Will national identity become obsolete?

From the Department of Home Affairs Secretary Stephanie Foster's decision to remove Australian flags from officials' photos in "cultural reforms" to the controversies around Australia Day, from the decreased sense of belonging among Australians, as the Scanlon Report 2024 reveals, to the critical questions around the importance of the Welcome to Country ceremonies, it can be seen that the concept of Australia as a nation is challenged significantly on many fronts.

Australia is a nation haunted by its colonial past, still as divisive and decisive as before. Like many other Western countries, it is divided over many issues, including Aboriginal rights, immigration, economic hardship, climate change, and racial reconciliation.

However, it is also united by many common causes. Some examples are the solidarity shown in collective responses to national disasters such as bushfires and floods, the Matildas victory, campaigns for climate change, and struggles under the cost of living. This solidarity also exists, to a certain extent, in the face of increasing threats to its very existence from China at its gate.

Australia is a prosperous, resilient, and amazing nation built on Indigenous Australians' lands with a short history of less than three centuries. Increasingly, the negative connotations presented in this history have changed people's sense of patriotism and pride into guilt and shame, thanks to its colonial past. As such, Australia is a nation amid a tug-of-war between its past and future, being relieved temporarily at its present.

Deep down, Australia is a soul-searching nation defined by its geographical location and historical consciousness. It is like a stray soul trapped within the wrong body - being the new home of European settlers or "invaders" of Aboriginal lands, where different cultures, histories, and volkgeists meet and interact - a true multi-entity.

As poetically trendy and rhetorical as it sounds, everybody praises diversity, inclusiveness, and multiculturalism in Australia now, but few discuss what binds these diversities together.

Any society, including Australia, requires a unifying force for cohesion. Whether this force is "asabiyya", representing social solidarity with an emphasis on unity, group consciousness, and a sense of shared purpose and social cohesion for Ibn Khaldun, or organic solidarity, stemming from interdependence through diverse roles and divisions of labour for Durkheim, fostering positive social relationships is crucial. This relationship promotes connection, community, and a shared sense of belonging, helping alleviate societal tensions and conflicts.

What foundational commonality holds Australian society together? We may consider our common citizenship under universal constitutional rights and obligations. However, common citizenship is as much a formal and legal framework as we may define ourselves outwardly. It is necessary but insufficient to keep our society glued together. Neither is having a common anthem or flag. For an increasing many, perhaps as for Ms Foster, a national anthem and a flag are markers of division, oppression, and a colonial past.

Let us take the migration issue as an example. Australia is a huge success story in terms of migration. All of us are migrants or descendants of migrants, in one way or another, except for Indigenous Australians. So many of us acknowledge we are on somebody else's ancestral land as guests, which is echoed in each Welcome to the Country ceremony.

Can this humble, truthful and grateful acknowledgment be the missing piece that could unify our national identity?

This acknowledgment itself, at the same time, highlights Australia as a colonial land, still dividing white settlers, along with all other non-white migrants, and Indigenous Australians. The fundamental potential for division is the constant focus of the colonial past inevitably turning one group against the other, that is, making the whites ashamed of their past, treating them as descendants of "unforgivable colonialists" while leaving migrants alone as newcomers, as innocent as possible.

Furthermore, it is a repetitious reminder of white people not belonging to a land they were born into, having no other land to call home. In the end, this division, whether we like it or not, has created a hidden and often-suppressed sense of a guilt triangle- Aboriginals as victims, Whites as perpetrators, and non-whites as rescuers.

For this triangle to perpetuate, the colonial past, for some, is neither forgotten nor let alone-it is constantly re-enacted, not only delaying racial reconciliation but keeping existing racial tensions very much alive. Worst of all, it will never liberate Indigenous Australians to adopt a positive, optimistic and resilient role, taking responsibility for their destiny genuinely, instead of being trapped in a historical role of victimhood. As such, it does not allow white people to find common ground with Indigenous Australians and with new migrants, genuinely and constructively, to move forward with a common goal.

There is no healthy sense of belonging in this endless tension, all remaining collectively trapped in the past trauma and behaviour of their ancestors, and nobody feels at home in the end, either.

In such a case, some of us may either feel ashamed of our national identity or become more defiant, filled with discontentment, leading to a duty of disobedience and a sense of revenge. Furthermore, we may abandon your national identity by embracing the freedom of being nobody or somebody as a global person, or we may become a hardened patriot to reclaim our identity as perceived to be taken away from you. While the former erodes our connection with our nation, the latter re-connects us to it more radically, often ending up in what is too broadly described as a far-right-wing faction. Either way, it profoundly impacts the sense of belonging as a key foundation of social cohesion, either positively or negatively, individually or collectively.

There is a third way out of this dilemma-globalisation and its charms. We are living in a gradually globalised world. One of the key aspects of this world is its connection through online virtuality within which we live as ghosts or phantoms, not in a physical form but rather a mental form, in a digital world. This sense of virtuality creates a false sense of belonging beyond recognition in the long run-it promises us a new identity that is liberating and extended, like a sweet dream.

Then, for us, a nation is not the soil we stand on, the air we breathe in and out, or even the passport we hold. It is a free, imaginative moment on-screen, in photos, memes, or videos. We may roam from one country to another within a second in this virtual world. In extreme cases, as some advocate for, a digital ID will fixate us on a permanent identity to make us traceable and controllable, a potential for control that is a stark reality of our digital age. Or, as Elon Musk promises, we will become part of AI or a matrix with chips inserted in our brains to gain a new identity, half human and half machine.

At no time has our national identity, however socially constructed it has been, been as diluted as it is now, gradually losing all its traditional seriousness, meaning, and implications.

In this brave new world, the question remains: What makes us united as Australians - our Constitution, citizenship, an American or Brazilian-style melting point caused by an ever-increasing level of immigration, a shared sense of belonging, a lifestyle shaped by our geographical location, history, and reality, a digital ID, or a global network of cyborgs?

The choice is ours.