Michael Evans: Australia and the US: Intimate Strangers
I do not know whether I have been more struck by the similarities between the American and the Australian or the differences. I incline to believe that the similarities are more superficial and the differences more fundamental.
—J. Pierrepont Moffat, American Consul-General in Australia, October 14, 1935
In November 2003, in an ABC radio interview, Andrew Peacock, once leader of the Liberal Party, and a former foreign minister and ambassador to the United States, was asked to identify the main differences between Australians and Americans. Without hesitation Peacock identified four areas in which national beliefs sharply differ: interpretation of the meaning of political freedom; attitudes towards the role of religion in public life and the challenge of American exceptionalism; the place of wealth and economic status in society; and attitudes towards war and the standing of the military. He went on to warn that while Australians and Americans are long-time military allies and share common Western liberal democratic values, they remain, at heart, two distinct nationalities shaped by very different histories.
These contrasting histories need to be carefully examined and understood, if only because casual assumptions about cultural similarities between Australians and Americans only act to conceal important differences—differences that carry with them risks of diplomatic superficiality and political miscalculation. When Mark Twain visited Australia in 1897, he observed that Australians “did not seem to me to differ noticeably from Americans, either in dress, carriage, ways, pronunciation, inflections or general appearance”. In the twentieth century, Twain’s comfortable image of similar peoples—what Alfred Deakin called “the blood affection” between Australians and Americans—was strengthened by the rise of the United States to global power and the pervasive Americanisation of so much of Western popular culture. Yet if Australia is to possess effective statecraft in the new millennium, we must probe beneath the veneer of popular myths and commonplace beliefs.
Too much of the language of contemporary Australian-American relations is smothered in sentimental rhetoric about the shared cultural values that characterise the “other special relationship” between Canberra and Washington. This is true on both sides—from President George W. Bush invoking a “fair dinkum” spirit of friendship in an October 2003 address to the Australian parliament to Julia Gillard’s “true friend down under” March 2011 address to Congress—in which the Australian leader lauded Americanism, stating, “your city on a hill cannot be hidden”. To be sure, there is much to take comfort from in Australian-American relations from what Labor senator Stephen Loosley described in 1998 as “the sheet anchor of cultural similarity”. Nonetheless, recognising the reality that cultural differences do exist between Australians and Americans is the acme of prudence when it comes to alliance management—particularly for Canberra as the junior partner.
There is no greater responsibility in Australian statecraft than ensuring smooth American-Australian alliance relations through the translation of cultural affinities into congruent policy interests. Accordingly, this article sets out to examine the four differences between Americans and Australians identified by Andrew Peacock. It also adds an overarching fifth difference that Peacock omitted but which has helped shape all of the others: the crucial role of the frontier in forging the philosophical outlooks of both countries. Using the lens of difference as an alliance measurement yields useful insights into the particulars of, and interactions between, American and Australian political behaviour. Such an approach may be the best way for Canberra and Washington to improve their understanding of each other in an evolving era when the rise of China presents a significant challenge to the continuation of the American-led international order that has dominated the world since 1945.
The frontier legacy
The frontier was as important in Australian history as it was in America, but the respective frontiers were of such very different character that they produced two quite contrasting peoples. While Australia and the US have similar origins as eighteenth-century British colonial fragments, their pattern of continental settlement was strikingly different. America’s frontier was initially developed by the heirs of British religious and political refugees who defined a new nationality through a war of independence and whose demographic spread from the east coast was assisted by an abundance of fertile land in the interior. The nineteenth-century American frontier marched onwards from the Appalachians through the Louisiana Purchase to Texas and California impelled by a sense of Manifest Destiny with pioneers not simply of British origin, but from nearly all parts of Europe. Alexis de Tocqueville, in his 1835 book Democracy in America, captured the grandeur of American mass movement when he wrote, “this gradual and continuous progress of the European race toward the Rocky Mountains has the solemnity of a providential event. It is like a deluge of men, rising unabatedly, and driven daily onward by the hand of God.”
In contrast, the Australian frontier developed from a homogeneous mosaic of Anglo-Celtic convicts, graziers, pastoralists and squatters whose political allegiance remained to the British Crown. Visiting Australia in 1871, the English novelist Anthony Trollope noticed that “the colonies are rather a repetition of England than an imitation of America”. Because of a forbidding interior, Australia was settled in a more fragmentary and dispersed manner than America. British settlers moved inland from separate coastal enclaves and did not represent a coherent continental movement on the American scale. Australia possessed no counterpart to the arable interior of the United States with inland waterways like the Mississippi. Instead, the outback was arid, and came to represent a “dead heart” whose harshness acted to inhibit European settlement.
From the outset then, the American backwoods differed from the Australian bush as influences on human settlement. In his 1950 book The American Mind, Henry Steele Commager noted that the wholeness and abundance of the American landscape welcomed the individual and yielded “the sense of spaciousness, the invitation to mobility, the atmosphere of independence, the encouragement to enterprise and to optimism”. In Australia the opposite was true, with the interior inspiring not optimism and hope but pessimism and despair. The Australian art critic and historian Robert Hughes explained the contrast well in 2006:
Americans have [a] contrary myth of space, because to them space is freedom. In colonial Australia, space itself was a prison. You walk across the country, find nothing, then [you] die. So Australians don’t associate large space with freedom and opportunity the way Americans do. It’s a totally different social myth.
There can be no greater symbolic contrast between the American and Australian frontiers than the different fates of the Lewis and Clark expedition and that of Burke and Wills. Between 1804 and 1806, Lewis and Clark traversed America “from sea to shining sea” and returned to report on a verdant interior and an unfolding Manifest Destiny. In 1860-61, Burke and Wills set out in a south-to-north expedition from Melbourne to the Gulf of Carpentaria. They found only desert, and perished on the return journey across forbidding terrain.
In the course of the nineteenth century, the United States was settled as “small man’s frontier” with pioneer families moving west in Conestoga wagons to form individualistic societies of freehold farmers, ranchers and townspeople. In contrast, Australia became a “big man’s frontier” of sheep and cattle in which the only successful small frontier group was a squatter class bankrolled by finance houses. While America’s experience of frontier family migration acted as the vanguard for a new property-owning class, Australia’s settlement was marked by the domination of British working-class men—rural workers, gold-diggers and stockmen. The stockmen came to form a homogeneous wage-earning class of pastoral workers often pledged to rural trade unions such as the Shearers’ Union. Individualism was less important in Australia than the US because of the greater need to foster a unity of strength using small-man egalitarianism on a big man’s capitalist frontier. H.C. Allen noted in his 1959 study Bush and Backwoods: A Comparison of the Frontier in Australia and the United States, that the Australian equivalent of an independent American farmer was a unionised rural worker pursuing collective effort. As a consequence, “the self-reliant, optimistic, ingenious, individualistic, independent American of the pioneer farmer’s frontier was markedly different from the socialistic, sceptical, rough-and-ready, ‘mate-conscious’, collectivist Australia of the rural wage-earner’s frontier”.
On the harsher Australian frontier, notions of fairness, equality and government assistance became more important to settlers than the independent spirit that characterised so much of America’s westward movement. In the United States, a constantly moving frontier bred independent communities who owed little to the far-flung American state. A libertarian culture based on the right of self-redress rapidly developed through a cluster of frontier beliefs that embraced the doctrine of individuals having “no duty to retreat”, the homestead ethic and a resort to vigilantism. On the Australian frontier there was much greater reliance on the law-enforcement of colonial governments—such as those of New South Wales and Victoria—a situation that made policing by the state both more acceptable and effective. While violent bushranging and armed collisions with indigenous inhabitants occurred on the Australian frontier, their scale did not parallel events in the United States. Australian colonial history has no counterpart to the lawless violence of the 1870s Lincoln County War—described by one American historian as “a veritable university for gunfighters”—or the 1876 military defeat of Custer’s Seventh Cavalry by the Lakota at Little Big Horn.
Yet another significant difference between the United States and Australia is the continuing metaphysical presence of the frontier in the American imagination. This is linked to what the historian David Hackett Fischer calls an “idea of boundlessness”—the notion that there is an “American Dream” that renews itself in every generation—from John F. Kennedy’s New Frontier of space exploration in the 1960s to the marvels of California’s Silicon Valley in the 1990s and beyond. In Australia, the physical harshness of the outback continues to constrain any similar sense of a boundless national vision. The Northern Territory is not yet a state, and as the English writer Jeanne MacKenzie observed in her 1962 book Australian Paradox, Australia’s harsh frontier produced not a people of vision but a people of resilience, “doubtful of too much ambition, and ready enough to accept what was at hand rather than reach out for what might be”. If there is what another English author, D.H. Lawrence, described in his novel Kangaroo as a profound indifference in the Australian psyche—a “withheld self”—then it owes much to the experience of settlement with its sense of alienation from the interior of the continent.
Despite significant differences in settlement and outlook, the frontier experience became a common bedrock for developing ideas about national identity in both the United States and Australia. Frederick Jackson Turner’s thesis of American socio-political transformation through the frontier experience appeared in 1890 and was later applied to Australia by writers from H.C. Allen to Robin Winks and often suggested the existence of common cultural narratives. Nowhere has this been more powerful than in the nineteenth-century folk mythology of the two frontiers. The legend of the American mountain men in the Rockies is paralleled by Australian explorers crossing the Blue Mountains and moving into the pastoral age. Similarly, both countries celebrate a history of social banditry and bushranging: Jesse James in America; Ned Kelly in Australia. The idealisation of the American Western cowboy in literature from Owen Wister through Zane Grey to Larry McMurty has a clear Australian counterpart in outback literature about drovers and diggers as celebrated by writers as diverse as Henry Lawson, Banjo Paterson, Ion Idriess and Russel Ward.
Ultimately, however, it is the differences between the Australian and American frontiers rather than the similarities that are more important. A verdant American interior helped to produce the personal liberty, individual energy and spirit of innovation associated with the citizens of “the land of the free and the home of the brave”. In contrast, in the Great South Land, the experience of a harsh bush frontier fostered virtues of social equality and collective endurance alongside a talent for improvisation. These separate features have proved powerful in shaping the modern political cultures of both countries.
The idea of freedom
Writers such as Louis Hartz, Seymour Martin Lipset and David Hackett Fischer have all argued that a unique combination of American historical events—from foundation by immigrants fleeing political and religious persecution through a war for independence and a civil war to the challenge of settling the frontier—produced the “first new nation” founded on personal freedom. As Fischer notes, before the revolution of 1776 America was founded on four great migrations from Britain, all of which upheld doctrines of liberty. The Puritans of New England looked on America as St Matthew’s “city on a hill”, a haven of ordered liberty. The English Royalists who fled Cromwell’s Republic for Virginia set up a more hierarchical form of liberty based on a Cavalier utopia. Quaker Pennsylvania came into existence on the basis of reciprocal freedom with a Charter of Liberties citing Leviticus: “Proclaim Liberty throughout the land, unto All the Inhabitants thereof”. Then, in the first half of the eighteenth century, a wave of British Borderers, many of Jacobite persuasion, arrived on American soil with a rugged doctrine of individual liberty that Patrick Henry would immortalise in 1775 as: “Give me liberty or give me death!”
The libertarian ideals of the various American colonists coalesced in July 1776 into the Founding Fathers’ Declaration of Independence—a document that is, in essence, a recapitulation of John Locke’s Second Treatise on Government. Once independence was won by force of arms, the American Constitution deliberately established a divided form of government to balance state power and maximise individual liberty: a presidency, two houses of congress, and a supreme court. By the early twentieth century, the people of the United States had emerged with a political tradition firmly based on individual rights and the pursuit of liberty.
In Australia, the concept of freedom has been shaped by very different historical forces. The legacies of convictism, the uncontested rule of the British Crown and the more collective character of frontier life spurred by Anglo-Celtic homogeneity created a country that was comfortable being the “independent Australian Britons” of a New Britannia in the antipodes. If the United States became imbued with the libertarian ideals of John Locke, Australia came to be dominated by Jeremy Bentham and his philosophy of utilitarianism embodied by the principle of “the greatest happiness of the greatest number” as the most important measure of right and wrong. Bentham was, above all, a theorist of government rather than of liberty, and his writing is more concerned with the operation of interests rather than ideals. The influence of Bentham is manifest in Keith Hancock’s seminal analysis Australia (1930) which argues that Australian democracy “has come to look upon the State as a vast public utility, whose duty it is to provide the greatest happiness for the greatest number”. As we shall see, despite great economic changes since the 1980s, a Benthamite philosophy of the common good continues to be a major philosophical force in Australian political culture.
Those who triumphed in Australian politics throughout the nineteenth century were bearers of Benthamite ideas and of the beliefs of the English Chartist movement that suffrage should be based on the path of representation, not revolution. By the 1860s, through self-government, practically the whole Chartist program was realised in Australia. Benthamite utilitarianism and egalitarianism came to assume pride of place in Australia, with the state being seen as an ethical instrument to distribute economic fairness and promote equality. One of the best examples of the application of utilitarian values to Australian politics is the system of compulsory voting—a system that would be seen in the United States as a violation of individual rights. As the Australian political scientist Don Aitkin once observed, “the Australian acceptance of the initiating role of government, which so shocks some American visitors, is perhaps the oldest element of our political culture”. For their part, it is common to find many Australians who are repelled by a libertarian American political culture that, through the Second Amendment, permits the citizenry to keep and bear arms so making it more difficult for the state to protect its individuals against criminal shooting sprees.
The Australian idea of freedom is far more concerned with ensuring fairness and social equality than with the American equation of personal liberty and individualism. Hancock put it well when he observed, “to the Australian, the State means collective power at the service of individualistic ‘rights’. Therefore, he sees no opposition between his individualism and his reliance upon Government.” For many Americans, the concept of fair play in public life is an alien notion because fairness is seen as a virtue that flourishes best in private life—through the agency of civic institutions and philanthropy—rather than through the state. In the United States, it is not the primary task of government to impose fairness on society but to uphold the rights of personal liberty. In Australia, political development has always revolved around a struggle for a “fair go”. W.A. Holman, later Labor Premier of New South Wales, made the case for state paternalism when he stated in 1905:
We regard the State not as some malign power hostile and foreign to ourselves, outside our control and no part of our organised existence … We recognise in the Government merely a committee to which is delegated the powers of the community … Only by the power of the State can the workers hope to work out their emancipation from the bounds which private property is able to impose on them today.
If the United States is marked by an assertive individualism that often views the best government as the least government, Australia puts far more emphasis on egalitarianism and faith in government—to produce what Sir Charles Dilke described in 1890 as “Britain with the upper classes left out”. Australians cherish what the political historian John Hirst calls a “democracy of manners”—a political order based not on birth, class or wealth but on the principle of human equality. When Federation was achieved in 1901 it was a polity that the political writer Paul Kelly describes as:
dedicated to [an] egalitarianism [to be] realized through state power for individual needs in contrast to American self-realisation through individual liberty. Australians looked by instinct to government. Americans, by contrast, had fought a war of independence in the cause of freedom against government tyranny.
The different ideas of Americans and Australians on freedom as personal liberty and freedom as fairness are further illuminated by attitudes towards wealth and economic status.
The role of wealth and economic equality
In 1906, H.G. Wells wrote in The Future of America that “essentially America is a middle-class [which has] become a community and so its essential problems are the problems of a modern individualistic society, stark and clear”. He went on to note the absence of socialists in the Labour sense or conservatives in the Tory sense: “All Americans are, from the English point of view, [classical] Liberals of one sort or another.” It is true that the United States has always been a nation of competitive individualism particularly in the financial and economic spheres. The American Dream places great emphasis upon the concept of the self-made man, on the Horatio Alger figure, who through freedom is able to strive for material gain and personal advancement.
In the accumulation of vast wealth, America has produced many financial tycoons from Carnegie to Gates, while many politicians from Roosevelt to Romney have been rich men. In the United States, wealth is seen to follow naturally from the opportunities offered from what Seymour Martin Lipset calls in his book The First New Nation (1997) “classic American laissez-faire, anti-statist, market-oriented, meritocratic, individualistic values: in short the Whig tradition”. While there is a social democratic tinge to modern American political culture—from William Jennings Bryan in the 1890s through Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 1930s and Johnson’s Great Society of the 1960s to Obama’s universal health-care scheme today—the idea of state intervention has always been fiercely contested in the United States.
When Democrat candidate George McGovern campaigned for the presidency in 1972 on a platform that included wealth redistribution he lost forty-nine out of fifty states. White- and blue-collar voters, rich and poor, across the country emphatically rejected redistribution as unjust to individual Americans. As David Hackett Fischer notes in Fairness and Freedom, his insightful comparative study of the United States and New Zealand as open societies, “Americans don’t dream of equality. They dream of wealth. They don’t want to get even; they want to get ahead. And they deeply believe that in this dynamic society one person can become a millionaire without beggaring another.”
Not surprisingly, given America’s value system, the mobilisation of workers behind collectivist objectives has always being difficult. American labour history is one of pragmatic voluntarism rather than mass participation in trade unions. Indeed, the United States is the only industrialised country not to have developed a significant labour party or socialist movement. Antonio Gramsci called the United States “the only purely bourgeois society”, a country in which individual liberty and freedom of opportunity had become the ideology of Americanism itself and which was accepted by most workers. This has occurred despite the fact that the United States contains the highest proportion of people living in poverty of any Western democracy. Historically, in the United States organised labour has been more syndicalist than anti-statist and, sometimes, even conservative. For example John L. Lewis, leader of the mineworkers and the founder of the Congress of Industrial Organisations, was a Republican for most of his life. As Walter Russell Mead has written, most Americans prefer individual to collective action because “they would rather get out of the working class than struggle with others to improve working-class conditions. They would rather go to night school and join management than join a union.”
Compared to the United States and its private enterprise culture, Australia has from its inception been far more of a public enterprise country with the avowed aim of civilising capitalism. Here again we encounter the legacy of Australia’s history of settlement with its exclusive British class roots that favoured trade unionism, its evolution of a Benthamite system of utilitarian government and a frontier environment that hindered individual economic opportunity. Moreover, given its egalitarian ethic, personal wealth in Australia is seldom seen as a barometer of social or political success. After all, in a country with compulsory voting the vote of a machine worker has the same value as that of a millionaire. As the politician and diplomat Frederick Eggleston put it in 1953:
in Australia there is little respect for wealth as such [and] it is harder for an industrial magnate to enter politics than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle … The wealthy classes have never provided leaders or shown the community any guidance in political matters.
Reporting on Australia in 1936, the American diplomat J. Pierrepont Moffat informed Washington that “the accumulation of wealth is not so great an incentive as it is with us”. He attributed this tendency to the fact that the average Australian voter was prepared to accept “governmental interference [in the economy] in a way no other Anglo-Saxon would stand”. The success in 2015 of Malcolm Turnbull—who became independently wealthy outside of politics—before becoming Australian prime minister is unusual and is the exception that proves the rule.
In Australia, not only have socialism, trade unionism and social democracy been influential in politics through the agency of the Labor Party, but the dominant strain of Australian liberalism is far less classical in character. It is in fact a form of social liberalism that traditionally permits a predominant role for the state in economic life. Much of the late nineteenth century in Australian politics was about the struggle for philosophical supremacy between Victorian social liberals, such as David Syme and Alfred Deakin, who favoured an economic system based on protectionism, and classical liberals such as Bruce Smith and George Reid in New South Wales, who favoured free trade. In the early twentieth century it was the social liberalism of Syme and Deakin that triumphed, Deakin famously declaring, “a Colonial Liberal is one who favours State interference with liberty and industry at the pleasure and in the interest of the majority, while those who stand for the free play of individual choice and energy are classed as Conservatives”.
In his 1932 book State Socialism in Victoria, Eggleston reflected that Victoria’s public services proportionately “constitute possibly the largest and most comprehensive use of state power outside Russia”. Writing to President Roosevelt in October 1942, Nelson Trusler Johnson, head of the US legation in Canberra, advised the White House that, unlike the United States, Australia had been developed as an exclusive Anglo-Celtic “legislatively-planned social paradise” and consequently lacked the dynamic free enterprise associated with competitive immigration. Johnson’s comments reflected how, in the first decade after Federation in 1901, the Australian Settlement emerged as a political consensus between Australian social liberals, socialists and organised labour on the necessity of a civilisation built around fairness—through the pillars of race nationalism (White Australia), industrial protection, wage arbitration, state paternalism and imperial security. Quite unlike the United States, wages in Australia became as much an ethical as an economic concern, with rises linked to prices rather than economic productivity. The French writer Albert Mėtin memorably called this economic order “socialism without doctrines”, a means through which the power of government could be harnessed to benefit the greatest number of Australians.
The Syme–Deakin political tradition lasted until the 1980s and included social liberals such as Robert Menzies and Malcolm Fraser amongst its adherents. It was to take the forging of another political consensus between modern social democrats of the Hawke–Keating Labor Party of the 1980s and the neo-liberal economic reformers of John Howard’s Liberal Party in the 1990s and early 2000s to dismantle the Deakinite Settlement in favour of free market reform and privatisation. Yet, despite the unshackling of the Australian economy, the role of the free market in Australia continues to be contested around the traditional idea of fairness. The loss of momentum in economic reform this century on both Liberal and Labor sides is stark testimony to the historical force of state intervention in Australia.
Despite the benefits of the micro-economic reforms of the last thirty years, no Australian politician can yet echo Ronald Reagan’s blunt declaration that in building prosperity, “government is not the solution but the problem”. Australia’s attachment to government-inspired fairness and economic equality remains a continuing philosophical challenge to the creation of an enterprise-based and productive form of social democracy which rewards individual endeavour and hard work while still providing a social-security safety net. It is a challenge, moreover, that is deepened by the continuing weakness of an Australian classical liberal tradition in the vein of George Reid, and by the absence of a strong conservative intelligentsia to help stimulate the type of wide-ranging policy debate required about the future.
Religion and American exceptionalism
The United States may dominate modernity and define much of Western popular culture, but it is also home to a Bible Belt that runs from Virginia to Texas and which constitutes the largest force of conservative religion in the developed world. As early as 1835, in Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville noted, “there is no country in the world where the Christian religion retains a greater influence over the souls of men than in America”. He went on to observe that the church pulpits of America were “aflame with righteousness” which encouraged a moral certitude that suggested that “if America ever ceases to be good, America will cease to be great”. It was belief in America as a redeemer nation that inspired Julia Ward Howe to write “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” and which in 1850 led Herman Melville to describe Americans as God’s elect forging a New Jerusalem:
We Americans are the peculiar chosen people—the Israel of our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world. God has predestined, mankind expects, great things from our race; and great things we feel in our souls. The rest of the nations must soon be in our rear. We are pioneers of the world; the advance guard, sent on through the wilderness of untried things, to break a path into the New World that is ours.
The United States is a certainly a country where ideas about individual freedom and the character of society merge with a powerful tradition of sectarian Christian religiosity to form “a theology of American exceptionalism”. The doctrine of American exceptionalism pairs religious conviction with beliefs in individual liberty, national destiny and free-market capitalism. America is sacralised as “the last, best hope of Earth” and its creed of exceptionalism brings together the secular and the sacred, the Enlightenment and the Bible, and reason and faith to form a covenant with history. The inspirations for this covenant are the New England Puritan image of the “city on a hill”; the Founding Fathers’ Declaration of Independence; the fiery trial of the Civil War and Manifest Destiny; and the great crusades of the Second World War and the Cold War against totalitarian tyranny. As the historian Richard Hofstadter famously observed of the United States, “it has been our fate as a nation not to have ideologies, but to be one”. The idea of Americanism as an ideology fostered by God’s grace infuses public life with a sense of morality and a high-flown rhetorical language that is seldom heard in Australia.
While hierarchical Episcopalian, Lutheran and Catholic denominations are part of Christianity in the United States, what gives American faith its real fervour is non-hierarchical Protestant sects—such as Congregationalists, Methodists and Southern Baptists—that are often non-conformist and evangelical in character. Again, the frontier legacy was important in helping to forge the character of American Christianity. Unlike Australia with its urban coastal settlements, in the far American West there was often an absence of government, and pioneer churches became the main institutions of social life and civilisation. These features have given American religiosity a populist voluntarism that emphasises a personal relationship with God as exemplified by preachers such as Billy Sunday and Billy Graham.
In 1990, nearly 70 per cent of Americans professed a belief in the personal existence of the Devil, and in 2000 evangelical Christians made up almost a quarter of American voters. In many parts of the United States there is a predisposition to believe in what the historian Charles A. Beard once described as “the Devil theory of politics”—a tendency to view social controversies such as Roe v Wade on abortion and political transgressions and scandals such as Watergate and Whitewater as morality plays between the forces of good and evil. In areas of foreign policy this approach is also evident—from Ronald Reagan’s Cold War branding of the Soviet Union as “the focus of evil in the modern world” to George W. Bush’s promise “to rid the world of evil” in the war on terror.
If the United States is, as G.K. Chesterton once put it, “a nation with the soul of a church”. Australia is almost the exact opposite, in the sense that, since the 1960s, the country has gone far down the road of embracing an almost post-Christian culture. In 1968, Ian Turner could write in his book The Australian Dream that “the Australian dream is … a worldly dream. Its concern has been the natural and social environment rather than the hope of a life to come.” Twenty years later, during the bicentennial celebrations of January 1988, Manning Clark observed in the Bulletin that Australians had always been “a nation of unbelievers, a people who have liberated themselves from the Judaic-Christian myth”. Christianity in Australia has little of the national power it has in America. Unlike Puritan New England, convict New South Wales did not begin as a place of religious haven. Indeed, there is an old joke that while the United States and Australia were both settled by a chosen people, in Australia’s case they were not chosen by God’s grace but by the finest legal minds in England.
Historically, while Anglicanism and Catholicism have long been important to the texture of Australian cultural life, their stamp has always been conservative in tone, and as such, less integral to the formation of Australian identity. With its male, working-class character, the Australian frontier was never dominated by families who embraced evangelical forms of Christianity as in much of America. Moreover, the Benthamite character of government with a focus on distributing economic fairness meant that religion had a lesser role in shaping socio-economic relations than in the United States. Evangelical fervour has always been treated with suspicion by many Australians as a manifestation of at best “wowserism” and at worst hypocrisy. While religious or quasi-religious figures, such as Daniel Mannix and Bob Santamaria, were occasionally prominent in Australian political life in the twentieth century, Australian Christianity today is a far weaker force. In 2013, a national survey found that only 8 per cent of Australians regularly attend Christian church services.
In 2015, Roy Williams published a book called Post-God Nation? in which he concluded, “on the measure of social significance, it must be said that Australia is no longer a Judeo-Christian country”. Indeed, it is difficult to disagree with current Australian Ambassador to the United States, Kim Beazley’s 2013 view, that the modern Australian lifestyle is “a secular style [for] we are not a church-going nation”. As a generalisation, it is not inaccurate to describe most Americans as utopian moralists impelled by a freedom that is shaped by religious faith while most Australians are secular realists who believe in a fairness that is shaped by social beliefs.
Attitudes towards war and the status of the military
Daniel J. Boorstin wrote in his 1965 book The Americans that “what a nation means by peace or war is as characteristic of its experience and as intimately involved with all its other ways as are its laws or its religion”. The United States was made by political revolution and a war for independence followed by a civil war to preserve federal union. Australia was made by peaceful constitutional evolution in which self-government inside the British Empire preceded any sense of national unity. Not surprisingly, despite having fought alongside each other in every major conflict since 1917, Americans and Australians have quite different perceptions about the meaning of war and the status of the military.
American exceptionalism, fuelled as it is by a clutch of libertarian and religious impulses, has frequently found baptism in battle, from Bunker Hill through Gettysburg to the sands of Iwo Jima and Iraq. Recent studies such as Andrew Preston’s Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (2012) and Raymond Haberski, Jr’s, God and War: American Civil Religion since 1945 (2012), are remarkable in that they demonstrate how revivalist religion, elite diplomacy and military power coalesce in American political life. The American approach to war often contains a messianic quality that is unique among English-speaking liberal democracies. Confronted by an Islamist adversary, one American military leader, Lieutenant-General William G. “Jerry” Boykin, confidently declared his belief in victory: “I knew my God was bigger than his. I knew that my God was a real God and his was an idol.” As Haberski remarks:
American troops take more than just a flag into battle; they carry with them a set of assumptions commonly understood as American exceptionalism, or the notion that no matter what actions it takes abroad ultimately America will be redeemed by history.
In 1941, the United States entered the Second World War as the self-proclaimed arsenal of democracy, with Henry Luce declaring the dawn of the American Century in crusading terms:
It now becomes our time to be the [military] powerhouse from which the ideals [of Western civilization] spread throughout the world and do their mysterious work of lifting the life of mankind from the level of beasts to what the Psalmist called a little lower than the angels.
The profession of arms is revered by most Americans and it is common for off-duty military personnel in uniform to be spontaneously approached by citizens with the greeting, “Thank you for your service to our country.” A recent book by Dick Cheney and Liz Cheney, Exceptional: Why the World Needs a Powerful America (2015) is dedicated to the men and women of the United States armed forces as “defenders of liberty, sustainers of freedom”. The high social status of the American officer corps is perhaps best exemplified by the fact that several successful generals—including Washington, Jackson, Grant and Eisenhower—have ascended to the presidency. In more recent times, diverse political figures such as Bob Dole, John McCain and John Kerry—all military veterans—have viewed their service records as major assets in their quest to win presidential nomination.
In Australia, attitudes towards war and the social standing of the military are strikingly different. Unlike the United States, Australia was not founded in the crucible of modern warfare and, given dispersed demography and a location as an Anglo-Celtic state in Asia, has long been a strategically dependent country. Australia’s armed forces remain limited in numbers and defence spending is low, with security being guaranteed by the great English-speaking Western power of the day, first Britain and then the United States. Moreover, because of its unbroken constitutional evolution in the nineteenth century, Australian nationalism is less political than social in character and tends to resemble that of Canada rather than the United States. Former foreign minister Bob Carr, in his 2014 book Diary of a Foreign Minister, was moved to write that, when it comes to the use of force, Australians lack “the pure blood-in-the-eye instincts” of Americans. Historically, Australians have long been deeply divided over war as an instrument of national policy—as the conscription crises of 1916-17 and again in 1942 as well as the political division over participation in the Iraq War of 2003 clearly demonstrate.
Paradoxically, the Australian view of war is less military than social and civilian in character. It is embodied in the national imagination by the Anzac tradition of volunteer soldiers that began with Gallipoli in 1915 where Australians earned their baptism of fire as a new nation. It is important to grasp that Anzac is not a martial tradition that is connected to either the state or to professional military values. Rather it is a popular tradition that portrays war in anti-elitist and Tolstoyan terms as a heroic saga of citizen soldiers—diggers in uniform—rather than as a Clausewitzian phenomenon of military experts pursuing politics by other means. As such, Anzac is fully congruent with Australia’s egalitarian ethos, for it is a military tradition with no hint of militarism.
As Keith Hancock shrewdly noted in Australia, it is one of the great paradoxes of Australian history that the digger is seen as a daring individual while the average voter is often viewed as a passive participant in the compulsory electoral system that has fostered so much state paternalism. The paradox can be understood once it is realised that Anzac is exclusively an expeditionary warfare tradition; that the Australian experience of modern war from the Western Front to Afghanistan is confined to volunteers on foreign soil, not armies at home; and that Anzac serves as a cultural transmission belt for Australian society’s cherished ideals of egalitarianism, fair go and mateship to operate in an overseas military setting.
Given the historical combination of social nationalism, strategic dependence and Anzac’s anti-elitism, it is not surprising that modern Australian military professionals lack the high social esteem enjoyed by their American counterparts. Despite the operational success of the modern Australian Defence Force, distinguished military service has seldom been seen as a route to high electoral office in Australia. In terms of public office, the best a retired Australian general can hope for is a ceremonial post as a state governor in the vein of such figures as John Sanderson and David Hurley or—as in the case of General Sir Peter Cosgrove, the most successful Australian general since Monash and Blamey—as Governor-General.
Implications for alliance relations
Australians and Americans increasingly resemble intimate strangers because their cultural similarities are often assumed while their cultural differences are often ignored. Australians are not Californians located on the other side of the Pacific any more than Americans are West Australians situated in Texas. Yet effusive rhetoric about the cultural similarity that exists between the United States and Australia has abounded over the last two decades. In November 1996, President Bill Clinton declared that sharing common values meant that Americans and Australians could see in one another “a distinct mirror of our better selves”. In March 2011, Julia Gillard told Americans that shared beliefs mean, “you have an ally in Australia. An ally for war and peace; an ally for hardship and prosperity … Australia is an ally for all the years to come.”
It is not that such statements about cultural affinity are incorrect; it is only that they serve, as Andrew Peacock highlighted in 2003, to mask more significant differences in outlook. It might be argued that, in the course of normal bilateral relations, Australian-American variations in cultural values are primarily domestic concerns that are unimportant in diplomacy. After all, in the world of public affairs, Australian and American politicians and diplomats are unlikely to consult each other with copies of Hancock and Tocqueville to hand. Yet it is precisely the possibility of future Australian-American disagreement over the direction of important policies that requires policy-makers to develop a sophisticated historical and psychological understanding based on the differences in each country’s political culture.
These challenges of historical knowledge and cultural psychology are not new but they are frequently overlooked. It is useful to remember J. Pierrepont Moffat’s December 1936 caution: “The great trouble [with US-Australian relations] is that the Australian has really little understanding of American psychology.” Although Moffat was writing well before formal alliance relations began in the 1950s, his point goes to the heart of the challenge of managing the Australian-American alliance. Accepting the reality that Australians and Americans have different political cultures need not involve any acceptance of Malcolm Fraser’s view—expressed in his 2014 book Dangerous Allies—that American foreign policy is now so alien to Australian values that the alliance needs to be ended in favour of a policy of armed neutrality requiring higher defence spending. Since there is no appetite in the electorate for such a drastic change in policy direction, the alliance will continue well into the future.
Nonetheless, Fraser’s clear implication that the Australian-American alliance will always resemble something of a shotgun marriage between a middle power of around 24 million people and a superpower of over 300 million people should not be lightly dismissed. Although Australia has been both a supporter and a beneficiary of the American-led world order that has existed since 1945, the assumption that Washington and Canberra will always agree on foreign policy decisions is an illusion. This is particularly the case in Asia, where the rise of China as a rival of the United States raises the scenario of the emergence of Sino-American strategic competition in the coming decades. If faced by a worst-case analysis of an assertive and expansionist China, there can be little doubt that the vast majority of Australians will prefer Washington’s liberal outlook to Beijing’s illiberal worldview. Yet there is much middle ground between the polarities of Sino-American co-operation, competition and conflict which Australian statecraft needs to explore in the coming years.
The uncertainty that is now beginning to envelop the older system of Asian geopolitics requires that Australia possess a clear vision of its national interest—one that seeks to carefully integrate an Asian economic destiny with a historical propensity for American strategic affinity. In 2013 Bob Carr declared, “the Australian dream is good US-China relations”. It will be an unprecedented challenge for Australian statecraft to pursue that dream, not as a neutral, but from within an American alliance framework. This task will demand the keenest appreciation of all the factors that may unite or divide us from our American allies.
The US and Australia are democratic polities with pluralist cultures, a concern for human rights, and respect for the rule of law. Yet within that common framework of Western values, Americans and Australians have drawn different meanings about the best way to govern their societies and to interact with the outside world. Americans primarily equate an open society with libertarianism and individual freedom; Australians are more concerned with establishing fairness and equality. Australians lack America’s sense of moralism as embodied in its notion of exceptionalism; Americans prefer to promote liberty at the expense of the social harmony that is cherished by Australians. Providing these philosophical variations are recognised and understood they are not, by themselves, disabling to alliance relations. As a middle-power alliance partner of the United States, Australia’s interests are best served by honesty and candour in diplomacy, which are facilitated not simply by the comfort of cultural similarity, but also by recognising the truth that an appreciation of cultural differences may actually serve to bring about more policy clarity.
Australians should take heart from the American philosopher and theologian Reinhold Niebuhr’s classic 1952 study The Irony of American History. In this work, Niebuhr wrestled with the paradox that America’s service to upholding the cause of human freedom around the world could be undone, not by conscious malice or by a lust for domination, but by an overconfidence drawn from its idealistic beliefs in liberty. He predicted that America’s unconditional veneration of its doctrine of redemptive freedom carried within it the seeds of hubris and imperial overreach. Writing long before defeat in Vietnam and the quagmires of Iraq and Afghanistan, Niebuhr perceived that the supreme irony of American history lay in the reality that the nation’s virtues could easily turn into vices if too complacently relied upon; while the enormous military power wielded by the United States would become vexatious unless used with wisdom. In memorable words that recommend themselves to all Australians and Americans concerned with the future health of the alliance, Niebuhr concluded:
the ironic elements in American history can be overcome [but] only if American idealism comes to terms with the limits of all human striving, the fragmentariness of all human wisdom, the precariousness of all historic configurations of power, and the mixture of good and evil in all human virtue.
Michael Evans is the General Sir Francis Haslett Chair of Military Studies at the Australian Defence College, Canberra, and a professor in the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at Deakin University.
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