A Test of Australian Identity: Waleed Aly – The New York Times

The best piece I have seen to date on the Australian political “crisis” over dual citizenship and the obsolescent and overly broad nature of the prohibition:

It will be a fascinating legal test, boiling down to whether the Constitution is meant to cover cases in which people say they had no idea they were citizens of another country. On that point, the wording isn’t encouraging. The Constitution expressly prohibits anyone from Parliament who “is a subject or a citizen or entitled to the rights or privileges of a subject or a citizen of a foreign power.”

But legal intricacies aside, it’s the talk of “subjects” that is most telling. As it stands, Section 44 of the Constitution is beginning to look like something of a relic, a monument to the 19th century that created it, and a pointer to just how profoundly Australia has changed.

Its animating idea is one of loyalty: that Australian parliamentarians must be shorn of any “allegiance, obedience or adherence to a foreign power.” But this was written at a time when Australian citizenship didn’t properly exist.

Australians were subjects of the British Empire, and the thought of simultaneously being subjects of another country would have been seen as a conflict. But the British Empire is no more, and since the end of World War II, this particular British outpost has become a thoroughly immigrant nation. That’s a rapid transition for a nation that had a “White Australia” policy until the early 1970s.

Today, nearly half of Australians were either born overseas or have at least one parent who was. In this context, dual citizenship is part of the grammar of Australian society. That’s why even the most avowedly nationalistic parties, like One Nation, have been caught up in this mess. It doesn’t matter how exclusively Australian you say you are, chances are you’ve come from somewhere else not very long ago.

That’s more than a mere demographic change. It’s a change in the notion of Australian identity.

We could say there are two ideal (and simplified) kinds of nationhood: one anchored firmly in ethnicity and culture and another built on a civil creed. Germany is frequently cited as an example of the former (it shed its citizenship laws requiring a blood connection to the country only in 2000). America, with its civil religion of individual liberty, is the classic example of the latter. Australia’s story is of a gradual, if incomplete, transition from the European to the American model.

It began as a self-consciously derivative nation, drawing its sense of self overwhelmingly from the Empire, and became a cosmopolitan New World society. Any attempt to maintain an exclusive ethnic sense of Australianness would inevitably fall apart under those conditions. There is nationalist resistance to this, but Australian identity has now become something that exists in combination with any number of other cultural identities.

This leaves Australia in a conundrum. To exclude dual citizens from Australian politics is to exclude contemporary Australia itself, and yet this is what Australia’s Constitution demands.

In the foreseeable future, this probably means a wave of political candidates renouncing their foreign citizenship. But at no stage are anyone’s loyalties likely to be altered.

Modern Australia has multiple, simultaneous identities, whether expressed in government documents or not. We will remain a nation of people with emotional attachments to foreign lands of which we’re not citizens, and of citizenships of lands to which we feel no attachment. In this instance, it’s not our dual citizens but our Constitution that’s un-Australian. Funny, that.