HONOURS THESIS - "We grew here, you flew here" the politics of national identity in the Cronulla BENJAMIN MOFFITT

“We Grew Here, You Flew Here”:
The Politics of National Identity in the
Cronulla Riots
Honours thesis submitted in partial fulfillment
of the requirements for the award of the degree
Bachelor of Arts (Honours)
from
University of Wollongong
By
Benjamin Moffitt
BA (Dean’s Scholar)
School of Social Sciences, Media & Communication
Faculty of Arts
2008
1
Synopsis
What were the Cronulla riots, why did they occur, and what can they tell us about the
operation of national identity? Examining media accounts of the 2005 Cronulla riots
through the theoretical framework of Ernesto Laclau’s political theory, this thesis aims to
understand how we negotiate the border between ‘Australian’ and ‘un-Australian’, and
how this delineation is vital to the creation of national identity. It traces the emergence of
the overdetermined Middle Eastern/Muslim Other in Australian society, investigates why
those who rioted at Cronulla and those who supported them imagined themselves as
marginalised, and ultimately concludes that national identity, as a totalised hegemonic
logic, is impossible.
2
Declaration
I certify that this thesis is entirely my own work except where I have given full
documented references to the work of others, and that the material contained in this thesis
has not been submitted for formal assessment in any formal course and the word length is
18,552.
Benjamin Moffitt
8 October 2008
3
Contents
Synopsis
2
Acknowledgements
5
Chapter I:
Introduction
6
Chapter II:
Theoretical Context
12
Chapter III:
Methodology
34
Chapter IV:
The Cronulla Riots: An Analysis
42
Chapter V:
Discussion
54
Chapter VI:
Conclusion
72
Appendix:
A Timeline of the Cronulla Riots
80
Bibliography
90
4
Acknowledgements
Writing is a team effort. These people’s love, support, guidance, encouragement (and not
to mention their eagle-eye editing skills) have been essential to me completing this thesis.
I would like to thank my supervisor, Dr. Richard Howson, for introducing me to
postmarxist theory and the work of Ernesto Laclau. His encouragement and belief in my
abilities have been much appreciated, and he has truly shown me that the gap between
political theory and practice is an artificial one. I would also like to thank Dr. Mary
Zournazi for nurturing my academic potential throughout my undergraduate degree, and
encouraging me wholeheartedly to follow my passions in the world of research.
My parents have always supported me in whatever I have done, and been my number one
fans. I thank them for their love, care and support, and for always being there for me. I
am so grateful to them for passing on a sense of the importance of education and social
justice to me. They are my heroes. I thank my younger brother Matt for his eye for detail
and his wise insight. I am incredibly proud of him and look forward to seeing how he will
change the world.
And finally, I thank Ash, who is not only a wonderful editor, but the one who nurtures
my heart and soul, and keeps my head in check. All my love in the world.
My deepest gratitude and love,
Ben Moffitt
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Chapter I: Introduction
Many Australians would recognise the song “I Am Australian”. Its chorus, almost as
patriotically familiar as “Waltzing Matilda”, is a stirring declaration of Australia’s
diverse and multicultural background. It is sung at citizenship ceremonies, Australia Day
celebrations, primary school assemblies and sporting grand finals across the country –
“We are one, but we are many, and from all the lands on earth we come. We share a
dream and sing with one voice: I am, you are, we are Australian” (Woodley & Newton
1987).
However, there is one problem with this song: it is an utter lie.
As recent events have shown, the definition of who is Australian is far from allencompassing. Over the past year, events such as the malicious dumping of severed pigs’
heads at the site of a proposed Islamic school in Camden and the anti-Islamic Lindsay
pamphleting scandal of the 2007 Federal Election have proven that Australian national
identity is not an essence that simply resides latent inside of us. Rather it is something
that is explicitly political and always contended. It is as divisive as it equivalential.
There was no clearer demonstration of this than the Cronulla riots of 2005, where
approximately 5,000 Anglo-Celtic Australians took to Cronulla Beach to violently
demonstrate against a conflated Middle Eastern/Muslim Other and attack “anyone of
Middle Eastern appearance” (AAP 2005a: online). Disturbingly, many Australians
supported these actions. Here, we saw that the delineation between us/them when it
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comes to defining the term ‘Australian’ is not just a semantic matter, but instead has very
real consequences – proving that I am, you are, we are not all, Australian.
This is not a strictly local phenomenon. Terrorist attacks in New York, London, Madrid
and Bali in the last decade have spurred questioning about the capability of national
identity to provide social cohesion in the face of a globalised and pluralised world. Civil
unrest in the suburbs of Paris and Northern Britain has highlighted the problems with the
exclusion of minority groups who are not considered part of their home country’s
national identity. As Biles and Spoonley (2007: 191) attest, “it is precisely at a juncture
like the present when questions of national identity and diversity become central and
particularly interesting”.
It is at this historical juncture that this thesis is situated. As we begin to see national
identity’s increasingly ‘Janus-faced’ (Nairn 1997) character – its potential for both social
inclusion and civil disharmony becomes clearer – now is the time to reconsider previous
theorisations of the concept that have attempted to essentialise or ‘freeze’ it. There exists
a true need to develop theory that operationalises the contingency at the heart of national
identity, and instead of attempting to define the fleeting ‘what is this country’s national
identity at this point in time?’, ask the more difficult question of ‘how does national
identity operate?’
The issue that this thesis will address is the ‘impossibility’ of national identity. It will
argue that national identity is a hegemonic construction that is premised on exclusion,
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and thus can never be completely equivalential. To do this, it will develop a theoretical
framework that explores the radical constructivism involved in the operation of national
identity through the work of Ernesto Laclau. Laclau’s postmarxist political theory
emphasises the precarious nature of identity and focuses on its relational nature. This
enables us to consider the us/them binary so important to the construction of national
identity in a more complex, sophisticated, but also dichotomic light. Here we can begin to
theorise the central role of the Other in the definition of national identity, and explore the
relationship between ‘Australian’ and ‘un-Australian’.
Chapter II will introduce this theoretical framework. It will firstly examine the various
contemporary theorisations of national identity and the problems associated with this
vague and under-researched field. It will differentiate the often confused concepts of
nation, state and ethnic group, and explore what a poststructuralist conceptualisation of
identity means for our contemporary understanding of national identity. In order to move
beyond the us/them theoretical impasse at which many theorisations of national identity
get stuck, this chapter will introduce four central Laclauian concepts. These are ‘the
impossibility of society’, antagonism, dislocation, and hegemony as an unstable
equilibrium between equivalence and difference. Together, they will be used to argue that
national identity can never be totalised, as exclusion is essential to its operation, and that
this results in the definition of the nation being forever contingent and contested.
However, this theoretical development means little without engagement with concrete
and historically-specific politicosocial situations. As such, this framework will be applied
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to a case study of the aforementioned Cronulla riots. These riots offer an important study
for Australian national identity, as they demonstrate the violent ramifications of the
breakdown of the concept’s equivalential logic. They are also interesting in that they do
not fit the pattern of recent riots in Paris, Northern Britain or Los Angeles, where an
antagonised minority violently responded to prolonged discrimination and social
exclusion. Instead, in the Cronulla riots there was a hegemonic majority attacking a
minority group, leading Moses (2006) to deem the events a pogrom rather than a riot.
This thesis will attempt to conceptualise why this might have occurred, arguing that the
Cronulla riots were a violent reassertion of Australian national identity in the face of an
overdetermined antagonism.
Yet how can we come to gain knowledge about these events? Chapter III will outline the
methodological approach of the thesis. Textual analysis of newspaper articles and
editorials about the Cronulla riots will be undertaken to construct a popular understanding
of the events. The analysis will focus on two central features of the texts: how the
narrative of the events was constructed, and where the causality was placed – or perhaps
more simply, what happened and why? Chapter IV will present the results of this
analysis. It will firstly provide an outline of the events of the Cronulla riots, and secondly
categorise the causal hypotheses put forward, which are divided into: moral panic,
multiculturalism, racism, policing and masculinity.
Chapter V, the discussion, will examine these findings with the Laclauian postmarxist
theoretical framework developed in Chapter II. It will demonstrate that these hypotheses
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are tied together by their theorisation of the dislocatory role of overdetermined
antagonism in the operation of Australian national identity. It will trace how this Middle
Eastern/Muslim Other came to be lodged in the social imaginary of Australia through the
coalescence of local, national and global events, ultimately expressed in the ‘rupture’ of
the Cronulla riots. It will also examine why the rioters and their numerous supporters
imagined themselves as marginalised, and how this group expressed itself in a populist
configuration. Finally, it will argue that any attempt to ultimately hegemonise the
‘excess’ of Australian national identity is a fruitless task, as national identity is always
contingent, and thus never complete.
Chapter VI, the conclusion, will explicate the wider lessons that can be taken from the
Cronulla riots when it comes to national identity. It will argue that the management of the
impossibility of national identity is of utmost importance for social cohesion, and look to
the future to propose what practical and theoretical steps must be taken to avoid a repeat
of the riots. It will argue that marrying the Laclauian theoretical framework developed in
this thesis with social capital theory represents a crucial step forward in creating a new
political sociology which can theoretically and practically develop ways to deal with the
impossibility of national identity.
Overall, this thesis aims to fill a lacuna in the literature. There is currently no Australian
work utilising postmarxist theory to examine national identity or the specific case of the
Cronulla riots. Further, much of the academic and popular work on the Cronulla riots is
too politically loaded, deterministic and ready to place singular causality rather than
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taking into account the multiple influences that led to this overdetermined event. As such,
this thesis aims to avoid these knee-jerk emotional responses, and will instead aspire
towards a measured analytical understanding of the Cronulla riots. The theoretical
approach as well as the choice of case study make this thesis a timely and valuable
contribution to the field of social and political theory, and will lead to a clearer
theorisation of the workings of Australian national identity and the future of social
inclusion in this country.
This thesis does not have the answer for the successful management of national identity –
as a hegemonic logic located between equivalence and difference, it can never truly be
totalised and ‘set’. The myth of a timeless national identity must be disregarded, and
instead the reality of a diffuse, complex and contested phenomenon must be taken
seriously. So whilst perhaps the sentiment that “I am, you are, we are Australian” is
utopian, this does not mean that we should not at least attempt to come to a greater
understanding of national identity in the hope that we can devise more inclusive and
equivalential ways of avoiding marginalisation in our definition of ‘Australian’. This
thesis is a step in this direction.
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Chapter II: Theoretical Context
To appropriate Mark Twain’s pithy aphorism, rumours of the death of the nation-state
have been greatly exaggerated. Despite the well-intentioned forecasts of many
international relations theorists of the nineties (Appadurai 1996; Bauman 1995; Castells
1996; Ohmae 1995; Robertson 1992) who predicted the “the emergence of a global
citizenship” (Bateson 1990: 145) following the withering of the nation-state, it remains
the preeminent political organisational entity in the world today. Globalisation has most
certainly changed the very means by which the social, political and economic realms
operate, but it has not erased the nation-state. Indeed, some theorists (Acharya 2002,
2007; Biles & Spoonley 2007; Jackson, R. 2007) have argued that the recent pivotal
events of September 11 and the Bali, Madrid and London bombings have seen somewhat
of a theoretical return to the entity, with the vital interlinking issues of nationalism,
sovereignty and citizenship being firmly put back on the table for discussion. However,
the problem is that these discussions have remained state-centric, with the ‘nation’
element of the nation-state nexus being effectively glossed over in the fields of political
science and international relations, as well as in international politics and diplomacy
themselves.
The ‘nation’ element of the nexus, however, is not glossed over in the everyday lives of
citizens of states. Recent racially and culturally motivated riots in the suburbs of Northern
Britain, Paris and Sydney have raised concerns about the complex phenomenon of
national identity, prompting these questions to be asked: ‘who are ‘we’ and how do ‘we’
define ourselves as a nation?’ Far from being abstract theoretical enquiries, these
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questions about how we comprehend the processes that construct some citizens as
legitimate members of a national community, and perhaps more importantly, how some
are excluded from this membership, are crucial for understanding the practical concerns
of living in a globalised, multicultural and pluralistic society.
The study of national identity, however, does not have a long history and is often
subsumed by the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, social psychology and cultural
studies. There exists no coherent field of study for the student of national identity and this
perhaps reflects the difficulty of the topic: it is a deeply emotional collective phenomenon
rather than one clearly defined by laws and rules. We live with national identity everyday
in the routines of our lives – as Edensor (2002: vi) argues, “the cultural expressions and
experience of national identity is usually neither spectacular nor remarkable, but is
generated in mundane, quotidian forms and practices”. This tendency towards
‘invisibility’ and obfuscation makes it a difficult notion to pin down. It has, as a result,
remained an under-theorised and under-developed concept (Hobsbawm 1990;
Schlesinger 1991).
As the riots mentioned above have demonstrated, the myth of national identity as
something that is timeless and natural is far from true. Instead, it is always contested and
in the process of changing. Many theorists (Bhaba 1990; Llobera 2005; Nairn 1997;
Tehranian 1993) have recognised that it is in this permanent state of eternal
reconstruction that the ‘Janus-faced’ duality of national identity is revealed: a
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sociological phenomenon that holds the potential for both social cohesion and
disharmony.
It is from this crucial point of recognising the socially constructed nature of national
identity and indeed, the concept of the nation itself, that the theoretical framework of this
thesis will be developed. However, before this position is elaborated, it is important to
clarify some of the key concepts that will be utilised in this investigation, and review the
theories that have influenced the contemporary understanding of national identity.
What Is (Not) a Nation?
In 1882, Ernest Renan posed what appeared to be a simple question: “qu’est-ce qu’une
nation?” (“what is a nation?”). Over 125 years later, a sufficient answer is yet to emerge
and we are still grappling with this seemingly impossible definition. Whereas Renan
(1994: 17) saw the nation as “a soul, a spiritual principle”, given the concept’s slippery
semantics, it may be better to firstly delineate what it is not. Connor’s (1994) informative
‘A Nation is a Nation, is a State, is an Ethnic Group, is a…’, which addresses the
tendency in the literature to interutilise the terms state, nation and ethnicity, offers an
important clarification as to how we should approach these key concepts.
States, for Connor, can be conceptualised as the quantitatively measurable territories that
subdivide the world – that is, the state as a physical geographical-territorial unit, as well
as its judicial and political apparatus (or what might be popularly defined as ‘political
society’). The nation, however, is far more difficult to define “because the essence of a
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nation is intangible…[it is] a psychological bond that joins a people and differentiates it,
in the subconscious conviction of its members, from all other people in a most vital way”
(Connor 1994: 38). A nation thus is not a matter of what ‘actually exists’, but rather what
people believe exists. In this sense, it is a truly sociological or social psychological
concept. The ambiguity around this vague notion of belonging is expressed in James’
(1996: 123) perception that “the concepts of the nation, this society and this community
are often used as coterminous”.
These familiar concepts all point to “a sense of homogeneity” (Plano & Olton 1969: 119)
or equivalence. This “sense” may draw from a number of what we might consider as
cultural resources – common language, ideology, institutions, customs, religion and so on
– depending on how one wishes to argue for what criteria ‘makes’ a nation. Yet Plano &
Olton also recognise that it is the key role of territory in the definition of nation that may
potentially distinguish it from other social groupings: “[in the nation] there is also present
a strong group sense of belonging associated with a particular territory considered to be
peculiarly its own”. This is what Derrida (1994: 82) referred to as ontopology, the
binding of identity and place – “axiomatics linking indissociably the ontological value of
present-being to its situation, to the stable and presentable determination of a locality, the
topos of territory, native soil, city, body in general”. For a working definition, then, the
nation is an “imagined community” (Anderson, B. 1991) that shares a sense of
unification, and is ontopologically bound to a particular territorial configuration (and this
territorial unit is often what is internationally recognised as a state or country).
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Yet the link between the nation and the state is not a natural one. Benedict Anderson’s
(1996: 8) conception of the “crisis of the hyphen” in the nation-state nexus is evidence of
this, where the state and the nation do not link up in a way that is considered legitimate.
Gramsci (1971: 275) similarly theorised this situation as a “crisis of authority”. Such
circumstances reveal the contingency at the heart of the concept of the nation, and the
fragility of the nation-state nexus.
Similarly, the link between nation and ethnicity is not essential. Whilst earlier
primordialist and perrenialist theorists of nationalism attempted to premise national
identification on ethnic or biological grounds (Geertz 1973; Joireman 2003; Smith, A.D.
1998), these views have since been discredited on the basis of their essentialist tendencies
and inclination to grant the nation an unproblematic ontological status (Day & Thompson
2004; Spencer & Wollman 2002). The theoretical milieu has now shifted to a form of
social constructivism, an epistemological view that sees the nation as invented,
contingent and in constant flux, rather than perceiving states as “possessing a geographic
and historical ‘reality’ that somehow exceeds their human membership” (Wallwork &
Dixon 2004: 22).
Such a view is indebted to the works of Gellner (1983, 1994, 1997), Hobsbawm (1990,
1995) and Anderson (1991), whose individual studies of nationalism have been important
in stripping the nation of its ontological ‘taken-for-grantedness’ and moving it into the
realm of social constructivism. Their ideas have been extremely influential, with
Anderson’s concept of the nation as an “imagined community” now part of everyday
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discourse. These works have paved the way for a shift towards what Bourdieu (in
Brubaker 1992: i) has called a possibility for “a reflexive sociology of the ongoing
fabrication of everything we subsume under the falsely self-evident name of ‘nation’”.
Yet explaining national identity purely in terms of the wider phenomenon of nationalism
is problematic, and this is where we must break with much of the current literature (see
Barrington 1997 for examples). As Billig (1995) has argued, such an approach implies
that the category of national identity is unproblematic, and perhaps even grants it an
ontological primacy. This view paints national identity as a resource lying dormant in the
minds of individuals, waiting to be unlocked by a great political orator or extraordinary
circumstance. The stirring of nationalist sentiment, however, is not a matter of a
homogenous psychological identification with the nation due to something deep inside
each of us, but rather a result of the fact that the category of the nation can be
strategically and malleably used to unite disparate identities under the ‘national interest’
(Wallwork & Dixon 2004).
National identity, then, can be considered as the resource which fills the ‘content’ of the
nation. When we speak of a nation, we are referring to a collective entity, a group of
people who identify with one another and are ontopologically tied to a certain territory. It
is national identity that enables this collective identification. The nation is always
contingent on what the national identity ‘is’ at the present time, no matter how timeless
and ahistorical it may appear to be.
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National Identity
To further elaborate on this process of the ‘making’ of national identity, we need to delve
more deeply into a sometimes forgotten component of the concept – whilst the ‘national’
element is well documented, we need to pay more attention to the question of identity. As
Edensor (2002: 24) perceptively notes, although there has been a large body of work in
sociology and cultural studies on the topic of identity in recent years, “national identity
has remained rather immune from these explorations, testifying to its assumed
naturalness even amongst social and cultural theorists”. This oversight demands
theoretical attention.
The prominent contemporary social constructivist understanding of identity is summed
up succinctly in Reicher and Hopkin’s (2000: 222) description of it as “a project, the
success of which depends upon being seen as an essence”. The key word here is
“project”, denoting that identity is unfixed and contingent. One is not born with a set
identity, nor is it set in stone when it is apparently acquired. The contingency that
permeates every moment of social and political life necessitates this lack of totalisation.
As such, identity is continually being made and remade through an “internal-external
dialectic” (Jenkins 1996: 24) that synthesises internal self-definition and others’
ascriptions. Identity is thus located between self and community (Bhanavi & Phoenix
1994).
This poststructuralist ‘decentering’ of identity has been concretely illustrated in the
breakdown of traditional identities and the subsequent emergence of identity politics or
18
new social movements in the post-World War II period (Darnovsky et al. 1995: v).
Nevertheless, this is not to say that identity is some kind of malleable clay to be played
with or that it is entirely up the individual to set out how their identity will be perceived.
To return to Reicher and Hopkin’s quote above, the success of an identity is reliant on
being seen as an essence – in short, identity is reliant on others.
Doing National Identity
The question is: how does this process occur? In his influential book Banal Nationalism,
Billig (1995: 41) uses the metonymic image of the “unwaved flag” of the nation to
suggest that national identity is reproduced in an unspectacular manner everyday, rather
than only in extraordinary or passionate circumstances where we are well aware that
national identity is on display. Its unobtrusiveness arises from its familiarity. The
metaphorical flag here is not being carried proudly into battle, but rather hangs in the
background of our lives – in schools, clubs, shops and homes. Billig argues that this daily
reproduction of national identity is grounded in the discursive connotations of belonging
that are prevalent in the media. The seemingly unproblematic use of ‘we’ as a signifier of
the ‘us’ of a nation is what Edensor (2002: 11) terms a “routine deixis” of the nation.
Here, day in and day out, the economy, government and coastline are unquestionably
reproduced and reified as our economy, government, coastline and so on. This illustrates
that we are all implicit in the reproduction of the nation everyday. This ostensibly
unremarkable deixis’ effect underlies a central tenet of this thesis: the argument that the
nation is a discursive formation (Calhoun 1997).
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The search for objective criteria for nationhood pursued by the modernists ultimately
failed for this very reason: differing nationalisms, national identities, and views of the
nation have been and continue to be different from varying perspectives and historical
junctures. As Zubaida (1978) has quite rightly identified, from the point of view of social
theory, there is no systematic way of designating a nation. They are “discursively, by
means of language and other semiotic systems, produced, reproduced, transformed and
destructed” (De Cillia et al. 1999: 153). The ‘we’ of the nation, then, is never a set
category, but is rather always open to contestation from differing identities – and
importantly, if there is a ‘we’ or ‘us’ that defines the nation, then there must be identities
excluded from this category.
Us/Them 1
The delineation between us/them is absolutely central to national identity on a number of
levels. Externally, to recognise oneself as part of a domestic us – for example, “I am
Australian” – is to necessarily differentiate oneself from citizens of other states around
the world – an external them. Domestically, things are not as clear-cut. Here, the us/them
divide of national identity involves the differentiation between those who fit into the
discursive category of ‘Australian’ and those who don’t. Those who are excluded from
this identity may hold citizenship – that is, be legitimately accepted in the eyes of
political society – but their ethnicity, religion, working habits and so forth may not be
part of what is considered Australian at the time. They may not fit into what Alexander
1
The categories of us and them are obviously socially constructed and contingent. I have not used
quotation marks around these categories throughout this thesis on the understanding that the reader will
take us and them – as well as related terms such as ours, theirs, we and so forth – as inherently problematic
configurations, and that these terms’ artificial nature will be acknowledged.
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(1993: 291) has described as “the national community”. This blurry drawing of
boundaries between us/them, or an inside/outside of the nation (Walker 1993), is an everpresent delineation that is constantly being renegotiated.
There is a serious deficiency in the literature on national identity when we reach this
point. Whilst many academic accounts of national identity argue that the concept is
reliant on an us/them divide, the investigations too often stop there. This theoretical
roadblock is premature. Rather than exploring the mechanisms by which this process
occurs or developing politicosocial theory to explain the underlying patterns of this
operation, many of the accounts rest on their laurels by providing examples of what is
considered, for instance, Australian and what is ‘un-Australian’. Although there is
certainly a place for such accounts, as they attempt to capture what we might consider the
contemporary cultural zeitgeist, they lack a certain theoretical sophistication. They may
answer the ‘what’ of national identity at a certain historical juncture, but they fail to
address the ‘how’ – the process. It is here that that Ernesto Laclau’s political theory is
particularly useful.
Laclau’s Political Theory: A Theoretical Framework
The political theory of Ernesto Laclau offers a key to theorising the us/them dynamic of
national identity in a more sophisticated way than the current literature attempts. Despite
the fact that a number of international theorists (Bowman, G. 1994; Doty 1996; Salecl
1994; Sutherland 2005; Torfing 1995) have attempted to utilise Laclau’s theories to
explain the processes of national identity, no Australian theorists have attempted to
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develop them in a local context. Emerging from the theoretical milieu of
poststructuralism, Laclau’s work synthesises Marxist theoretician Antonio Gramsci’s
(1971) theory of hegemony with elements of Western philosophy’s ‘linguistic turn’. With
Gramsci’s hegemony as its base, 2 it draws on Derridean deconstruction, Lacanian
psychoanalysis and Foucauldian notions of discourse to articulate a radical theoretical
approach to the question of political and social identities.
Laclau’s postmarxist 3 theory ties these threads of Marxist and poststructuralist thought
together in an attempt to “reformulate the basic concepts of political theory in a time of
their disintegration” (Critchley & Marchart 2004). For this reason, Laclau’s work is
extremely valuable in analysing national identity. Eschewing the tired vocabulary of
theoretical approaches that attempt to ‘freeze’ national identity as a static concept,
Laclau’s focus on the impossibility of fixed meaning and the central role of contingency
allows us to theorise the overdetermined antagonisms that contribute to the ‘making’ of
this complex social phenomenon.
The key Laclauian concepts that will be explored in this analysis of national identity are
‘the impossibility of society’, antagonism, dislocation and hegemony as an unstable
equilibrium between equivalence and difference. These notions are all reliant on Laclau’s
theorisation of the constitutive lack in all identity – the idea that no identity can fully
2
So central is Gramsci to Laclau’s work, Laclau claims in an interview with Paul Bowman (1999) that his
postmarxist theory could not have emerged without Gramsci.
3
Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, co-authors of the seminal Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (2001), did not
invent the label of ‘postmarxist’, although it has come to categorise their work. They claim that “if our
intellectual project…is post-Marxist, it is evidently also post-Marxist” (2001: 4), referring the fact that their
theory both reappropriates Marxism and goes beyond it. For a history of postmarxism, see Sim’s (2000)
outstanding Post-Marxism: An Intellectual History.
22
constitute or totalise itself. Such an idea takes the socially constructed view of national
identity to a further level of anti-essentialism: “a radical constructivism” (Laclau 1994: 2)
that not only argues that all identities are constructed, but that they only make sense in
relation to other identities. Far from the self-contained eidos of classical philosophy,
contingency means that identities and relations between identities cannot be fixed with
any precision: they can never form a fully closed system. Such a conception draws out
the political implications of Derrida’s (1976) Of Grammatology: if identities are only
meaningful and come into existence in terms of their relations to other identities, then we
must recognise that these relations are always power relations. It follows, then, that “the
constitution of identity is an act of power and that identity as such is power” (Laclau
1990: 31).
The premise of the us/them divide that often results in a conceptual dead-end street for
national identity theorists can start to be conceptualised in this manner. In framing this
relationship in terms of contingency, we can begin to see that the central reason that
national identity is a power relation is because “identity is always based on excluding
something” (Laclau 1990: 32). The exclusion necessary for national identity is evident in
the popular rhetorical device extensively utilised by politicians and journalists of
labelling undesirable peoples, practices, and so forth as ‘un-Australian’ (Arvanitakis
2006). Such blatant discursive exclusion reveals the precarious nature of signifying
national identity: the exclusion is necessary for ‘Australian’ to even make sense as a
concept. We may have difficulty in specifically knowing what is Australian, but we have
very little trouble in labelling things as ‘un-Australian’.
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The Impossibility of Society
Laclau’s notion of ‘the impossibility of society’ can help us to more thoroughly
conceptualise this operation. Reflecting on the cynicism towards structuralism and
totalising systems that the ‘linguistic turn’ brought about, Laclau (1990: 90)
acknowledges that “we tend nowadays to accept the infinitude of the social, that is, the
fact that any structural system is limited, that it is always surrounded by an ‘excess of
meaning’ which it is unable to master”. Consequently, the incompleteness of any identity
or system leads to the conclusion that there is a need to abandon “the premise of ‘society’
as a sutured and self-defined totality. ‘Society’ is not a valid object of discourse” (Laclau
& Mouffe 2001: 111). The lack of a single underlying principle unifying ‘society’ means
that ‘society is impossible’. The same can be said of the nation. It cannot fully constitute
itself as a totality as it has no underlying essence, and hence its constitutive lack can
never be fully sutured.
Yet we cannot simply leave it there. The impossibility of fixed meaning represents
“nothing else but the discourse of the psychotic” (Laclau 1990: 90) – an unimaginable
situation where the social realm dissipates into an infinite play of differences having no
limits, thus being unfixed and ungraspable. Here, nothing makes sense. As such, for any
identity to be comprehensible there exists a need to attempt to temporarily fix meaning.
Now, even though the ultimate fixture of meaning is impossible, the temporary fixture of
meaning is not – indeed, this is a completely necessary move. These vital attempts to fix
meaning are hegemonic acts.
24
These hegemonic acts constitute what we call society, or for our purposes, the nation.
Drawing on the Lacanian concept of the point de capiton, Laclau and Mouffe (2001: 112)
argue that these hegemonic acts are acts of closure around certain “nodal points”. These
are what can be conceptualised as anchoring points in society, where discourse is closed
down around what Howson (2006: 23) has recently referred to as “hegemonic
principles”. Laclau (1990) delineates between the concepts of ‘society’ and ‘the social’
here. The social is the field of contingency and difference, as well as the necessary
attempts to limit the play between these differences to temporarily impose order and fix
meaning or structure. Laclau and Mouffe (2001: 111) refer to the social as “the field of
overdetermination”. 4 Society is what is created in the hegemonisation of nodal points: it
is the result of the attempt to master and totalise the overdetermined field of the social.
The consequence is that “the social always exceeds the limits of the attempts to constitute
society” (Laclau 1990: 91). The nation is thus always surrounded by this excess, the
identities that are not subsumed as part of the national identity at any one time.
Antagonism & Dislocation
Laclau (1990: 17) terms these excluded identities antagonisms. Antagonism represents
“the limit of all objectivity…that which prevents the constitution of objectivity itself”. In
preventing the totalisation of society as a sutured entity, antagonisms delineate the limits
of society. They are the outside of society, the ‘un-’ prefix to be attached to a nation’s
name, and they therefore draw the symbolic borders of the nation. This outside, however,
4
The concept of overdetermination is drawn from psychoanalysis (Freud & Breuer 2004), and its
politicosocial implications were most famously explicated by Althusser (1977). Laclau and Mouffe (2001)
refer to overdetermination in terms of identity. Due to the fact that identities can never be ‘closed’ or
‘totalised’, but are instead contingent on relations with other identities, they argue that any identity is
fundamentally overdetermined. This is because identities ultimately lack ‘essence’ or a ‘final suture’.
25
is a constitutive outside. To explain this notion, Laclau (1990: 21) quotes Saint-Just’s
adage “what constitutes the unity of the Republic is the total destruction of what is
opposed to it”. What this means is that antagonism is a necessary component in the
simultaneous blocking and constitution of identity. Antagonism blocks the totalising urge
of identity by revealing its contingency. At the same time, due to the fact that all
identities are relational, an identity cannot exist without its antagonising forces. As such,
antagonism is always present within an identity, simultaneously denying its closure and
at the same time enabling its constitution. The blocking/enabling dialectic demonstrates
that “neither absolute fixity nor absolute non-fixity is possible” (Laclau & Mouffe 2001:
111) when it comes to national identity.
To put this notion in simpler terms: we know what we are because we know what we are
not (Tafjel 1981). This ‘knowing’ of who we are not is an absolutely essential part of
national identity (Mummery & Rodan 2007) – it is why the literature on the subject so
often returns to the us/them distinction. Bhaba (1990: 4) signals towards the constitutive
role of antagonism when acknowledging that “the ‘other’ is never outside or beyond us; it
emerges forcefully, within cultural discourse, when we think we speak most intimately
and indigenously ‘between ourselves’”. Indeed, antagonism and “the Other” have the
same meaning. They represent the Lacanian Real – the ‘excess’ of identity which is cut
off in order to delineate an identity that is totalised as a normative and bounded whole.
This is where the oft-mentioned ‘fact’ that a nation is self-defined (Connor 1994;
Hutchinson & Smith 1994; Weber 1948) is revealed as being only partly true: the ‘self-
26
definition’ of any nation is absolutely reliant on the exclusion of antagonisms. As Billig
(1995: 78) argues, “if nationalism is an ideology of the first person plural, which tells ‘us’
who ‘we’ are, then it is also an ideology of the third person. There can be no ‘us’ without
a ‘them’”.
Antagonism thus stands as the marked them to the unmarked us (Laclau 1990). The
unmarked us is imagined as natural, and the contingent factors of our identity are
concealed. As our behaviour is constructed as normal or standard, it is their behaviour
that is strange or deviant. As Billig (1995: 83) enumerates, “another group might be
stereotyped as ‘cold’, whereas ‘we’ will be neither ‘cold’ (too cold) nor ‘emotional’ (too
emotional)”. Žižek (1993: 203) conceptualises this operation by arguing that
what really bothers us about the “other” is the peculiar way he organizes his enjoyment, precisely
the surplus, the “excess” that pertains to this way: the smell of “their” food, “their” noisy songs
and dances, “their” strange manners, “their” attitude to work. To the racist, the “other” is either a
workaholic stealing our jobs or an idler living on our labor.
In short, their way is deviant and difficult for us to understand, with their practices clearly
delineated as that of the Other. As Žižek’s final comment identifies, they, as the Other, do
indeed exist as the constitutive outside: their way of life cannot possibly be part of the
national identity. In this manner, they are burdened with a parasitic quality in whatever
way they act, by taking advantage of our welfare system, or threatening our livelihood
with their ‘unnatural’ work ethic. In this sense, they constitute a threat to ‘our way of
life’. It is us who acts as the barometer – not arguing that our way is necessarily the right
way, but instead seeing it as the only way. The nodal points in such a case are
27
successfully hegemonised – the contingency of the central hegemonic principles made
invisible.
The threat of the antagonistic Other shows that national identity is fundamentally
dislocated. As Torfing (1995: 149) identifies, “Laclau conceives dislocation as a
permanent phenomenon inasmuch as there is always something that resists symbolization
and domestication, and thereby reveals the limit, incapacity and contingency of the
discursive structure”. This permanent dislocation means that the nation is characterised
by its constitutive lack – its contingency and impermanence is always present. We can
thus identify the nation as an ‘empty space’, or what Laclau (1996: 37) calls an “empty
signifier”. This idea of emptiness and dislocation is implicit in many definitions of the
nation, and helps explain why it is such a contested term – for example, Cubitt (1998: 1)
refers to it as “an imaginative field on to which different sets of concerns may be
projected, and upon which connections may be forged between different aspects of social,
political and cultural experience”. National identity is thus the way to deal with the
nation’s dislocated character: it aims to ‘fill the gap’ by creating and maintaining a
“frontier” (Laclau 2000a: 302) between us/them. 5
Hegemony as Unstable Equilibrium Between Equivalence & Difference
How is it that certain antagonisms are kept from becoming so prominent as to overwhelm
and radically change the identity of a nation? How are these antagonisms ‘kept in check?’
5
A frontier is “a delineative marker between opposing demands and interests” (Howson 2007: 241). In this
sense, it is not just a marker between groups, but a marker of the different ethics held by each group – and
these are held as ultimately irreconcilable. I use the virgule (/) not to link us and them, but to make clear the
violent opposition between these groups and the large frontier that exists as a necessary attempt to deny the
presence of the antagonistic Other in our own identity.
28
The final key Laclauian theoretical concept that will be introduced in this chapter –
hegemony as an unstable equilibrium between equivalence and difference – allows us to
conceptualise this operation. We have so far explored why a totalised national identity is
impossible by investigating Laclau’s (1990) concept of ‘the impossibility of society’. We
have further examined the vital role of antagonism in the simultaneous blocking and
enabling of national identity, and how this means that national identity is fundamentally
dislocated. These notions tie together in the theory of hegemony, which “rests upon the
twin logics of equivalence and difference” (Widder 2000: 120), or the logics of
universality and particularity. Hegemony, as elaborated by Laclau and Mouffe (2001:
189) through the work of Gramsci (1971), represents an “unstable equilibrium” between
these logics.
Neither of these logics can be ever be taken to their extremes – and nor should we even
imagine it as a true binary relationship. A logic of pure equivalence would eradicate all
difference, whilst a logic of pure difference would disintegrate into atomised particularity
with no common links. Both of these fail. Instead, the relationship between these forces
should be conceptualised as dialectic. As Zerilli (2004: 96) argues,
hegemony means that the relationship between universal and particular entails not the realization
of a shared essence or the final overcoming of all distances but an ongoing and conflict-ridden
process of mediation through which antagonistic struggles articulate common social objectives
and political strategies.
Differences here between identities are not bridged by an ultimate suture (for this can
never arrive), but instead come together in historical blocs (Gramsci 1971) hegemonised
around certain nodal points.
29
National identity thus stands as a hegemonic logic that seeks equivalence, aiming to act
as a universal for its members. It presents as a totality which subsumes a number of
differential identities under its equivalential horizon. However, the nation is never full
here: the final universal cannot arrive for the reasons outlined above. No identity can be
truly closed. The universal is ultimately impossible.
As such, national identity is an act of hegemonisation: the “operation of taking up, by a
particularity, of an incommensurable universal signification” (Laclau 2005a: 70). That is,
particular identities come together under the equivalential logic of national identity and
fill this empty signifier of the nation. The universal – the nation in this case – is
ultimately “an empty place, a void which can only be filled by the particular” (Laclau
2000b: 58). However, we must remember here that for this filling to occur – an act of
hegemony – certain identities must be excluded. The antagonistic Other cannot be
subsumed under the universal ‘nation’. Equivalence in this case can only be enabled
through difference.
What this means is that the unification of a people always comes at a cost. To
demonstrate, we might ask ‘what do those identities subsumed under the signifier
‘Australian’ share in common?’ A preliminary list could be provided, but as has been
mentioned, it would only be a contingent one premised on the historical bloc we are
currently living in, the conditions of which are continually changing. In line with the
social constructivist theories of national identity mentioned earlier, Australians share no
essence. If they are not linked by an underlying essence, then what is it that unites these
30
differential identities as Australian? The answer lies in exclusion. As Laclau (2005a: 78)
argues, “there is no totalization without exclusion…such an exclusion presupposes a split
of all identity between its differential nature, which links/separates it from other
identities, and its equivalential bond with all the others vis-à-vis that excluded element”.
The particularities of the many identities that fall under the Australian national identity
are thus made equivalent due to their shared antagonism. The shared Other acts as the
exclusion that enables the particularities to transcend their differences and become
equivalent as Australian.
Obviously, being in the position of the central antagonism for a nation is not an enviable
role – it entails discrimination, social exclusion, isolation and possibly violence. What
can the excluded Other do about this? Laclau (1996) argues that the Other faces two
major strategic dangers here. Firstly, if a minority group in a hostile environment
attempts to assert its particularistic identity, it risks condemning itself to a ghettoised
marginality due to its place in the community being dictated by exclusion. The second
danger is that if the group wishes to change its place in society by engaging with the
current universal/equivalential logic, this entails engaging with the institutions of the
dominant group. This engagement will necessarily alter the identity of the Other, thus
meaning that it loses elements of its particular/differential identity. In short, there are two
stark choices: condemn one’s differential identity to particularistic isolation, or risk
changing one’s unique identity by engaging with the dominant group. The latter choice is
basically assimilation, a concept which underlies the Australian understanding of
31
multiculturalism: they can keep their food because we like it too, as long as they take on
‘the Australian way’ in every other aspect of their lives.
The former choice has its dangers too. As we will see in the case study of this thesis, a
dominant group’s contingency can be revealed if an antagonism chooses or is forced into
situating itself in a specific logic of particularity, and this dislocatory effect for the
majority can spur a violent reaction. As Laclau (1996: 65) writes, “precisely because the
universal place is empty, it can be occupied by any force, not necessarily democratic”.
This, as we will see, is a sad reality of national identity.
The Vagaries of National Identity
Let us draw together the key points of this argument. What this chapter reveals is the
ultimate contingency of national identity. Its fundamental dislocation, as enabled through
antagonism, ultimately makes it impossible as a bounded identity. Its impossibility – that
is, its ‘gap’ or ‘emptiness’ – is what makes it such a powerful and vital force in
sociopolitical life: how national identity ‘fills’ the gap has the potential to bring social
cohesion and violence. As we have seen, this contested definition of the nation – the
seemingly innocent and unremarkable ways in which we wield the deixis of us and them,
we and they – has concrete effects.
How a nation’s identity will change and develop is unforeseeable. What antagonisms will
populate its constitutive outside, how its central nodal points are hegemonised, and how it
will continue to act as an equivalential logic is impossible to forecast due to the radical
32
contingency that permeates its every being. As we realise that the social relations that
underlie national identity are not determined in a linear, a priori manner, we come to
recognise that national identity is an overdetermined phenomenon that can never be
completely totalised. This, indeed, is the very condition of its existence.
As we will see, how this is managed is one of the key problematics of contemporary
politicosocial life.
33
Chapter III: Methodology
So far, we have seen how Laclau’s political theory offers a key to understanding the
critical processes in the operation of national identity. However, this theoretical approach
means little without engagement with concrete and historically-specific politicosocial
situations. It is this need for praxical engagement that moves Laclau’s postmarxism from
the realm of “just theory” (Howson 2007: 235) to the sphere of critical social research
that “provides knowledge which engages the prevailing social structures” (Harvey 1990:
2).
With this in mind, the methodological approach that this thesis takes is in the form of a
case study of the Cronulla riots. A case study allows an in-depth analysis and
understanding of a single event and its operations or functions (Berg 2001: 225). Vital to
this choice of methodology is the fact that “many of the variables that interest social
scientists, such as democracy, power, political culture, state strength and so on are
notoriously difficult to measure” (George & Bennett 2005: 19). As the previous chapter
has demonstrated, national identity is a similarly complicated variable. Although we
cannot quantitatively measure national identity in any meaningful statistical or formal
manner, a qualitative disciplined configurative case study (see Lijphart 1971) of the
Cronulla riots allows us to explore the particular operations of Australian national
identity at this certain historical juncture. Such a form of research can highlight the “need
for new theory in neglected areas” (Eckstein 1975: 99) and ultimately contribute to
theory-building and new understandings of the social and political world.
34
The Cronulla riots represent a fruitful case study for the operation of Australian national
identity for a number of reasons. Firstly, the riots represent an illustrative and evocative
case in which the hegemonic logic of national identity was fissured, with this breakdown
having a significantly deleterious effect on the political and social landscape. Secondly,
the Cronulla riots offer a peculiar example of a ‘race riot’ in that they do not necessarily
fit the pattern of recent highly publicised riots in the West. Whilst the riots in Northern
Britain and Paris in 2005 and Los Angeles in 1992 saw a frustrated and antagonised
minority react against discrimination by a majority, the Cronulla riots flipped this
equation. As historian Dirk Moses (2006: [online]) puts it, the Cronulla riots were
actually a pogrom: a “violent attack by majorities against minorities…the point of the
pogrom is to put the subordinate minority group in its place”. Such an example is
illustrative of the central role of the antagonistic Other in the operation of national
identity, and indicates the dislocated nature of national identity itself. Thirdly, the
Cronulla riots were a largely significant event in Australia’s history, receiving
international media attention and touching on key points of tension in contemporary
Australian society: multiculturalism, faith and ethnicity. The tension around these points
can still be felt in concerns about the recently rejected Islamic school in Camden – as
Murphy (2008: 29) puts it, “the spectre of the Cronulla riots” still lingers. For these
reasons, further research must be undertaken on the Cronulla riots so that we may avoid a
repeat of the events.
Yet how can we analyse the events of the Cronulla riots? How can we understand them as
a particular manifestation of Australian national identity? The answers to these questions
35
are dependent on the ontological and epistemological assumptions of the researcher and
the theoretical approach they favour. This thesis adopts the antifoundationalist
ontological position of Laclauian political theory, arguing that reality has no meaning
outside of our conception of it, and therefore the world is socially constructed by
individuals and their relations with one another. Epistemologically, this involves the
denial of the notion that objective knowledge of the world can be attained, or to put it
more simply, it advocates that “the separation of ‘fact’ and ‘value’ is not so clear-cut”
(Grix 2004: 83).
In this light, this investigation argues there is no truth waiting ‘out there’ to be discovered
about the Cronulla riots: there is no one way that things ‘really happened’, nor is there a
clear causality at play in the events. Instead, a conflation of events, people, location,
actions, ideas and other contingent elements all played a key role in constructing and
contributing to the events at Cronulla. In order to examine this process of
overdetermination, newspaper reports of the Cronulla riots will be textually analysed to
come to what can be called a ‘popular understanding’ of the riots.
Why analyse newspaper reports? They offer a highly visible public narrative of how
events occurred – that is, they act as popular records of historical events. They serve as a
key medium for how we gain knowledge about political and social events both
domestically and internationally (Myers & Schaefer Caniglia 2005). This is not to say
that they report the ‘truth’ – indeed, as has been outlined, under a radical social
constructivist approach there is never one objective truth that exists. However,
36
newspapers often report what can be understood as a public and acceptable narrative in
the general populace. This process is what Gramsci (1985: 421) refers to as the
“sedimentation of ‘common sense’”, where the “relatively rigidified phase of popular
knowledge in a given time and place” occurs. In other words, this is where the
‘definitive’ meanings and narratives of an event are cemented.
This process of sedimentation is extremely important in understanding how we come to
regard historical events from the perspective of the present. As Curthoys (1994: 113) has
noted, as time passes from an event, our access to it becomes a fusion of “personal
memory with popular and academic imagination”. Attwood (2001: 183) has similarly
argued that the complexity of events is often lost in this progression, and that this process
of “narrative accrual” grants precedence to popular explanations. In this sense, it is highly
likely that at this current historical juncture, almost three years on from the events of the
riots, our collective recollections and memory of the events of the Cronulla riots are
highly dependent on how the press, and particularly the medium of newspapers,
construed and represented them.
Furthermore, many theorists have pointed to the key role of newspapers in the
maintenance of national identity. Benedict Anderson’s (1991) Imagined Communities
argues that newspapers promote national community by providing a temporally and
geographically bounded sense of similarity and solidarity, whereas Fowler (1991) claims
that newspapers play a role in shaping and reflecting the prevailing values of a
community or society. As was extensively discussed in the previous chapter, Billig’s
37
(1995) Banal Nationalism insists that the media, and newspapers in particular, are
essential in delineating the us/them divide of a nation, and provides practical examples to
prove his case. Recent empirical studies (Brookes 1999; Rosie et al. 2004) have qualified
these arguments.
The theoretical underpinning of this methodological approach draws from Laclau’s
(1990) critique of the central Marxist concept of ideology, from which he has drawn
heavily on Gramsci (1971). Gramsci attempted to move away from the strict determinism
of the base/superstructure model of classical Marxism, instead envisioning the two
elements in a dialectical relationship. Here, Gramsci acknowledged the very real effect
that ideology can have on the economic sphere. Laclau (1990: 89) makes a radical leap
from this Gramscian dialectical understanding, and argues that the Marxist concept of
ideology as false consciousness is untenable in the presence of the contemporary
breakdown of the base/superstructure distinction. This is due to the “widening of the
historical effectivity attributed to what was traditionally considered as the domain of the
‘superstructures’”. As Niels Anderson (2003: xiii) has argued, Laclau’s theory is
epistemologically grounded as it is concerned with the conditions of the emergence and
possibility of truth, rather than ‘the Truth’ itself. What this means for this methodological
approach is that newspapers cannot be considered as simply conduits for ‘false
consciousness’: instead, we must accept them as central organs of how meaning is
created in the public sphere.
38
This textual analysis will draw on a sample of Cronulla riots-related articles, editorials
and letters to the editor from the two major Sydney daily newspapers, The Sydney
Morning Herald and The Daily Telegraph (and their Sunday counterparts, The Sun
Herald and The Sunday Telegraph respectively). These have been chosen as they have
the highest circulation of daily newspapers in Australia (Herman 2007) and represent a
local focus on the events of the Cronulla riots. The period from which articles will be
drawn is 4 December 2005, the day of the alleged attack on the lifesavers at Cronulla that
has been popularly understood as the central impetus for the riots (Grewal 2007), to 4
January 2006. This month-long period is a sufficient sampling frame for perceiving how
the events of the riots were understood at the time, as it includes the ‘lead-up’ coverage
of the event, immediate reports, and then allows a sufficient time for comments, editorials
and reflection on the events.
These media reports will be drawn from a search of Factiva, an online electronic database
that provides archival access to major media publications. The search will be conducted
utilising the following keywords in either the title or body of stories in the newspapers
and date range mentioned above: Cronulla, riot*, Islam*, Muslim*, Lebanese, Middle
Eastern, Shire, Beach*, lifesaver, lifesaver and racis*. 6 These results will be culled,
keeping only those articles which refer to the Cronulla riots.
The reports will be analysed looking for two key features: how the narrative of the events
was constructed, and where the causality for the events was placed. These two aspects of
the texts have been chosen as they best indicate a broad representation of the riots. The
6
* denotes truncation: for example, if I searched Islam*, it would search for Islam, Islamic, Islamist, etc.
39
first category will be used to develop a timeline of the events related to the riots as
reported by the newspapers – essentially the question of what happened?; whilst the
second category will be used to construct an understanding of the debates about the riots
in their immediate wake – essentially the questions of why did this happen and what does
it mean?
This textual analysis will be supplemented by a critical reading of the relatively small
field of academic work that has emerged on the Cronulla riots. These papers and articles
were found utilising a number of databases, however the most useful of these has been
the Cronulla Research Database maintained by Macquarie University’s Centre for
Research on Social Inclusion. This database, created in conjunction with the Community
Relations Commission for a Multicultural NSW, aims to compile all research undertaken
on the riots and their aftermath.
It is important to note that this content analysis will not take the form of a traditional
postmarxist discourse analysis (as per Howarth et al. 2000): there is no intention to
provide an account of the latent content or underlying meanings of the reports specified.
Rather, addressing the questions above in a combination of descriptive and contextual
analysis will provide ideological insight that opens up the social ontological reality of the
riots. From this point, we can better understand how national identity was challenged in
the Cronulla riots, and investigate its wider implications for Australian national identity
in general. The combination of this methodological strategy and theoretical approach of
Laclau’s political theory thus escapes the trap of ‘ivory tower’ political philosophy that
40
has no ontological grounding, as well as avoiding forms of grounded theory that leave
theoretical assumptions implicit.
41
Chapter IV: The Cronulla Riots: An Analysis
What were the Cronulla riots? Why did they happen?
The questions seem simple enough. However, even a cursory glance at popular and
academic accounts of the events suggests otherwise. This chapter presents the results of
the textual analysis of newspaper reports on the Cronulla riots, as set out in the previous
chapter. The investigation reveals that although the timeline of the riots is generally
agreed upon, the causes are not. It finds that the causal hypotheses for the riots can be
broken down into five main categories: moral panic, multiculturalism, racism, policing
and masculinity. In this sense, the riots were, as DeBrannan (2006: 34) notes, “a
journalist’s dream” – an event on which commentators from the Left and Right could
impose their own definitions and versions of the narrative to fit their respective
ideological agendas. What united these arguments was that they revolved around the
central issue of defining Australian national identity – the divide between us/them
amplified to a deafening crescendo.
What Happened? A Timeline of the Cronulla Riots
As mentioned, the chronological unfolding of the events at Cronulla is generally accepted
– that is, the temporal and geographic details of the riots are by and large concurrent
throughout the reportage and academic texts examined. Whilst a far more detailed
timeline of the Cronulla riots (as drawn from the sources identified in the previous
chapter) can be found in the appendix, we will now consider an abridged version to frame
the discussion.
42
The event that is regarded to have acted as a catalyst for the riots is an altercation that
occurred at Cronulla Beach on 4 December 2005 at approximately 3 pm. An argument
broke out between two or three (depending on the source) North Cronulla volunteer
lifesavers and four youths of Middle Eastern appearance, with taunts being thrown about
who ‘owned’ the beach. The altercation then turned violent, with one of the lifesavers
being bashed unconscious.
Over the following week, this event was reported with differing ‘facts’ about the extent
of the injuries, the viciousness of the attack, and the numbers involved. Indeed, this did
not just vary between newspapers, but even within newspapers: The Daily Telegraph
varied between two and three lifesavers being involved in the melee throughout its
coverage. Furthermore, the fact that the lifesavers were off duty and not in uniform was
left out of many media reports, as was the element of provocation from both sides
(Grewal 2007). With these details left unemphasised, the narrative of the events became
as simple as ‘Middle Eastern men brutally attack volunteer lifesavers’.
By Wednesday, emails and text messages were circulating about a rally on Sunday to
‘reclaim the Shire’. The following day, The Daily Telegraph published two text messages
in full: “this Sunday every Aussie in the Shire get down to North Cronulla to help support
Leb and wog bashing day” and “bring your mates and let’s show them that this is our
beach and they are never welcome…let’s kill these boys” (McIlveen & Downie 2005: 5).
Alan Jones read one of the text messages on air. The subsequent days saw an escalation
43
of media attention and an increase in public anxiety, with Police Commissioner Ken
Moroney (2005) urging people to not attend the rally.
Sunday 11 December saw a 5,000-strong crowd of mostly young Anglo-Celtic Australian
males gather at Cronulla Beach for the ‘reclaim the Shire’ rally. However, things quickly
escalated when the crowd began chanting “fuck off Leb” and “kill the Leb bastard”
(McIlveen 2005: 4). The crowd chased and attacked “anyone they identified as ‘Leb’,
Muslim, ‘of Middle Eastern background’ or even just ‘wog’” (Poynting 2007: 159-160).
These attacks were brutal, with at least 13 people injured (Kennedy et al. 2005). The
crowd also turned on police, paramedics and emergency personnel, blocking and
throwing missiles at ambulances used to treat those who were attacked.
That evening, a crowd of approximately 100 to 150 men of Middle Eastern appearance
gathered at Maroubra Parade, Maroubra, and began smashing cars in a revenge attack.
Police were turned upon when they entered the scene. They set up roadblocks at Cronulla
in an attempt to stop any further violence. Elsewhere, at Brighton-le-Sands, a group of
youths of Middle Eastern appearance stole the Australian flag from the local RSL club
and set it alight.
The following day, Monday 12 December, saw politicians argue about whether Australia
was a racist country or not. In the evening, approximately 3,000 people gathered at the
Lakemba Mosque. According to police reports, a convoy of approximately 70 cars left
the Mosque at 8:45 pm heading for either Maroubra or Cronulla to fight locals in another
44
revenge attack. Police set up roadblocks later that evening after ambulance officers were
attacked in Cronulla and Brighton-le-Sands. Maroubra-based surf gang ‘the Bra Boys’
later claimed responsibility for chasing the mob away from Maroubra.
The combination of events of 11 and 12 December 2005 constitutes what we can
immediately understand as ‘the Cronulla riots’ as a cohesive temporally and
geographically located event in the press. This is not to say that the following days and
events were not an important part of how we understood the riots, but in a sense, they
were secondary to the immediate riots: the laws passed, the public debate and analysis
that followed were consequences of the preceding days’ events. Monday night’s attacks
of retaliation signalled the last significant act of violence of the riots, as the following
weekend’s expected mayhem failed to materialise. As the dust began to settle on the
beaches of Cronulla and the streets of Maroubra, the question that loomed large was ‘why
did this happen?’
Why? Making Sense of the Cronulla Riots
Redmond (2007: 336) begins his article on the Cronulla riots with a quote from Bourdieu
(1977: 40) that succinctly sums up the process that was pursued by journalists,
politicians, academics and other social commentators following the event: “to possess the
capital of authority necessary to impose a definition of a situation (where collective
judgment falters) is to be able to mobilize the group by solemnizing, officializing,
universalizing a private incident (for example, presenting an insult to a particular woman
as an insult to the whole group)”. The debates that ensued in the pages of The Daily
45
Telegraph and The Sydney Morning Herald were characterised by this goal: an attempt to
read the events at Cronulla as symptomatic of wider politicosocial trends and to provide a
definitive interpretation of what went on at Cronulla.
Whilst the interpretations in the newspapers articles varied largely depending on the
writer’s ideological agenda, they can be categorised into five major causes or hypotheses
for the Cronulla riots: moral panic, multiculturalism, racism, policing and masculinity.
The features of each argument will be outlined respectively. Although these hypotheses
necessarily intersect in certain regards, an attempt will be made to keep them as distinct
as possible for analytical purposes.
Moral Panic
The moral panic hypothesis argues that the Cronulla riots were a result of inflated media
attention and the whipping up of hysteria in the general public by the popular media and
politicians with populist agendas. The argument here is not that Australians are inherently
racist, but rather that they succumbed to a “racialised fear” (Evers 2006: 19) as promoted
by the ‘dog-whistling’ of former Prime Minister John Howard and the sensationalism of
the press. Perhaps the most vocal proponent of this view is academic Scott Poynting
(2006a: 95), who claimed that causality in the riots was clear-cut: it was "the culmination
of a campaign of populist incitement waged in the media and by the state", reading the
battle of the beach as mirroring Howard’s attempts to control the nation. Judy Lattas
(2007: 320) has identified this line of argument as “the norm for discussions of the
Cronulla riot for those on the Left side of politics”. It is little surprise that this was not a
46
prominent argument put forward in the newspapers themselves, as this would be selfcritical reflection, but instead was propagated mostly by academics and ‘letter to the
editor’ writers.
There are some fundamental problems with such a hypothesis. There is little doubt the
media played a crucial role in the Cronulla riots – the Hazzard report 7 found that “the
Cronulla riots highlight the caution the media must display when engaging in public
debate on issues that may lead to civil unrest” (Clennel & AAP 2006: 3). However, the
moral panic hypothesis falls back on Marxist perceptions of ideology as false
consciousness, and returns to the Frankfurt School view of the populace as easily
manipulated drones willing to swallow any message aimed at them. Simply blaming the
Cronulla riots on Alan Jones or The Daily Telegraph is not academically astute in the
least, and it represents a form of lazy scapegoating. As Burchell (2006: 7) bluntly argues,
what underlies this view is “the determination to see the mass of one’s fellow-citizens as
willing dupes of every ill-intentioned populist; the metaphor of the ‘dog-whistle’, with its
implication that the majority of Australians, after all, are little more than pets”. Such a
view is arrogant and elitist.
Furthermore, as Andrew Lattas (2007: 301) has argued, the moral panic hypothesis is
worryingly dismissive, sometimes ignoring real concerns and conflicts that occur as
“unnecessary hysteria”. Although Cronulla residents’ concerns about their safety at the
beach were no doubt exaggerated and overblown, dismissing them as mere panic does
7
This report, written by former Assistant Police Commissioner Norm Hazzard, is yet to be made fully
available to the public.
47
nothing but erect cultural barriers and exacerbate the problem. At the very least, the
rioters have a right for the concerns to be heard – it must be remembered that if these
concerns were not legitimate in the rioters’ minds, we would not have seen the extreme
display of aggravation and violence witnessed in the Cronulla riots.
Multiculturalism
If the moral panic hypothesis characterised debates on the Left about the Cronulla riots,
multiculturalism – or more precisely, the failure of multiculturalism – served as the crux
of arguments from the Right. This argument postulates that the riots were evidence that
the government’s multiculturalism policy had failed. Here, multiculturalism represents an
empty form of cultural relativism that encourages separatism, as assimilation is not
pursued heavily enough. It is imagined as an elitist agenda, with the ‘common person’ –
that is, the Anglo-Celtic Australian 8 – “subjected to the multicultural experiment…
hav[ing] to cope with carjackings, gang rapes, drive-by shootings, the occasional
explosion at the football, amplified calls to prayer, and gangs of violent young men”, as
Akerman (2005a: 18) put it. The implication is that even though the course of action
taken by the rioters was despicable, it is understandable, because they had ‘put up’ with
the failed policies of multiculturalism for long enough.
Such a view relies on a ‘we warned you’ mentality, implicitly citing the concerns of
Powell (1969) and Blainey (1984) that multiculturalism as non-assimilation would result
in the spilling of blood. This argument is deeply flawed, and ignores the fact that Sydney,
the seventh-largest immigrant city in the world, with 58% of its residents being first or
8
See p. 27 for discussion of marked and unmarked political identities.
48
second generation immigrants (Collins 2006), has managed to elude mass displays of
racially-motivated violence until this point. The version of multiculturalism that these
pundits put forward is a utopian “straw-man caricature” (Soutphommasane 2006:
[online]). Opponents of this hypothesis argue that it is not the failure of multiculturalism
that underlay the events at Cronulla, but rather the gradual dismantling of the policy by
the Howard government, where the term was even removed from the portfolio to which it
was originally assigned (Johns 2008; Poynting 2006b).
Racism
The question that occupied the Australian social imaginary immediately following the
Cronulla riots was ‘is Australia a racist country?’ Although Prime Minister John Howard,
Opposition leader Kim Beazley and NSW Premier Morris Iemma all denied that
Australia was inherently racist, Iemma (2005: 18) declared that the riots showed “the
ugly face of racism” in Australian society. Coming most often from the Left, the racism
hypothesis argues that Australian national identity is premised on racism, a legacy
inherited from the White Australia Policy. There is an overlap with the moral panic
hypothesis here, as the racism hypothesis sees the ‘dog-whistling’ of John Howard and
frenzied media attention as bringing to the surface these intrinsic racist urges.
Whilst there is little doubt that the events at Cronulla were blatant acts of racism – it
would be ridiculous to suggest otherwise – the argument that Australians are ‘naturally’
racist is a somewhat illogical one. A distinction must be made: the racist actions of 5,000
people and numerous supporters do not stand as proof that a country of over 21 million
49
people is racist. Furthermore, this argument is premised on essentialism, putting forward
the idea that racism is innate in the Australian psyche. This is illogical for reasons
outlined in Chapter II: there is nothing intrinsic about national identity. As such,
attempting to hegemonise Australian national identity as ‘naturally’ racist is problematic,
and borders on biological essentialism itself. As Julia Baird (2005: 17) has argued “we
need to identify and combat the dark underbelly of our community, not argue over a
blanket term often misused, or disowned, for political purposes”. The more urgent
question is why and how this break of social cohesion occurred, and how to avoid social
isolation and disenfranchisement of minority identities.
Policing
Then NSW Opposition leader Peter Debnam (in Patty 2005: 2) summed up the policing
hypothesis when he argued that the “softly softly approach” of the state police force
under the NSW Labor government had left ethnic tensions to simmer, and that ‘policing
without teeth’ was to blame for the Cronulla riots. Conservative commentators took the
government to task over this: Akerman (2005b: 43) argued that “spineless politicians
pandering to pressure groups” had led to this situation, whereas Devine (2005a: 11)
hyperbolically claimed that this ‘softness’ had resulted in “the Lebanese-Australian
criminal gangs of Sydney’s south-west who have ruled the roost in this city for at least a
decade… now number[ing] in the thousands”.
This hypothesis shares a logic with the multiculturalism hypothesis, in that it places all
blame on the state and again relies on a ‘we warned you’ mentality. It tars the alleged
50
political correctness of the legal system with the same brush as multiculturalism, painting
it as a soft policy pushed by an elitist and out-of-touch Left. There is a longing for a
return to the ‘good old days’ of hard policing, when “lenient, Left-leaning, anti-police
magistrates” (Devine 2005b: 17) weren’t apparently destroying the state justice system.
Demonstrating this desire for hard justice, Debnam (in Clennel 2006: 1) made the rather
bizarre claim that if elected as NSW Premier, he would order the Police Commissioner to
charge “200 Middle Eastern thugs…with anything”. This audacious declaration delivered
Debnam a large amount of public ridicule.
There was certainly an insufficient number of police on the day of the riots, and the
authorities clearly misjudged the large number of people that were to attend. This,
however, does not mean that ineffective policing caused the riots. In response to the
pressure on this topic, NSW Premier Iemma recalled state government on December 15
to rush through tougher police laws, allowing police to lock down trouble spots, search
people and cars without warrants, ban alcohol sales, and confiscate cars and mobile
phones.
Masculinity
The masculinity hypothesis argues that the Cronulla riots were a display of overt
masculinity and machismo. This is what local Member of Parliament Bruce Baird (in
McMahon 2005: 7) called “boys being boys”. Under this rubric come the arguments that
the Cronulla riots were about protecting ‘our’ women; that the riots was caused by excess
alcohol consumption; and that the beach has always been a contested space between
51
groups of men. Protection of women, consumption of alcohol and localism are all viewed
here as essential elements of Anglo-Celtic hegemonic masculinity (see Connell 1987) in
Australian society.
The ‘protection of women’ argument links the anxiety around the ‘Lebanese gang rapes’
of 2000 with the reported sexual harassment of Anglo-Celtic females at Cronulla Beach
by groups of men of Middle Eastern appearance. With the conflated Other imagined as a
repressed sexual deviant, this viewpoint sees the riots as a legitimate “demonstration
against the sexual harassment and racist intimidation by Lebanese men at Cronulla”
(Sheehan 2006: 56), rather than against the ‘original’ cause of the altercation with the
lifesavers the week before. There is an underlying possessive element of masculinity
operating here, as it is ‘our’ women who have to be protected. Grewal (2007) argues that
this discourse brought out the insincere ‘inner feminist’ of some politicians, suggesting
that using the language of feminism allowed them yet another coded way to attack Islam.
Prime Minister John Howard (in AAP 2005b: online) acknowledged the alcohol element
of the masculinity hypothesis when he claimed that “the always explosive combination of
a large number of people at the weekend and a large amount of alcohol” led to the
violence at Cronulla. Further, the idea of the beach as an always contested space for
groups of young men was put forward by a number of commentators. The Cronulla riots
were contextualised as part of this tradition in claims that tribalism was an inevitable part
of Australian beach life (Sheehan 2005) and that “blue-collar thuggery…has
characterised these beaches for half a century” (Bouma 2006: 81).
52
Interestingly, the masculinity hypothesis was put forward by commentators from all over
the political spectrum. Whilst those on the Right tended to side with Bruce Baird’s (in
McMahon 2005: 7) view – the events at Cronulla were “boys being boys” – those on the
Left were concerned at the ugly types of masculinity that were on show in the events. In a
sense, the former offered a form of absolution to the rioters by regarding their behaviour
as natural but exaggerated, and the latter threw the category of masculinity itself into
question and problematised the masculinities on display.
The Truth(s) About the Cronulla Riots
Far from there being one single ‘truth’ about the Cronulla riots, these findings suggest
that there are a number of causes that contributed to the events. The moral panic,
multiculturalism, racism, policing and masculinity hypotheses all have their own
explanatory strengths and weaknesses. However, rather than arguing that one explanation
is better than another, considering these hypotheses alongside one another makes evident
the overdetermined nature of the Cronulla riots, and more generally, the phenomenon of
national identity itself. Using the theoretical framework developed in Chapter II, the next
chapter will examine how these hypotheses tie together in their theorisation of the
dislocatory presence of antagonism in the definition of the term ‘Australian’. It will argue
that the Cronulla riots must be understood as ultimately demonstrating the impossibility
of national identity.
53
Chapter V: Discussion
In hindsight, the immediate catalyst for the Cronulla riots seems far too banal and
commonplace to have sparked the display of aggression and hatred that was to follow a
week later. It was, after all, a reasonably familiar and trivial act of violence – a brawl
between two groups of young men of different cultural backgrounds. Such melees, no
doubt, occur every week in Sydney and often go unreported. However, what separated
this particular brawl from those that remain culturally invisible was that it became
burdened with a heavy symbolic weight, with frustrated, angry and scared citizens
hanging their grievances on its corpus. In this sense, the Cronulla riots were not simply
about the bashing of a lifesaver. Instead, they were influenced by a number of factors and
causes built up over time. The Cronulla riots were a result of overdetermined antagonism.
With this in mind, this chapter will examine the case study of the Cronulla riots, as
presented in the previous chapter, utilising the Laclauian theoretical framework
developed in Chapter II. It will attempt to come to an understanding of three central
facets of the riots: who the Cronulla riots were aimed at, what drove 5,000 people to turn
up at Cronulla to violently act out against this target (and many more to support this act),
and what this means for our understanding of Australian national identity. In theoretical
terms, it will ultimately argue that the Cronulla riots were a result of the impossibility of
national identity. To demonstrate this, it will show how the Middle Eastern/Muslim Other
was a fictional conflated antagonism that came to represent the dislocatory excess of
Australian national identity. The Cronulla riots represent an attempt to hegemonise this
54
excess, and thus reinscribe the border between us/them – or in short, define what it means
to be Australian.
The Overdetermination of the Cronulla Riots
As the previous chapter has demonstrated, there are a number of explanations for why the
Cronulla riots occurred. Although some of these hypotheses have gained more cultural
credence than others, there is little sense in declaring one as definitive over the others: as
Gramsci’s (1971) concept of the historical bloc demonstrates, there is no such thing as
singular causality in politicosocial life. As such, these hypotheses must be taken together
to provide an indication of the overdetermination that led to the riots. We must consider
how at Cronulla, “as in all processes of overdetermination, grievances which had nothing
to do with those…[original] demands nevertheless expressed themselves through them”
(Laclau 2005a: 97-98). Here, the original act of violence and the immediate demand for
justice expanded into a number of accumulated grievances not actually linked to the
initial attack – the breadth of the hypotheses in the previous chapter is testament to this.
To borrow a term from Althusser (1977: 99), what we witnessed at Cronulla was a
moment of “ruptural unity”, 9 where local, national and global issues became intricately
linked and ‘fused’, ultimately reaching a ‘boiling point’. This lack of singular causality is
not an attractive theorisation: as Smith (2006: 9) argues “if there were a single, simple
explanation for the current disturbances then governments would not seem so immobile
and the rest of us would not seem so helpless”.
9
My use of this term should not be understood in a strictly Althusserian sense: as Laclau and Mouffe
(2001: 124-125; 189-190) have made clear, Althusser’s conception of ‘contradiction’ is inherently
problematic if we consider antagonism as part of any identity. Instead, I use the term to refer to the building
and subsequent melding of anxieties in the antagonistic Middle Eastern/Muslim Other that hit a ‘ruptural’
point in the Cronulla riots.
55
What does tie the differing hypotheses put forward for the Cronulla riots together is that
they all revolve around the question of national identity, or more specifically the role of
antagonism in the construction of national identity. They each reveal the ‘emptiness’ of
the term ‘Australian’, and as such, national identity’s dislocated nature.
Let us consider what each of the hypotheses tells us about being Australian. The racism
hypothesis argues that to be Australian is to be racist, or at very least, intolerant.
However, what does this actually reveal about ‘being Australian’? Very little, in fact:
‘Australian’ here has no content beyond its reliance on the construction of an Other to
project hatred upon. The logic of this hypothesis is thus based on the positivisation of
negativity – a ‘them’ must exist for Australians to identify themselves as ‘anti-them’.
The multiculturalism, policing and masculinity hypotheses aim to define this ‘them’, each
relying on an exclusionary logic that points out the dislocatory presence of this
antagonistic Other in our society. The multiculturalism hypothesis argues that we have
given them a chance, but they have not appropriately assimilated. The policing
hypothesis posits that their crimes have been ignored due to political correctness and now
represent a major threat to the ‘Australian way of life’. The masculinity hypothesis
speculates that their masculinity and sexuality is deviant and dangerous to our women.
Taken together, what these hypotheses actually aim to do is fill the content of ‘us’ by
attributing those features we desire least in ourselves to them. The union of these
56
divisionary logics acts to shut down debate about Australian values, and ultimately reify
the virgule 10 between us/them as immutable.
Theoretically speaking, when commentators refer to a threat to ‘our way of life’ –
whether the threat is through non-assimilation, crime or sexual deviancy – what they are
actually doing is acknowledging the threat of dislocation that antagonism offers to
national identity. This argument underlies the moral panic hypothesis to some extent. The
more visible the antagonism, the more obvious the dislocation of national identity
becomes, and those hegemonic principles upon which national identity is premised
become less ‘set’. In short, national identity becomes more unclear, the term ‘Australian’
loses some of its meaning, and this is threatening to those who invest a great deal of their
personal identity in national identity. What can be done to rectify this situation? As we
will see in the Cronulla riots, one way to attempt to ‘restore’ national identity is to deal
with what is perceived as the main cause of dislocation: the antagonistic Other.
A Most Peculiar Antagonism: Constructing the Other
At present, the most significant antagonism in Australian society is the identity that
Poynting (2006a: 89) refers to as “the folk demon of the Middle Eastern/Muslim ‘other’”.
The peculiar thing about this antagonism, however, is that it does not actually exist. This
Other is a fiction – a dangerously conflated collection of identities with no true
ontological presence. Over the space of approximately a decade, a number of local,
national and international events have contributed to the gradual build-up of tension and
10
See footnote on p. 28 regarding the use of the virgule (/) and its relation to the concept of the “frontier”
(Laclau 2000a: 302) between groups.
57
anger aimed at a number of identities that have become fused in the public consciousness
as an overdetermined singular threat. The Cronulla riots represented the rupture of this
overdetermination.
To recognise that these processes of overdetermination and conflation have been
successful (that is, hegemonic), one only needs to examine the vox-pops conducted by
The Daily Telegraph two days after the violent clash involving the off-duty lifesavers. In
the space of one article, members of the public refer to the assailants as “thugs of Middle
Eastern descent”, “wogs”, “young Lebanese males” and “Arab” (McIlveen & Downie
2005: 5). As we can see, this fused identity has little to do with actual geographic or
ethnic origins – as Andrew Lattas (2007: 301) identifies, “here ‘Lebanese’ often operates
as a shorthand term for new Muslim migrants who could be from Jordan, Syria, Iraq or
Iran”. In the Australian public consciousness, the gradual merging between all of these
identities has meant that Middle Eastern/Muslim/Arab/Lebanese, via chains of
association, had become seen as one and the same.
So how did this overdetermined antagonism actually come to be? What events and issues
contributed to this coalescence? The emergence and prominence of this fused political
identity cannot be divorced from the local issues of ‘race rapes’ and ‘ethnic crime gangs’,
the national anxiety around ‘boat people’ in the MV Tampa and children overboard
controversies, and the global events of the terrorist attacks of September 11, the Bali
bombings and the invasion of Iraq. Here, micro meets macro, where local and national
events are recontextualised and globalised “by being re-read within the logic of a global
58
civilisational struggle” (Lattas, A. 2007: 304). Here, an irreducible dichotomy is drawn
between the West and East. The West is viewed as Christian, civil, democratic, liberal,
peaceful and progressive, and the East 11 is imagined as “backward, uncivilised, irrational,
violent, criminally inclined, misogynistic and a terrorist threat” (Poynting 2006a: 89). It
is important to analyse the gradual accrual of these negative qualities in the Middle
Eastern/Muslim Other to understand who those at Cronulla, and those who supported
them, thought they were rioting against.
The current antagonistic discourse extends the assimilation anxieties of Hansonism that
emerged in late nineties. Whilst Hansonism constructed Asians as a threat to Australia
due to concerns that they would overpopulate and not assimilate, the current discourse
goes a step further by positing the Middle Eastern/Muslim Other as not only unable to
assimilate, but as a serious threat to national security. As Poynting et al. (2004) argue, the
current anxiety around this Other can be traced to 1998, where concerns about ‘Lebanese
gangs’ emerged following the murder of Edward Lee 12 in Punchbowl and the shooting of
the Lakemba police station. These events shifted the antagonistic focus from the ‘Asian’
heroin gangs of Cabramatta towards the Lebanese and Muslim enclaves of southwest
Sydney, where the gaze has since remained.
11
In terms of this ‘civilisational struggle’, the East no longer refers explicitly to Asia, but more to the
Middle East, as the West is currently involved in conflict in this region. Here Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran
have taken on the role of agent provocateurs. This division is yet another us/them binary.
12
14-year old Edward Lee was stabbed to death by a member of the ‘Telopea Street Boys’, a Lebanese
gang, in Punchbowl on the way to a party on October 17 1998. The murder received a huge amount of
media attention, with a visible focus on the ethnicity of the perpetrator.
59
From mid-2000 to mid-2001, there were a series of vicious gang rapes in this geographic
area – Bankstown to be precise. These crimes took on an ethnic dimension when it was
reported that a “Lebanese Muslim gang” (Devine 2002: 15) was committing the rapes,
and that they were specifically targeting Anglo-Celtic Australian females. Reports stated
that the rapists taunted a victim by calling her “an Aussie Pig” and telling her she would
be raped “Leb-style” (Crichton & Stevenson 2002: online). These crimes were projected
onto the entire Lebanese community, and as such, a discourse of criminalised ethnicity
emerged. This series of rapes and the subsequent media attention played a large part in
deeming the male Middle Eastern/Muslim Other as sexually deviant, or as Sheehan
(2006: 294) put it, a “cultural time bomb” unable to control his animalistic sexual urges
in ‘civilised’ Australia.
At a federal level, there are two diplomatic decisions that occurred in 2001 that must be
considered when investigating the overdetermination of the Middle Eastern/Muslim
Other: the turning away of MV Tampa and the ‘children overboard’ affair. The MV
Tampa incident involved Prime Minister John Howard disallowing a Norwegian cargo
ship that had rescued 439 Afghani ‘boat people’ from a sinking vessel to enter Australian
waters. By showing little regard for the human rights of these asylum seekers, Howard’s
‘hardline’ approach legitimised concern about Middle Eastern/Muslim refugees.
Construing them as opportunistic ‘queue-jumpers’ or potential terrorist threats denied
their basic humanity. This dehumanisation was further compounded in the children
overboard affair, in which it was claimed that Middle Eastern asylum seekers threw their
children from their vessel in an attempt to stop the HMAS Adelaide from turning them
60
away from Australian waters. In apparently being willing to sacrifice their children for
their own benefit, the asylum seekers were presented as cold-blooded, manipulative and
ruthless. Although a Senate enquiry later showed that the government had deliberately
misled the public in this incident and that no children had been deliberately thrown
overboard (Commonwealth of Australia 2002), the damage was already done. The
cynical manipulation of the electorate legitimised concern that these asylum seekers’
values were completely incompatible with ours, and subsequently solidified the
exclusionist attitude that they have no place in our society. The concerns about the Other
impinging on our nation were given a literal embodiment in the demonisation of these
‘boat people’.
As mentioned earlier, these local and national issues must be considered alongside global
events. Concerns about terrorism following the September 11 attacks had a concrete
effect here in Australia, with the Australian Arabic Council recording a twenty-fold
increase in reports of vilification and discrimination in the month after the attacks
(Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission 2004: 43). These attacks acted to
link the Middle Eastern/Muslim figure with terrorism, and US President George Bush’s
(2001: online) rhetoric did little but amplify the us/them dichotomy: “either you are with
us, or you are with the terrorists”. Australia stood by the US as one of their closest allies,
and went to war in Iraq based on false intelligence regarding weapons of mass
destruction. We were strongly against the terrorists, and via chains of association, we
were against Islam and the Middle East in what Huntington (1996) has posited as a global
“clash of civilizations”.
61
The Bali bombings, thirteen months after September 11, had a similar effect, but the local
and global collided to an even greater degree for Australia. In this attack, 88 Australians
were killed, and rumours spread that this act of terrorism was specifically directed
towards Australia. Bali’s close proximity to Australia and reputation as a popular holiday
destination effectively operated to bring the terrorist threat close to home. Following the
events, there were high-profile crackdowns on suspected terrorist ‘sleeper cells’ in major
Australian cities by the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO), and the
introduction of more stringent and authoritarian anti-terror laws and border protection
policies. Islamic terrorism was no longer something that happened ‘over there’ – instead
the Middle Eastern/Muslim Other was construed as a terrorist danger here on Australian
shores. 13
Each of these events has only been briefly considered, yet it is clear to see that when
taken together, identities tend to become conflated, and a singular overdetermined
antagonism emerges. Here, Lebanese, Arab, Middle Eastern and Muslim all become one
and the same – this identity associated with terrorism, violence and sexual deviancy. As
Perara (2006: 48) concludes, “on the beach, the threads of racial terror, of the sexual
predator, the already suspect Muslim/oriental terrorist, the invader of the homeland, the
criminal and the racial other, begin to come together in the figure of an overdetermined
bogeyman”. In this overdetermined Other, we see the strains of different hypotheses put
13
Evidence of the anxiety surrounding ‘homegrown’ terrorists can be found in 2007 Dr. Mohammed
Haneef controversy, where Haneef was arrested and detained under the 2005 Australian Anti-Terrorism
Act, his visa cancelled, and his presumption of innocence denied under suspicion of assisting terrorists.
This stemmed from a tenuous link regarding the use of a SIM card in a mobile phone used in the attempted
2007 terrorist attack on Glasgow International Airport. These charges were later dropped. The Federal
Government has since launched a judicial enquiry into the mishandling of Dr. Haneef’s case.
62
forward for the Cronulla riots: the lawless figure of the policing hypothesis, the sexual
deviant of the masculinity hypothesis and the unassimilable immigrant of the
multiculturalism hypothesis. In short, we have an antagonistic identity that cannot be
subsumed by national identity. Its dislocatory presence is too much for the ‘system’ to
bear. This antagonism reveals far less about people from the Middle East or those who
follow the Islamic faith than what it actually reveals about the limits of Australian
national identity.
Marginalising the Majority
We now have a notion of the process of overdetermination that led to the emergence of
the antagonistic Middle Eastern/Muslim Other, so we must turn our focus towards the
other group in the Cronulla riots: the rioters and their many supporters. Who do they
represent?
The ‘we’ in the slogan ‘we grew here, you flew here’ 14 are ‘Australians’, and in this
instance, reference to ‘Australians’ is actually code for Anglo-Celtic Australians. Here,
Australians of Anglo-Celtic heritage are the ‘unmarked’ 15 group, as they make up the
majority of the population of Australia (ABS 2008a). Furthermore, although not all
rioters were from Cronulla and the surrounding Sutherland Shire, it is important to note
that ‘the Shire’ is a substantially ethnically homogenous area, with 78.1% of its residents
born in Australia, compared to 60.4% in the greater Sydney area (ABS 2008b; 2008c). As
Hodge and O’Carroll (2006: 67) note, “this leads to Anglo-Celts being invisible, without
14
This slogan was scrawled on the t-shirt or body of at least one of the rioters at Cronulla (Saniotis 2006),
and has since become one of the infamous slogans associated with the riots.
15
See p. 27 for discussion of marked and unmarked political identities.
63
a structure, the reference point from which other cultures are judged”. Here, the AngloCeltic Australian is the ‘natural’ barometer by which others in this country are judged.
Whilst it is outlandish to imagine that this is a strictly homogenous group, the hegemonic
logic of national identity subsumes the differences in the Anglo-Celtic group under the
equivalential power of the ‘Australian’ signifier. As has been discussed, this is due to the
shared exclusion of the overdetermined antagonistic Middle Eastern/Muslim Other.
If this Anglo-Celtic group is quite obviously the hegemonic majority in Australian
society – the ‘natural’ us compared to the antagonistic them – why did they imagine
themselves as marginalised? The violent attack of a minority by a majority – what Moses
(2006) identifies as a pogrom – represents the reassertion of the hegemonic group’s
political identity at an entirely coercive level. So why did the rioters and their supporters
feel that such a violent display was necessary? Let us examine this seemingly illogical
self-perception.
Throughout interviews with those who rioted at Cronulla, as well as locals who supported
them (Carswell 2001; Jackson, L. 2006; Lattas, A. 2007), there is an overwhelming sense
that the interviewees were ‘at wit’s end’, or that they had simply ‘had enough’ with the
overdetermined Other. The operation that occurred here was that “a segment of the
dominant group…imagine[d] itself as marginalised, as being progressively provoked,
depowered and humiliated” (Cowlishaw 2007: 295). In short, we had a majority that
believed it had been ‘pushed into a corner’. This is not the kind of logic we are used to
seeing in a majority, but rather a discriminated-against minority, as with the disaffected
64
North African youth in the previously mentioned Paris riots, or African-Americans in the
Los Angeles riots.
There are three central theoretical elements that must be drawn out of this imagination of
marginalisation: the role of antagonism in national identity, the relationship between the
universal and particular, and the hegemonic role of the state. The first – the role of
antagonism as the constitutive outside of any identity – has been discussed extensively
thus far. In short, Australian national identity can only make sense by excluding certain
identities (at present, the overdetermined Middle Eastern/Muslim Other), yet because the
operation of Australian identity is reliant on this exclusion, this Other both blocks and
constitutes Australian identity. As has been mentioned, this dislocatory effect is felt more
keenly as this Other becomes more prominent – the constitutive outside’s ‘constituitivity’
becomes more visible – and as such, Australian national identity is threatened and
destabilised. The more anxieties and concerns that are placed in the overdetermined
antagonistic Other, the larger it grows as a block to Australian national identity.
The second theoretical element involves the relationship between the universal and
particular. The era of globalisation has ushered in what Laclau (1996: 26) has called “a
proliferation of particularisms, while the point of view of universality is increasingly put
aside as an old-fashioned totalitarian dream”. What this has meant for national identity is
that its ontological status as a universal equivalential identity has been thrown into
question, as its contingency has been revealed. The dialectic between the universal and
the particular has been brought into relief.
65
Now, as an equivalential logic, national identity relies on hegemony as the “operation of
taking up, by a particularity, of an incommensurable universal signification” (Laclau
2005a: 70). In light of our discussion so far, this is quite obvious: the term ‘Australian’
evidently does not take in everyone who lives in this country, but instead reflects a
particular segment of the population, and is fixed around certain hegemonic principles to
reflect the shared values of this particular group. However, as I have outlined, hegemony
is never ‘set’, and is instead an “unstable equilibrium” (Laclau & Mouffe 2001: 189)
between universality and particularity. This instability is threatening for some.
Globalisation and the plurality of identities and practices that have accompanied the
increasing movement of peoples across the world have interrupted the equivalential logic
of Australian national identity and thus loosened what we might call the ‘hegemonic grip’
around its specific hegemonic principles. Globalisation has thus contributed to this
instability. Rutledge (2007: 29) identifies what this dissolution of the ontopological 16
‘certainties’ of the past might mean for those who derive much of their personal identity
from being Australian:
National identity no longer tells us who we are in quite the clear, ringing tones of bygone days.
Mass immigration, multiculturalism, the globalisation of commerce and labour – all these
phenomena conspire to make our geographical location mean a good deal less than it used to…for
the patriot, on the other hand, national allegiance may be the only point left in a disintegrating,
atomised universe. I might not feel secure any more in my job, my relationship, my religious
beliefs or my sexuality, but, by crikey, I’m an Aussie and that means something.
16
This Derridean concept refers to the binding of identity and place. Refer to p. 15 for further explanation.
66
What the rioters have ‘had enough of’ is actually the disintegration of the universal at the
hands of the plural identities that have emerged with globalisation. The more identities
subsumed under the universal horizon of an equivalential logic such as national identity,
the emptier that universal content becomes. That is, the more people that are understood
as Australian, the less specific the meaning of the term ‘Australian’. It is likely that the
rioters were both frustrated and threatened by this process, as it signalled the instability of
the hegemony that constructed them as ‘real’ Australians. Their claim to universality had
been corrupted by particularism. 17
John Howard (in Johnson 2007: 202) summed up this view when he claimed “I don’t like
hyphenated Australians, I just like Australians”. What he indicates in this comment is that
Australian national identity, as a hegemonic logic that strives for equivalence, should be
strong enough to overcome any ethnic differences or particularities. Implicitly, it suggests
that “hyphenated Australians” are not ‘real’ Australians, that they interrupt the logic of
national identity and are thus dislocatory and problematic for the constitution of the
nation.
The third reason the majority group imagined itself as marginalised is the perceived
failure of the state to satisfactorily manage the dislocatory effect of the antagonistic
Other. Here, people frustrated by the state’s alleged ineffectuality were linked together in
what Laclau (2005a: 74) has identified as a populist configuration, where there exists “the
formation of an internal antagonistic frontier separating ‘the people’ from power”. This
17
This is precisely the logic that underlies the multiculturalism hypothesis described in the previous
chapter.
67
separation of ‘the people’ from power is present in the policing and multiculturalism
hypotheses, where the state is seen as rendered impotent by political correctness,
pandering to minority groups rather than ‘real’ Australians. If hegemony relies on the
dialectic between consensus and coercion (Howson & Smith 2008), then the state had
failed its coercive role of hegemonising the antagonistic excess of Australian society
through law enforcement, legislature and social policy. As a result, rioters felt they ‘had
no choice’ but to take coercive matters into their own hands. In this populist
configuration, the state is implicated in the content of ‘them’ along with the antagonistic
Other, rather than with the marginalised us.
This anger at the state for its failure was clear in the riots. Not only were police attacked,
but paramedics and ambulance workers too – groups usually given an informal version of
‘diplomatic immunity’ in episodes of civil strife. The disillusion and disenchantment with
the state was hinted at in the week leading up to the riots. Premier Morris Iemma was
jeered by locals when he visited Cronulla two days before the riots (Jones & Behar 2005),
and NSW Police Commissioner Ken Moroney’s pleas to vigilantes proved completely
unsuccessful. The state was severely undermined.
To sum up, there were three major interrelated concerns for those who rioted at Cronulla:
the Middle Eastern/Muslim antagonism was too threatening, the meaning of ‘Australian’
was being dissolved, and the state wasn’t doing enough about it. In Laclau’s (2005a: 77)
eyes, this situation offers the prerequisites for a populist configuration par excellence.
Firstly, we have the unification of separate demands under an equivalential logic –
68
Australian national identity. Secondly, we have the division of society into two camps –
us/them. Thirdly, we see the emergence of an identity which is more than just the sum of
those equivalential links – a ‘real’ Australian who wishes to restore Australia’s ‘true
meaning’ as opposed to the version offered by the Other and the state.
Yet the emergence of this ‘marginalised’ populist logic is extremely problematic, as is the
implicit denial of agency. As Žižek (2008: 282) identifies, the frustrated populist cry of ‘I
had no choice but to do it, something had to be done’ represents “a refusal to understand,
exasperation at complexity, and the ensuing conviction there must be somebody
responsible for all this mess”. By loading the conflated Other with contemporary political
and societal anxieties, the majority effectively constructed a wicker man whose burning
down was inevitable as it grew in size. There can be no true resolution or solution for
such a populist movement. As Glynos (2001: 202) points out, the brutal means used in
attempting to hegemonise the excess “conceals the immensely more troublesome fact that
there is no plotting agency pulling the strings behind the scenes: and this is not because of
some empirical deficiency that can be remedied as our technological powers of detection
improve…rather, it is strictly ontological: society is constitutively lacking”.
The Impossibility of National Identity
This lack is the ultimate problematic behind the Cronulla riots. On the day of the riots,
the message “100% Aussie Pride” was traced into the sand at Cronulla Beach (BBC
2005: online). Such a message is futile: to recognise the constitutive lack in society or the
nation is to come to terms that there is no such thing as “100% Aussie” – not now, not in
69
the past, and not in the future. If ‘restoring’ the content of the nation to “100% Aussie”
was the goal of the Cronulla riots, it was bound to fail.
Let us revisit the argument made throughout this chapter, and examine how it ultimately
leads to this conclusion of the constitutive lack in society. The Cronulla riots can be seen
as the result of the dislocation of Australian national identity. Here, the antagonistic
Middle Eastern/Muslim Other was laden with social anxieties over the space of
approximately a decade. These social anxieties reflected local, national and global issues,
and this political identity became associated with terrorism, violence, criminality and
deviant sexuality. As the antagonistic identity became more overdetermined, its presence
as a constitutive outside became more evident, and it thus began to impinge on Australian
national identity. This overdetermination hit a point of ruptural unity in the Cronulla
riots.
With the state apparently failing in its role to hegemonise the dislocatory excess of the
nation, some citizens felt threatened and powerless. In a populist configuration, this
group took the role of hegemonisation into their own hands. This act of hegemony –
filling the gap of the empty universal with a particular – represented an attempt to suture
the lack, and unify Australian national identity as bounded, discernable and objective. By
violently communicating to the Middle Eastern/Muslim Other to “stay in your
(subordinate) place!” (Moses 2006: online), the Cronulla riots were an attempt to
reinscribe the limits – and thus the borders – of Australia. The rioters attempted to push
70
the antagonism back to its role as the “‘experience’ of the limit of all objectivity” (Laclau
& Mouffe 2001: 122).
With “no single underlying principle fixing – and hence constituting – the whole field of
differences” (Laclau & Mouffe 2001: 111) of the overdetermined ‘social’, any hegemonic
attempt to ultimately define the nation will fail. National identity can never truly fill the
constitutive lack of the nation. It will never be totalised and “100% Aussie”, but instead
will always remain contested and contingent, as there is no ultimate ‘cutting off’ of an
identity’s excess. Eliminating migrants, Muslims, Asians or whichever political identity
is construed as the central antagonism in society at a certain historical juncture will not
eliminate gangs, unemployment, crime or all social ills. The ultimate suture can never
arrive – there can be no utopia with ‘the social’ and ‘society’ becoming one and the same.
The nation, then, can never be anything more than a hegemonic configuration between
fixity and non-fixity, and national identity is always permeated by this lack.
National identity, then, is impossible.
71
Chapter VI: Conclusion
So what is the ultimate lesson of the Cronulla riots when it comes to national identity? Is
there one?
As the previous chapter demonstrates, the ultimate underlying reason for the Cronulla
riots is that national identity is impossible. The nation is fundamentally dislocated by
antagonism, and this can never be resolved. The central lesson we must take from the
riots is that managing this dislocation and impossibility is of utmost importance if we
wish to maintain social cohesion in an increasingly complex and pluralised society.
How was this managed in the wake of the Cronulla riots? The state’s immediate response
was to restore a temporary equivalential logic through entirely coercive and dominative
means. Thus we witnessed the emergency sitting of NSW Parliament that pushed through
laws granting police greater powers to lock down trouble areas, ban alcohol, search
people without a warrant, and confiscate cars and mobile phones. Bail was denied for
rioters, and the penalty for rioting and affray were increased to fifteen and ten years
respectively. There was a large police presence on beaches from Newcastle to
Wollongong the weekend following the riots. However, these rushed measures only
served the riots’ short-term resolution. They may have placated those who supported the
policing hypothesis, but few else.
The most visible and media-friendly attempt at hegemonising the gap between us/them in
a long-term and meaningful way has been the ‘On The Same Wave’ program, a
72
partnership between Sutherland Shire Council, Surf Life Saving Australia and the former
Department of Immigration and Multicultural Affairs 18 . This program aims to attract
young people from diverse backgrounds to lifesaving, especially targeting “Muslim,
Chinese, Lebanese Christian and African communities and schools in Sydney’s south and
south-west” (White 2006: 7). Such a program aims to concretely extend the meaning of
‘Australian’ by including a wider range of political identities under its equivalential logic.
Unfortunately, this is a rare example. In post-Cronulla Australia, long-term measures that
aim to manage the fundamental impossibility of national identity have been uncommon.
If we accept Laclau’s (2005b: 114) argument that “as far as we have politics…we are
going to have social division”, then short-term and token gestures are simply not
satisfactory. As such, the central task – theoretical and practical – for anyone interested in
a socially cohesive Australian community is not to find ways that this division can be
eliminated (for this is impossible), but to explore peaceful ways this division can be
bridged, or hegemonised.
To do so, the most important step is to abandon the notion that national identity can bring
the final hegemonic act to ‘mend’ a nation and deliver a utopia. Instead, we must come to
terms with that the fact that the politicosocial plane in our complex globalised world is
characterised by hegemony, “an ongoing and conflict-ridden process of mediation
through which antagonistic struggles articulate common social objectives and political
strategies” (Zerilli 2004: 96). How this hegemonic process takes place is of great
significance for the functioning of a healthy democracy, because as we can see in the
18
This department has now been renamed the Department of Immigration and Citizenship.
73
Cronulla riots, if the process is ignored or not handled responsibly, it can spill over into
anger and violence.
Why? Because as we have found, national identity is far from an innocent resource lying
dormant in the minds of individuals, or an inborn essence that that somehow links us with
one another. Instead, throughout this investigation we can see that national identity is a
contested hegemonic construction, through which the logics of equivalence and
difference can either bring a peaceful temporary universality between plural identities in
society, or can lead to a deleterious fissure in the politicosocial landscape. It is, as
Chapter II shows, ‘Janus-faced’ (Nairn 1997).
The Cronulla riots also point to the incredible importance of national identity as a source
of personal identity in people’s everyday lives. With this in mind, there is little sense in
simply dismissing those who rioted at Cronulla as ‘bogans’, ‘rednecks’ or ‘racists’. Such
labels do little but continue to isolate certain elements of the national community.
Instead, there is a real and concrete reason these people felt it necessary to take to the
streets of Cronulla and inflict violence on those of Middle Eastern appearance. To avoid a
repeat of the Cronulla riots, further research must be undertaken into the phenomenon of
national identity, its political implications, how it is manifested, and the deleterious
effects of what occurs when people feel it is threatened.
As Chapter II shows, national identity, and in particular its dislocatory nature, has
remained an under-researched and under-theorised phenomenon due to its tendency to
74
fade into the everyday routines of our lives. This investigation has aimed to address this
problem by making clear its importance in the sociopolitical landscape and its central role
as a source of collective identification. The development of a theoretical framework
based on the work of Ernesto Laclau has moved away from the essentialist tendencies of
previous theorisations of the concept. It has aimed to advance beyond the impasse of the
us/them binary by introducing a more complex understanding of the role of antagonism
in the operation of national identity. In doing so, it has considered the important ‘how’ of
national identity, rather than the temporary ‘what’.
This conceptual move has great significance for research in the field of national identity,
as well as postmarxist social and political theory. Firstly, it has identified that there is a
deficit in the theorisation of the Other in national identity research: the idea of a nation as
purely self-defined must be abandoned, and the role of the constitutive outside must be
acknowledged. In this sense, the operation of national identity should be understood as
radically constructed and explicitly political. Any realist or structuralist definition of the
nation should be treated with suspicion, and its attempt to hegemonically conceal the
nation’s contingency should be revealed.
Similarly, this investigation has unveiled the need for further theorisation of the role of
antagonism in postmarxist theory. In grounding this theory in a specific and concrete
politicosocial situation 19 such as the Cronulla riots, the thesis has uncovered the curious
circumstances in which a hegemonic majority feels marginalised by an imagined
antagonism, and subsequently emerges in a populist configuration. Whilst the discussion
19
This has been urged by Howson (2007) and Nash (2002).
75
in Chapter V argues that this threat was felt as a result of overdetermined antagonism,
dislocation in a globalised world and the perceived failure of the state, there is more work
to be done. Further investigation must be undertaken into the theoretical implications of
cultural anxiety when it comes to antagonism and dislocation, and how this operates in
the marginalisation of identities, whether ‘real’ or imagined.
As mentioned before, the ultimate project at hand revolves around trying to understand
and create more inclusive and effective ways of managing social cohesion in a world of
plural identities. This is what Stuart Hall (2000: 209) has called “the multicultural
question” – that is, how can universality and particularity exist together in a globalised
world without erupting into violence? To address this incredibly complex dilemma, there
is a need to extend the elements developed in this thesis – antagonism, dislocation, the
impossibility of society, and hegemony as unstable equilibrium – with theory that
unlocks these concepts’ potential for political efficacy. Social capital theory represents a
logical step in this direction.
Social capital theory revolves around similar concepts to those in this thesis that have
been highlighted as important for the operation of national identity: networks (what have
been defined as us/them), norms (what have been identified as hegemonic principles or
nodal points) and sanctions (the punitive measures undertaken when a member or
members of a network violate the norms, as in the Cronulla riots) (Halpern 2005). These
concepts are used to identify the elements that allow communities to operate.
76
The division between bonding, bridging and linking social capital (Putnam 2000;
Woolcock 2001) is used to examine how communities maintain their internal links, and
interact with external homogenous and heterogeneous groups. As can be seen, there is
significant conceptual overlap between these different types of social capital and our
understanding of hegemony as an unstable equilibrium between equivalence and
difference. Social capital theory also examines the role of closure in the maintenance of
trust and obligation in communities (Coleman 1988). This is essentially what national
identity, as a hegemonic logic that strives for equivalence, aims to do: close down
meaning by enabling equivalence through shared difference.
Social capital theory remains popularly understood in a functionalist and structuralist
manner, and consequently suffers from the same problems as the structuralist
understandings of national identity as discussed in Chapter II. As such, the “radical
constructivism” of Laclau’s (1994: 2) political theory would act to destabilise the
essentialist categories of social capital theory, and take into account their contingent
nature. In this sense, they act as complementary theoretical frameworks.
The Australian Government is aware of the possibilities behind social capital theory, with
the Australian Bureau of Statistics (2006) now measuring the concept and the
Productivity Commission (2003) examining its many policy implications. Governments
and international bodies around the world are slowly coming to the realisation that
investment in research, projects and policy that foster the development of different kinds
of social capital between communities can have a great effect in promoting harmonious
77
consensus in civil society, as well as significant benefits for the economy. Linking it with
the postmarxist theoretical framework developed in this thesis represent a truly praxical
way to “pay closer attention to who can participate in civil society, and to pockets of
exclusion in terms of resources, access to services, neglect and disadvantage…[looking
at] not only distributional (economic) disadvantage, but also relational issues such as
anger, apathy, isolation and social relationships of citizens with each other” (Babacan
2006: 72). The marriage of these two complementary theoretical frameworks has the
potential to produce a new political sociology that is able to explain and explore the
vagaries and vicissitudes of the everyday experience of national identity in a complex,
meaningful and sophisticated manner. Most importantly, it would also provide practical
suggestions for its management.
There are no definitive answers to be found in this thesis: it does not have the solution to
bring peace and civility to the operation of national identity. As we have seen throughout,
this is a complex phenomenon that resists easy definition. National identity exists
between the dialectics of universality and particularity, and fixity and non-fixity. It
cannot exist without antagonism as its constitutive outside, ultimately reminding us of
our dislocated nature and the impossibility of ever fully totalising the nation. As Sim
(2000: 171) intuitively points out, such a theorisation is “not show biz: but an
acknowledgement of a messy, complex, on-the-edge-of-chaos reality which resists ‘one
big idea’ fixes”. The reaction here should not be one of hopelessness though: this
impossibility needn’t bring disenchantment. As Butler, Laclau and Žižek (2000: 2) agree,
“incompleteness is essential to the project of hegemony itself”.
78
How national identity operates – whether as a temporary equivalence between a range of
particularistic identities, or as radical exclusion – is reliant on the efforts of the state and
civil society in engaging the political terrain of hegemony and the management of the
non-totalisation of national identity. This incompleteness, indeed, represents the very
possibility of democracy. We must take it seriously.
79
Appendix: A Timeline of the Cronulla Riots
Sunday 4 December 2005
•
At approximately 3 pm at Cronulla Beach, a fight occurs between two or three
(depending on source) un-uniformed off-duty North Cronulla volunteer lifesavers
and four youths of ‘Middle Eastern descent’. The youths apparently yell at them
in Arabic, to which the lifesavers reply “what are you looking at?” The youths tell
the lifesavers to get off the beach because they ‘owned’ it, and the lifesavers
accuse the youths of not being able to swim. The taunts turn violent. One of the
lifesavers is bashed unconscious.
Tuesday 6 December 2005
•
First media report about bashing.
Wednesday 7 December 2005
•
Emails and text messages begin spreading about upcoming Sunday rally to
‘reclaim the Shire’.
•
One teenager of Middle Eastern appearance is charged over the Sunday attack.
•
Brawl outside Cronulla Surf Life Saving Club between three ‘local youths’ and
six men of Middle Eastern appearance
•
NSW Premier Morris Iemma condemns rumours of vigilante action.
80
Thursday 8 December 2005
•
Circulating text messages published in full on front page of The Daily Telegraph,
and partially by The Sydney Morning Herald. Alan Jones reads one of these text
messages on air.
Friday 9 December 2005
•
NSW Premier Morris Iemma is accosted by locals at Cronulla Beach, and shouted
down as he attempts to speak to the media.
•
Koby Abberton, leader of the Bra Boys, warns Middle Eastern gangs to stay away
from Maroubra.
Saturday 10 December 2005
•
NSW Premier Morris Iemma announces plans to create 25-year jail terms for
attacking lifesavers.
•
Emails circulate warning of drive-by shootings by Middle Eastern gangs.
•
Text message circulates urging Middle Eastern gangs to gather at Maroubra on
Sunday.
Sunday 11 December 2005
•
5,000-strong crowd gathers at Cronulla for ‘reclaim the Shire’ rally.
•
At approximately 1 pm, a youth of Middle Eastern appearance is chased from a
park adjacent to Cronulla Beach into Northies Hotel, Cronulla. He is assaulted
before reaching the pub.
81
•
At approximately 2:30 pm, scuffles between Middle Eastern and Anglo-Celtic
males break out outside of Northies Hotel, Cronulla.
•
At approximately 3 pm, word spreads about a Lebanese gang travelling to
Cronulla on a train. The rumours are untrue. Mob attacks two men of Middle
Eastern appearance on a train carriage.
•
At approximately 4:30 pm, a brawl breaks out in the car park of North Cronulla
Surf Club. Six men are injured.
•
At approximately 4:35 pm, a crowd blocks the path of an ambulance and throws
bottles and other missiles at it, breaking its windows in Bourke St, North
Cronulla.
•
At approximately 4:45 pm, a man in Woolaware golf course carpark is stabbed in
the back when he tries to defend three women being abused by a group of men of
Middle Eastern appearance.
•
At approximately 9 pm, a crowd of 100-150 men of Middle Eastern appearance
gather at Maroubra Parade, Maroubra and begin smashing cars with crowbars and
baseball bats. One car is torched with a Molotov cocktail. Police are pelted with
bottles and bricks on arrival at the scene.
•
From 10 pm onwards, police set up roadblocks on the major roads leading into
Cronulla due to rumours of carloads of Middle Eastern men travelling towards
that location.
•
At approximately 10 pm, police are attacked by a group of twenty men of Middle
Eastern men on Duke Street at Brighton-le-Sands.
82
•
At approximately 10.15 pm, a group of youths of Middle Eastern appearance
climb onto the roof of Brighton-le-Sands RSL club, steal the Australian flag, and
set it alight.
Monday 12 December 2005
•
Prime Minister John Howard denies that Australia is a racist country, and blames
alcohol as the main cause for the riots.
•
Opposition Leader Kim Beazley plays down claims of racism and instead argues
that multiculturalism is alive and well.
•
NSW Premier Morris Iemma accepts that the riots represented the ugly face of
racism, but denies that Australia is a racist country.
•
NSW Opposition Leader Peter Debnam claims that racial tensions have been
simmering for years and that the riots occurred due to lack of policing.
•
Strike Force Seta is set up to identify rioters.
•
Text message circulates calling rioters to take the fight to the streets of Lakemba
and Bankstown.
•
The Bra Boys’ Koby Abberton meets with Lebanese community leader Keyser
Trad for peace talks.
•
Iemma announces full-time riot squad to be in operation by January 2006.
•
Waverley Council votes 6-5 against proposal to fly Australian flag above Bondi
Pavilion.
83
•
In the evening, up to 3,000 people gather at Lakemba Mosque, with rumours of
this group gathering to move on to Cronulla and Maroubra to wreak havoc as
revenge for the riots.
•
Dozens of cars are smashed outside Lakemba Mosque by at least 100 AngloCeltic males.
•
Between 200 and 400 men gather outside Lakemba Mosque to protect cars.
•
It is reported on police radio that at approximately 8.45 pm, a convoy of up to
3,000 people leaves Lakemba Mosque, allegedly driving to Cronulla or Maroubra
to fight approximately 300 locals. There are similar reports at Campsie and
Punchbowl. Reports later rectify the crowd heading towards these areas as ‘70
carloads’.
•
At approximately 10:30 pm, ambulance officers are attacked in the Kingsway,
Cronulla.
•
At approximately 11 pm, a man is bashed by approximately 30 men of Middle
Eastern appearance in Woolaware.
•
At approximately 11:15 pm, ambulance officers at the Grand Parade, Brighton-leSands are harassed by a group of 80 men of Middle Eastern appearance.
•
At approximately 11:15 pm, police begin sealing off key roads to Cronulla,
Maroubra and Brighton-le-Sands, most notably Tom Ugly’s Bridge and Captain
Cook Drive.
•
At approximately 11:20 pm, police under attack in Brighton-le-Sands take refuge
in the Novotel Hotel.
84
•
The Bra Boys apparently chase away Middle Eastern gangs and protect police in
Maroubra.
Tuesday 13 December 2005
•
Road blocks are set up on all major routes into the Sutherland Shire, with an extra
450 police searching vehicles for weapons.
•
Text message spreads calling for riots on Terrigal Beach on Sunday.
•
Cars are shot at in Auburn at a Christmas carols service.
Wednesday 14 December 2005
•
Iemma recalls NSW Parliament for Thursday to rush through laws to grant police
extra powers.
•
Lebanese Muslim Association meets with twenty other community groups,
uniting Sunni and Shi’ite groups in a crisis meeting to discuss strategies to avoid
further violence.
•
Australian Arabic Council and various school principals plead for parents to
impose curfews on their children.
•
First two offenders from the riots are jailed.
•
Man is fired from his job for displaying an ‘Aussies fight back’ poster at his
workplace.
•
Auburn Uniting Church is firebombed.
•
Night buses between Cronulla and Miranda are suspended due to safety concerns.
85
Thursday 15 December 2005
•
Emergency sitting of NSW Parliament pushes through laws that allow police to
‘lock down’ trouble spots, search people and cars, confiscate cars and mobile
phones for seven days, ban alcohol and close down licensed premises in specific
zones for 48 hours. The laws further dictate that bail is not available for rioters,
and penalties for rioting and affray are increased to fifteen and ten years
respectively.
•
Text messages calling for violence are detected interstate in Melbourne and parts
of Western Australia.
•
NSW Police Commissioner Ken Moroney announces an extra 1,000 officers on
the beat for Saturday and 2,000 for Sunday.
•
Two men are jailed for the weekend for stockpiling Molotov cocktails at their
home.
•
Police declare that the following beaches are unsafe for public use for the
weekend: Cronulla, Maroubra, Bondi, Terrigal, Wollongong and Nobby’s Beach
at Newcastle.
•
Wollongong and Eastgardens Rebel Sports report to NSW police unusually large
sales of baseball bats in their stores.
Friday 16 December 2005
•
Three men are arrested over the train attack on Sunday.
•
2GB announcer Brian Wiltshire is fired after calling Lebanese-Australians
“inbred” on air.
86
Saturday 17 December 2005
•
Very few people are on beaches from Newcastle to Wollongong after warnings.
•
Multicultural Affairs Minister John Cobb announces a $440,000 grant to train
ethnic lifesavers.
•
Annual Coogee Christmas Carols are cancelled due to concerns about racial
violence.
Sunday 18 December 2005
•
Expected violence fails to erupt; Cronulla, Maroubra and Terrigal beaches are all
relatively empty.
•
59 arrests are made, eleven cars and 22 mobile phones are confiscated, and
numerous weapons are seized.
•
Two anti-racism rallies occur in Sydney; the first, organised by the National
Union of Students, draws approximately 10,000 protestors; the second, organised
by the Ted Noffs Foundation, draws 1,000.
•
Brighton-le-Sands is locked down after a carload of men are caught carrying a 25litre drum of petrol, grenades and white supremacist literature.
•
Two men are arrested on a Bondi bus for each carrying a 600-millilitre bottle of
petrol. All Eastern Suburbs buses are searched as a result.
•
Sutherland Council announces plans to seek a compensation package for damage
done to business as a result of the riots.
87
Monday 19 December 2005
•
NSW Premier Iemma declares it safe to return to Sydney’s beaches.
•
800-strong squad of police announced to protect beaches in Sydney until end of
January.
Tuesday 20 December 2005
•
The NSW Council of Civil Liberties argues that the laws rushed through as a
response to the riots have gone too far, as police can declare a state of emergency
and give themselves extra powers, rather than an external source declaring the
emergency.
Wednesday 21 December
•
A text message spreads encouraging racial violence against Middle Eastern
people at the Summernats car festival in Canberra.
•
Two Molotov cocktails are thrown at the Lebanese Blemzen supermarket in
Auburn.
•
A Matraville man arrested for sending riot text message.
•
Two men sent to jail over riot-related charges – one of the train attackers, one of
the men caught in Bondi with petrol.
88
Thursday 22 December 2005
•
Head of NSW Anti-Discrimination Board, Stepas Kerkyasharian, reveals reports
of an enormous increase of discrimination against Middle Eastern people
following the riots.
•
First guilty plea is entered over riot-related crimes.
Friday 23 December 2005
•
Lebanese teenager who burnt Brighton-le-Sands RSL Australian flag is denied
bail after violating his good-behaviour bond.
Sunday 25 December 2005
•
Smaller crowds than usual at beaches in NSW for Christmas Day.
Saturday 31 December 2005
•
Twice the normal riot squad makes up a record police presence for New Year’s
Eve celebrations in Sydney. The NSW Deputy Police Commissioner says this is a
result of the Cronulla riots and resulting tensions.
Sunday 1 January 2006
•
A lifesaver punched in face by an Anglo-Celtic man after being asked to swim in
between the flags at Newcastle. There is no real outrage in the media following
the event.
89
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