Post-Modern Nation

Wednesday, 18 November 2002

This is something which shouldn't go unremarked, especially for those who are concerned about the intellectual health of the nation. Listening to AM this morning, I learnt that the traditional notion of a nation state - you know, a more or less fixed area of geographic territory inhabited by a bunch of more or less similar people who get to vote for a democratic government every so often (even if it's at the point of a gun and there's only one political party to vote for most of the time) - has undergone a little post-modernist deconstruction. Over the weekend, alarmed by the possibility that a small vessel spotted in Australian waters was carrying asylum seekers, the Government quickly removed four islands from Australia's Immigration Zone. Now that it has been learnt that the boat was just an illegal fishing vessel, the Government is faced with putting them back in.

It's a pretty clear indication that the opponents of post-modernism might as well throw in the towel and turn to other intellectual disputes. The traditional nation state is no more: in its place is a shifting ambiguous something-or-other whose main defining feature is that it can be redefined at will, with the usual playful irony. Post-modernism has finally penetrated the halls of Parliament. Not, as you might expect, through the ALP or those pernicious Greens but through the Government itself. When even the nation's established boundaries are up for the occasional spot of post-modernist revision and re-revision, the cause of traditional values is well and truly lost. The Government's action has made it official: we're all post-modernists now so we may as well start learning to live with it.