IN FEW countries do history and geography tug in such different directions. It is half a century since Japan overtook Britain as Australia’s largest trading partner, itself to be overtaken by another Asian giant, China, in 2007. More than 40 years have passed since “White Australia” immigration policies were dropped and Australia began to look a little more like Asia. And it is 16 years since an Australian prime minister, John Howard, claimed “we do not have to choose between our history and our geography.”

It is only three months, however, since Australia’s government produced a white paper on “Australia in the Asian Century”, which has provoked renewed debate about Australia’s place in its closest neighbourhood. As Kevin Rudd, a former prime minister, says, Australians feel they live “slightly on the edge”, a feeling heightened by extreme natural events, such as the recent heatwave and accompanying bushfires.

Their head of state is still the British queen and their security is founded on a treaty with America. Indeed, by agreeing to play host to up to 2,500 American marines, Australia is central to the Obama administration’s “rebalancing” to Asia. And most of Australia’s foreign investment is still from America and Europe. A poll last year by the Lowy Institute, a think-tank in Sydney, found that 95% of Australians thought China already was, or would become, “Asia’s leading power”; 52% felt uncomfortable about it.

The upshot of months of bureaucratic arm-wrestling between independent experts and various government departments, the white paper offers a predictably awestruck view of Asia’s economic rise. By the early 2020s Asia will overtake the combined economic output of Europe and North America. The white paper offers an exhaustive list of recommendations as to how Australia can take advantage of this (it was even more exhaustive before it was drastically pruned, in a late fit of editing, to a mere 312 pages). These cover everything from education, with every Australian school to be linked to one in Asia by 2025, to the transformation of the civil service and even corporate boards by ensuring one-third of their members are “Asia-literate”.

The plea to Australians to wake up to Asia’s potential recalls the efforts of governments in the 1980s and 1990s to rebrand Australia as an “Asian country”. But the context has changed utterly. Back then Australia was languishing and a booming Asia enjoyed condescending to it. In 1980 Lee Kuan Yew, Singapore’s patriarch, warned Australians that they risked becoming “the poor white trash of Asia”. In 1986 an Australian finance minister (and later prime minister), Paul Keating, fretted that without reform the country might become a “banana republic”.

In contrast, 2013 is expected to be Australia’s 22nd consecutive year of economic growth. It weathered the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98, contributing to the bail-outs of Indonesia, South Korea and Thailand. And, uniquely among developed economies, it survived the global financial crisis without a recession. Australia has a new self-confidence in its own economic model. A book published last year by an Australian journalist, George Megalogenis (“The Australian Moment”), argues that, thanks to the economic reforms undertaken over the past three decades, Australia is “more versatile today than any other first-world nation”, and that “it’s our turn to tell them how the world works”.

Asia’s relative economic importance also looks greater than ever. That is partly because of the recent troubles of the developed economies and partly because India has joined the region’s fast-growth club. But mainly it is because of the continued expansion of the Chinese economy. China now takes about 29% of Australia’s exports, mostly energy and minerals. The white paper argues Australia has to ready itself for the day when it cannot prosper simply by digging stuff up and selling it to China. It needs to excel in providing the services a growing Asian middle class will need—such as education and tourism.

The domestic political context has also changed. Not only are ethnic Asians now an important electoral constituency, but the prolonged Asia-led boom means that politicians have to compete to prove their “Asia-literacy”. So for Julia Gillard, the prime minister, commissioning the white paper was one card she can play in the election to be held later this year. It may also have been an attempt to steal some of the Asian clothes of Mr Rudd, the Mandarin-speaker she toppled in a Labor party coup in 2010. To counter impressions that he has a bias to the “anglosphere”, her probable opponent in the election, Tony Abbott, leader of the conservative opposition coalition, has said that as prime minister his policy would have “more Jakarta, less Geneva”. His deputy and prospective foreign minister, Julie Bishop, picks holes in the white paper (“a missed opportunity and potentially counter-productive”) but concedes that its goals and targets are “laudable”.

One analyst, however, levels two related criticisms at it. The first is that it amounts to an “enormous one-way bet” on a rising Asia, and Australia should be worrying more about unforeseen shocks. The second is that the paper does not squarely confront changes to the security environment. It accepts that a “natural, legitimate outcome” of China’s growth will be increased military strength, and expresses optimism that China and America can “manage strategic change”.

…but in the middle

In a public document, one would expect little else, and just this week the government delivered a separate national security strategy. But in Australia as elsewhere in Asia, the mismatch between growing economic dependence on China and security reliance on America looks uncomfortable. Under Mr Rudd, Australia was key to the expansion of the annual East Asia Summit into a security forum which both China and America attend. Few countries have a greater interest in seeing the Pacific’s two big powers get along, and history reconcile itself with geography.

Economist.com/blogs/banyan