Collapse_ How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed - Jared Diamond [245]
Until 50 years ago, emigration to Australia was overwhelmingly from Britain and Ireland. Many Australians today still feel strongly connected to their British heritage and would indignantly reject any suggestion that they treasure it inordinately. Yet that heritage has led Australians to do things that they consider admirable but that would strike a dispassionate outsider as inappropriate and not necessarily in Australia’s best interest. In both World War I and World War II Australia declared war upon Germany as soon as Britain and Germany declared war on each other, though Australia’s own interests were never affected in World War I (except for giving Australians an excuse to conquer Germany’s New Guinea colony) and did not become affected in World War II until the outbreak of war with Japan, more than two years after the outbreak of war between Britain and Germany. The major national holiday of Australia (and also of New Zealand) is Anzac Day, April 25, commemorating a disastrous slaughter of Australian and New Zealand troops on Turkey’s remote Gallipoli Peninsula on that date in 1915, as a result of incompetent British leadership of those troops who were joining British forces in an unsuccessful attempt to attack Turkey. The bloodbath at Gallipoli became for Australians a symbol of their country’s “coming of age,” supporting its British motherland, and assuming its place among nations as a united federation rather than as half-a-dozen colonies with separate governor-generals. For Americans of my generation, the closest parallel to Gallipoli’s meaning to Australians is the meaning to us of the disastrous Japanese attack of December 7, 1941, on our Pearl Harbor base, which overnight unified Americans and pulled us out of our foreign policy based on isolation. Yet people other than Australians cannot escape the irony of Australia’s national holiday being associated with the Gallipoli Peninsula, situated one-third of the way around the world and on the opposite side of the equator: no other geographic location could be more irrelevant to Australia’s interests.
Those emotional ties to Britain continue today. When I first visited Australia in 1964, having lived previously in Britain for four years, I found Australia more British than modern Britain itself in its architecture and attitudes. Until 1973, the Australian government still submitted to Britain each year a list of Australians to be knighted, and those honors were considered the highest possible ones for an Australian. Britain still appoints an Australian-nominated governor general for Australia, with the power to fire the Australian prime minister, and the governor general actually did so in 1975. Until the early 1970s, Australia maintained a “White Australia policy” and virtually banned immigration from its Asian neighbors, a policy that understandably angered them. Only within the last 25 years has Australia belatedly become engaged with its Asian neighbors, come to recognize its place as being in Asia, accepted Asian immigrants, and cultivated Asian trade partners. Britain has now fallen to a ranking in eighth place among Australia’s export markets, behind Japan, China, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan.
That discussion of Australia’s self-image as a British country or as an Asian country raises an issue that has recurred throughout this book: the importance of friends and enemies to a society’s stability. What countries has Australia perceived as its friends, its trade partners, and its enemies, and what has been the influence of those perceptions?