port. Roads and railways were built outwards from each capital into the surrounding country, the railways having gauges that varied (as they still do) from state to state, and interstate communications being relatively poor until the growth of air services after the Second World War. About 70 per cent of the entire Australian population live in these state capitals, which thus have a natural importance far beyond that exercised by Edinburgh, Cardiff or the provincial capitals of Canada. Victoria, Regina and Halifax are insignificant as cities and as foci of loyalty in comparison with Perth, Adelaide and Brisbane. Another factor is historical. Australia is unique among federal democracies in that all except one of its constituent states had a considerable history of largely independent self-government before joining in federal union. It is therefore not surprising that the institutional life of these states continued without much immediate change after the Commonwealth was established. State bureaucracies were entrenched and maintained their structure without substantial revision. State politics have provided a satisfying career for generations of politicians, very few of whom have thought it desirable to move from the state to the federal arena. Since the 1920s only two men, Lyons and Menzies, have gone on from holding

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ministerial office at the state level to holding the highest office at federal level. In addition, most voluntary associations and interest groups continued for some time after federation to be organized on a state rather than a Commonwealth basis. As Joan Rydon has pointed out, ‘many churches and other associations were incorporated at state level; many professional groups were subject to state registration’ (Rydon, 1986, p. 7). Some of these bodies established federal organizations quickly after federation but others were much more slow to do so. The Presbyterian churches united in 1907 but the Baptist churches did not follow suit until 1925. The state architectural associations established a Federal Council in 1915 but the Royal Australian Institute of Architects was not created until 1930 (Rydon, 1986, p. 5). The state medical associations got together more slowly, not establishing a Federal Council until 1933 and not creating the Australian Medical Association until 1961. Because of these and other factors, the federalized structure of government has never seriously been threatened by the unifying forces in Australian politics. To turn Australia into a unitary state would upset many entrenched interests and bring about a drastic change in the pattern of political organization. It has never been likely that a proposal to do this would overcome the difficult hurdle of the Australian procedure for constitutional amendment. The history of attempts at constitutional amendment reveals that proposals to increase the scope of Commonwealth powers have in nearly all cases failed to secure the required majorities in a referendum. Voters agreed in 1910 and 1929 to technical amendments enlarging the power of the Commonwealth to take over and manage state debts; they agreed in 1946 that the Commonwealth should have power to provide a wide range of social benefits; and they accepted in 1967 that the Commonwealth should have power (along with the states and territories) to pass ‘special laws’ regarding Aborigines. However, eighteen proposals to extend Commonwealth power over economic issues have all been rejected, as have a proposal to give the Commonwealth power to regulate ‘essential services’, a proposal to require all state houses of parliament to be elected directly by the people, and a proposal to require substantial equality in the population of electoral constituencies for all legislative houses. In all, 28 of the 36 proposed amendments to the constitution have been rejected by the voters. It does not follow from this that the Australian constitution is unduly rigid. It has been stretched by judicial interpretations, some of which have shown remarkable elasticity in extending the range of


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federal authority. The practical powers of the federal government have also been greatly increased by the financial dependence of the states on Commonwealth grants, following the monopoly of income tax that the Commonwealth secured during the Second World War. The point is not that Commonwealth governments have been greatly hamstrung or frustrated by the federal system, only that the federal structure of Australian institutions determines the channels through which political activity has to be directed. As will be shown, the extent of national integration in Australia is very considerable, but the federal system itself seems virtually indestructible. Even the federal executive of the Australian Labour Party, so long in favour of establishing a unitary system of government, has now accepted the inevitable in this regard. There is one exception to this general history of stability in the federal system, namely that in 1933 Western Australia proposed to secede from the federation. The westerners had always had doubts about the advantages of federation and there had for some time been a few politicians who favoured secession. The eruptive factor that persuaded the majority of westerners to embrace this objective was the impact of the depression on the state’s economy. In Greenwood’s words, ‘the economic ills of the state were responsible for transforming secession from a goal favoured by a few extremists into a movement expressive of an almost universal dissatisfaction with existing conditions’ (Greenwood, 1946, p. 163). The proposal to secede was put to a referendum by the state government and endorsed by a vote of 138,653 to 70,706. The case for secession, carefully argued in a document prepared by the state government, was based on four propositions. First, the high protective tariff imposed to shelter Australian industries from competition had put a heavy burden on Western Australia, whose economy at the time depended almost entirely on primary products intended for export. Second, free interstate trade within Australia prevented Western Australia from protecting its own infant industries against competition from the eastern states. Third, the Navigation Act confining trade between Australian ports to Australian ships bore hardly on Western Australia, because it prevented European ships that called at Fremantle on their way to and from Melbourne and Sydney from carrying goods for that leg of the journey, thus leading to increases in the shipping rates between Europe and Fremantle as well as reducing competition between Fremantle and the east. Fourth, the federal embargo on the import of sugar forced the consumers of Western Australia to pay £30 a ton for Queensland sugar instead of buying it from Java at about £7 a ton (see Greenwood,

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1946, pp. 165–71). The case was clearly not without merit. Did it give Western Australia a right to secede, in terms of the principles adumbrated in Chapter 6? The answer seems to be in the negative, as Western Australia had freely consented to join the federation and the legislation complained of had been passed by a parliament in which the state was fairly represented in terms of its population. Advocates of secession could point out that the state had been the last to agree to federation, had been under some pressure from London to do so, and had agreed in a referendum in which the narrow majority in favour (25,109) was almost entirely made up (to the extent of 24,517) of newcomers from the east living in the area of the goldfields (Greenwood, 1946, p. 161n). It had been a very near thing, but in terms of principle the point is that the decision to join had not involved coercion. In the event the state’s case received a pragmatic and generally sympathetic response from the other states and the new Commonwealth Grants Commission, without the alarm and resentment that the Quebecois movement towards secession caused in political circles elsewhere in Canada. In its first report the Commission accepted that Western Australia could only be as well off within the federation as outside it if ‘compensation can be given in some way for the injury done by the tariff’ (Commonwealth Grants Commission, 1933, p. 71). The report acknowledged that the most logical way of assessing the compensation needed would be to measure the loss caused by the tariff, but found that this was not practicable. It therefore concluded that the grants to the three poorer states (South Australia and Tasmania as well as Western Australia) should be based on the principle of fiscal need. This principle was used to give the poorer states grants that would enable them to provide public services at the same level as those of the richer states, without a higher burden of taxation, when allowance was made for special local factors such as a sparse population over a large area (for details, see Birch, 1955, pp. 130–4). The effect of this principle is highly egalitarian. It brings all states to approximately the same level of affluence in terms of their budgets. It is therefore much more egalitarian than the tax equalization formula adopted in Canada and about as egalitarian as the system for determining grants to local authorities in Britain. The system has been accepted as fair by all governments, has eased the problems of federal-state financial relations, and has removed the main financial basis of the interstate rivalries and conflicts that occur in most federations. It led Western Australia to drop its attempt to secede, and since 1935 no more has been heard of this proposal.


2

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ETHNICITY AND IMMIGRATION

In Australia, unlike Britain and Canada, politically significant ethnic divisions hardly existed until after the Second World War. Australian society has until very recently been remarkable for its degree of ethnic and cultural homogeneity. From the first settlement of 1788 until after 1945, the settlers were overwhelmingly from Britain and Ireland. The existence of the Aboriginal population has always provided a sharp contrast to this dominant culture, but the Aborigines have been few in number and for most of the time the great majority of them have lived only on the fringes of white society. They have not posed a serious social problem for the whites, except temporarily in a few areas, and have not hindered the process of national integration any more than the Canadian Indians have done. The position and problems of the Aborigines, in relation to Australian society as a whole, will be discussed briefly in a subsequent section. In part, the ethnic homogeneity of Australia up to 1945 resulted naturally from the facts of geography and history. The Australian settlements were on the other side of the world from Europe, and migration there involved a long and arduous voyage. It was altogether easier for European migrants to make North America their destination, with South America the obvious alternative for those who spoke Spanish or Portuguese. European countries other than Britain and Ireland got very little news of Australia and few continental migrants thought of moving there. Nearly all new migrants came from Britain and Ireland, attracted by reports from relatives and friends who had preceded them or by encouraging news in the press. Many of them were given assisted passages by the Australian authorities. The other part of the story is the legal ban on migration from Asia or Africa. The colonies had all at different times prohibited immigration by non-white people, with the partial exception of Queensland, which had permitted the recruitment of Kanakas to work on the sugar plantations. Australian determination on this issue is indicated by the fact that one of the first actions of the Commonwealth Parliament in 1901 was to pass the Immigration Restriction Act, empowering customs officers to require prospective immigrants to take an education test by writing down fifty words of English dictated by the officer. In the words of the historian Russel Ward, ‘it was understood by everyone, and often openly stated in the debate, that the test would be applied to all coloured applicants for admission and to no one else’ (Ward, 1977, p. 32). This Act was

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accompanied by another declaring that Australian mail should only be carried in ships employing all-white crews. These two Acts gave federal legislative expression to what was universally known as the White Australia policy. The policy was inspired by fear that Australia would otherwise be swamped by millions of immigrants from China, Japan and the other crowded lands to Australia’s north. These Asian peoples were regarded, like Africans, as racially inferior to people of white stock. They were also regarded, particularly by trade unionists and members of the Australian Labour Party, as posing a threat to Australian living standards by their readiness to work long hours for low wages. Thirdly, they were regarded as culturally different from European peoples, to such an extent that mass immigration by non-whites would create an unbridgeable cultural cleavage within Australian society. In recent years the history of the White Australia policy has brought a good deal of embarrassment to Australians. In fairness, it should be said that the policy itself was quite understandable in the circumstances of its time. In the later decades of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth it was commonly assumed in Europe and North America, as well as in Australia, that the nonwhite races were inherently inferior to the white. Within Australia this widespread assumption was strengthened by the fact that the non-white people of whom Australians had first-hand knowledge, namely the Aborigines, had not progressed beyond a Stone Age culture and thus gave the appearance of being among the most primitive of all human groups. Australia was not alone in discriminating against non-whites or in being alarmed by what was often described as ‘the yellow peril’. In 1875 British Columbia had disfranchised Chinese residents, even if they had been born in the colony. In 1879 California had banned registered companies from employing Chinese or Mongolian workers. In 1881 New Zealand adopted a Chinese Immigration Act ‘that virtually excluded all Chinese immigrants’ (London, 1970, p. 5). Throughout the first half of the twentieth century Canada and the United States discriminated against prospective coloured immigrants, in Canada by rules excluding people who could not (as it was said) be expected to cope with the Canadian climate or to adjust to Canadian society, in the United States by a quota system based on country of origin. What was unique about Australia was not the sentiment or even the policy, but the brutal frankness by which the policy was proclaimed and defended. Australian politicians and labour leaders made no attempt to disguise their feelings of superiority


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over non-white peoples and offered no apology for their policy. Alfred Deakin, one of the founding fathers of federation and second Commonwealth Prime Minister, said that the policy was based upon a national instinct for self-preservation, for ‘it is nothing less than the national manhood, the national character, and the national future that are at stake’ (quoted in London, 1970, p. 13). After 1945, Australian immigration policies were radically changed, for it was generally accepted that the country needed to expand its population rapidly and it was clear that Britain, then in the period of postwar labour shortages, could not supply the millions of immigrants that were wanted. It was therefore decided to recruit non-British immigrants from Europe on a large scale, but the decision to diversify the population in this way did not go so far as to embrace the recruitment of non-white immigrants from countries like China. Addressing this question, the Minister for Immigration, Arthur Calwell, produced his famous (or notorious) quip, ‘two Wongs do not make a white’ (quoted in Ward, 1977, p. 283). Indeed, at the very time when Calwell was actively promoting the policy of diversification, based on the perceived need to increase the population rapidly, he was also ruthlessly deporting the small number of non-white refugees who had entered the country during the war years. However, attitudes have changed. The belief that some races are inherently superior to others was thrown into disrepute by Hitler’s racial policies. Scepticism about the abilities and potentials of the Japanese people was undermined by Japanese victories in the war. Dislike and fear of non-whites was eroded by the success of the Colombo Plan, which brought thousands of Asian students to Australia to complete their education. After 1964 Liberal-Country coalition governments quietly changed administrative procedures so as to admit about 6,000 non-white (or partly white) immigrants each year (Ward, 1977, p. 401). In 1965 the Australian Labour Party removed the paragraph committing it to the White Australia policy from its national platform. By 1972 it was possible for Gough Whitlam, on coming to power as Labour Prime Minister, to announce the complete abandonment of the policy and to declare that henceforth race would not be a factor in the admission of immigrants. This reversal of policy has substantially changed the ethnic balance among new immigrants, in favour of Asians and at the expense of Europeans. The proportion of Asians among new permanent settlers rose to 14 per cent in 1974, 25 per cent in 1975 and 33 per cent in 1976 (Blainey, 1984, p. 51). The admission on

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humanitarian grounds of many Vietnamese refugees—about 100,000 by 1987—has pushed the proportion upwards, the figure for 1983 being 38 per cent (Blainey, 1984, p. 166). The abandonment of the White Australia policy has therefore led to a sudden influx of settlers with quite different cultural traditions from those of the host population, that can be compared with the sudden influx of West Indians and Asians into Britain in the late 1950s and early 1960s. By 1986 the proportion of Asians (in ethnic terms) among the Australian population had reached 3.9 per cent, comprised of 1.3 per cent from the Middle East and 2.6 per cent from the remainder of Asia (Price, 1987). Since any sudden change in the ethnic composition of a community is likely to produce social tensions, it is relevant to compare Australian experience in this regard with British experience. There are some points of similarity but (happily for Australia) not very many. First, opinion polls in Australia show that public opinion about the immigration policy has been much more divided than in Britain. In repeated polls people were given a figure for the number of Asian immigrants in the previous year, or the number estimated to arrive in the same year, and asked whether they thought the number was too few, about right, or too many. Some of the results are given in Table 9.1. Table 9.1

Australian public opinion about the number of Asian immigrants

Source: Goot, 1985, p. 54

It is clear from these figures that in the early years of the new policy the government had the support of more than half the Australian people but that after 11 or 12 years a majority had swung round to the view that too many Asians were being admitted. However, this is a much milder rejection of Asian immigration than the overwhelming rejection of Asian and West Indian immigration shown by the British polls. It should also be noted that the figures for those believing that too many immigrants were being admitted


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overall closely paralleled the figures for those concerned about the number of Asians, so that many of those who thought that too many Asians were being admitted would have said the same about Europeans. Secondly, public attitudes towards Vietnamese refugees have turned rather sour in a few urban areas where sizeable concentrations of refugees, many of them unemployed, have gathered. The unemployment rate among Vietnamese immigrants in May 1984 was said to be 41 per cent (Blainey, 1984, p. 73). There have been complaints that the character of neighbourhoods has changed and that the refugees are competing with established Australians for scarce jobs. Such complaints often reflect real grievances, though they may be inflamed by racial prejudice. However, they have not led to the kind of personal violence that has occurred in some British cities. Thirdly, there has been no Australian equivalent of the British National Front, competing in elections on an anti-immigrant platform and holding repeated public demonstrations. As noted earlier, the National Front attracted very little support from British voters, but its demonstrations led to violence and its racist policies were therefore repeatedly brought to the attention of the general public. Fourthly, there has been no Australian equivalent to the sense of alienation that has developed among young blacks in English cities, leading to violent clashes with the police. If unemployment levels among Vietnamese immigrants remain high and increasing numbers are admitted, there is clearly a possibility that feelings of alienation may develop, particularly among a younger generation who do not have a personal sense of gratitude to Australia for accepting them. However, there are grounds for optimism on this score. The general record of Third World immigrants in the labour market has been very good, as will be reported in a subsequent section on economic integration. Australian unemployment rates are lower than British rates and there is virtually no evidence of ethnic discrimination among Australian employers. The Vietnamese have a reputation for hard work and also for helping one another, so it seems reasonable to expect that high unemployment rates among them will be only temporary. In these four ways the situation in Australia is markedly happier than that in Britain, with greater tolerance being shown on all sides. One item of news points in the opposite direction, however. This is that three or four applications to build mosques in the suburbs of Sydney and Melbourne have been rejected, ostensibly on town

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planning grounds. If the grounds cited were in fact fictitious and if alternative sites for the mosques are not found, this would clearly be a deprivation of rights for Muslim immigrants, and one that is certain to cause resentment. The other ethnic dimension of Australian society is that until after 1945 the people (Aborigines apart) were not only all European by origin but were overwhelmingly British or Irish by origin. This was an important dimension of Australian national identity. Most Australians took it for granted that they were a British and Irish people, ‘Anglo-Celtic’ in the language of politicians, living in the southern hemisphere. It was commonly believed that at the end of the Second World War 98 per cent of Australians had this kind of ethnic origin. In actual fact this figure, though frequently publicized and hardly ever contradicted, somewhat exaggerated the Anglo-Celtic predominance. Australia’s leading demographer, Charles Price, has traced the ethnic origins of the population with meticulous care, dividing individuals up for statistical purposes into one half English, three eighths Irish, one eighth German, or whatever the records show. His reconstruction of the ethnicity of Australians, calculated in this way, shows that only 90.9 per cent of the non-Aboriginal population in 1947 had Anglo-Celtic origins. Price’s detailed figures, given in Table 9.2, show both that people of German origin constituted the largest ethnic minority (assuming, for the time being, that the Irish can be included with the British as part of the majority) and that the Germans were already there in 1861. In fact, many Germans moved to Australia in the years 1834–40 and settled in South Australia, while others went to Queensland. The main reason why Australians seemed largely unaware of the German and other minorities before 1945 is that these minorities were almost completely assimilated into Australian society. They spoke English and showed no desire to emphasize such distinctive cultural characteristics as they retained. Their existence did not affect the predominant self-image of Australian society as essentially British and Irish in origin. The table also shows the considerable change that has occurred since 1947. The non-Anglo-Celtic proportion has increased from 9 per cent to 25 per cent in demographic terms and from about 2 per cent to 25 per cent in terms of popular conceptions. This change has led to a lively and vociferous debate about how far the diversification of the population means that Australians should now regard their society as multicultural and should adopt policies to encourage the maintenance of cultural diversity.

Integration in Australia Table 9.2

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Ethnic origins of the Australian population

«

No records available. Source: Price (1987). Note: In one respect the above figures differ from those calculated by Price. Following the 1981 Census, he gives Jewish Australians as a separate ethnic group for 1986, though not for the earlier years. Thinking this to be unhelpful, I have reclassified the Jews, making the assumption that the same proportion were German in 1986 as in 1978, that three quarters of the remainder came from eastern Europe and that the rest came from northern Europe.

The policy of encouraging the immigration of people from continental Europe was forced upon the Australian government in the immediate postwar years by the coincidence of two factors: a consensus among ruling élites that Australia must ‘populate or perish’ together with the impossibility of getting as many British and Irish immigrants as were deemed necessary. In 1947 the government arranged free transport for large numbers of displaced persons, then mostly accommodated in camps in Europe. In succeeding years free passages were offered to citizens of Italy, Greece, Holland and other European states on the same conditions that were set for the displaced persons, namely that for two years they would be accommodated in hostels in Australia and would do whatever work the government asked them to do. By the mid-1970s nearly two million new immigrants had been accepted from continental Europe. This development placed certain burdens on postwar Australian governments: they had not only to find work for the immigrants

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but to ensure that they were taught English, were welcomed by the host population and were integrated into Australian society. The work was not a problem since there was full employment at the time and the immigrants were not permitted to be fussy about what they did, but the cultural homogeneity of the host population mitigated against the quick success of measures to promote social integration. Classes in the English language were organized, but they were nearly all conducted in English and were therefore pretty ineffective. Immersion teaching can often work well with young children, but it did not work well with adult immigrants. A survey of adult immigrants in the Melbourne area in 1965–6 showed that only 39 per cent of the Italians and 41 per cent of the Greeks could speak English well, with 50 per cent of each group speaking it badly (in the opinion of the interviewer) and the rest unable to speak it at all (Jupp, 1966, p. 183). Good Neighbour Councils were established to welcome the immigrants, but these were groups of middle-class volunteers, operating only in English, who proved singularly unsuccessful in making contact with non-British immigrants (Jupp, 1966, pp. 148– 51). In any case the latter would have wanted to be approached as Greeks, Italians or whatever, as this was the most meaningful identity they then had, rather than as ‘new Australians’ or ‘our migrants’, the rather patronizing collective terms used at the time. The policy of the Australian government towards these new immigrants in the first two postwar decades was that they should be assimilated, in the sense defined in Chapter 4, and that this should happen as quickly as possible. Pressure was put upon the immigrants to become naturalized as soon as they were eligible and they were required not only to take an oath of allegiance to the Queen but also formally to renounce their allegiance to their country of origin. These Australian policies contrasted with British and Canadian policies in the same period, for neither the British nor the Canadian government put pressure on foreign residents to become naturalized, and though new citizens have had to swear allegiance to the Queen they have not been required to renounce their allegiance to their country of origin. They are, in fact, able to retain dual citizenship if the regulations of their country of origin permit this.

3

MULTICULTURALISM

That the Australian policies were modified in the late 1960s and 1970s was evidence not so much of a change of heart among


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Australians as of a willingness to recognize the lessons of experience. Evidence mounted that the newcomers were not being assimilated nearly as quickly as the Australian authorities had predicted. Figures were produced showing that disgruntled immigrants were returning to Europe in sizeable numbers. It was reported that in the period 1959–65 ‘settler loss was over 16 per cent of settler arrival’ (Martin, 1978, p. 31). Later figures showed this had underestimated the true rate of return. It was realized that migrants could not immediately exchange one cultural identity for another just because they had changed countries, and that it was unreasonable to expect them to do so. It was appreciated that services to immigrants fell short of what was desirable and that they had to be improved. Within a few years Australians moved from a policy of assimilation to one of accepting that their society had become, or was becoming, multicultural and plural in character. This change occurred at about the same time as Canada decided that its society should be labelled multicultural rather than bicultural, but the Australian change has provoked much more ideological conflict than the Canadian change. In part this can be explained by the fact that acceptance of cultural diversity is new to Australians, old and inevitable to Canadians; in part it may result from the greater tendency of Australians to engage in ideological debate over political issues. The debate has produced a rich variety of concepts, including conservative pluralism, structural pluralism, radical pluralism, cultural liberation, holistic multiculturalism and hard multiculturalism. Scholars, as well as politicians, group spokesmen and journalists, have taken diverse views on the whole issue of the right of cultural minorities to preserve their identities. What the Australian government means by multiculturalism is not entirely clear, in spite (or perhaps because) of a plethora of statements on the subject. It would seem that the authorities, though not all of the commentators, have a vision of a multicultural society that is closer to the model of the melting pot than to that of cultural pluralism. Australian immigration officers frown upon the intention to live in ethnic ghettoes, whereas Canadian immigration officers generally expect French-speaking immigrants to settle in Quebec and Chinese immigrants to settle in Vancouver, Victoria or Toronto. There have developed concentrations of Italian, Greek and Vietnamese immigrants in particular quarters of Melbourne and Sydney, but there is not the same sense of a ‘Little Italy’ that there is in Toronto and Montreal. For in so far as there is an Australian model it is that immigrants, while retaining something of their original cultural

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identities, should gradually merge into Australian society, perhaps enriching it with their own contributions. It has been argued in Chapter 5 that in most respects immigrant members of ethnic minorities can preserve their cultural identities without official help, provided only that they are spared active pressure to adopt the habits and beliefs of the host society immediately. They need tolerance from the majority and time to make the adjustments that they or their children are bound to make in the long run. Their only clear needs for positive official assistance are help to learn the majority language, by the provision of classes conducted in minority languages, and guidance on how to secure the social services they are entitled to. Since the late 1960s Australian governments have provided both these kinds of help and have also introduced two imaginative new services that have no exact parallel elsewhere. One of these is a telephone interpreter service, available at first in Melbourne and Sydney and now in other cities as well. The other is an eveningsonly television channel directed primarily at the minorities. This Special Broadcasting Service (SBS) specializes in showing foreign films and drama series with English subtitles, thus both enabling people to enjoy programs made in their own countries of origin and helping them to learn colloquial English. SBS also shows a fair number of soccer matches, soccer being a game played mostly by European immigrant teams with names like the Melbourne Croatians. In a typical week in 1987, SBS showed 15 hours of foreign drama programs (from Sweden, Greece, Germany, Italy, China and Japan), 12 1/2 hours of foreign films (from France, Italy, Spain, Holland, Germany and Bulgaria), 31/2 hours of foreign documentary programs, 3 hours of soccer and 3 hours of foreign comedy or children’s programs. The logic underlying this choice of program is obvious and the result is a service that not only fulfils its function of making immigrants feel at home in Australia but also provides attractive features for Anglo-Celtic Australians. In practical (as distinct from theoretical) debate, the main issue of controversy about multicultural policies is whether state schools should be expected to teach the language of their country of origin to immigrant children. Spokesmen for some ethnic minorities, notably the Greeks and Italians, have emphasized the case for this kind of policy and have claimed that it is a logical corollary of the proclamation that Australian society is multicultural. State and municipal authorities have tended to resist the demand, partly for practical reasons such as a shortage of trained teachers and pressure


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on educational budgets, partly because of doubts about the wisdom of perpetuating linguistic divisions. The federal government has also done little to meet the demand, preferring to spend most of its very considerable outlay on services to immigrants on teaching English and on the SBS. The figures for federal expenditure in 1985–6 are given in Table 9.3. Table 9.3 Commonwealth expenditure on services to immigrants, 1985–6 (Figures in millions of dollars)

Source: Jupp, 1987, p. 2.

There is, however, some pressure for a national policy on language teaching, which would necessarily include a policy about ‘community languages’, the Australian term for the native languages of non-British immigrants. In 1984 the Senate Standing Committee on Education and the Arts produced a report entitled A National Language Policy (Colston Report, 1984) and in 1987 a special adviser to the Minister of Education contributed a further report entitled National Policy on Languages (Lo Bianco Report, 1987). The reports are quite similar in their approaches and their conclusions, though the latter report is noticeably more bureaucratic in expression. They conclude that there should be a national policy on languages, to give guidance on priorities to the various authorities responsible

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for providing language teaching; and that the appropriate authorities should be the following: (1) (2) (3)

to provide adequate instruction in English for all those who need it, whether children or adults; to maintain a limited number of Aboriginal languages in existence and use; to ensure that all children have some experience of learning a second language.

On Aboriginal languages, the Colston Report states that 150 were in use, whereas the Lo Bianco Report noted that these languages are dying out at the rate of about one a year and considered that only 50 could be considered viable. That this estimate may be optimistic is indicated by figures subsequently given for the numbers of speakers of Aboriginal languages, which reveal that only six languages or groups of dialects have more than 2,000 speakers. On the need for language teaching in schools, the Colston Report recommended that all secondary school pupils should study a second language for at least a year while the Lo Bianco Report insisted on some teaching for all but did not specify a minimum period. The reports followed similar criteria regarding the choice of languages, these being a mixture of the cultural (teaching languages with a rich literature), the practical (teaching languages that will be useful to Australia in terms of the country’s location and trading patterns) and the social (teaching languages that are spoken by sizeable minorities in Australia). The second report settled on nine languages, namely French; German; Spanish, Italian; modern Greek; Arabic; Chinese; Japanese and Malay/ Indonesian (Lo Bianco Report, 1987, pp. 148–9). Of these nine eight can be defended on cultural and/or practical grounds so that it is only modern Greek that has been included primarily to satisfy the demand for community language teaching. It is in fact Greek-Australians who are most vociferous in demanding that their children be taught the language of their country of origin.

4

THE INTEGRATION OF IMMIGRANTS

To what extent have immigrants from non-English-speaking backgrounds been integrated into Australian society? As a broad generalization, it can be said that the German, Dutch and Scandinavian immigrants have mostly been assimilated, much as have the Polish and Hungarian immigrants in Britain or the Germans in


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Canada. Their command of English is complete, they are not concentrated in particular residential areas or particular occupations, they have intermarried with Anglo-Celtic Australians. The southern Europeans and the Asians have not been assimilated in the same way and it is no longer believed that their integration depends on assimilation. The degree of their integration has to be assessed in terms of their ability to participate in Australian life, in their economic situation and their political activities. Two rather striking illustrations of their contributions to Australian society are the growth in the popularity of soccer, no longer confined to new immigrants, and the transformation of the Australian cuisine, at least in the bigger cities. Whereas in the 1950s Australian food was like English food in the same period, namely stodgy and boring, the incorporation of Italian and other continental European dishes and techniques into the diet has produced a very different cuisine, distinctively Australian rather than just a mixture, which must be counted among the finest in the world. Other aspects of the social integration of these groups are more difficult to assess at this juncture, though another highly relevant indicator is the report that second-generation Italian and Greek immigrants mostly speak English to one another, except when their parents are present. This supports the view that the Australian pattern is likely to be that of the melting pot rather than that of cultural pluralism, in the senses defined earlier. We are fortunate to have available a rather elaborate study of the extent to which recent immigrants have become integrated into the Australian economy. This is a report prepared by three sociologists for the Committee of Review of Migrant and Multicultural Programs and Services. The 1986 report was based on 1981 census data supplemented by a survey of a large representative sample of Australians over the age of 18. The study showed that only one migrant in six and one native-born Australian in eight thought that employers showed favouritism towards white-born Australians, while very few people reported any personal experience of discrimination. Twentythree per cent of immigrants from non-English-speaking countries thought they had probably ‘missed out on a job’ because of their national origins, but only 3 per cent of second-generation immigrants from these countries thought this (Kelley, Jones and Evans, 1986, pp. 47, 49 and 57). When asked about the reason for such disadvantage that they had experienced, virtually all respondents cited language difficulties. Since many adult immigrants, including one in five of those from Mediterranean countries, reported that they spoke English poorly, it is not surprising that they should have found themselves at some

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disadvantage in the labour market. What is significant is that hardly any of the immigrants cited prejudice among native-born Australians as a factor. Moreover, 9 per cent of immigrants and their children reported that they had got a job because of their national origins (Kelley, Jones and Evans, 1986, p. 57). Among employers, eight out often reported that they would treat immigrants equally with native-born Australians (Kelley, Jones and Evans, 1986, p. 52). Analysis of the incomes of immigrants and others in 1981 showed that anglophone immigrants and their children came top, with average incomes of $14,600, followed by northern and eastern European immigrants and their children with $14,100, Third World immigrants and their children with $13,400, native-stock Australians with $13,300 and Mediterranean immigrants and their children with $11,000. The reasons for the poorer average performance of Mediterranean immigrants (mainly from Italy, Greece and Turkey) were investigated carefully. The conclusion was that three factors were involved: one was that their knowledge of English tended to be poorer than that of other groups; the second factor was that, on average, they came from poorer backgrounds, such as peasant farming, than other immigrants; the third was that those with professional qualifications did markedly less well. Australian authorities have been suspicious of professional qualifications from Mediterranean countries and slow to give them full recognition, a fact that not only depresses the incomes of immigrants possessing such qualifications but also discourages prospective immigrants from these occupational groups. It is important to note, however, that these disadvantages have not carried over into the next generation. As the report puts it: ‘Brown eyes, olive skin and eleven years of Australian education entitle a man to just as good a job as do blue eyes, sunburnt skin and eleven years of Australian education. This is compelling evidence that ethnic discrimination does not confine Mediterranean migrants to a secondary labour market’ (Kelley, Jones and Evans, 1986, pp. 76–7). The economic success of Third World immigrants, mainly from eastern Asia, is also noteworthy. It is clear that the energetic efforts of the federal government, combined with the tolerance of the Australian people, have produced a situation in which immigrants from all lands enjoy equal opportunities in the labour market, so that the economic integration of ethnic minorities (apart from the Aborigines) is virtually complete. This is a remarkable achievement in view of the ethnic homogeneity of Australian society up to 1946 and the value that Australians attached to it until policies changed.


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Political integration To be integrated into the political system of a country, immigrants have, at the very least, to vote in its elections. Beyond this there are, as outlined in Chapter 4, four patterns or models for the political integration or non-integration of ethnic minorities. The first is political assimilation, with participation through common institutions and established partners and no importance attached to ethnic identity in elections and propaganda. The second is political accommodation, based on a conscious attempt by established parties and government agencies to recognize cultural diversity and accommodate the demands of minorities. The third is ethnically-based political conflict which nevertheless stays short of organized violence. Finally, there may exist a situation not of integration but of majority control, in which minorities are left outside the participatory political system and treated only as objects of government policy. This last situation obtains in respect of Australian Aborigines, as it does in respect of the native Indian and Inuit peoples of Canada. In Australia the institution of compulsory voting means that there are no variations in turnout between native Australians and immigrants, once they have secured citizenship. A study of the factors inducing immigrants to take out Australian citizenship shows that length of residence is by far the most important. A survey of 700 non-British immigrants over the age of 30 conducted in 1973 revealed that 53 per cent had taken out citizenship almost as soon as they were eligible, 64 per cent had done so within 10 years of arrival and 85 per cent had done so within 20 years of arrival. There was no significant difference between immigrants from the various countries of origin and no relationship between occupational status or job satisfaction and the decision to become naturalized, once controls for length of residence and age were taken into account (Kelley and McAllister, 1982, pp. 434–7). Two other studies showed that people who had become naturalized had a greater sense of identity with Australia than those who had not (Martin, 1965, p. 74 and P.Wilson, 1973, p. 85), but a third concluded that naturalization had ‘few behavioural implications beyond its direct political consequences’ (F.L.Jones, 1967, p. 422). Its most direct political consequence is that the new citizens are required to vote. A comparison of the ethnic composition of constituency electorates with election results in those constituencies reveals very little about the voting behaviour of first and second generation immigrants. For one thing, there are no constituencies with really high proportions

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of first-generation immigrants from the same countries apart from one on the outskirts of Adelaide where over 40 per cent of the people were born in Britain. In 1976 Italian-born immigrants constituted 12.5 per cent of the people in one Melbourne constituency and 9.1 per cent of the people in another, but not more than 8 per cent anywhere else. Greek-born immigrants constituted more than 8 per cent of the population only in Melbourne Ports, where the figure was 8.1 per cent (Jupp, 1982, p. 15). Not all of the immigrants had Australian citizenship so the proportions of the electorates were smaller than these figures suggest. In any case, nearly all the areas of high immigrant concentration are in industrial suburbs which would be safe Labour seats with or without the immigrants. However, an elaborate statistical analysis, based on nationwide surveys of individuals, has revealed interesting patterns of voting behaviour among immigrants. It appears that immigrants from northern Europe, predominantly British in origin, have supported the main parties in approximately the same proportions as the Australian-born majority of the voters, whereas immigrants from other parts of Europe have varied in their allegiance. Those from eastern Europe have been significantly less likely to support the Labour Party, and this anti-Labour tendency increased markedly between 1967 and 1979. When their voting behaviour was adjusted for variations resulting from their family background and their socio-economic status, voters born in eastern Europe were 2 per cent less likely to vote Labour than Australian-born voters in the 1967 federal election, 10 per cent less likely in the 1973 election and 20 per cent less likely in the 1979 election (McAllister and Kelley, 1983, p. 103). The reasons for this tendency cannot be found by statistical analysis, but it is believed by several students of the matter that the main reason is strong dislike of the communist regimes in their countries of origin, leading them to be suspicious of the Australian Labour Party because of its mildly socialistic policies and attitudes (Aitken, 1977, p. 159; Richards, 1978; McAllister and Kelley, 1983, p. 105). Voters born in Mediterranean countries have shown a significantly different pattern of behaviour. When their voting patterns were adjusted for variations resulting from their background and socioeconomic status, they were 10 per cent less likely than Australianborn voters to support Labour in 1967, 11 per cent less likely in 1973, but 12 per cent more likely in 1979. The reason for their antiLabour tendency in the earlier elections is unclear, but may be related to the attractions of the largely Catholic Democratic Labour Party in this period, founded as it was by an Italian-Australian. The reasons


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for the marked swing in their allegiance after 1973 are also uncertain, but are thought to be the adoption of the policy of multiculturalism by the Whitlam government of 1973–5 and the move within the Victoria Labour Party towards the establishment of ethnic sections catering specially for ethnic minorities (McAllister and Kelley, 1983, pp. 105–6). The Italians and Greeks are the minorities whose geographical concentration has led them to appreciate these developments most. What about political activity beyond voting, such as writing to MPs or the press, joining pressure groups or parties, or standing for electoral office? While there has been no national study dealing with this question, various local studies have drawn the conclusion that levels of political interest and participation among non-British immigrants are generally low. The Italian-Australians are a clear example. They came to Australia to improve their economic prospects and have worked very hard to do so. They are to some extent active in their church but apart from that their concerns have been with their work and their families. They mostly came from poor backgrounds in rural Italy, a country with a non-participant political culture where voting is, as in Australia, compulsory. For the most part, it has simply not occurred to them to become active in Australian politics. A survey of Brisbane electors in the early 1970s showed that whereas 12 per cent of the native Australians had at one time or another joined a political party, 17 per cent had campaigned for a party and 41 per cent had attended a political meeting, the corresponding figures for Italian immigrants were nil, 1 per cent and 3 per cent (P.Wilson, 1973, p. 44). Immigrants from Greece, Yugoslavia and Turkey are in a very similar position to those from Italy, though Greek-Australians have been somewhat more active than the others in pressing for language teaching in their mother tongue. Most of the other postwar immigrants from non-British backgrounds have been refugees, either from the displaced persons camps of Europe in the 1940s or from south-east Asia in the 1970s and 1980s. Grateful to have found a haven, they have also tended to concentrate their attention on their families and their economic position rather than on politics. This is also true of recent Asian immigrants who have moved to Australia because of its economic opportunities. The political parties in Australia, though ideological like British parties, do not have the same concern to attract large numbers of members. This follows from the institution of compulsory voting, which relieves parties of the need to recruit an army of unpaid

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canvassers to get out the vote. The parties have not been much affected by the arrival of so many non-British immigrants. Aitkin has pointed out that ‘the postwar period has produced no Tammany Hall, no migrant parties or groups, nor even a notable individual of immigrant stock who relies on an electoral base of migrants…the parties have ignored immigrants almost entirely’ (Aitkin, 1982, p. 155). The Victoria Labour Party’s initiative in establishing ethnic sections in the Melbourne area has not been copied elsewhere and the policy of multiculturalism is not an issue between the parties; though introduced by Labour, it has been accepted by all. According to Jaensch, ‘the ethnic vote is a target of the campaigning of the political parties in every election, but ethnicity has not emerged as a salient factor in the electoral party system. Ethnic groups in Australia do not seem to participate in politics to any great extent as ethnic groups’ (Jaensch, 1983, p. 95). A possible exception to what seems to be the general trend, one of gradual political assimilation, is provided by the success for some years of the Democratic Labour Party. This party was created in 1955 as the result of a curious and interesting campaign by Roman Catholic groups within the Australian labour movement to protect the latter from what the Catholics regarded as the threat of communism. The campaign was started in the Melbourne area at the end of the 1940s by a second-generation Italian-Australian called B.A.Santamaria, acting under the guidance of Archbishop Mannix, the highly-politicized Irish-Australian priest who had led the campaign against conscription in 1916. Santamaria formed Catholic action groups to penetrate the governing committees of trade unions so as to keep Marxists and fellow-travellers out of power there. This tactic was so successful that by 1952 the Industrial Groups, as they were called, found themselves in a position to control the Labour Party itself, through its affiliated unions, in Victoria and New South Wales. They exploited this position because of suspicions that H.V.Evatt, the party’s leader, was soft on communism. After the 1952 annual conference the Groupers controlled the state executives of the party in the two most populous states. The Groupers were all Catholics but not all recent immigrants, some of them being of old Irish-Australian stock. Having got into positions of power within the Labour Party, they tried to convert it to a range of novel policies that ran quite counter to prevailing Labour doctrine. These policies included ‘the use of a productivity index to fix wages, decentralisation of government, increased immigration and the setting of immigrants on small-holdings on the land. In foreign policy they strongly opposed the recognition of


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Red China and openly supported the Liberal Government in most of its defence plans’ (Pringle, 1961, p. 82). It was this attempt to change the party’s policies that eventually led Evatt, in October 1954, to denounce the Groups and to drive them from the party. After much factional fighting and bitterness Evatt achieved his aim, but at a heavy cost. The Labour Parties of Victoria and New South Wales were split; Labour lost its majorities in Victoria and Queensland; the national Labour Party was badly defeated in a general election in 1955; and in 1957 the Democratic Labour Party (DLP) was formed by the defeated Labour factions. The new party quickly became national and was committed to opposing the Labour Party throughout its life. Although essentially a Catholic rather than an immigrant party, the DLP had policies designed to appeal to Catholic immigrants and had some success in this. In the 1967 election, for instance, it was supported by 2 per cent of Australian-born voters, 4 per cent of those born in northern Europe, 7 per cent of those born in eastern Europe and 8 per cent of those born in southern Europe (Aitken, 1977, pp. 157–9). Its electoral performance was never good enough for it to win any seats in the federal House of Representatives, but the fact that it persuaded its supporters to nominate anti-Labour candidates as their second choice meant that its intervention cost Labour a number of seats under the Australian system of proportional representation. It also gained some seats in the Senate and for several years held the balance of power in that body. It was Whitlam’s appointment of a DLP Senator to the post of Ambassador to Ireland, made in the hope of ending the anti-Labour majority in the Senate, that led to the 1975 deadlock between the two Houses and thence to the Governor-General’s controversial decision to dismiss the Labour Government from office. All in all, the DLP did Labour a great deal of damage. According to Aitkin, survey interviews with a random sample of Australian voters in 1967 and 1969 revealed that the DLP was the most disliked, and even despised, of the parties, but that the blame for its existence was pinned on the Catholic hierarchy rather than on Catholic immigrants. The Catholic Church, people felt, ought to keep out of politics (Aitkin, 1977, pp. 68–70). In view of this it is remarkable that the Labour Party, which suffered greatly from the activities of the DLP between 1955 and 1975, should have agreed during this period to an entirely new policy of paying government grants to private schools, many of which are Catholic. The Labour Party showed considerable tolerance, in face of the phenomenon of the DLP, in both supporting aid to Catholic schools and continuing

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to support large-scale immigration from Catholic countries. This tolerance was justified, in partisan terms, by the fact that during the 1970s popular support for the DLP waned and by the mid-1980s it had ceased to be a significant force. The overall conclusion about the political integration of non-British immigrants must therefore be that they are following the pattern of assimilation. There is neither a pattern of incipient conflict, as with blacks in Britain, nor one of elaborate accommodation, as in Canada. The pattern of social integration appears to be one of the melting pot, though with no significant pressure on immigrants to ‘melt’ more quickly than they and their descendants wish to do. When this pattern is combined with assimilation in both the economic and political fields the overall judgement can only be that the ethnic diversification of the Australian population has been a highly successful operation. The Australian practice of strong governmental leadership in regard to both the selection and reception of immigrants has clearly paid dividends.

5

THE INDIGENOUS PEOPLES

The relationship between the Australian state and organized society on the one hand and the indigenous peoples on the other has always, as in Canada, been one of majority control. The indigenous peoples comprise the Aborigines of mainland Australia and the Torres Straits Islanders. However, as the latter are small in number and similar in character to the former, the term Aborigines will henceforth be used to describe both categories. When the first white settlement of Australia was made in 1788 the continent was inhabited by Aborigines whose total has been estimated to have been about 250,000, though it may have been larger than that. They had a stone age culture that had probably not changed for hundreds or thousands of years, and showed great skill in eking a living out of a largely infertile land by hunting and gathering berries. Their early relationship with white settlers did not involve warfare, but it could hardly be described as friendly. When white people used the land for grazing their stocks or growing crops, they inevitably reduced the area available to support the nomadic Aborigines. This was naturally resented and the Aborigines tended to retaliate by stealing the white man’s goods, which in turn led the settlers to take punitive measures, sometimes homicidal, against the suspected culprits. In many areas, a kind of trading relationship developed in the outback. The settlers had food and other goods that the Aborigines


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coveted, while the latter had only one thing they could offer in return. This was the services of their women, in demand among the settlers because, unlike the settlers of the Canadian (or American) west, they generally left their womenfolk in the coastal cities while they explored the inhospitable terrain of the interior. One inevitable result of this relationship was the production of numerous half-caste children, who were sometimes accepted and brought up as their own by the Aboriginal tribes and sometimes not. In the latter part of the nineteenth century half-caste children not fully accepted by their tribes were commonly brought up in missions established by the Christian churches, later supplemented by settlements run by colonial or state governments. In this way the population now classified as Aboriginal developed two features that have no parallel among the indigenous peoples of North America: the first, that over two-thirds of them are of mixed blood; the second, that many of them have been alienated from Aboriginal society by their upbringing without having been accepted by white society. The story of the Aborigines since 1900 is complex and sad, but as they have borne only a marginal and subordinate relationship to the Australian polity they can be dealt with only in the briefest outline in this chapter. It will make for simplicity if some of the distinctive features of their situation are listed. First, they are unlike most of the Canadian Indians in that no treaties were ever concluded between Aborigines and white settlers. The Indian concept of land ownership is different enough from European concepts, as we have seen, but the Aboriginal concept was even more different, reflecting their social organization as small bands of nomadic huntsmen and food-gatherers. In consequence, the Aborigines have no possibility of legal appeals based on treaties. They were simply elbowed aside by the white newcomers and regarded as a nuisance. Second, the Aborigines were not regarded as Australian citizens until 1967. They were protected persons and white men who killed them were in some states and at some times charged with murder; for instance, in 1838 seven white men were convicted and executed for the murder of an Aboriginal child during a mass murder in New South Wales (Clark, 1962, p. 149). However, in other areas and at other times, reaching into the 1920s, Aborigines were murdered by white men with impunity. They did not enjoy the protection of the law that was afforded to citizens. The policy of both governmental authorities and churches for many decades was to try to isolate and segregate Aborigines, partly

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for their own protection and partly for the protection of white society. They were treated like children or even like cattle; sometimes looked after with good intentions, but never consulted and rarely understood. The Christian missions, for example, ‘became centres of retreat and protection for the remaining Aboriginal population’ in the latter part of the last century and the early years of this; but the Christian aims of the missionaries ‘were totally hostile to the perpetuation of Aboriginal culture’ (Gale and Brookman, 1975, p. 29). Third, most of the Aborigines have lost their native skills. It is not easy to scratch a living out of the desert or semi-desert that occupies most of the Australian continent and few could now do it. It was argued in Chapter 5 that having been partly dispossessed of native skills and a traditional way of life gives indigenous peoples a right to retain what remains of those skills and customs. The Australian federal government now appears to accept this, but it is too late for most Aborigines, who are dependent on white men and the white economy for their physical well-being. At the time of the 1981 census 41.3 per cent of Aborigines lived in cities and 34.3 per cent lived in small non-Aboriginal towns, leaving only 19.6 per cent in Aboriginal towns and 4.9 per cent in outstations (Fisk, 1985, p. 9). It has been estimated that hunting and food-gathering provided less than 5 per cent of Aboriginal food consumption in 1981, leaving them dependent on the market for the other 95 per cent (Fisk, 1985, p. 21). Fourth, Aborigines have been much slower than Canadian Indians to adjust to the white economy and acquire modern skills. The cultural gap is greater and it has proved very difficult for people to bridge it. Whereas some Indians run business enterprises, Aborigines are almost entirely confined to menial or routine occupations. Only 4.9 per cent of them had any kind of diploma or trade certificate in 1976, compared with 20.3 per cent of nonAboriginal Australians (Fisk, 1985, p. 11). Their unemployment rate is almost three times the rate for other Australians (Law Reform Commission, 1986, p. 25). In the urban areas in 1981, they derived 65 per cent of their total income from social security benefits of one kind or another (Fisk, 1985, p. 49). The Aborigines form a depressed minority, neither socially nor economically integrated into Australian society. In political terms, the Aborigines were simply subjects of government policy until 1967, having no citizenship rights and no ability to shape that policy. The granting of citizenship had the effect of bringing them within the pale of the constitution. Simultaneously,


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the constitution was amended to give the Commonwealth Parliament the power to pass laws regulating Aboriginal affairs, a power that had hitherto belonged only to the states. It is pertinent to ask how far these new citizens have become integrated into the Australian political system. Granting Aborigines citizenship meant that they would henceforth be included in the census and this raised the question of how those of mixed blood should be classified. In the states there had been attempts to determine their percentage of descent, but the newly-established Council for Aboriginal Affairs recommended, and the federal government accepted, that henceforth Aboriginality should be a matter of self-identification. (See Dexter, 1985, p. 5, for the early decisions of the Council.) Since Aborigines were subsequently given certain rights, for example to housing and educational grants, that non-Aboriginal citizens do not enjoy, the principle of self-identification opened up the possibility of a court challenge about entitlement to these rights in particular cases, such as claimants with blue eyes and fair skin. In the event no such challenge has been made; Australians seem to have reached a consensus to be generous in marginal cases. The grant of legislative powers to the federal Parliament also raised a question about scope. All other powers are allocated according to a field of activity, but this one gave power to legislate regarding a class of persons. Did this imply that the Parliament can legislate in respect of any activity by or on behalf of Aborigines, or was the power circumscribed in some way? In practice the courts have agreed on the broader interpretation and have extended the power so that a federal law can deal not only with Aboriginal people as such but also with the Aboriginal cultural heritage. (See Hanks and KeonCohen, 1984, p. 33.) The granting of citizenship made obsolete some of the earlier laws that treated Aborigines as persons in need of protection and gave them the theoretical right to full equality of treatment with other Australians. In 1975 the Racial Discrimination Act was passed with the object of ensuring equality of treatment in practice. This Act followed the example of the British anti-discrimination laws of the 1960s in that it was comprehensive in scope but emphasized conciliation rather than litigation. A Commissioner of Community Relations was appointed to improve relationships and if he is not able to achieve conciliation in a particular case he has the power to authorize the aggrieved party to institute proceedings for damages in a civil court or tribunal. However, this power has rarely been used. Relations between Aborigines and the police have somewhat improved since 1967 but are far from harmonious, as witnessed by

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the fact that Aborigines, comprising 1 per cent of the entire population, comprise 10.6 per cent of the prison population (Hazlehurst, 1987, Table 1). Part of the reason for this is the high incidence of drunkenness among Aborigines. Another factor is the high incidence of personal violence. In Queensland the homicide rate on Aboriginal reserves in the years 1979–81 was ‘some ten times both the national and Queensland average’ (Law Reform Commission, 1986, p. 26). In these circumstances it is not surprising that Aboriginal living areas are policed more heavily than other areas, which leads in turn to allegations of police harassment. However, it is also noticeable that Aborigines tend to get prison sentences for trivial offences, such as using obscene language, that would not normally lead to prison for white men. There are very few Aborigines in Australian police forces, but Western Australia has led the way in making extensive use of Aboriginal ‘police aides’, while New South Wales has established an elaborate and costly program of public relations to improve relationships with the state’s Aboriginal citizens. It is clear that despite legal equality, Aborigines have a different relationship with the forces of law and order from that enjoyed by white citizens. Since 1967 Aborigines have been entitled to the same health and welfare services as other citizens. Because of their circumstances, they place greater demands on these services. Thus, in Western Australia 58 per cent of the children in residential child care homes and 54 per cent of the children in foster care in 1981 were Aborigines, though only 2.4 per cent of the population are Aborigines. In New South Wales in the same year 15 per cent of the children in substitute care were Aborigines, though the Aboriginal percentage of the population was only 0.7 (Law Reform Commission, 1986, p. 25). In addition to the general health and welfare services, Aborigines now get special grants for housing and for both secondary and tertiary education. One consequence of providing improved health and welfare services is that the Aboriginal population is increasing rapidly. The 1981 census showed a population of 159,897, but almost half of these were children and it is estimated that by the end of the century there will be over 300,000 Aborigines (Coombs, 1978, p. 8). The cost of helping the Aboriginal people to secure equality within the political system is therefore increasing rapidly. On the twentieth anniversary of the referendum that gave citizenship to Aborigines, the Canberra Times published a leading article on the progress that had been made. It was said that although the real rate of annual Commonwealth expenditure was at least ten


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times as great as it had been in 1967, ‘most Aboriginal children still face an extremely bleak and untrained future’. Investment in land, facilities and infrastructure ‘has not yet provided, and shows little promise that it ever will provide, Aborigines with a secure economic base’ (Canberra Times, 29 May 1987). It is clear that the problems of the Aboriginal people are deep-seated and extremely difficult to eradicate: they are worse than the problems of Canadian Indians and markedly worse than the problems of black citizens in British cities. What of Aboriginal participation in the Australian political system? The answer to this question is that Aborigines are represented on a variety of consultative bodies and have some significant posts in the public service, including that of the chief civil servant in the Department of Aboriginal Affairs, but that they play little part in the political parties and have very few elected members in legislative bodies. Aborigines have been elected in small numbers to municipal councils and to the legislative assembly of the Northern Territory, but they have not yet been elected to state legislative assemblies. They have a dominant position in community councils in the Northern Territory, but these councils do not have much power. The Aborigines are so dispersed geographically that there is no constituency in which they can play a dominant role. In consequence they are likely to remain, like the Canadian Indians, on the outside of the main political system, but with less opportunity than the Indians to achieve a meaningful measure of self-management. The Australian government, like the Canadian one, proclaims that self-management is a desirable goal, but the difficulties of achieving it in Australia are even greater than in Canada. In the face of this position of substantial powerlessness, some Aboriginal spokesmen have encouraged alternative forms of political action. In the 1960s there were ‘freedom rides’ by young Aboriginals, to draw attention to their plight. In 1972 there was a short-lived attempt to establish an ‘Aboriginal Embassy’, housed in tents, outside the national Parliament in Canberra. In 1987 a self-styled Aboriginal leader from Tasmania visited Libya at the invitation of Colonel Gaddafi and said on his return that the Aborigines were entitled to a separate state within the Australian continent, that would be duly represented in international bodies. However, there does not appear to be any widespread support for this claim. In 1987 a committee of the Commonwealth Parliament, sensitive to the desire of many Aborigines to enjoy more independence from white control, produced a report entitled Return to Country. This report recommended that the Commonwealth government should

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actively encourage, both with its policies and with financial aid, the development of ‘homeland centres’ or ‘outstations’ for Aboriginal people. Homeland centres were defined as ‘small decentralized communities of close kin established by the movement of Aboriginal people to land of social, cultural and economic significance to them’ (Return to Country, 1987, p. xvi). The committee claimed to have identified 588 such centres throughout Australia, with a further 111 communities in the Northern Territory that might qualify for this category. The population of the centres was about 9,500 and the other 111 communities contained a further 3,900 people. These figures, it should be noted, are considerably in excess of those produced by the Aboriginal Development Commission, which identified 495 homeland centres with a total population of only 6,558. Three brief comments may be made about this proposal. First, the number of people involved is only a very small proportion of the Aboriginal population, even using the most generous estimates. Second, it is not likely that the communities could become selfsupporting in an economic sense. Their members depend on welfare payments to buy most of their food and on government assistance of a moderately expensive kind to provide them with roads, airstrips, health services and other amenities and services to which, as Australian citizens, they are entitled. The proposal to extend these centres could therefore be described by critics as a proposal to keep Aborigines in idleness in inconvenient locations at the taxpayers’ expense. Third, there is evidence that Aborigines in such communities tend to be happier than those living in towns or on the fringes of towns. Many or most of the latter depend on welfare payments in any case, and might be less likely to become demoralized in homeland centres than by living on the fringes of white society. Moreover, the existence of a larger number of homeland centres, if assured of government support, would presumably provide a safety valve for the tensions that are apt to build up among Aborigines in urban areas. It is therefore possible that this report will meet with government approval and lead in due course to developments that most Aborigines would approve of. If the hope of integration into national Australian society is doomed to failure, it is helpful to have an alternative policy available.

6


Aborigines apart, Australia is a rather successful example of national integration. Since 1945 it has broadened its immigration requirements


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and diversified the ethnic composition of its population with only a few of the tensions and social problems that coloured immigration has brought to Britain. After some initial difficulties, it has provided far more services to immigrants than either Britain or Canada, regarding this as an important field of government policy. The energy devoted to this type of policy in recent years is illustrated by the list of official reports included as an appendix to this chapter, a list that has no equivalent in either Britain or Canada. It has a policy of multiculturalism that seems likely to make Australian society a melting pot for immigrants rather than to perpetuate cultural divisions. In terms of economic integration, Australia has been somewhat more successful than Britain or Canada in providing equal opportunities for immigrant groups. It is noteworthy that Third World immigrants in Australia have marginally higher incomes than nativestock Australians, a situation that certainly differs from that in Britain and Canada. Regional economic differences are also smaller in Australia than in the other two countries. The economic resources of the Australian states vary very little and federal fiscal policies have been egalitarian in their intentions and consequences. A common source of regional conflict within a country, apt to produce interstate tensions in a federation, is the geographical distribution of contracts and subsidies awarded by agencies of the national government. Australian federal governments are certainly not unaware of political considerations when they make such awards. Indeed, Butler has observed that they are particularly likely to take such considerations into account (Butler, 1974, p. 22–3). However, Australian governments are generally perceived as using their patronage to help the majority party in marginal constituencies, rather than as favouring this state at the expense of that. This is partly because there is less regional bias in partisan loyalties in Australia than there is in Britain or Canada, so that favouritism, when exercised for partisan advantage, has to be specific to an area smaller than that of a state or region. In Britain Margaret Thatcher’s government is perceived as favouring the south over the north in its economic policies; in Canada Liberal governments have been perceived as favouring central Canada over the west; but in Australia Labour governments in Canberra are perceived as helping Labour’s cause in this or that marginal constituency. The consequence is that federal economic policies and the use of federal patronage do not sharpen regional rivalries as much as they do in Britain or Canada. In respect of political integration, there are no serious problems apart from the virtual exclusion of the Aborigines. The secessionist

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movement in Western Australia collapsed very quickly when the Commonwealth Grants Commission produced a formula helpful to that state. The main issues of Australian politics are national issues that divide the electorate on ideological lines but not on ethnic or regional lines. The political unity of the country is also helped by an excellent national newspaper, The Australian, that has to be rated as more successful than the Toronto Globe and Mail. There has not been any real problem about Australian national identity since the federation was established. To be sure, people have secondary identities as Victorians, New South Welshmen and so on, but these do not rest on ethnic or cultural differences or even on any major differences of lifestyle. When people in Brisbane wear T-shirts proclaiming ‘And on the eighth day the Lord made Queensland’ this reflects a feeling more like that of Yorkshiremen in relation to other Englishmen than that of the Scots or Irish in relation to each other or to the English as a whole. The only state where state loyalties have rivalled national loyalties is Western Australia, but its brief threat of secession was based on financial calculations rather than on the assertion of an alternative national identity, comparable to that of the Quebecois. First-generation Australian immigrants have a dual sense of identity, but life is simpler for their children. In part this derives from the country’s self-contained geographical character, as being, together with Japan, one of the only two large countries in the world without a land frontier. In part it is a consequence of the distance between Australia and Europe or North America, a matter of weeks at sea until long-distance air transport developed in the 1950s. Australians are geographically isolated and their national psyche has been deeply influenced by that fact. It has imposed certain costs on them but in terms of national identity and cohesion it has been beneficial. Another factor in the situation is the early prosperity that Australia enjoyed. In 1900 it is commonly reckoned to have had the highest gross national product per head of any country. The United States very quickly overtook it and some economic historians believe that this had occurred by the turn of the century, but the greater equality in the distribution of incomes that prevailed in Australia gave the average citizen there a more comfortable standard of living than the average American enjoyed. Australians were well aware of their good fortune in this respect, which they attributed to the hard work of their ancestors and themselves combined with the beneficial effects of strong trade unions and sensible government policies. Australia was the place where the eight-hour day was first established and


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where the working man was thought to be better off than anywhere else. This contributed to a strong sense of national pride, already apparent when the country had been unified for less than a decade. Almost from the beginning, Australians have been somewhat chauvinistic; it was within the first five years of federation that a journalist coined the oft-repeated phrase ‘temper democratic, bias offensively Australian’. Yet another factor was the cultural homogeneity that prevailed, Aborigines apart, from the earliest times until the first waves of nonBritish immigrants arrived in the late 1940s. Australians did not have to surmount cultural cleavages like that between English- and FrenchCanadians or those between the English, Scots, Welsh and Irish. And, as we have seen above, the postwar transition from cultural homogeneity to a kind of melting pot has been relatively smooth, despite being surrounded by a penumbra of argument. Though a large country, Australia has a relatively small population, and is therefore, like Canada, dependent upon allies for its defence. Until the winter of 1941–2 Australia relied on Britain and then, in a publicly-announced switch of dependency, it transferred to reliance on the United States. Now, dependence on a greater power is commonly assumed to be an unfortunate state of affairs. Latin American theorists of dependencia take this for granted. Even when the standards of living of the countries involved are similar, as in the case of Canada and the United States, citizens of the dependent nation tend to be slightly resentful about the matter. Australia is unusual in that resentment about dependency has been almost wholly absent. A leading student of Australian diplomacy has said that the Australian case might ‘be presented as a persistent national addiction to a rather profitable dependency, a conscious and even sometimes Machiavellian adoption by policy-makers of the easiest and least costly way out of assumed strategic dilemmas’ (Bell, 1984, p. 2). Dependence on Britain, not only for defence but also for capital investment and immigrants, seemed natural to Australians for many decades. The emotional bonds between Australia and Britain have always been stronger than those between Canada and Britain, and there were no serious tensions in the relationship before the Second World War. At meetings of Commonwealth prime ministers between the wars, there were repeated occasions on which Australia and New Zealand lined up with Britain on some issue of diplomacy or defence strategy, while Canada, Ireland and South Africa took different views. The switch from Britain to America was occasioned not by any marked difference of opinion, but by the simple fact that Britain was

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incapable of defending Australia against the Japanese after the fall of Singapore in December 1941. The policy of dependence has paid dividends in terms of defence costs. These have rarely exceeded 3 per cent of gross national product, running at ‘about half the average British level and a third that of the United States’ (Bell, 1984, p. 247). As Australian policy-makers have always been keen to appear good allies, troops were sent to help the British fight the communist insurgents in Malaya and, later, to fight the Indonesians in Borneo. They were also sent to fight alongside the Americans in Korea and in Vietnam. The contrast with Canada’s policies is obvious. The Vietnam excursion proved controversial, particularly when it became clear that the Americans could not win, but the other expeditions got general public support. Casualties were low, partly because military leaders saw to it that little more than token forces were sent, but Australia got the approval of its allies for being supportive and Australians got the satisfaction that comes from feeling that they could be proud of having played their part. As a people, they attach more importance than most to their military activities, as witness the very moving Anzac Day parades that take place every year in every sizeable city. Defence policies can therefore be said to have contributed in some measure to the rather clear feelings of national pride and satisfaction that Australians display. A final point is worth adding, even though it is somewhat speculative. Australia has been characterized as ‘the lucky country’ and, whether by luck or good management, it is a conspicuously contented society. As compared with British society, it is largely free from class conflicts and regional conflicts, has more optimism about its economic future and has handled the reception of ethnic minorities among its immigrants more successfully. As compared with Canadian society, it is free from linguistic cleavages and does not suffer from the feelings of resentment, mild or active, that French-Canadians have about their defeat and subsequent treatment by the English; that some English-Canadians have about the constant concessions that (since the 1960s) their politicians have made to the French; and that Canadians of all groups tend to feel about their cultural and economic domination by America. There is also a more subjective factor. Australians have been described by Max Harris as hedonistic existentialists, seeing no inherent purpose in life beyond the search for comfort, enjoyment and friendship. The British are less simple, being concerned about their individual status at home and their collective status abroad, somewhat resentful that their earlier role as world leaders in many


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fields of activity is slipping from them. The Canadians are less simple too. On the one hand, they are more religious than Australians and more affected by a desire to do good in the world, whether by collecting for charity, fighting environmental pollution or supporting peace movements. On the other hand, they have accepted the American belief that success involves acquiring more material possessions than their neighbours, together with the constant drive to make money that goes along with that. Australians like money too, but they are not so willing to sacrifice their leisure for it, and there are very few Australian equivalents of the compulsively houseproud Canadian wife, driving the second or third family car with a bumper sticker reading ‘Born to Shop’. The life-aims of the average Australian are essentially attainable aims, that most citizens have attained or are within sight of attaining. Subjective factors of this kind increase the satisfaction that people feel with their society and thus contribute, in some degree, to the integration of the Australian nation.

APPENDIX Australian Government Reports relating to the integration of immigrants, 1973–86 1973 1974

1975 1976 1977

1978 1981 1982 1984

Survey of Interpreting and Translating Needs Inquiry into the Departure of Settlers Reports of Migrant Task Forces in each of the six states The Multicultural Society The Language Barrier Survey of Views of Local Government Authorities relating to Immigration Settlement and Integration Population and Australia Report of the Inquiry into Schools of High Migrant Density A Decade of Migrant Settlement Report of the Committee on the Teaching of Migrant Languages Australia and the Refugee Problem Australia as a Multicultural Society Immigration Policies and Australia’s Population: A Green Paper Report of the Interdepartmental Working Party on Interpreters and Translators Final Report of the Royal Commission on Human Relationships Migrant Programs and Services About Migrant Women: Statistical Profile, 1981 Evaluation of Post-Arrival Programs and Services Multiculturalism for all Australians: Our Developing Nationhood A National Language Policy

220 1985 1986

1987

Nationalism and National Integration Serving Multicultural Australia: The Role of Broadcasting The Economic Effects of Immigration in Australia Report of the Committee of Review of the Adult Migrant Education Program Ethnic Youth: Their Assets and Aspirations Patterns of Disadvantage among the Overseas Born and their Children Research on Patterns of Social Mobility Intergovernmental Aspects of the Provision of Post-Arrival Services of Migrants Don’t Settle For Less: Report of the Committee for Stage I of the Review of Migrant and Multicultural Programs and Services National Policy on Languages

10

Conclusions

Nationalism and the nation-state Nationalism emerged as an ideology as a consequence of the French Revolution. Two hundred years after that revolution, it can be recognized as the most successful ideology the world has ever known. Empires and other pre-national forms of political organization have come to an end, save for one or two small remnants such as Gibraltar and New Caledonia. The whole land surface of the world, with the single exception of Antarctica, is now divided between the jurisdictions of nation-states. The formal independence and equality of these states is recognized in international law and in the organization of the United Nations and its agencies. In short, nationalism has triumphed. Though some would deny this, the evidence suggests that the nation-state has brought great benefits to mankind. First and foremost, it has brought people the satisfaction of being governed by their own political leaders instead of by foreigners. Their own leaders are sometimes corrupt and often inefficient, but history shows that most people would rather be ruled by governors of their own than by outsiders, even if the latter might be more honest and better administrators. The men who ruled India and the British African colonies were exceptionally honest and quite good as administrators, but this did not make them popular with their subjects. Secondly, the nation-state has given people a secure sense of identity, status and (usually) pride. They are no longer pawns in an imperial order, but members of a collectivity that has no legal superiors, that has its own institutions and culture, that has its own roster of heroes, a collectivity for which predecessors have made sacrifices that contemporaries can take pride in emulating. Thirdly, the nation-state has the great advantage of imbuing its government with political authority. Imperial governments were generally minimal governments; they kept the peace and built railways and roads, but they did not develop many social services. 221

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One reason for this is that such governments did not have the authority necessary to collect taxes at the level needed to finance social services. Tax collection in the colonies was always a hit-andmiss affair, with evasion as common as compliance. Decolonization has changed this and it would be difficult to argue that this is not a change for the better. Karl Deutsch was stating a simple truth when he said that ‘the nation-state performs more services than any other sort of government in the history of the world has performed before. It is the best arrangement the world now has for getting things done’ (Deutsch, 1969, p. 33). It is sometimes said that the organization of the world into nationstates has brought a curse that outweighs these benefits, that curse being an increase in the incidence and intensity of war. Some scholars, indeed, have gone so far as to describe the state system as a war system. This proposition is, however, difficult to sustain. It is certainly not clear that wars have been any more common since the rise of the nation-state than they were before. There have been tribal wars, trading wars, religious wars, dynastic wars and imperial wars throughout recorded history. Wars since the middle of the nineteenth century have undoubtedly been much more violent and murderous than they were previously, but the main reason for this is technological change in the form of the development of more effective weapons. It is by no means obvious that the state system can be blamed for modern warfare. Consideration of the main wars since the French Revolution does not suggest that most of them have been products of the state system. The Franco-Russian war would certainly fall into that category, as would the recent war between Iraq and Iran. The First World War could probably be put into the same category, but this is open to argument as one of its main causes was German fear that the Russian Empire might expand westwards with the imminent collapse of the Hapsburg Empire. However, as Holsti has pointed out, the Napoleonic Wars and the Second World War were brought about by the attempt of dictators to replace the state system by new empires, not by rivalries produced by the state system itself (Holsti, 1985, pp. 683–4). Since 1945, most wars have resulted from the decolonization process, either directly as in the wars challenging French rule in IndoChina and Algeria, or indirectly, as fighting developed over the organization of power in the immediate post-colonial period. The four Arab-Israeli wars fall into the latter category, as do the Nigerian and Congolese civil wars and the American war in Vietnam. If nationalism has reshaped the political world and that reshaping is on balance probably beneficial, has the new system come to stay

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or is it merely a transitory phenomenon? Some scholars take the view that it is likely to be short-lived, maintaining that the growing interdependence of states is making the state system obsolete. Regional associations are developing and the growth of transnational relations will inevitably, it is said, lead to the replacement of the state system by some new kind of global political organization. The trouble with this line of argument is that it is permeated with wishful thinking. Those who advance it tend to be both shocked by the economic gulf separating the industrialized states from the Third World and horrified by the possibility of nuclear war. There is a belief that the supercession of the nation-state system by wider and eventually global forms of political organization is necessary to provide a more equitable distribution of economic resources and to avert the danger of mass destruction by warfare. The belief is understandable and should be respected, but it does not follow that what is desirable is also likely to occur. The problems standing in the way of the supercession of the nationstate as the basic unit of political authority lie partly in the realm of institutions and partly in the realm of public loyalties. The supranational organizations that have developed since 1945 are based upon the support and co-operation of state governments. The United Nations, UNESCO, the Food and Agricultural Organization, the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund all work through and support the state system because that system supports them. When state governments refuse to pay their contributions to the cost of such agencies, there is practically nothing that the agencies can do about it. Likewise, when state governments refuse to comply with resolutions and directives issued by the agencies, the latter are revealed as impotent. They have no sanctions, because state governments have a monopoly of armed force in the world, with the exception of a few private armies like the IRA. When the United Nations Organization sends in troops to keep the peace, as in the Middle East, the contingents making up the force can be ordered to leave at a moment’s notice by the local state governments; and in any case the troops are seriously weakened by the order not to use their weapons, even if fired upon. NATO is a much stronger organization because it is more vital to its member-states, but even so it is revealing to see that the component armies within NATO use incompatible weapon systems because the state governments concerned refuse to agree upon standardization. Quite apart from these considerations, there is no evidence at all of public loyalties being transferred from national governments to

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supranational organizations. The most ambitious and successful of these organizations, the European Community, has been in operation for over thirty years without attracting much loyalty from citizens. On the contrary, public pressures within the Community invariably take the form of pressure on state governments to look after national interests, even to the point of vetoing Community decisions if these are found offensive. At the administrative level the Community has a functioning supranational bureaucracy, but at the level of political loyalties and authority it remains only a little more than an arena for negotiations between state governments. If the Community as such wielded any sizeable amount of political authority it would long ago have reformed its Common Agricultural Policy. The European Parliament, though now directly elected, has attracted little public interest and possesses little influence. Surveys do not even show a significant build-up of friendly feelings among the various national publics. The British public have warmed to Western Germany, but the West Germans have not reciprocated this feeling. At the same time, commercial rivalries between Britain and France have led the British public to rate France as second only to the Soviet Union as a country that is disliked, while French views of Britain have declined in parallel. The evidence from current politics all points in the same direction. Possessive nationalism is very much stronger than incipient internationalism. As Michael Howard has put it: ‘the withering away of the nation-state at present remains a dream and, in the eyes of the masses of the peoples of the world, not even a beautiful dream’ (Howard, 1984, p. 33; see also Miller, 1981, p. 198).

Minority nationalist movements It is possible to argue that the growth of minority nationalist movements in recent years poses a greater challenge to the nationstate than the growth of supranational organizations and commitments. Certainly that growth has tended to invalidate many social science theories that previously held sway. From the 1850s to the 1960s, most social theorists believed that the development of industrial society would be accompanied by the withering away of conflicts based on ethnic or cultural divisions. Marxists regarded such conflicts as a passing phase of capitalist society, essentially irrelevant to the class struggle and certain to be engulfed by class warfare when the latter developed. Leading sociologists, including Talcott Parsons, S.N.Eisenstadt and N.J.Smelser, subscribed to a

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diffusionist theory of social integration, according to which the culture and values of the core community in a society are gradually diffused throughout the peripheral communities. Political scientists committed to ‘modernization theory’ believed that conflicts based on ethnicity and religion are less rational than economic conflicts and are likely to fade into history as societies become wealthier and more industrialized. It cannot be said that these theories were totally mistaken. Some cultural minorities have indeed merged with the majority so that their local cultures are now only of antiquarian interest. The Cumbrians and the Cornish in England are examples, along with numerous other groups in western Europe. Political conflicts over religion, so important in many European states in the nineteenth century, have faded into insignificance in most of them. The point is not that the earlier theorists were entirely wrong but that their predictions were too sweeping. In the 1970s one of the main political developments of the decade was the emergence or re-emergence of nationalist movements in peripheral areas of modern states. The Scots and the Welsh in Britain, the Quebecois in Canada, the Basques in Spain, the Bretons and Corsicans in France were only the most conspicuous examples. In 1976 there were actually nationalist agitations in five different parts of France, for so long known as the ‘one and indivisible republic’. It became clear that ethnic and cultural loyalties among minority communities within the state have greater survival power than had hitherto been thought. They may be half-submerged for generations, but still blossom out if the circumstances favour them. In the face of these developments, some scholars have predicted not only the continued existence but also the success of minority nationalist movements. In a book entitled The Quest for SelfDetermination, Ronen has argued that the logical implication and probable consequence of accepting the principle of self-determination is the splintering of existing states into smaller units based upon ethnic communities. These smaller units may not (and should not) be sovereign, because wider, perhaps worldwide, organizations are needed for economic planning and the distribution of economic resources. Nevertheless, the modern nation-state is likely to disappear as the main unit of political organization and to be replaced by a world order composed of ‘hundreds, maybe thousands, of social and political frameworks’ (Ronen, 1979, p. 119). The case studies examined in the above chapters do not give much support to this view. It is clear that, as was suggested in Chapter 6, minority nationalist movements need both a sense of cultural

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distinctiveness and a significant material grievance or opportunity for material gain. Cultural distinctiveness is needed to produce romantic nationalists who keep the spirit of nationalism burning, while material grievances or opportunities are needed to engender widespread support for the cause. Welsh nationalism, which has the cultural factor without the material factor, seems condemned to be a cause supported by only a small minority of the Welsh people. The secessionist movement in Western Australia, which had the material factor without the cultural factor, gained mass support very quickly, but died a natural death with equal speed when the grievance was remedied by larger federal grants. Scottish nationalism, which survived for generations as a small and romantic movement, flared into a mass movement only when evidence of British economic mismanagement, combined with the prospect of massive revenues from North Sea oil, convinced electors that Scotland could be richer if it were self-governing. The fiasco of the devolution referendum, combined with the realization that the English were never going to relinquish control of North Sea oil, resulted in a dramatic collapse of electoral support. In the 1980s Scottish nationalism has almost (though not quite) reverted to the status of a romantic movement. The history of Quebecois nationalism bears some similarities to the history of Scottish nationalism. Its cultural basis is much stronger, because of the linguistic cleavage in Canadian society, but it did not attract mass support until the Quiet Revolution produced grievances about the control of economic life in the province. With the grievances now largely satisfied, the prospect of Quebecois secession from Canada has become much more remote. The case studies have also produced three other examples of incipient or actual nationalist movements, all quite different. One is the incipient discontent of people in the western provinces of Canada, who have economic grievances but no cultural distinctiveness. The parties that articulate this discontent have never got off the ground in electoral terms and the reason for this is quite simple. Unlike Western Australia, which was one of the poorer Australian states in the early 1930s, the western provinces of Canada are more prosperous than most of the eastern provinces. The possibility of being even better off is reflected in public opinion polls and media grumbling, but is not a sufficient basis for a secessionist movement of any strength. Another and totally different example is the Irish republican movement, which I take to be a case of romantic nationalism turned into tragedy. The Irish republicans had material grievances in 1919,

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but these came to an end with Irish independence in 1921. That, all these years later, people should be willing to murder others and risk their own lives for a romantic dream, that has no serious prospect of realization, is a terrible long-term consequence of the decision to stage the Easter Rising as a way of inflaming opinion by creating martyrs. It is appalling that the IRA should still be in the business of assassination, but sad to learn that young women convicted of terrorism should give as their reason that they were avenging the death or imprisonment of a grandfather or great-uncle. It is sad also that young men should starve themselves to a painful death in the attempt to turn themselves into martyrs. The modern IRA and Sinn Fein are pathological examples of nationalism, at one level disgusting but at another level deeply pathetic. In my view the Ulster Unionists, in their various organizational manifestations (the Official Unionists, the Democratic Unionists, the Orange Order, the Ulster Volunteer Force, etc.), should also be regarded as constituting a nationalist movement. They are not normally so regarded, because they have always wanted to preserve the political order rather than to change it. But they have all the basic ingredients of a nationalist movement: a distinctive culture to maintain, a sense of superiority over their rivals and enemies, a set of material interests to defend. Their nationalism is possessive rather than aspiring in character and is all the stronger because of this. So long as they remain united in their main objectives, as they show every sign of doing, they are in no danger of defeat. In all truth they could afford to be more generous towards the Catholic minority and more willing to let Catholic politicians have a junior role in the government of the province, but, for understandable reasons, they show no signs of changing in these ways. It will be noted that of these seven movements the Ulster Protestants alone have achieved their main objective. The reason for this is that the other six have favoured constitutional changes and in any well-run state the tactics available to the government to maintain the system against proposals for radical change are very considerable. It is to this question of system maintenance that we must now turn.

System maintenance A government faced with a discontented minority has various ways of alleviating the discontent so that it does not endanger the stability of the political system. In the first place, it can offer greater

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representation to the minority. As I have argued elsewhere (see Birch, 1971), the political representation of minorities has four logically distinct forms. Symbolic representation occurs when flags, anthems or sporting teams reflect the presence of minorities within the national society. Functional representation occurs when minorities appoint representatives to government agencies or organize pressure groups that secure access to political decision-makers. Elective representation exists when the electoral system enables minority interests to be articulated in legislative assemblies. Microcosmic representation is secured when minorities are reflected, in rough proportion to their size, in the staffing of public services. The United Kingdom has gone much further than Canada or Australia in giving its cultural minorities symbolic representation in the design of the national flag, in numerous official ceremonies, in the naming of regiments and in the field of international sports. All three countries afford functional representation to their minorities through a myriad of agencies and communication channels, though the indigenous peoples of Canada and Australia were somewhat left out of these arrangements until recently. In respect of elective representation, the United Kingdom is unique among these countries, and conceivably in the world, in its practice of deliberately distorting the electoral system so as to give proportionately more seats to the Irish, Welsh and Scots than to the English. Microcosmic representation is the most difficult of the four types to arrange, because the normal procedures of appointment and promotion on the basis of merit may have to be distorted to achieve it. Nevertheless, governments can intervene if faced with protests from minorities, as the Canadian government did in order to ensure that more francophones got into the federal public service. Another tactic of system maintenance is decentralization. Quebec has been given more and more independence of federal control, as pointed out in Chapter 8, so as to blunt the force of the complaints that successive Quebec governments have made about the federal system. Scotland and, much later, Wales have been given large measures of administrative decentralization to keep their politicians happy. Canadian Indians have been given extensive powers of selfmanagement on Indian reserves. The British government showed in the 1970s that it was willing to establish Scottish and Welsh assemblies if this was really necessary to prevent the further growth of the nationalist parties in those countries. Yet another tactic is to offer financial subsidies of one kind or another to regions that show signs of disaffection. Public expenditures in Britain are deliberately planned so as to spend proportionately

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more money in Scotland and (to a much smaller extent) Wales than in England. Quebec has repeatedly been given subsidies for declining industries and special grants for economic development, though it does not need them as much as the Atlantic provinces need them. Western Australia’s threat to secede was bought off by a radically new formula for paying federal grants to the states. Material grievances, so necessary to gain mass support for a minority nationalist movement, can usually be alleviated by the right kind of bribe. Finally, the referendums discussed in Chapters 7 and 8 show that a carefully managed referendum can take the wind out of the sails of a secessionist movement. A complicated set of proposals is almost certain to weaken the support for radical change by creating uncertainty in the minds of electors. Warnings about possible future difficulties can have the same effect. A requirement that 40 or 50 per cent of the whole electorate have to support change for this to count can weight the balance in favour of the status quo. Extending the referendum to the rest of the country could be even more conservative in its effects. With all these weapons in its armoury, a national government ought to be able to head off a secessionist threat by a minority. Indeed, the Scottish and Quebecois cases are good examples of this. When Michels wanted to show that oligarchy was an inevitable characteristic of sizeable political parties, he took the German Socialist Party as an example because it was the most democratic party he knew of. If that party was oligarchic, he maintained, all parties of equivalent scale were likely to be or become oligarchic (Michels, [1915] 1958). By the same logic of ‘the most extreme case’, it is now suggested that the failures of the Scottish and Quebecois nationalist movements to carry the day in the 1979 and 1980 referendums demonstrate the inherent weakness of such movements when it comes to the crunch. Scotland and Quebec were the most plausible of the various candidates for political autonomy (if not for full independence) in the 1970s; their nationalist parties faced governments more liberal than most; but when it came to the point they could not persuade a majority of electors to support them. The fact is that in the contemporary world the great majority of national governments are too powerful for minority nationalist movements to have much real chance of success. Governments control the police and the armed forces, control the national exchequer, determine trading relations with other states, have an immense amount of patronage at their disposal and have the capacity to exert great influence over public opinion. They have all the tactics of system

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maintenance available to them and they should be able to maintain the integrity of their state if they want to do so. The example of East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) does not invalidate this conclusion, because circumstances there were altogether exceptional. It was separated from the rest of Pakistan by two thousand miles of Indian territory and the secessionists won because they had both diplomatic and military support from the Indian government.

Plural societies If the present state system is likely to continue for the foreseeable future, so are the problems arising from the existence of plural societies governed by a single state government. Canadian liberals like Pierre Trudeau and Ramsay Cook have tended to make light of these, as noted in Chapter 8, but their sentiments can be regarded as those of Canadians making the best of a difficult situation. The world has too many examples of bloodshed and suffering caused by communal conflict within states for it to be reasonable to regard ethnic or religious plurality as other than intrinsically difficult and potentially dangerous. In Northern Ireland there is no foreseeable end to the violent conflict between Catholics and Protestants. In Cyprus the Greek-Cypriots and Turkish-Cypriots have been unable to find a way of living together peacefully. In Lebanon the precarious balance between religious groups that kept the country more-or-less peaceful from 1941 to 1975 broke down in the latter year into a civil war that continues to flare up intermittently, with the Christians, the Sunni Muslims, the Shi’ite Muslims and the Druze all maintaining their own armed forces. In Sri Lanka fighting broke out between the Tamils and the Singhalese in 1986 and was stopped only by the arrival of the Indian army. In Fiji the democratic regime was overthrown in 1987 by a military coup motivated by native Fijian resentment of Indian settlers. In India Sikh nationalists assassinated the Prime Minister in 1984 and have murdered over 300 Hindus since then. Nigeria and Zaire have experienced civil wars resulting from tribal conflict. In Spain Basque nationalists have murdered scores of Spaniards. In France Breton nationalists have blown up the Palace of Versailles. In Wales militant supporters of the Welsh Language Society have set fire to scores of holiday homes owned by Englishmen. The list could be extended but these examples are enough to make the point. The three countries taken as case studies in this book have avoided civil war, except in the case of the Irish insurrection against British

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rule. What lessons can be drawn from their experiences of the problems of national integration, as examined in the previous three chapters? One clear lesson is that linguistic cleavages are apt to be the most permanent and perhaps the most difficult of the divisive factors. John Stuart Mill was not stupid when he suggested, in the remarks quoted in Chapter 4, that democratic government could not easily flourish in countries that lack a common language. Canada has been a difficult country to govern throughout its life, with linguistic issues causing intermittent but never-ending political conflict. The Canadian federal government is in many ways weaker than the national governments of either Britain or Australia; and if the agreements reached at the Meech Lake conference in 1987 are passed as constitutional amendments it will become weaker still. Secondly, the fact that plural societies have the potential to produce social conflict raises questions about immigration policy. A government that diversifies its society by authorizing immigration that will have that effect is necessarily creating a potential social problem. The three countries on which this book has focused have differed in the goals, the styles and the consequences of their immigration policies. The Australians, being anxious to populate their large and remote territory, have had a collectivist approach to immigration. The aims of national policy have been publicly debated; the government has given assisted passages to large blocks of immigrants from selected countries; and the government has also accepted the responsibility of providing services, often including temporary housing, to the immigrants. The Canadians have had an individualistic approach to the matter. They discriminate between individual applicants on the basis of criteria that have rarely been the subject of public debate and have not always been publicly known, but have been largely determined by the views of the political and bureaucratic élite about what is in the Canadian public interest. They have not accepted any governmental responsibility for providing services to immigrants, though sponsorship of immigrants by families or by church organizations has been encouraged. The British have hardly had an immigration policy per se, but have let it be largely determined by foreign policy. Before 1905, Britain had an open door to the world; between 1905 and 1962, citizens of Commonwealth countries had the right of entry while others were subject to restrictions; since 1973, citizens of European Community countries have had this right while Commonwealth citizens have

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been restricted. Between 1962 and 1973 the government department responsible for immigration gave the unhappy impression of being forced into adopting hasty policies by the pressure of public opinion and the evidence of mounting social problems created by immigration from the Commonwealth. Until 1981 the laws regarding nationality and citizenship in Britain were exceptionally untidy; and though the British Nationality Act of 1981 has improved the situation in this respect a constitutional lawyer has said that ‘many of its provisions are so obscurely drafted that they are unfit to be in the statute-book’ (Lester, 1985, pp. 279–80). As will probably be clear, my own conclusion is that immigration policies ought to be publicly discussed so that governments can be sure that they are acceptable to a majority of citizens. Of the three countries, Australia clearly comes out best in terms of this criterion. This may seem a paradoxical conclusion in view of the international embarrassment caused to Australians by the White Australia policy. However, embarrassment is a much less serious problem than social conflict. The advantage of the Australian practice of making immigration a public issue and having a minister in charge of it is that Australian governments have been able to liberalize their policies with some confidence that the host society will accept and welcome the newcomers. This is now being put to a test by the acceptance of over 100,000 Vietnamese refugees with uncertain skills and linguistic abilities, but so far there is no evidence that the Vietnamese influx will cause trouble, as distinct from certain local tensions. The need to integrate immigrants with different cultural backgrounds raises questions about language training and multiculturalism. It was asserted in Chapter 5 that governments have a duty to instruct immigrants in the main language of their new society and the employment difficulties experienced by Muslim women in Britain serve to underline this point. The question of teaching what Australians call ‘community languages’ is one about which generalization is difficult. I do not believe that immigrants can reasonably be said to have a right to have their children taught the language of the country they themselves have voluntarily left. In Canada the existence of two official languages effectively determines what will be taught as a second language in the great majority of schools, though Ukrainian is taught in some schools in Alberta and Saskatchewan. In Britain membership of the European Community and close proximity to the Continent make French and German the obvious candidates; a few schools offer Urdu as an alternative but it would be difficult to establish a case for making this or Hindi generally available. In Australia geographical

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remoteness means that a wider choice of languages can sensibly be offered; and official reports on this matter have been outlined in Chapter 9. The general conclusion must be that the choice of a second language is best determined by pragmatic considerations rather than by statements of principle. This leads into the more general question of whether, when assimilation is either inappropriate or impossible, the multicultural model is more or less advantageous for society than the older model of the melting pot. Sociologists differ not only on the relative advantages of these models or ideals but also on how far they are realistic categories. Some have argued that the idea of a melting pot is a myth and that in practice the United States is just as much a cultural mosaic as Canada (see, for instance, Anderson and Frideres, 1981, p. 107). I am not persuaded by this argument. Having lived in both countries, I believe that there is a distinctively American culture, widely shared, that is definitely more than the sum of numerous ethnic contributions; but I do not find a distinctively Canadian culture equivalent to this. Though the two categories are far from watertight, I think that there is a useful distinction to be drawn between the model of the melting pot and that of cultural pluralism. I would add that I think American society and Australian society approximate to the melting pot model, whereas Canadian society is more substantially multicultural; and if we think in terms of ideals rather than models I prefer the melting pot ideal. Cultural pluralism is agreeable to immigrants while they are settling in to a new society, but I do not see much advantage in passing it on to succeeding generations. It divides cultural energies and talents instead of uniting them (see Wangenheim, 1966, pp. 84–6); and it may tend to perpetuate ethnic stratification. We should not ignore the conclusion of two Canadian sociologists that ‘the more a minority group turns in upon itself and concentrates on making its position strong, the more it costs its members in terms of their chances to make their way as individuals in the larger system’ (Vallee and Shulman, 1969, p. 95). The British case is complex, because there is no possibility of creating a melting pot out of the English, Indian, Pakistani and West Indian cultures. The alternatives are assimilation or cultural pluralism, with no middle way. It is too early to say what pattern will emerge, though one might perhaps expect assimilation for some of the better-educated blacks and Indians, cultural pluralism for the others. The cultural cleavages between the indigenous peoples and the settlers of Canada and Australia are obviously too great for anything

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but cultural pluralism to be feasible. Attempts to assimilate native Indians and Aborigines have failed and the consequence has all too often been that groups of these people live an impoverished existence on the margins of white society, having poor jobs and housing conditions, cut off from their traditional culture, sometimes taking to drink. Indians and Aborigines still living on reserves are generally in a happier position and in both countries government policy now recognizes this. In Canada the attempt to give Indians some form of selfgovernment has failed for the time being. However, government policies have now retreated from the ideal of assimilation and are aimed at encouraging native life on the reserves in so far as this is feasible. The slowness with which Indian land claims are being settled illustrates the practical difficulties involved, but the will is there. The position of Aborigines is worse than that of Canadian Indians, for three main reasons. One is that their treatment by white settlers was simply worse than the treatment the Indians received. Another is that the cultural gap between the Aborigines and the white man is much greater than that between Indians and whites. Aborigines have not adapted to the white economy as well as a few—but nevertheless a significant few—Indians have done. Nor do Aborigines seem to understand white ways so well. An Australian commission of inquiry was established in late 1987 to investigate the deaths by suicide of sixty-nine Aborigines while in police custody. The report of the inquiry has not yet been published, but it is widely believed that the deaths were genuine suicides caused by despair and culture shock. Nothing like this has happened in Canada. The other bleak fact for Aborigines is that the Australian outback is less hospitable than its Canadian equivalent. In many areas Indian tribes can provide much of their food by hunting and fishing, but very few Aborigines could now do this in the wild. The move ‘back to the country’ in Australia, though desirable on social and cultural grounds, is nevertheless a move to living on relief payments in rural areas instead of doing so in cities. The Aborigines, and to a lesser extent the Canadian Indians, are historical losers. Nothing can alter that sad fact; the most that the white majorities can do is to show understanding and offer help to mitigate the practical problems that these indigenous peoples face. Another vital aspect of integration, besides the social, is the economic aspect, which has both regional and ethnic dimensions. In regional terms Australia is the most integrated of the three countries and Canada the least integrated. In Australia the wealthiest state

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(Victoria) is only about 14 per cent richer than the poorest (Tasmania). In the United Kingdom England is about 32 per cent richer than Northern Ireland. In Canada the three wealthiest provinces (Ontario, Alberta and British Columbia) are about 45 per cent richer than the four poorest (Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island). The ethnic dimension of economic integration can best be illustrated by the imaginary matrix suggested in Chapter 4. In any advanced society there are horizontal divisions between people in professional and managerial occupations, shopkeepers and other selfemployed people, skilled workers and unskilled workers. If communal divisions are represented by near-vertical lines superimposed on the horizontal lines, the crucial test is to discover by empirical enquiry how nearly vertical the communal lines are. If the lines of communal division are far from vertical, the community with a preponderance of less skilled occupations will tend to feel resentful about the structure of society. This is obviously the case with members of the indigenous peoples in Canada and Australia who have moved into the cities to compete with the white man. It is true of Catholics in Northern Ireland, as explained in Chapter 7. It is true of Afro-Caribbean groups in English cities. They may well be much better off in London or Birmingham than they would be in the West Indies, but after a few years in Britain life in the West Indies ceases to be such a relevant point of reference for them as the life and incomes of their white neighbours. The economic achievements of Asians in Britain are more varied, as noted earlier, and their attitudes are also more difficult to generalize about. In Canada there is evidence of a fairly clear hierarchy of economic achievement among ethnic groups, as reported in Chapter 8. Asian and Afro-Caribbean immigrants are, next to the indigenous peoples, at the bottom of this hierarchy, but there have been no public signs of alienation parallel to those among blacks in Britain. Canada is helped in this respect by its relatively low unemployment rate, lack of decaying inner-city areas, better housing and greater space; though it is also fair to observe that a lower level of political activity and the different organization of the mass media mean that discontent is more likely to go unnoticed in Canada than in Britain. In Australia the economic integration of immigrants has been remarkably successful, as reported in Chapter 9, though the Vietnamese constitute a partial exception to this generalization. The third aspect of national integration, namely the political aspect, can take any of the four forms outlined earlier, namely assimilation, accommodation, ethnic or regional conflict and

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majority control. Of the three countries studied, Australia has the simplest pattern, being one of majority control for the Aborigines and political assimilation for all other groups. Canadian politics are characterized by accommodation, with each of the two main parties being an alliance of regional groups and to some extent an alliance of ethnic groups. British and Irish-Canadians are divided; the groups of east European and north European origin tend to support the Progressive Conservative Party; French-Canadians and Italian-Canadians tend to support the Liberals. Canadian governing bodies, from the Cabinet downwards, contain a careful mixture of regional and ethnic representatives. The Quebec nationalists have excluded themselves from these arrangements and their relationship with the other parties and institutions of Canada must be put under the heading of ethnic conflict. As in Australia, the political position of the indigenous people must be regarded as a form of majority control. Within Britain, the pattern was one of assimilation until this was disturbed by the growth of the Welsh and Scottish nationalist parties in the 1970s. The coloured minorities are only just beginning to emerge as political actors, as distinct from being subjects of legislation and policy-making. They enjoy functional representation on numerous agencies concerned with race relations; they have representatives on a number of municipal councils; and since 1987 they have had four representatives in Parliament. Nearly all these elected representatives belong to the Labour Party and there has been no attempt to form distinctively ethnic parties. It remains to be seen how far they will be drawn into the mainstream of British political life. Northern Ireland is different. It is dominated by the politics of ethnic conflict, as has been shown, with each communal group having its own form of nationalism as well as its own specific interests. It stands as a warning to other communally divided societies. Representative government at the provincial level has been suspended for good reasons, and although the Northern Irish are represented in the British Parliament the fact that their representatives do not belong to the British parties reduces the influence they can have. As was pointed out earlier in this chapter, microcosmic representation is also important for ethnic minorities or peripheral regions. It should perhaps be added that there is one area in which this threatens to become an issue in all three countries, and that is the composition of police forces. For many years this has been an awkward question in Northern Ireland, while Catholics have felt

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unfairly treated by the overwhelmingly Protestant police force. Sympathy for the Catholics in this respect has to be tempered by the knowledge that when the Royal Ulster Constabulary was created in 1922 a third of the places in it were reserved for Catholics, who refused to join. Nevertheless, the authority of the police in Catholic areas is weakened by the fact that they are looked upon with suspicion and frequently denied the kind of co-operation they can normally expect from citizens. In those parts of English cities where black people are concentrated the English police, being almost entirely white, are at a similar disadvantage. So are the Vancouver police when dealing with the large Sikh community in that city, among whom are a number of political extremists and suspected terrorists. So are the Australian police when dealing with Aborigines in certain areas where relations have become tense. This is, perhaps, a small problem, but it is peculiarly intractable. In any area the police form a closely knit subgroup, with considerable esprit de corps, their own standards and a great deal of discretion in deciding which crimes to treat more seriously and which to treat less seriously. They exercise this discretion in accordance with their interpretation of the dominant values of society. Members of communities who do not share these dominant values would probably be unhappy in the police force, and because of this they are reluctant to join. British police forces have had relatively little success in their attempts to attract blacks and Asians to their ranks. American experience in this regard shows that where there is a large black ghetto, such as Harlem or the Watts area of Los Angeles, it is possible to recruit a black police force that is effective and efficient. Where blacks are scattered more thinly, it is more difficult to recruit suitable blacks for a mixed force. While this is not a major issue in the whole area of national integration, it is nevertheless an awkward issue. At times of crisis the police constitute the sharp end of the state.

A final word The object of the second half of this book has been to explain and discuss the processes of national integration in three states that differ considerably in respect of integration though they are similar in their parliamentary systems of government. The analyses that could be made of national integration in other states would naturally be different, but they could be made under the same headings and by using the same categories and models.

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The subject is of increasing importance. Throughout the Third World, new states have recently embarked upon processes of nationbuilding and national integration that are inherently difficult because of the ethnic heterogeneity of so many Third World states. Many advanced industrial states, though fairly well integrated, are now facing new problems because of the arrival of new types of immigrants. The United Kingdom, Canada and Australia are not alone in having diversified their populations considerably in the past three decades. West Germany and France have done so too, inviting foreigners in to help their labour shortages in the years of rapid economic growth and now finding that the new residents create social problems in a period of slow growth. Other countries have diversified their populations by accepting refugees. Sweden, for example, now has a minority of Palestinians, who will presumably stay there because they have no state of their own to go to. There is no probable end to this process of ethnic diversification. The constant improvement of world communications tends to increase the flow of migrants, while political upheavals tend to maintain the flow of refugees. The problems of national integration and nationalism discussed in this book are therefore certain to remain on the political agenda for the foreseeable future and may be of increasing importance in the years to come.

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Index Abella, I 167 Aboriginal languages 200 Aborigines 51, 58, 61–2, 189, 190, 208–14, 233–4 Acton, Lord 26–30, 181 Affirmative action 55, 57 Aitken, Don 204, 206, 207 Algeria 73 Alsacians 26 American blacks 47, 54–5 American nationalism 7, 13–14, 22–3 American religiosity 43 Andalucians 26 Anderson, A.B. 181, 233 Andrews, J.V. 155 Anglo-Irish Agreement 109 Arafat, Yasser 5 Armenian nationalists 70 Asch, M. 174 Assimilation in general 49–51 of coloured minorities in Britain 126–7 of immigrants in Canada 169–70 of Canadian Indians 173–4 of immigrants in Australia 194, 196, 200–2, 206–8 Ataturk, Kemal 24 Australian defense policy 217–18 Australian national identity 216–19 Australian nationalism 183–4 Bangladesh 65, 73, 230 Banton, Michael 124, 128 Barnard, F.M. 14, 18 Basques 26, 48 Basque nationalism 131, 230 Belgium 11, 42, 45–6, 73, 152 Berlin, Isaiah 17, 18 Bell, Coral 217, 218 Biafra 73 Bilingualism 44–6, 144–5, 150–6 Bilingualism & Biculturalism, Royal Commission on 152–4, 170 Blainey, Geoffrey 191–2, 193

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Blais, André 161 Blishen, B. 158 Bonaparte, Napoleon 22, 41 Bourassa, Henri 149–51, 152 Breton language 11, 44–5 Breton nationalism 131, 230 Breton, R. 171 Bretons 26, 48 Breuilly, J. 25 British Broadcasting Corporation 126–7 British nationalism 134–7 British North America Act 138–41, 144–5 Brookman, A. 210 Brown, A.J. 82 Brown, C. 130, 119, 124 Brotz, H. 171 Brunet, Michael 157 Bulpitt, J. 81, 114, 129 Burke, Edmund 54 Butler, David 215 Campaign Against Racial Discrimination 115 Canadian Indians 51, 54, 58, 61–2, 64, 233–4 Canadian national identity 180–2 Canadian nationalism 180–2 Carson, Edward 100 Cashmore, Ernest 125 Catalans 26 Cavour, Camillo 97 Chaiton, A. 181 Chiang Kai Shek 24 Chubb, Basil 101 Claiborne, L. 115 Clark, C.M.H. 209 Clift, D. 158 Cobban, Alfred 26 Colston Report 199–200 Commission for Racial Equality 115, 124 Commonwealth Grants Commission 188

Index Community languages 60 Connolly, James 98–9 Connor, Walker 38, 48 Conway, J.F. 142 Cook, Ramsay 149–50, 156–7, 182, 230 Coombs, H.C. 212 Cornish nationalism 67 Corsicans 26 Coupland, R. 39, 135 Crete, J. 161 Cultural pluralism in general 46–9, 51, 133, 233–4 in Britain 118, 126–7, 130–4, 233 in Canada 170–2, 178–82 in Australia 197–201 Cypress 230 Decolonization 23–4, 32–3, 222 Democratic Labour Party 207–8 Dennis, J. 14 Deutsch, Karl 36, 37, 222 Dexter, Barry 24 Devolution plans in the U.K. 89–95 Durham, Lord 38, 143–4 East African Common Market 83–4 Easter Rising 98–9, 103, 108, 146, 227 Economic integration in general 49–51, 234–5 in Britain 82–4, 118–23, 130, 132–3, 235 in Canada 141, 179, 234–5 in Australia 188, 201–2, 215, 234–5 Education and national integration 9–11, 15, 20, 41, 44–5, 55, 111 in Northern Ireland 105, 111 in Britain 120–5 in Canada 146–8, 153, 154, 159, 168–9, 180 in Australia 198–200 Engels, Friedrich 38, 97 English nationalism 135–7 Ergang, R.R. 17 Esman, M.J. 70 Ethnic trap 55–6, 60 European Community 71, 224 Evans, Gwynfor 47 Evans, M.D.R. 201–2 Evatt, H.V. 206–7 Fichte, J.G. 5, 19–21, 22 Field, S. 119–20

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Fijian nationalism 72, 230 Finland 152 Fiscal equalization 42, 83–4 Fisk, E.K. 210 Flemish language 45–6 Fox, A.D. 116 French-Canadian grievances 145–8 French-Canadian nationalism 148–51 French universalism 13, 17–18 Freud, Sigmund 32 Frideres, J.S. 233 Front de libération du Quebec 159–61 Gaelic language 11, 44, 55, 78–80, 90, 98, 101, 150 Gaelic League 98 Gaelic Athletic Association 98 Gale, G.F. 210 Gandhi, Indira 44 Gandhi, Mahatma 23 Garibaldi, Giuseppi 26 Gellner, Ernest 49 German Democratic Republic 10 German nationalism 18–21, 27 Ghai, D. 84 Gibbins, Roger 155, 177 Gillies, A. 18 Glazer, N. 47 Goethe, Johann 18 Goot, Murray 192 Grant, George 181 Greenwood, Gordon 184, 187–8 Gwyn, Richard 155 Hamilton, Richard 161 Hanham, H.J. 90 Hanks, P. 211 Harbinson, J.G. 106 Harris, Max 218 Harris, Rosemary 103 Hawkes, D.C. 178 Hawkins, Freda 167, 169 Hazlehurst, K. 212 Hechter, Michael 48, 67–8, 82 Hegel, G.W.F. 21–2, 29, 37–8 Herder, J.G. 16–19, 21 Herold, J.C. 41 Hitler, Adolf 14 Holsti, K.J. 222 Home Rule Bill 98 Homeland centres (for aborigines) 213–14

250


Howard, Michael 224 Human rights 53–4 Immigrants, services for in Britain 123, 134 in Australia 198–200 in general 232–3 Immigration policies in Britain 112–14, 231–2 in Canada 167–9, 231–2 in Australia 189–96, 208, 231–2 India 25, 33, 44, 72 Indian immigrants in Britain 59 Indigenous peoples, claims and rights of 60–2 in Canada 172–8, 233–4 in Australia 189, 190, 208–14, 233–4 Individual rights 53 Innis, H.R. 153 Internal colonialism 67–8, 79, 82–3 International Monetary Fund 71 International system 71 Inuit peoples 51 Ireland, before 1916 78, 96–8 Irish Civil War 100–1 Irish independence 101–2 Irish insurrection 99–100 Irish language 80 Irish nationalism 97–9, 102 Irish Republican Army 99–101, 107–8, 226–7 Islamic nationalism 23–4 Italian nationalism 5, 22, 26 Jaensch, D. 206 Jewish minority in Britain 50 Jinnah, Mohammed Ali 23–4 Jones, F.L. 201–2, 203 Jones, R.T. 87 Jones, Thomas 100 Jupp, James 196, 199, 204 Kallen, E. 171–2 Kedourie, Elie 4, 7, 26, 30–4, 181 Kelley, G.A. 19, 20 Kelly, J. 201–2, 203, 204, 205 Kringas, P. 55 Keon-Cohen, B. 211 Kenyatta, Jomo 23 Kerner Report 47 Khomeini, the Ayatollah Ruhollah 24 Kossults, Louis 22 Krasnick, M. 141

Language teaching in Britain 134 in Australia 198–200 in general 232–3 Laponce, Jean 44, 45–6, 150–1 Layton-Henry, Z. 113, 114, 117, 118, 127, 128 Lebanon 230 Lester, Anthony 112, 232 Levesque, Rene 161, 165 Levitt, J. 148 Lewis, Saunders 33–4 Lijphart, Arend 48, 74 Lindberg, L. 14 Linguistic cleavages and issues in general 10–11, 44–7, 55, 232–3 in Britain 78–80, 87–90, 150 in Ireland 98, 101 in Canada 143–56, 159–60, 163–7 in Australia 196, 198–200 Lloyd, George 100 Lo Bianco Report 199–200 London, H.I. 190–1 Lyons, F.S.L. 99 MacGreil, M. 132 MacLennan, Hugh 178 Madison, James 29 Manitoba Schools Act 146–7 Mansergh, N. 97 Manuel, F.E. 18 Malaysia 49 Martin, Jean 197, 203 Marx, Karl 38 Mazzini, Giuseppe 5, 18, 22, 97 McAllister, Ian 127, 203, 204, 205 McCrone, D. 14 McDonald, N. 181 McEachran, F. 18 McNeill, R. 103 McRae, Kenneth 45, 48 McRoberts, K. 157–9 Meinecke, Friedrich 13, 14, 22 Meisel, John 151 Melting pot model in general 43, 47, 49, 51, 233 in America 47, 170, 233 in Britain 118 in Canada 169–70 in Australia 197–8, 201, 208, 233 Michels, R. 229 Mill, J.S. 39, 46–7, 74, 231 Miller, J.D.B. 224

Index Minogue, Kenneth 40–1 Minority nationalist movements 63–72, 224–30, see also specific examples Minority rights 52–62 Modernization theory 225 Morchain, J. 161 Morgan, Kenneth 86 Moxon-Browne, E. 105–6, 110, 111, 131, 132 Moynihan, D.P. 47 Multiculturalism in Canada 170–2 in Australia 196–201, 205 in general 233 Muslim immigrants in Britain 124–5 in Australia 193–4 Nairn, Tom 68–9 Napoleon, see Bonaparte Nasser, General 24 National Front 117–18 Nationalism definition of 4–7 theories of 13–24 critics of 26–35 advantages of 31–3, 221–2 among cultural minorities 63–74, 224–30 see also specific nationalist movements Nationalism and the nation-state 221–4 Nation-building 37, 40–6 Nation-state benefits of 221–2 future of 222–30 NATO 71, 223 Nigeria 9, 48, 65, 73, 74 Norrie, K. 141 Northern Ireland 9–10, 80, 102–11 Northern Ireland Parliament 80, 104–5, 106–7 Nyerere, Julius 24 O’Brien, C.C. 106 O’Cuiv, B. 101 Ornstein, M.D. 162 Pakistan 24 Pakistani immigrants in Britain 59 Palacky, Frantisec 22 Parti Quebecois 5, 161–5 Pearse, Patrick 98–9

251

Pearson, Lester 152 Perrault, Antonio 157 Phizacklea, A. 122 Pinard, M. 161 Plaid, Cymru 33–4, 85, 87–90 Plural societies 230–37 Poland 30 Polish nationalism 69 Police and ethnic minorities 117–18, 126, 128–30, 211–12, 233–4, 236–7 Political demonstrations 117–18, 128–9 Political representation of minorities in general 228 in Britain 127–8, 228, 236 in Australia 203–8, 213 Political representation of regions in Britain 79, 228 in Canada 139, 142–3, 179 in Australia 184–5 Ponting, J.R. 177 Porter, John 55, 171, 179 Posgate, D. 157–9 Positive discrimination 55, 57 Price, Charles 192, 194–5 Pringle, J.M.D. 206–7 Przeworski, A. 74 Quebec referendum 164–5 Quebecois nationalism 5, 37, 66, 72, 73, 156–66, 226, 236 Quiet Revolution 157–9 Race relations in Britain 114–30 in Australia 211 Rastafarians 124–6 Referendums in Scotland and Wales 94–5 in Quebec 164–5 and system maintenance 229 Regush, N.M. 160 Religious cleavages in general 43–4 in Ireland 96–111 in Britain 124–6 in Canada 146–7 in Australia 193–4, 207–8 Renan, Ernest 6 Richards, L. 204 Riel, Louis 145–6 Robarts, S.C. 142 Robespierre, Maximilien 9 Romantic nationalism 67, 69–70, 226–7

252


Ronen, Dov 225 Rose, Richard 78, 83, 86, 97, 110–11 Rothschild, J. 69 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques 14–16, 20, 21 Royal Ulster Constabulary 106, 108 Rydon, Joan 186 Sanders, D. 176 Santamaria, B.A. 206 Scarman, Robert 122, 129 Schwartz, Mildred 182 Scott, Roger 108 Scottish national identity 81, 85–6 Scottish National Party 87–95 Scottish nationalism 4, 67, 72, 73, 86–7, 226 Secession justifications of 63–6 conditions for 66–72 Self-determination 23, 27 Seton-Watson, H. 25 Shafer, Boyd 24, 25 Shulman, N. 233 Sikh immigrants in Britain 59 in Canada 59 Sikh nationalism 44, 72, 131, 230 Simeon, Richard 141 Sinn Fein 98, 104, 106 Smiley, Donald 156 Smith, D.J. 122 South Africa 50 Soviet mobilization 10, 36–7 South Moluccan nationalists 64, 71–2 Soviet Union 9, 42, 46, 74 Sri Lanka 72, 230 State-building 8 Stevenson, M. 162 Stormont, see Northern Ireland Parliament Studlar, D. 127, 128 Sudan 43 Supranational organisations 71, 223–4 Swann Report 121 Switzerland 45, 73, 152 Symbols of cultural difference 79, 80 of national identity 9, 40–1 System maintenance 72–4, 227–30 Tamils 25, 72 Tardivel, V-P 156

Taylor, Charles 158 Television and minority nationalist movements 70, 71–2 and Canadian national identity 181 and multiculturalism in Australia 198–9 Teune, H. 74 Tomlinson, Sally 122–3 Torres Straits Islanders 208 Transnational relations 223–4 Troper, H. 167 Trudeau, Pierre 140, 154–5, 161, 165, 170, 174, 181, 230 Ulster Catholics 105–11 Ulster nationalism 102–3, 227 Ulster Plantation 97 Ulster Protestants 100–11 Ulster Unionists 104, 227 United Nations Organization 223 de Valera, Eamon 101 Vallee, F.G. 233 Van Dyke, Vernon 53 de Vault, C. 161 Verney, Douglas 146, 147 Villeneuve, J-M-R 156–7, 161, 178 Waddell, E. 151 Wangenheim, E. 233 Ward, Russel 189, 191 Wardhaugh, R. 153, 154 Weinfeld, M. 171 Welsh language 11, 44, 67, 78, 80, 81, 85, 87, 89–90 Welsh Language Society 67, 85, 89, 230 Welsh nationalism 33–4, 47, 67, 73, 86–90, 226 Western alienation in Canada 141–3, 226 Western Australia, proposed secession 65–6, 73, 187–8, 226 West Indian immigrants in Britain 113–14, 119–30 in Canada 168–9 Whitaker, Reg 168 White Australia policy 189–91 Wiley, N.F. 55 Williams, P.M. 162 Williams, T.D. 100 Wilson, J. 175 Wilson, P. 203, 205

Index Wilson, Woodrow 23 Woodburn, J.B. 102–3 World Bank 71 Young, Crawford 64

Youth Training Scheme 123, 129 Zaire 230 Zimmern, Alfred 26 Zionism 72

253

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