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.