Abstract
In the late 1930s and living in exile from his native Germany in London, Norbert Elias completed his great study of the civilizing process. In it Elias traced out the role of the state in promoting the evolution of peaceful social orders made up of people capable of foresight, self-restraint and self-management. Around the time that Elias produced his book, two young children half a world away from each other, experienced the full force of what writers following in Elias’ footsteps later called the ‘civilizing offensive’ (Mitzman 1987).
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Notes
- 1.
Real debate only began in earnest in 1997, when Sir Ronald Wilson, then Chairman of the Australian Human Rights and Equal Opportunity Commission (HREOC) released a report, Bringing Them Home. That report documented a long history of forced removal of children by state government welfare and police officials of children of mixed white and Aboriginal descent. Wilson’s report argued that those practices were part of a policy designed to ‘breed out the black’ of the ‘half-castes’ at a time when it was confidently expected that ‘full-blood’ Aborigines were a dying race. Acclaimed by left intellectuals and Aboriginal communities (Bird 1998; Gaita 1999), neo-conservatives (Brunton 1998; Meagher 1999) reacted angrily, pointing to the HREOC Report’s ‘methodological’ deficiencies and ‘presentist’ bias based on the importation of ‘contemporary values’ into the past. A subsequent test case brought by two members of the ‘stolen generations’ in 2000–1 to Australia’s Federal Court found that what had been done to aboriginal children and their families had been done both lawfully and in the light of then-prevailing ‘community values and standards’. Justice McLoughlin ruled there was neither a policy basis nor any genocidal intent at work in the child-removal practices in question, and that Gunner and Cubillo, the two plaintiffs, had failed to make their case against the Australian government (Bessant 2004). In 2008 Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd formally apologized to the ‘stolen generations’.
- 2.
The dispossession of the Aborigines rested on the thoroughly racialized foundations built into classical liberal theory as developed in the late seventeenth century by John Locke in his account of the ‘state of nature’. Locke had argued that primal rights to land tenure only obtained when people laboured on the land and so transformed it. He made a distinction between those who worked hard and those who were ‘lazy and quarrelsome’. ‘[God] gave the world to the use of the industrious and the rational … not to the fancy of covetousness of the quarrelsome and the contentious’ (1952: 32). The right to own property was only conferred by the activity called labour. He also stated: ‘What a man labours to obtain or produce belongs to that man. What was previously owned in common in the state of nature becomes “private property” once men labour to assuage their hunger’ (1952: 26). The actual presence of indigenous people was therefore no embarrassment to the claim in 1770 by Captain James Cook that the land of New Holland was ‘unoccupied’, thereby entitling him to seize half the continent on behalf of his Britannic Majesty King George III.
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Watts, R. (2016). ‘The Day the Police Came’: Welfare Policy as State Crime. In: States of Violence and the Civilising Process. Critical Criminological Perspectives. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-49941-7_6
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