Singapore is worried, as the Washington Post reported last year. There is a sense that the Chinese diaspora located there might view their transnational home as China in vitro. ‘Shared vision’ is the byword for this, as Xi and the Chinese Communist Party aim to mobilise Chinese minorities outside the homeland to help lend muscle to a state ready to flex. This should be of discomfort to more places than Singapore.

The multicultural experiment in Australia, and most of the West, was a toe in the water prior to the end of the Cold War. When the Wall came down it really took off, and has only gathered steam since then. This is in large part because the big conversations about world power seemed to be over. There was one superpower; there was one governing ethos. Everybody would adopt it, and it was only a matter of time. Russia under Yeltsin and a China enjoying Deng’s legacy would become core parts of the liberal international order soon enough. We would all march together into the sunrise, with all the peoples from the world singing the praises of societies that let us indulge ourselves and vote every few years. There seemed no risk in throwing open the gates to all ye wretched of the earth, or those who wanted to make a dollar in an economy a little sounder than the one they left behind. Critics were tarred and feathered as latter-day Rhodesians.

And some new Australians have done very well. Of this there is no doubt. Others have not. Tension between different groups, once they expand past a few percent of the population, is a feature of multi-ethnic societies. We might enjoy getting our coffee and lunch from different-looking people from different-sounding places, and working beside them in nicely variegated workplaces. Friendships with those from far away are natural for those who do not carry with them coarsely reductionist and disfigured views about the world. Goodwill is possible, if not universal.

But the ethic of society writ large cannot be perfectly matched to that of the individuals within it, even if they enjoy goat curry and know how to say xièxiè. In the same way personal morality differs from the morality of kings – who must account for far more – so solidarity in a state is different from solidarity among people who know one another in the flesh. It’s more complicated than the ‘imagined communities’ Benedict Anderson banged on about, essentially arguing that the nation is merely a celebration of propaganda to bind disparate groups together. We can’t wish a coherent society into existence, and to believe as much is to grossly overestimate the grasp of government, our now degraded civil society, and a particular vision the West believed would last forever. It is also to overestimate the robustness of the society we inherited.

It is further a mistake to consider goodwill universal. When power and influence is on the table, minority groups with determined vanguards that know how to manoeuvre inside political systems will do their bit. Sam Dastyari’s fall from grace and Jamie Clements’ Aldi bag of cash are testament to this. Even when the donors aren’t directly foreign, the diverging interests of groups without a geographical stake – but with definite social and cultural ones – will make their plays. What else was the Voice, aside from public contrition for guilt-ridden middle-class white liberals, if not a power grab? The United States is riven by this spoils-driven dynamic, which has contributed to the drastic decline of political life in that country, including looking the other way when one part of the population decided to collectively ransack the other under the guise of campaigning for ever-elusive racial equality. Our desire to ape the American experience appears to have extended to importing intractable racial problems along with Hollywood, Levi Jeans and Netflix.

Multiculturalism of our sort, rather than the historic American sort, makes a lot less sense in a multipolar age. We saw this in the wake of October 7, when crowds gathered in our cities and let slip just what exactly multiculturalism has wrought. Those assembled bore no resemblance to Banjo Paterson or Paul Hogan or anything in between. These deracinated products of multiculturalism, halfway between worlds, seek firmer ground somewhere. The national identity we proffer appears anaemic and unsatisfying. It involves singing Advance Australia Fair in monotone on the one hand – an anthem recently changed, which should speak volumes about our own civilisational uncertainty – and celebrates consumerism and enjoying oneself as eudaimonia (‘good spirit’) on the other. If we no longer believe our own national story is any good, why should anybody else, aside from reasons of financial gain? There’s a term for that: piracy.

Problems of identity are one thing, but geopolitical loyalties are quite another. In Australia, according to a Lowy Institute poll, thinking in the Chinese diaspora tends to divide in three: one-third loyal, one-third uncertain, and one-third disloyal. These are sobering numbers when discussing a population over a million strong. Go to a cricket match at the MCG between India and Australia and see for whom the crowd cheers. Questions about the malleability of the post-racial human being – an imagined creation of pure ideation – might soon find answers. I respect my ancestors’ will is a Chinese axiom; our ethic is exactly inverted.

What happens when foreign powers decide that their transnational populations are not really the property of any other state, that they constitute a million Lord Haw-Haws? After all, it was we who first regarded citizenship as virtually an automatic right with little significance beyond the paper it’s printed on, other than for tax purposes. It is hardly fair to blame other national actors for treating our foolish mistakes as potential opportunities. We might not think that blood is thicker than paper, but other people might. And they might be the ones who set the rules of the game.

We’ve managed to build a postmodern tower of Babel, bricked with utopian prospects and mortared with the desire to do away with history. The difference was that in our case, the mixture of languages came before God kicked over the sandcastle, rather than afterwards. In this respect, we are even stupider than our Biblical antecedents. It is a monument to naivety, hubris, and the belief that history is dead, but history has a stubborn habit of returning from the grave.