Australia is not immune to the global trend to nationalism. Politicians here as elsewhere pepper their talk with terms such as “sovereignty”, “national values” and “our way of life”. These are all relative, only defined by reference to other peoples and other nations that are “not like us”. The uniqueness of Australian nationalism is that it is universally assumed to include the values, way of life and strategic outlook of the United States of America. They are not us but like us. This is what I call fuzzy nationalism.

Nationalism is an ill-defined concept. Realists such as Stephen Walt and John Mearsheimer regard it as the driving force in international relations. Others note that over the last decade nationalism has been characterised by a focus on national autonomy, unity and identity. Cases in point include the election of former US president Donald Trump and the British “Brexit” referendum. Nationalist leaders have dismantled international rules and laws such as GATT and what Trump called “globalism”. Australia, a trading nation for the last two hundred years, would be doomed to extinction if we subscribed to such inward-looking policies, but that has not stopped the spread of nationalist ideology. Surely this is cognitive dissonance!

Australian politicians’ rhetoric is sprinkled with nationalist terms, generally couched in vague terms such as “values”.........

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