The 51st State
Dennis Altman. Scribe, 2006. ISBN: 1920769986. RRP $22
In my field of medicine it always seemed that Australian doctors arranging overseas postings for further experience, or hospitals establishing linkages, tended to look either to the UK or the US in roughly equal numbers, depending on reputation, past connection, personal inclination and history. The cynic might also say that sentiment and history favoured the UK, and resources the US. Anyway, they seemed to take the best from both countries, not to feel beholden to either, and the relative influences tended to balance each other in Australia.
51st State is a long essay, in the style of the highly successful Quarterly Essay series, on the relationship between Australia and the USA. Dennis Altman is a political scientist from La Trobe University, the home of a number of this country’s most influential public intellectuals. He has extensive experience in the US, where he has held a number of senior academic appointments.
The thesis set up for analysis by Altman is that Australians, particularly on the left, tend to blame the US for many of the contemporary economic, social and political trends that they dislike in their own country. The all-pervasive presence of American fast food chains, music and films, the war in Iraq, the coalition of the willing—all these are mobilised at dinner party tables as evidence of a remorseless destruction of Australian identity, and a creeping destruction of political and business life, as well as many local norms and icons.
This book aims to undermine that cliché, without underestimating the influence. It is most of all a clarion call to Australians to move away from an over-emphasis on American (or British) influence and adopt a more diverse ‘global’ view, with more engagement in foreign aid and other middle-sized countries all over the world. Altman pushes for a retreat from nationalist worldviews, and a move towards a more genuinely internationalist role in world affairs.
The text that it is apparently intended to rebut is ‘Rabbit Syndrome’, by Don Watson, which was published in Quarterly Essay in 2001. In this piece Watson points to the limitations of both American and Australian imaginations, but is pessimistic about Australia; he argues the latter has submitted to being ‘engulfed by this great and powerful friend because the mental process is already so advanced’.
Whilst Altman also does not trumpet the US cause, neither does he share Watson’s rather gloomy view of Australian