The next case study is of both domestic and interstate fears: Australia's running confrontation with China. Thucydides had an unusual, rarely used term for this phenomenon, hypopsia, as he sketched the fear-encrusted relations that existed between Athens and Sparta in the fifth century BCE. The term he employed in his catalog of fear, hypopsia, entails searching beneath the surface of things in order to identify a general fear of a rather distant threat.

Australian research has spotlighted the significance of achieving a sense of social cohesion in its society. A corollary of this is ascertaining whether protectionist, nativist, and even anti-foreigner attitudes in a society will undermine this objective. But Australia's relevance to China is more than just the possible impact on domestic policy caused by large-scale demographic shifts and immigration. It also can create an interstate fear in foreign policy that contrasts two states which are distant from each other but one of whose populations is around twenty-five million and the other's is approaching 1.5 billion. Interstate fear thereby overlaps with a domestic threat.

Ethnic minorities often experience uneasiness when they live alongside earlier-settled societies; this is especially applicable to Indigenous First Peoples. Interstate distrust can also be rooted in countries separated from each other which develop mutual suspicions, for example, security threats emanating from one or the other—or both as in the case of ancient Athens and Sparta. Hypopsia becomes even more precarious when one state holds strategic advantages compared to the other, in other words, arising during a shaky imbalance of power.

Racial makeup regularly constitutes a factor that shapes fear of strangers. In the studies examined in this book, I also highlighted cultural racism where religious, educational, and/or behavioral factors not linked to the color of a person's skin comes to the fore. When Brexit forces used a culturally racist argument to undermine the free movement principle established by the EU and now available to enlargement states, it was a clear instance of discrimination against strangers.

In Australia, it was argued how privileged the country had been for a long time due to skin color. Its White population rarely experienced systemic prejudice against it while sometimes it has been responsible for sowing prejudice against non-Whites. Generally, it enjoyed the benefits of racial advantage, as other colonized states had done.