White Australia as a white nationalist project

• In Event: Law and Settler Colonialism: Indigenous Sovereignty, Resistance, and Jurisdiction

Abstract

This paper examines the White Australia Policy—a general term for the far-reaching suite of policies Australia pursued aimed at creating and maintaining its overwhelmingly “Anglo-Celtic” ethnic and racial demography— in its first two decades from 1901-1920 as a political and legal regime of white nationalist worldmaking that diverged from, and at times directly opposed, the prevailing imperial models of racial hierarchy. Contrary to interpretations that frame the policy as an insular or purely domestic project, this paper analyzes its outward-facing entanglements, stressing their implications for international law and foreign policy. Central to this worldmaking project was what I term the “racist critique of racial hierarchy,” whereby the Australian state ideologically positioned itself against the race-based exploitation characteristic of imperial labor systems and as an alternative to the imperialist logic of racial governance, drawing substantial support from the Australian labor movement and the political left, by rearticulating the same settler-colonial white supremacist logics which were first employed to justify its privileged position within the British Empire. Through key episodes-such as Australia’s opposition to Japan’s Racial Equality Proposal at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference and the policy’s ongoing negotiation with British, Japanese, and other foreign interests, this paper demonstrates how White Australia used legal mechanisms and frameworks to articulate a vision of global white supremacy rooted in settler colonialism and racial solidarity among white states. This vision, shaped by Australia’s marginal status within the international order, constituted a deliberate strategy to assert sovereignty and redefine the terms of international racial hierarchy, ultimately offering a rival model to the inter-imperial “sacred trust of civilization” that dominated the era.

Author

• Jack Wells, The New School