The ethnocentric syndrome

PERSONAL COLUMN BRIAN CROZIER

I first became aware of ethnic differences when I was five. This was forty-five years ago and we had just arrived in the south of France from Australia for what turned into a stay of seven years. My sister had very fair hair, and a young Frenchman expressed surprise, since Aus- tralians, he had been taught, were black. (It was somebody else, I think, who asked whether we had come by train.) The indelible mark of ethnos has shown through, from time to time, ever since. But a confusion of assumptions has relieved any in- cipient boredom. At my lye& in Montpellier, an unpleasant maths master called me a liar before the entire form (presumption of guilt being universal in French schools) when I told him that, as we were Australians and my mother know little French, I had written down for her her excuse for my failure to attempt some particularly rebarbative problem. Later, having ascertained that I had been telling him the truth, he started calling me 'le petit Anglais.'

'Mother,' I asked, 'are we English?"

'No, dear, we're Australians.'

'Are we British, then?'

'Yes, dear.'

'Then we must be English, too?'

'Well, it's all the same, really.'

At times, I have wished it was. (In England, in 1930, I was promptly dubbed 'the little Frenchman' because of a strong Gallic accent.) I wished it with special fervour in 1948, when I returned to Australia, complete with wife and young family, and was called, with that distinctive Aussie mixture of half-affectionate contempt, a 'pommie bastard.' My pre- emptive Lifeman ploy for that one was to intro- duce myself as 'the only pommie born in Aus- tralia."Well, at least nobody can take that away from you,' said a well-disposed cobber, referring to my birth and parentage.

Well, no, I suppose not. But in 1952, when I wanted to leave Saigon on a passport that was shortly to expire, and presented it to the British consulate for renewal, I was told I could no longer have a British passport since I was born in Australia and lost my British citizenship when the Canadians, Australians and other Commonwealthers created individual citizenships in 1949 et seq.

This sad intelligence was confirmed when I called at the Australian consulate. But nothing was going to be simple any more. It was all very well saying I was an Australian, but could I prove it? Did I, for instance, have a birth certificate? This was awkward, for if such a document existed, I had never held it in my bands. The fact that I was born far in the Queensland outback, at a small mining settlement called Kuridala, in the Cloncurry district—a mere incident on the journey, to be taken away aged three months, never to return—had always seemed, if not self-evident, then hardly open to question.

With feelings falling short of optimism, I wrote to the town clerk at Brisbane and asked him to prove me an Aussie. To my great sur- prise, he wrote back within a fortnight, en- closing an authenticated copy of my birth cer- tificate.

I pondered the matter deeply, since this new evidence widened my options. Did I really want an Australian passport? I was shortly to leave Saigon for Singapore, where I would spend at least a year. Thereafter, my impulse was to move back to London rather than to Sydney or Melbourne. In those days, an Australian passport was a distinct inconvenience to a UK resident, obliging him to seek a visa every time he went, say, to Paris or Rome.

Listening sympathetically as I explained my problem, a British consular official pointed out that if I really did want a British passport, the simplest way was to go to Singapore, let my existing passport expire there; and then, after six months' residence, take out citizenship of the in( and Colonies, thereby qualifying for a British passport. And that is how I remained —with a brief, stateless hiatus—British.

Then there was the case of the wife whose husband was Australian and father born in Trinidad (but of pure Asian Indian parentage) and mother British. Did she go on using a British passport, or apply for an Australian one? Or claim Indian citizenship? And where did the West Indies come in? And what about her father's birth certificate? This is a well- authenticated case: my wife's. She, too, regis- tered as a citizen of the UK and Colonies; but not before she had had to threaten diplomatic action to persuade the Australian authorities to return her British passport (which they wanted her to exchange for an Australian one) so that she could travel to Singapore.

And then there was the case of the girl whose early travel had been done on her mother's passport, but who found on the eve of her departure from England to Spain that she didn't qualify for a British passport, since she was born in Singapore. What was she now? A Malayan, a Malaysian or a Singaporean? In the end, her father, having proved his own citizenship, simply registered her, too, as 'UK and Colonies.' This, too, is an authentic case : my daughter's.

These minor lunacies are all part of the great ethnocentric syndrome, and perhaps not the most important part. We are what we are and we don't like other people to claim to be what we know we are. (Hence the exultant public response to Enoch Powell's Tiber and pyre speech.) But there is another aspect, which lies at the root of some of our imperial follies and, paradoxically, of our colonial disengagements: the notion that the way we do things is best, not only for us, but for lesser breeds as well. ('We,' according to the context, can mean 'we French' or 'we Anything' as well as 'we British.) The French were perhaps more guilty than we were of this wider ethnocentric syndrome. Con- ceiving of no higher civic good than the confer- ment of French citizenship (since to be French was to speak French, to recognise the superiority of French cuisine and thus, in a word, to be civilised) they found it almost im- possible_ to take seriously the possibility that some people might actually not want to be French. To have 'got there,' indeed, was to have transcended the Darwinian original sin of ethnic distinctness by meriting the label &Md. This concept of ethnic evolution, with its heavy undertone of condescension, led to major wars in Indochina and Algeria.

We—the British, that is—were not, in that supreme sense, ethnocentric. We were, however, rather proud of Westminster democracy and slightly smug about successfully transplanting it to unlikely places. For a while, 'life itself,' as Khrushchev used to say, seemed to support this conceit. The presence of a charismatic leader (as Nehru appeared to be), or a benevo- lently acceptable one (such as Tunku Abdul Rahman), the quite exceptional existence of a well-trained civil service, or the fact that the struggle for independence produced a large ruling party (which could rely, while unity lasted, on steamrolling its way to electoral victory)—all such abnormalia contributed to the illusion.

Well, it was nice while it lasted. Now look at Indira's India, at Ne Win's Burma, at the ex-Redeemer's Ghana, at tomorrow's Kenya. Look even, if you can bear it, at Nigeria.

You might, for that matter, try looking at Rhodesia, where sensible old Smithy's ethno- centric syndrome worked in reverse, since he could see, as others could not, the local aptness of the tribal chiefs' system and the wild irrelevance of one-man-one-vote. (Does that, I wonder, jeopardise my hard-won 'UK and Colonies' passport?) After all, even we, with centuries of democratic apprenticeship behind us, achieved one-man-one-vote only in 1928 (when the principle that one-man could mean one-woman was conceded); if that can be called an achievement.

To be sure, our ethnocentricism has been less disastrous than was Stalin's in his heyday. The monstrous assumption that the Soviet Union's economic autarky and 'democratic' centralism would be equally suited to Russia's minor western neighbours has blighted the face of eastern Europe ever since, as the events of Prague remind us daily.

For my part, such ethnic particularism as I have is translated in envy: envy for 'the steel thigh muscles of Cossack dancers; for the natural dignity of the Zulu, the grace of the Indian, the toughness and resilience of the Chinese, the track prowess of the American Negro, the dexterity of the Andalusian guitar player, and many more examples one could think of.

Envy being sterile, I console myself with the thought that diversity is self-evidently more interesting than uniformity. I possibly know more about international politics than an Arunta of comparable age, but am clearly un• qualified to procure witchety grubs. This deficiency is of little moment in WI, but might hasten my demise in Centralia. Until mis- cegenation solves all our racial problems, as it partly has in Brazil, this is a sobering and sustaining thought.