Diversity is not our strength. Social cohesion must be nurtured, not ignored.

Kerry Wakefield I 24 August 2024 I Spectator Australia

It was encouraging to see Albo’s government recently appoint a Special Envoy for Social Cohesion, Wills MP Peter Khalil, in a nod to community harmony, which has been taken for granted in Australia for far too long. Equally, it was discouraging to see the same regime recklessly importing relatively unvetted Gazan migrants from a war zone, given that the Palestinian-Israeli conflict has become the violent edge of ethnic division here. Stoking a problem at the same time as staunching it, then? Despite the protestations of our multicultural lobby, it is self-evident, after the 7 October massacre in Israel, that not all communities can coexist peacefully – or even want to.

Yes, Australian generosity and tolerance has created a successful multi-ethnic society, but growing divisions are emerging, as separate group identities, funded and promoted by multicultural ideologies and agencies, strain the ties that bind. Divisive Welcomes to Country, locking up ‘country’ such as Mount Warning away from other Australians, unruly pro-Palestinian protesters, two-tier policing, and massive migration numbers are straining this nation’s social fabric like never before.

At issue is our 50-year-long policy of multiculturalism: are we creating too many rival groups and enclaves, at the expense of a shared Australian national identity? One of the first great social philosophers, the 14th-century Arab Ibn Khaldun introduced a concept called ‘asabiyah’, the unifying feeling that binds a group and makes collective action possible. It can be religious, or racial, cultural or military. It’s the glue that makes a society work. The asabiyah of the terrorist group Hamas is the destruction of Israel and the Jews, for example.

A 2023 book, Out of the Melting Pot, Into the Fire, by US economist and researcher Jens Heycke, contrasts ethnic separatism (‘Multiculturalism’) throughout world history with a more integrationist (‘Melting Pot’) approach. Across the globe and through history, societies that preferenced separate identities fared far worse, sometimes catastrophically so, than more integrated ones. It is a woeful tale that makes you wonder how modern multiculturalism ever took hold.

The Roman and Ottoman Empires, Islam, Rwanda, Sri Lanka, the Balkans and more come under Heycke’s gaze. Expanding, successful Rome was assimilationist, explicitly including conquered peoples as citizens; the Greek Aristides wrote: ‘In your empire all paths are open to all.’ But separatism rose after the mass immigration of Goths and Huns in the 4th and 5th centuries; they failed to integrate or gain citizenship and in 476AD Rome fell.

Similar stories play out elsewhere. In Rwanda the Tutsi-Hutu enmity turns out not to be an age-old rivalry but a product of Belgium’s divide and conquer approach, in which the colonialists gave out ID cards distinguishing Tutsis from Hutus, and gave Tutsis job and educational preferences, thus setting the stage for an explosion of racial violence that killed up to one million people in 1994. A modern success story, Rwanda now has a strongly colour-blind policy, in which all must be Rwandans, no longer Tutsis or Hutus.

Similarly Sri Lanka, where the Tamils and Sinhalese had long coexisted relatively peacefully. After independence in 1948 a ‘Sinhala only’ language campaign arose, the linking English language was abandoned, and separate education systems for Sinhala and Tamil ultimately divided the two populations. The percentage of Tamils employed in the armed forces fell from 40 per cent in 1956 to one per cent in 1970. Finally in 2009 a bloodbath left some 40,000 Tamils dead.

Botswana’s story is extraordinary. Founder and first president, the black prince Seretse Khama, had to overcome British government skulduggery and racism in order to marry London clerk, Ruth Williams. As a result, Khama’s movement was welded to colourblindness, resolutely opposing racial, ethnic and tribal distinctions. Questions about race, tribe or ethnicity are banned from the official census, for example.

Heycke notes that the Botswana, Mauritius and Rwanda constitutions all mandate colour-blindness, and are among Africa’s freest, and most prosperous nations.

The economist then ‘costs’ ethnic division: ‘the data… suggest that ethnic diversity is strongly correlated with extensive violence, rampant corruption, poor economic growth and abysmal living standards’. The happiest countries, such as the Nordic nations, also turn out to be the most homogeneous.

A key insight concerns public goods such as health, sanitation, law enforcement, education and infrastructure. Highly divided nations do very poorly at providing such public services, with ethnic communities tending to focus on their own people, at the expense of the country at large. This impoverishes everyone. In this he builds on the work of sociologist Robert Putnam, as quoted in the New York Times. His 30,000-strong study across the US found ‘the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote, and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects’.

Heycke concludes: social unity is fragile; ethnic division elicits evil from ordinary people; group preferences favour powerful elites over the needy (as we see with the Aboriginal industry, where the monies never seem to reach those living in the dirt); ethnic preferences never solve the problems they were created for, and in practice are usually there forever.

The problem turns out not to be people’s diverse origins but tying benefits or disadvantages to  group identities. This is the toxin that poisons societies. Heycke writes, ‘When a society maintains group distinctions, and particularly when it bolsters them with group preferences, people hunker down, adopting an “us versus them” outlook.’ Australia indeed dodged a bullet with the Voice referendum, which, had it succeeded, would likely have expanded society-inflaming race-based benefits. Such toxins can include, for example, the barring of non-indigenous from some parts of ‘country’, or, in the UK, ‘Two-Tier’ Keir’s punitive policing of native Brits, while allowing gangs of recent migrants, masked and brandishing weapons, to rampage without hindrance.

I grew up in a 1950s and 1960s white bread Australia with a level of safety, harmony and peacefulness unimaginable to young Australians now. My community had the second-densest migrant concentration in post-war Australia; I had Ukrainians over the road, Russians and Maltese on either side of our house; and local Aborigines at our school. The migrants were called New Australians then, an innate acknowledgement that we were all involved in building a new Australia. It was our asabiyah.

What is the point, then, of all this diversity, that is straining infrastructure and unity for everyone already here? It is past time to focus on our commonalities and unity, not ethnic and cultural differences.

Author: Kerry Wakefield