Discordant communities : Australia, Britain and the EEC, 1956-1963

Abstract

This work is concerned with the demise of ‘British race patriotism’ in Australian political culture in the late 19505 and early 1960s. The organic ideal of British racial community was a founding ideological pillar of Australian nationality for much of this century, yet the declining relevance of these ideas, and the emergence of a more limited, exclusive conception of Australian ‘community’ has not been adequately addressed in the existing historical literature. In many respects, the waning appeal of ‘Britishness’ in Australia was a gradual and piecemeal process, but at the level of Australian political culture the shifts in outlook and assumptions occurred surprisingly rapidly, and converged largely around a single key event; namely, the first British application for membership of the European Economic Community in the years 1961 to 1963. The Macmillan Govemment’s painful choice between the discordant communities of ‘Europe’ and the ‘the British race’ provoked a crisis of British race patriotism in Australia, and prompted long overdue reflection, discussion and debate about the changing determinants of Australian nationhood in the post-war world. This occurred, not under the impetus of an instinctive dawning of an innate and assertive Australian nationalism as is often suggested, but in reaction to the demise of British race patriotism as a viable and credible framework for the ordering of Australian loyalties, priorities and policies. In the case of Britain's EEC membership application, it is significant that the revision of sentimental assumptions took place after it had become painfully self-evident that the United Kingdom was determined to pursue national interests and a national destiny that could no longer be reconciled with the traditional conception of organic Anglo-Australian community. The tensions and contradictions between ‘sentiment’ and 'self—interest‘, long inherent in Australia's political and economic ties to Great Britain, imploded under the impetus of the Macmillan Government's EEC aspirations. Before any limited. sovereign, national community could become fully imaginable in Australian political culture, it was a necessary precondition that the wider sense of British racial community should become ‘unimaginable’.