Whole countries can attempt to defect from their civilization and bandwagon with rising ones

Evidence

The Keating-Evans choice could be viewed as the shortsighted result of overweighting economic factors and ignoring rather than renewing the country’s culture, and as a tactical political ploy to distract attention from Australia’s economic problems. Alternatively, it could be seen as a farsighted initiative designed to join Australia to and identify Australia with the rising centers of economic, political, and eventually military power in East Asia. In this respect, Australia could be the first of possibly many Western countries to attempt to defect from the West and bandwagon with rising non-Western civilizations. At the beginning of the twenty-second century, historians might look back on the Keating-Evans choice as a major marker in the decline of the West. If that choice is pursued, however, it will not eliminate Australia’s Western heritage, and “the lucky country” will be a permanently torn country, both the “branch office of empire,” which Paul Keating decried, and the “new white trash of Asia,” which Lee Kuan Yew contemptuously termed it. — Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the…, 416

Categorization

• SEED: A possible essay angle: what would it take for a Western nation to successfully ‘change civilizations,’ and does the Australia case show it is structurally impossible or merely hard?