Published on December 18, 2005

Angry young men in Sydney, Paris and Birmingham highlight need to give more thought to new era’s losers. Sydney’s beaches are its pride and joy. Few other large cities in the world can boast such a sublime coastline of long, sandy beaches and rugged headlands. But a week after one of Australia’s worst outbreaks of racial violence, in which a mob of 5,000 white youths, many of them drunk, gathered at the city’s southern Cronulla Beach and attacked people who appeared to be of Arab descent, the idea that Sydney is somehow heaven-blessed has been sullied, along with its reputation as a town of relaxed, ethnic diversity.

By most accounts, the disturbances, which continued for three nights, escalating into retaliatory attacks and vandalism on churches, were as much a turf war between rival gangs of young thugs as racially inspired unrest. Indeed, one of the victims was the Thai owner of a restaurant not far from the coast. The attackers who trashed her restaurant weren’t whites, though: they were angry young men of Arab descent from Sydney’s southwest, who, with their rap-style tattoos and hairstyles, baggy trousers and biker-gang affiliations, seem to proudly wear their reputation as society’s “outsiders”.

In this they appear to have quite a bit in common with the young Muslim men from France’s troubled suburbs who set hundreds of cars in Paris alight last month and the “Asians” from Pakistani families who battled blacks in the English city of Birmingham in October.

There are numerous similarities between all three incidents: the existence of long-running communal tensions, widely disseminated stories of pack rapes of young girls and religious vilification compounded by the War on Terror. Each case had particularly local hues, but the pattern and frequency of such disturbances suggests that there is also something universal at play, and that seems to be one of the nasty side-effects of globalisation: you don’t want to be caught on the bottom rung of society when low-skilled manufacturing jobs start moving overseas.

Australia has a fairly long history of successfully integrating migrant groups. Italians, Greeks, Hungarians, Chinese, Vietnamese, Koreans, Turks, one after the other they have moved up the social ladder, from the factory floor to mainstream middle-class jobs.

In Australia, the Lebanese are the glaring exception to the migrant success story. They cluster in poorer suburbs in Melbourne’s north and Sydney’s west, areas with high crime rates and high unemployment. Their income and educational levels are lower than those of other ethnic groups, and the gap seems to be widening rather than closing. It is a social phenomenon that stands in contrast to Lebanese communities elsewhere, such as in Brazil, where they have prospered. Their particular circumstances, refugees from Lebanon’s civil war in the 70s, may be a factor, but the loss of the classic entry-level manufacturing jobs as Australia’s economy has evolved over the last three decades seems to be playing a key role.

Globalisation, particularly the movement of jobs and increase in trade, has done much to spread wealth around the world and reduce international inequalities. But not everyone can be a winner. The addition of two billion Chinese and Indian workers to the global labour market has undermined the bargaining power of low-skilled workers everywhere, and the result is large pockets of young men in places like France, Britain and Australia who have no jobs and, because of their lack of education, look as if they will never have the skills to get decent work.

In Hong Kong and Europe last week, national leaders met to plot the next wave of globalisation. The driving principle for bodies like the World Trade Organisation and the European Union is that by pulling down barriers to trade, investment and commerce, nations will become richer and their peoples’ potential can be fully realised. But as the teenagers from Birmingham, Clichy-sous-Bois, and Sydney’s southwest showed, thought needs to be given to those who are most exposed to the upheaval caused by globalisation.

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