Protecting National Sovereignty: The ‘Australian Model’ and the Exclusion of Asylum Seekers

Abstract

Increasingly, the ‘Australian model’ of offshore detention is promoted to restrict asylum seeker migration and preserve national sovereignty. This article analyses metaphor usage within press coverage of immigration to examine the origins of this discourse. Focusing on two high points of asylum seeker arrivals (2001–2002, 2012–2013), I demonstrate how negative metaphor use constructed asylum seekers as racialized, illegitimate, illegal Others, who breached Australian sovereignty. I argue that this was a response to a crisis of settler-colonial legitimacy, exacerbated by calls for Indigenous sovereignty, with anti-asylum discourse utilized as a tool to negate and neutralize Indigenous sovereignty claims and legitimate settler-colonial state power. I further argue that sovereignty claims were employed to reinforce Australia’s positioning within regional hierarchies of power, through the enactment of offshore processing agreements with less powerful, ostensibly ‘sovereign’ nations, thereby reaffirming and legitimating a racialized, neo-colonial ordering of the world.

Introduction

The ‘Australian model’ can be defined as a collection of measures designed to limit asylum seeker boat arrivals, initiated in 2001 and consolidated over the last two decades. Broadly, this consisted of boat turn-backs, offshore processing and detention of asylum seekers who arrive by boat (classified as Irregular Maritime Arrivals), and, from 2013, the refusal to grant permanent visas to any asylum seeker boat arrivals, regardless of whether they were later found to have refugee status. In addition, the government passed legislation ¹ ‘excising’ many of the nation’s external territories from Australia’s ‘migration zone’ (land considered part of Australia for migration purposes) thereby disqualifying asylum seekers who landed in these areas from applying for visas or accessing legal protections. These measures were articulated in terms of national sovereignty and Australia’s right to protect its borders.

Australia was widely castigated for its harsh stance at the inception of the policy, with the UN continuing to condemn Australian measures as arbitrary and illegal. However, increasingly within Europe, mention is made of the ‘Australian model’ to handle unwanted asylum seekers. While such views initially gained traction within far-right groups (Geibel et al., 2023), this approach has now gained mainstream support.

I argue that the utilization of state sovereignty claims in the promotion of offshore processing was a discursive mechanism that legitimated entrenched power divisions within Australia and buttressed a racialized ordering of the nation both internally and regionally. Despite being a fundamental principle in state formation, the concept was largely absent from Australian press discourse on immigration until the asylum seeker ‘crisis’ of 2001, when it was utilized in justifications for the exclusion of asylum seekers through Australia’s newly conceived offshore processing regime, known as the Pacific Solution. In this article, I analyse the racialization of asylum seekers through use of historically racializing metaphors, alongside asylum seeker-specific metaphors of illegitimacy. I then highlight the increased utilization of the term sovereignty, which I argue functioned to legitimize Australian state power and maintain settler-colonial state legitimacy by reasserting a neo-colonial worldview that reaffirmed a racialized structuring of the Australian nation-state and its place within the world of nation-states.

The racialization of asylum seekers served a crucial purpose, connecting them to a long history of racialized anti-immigration sentiment, locating anti-asylum seeker rhetoric within a wider (contested) discourse of national identity. This had key relevance at a historical juncture when coverage of and support for Indigenous rights and sovereignty had achieved an unprecedented level. In response to these contestations to the racialized configurations of power that predominated, sovereignty claims were used as a ‘legitimating resource’ (Rasmussen, 2023: 14) to reaffirm the value of the existing racialized social and political order, with anti-asylum seeker rhetoric, articulated through the prism of sovereignty, utilized as a tool to negate, and neutralize Indigenous sovereignty claims. Thus, racialized, and historically rooted configurations of national belonging were reproduced, which restated the centrality of (white) settler colonial identity in response to challenges from racialized ‘Others’.

While, initially, this represented a response to a crisis of Australian settler colonial legitimacy, the utilization of sovereignty claims proved to be a powerful tool through which Australia could reaffirm its positioning within regional hierarchies of power, both figuratively and literally, through the enactment of its offshore processing agreements with other ostensibly ‘sovereign’ nations. Speaking of sovereignty in this context legitimates and delineates configurations of power, which are both racial and rooted in a colonial past. At a historic juncture where sovereignty is globally contested, the notion of sovereign borders has become a powerful mechanism for conveying and reinforcing racial orders both within and without borders.

State Sovereignty, Immigration and Asylum Seekers

Sovereignty refers to the absolute political authority and rule over a particular territory and associated population. Since the Treaties of Westphalia (1648) the notion of sovereignty has included respect for territorial boundaries and the proscription of intervention within a state’s internal affairs, providing the foundations for the modern state system (Prokhovnik, 2015). The right to manage the territorial boundaries of the polity, particularly regarding immigration, is still widely accepted as an absolute right of any nation-state, with sovereignty at the core of efforts to regulate immigration (Doty, 1996; Sassen, 1996). Yet this right has been challenged by several factors over the decades since the end of the Second World War.

One issue is the increasing emphasis on human rights, with many nation-states now party to international human rights regimes that protect the status of the individual (Sassen, 1996). Yet while Sassen identifies a tension between the, often conflictual, demands of state sovereignty and individual rights, particularly in the case of refugees (Sassen, 1996), others, drawing on Agamben’s (1998) concept of homo sacer, highlight the stateless and right-less refugee as essential to the functioning of state sovereignty (Everuss, 2020; Rajaram and Grundy-Warr, 2004). Homo sacer refers to the individual cast out from society, possessing only what Agamben (1998) terms as ‘bare life’; that is, a life outside the protections and rights afforded by the law. This occurs within a state of exception, a suspension of rights by the sovereign power, that is, the government, with this exclusion simultaneously constructing the sovereign body politic, defined by who is included (Agamben, 2008).

While Agamben referenced the concentration camps of the Second World War, refugee camps and detention centres are argued to function similarly as states of exception, with the bare life of the refugee essential to the construction of a nation’s sovereign polity (Everuss, 2020; Rajaram and Grundy-Warr, 2004). Rather than the abuse of refugees’ rights constituting a threat to a nation’s sovereignty then (Sassen, 1996), this suspension of human rights outside the protection of a nation-state is read as fundamental to upholding the sanctity of states’ sovereign power, with the refugee ‘integrally tied into the practices of excluding and including that constitute and maintain the faceted system of the nation-state’ (Rajaram and Grundy-Warr, 2004: 39, emphasis in original). Within Australia, the excision of the whole mainland from Australia’s migration zone in 2012 made the entire nation a state of exception for asylum seekers and refugees, with their bodies the site at which Australia’s sovereignty was enacted (Everuss, 2020; Rajaram and Grundy-Warr, 2004).

A further challenge to state sovereignty has been the exponential increase in human mobility (Sassen, 1996). The resulting crises of national identity within states called into question previously held boundaries of who was included within and excluded from the sovereign body politic, potentially undermining the concept of a territorially bounded population that underpins traditional notions of state sovereignty (Doty, 1996). This territoriality was also invariably racialized even, or perhaps particularly, within settler colonies such as Australia, which historically claimed the nation-continent as a home for the white man by dispossessing the continent’s Indigenous peoples and proscribing non-white immigration. In times of crisis, there are ‘attempts to fix meanings and identities, and thereby to produce the foundations presumed by conventional understandings of sovereignty’ (Doty, 1996: 123–124), the successful construction of which Doty (1996: 124) refers to as a ‘sovereignty effect’ in contrast to conceptions of sovereignty as static or fixed. This link between crisis and the functioning of sovereignty is one I will return to.

Increased human mobility and the weakening of traditional territorial boundaries has also led to the reconceptualization of border spaces and increased technologies for immigration control (Pickering, 2004). Increasingly asylum seekers are subject to security regimes involving outsourced, privatized detention and decision making, with processing offshore in remote locations. This process has been described as diffused sovereignty; that is, sovereign power is decentralized and diffused through the private sector to evade public scrutiny and international legal obligations (Welch, 2013). Pickering (2004: 363–364) utilizes the concept of a ‘borderland’ to describe the shift from understanding borders as fixed to being ‘spatially produced and circulated’ through state practices with national borders ‘no longer lines on a map but spaces of both legitimate and illegitimate behaviour which require simultaneous performances of control and crisis that collapse boundaries, frontiers and borders into borderlands’. In such circumstances, discourses of sovereignty underpin policing of asylum seekers, with sovereignty the basis for the legitimacy of this application of sovereign power, even as this same sovereignty is diffused through non-state and thus non-sovereign entities for its enactment. Thus, sovereignty is both fixed when delineating the state that needs defending, and de-territorialized in the process of that defence (Pickering, 2004).

Challenges to sovereignty within the Australian state have a further dimension due to its settler-colonial status and racially structured history. Indigenous claims to sovereignty challenge the legitimacy of the nation-state, with this exacerbated by the nation’s ongoing attachment to its colonial past, which has stifled the development of a postcolonial national political identity (Prokhovnik, 2015). Moreton-Robinson (2015: xxiii) asserts that Australia is characterized by a patriarchal white sovereignty, which ‘as a regime of power, operates ideologically, materially, and discursively to reproduce and maintain its investment in the nation as a white possession through a discourse of security’, with threats constructed from both Indigenous people and asylum seekers. While Moreton-Robinson argues that both are grounded in fears of being dispossessed of the nation by non-white Others, I argue that anti-asylum seeker discourse was utilized to manage the nation’s foundational anxieties about legitimacy and the sovereign rights of Indigenous peoples.

Thus, the literature outlined so far raises several key points. First, that sovereignty is increasingly diffuse and de-territorialized, outsourced and located offshore, with the border transformed from a firm territorial boundary to indefinite and mobile borderlands constructed by state practices of legitimation and exclusion (Everuss, 2020; Pickering, 2004; Welch, 2013). Second, that Indigenous claims to sovereignty undermine the legitimacy of Australian nation sovereignty claims, generating ongoing anxiety and a white possessive logic in response (Moreton-Robinson, 2015). In response, the refugee as homo sacer reaffirms the legitimacy of the Australian sovereign polity (Everuss, 2020). Perera (2009) calls this reworked conception of Australia’s border zones a borderscape, encompassing border control and the Pacific Solution, the varying forms of mobility that traverse the border zone and Indigenous sovereignty claims.

However, while the assemblage of bordering practices contained within the Pacific Solution can be explained through concepts of diffuse or mobile sovereignty, the impingement on other nations’ sovereignty also needs consideration. While the misnomer ‘the Pacific Solution’ suggests a Pacific-wide consensus on Australia’s bordering practices, this obscures the extreme power imbalances involved in securing ‘consent’, and the lack of respect for the sovereignty of the nations involved (Perera, 2009; Rajaram, 2003). As former colonial dependants/possessions of Australia, and ongoing recipients of Australian aid, the countries chosen as sites for the enactment of Australian sovereign practices, Manus Island (Papua New Guinea) and Nauru, had little ability to refuse (Jini Kim, 2015; Rajaram, 2003). The inclusion of aid and development packages, with the concomitant fear of withdrawal of assistance, while ostensibly providing the illusion of a mutually beneficial arrangement, obscured the requirement that both countries limit their own sovereign laws and rights to accommodate Australian requirements (Jini Kim, 2015; Rajaram, 2003). This exemplifies what Nkrumah (1965: ix) defines as the ‘essence’ of neo-colonialism in that ‘the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.’

When discussing western intrusion into African states in the decades since the end of colonialism and the ostensible attainment of sovereignty, Harrison characterizes the relationship as one of subordination and intervention, designed to maintain neo-colonial (and neoliberal) control. Rather than any substantive sovereignty, he points to a sovereignty frontier that:

constitutes a set of claims based on the scope and legitimacy of the state’s role; the frontier is the social space in which claims are effected and it is defined not spatially but socially as the mediation between a national state and international agencies. (Harrison, 2007: 196–197)

This analysis of the relationship between post-colonial states, international agencies and the semblance of sovereignty can also usefully be applied to the Australia/Pacific relationships, and the neo-colonial logic underpinning this sense of proprietorship is essential to understand how national sovereignty claims can be defended in the face of sovereignty intrusions into other nations.

Data and Method

This research takes a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach to the study of metaphor and press discourse. The press is a prime focus for CDA; in particular, it plays a key role in the (re)production of discourses around race, immigration and national identity (van Dijk, 1998). Metaphors both reflect and shape the conceptual categories through which our worlds are understood (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980), but the categorizations they impose, rather than neutral or natural, reflect the speaker’s positioning, making metaphor choice ideological (Charteris-Black, 2004), hence metaphor was utilized as a key to access press discourses around asylum seeker migration.

CDA is an explicitly political practice, which examines language as a form of social practice, with the interplay between language and power a fundamental aspect of CDA (Reisigl and Wodak, 2001). Central to CDA approaches is revealing how language is utilized in the maintenance of dominance and power. Power has implications not just for what people do but also how they think, with power manifested in ‘persuasion, dissimulation or manipulation, among other strategic ways to change the mind of other in one’s own interests’ (van Dijk, 1993: 254, emphasis in original). Thus, through the exercise of power, dominance can be legitimized, and unequal power relations naturalized.

Data come from a larger project tracking the use of metaphors in Australian press reports on immigration between 1854 and 2018. Data for this article were collected from sample periods of two years and come from three newspapers: The Sydney Morning Herald (SMH), The West Australian and The Australian, in 2001–2002, and 2012–2013, and draw on a corpus of 1066 press reports and 3800 metaphors. Data were retrieved from the Factiva database, with data collected through Boolean searches combining immigration OR immigrant* OR migration OR migrant* with metaphors previously identified in sociolinguistic analyses of immigration metaphors (Charteris-Black, 2004; Santa Ana, 2002). Metaphors were first analysed using CDA principles to understand their discursive contexts; these findings were then incorporated with a wider sociological analysis of the usage of sovereignty claims. This article contains representative samples of data, chosen for their relevance to the arguments made; it is not a complete summary of the data collected during the sample periods.

The Pacific Solution

While Australia has accepted many refugees since the end of the Second World War, its first encounter with unapproved asylum seekers was the arrival of asylum seeker boats from Vietnam in 1976 (Mares, 2002; Marr and Wilkinson, 2003). In the early years of Vietnamese arrivals, asylum seeker discourses were easily mapped onto the Asian invasion stereotype, with earlier tropes reactivated (Martin, 2015). From 1999, however, the number of arrivals increased substantially, largely due to wider geo-political conflicts, with this accompanied by a much harsher anti-asylum seeker rhetoric. The origins of the asylum seekers, predominantly Afghanistan and Iran, led to fears of invasion becoming intertwined with anti-Muslim sentiment that had become prominent in Australia in the late 1990 (Poynting, 2002).

PM John Howard’s refusal in 2001 to allow entry to the Tampa, a Norwegian ship with 438 rescued asylum seekers on board, created an international outcry (Mares, 2002; Marr and Wilkinson, 2003) although domestically, his actions met with widespread bipartisan approval. In the post-9/11 environment, the Australian government conflated asylum seekers with terrorism, articulating restrictions on their immigration within the context of the global war on terror and instituting a host of restrictive immigration measures (named the Pacific Solution), including offshore processing of asylum seeker claims, and boat ‘pushbacks’ aimed at preventing boats from reaching Australian waters (Mares, 2002; Marr and Wilkinson, 2003).

Press discourse around asylum seekers in this period had three key features. First, there was excessive use of metaphors constructing immigration as Dangerous Water or as War. Both conceptual metaphors ² have a long racialized and racializing history in Australia, having consistently been negatively applied to non-white immigrant groups (Martin, 2021a, 2021b, 2023), suggesting that asylum seekers were also perceived as racially undesirable. Second, there were several asylum seeker-specific metaphors, that constructed asylum seekers as illegitimate, alongside explicit framings of illegality. Finally, these were accompanied in an increase in sovereignty claims by the government, most notably the PM John Howard and Immigration Minister Phillip Ruddock:

The Federal Government will attempt to exclude three of Australia’s northern territories from the national migration zone today to stem the flow of boat people. (‘Move today to exclude islands’, News, The West Australian, 18 September 2001, emphasis added)

Mr Ruddock will head to the Middle East tomorrow in a bid to staunch the influx of illegal immigrants following a surge of more than 800 boat people arriving since December 1. (‘People smugglers exploit Middle-East’s well-off’, News, The Sydney Morning Herald, 4 January 2001, emphases added)

Asylum seekers were referred to as illegal immigrants, and boat people; by using terms that emphasized their purported illegality or the means of their arrival, the legitimacy of their asylum claims, as well as their humanity, was obscured. Whether needing to be staunched or stemmed, there is no doubt that the flow, influx or surge poses a risk. When using metaphors with a long racial history, there is the double intertextuality of both explicit surface linkages and implicit thematic chains (Reisigl and Wodak, 2001) linking asylum seekers with earlier discourses of undesirable, non-white immigrant Others. Activating these historical links functions to reaffirm the centrality of Anglo-white settler colonial national identity and power.

This was mirrored in language used by the PM John Howard, which juxtaposed this racialized and delegitimized threat with the sovereignty of the nation, with the ‘we’ of the nation repeatedly invoked to normatively construct the nation in opposition to metaphorically constructed Others:

‘We appear to be losing control of the flow of people coming into this country . . . we have to take a stand,’ he told the Nine network. ‘We cannot surrender our right as a sovereign country to control our borders, and we cannot have a situation where people can come to this country when they choose.’ (‘Cargo of Human Misery’, News, The Australian, 29 August 2001, emphases added)

Asylum seekers were also framed through metaphors likening their immigration to war – see expressions like take a stand and surrender. However, the most common war metaphor was protection. While it can be argued that protection, particularly border protection, is not metaphorical, I would suggest that as there was no physical threat, then such debates are entirely symbolic. Aside from once in 1989, protection was not found as a metaphor in any reports prior to 2001. Its exponential increase from 2001 can be attributed to John Howard’s response to the arrival of the Tampa and the terrorist attacks on 11 September, which strongly emphasized national security and protection in response to constructed threats from racialized Others:

What has been overlooked sometimes in this debate is that Australia has rights, too. It has the rights of sovereignty to determine who should be allowed into this country and who should be denied entry. It has the right to protect its borders against uninvited intruders. And it has the right to enforce laws aimed to protect its security and to regulate immigration. (‘Asylum seekers test patience’, News, The West Australian, 3 October 2001, emphases added)

There are several factors driving the public’s reaction. Yes, xenophobia is one of them. But vastly more important has been the belief that the Government should be able to protect national sovereignty and choose who will live in this country. (‘Big questions are being asked but not answered’, News, The Sydney Morning Herald, 12 September 2001, emphasis added)

Yet despite this increase in references to protection, the borders were never threatened by the uninvited intruders, although both PM John Howard and Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock suggested, without any evidence, that asylum seeker boats could contain terrorists (‘Beware of Terrorists in refugee clothing’, Opinion, The Australian, 8 November 2001; ‘Detainees no threat to security – ASIO’, News, The Australian, 23 August 2002).

In addition to Dangerous Water and War metaphors, asylum seekers were constructed through asylum seeker-specific metaphors, such as queue-jumpers and customers, further delegitimizing them, marking them as deviant and contributing to their construction as racialized, illegitimate Others. Usage of the queue-jumper metaphor increased massively in the 2001–2002 period, being widely used by then Immigration Minister Philip Ruddock, and appearing extensively in the press:

It would not be too hard to find a body of opinion that would call for them to be sent back home – immediately and without compassion – for two main reasons: to protect Australia’s borders from possible security threats and to ensure that illegal queue-jumpers are not allowed to displace asylum-seekers just as worthy who are waiting, with more patience, for Australian officials to process their applications. (‘We need to respond as a civilised society’, Comment, The Australian, 19 June 2001, emphases added)

Queue-jumping was conceptualized in terms of the illegality and deviance of asylum seekers, which was contrasted with the worthy asylum seekers who patiently wait. While many press reports used the queue-jumping metaphor critically, this strategy nonetheless reinforced the perception of asylum seekers as queue-jumpers (Martin and Fozdar, 2022). Moreover, even critical usage took as a given the sovereignty claims that were attached to asylum seeker discourse:

Australia had a sovereign right to control our borders, but turning back the Tampa countered our obligations and put political imperatives above sensible policies. Lacking a strong domestic policy agenda in the lead-up to the election, Mr Howard seized on the asylum seeker issue. Boatpeople were demonised as illegals, queue jumpers and potential terrorists to justify government’s costly Pacific Solution. (‘Tampa, terror and the challenge ahead’, News, The Australian, 24 August 2002, emphases added)

There was also a proliferation of metaphors that framed asylum seeking as a form of trade, which can be grouped together within a conceptual metaphor Seeking Asylum as a Business Transaction. Business metaphors reduced asylum seeking to an illegal business enterprise, with asylum seekers often referred to as customers or cargo. Discourse centred on criminal justice as opposed to social justice and human rights, with the suppression of asylum seeker rights justified in the name of halting the illegal trade:

As the trade in human cargo becomes more reckless, at least four other boats have broken down at sea due to engine failure or have hit reefs in the past two weeks. (‘5000 new illegals heading this way’, News, The Australian, 31 August 2001, emphases added)

This armada included the Adelong, which contained the biggest cargo of illegal entrants to successfully make the journey. (‘Reception committee for people-smuggler’, News/Feature, The Australian, 8 October 2001, emphases added).

Business metaphors were explicitly linked with the justification of offshore processing, and the articulation of sovereign rights:

THE next phase of the people-smuggling crackdown will begin in federal parliament today through a raft of legislation intended to cripple the trade in human cargo and remove from boatpeople the right to permanent residency . . .

. . . in a statement Mr Ruddock and Justice Minister Chris Ellison said: ‘This will put beyond doubt that decisions about who can and who cannot enter Australia is the sovereign power of the Australian Parliament.’ (‘Coalition resurrects illegals bill – The refugee crisis’, News, The Australian, 18 September 2001, emphases added)

When presenting the proposed legislation to parliament, PM Howard employed many of the metaphors outlined above and made multiple references to sovereignty, stating at one point:

It is in the national interest that we have the power to prevent beyond any argument people infringing the sovereignty of this country. One of the great enduring responsibilities of a government is to protect the integrity of its borders. There is no doubt that the integrity of the borders of Australia has been under increasing threat from the rising flood of unauthorised arrivals. (Australian House of Representatives, 2001, emphases added)

The rising flood is an explicitly racialized water metaphor, linked with war metaphors, protect, increasing threat and a framing of illegitimacy, unauthorized arrivals, with all attached to a sovereignty claim, highlighting how these three features worked together.

The construction of asylum seekers as the totemic immigrant Other within Australia dates to John Howard’s anti-asylum seeker policies that culminated in the Pacific Solution, when asylum seekers became the object of a vehement discourse around immigration, legitimacy, sovereignty and security. The timing of this was no accident – the decade leading up to the Tampa had been marked by an increasing focus on Aboriginal land rights, culminating in several ‘Bridge Walks for Reconciliation’ in State capitals throughout 2000 (Elder et al., 2004). Over 300,000 people walked across Sydney Harbour Bridge, and 350,000 marched in Melbourne, with tens of thousands walking across bridges in other State capitals in a highly symbolic performance of national coming together. Coming after a decade of reconciliation processes that highlighted the extent of historical settler colonial violence, the Bridge Walk did powerful emotional work, with Edmonds (2016: 100) noting: ‘After so much shame, the nation required a narrative of redemption, wrought in part through reconciliation and a return to good feeling.’

Yet the extent to which the Bridge Walks themselves offered any real commitment to practical redress as opposed to focusing on the needs of the majority non-Indigenous population and the amelioration of settler-colonial guilt has been questioned (Edmonds, 2016). It has further been suggested that the reconciliation process itself was part of a broader nationalist project to incorporate Indigenous people within the existing settler colonial nation structure and thereby undermine Indigenous sovereignty claims (Gunstone, 2004). While these issues underscored the shift that followed, there nonetheless existed a wide public focus on Indigenous issues, broadly centred on some understanding of reconciliation.

However, after the onset of Howard’s anti-asylum seeker rhetoric, the push for reconciliation lost prominence in the public sphere, leading to what has been referred to as ‘the “ditching” of indigenous issues’ (Elder et al., 2004: 217) and a noted hardening of public attitudes against Indigenous Australians (Behrendt, 2002). Elder et al. (2004) attribute this shift in public focus to understandings of the nation being structured according to ‘the White national will’, with a limitation to only one non-white issue within the ‘White nation-space’ at any given time. Without disputing this, I suggest that the shift from Indigenous rights to asylum seekers was facilitated by the way discourses around asylum seekers were constructed. It is no coincidence that the most prominent asylum seeker metaphors centred on their illegitimacy, with the threat conceived of in terms of national sovereignty. Through the construction of an illegitimate racialized, immigrant Other that breached national sovereignty, the legitimacy of settler colonial possession was restated. Settler colonial anxieties occasioned by claims for Aboriginal land rights and sovereignty, were mitigated by a discourse that restated white sovereignty.

Unlike pushes for Indigenous land rights and sovereignty, the asylum seeker discourse restated the nation as a white possession (Moreton-Robinson, 2015). The potency of this was that it allowed even opponents of the government’s policies to articulate their objections from a position of sovereignty. In every statement promoting the acceptance of asylum seekers, there is still an expression of ‘governmental belonging’ (Hage, 2000). In saying, ‘we believe they have the right to come to our country’, there was a reiteration of the nation as a white possession. Thus, both pro- and anti-government proponents were able to debate asylum seeker admission without any direct challenge to white sovereignty. Through the construction of the asylum seeker Other, anxieties as well as debate about Indigenous sovereignty and settler colonial legitimacy were neutralized, and existing power structures were legitimated, and thus maintained.

Operation Sovereign Borders

While the Pacific Solution was repealed in 2007 following the election of a Labor government, an increase in asylum seeker boat arrivals meant that by 2012, asylum seekers were again a focus of political attention. Paralleling the Pacific Solution in 2001, discourse around asylum seekers was conducted in terms of national security, again culminating in a militarized operation, disingenuously named Operation Sovereign Borders, implemented by the newly elected Coalition Government in 2013. Many of the same discursive features described above were also present in this period:

Australia already has enough border protection problems without encouraging a new wave of people to risk their lives sailing to Australia in their own vessels. (‘Shopping around for asylum’, Feature, The Australian 12 April 2012), emphases added)

A fourfold increase in people-smuggler networks in Sri Lanka is driving the surge of boats that threatens to overwhelm Australia’s border protection regime. (‘Criminals moving in on asylum rackets – Exclusive’, Feature, The Australian, 17 December 2012, emphases added)

Hard won battle on border protection is already being sabotaged. (Headline, Feature, The Australian, 12 August 2012, emphases added)

Utilizing both Water and War metaphors, there was explicit structuring of racialized threat. Border protection was framed as a problem or a battle, with the wave or surge that threatens to overwhelm. There was also ongoing use of Business metaphors, framing asylum seekers as illegitimate and criminal: ‘Faced with this new challenge, people-smugglers are dramatically changing their pitch to customers’ (‘Jury still out on whether PNG Solution will work’, Feature, The Australian, 10 August 2013, emphases added). Here the customer ceases to be a person fleeing persecution, and instead becomes a consumer of an illegal trade; both an active participant in performing the transaction and the object of the transaction.

There was also increased use of ‘queue’ metaphors during this period, and repeated suggestions that asylum seekers be ‘returned’ to Indonesia, highlighting the blatant disregard for Indonesian sovereignty embedded within Australian border practices:

ASYLUM-SEEKERS not in direct flight from persecution but only seeking a more ‘benign’ country in which to live should be safely returned to Indonesia and put ‘at the back of the queue’. (‘Return to Indonesia a “pragmatic” option’, News, The Australian, 1 July 2013, emphasis added)

Almost certainly this arrangement would have the effect of attracting more people to Indonesia in the expectation of getting a place in the Australian queue. That then becomes a border control issue for the Indonesians, not Australia. (‘A queue starting in Indonesia is far more orderly’, Opinion, The Sydney Morning Herald, 6 September 2013, emphasis added)

Sovereignty claims were used as a legitimating resource for policies and practices that criminalized asylum seeking. This is evident in the way sovereignty claims were mobilized as justification for the passing and retrospective application of a raft of legislative measures designed to proscribe asylum seeker arrivals and approve offshore processing. Pickering (2004) has argued that the utilization of the concept of sovereignty alongside the construction of asylum seeker deviance legitimates extended policing powers, de-territorializing the sovereign state with regards to the practices of sovereign protection while simultaneously consolidating the borders of the sovereign state that need to be defended. Similarly, offshore processing relies on the stability of sovereign national borders for the nation being defended, and the de-territorialization, or diffusion, of sovereignty for the affecting of the processing itself.

However, the diffuse sovereignty of offshore processing is dependent on incursions into other nations’ sovereignty. Both Nauru and Papua New Guinea have colonial links and ongoing economic ties with Australia; their ongoing economic dependence, coupled with the ‘development’ packages provided as part of their offshore processing agreements undoubtedly impacted on their decisions to acquiesce to Australian intrusions on their own sovereignty (Jini Kim, 2015; Rajaram, 2003). Plans to send asylum seekers alongside ‘development’ aid to poorer, non-white countries evince a wider historical relationship of intervention, neoliberal economic enforcement and neo-colonial control that characterizes western relationships with former colonial possessions, representing an expansion by the West (Harrison, 2007). This draws on the notion of a sovereignty within these nations as frontier or a zone involving ‘political practices of subordination and incorporation’ (Harrison, 2007: 189) from more powerful, former colonial overlords.

That is not to suggest that sovereignty was absent in these nations. When discussing government plans to extend Operation Sovereign Borders in parliament, the Governor General stated:

The government will strengthen Australia’s borders and stop the flow of illegal arrivals . . .

Operation Sovereign Borders has already commenced to combat people smuggling and protect our borders . . .

My government is putting in place a regional deterrence framework with our partners to strengthen our region’s borders and thereby strengthen Australia’s borders.

Border Protection Command has been tasked to deploy the full set of measures necessary to ensure the integrity of our maritime borders and protect Australia’s sovereignty.

All of this will occur in consultation with our friends and neighbours in the region. (Australian House of Representatives, 2013, emphases added)

Protecting Australia’s sovereignty is articulated as strengthening our regions borders – note the possessive our, denoting the proprietorial sense of control that Australia has over the region. The Pacific Solution has been read as a tool by which Australia ‘emplaced’ itself and reasserted its dominance in the Pacific region (Rajaram, 2003). This was extended by Operation Sovereign Borders, which highlighted Australian sovereign borders even as it undermined the sovereignty of other nations’ borders. However, these nations are presented as fully complicit, referred to as partners, friends and neighbours suggesting an equality in power relations, and an equal respect for other nations’ sovereignty; thus, the government will strengthen our region’s borders. This is because the appearance of sovereignty is essential for the legitimacy of any intervention within a state, with sovereignty ‘a key claim which states employ to engage with international actors’ (Harrison, 2007: 196). Thus, the extract restates the purportedly mutual nature of the relationship, with other states referred to as partners.

The racialization of asylum seekers as Other played a further role in the legitimation of these processes, promoting a racial ordering of the world, which suggested that non-white people should be corralled in non-white countries. Although asylum seekers from the Middle East, driven in part by Australia’s role in war in the region, did not belong in the countries to which they were sent, there was nonetheless a sense that they belonged there rather than here. This was exemplified by the lack of regard shown not only for the sovereignty of the countries to which asylum seekers were sent for processing but also in disregarding Indonesian sovereignty when turning back boats, something Indonesia has protested despite its wider acquiescence with Australia’s border regimes (Dastyari and Hirsch, 2019).

Discussion

Rosaldo (1993: 70) outlines imperialist nostalgia as utilizing ‘a pose of “innocent yearning” both to capture people’s imaginations and to conceal its complicity with often brutal domination’. Speaking of ‘sovereignty’ then is a nostalgic move that masks the reality of the actions undertaken in its defence: the absolute transgression of other nations’ sovereignty and the brutal dehumanization of the bodies against which it is exercised. It evokes a time when imperial rule was explicit, when the world could be divided into colonized and colonizer, white and non-white.

In much of the press discourse around asylum seekers, Australia is presented as a ‘victim’ of unscrupulous illegals, attempting to invade. This is no accident – as Gilroy (2004: 115) noted about the claiming of victimhood within racialized discourses around immigration in the UK:

Taking possession of that coveted role can also be linked to a sustained academic attempt to rehabilitate the imperial idea and enhance colonial history so that it can play a proper role in the redefinition of national sovereignty, a move required by the military humanism of the gunboat diplomats who, in the words of Tony Blair’s military adviser, the diplomate Robert Cooper, promote the application of ‘double standards’. There is now one law for the ‘postmodern’ West, another for the chaotic world of failed, incompetent, and premodern states.

While Gilroy was referring to the justification used for military incursions into other ‘lesser’ sovereign nations (for example, the 2003 invasion of Iraq), the logic of the ‘double standards’ of national sovereignty is equally applicable to the incursions occasioned by offshore processing. The role of victim – of illegal invasion, criminality, incursion – reconfigures Australia’s positioning and legitimizes the actions taken to ‘protect’ its sovereignty.

Australian settler-colonial responses to asylum seekers differed from that of many Indigenous peoples. Perera (2007: 212) notes how Melville Islanders responded to the Australian government’s excision of Melville Island from Australia’s ‘migration zone’ in 2003 by claiming solidarity with the asylum seekers as fellow ‘non-Australians’ and extending a future welcome to them. Similarly, Aboriginal Australian activists responded to the exclusion of 255 Sri Lankan Tamil asylum seekers in 2009 by issuing them ‘Original Nation Passports’, thereby asserting Aboriginal sovereign rights (Cox, 2014). While Indigenous responses to asylum seekers are diverse and not universally positive, these solidarities underline the racialized nature of the sovereign power being defended in anti-asylum seeker discourse.

Offshore processing did more than legitimize settler-colonial power within the nation; in sending non-white peoples ‘back’ to non-white countries, there was a reaffirmation not only of Australia as a white nation, but also of Australia’s positioning within a neo-colonial world order that saw brown bodies (re)confined to brown countries. Thus, sovereignty claims in asylum seeker discourse restated not just Australia’s position vis-a-vis ‘intruders’ but also Australia’s place in the world. More than the racial structuring of Australian society, the reassertion of white sovereignty provided the security of previously held convictions in Australia’s place in the vanguard of a racialized world order, unsettled most powerfully by Indigenous claims to sovereignty.

This was doubly effective: externally, it was an expression of neo-colonial power. Internally this also served a purpose: Hage (2000: 107) has argued ‘the mode of categorising and dealing with national otherness in the process of defending the nation from external threats is intrinsically linked to the way national otherness is categorised and dealt with internally’. The reaffirmation of the nation as a white possession also reaffirmed the governmental power of white people within the nation, disciplining the nation’s internal Others by virtue of its treatment of external Others. It has been argued that asylum seekers in offshore detention centres are the external, the homo sacer, through which the internal, the citizenry are constructed (Everuss, 2020; Rajaram and Grundy-Warr, 2004). However, the racial dimension of asylum seeker discourse and offshore processing also introduces a conditionality of belonging to non-white citizens, restricting their access to the forms of governmental belonging possessed by the dominant white ‘mainstream’. Thus, a neo-colonial world order is re/produced both inside and outside the nation.

Crisis plays a key role in generating sovereignty effects. That is, through crisis there are ‘attempts to fix meanings and identities, and thereby to produce the foundations presumed by conventional understandings of sovereignty’ (Doty, 1996: 123–124). Within Australia, a crisis of settler colonial legitimacy was neutralized by the reaffirmation of white sovereignty embedded within the Pacific Solution. The success of this tactic was repeated with Operation Sovereign Borders, which further consolidated a particular (neo-colonial) understanding of Australia’s place in the world.

A fruitful avenue for further research would be the recent developments in immigration policy within the UK. The idea of ‘taking back control’ of British sovereignty was an over-riding theme in pro-Brexit discourse and continues to garner extensive support (Menon and Wager, 2020). It has been argued that the Leave campaign harnessed a post-colonial melancholy and longing, which reinvigorated a sense of attachment to Britain’s imperial past (Menon and Wager, 2020). In this sense, the vote for Brexit has been read as rooted in nostalgia for empire and Britain’s imperial past, particularly in the face of ongoing migration from former colonial possessions Since passing the Illegal Immigration Bill (2023), the UK government has affected a wholesale adoption of the ‘Australian’ model, with PM Rishi Sunak repeatedly vowing to ‘Stop the boats’, a direct mirroring of the Operation Sovereign Borders Campaign. While it is beyond the remit of this article to undertake an analysis of these developments, the similarities suggest a need for further investigation.

Conclusion

I have argued that within Australia, state sovereignty claims were utilized in the promotion of offshore processing as a legitimating resource to reaffirm white sovereign settler-colonial power and reinforce a racialized ordering of the nation both internally and regionally. I have demonstrated how racializing metaphors were used to construct asylum seekers as racially Other, connecting them to broader historical understandings of Australian national belonging. I have shown how this was combined with a rise in asylum seeker-specific metaphors, centred around illegitimacy and illegality, with illegitimacy constructed in direct relation to Australian sovereignty. I argue that the timing of this intervention was crucial, coming when Indigenous claims for sovereignty had reached unprecedented levels of prominence. By focusing on asylum seekers as an illegitimate racial Other, the legitimacy of white settler-colonial sovereign power was reaffirmed. I have further argued that the affective potency of this discursive move was that it allowed both proponents and opponents of the government’s position to debate the issue from a position of sovereign power. Thus, by reorienting debates around sovereignty towards asylum seeker (il)legitimacy, white, settler-colonial sovereignty was legitimated and Indigenous claims to sovereignty were undermined.

The choice of much poorer nations for ‘partnership’, with the suggestion that these nations shared an equal footing, despite the impingement on their own sovereignty also did powerful work. In mobilizing sovereignty claims to promote offshore processing deals, there was a reaffirmation of the sovereign borders of Australia, even as that sovereignty was diffused through bureaucracies in other (ostensible sovereign) nations. I argue that this apparently contradictory approach is effective because in addition to reaffirming Australian national sovereignty, it restates a neo-colonial world order that (re)confines non-white bodies to non-white nations; as such, it is also a warning to the nation’s internal non-white Others (Hage, 2000). Sovereignty claims within offshore processing arguments then are a powerful tool, that reaffirm a racialized structuring of the world and the people within it, adding affective potency and legitimacy to the brutality of (neo)colonial geo-political inequalities. In this reading, it is the ultimate expression of post-imperial nostalgia, in that it reconfigures that which it ‘mourns’, while obscuring its own enduring constancy.