A global community emerges

Since European settlement, Australians have wondered how they fitted in to the world. They have seen themselves as a remote penal settlement, an outpost of the British Empire but, a new world, a partner in a Western, global, anti-Communist alliance, and a partner of Asian economies. The key words in Australia’s history have been 'remote', 'extension', 'outpost' and 'isolated'. In the new century Australia will be none of these things. Australia’s story will be a story of the new Millennium: the triumph of technology and culture over geography. For the first time, Australia has a natural place: as a global nation of the twenty-first century.

What sort of world will the new Millennium offer Australia? When we think in terms of millennia, we paint on a very wide canvass indeed. There are any number of things we can reflect on, from the rise and decline of religion and empires to the impact of technology. The only practicable thing we can do is to identify the major changes in the twentieth century and consider if they are rising trends which will figure in the twenty-first century. One thing, which appears to be clear, is the slow, steady emergence of a sense of being part of a global community.

The twentieth century was the world’s first truly global century. We had our first "world" wars, the first superpowers emerged, we saw the development of the ‘global economy’, we perceived protection of the environment as a 'global' problem and we started experiencing pandemics rather than epidemics. We started exploring space and for the first time in human history saw the earth from space. This has truly fascinated us. Hollywood, the wondrous sensor of popular values, has produced movie after movie about contact with aliens and deep space adventures. Hollywood invented Earth Governments and even intergalactic federations. All this reinforced the idea of a global community.

High-speed travel and prosperity gave people global experiences. Never before in human history have so many people shared knowledge about the world. Knowledge has become a common property, not a mark of distinction or position. Information technology will accelerate this trend, making knowledge even more widely and much more cheaply available. Until the twentieth century, governments universally were creations of people, and mere handfuls at that. Before the rise of democracy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, small groups in society who wielded power set up governments. They controlled people – how they lived, where they lived, what taxes they paid, where and if they could travel, who they could talk to and what they could say, often even what they should think.

Democracy has handed this power to the people. Although nearly half of the people of the world were still not living in democracies at the end of the twentieth century, the trend towards greater democracy clearly looks like an historical trend. People in all cultures seem to like the idea that they should have the right to determine who rules them.

Can we say also that personal freedom is something valued universally? Probably, but we will have to wait to see if those societies which have traditionally put the rights of the community ahead of the rights of the individual, particularly in Asia, will continue to do so. One thing we can be sure of is that IT is creating opportunities to experience a freedom to communicate which has not been available before. This is bad news for those in power who believe they can control what their citizens think and say.

We will see the evolution of the truly global citizen. They will not be citizens of a world government but of a global society. The idea of nation states passing power to super governments will be too radical for the twenty-first century. The European Union is edging towards this, but there are no other comparable movements. Perhaps that is something for the twenty-second century. Nevertheless, individuals all over the globe will feel affinity with others in ways which are new. In this sense they will think like global citizens and in many instances act in ways which will be outside the control of governments, for example not paying tax and reading things Governments have outlawed. This will be bad news for those in the business of government.

Globalisation in the twentieth century gave people a sense they were operating in a global rather than national economy. As noted earlier, one of the surprises of the twentieth century was the preparedness of governments to merge their economies with others. This trend was unexpected.

When the world’s leaders came together at the end of both of the twentieth century "World Wars", they attempted to set up international institutions of government to manage global affairs. The first was the League of Nations, then the United Nations. Very little power was handed to the new bodies. The most important was the power given to the UN Security Council to sanction action against governments which threatened the security of others. It sanctioned the "Desert Storm" invasion of Iraq to force it to withdraw from the Kuwait which it had conquered. The long-term hope for the UN system was that it would evolve ultimately to some form of world government to which governments would progressively surrender political power.

Governments did give up power, but it was economic, rather than political, and they did not give it to the UN. A new world order is emerging, but it is an economic community, not a political community. On reflection, one can understand why things went this way. When economic authority is shared, it is easier for governments to demonstrate the benefits. Ask an Australian or a New Zealander if they want to become citizens a new country merged from the two, "Tasman" for example, and they will say no. When trade barriers were removed between the two countries to build a joint market over both countries, giving people in each unrestrained right to do business in the other, this was supported. The same thing is occurring in every region of the world.

We can see in the twenty-first century the consolidation of the global economy and the evolution of a global society. Those who can move most effortlessly in this world will secure remarkable benefits. There will also be dramatic changes. The Information Age will accelerate the impact on life of technology.

We have already had a taste. The idea of ‘jobs’ and the working day and the working week are likely to disappear. People will be able to work globally. The Internet is already creating these opportunities. There is a lot more of this to come. This will lead to dramatic changes in how we organise our lives. Certain countries will thrive in this global community. It will be the nations whose citizens and enterprises will work and move effortlessly from one country to another and back to their own. They will be the global nations. Australia will be one of them.

A global nation

The people who benefit most from markets are those who can buy and sell in them. This applies to any market – a fish market or a Sunday market. Globalisation has made the world economy the biggest market we have ever seen. It will get bigger in the twenty-first century. Those who can trade in it will do better than those who do cannot. Australia is now ready to deal in it with a capacity which is entirely new.

In the second half of the twentieth century, the biggest stalls and biggest sales in this market were for manufactured products. For most of the twentieth century Australia had nothing much to offer at these stalls. By century’s end, Australian manufacturing was globally competitive. Australia was exporting in all sectors of its economy – agriculture, minerals, services and manufacturing.

Few countries in the world have the capacity to export from all sectors of their economies. Usually this is a feature of large economies, like the United States. The ability to trade in all sectors and therefore to all regions of the world creates a valuable durability in the global economy. It gives natural protection against being buffeted by recession in one part of the world. One of the reasons the Asian recession in the late nineties did not affect Australia more than it did was because of this remarkable spread of exports. This spread will widen, not narrow.

We have always been competitive exporters of agriculture and minerals. Business in those areas will stay brisk. Services will also be a high growth area. Australia can achieve striking growth in tourism. But manufacturing will remain the biggest area of world trade and the potential for growth in exports by Australian manufacturers is enormous. They are just at the beginning of this process.

Australia is ready to deal in this market for a more fundamental reason than that it has removed protection of manufacturing. The tearing away of protection also required a change in outlook. We had to shake off the boom mentality, the idea that wealth naturally came our way because of a blessed inheritance. Australians at last understand that prosperity is won with effort and excellence. We have started to value excellence.

There is no surer indication of this than the trauma which Year 12 now creates for Australians. When a family has student in Year 12, houses are reconfigured, holiday plans are altered, and attention focuses on supporting the effort to secure a good mark. The mark determines what university course can be done and what careers can be followed. When excellent results are achieved, the success is applauded and they are held up as exemplars. They are no longer seen as tall poppies, to be derided with snide envy. In this Australia, success in global markets will be the result of excellence and hard work, not easy fortune. Australia’s principal asset will be its people, not its resources. This is a new Australia.

The new Australia is geared for the information economy. Information technology will alter the competitive and comparative advantage of every economy. It is such a pervasive phenomenon that it is almost impossible to anticipate the full impact of these changes. The only measure of who will benefit most from this will be which societies are embracing it most willingly. As we have noted, Australia is among the leaders in this pack.

The measure of national success in IT is not whether Governments invest in large infrastructure projects to encourage use of IT or whether we export more IT products than we import, it is whether people in the society quickly adopt the new ways of doing things which IT creates. Is the country IT-literate? Have people taught themselves how to use personal computers and taught themselves to type. Do people have animated discussions about the latest inconvenience visited on them by Microsoft software, in the way they discuss the weather or the football? There are only a handful of countries in the world where the answer to these questions is yes. Australia is one of them.

Being competitive and IT literate are essential factors for success in the twenty-first century. But more is needed. The successful countries will have to have the right culture. Societies have to be able cope with the stresses which the high rate of change will induce.

The world is progressively westernising. Two basic tenets of western culture – democracy and free markets – are steadily spreading. We have seen that Asia is embarked on a long steady process of adoption of these western ideas. We do not have to conclude that they will end up "westernized". We do not know this. But we can say that the Asian societies which do not adopt these values and institutions will not succeed in the next century as well as those that do. On this basis, the Philippines has brighter future than Vietnam.

The importance of democratic political systems is that they have natural safety valves to adjust for change. We saw what happened in Russia and Eastern Europe where they had communist political systems that could not respond to change. They finally imploded. Democracies force leaders to be alert to how change is impacting on society. Democracies force governments to be better.

The successful nations will also need a culture which embraces and fosters openness.
Citizens need the freedom to move in and out of their country, money and products need to move easily, foreigners need to be able to move in and out freely and rules on residence need to be permissive.

This will be deeply threatening for some societies. Societies with no tradition of immigration will be challenged. Japan has a large resident population of Koreans to whom it will not extend full citizenship rights. Germany grew on the labor of Turkish and Yugoslav guest workers, and delayed for decades the granting of full citizenship. Why? Because like many nations, the culture was averse to introduction of different values. The vibrancy of the United States is generally attributed to permanent influx of emigres. It is the most open society in the world.

The final ingredient for success in the next century will be adaptability to new circumstances. The émigré societies of the twentieth century have been among the most vigorous. The reason is that they have an aptitude for change that equipped them to deal with the high rate of change which the century delivered. They had to be tolerant and open in order to manage as émigré societies. Their new citizens had to adaptable and responsive to change to handle the migrant experience. The established emgires had to be adaptable and responsive to manage the influx of the new. Australians take this for granted. It is not a universal characteristic in other societies. It is no wonder that the Information Age is having a faster impact in the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, than other countries.

Australia is at the point of realising its destiny. National barriers and geography no longer create natural impediments to how Australians locate themselves in the world. Geography made Australia the forgotten continent. The melting of the icecaps sealed Australia’s human settlement off from other centres of civilisation. With isolation and limited contact, there was no cross fertilisation between people in Australia and major civilizations for thousands of years. No other civilisation had the technology or the inclination to establish settlement in the southern or southeastern part of the continent until the late eighteenth century.

When it did, it brought a culture out of Europe in a period of ferment. The great Australian historian, W K Hancock observed that Australia was settled with people who brought the outlook and technology of the industrial revolution from Britain and the ideals and political values of the French Revolution. These were the latest flowerings of Western culture. They were transplanted to a new society where they could flourish free of the social constraints which still impeded social change and political development in Europe. They had an alternative model to mimic. That was the success of the transfer of western culture to the new environment in North America.

This was not an entirely happy experience. In all these societies, European intolerance of other races lead to shameful treatment of indigenous peoples, and of slaves and their descendents in the case of the United States. Tolerance of other races was a value that had to develop in these new societies. As well in Australia’s case, its capacity to act as a global nation in the twenty-first century would have been completely eroded if it had not come to terms with its phobia about Asia.

In all those societies, everything had to be built from scratch. They had to develop values which enabled them to succeed in this environment. They had to be adaptable and innovative. The capacities to succeed in these new environments have created the aptitudes which equip nations to succeed in the new Millennium. Globalisation and the Information Age have ended the geographic isolation which has shaped the perceptions Australians had about where they fitted in the world. Its citizens will be able to operate effortlessly in the global society and the global economy of the twenty-first century.

Australia’s history and culture have equipped it to succeed in the new global society. It will be one of the global nations of the new Millennium. The Vision on the Seal of the colony of Botany Bay that the penal settlement would foster a society reflecting the finer values of western civilisation is close to realization. So set up, Australia should enter in the new Millennium and enjoy its third golden age. Of course Australians are human. People do make mistakes. Australia could easily waste this opportunity.