When World's Collide.

Different Strokes: If a multicultural immigration policy imposes no obligation on immigrant communities to acknowledge and ultimately embrace their host nation’s most cherished traditions and values, then how is that nation to prevent itself from being reduced to a collection of inward-looking and self-replicating ethnic and cultural enclaves?

THE COALITION GOVERNMENT’S new “Culturally Arranged Marriage Visitors Visa” offers a powerful demonstration of multiculturalism at work. It signals to all those persons intending to settle in New Zealand that their traditional cultural practices will not be forbidden or discouraged by the authorities of their prospective new home. Regardless of how jarring those practices might be to the native-born population, official tolerance is guaranteed.

The cultural phenomenon of arranged marriages is widespread in the Developing World – with good reason. In traditional cultures, the extended family and its resources – both social and economic – has for centuries been the most important means of protecting and advancing its members’ interests. In circumstances of crippling poverty and inequality, the institution of marriage not only regularises procreation, it also offers multiple opportunities for increasing family wealth and prestige. The personal desires of the man and the woman involved are secondary to the advantages accruing to both sets of parents (the groom’s especially) from these carefully arranged and fiercely negotiated family alliances.

Westerners find it difficult to accept the level of individual self-sacrifice which arranged marriages require of the young men and women involved. Our own culture long ago abandoned the notion that parents are entitled to expect the unquestioning obedience of their offspring. In traditional cultures, however, such expectations remain extremely strong. Defiance of parental wishes is not just frowned upon, it can lead to the offender’s expulsion from the family home; withdrawal of financial and emotional support; and, in the worst cases, to their complete disinheritance.

Historically, immigrant children broke free from the strictures of their parents’ cultural traditions by taking advantage of the host nation’s more liberal legal and cultural regimes to seek partners and establish families independently. One or two generations was usually all it took for the cultural traditions of immigrant communities to become more honoured in the breach than in the observance.

Crucial to this process of assimilation was the host nation’s unashamed assumption of cultural superiority. Immigrants were told that they were joining a “modern” society founded on the principles of personal liberty, private property and human equality. Clinging to the ideas and practices of the “old country” was not the way to make “progress” in the new.

This “Melting Pot” approach to resolving the cultural tensions inherent in mass immigration worked relatively well in the age of “scientific racism”. This was because the diverse cultural practices of European ethnicities could be subsumed, in the racist ideology of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, by lumping them all under the broad category of “Caucasian”. In essence, the Melting Pot “worked” because the only peoples thrown into it were white. The populations constructed in this way – especially that of the USA – are, therefore, best described as multi-ethnic, rather than multicultural, societies.

It is significant that the assimilation processes which transformed Europe’s “huddled masses yearning to breathe free” into “Hyphenated Americans” – as in Irish-Americans, Italian-Americans, German-Americans, Polish-Americans and, more grudgingly, Jewish-Americans – were simply not equal to the task of assimilating either the descendants of former slaves or, until quite recently, immigrants from Asia. In this regard, New Zealand and the USA have much in common. In both countries the hatred for Asian immigrants – the Chinese in particular – was so intense that their respective governments were obliged to pass legislation which viciously restricted Asian immigration.

The scientific racism of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries also accounts for the dramatic difference between the way Australians treated “their” indigenous peoples as compared to the way Pakeha New Zealanders treated the Maori. According to leading New Zealand historian, James Belich, a small monograph entitled The Aryan Maori goes a long way to explaining the difference in treatment.

Penned by Edward Tregear, a senior and well-respected public servant, The Aryan Maori purported to prove that the Maori were a far-flung offshoot of the Caucasian (or, as they preferred to say in those days, “Aryan”) race. Whether Tregear truly believed this claim, or whether he made it up for the express purpose of bringing the races together, is difficult to establish. The important point is that it worked. The idea that Maori and Pakeha were racially kindred was reiterated everywhere: in political speeches, newspaper articles and school textbooks. In Belich’s own words, The Aryan Maori “arguably ranks with the Treaty of Waitangi as a key text of Maori-Pakeha relations.”

Alas the Australian Aborigines had no Edward Tregear to soften the extreme racial prejudice of Australian settler society.

Influential monographs aside, the driving conviction of European settler societies was that they represented the distillation of all that was most admirable in the “old world’s” civilisation. In these far-flung outposts of the West, the “pioneers” asserted, all that was rotten in Europe had been discarded, leaving only its most wholesome influences in play. New Zealand’s national anthem asks God to “guide her in the nations’ van/preaching love and truth to man”, all in the name of “working out [the Almighty’s] glorious plan”. Or, to quote the Louisianan populist, Huey Long, in these “new worlds” it was a case of “Every man a king – no one wears a crown”.

Who wouldn’t want to assimilate themselves into the very point of civilisation’s spear? That’s the question a great many Pakeha still (very quietly) ask themselves. Scratch the descendant of a New Zealand settler, and the dull gleam of assimilationism, with all its vices and virtues, remains the most likely result. Much less common, outside the universities’ sociology and anthropology departments, is the deep cultural pessimism born out of twentieth-century Europe’s horrific self-immolation.

In the ears of post-war intellectuals, Europe’s claim to global moral leadership sounded obscene. What sort of civilisation could produce Auschwitz?

The First World War had raised all manner of questions about the moral endurance of the West – and the Second World War settled them. European “civilisation” had turned the world into a charnel house. And it refused to stop. In Vietnam, the New World appeared to have decided to carry on from where the Old World left off. Post-war Americans may have looked upon their country as a “shining city set upon a hill”, but non-European eyes saw only cities burning under American bombs.

The central moral question of the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries thus became: by what right do Europeans pronounce upon who is, and who is not, “civilised”? After Auschwitz, and the Gulag; after My Lai and Srebrenica; who dares assert cultural hierarchies in which killers and colonialists occupy all the topmost places? And right up until the moment when the “wretched of the earth” started flying airliners into tall buildings and posting beheadings on Facebook, these were good – and fair – questions.

Here are some others.

In a world where no culture or ethnic group can credibly lay claim to moral superiority, is it not permissible for the citizens of a nation to demand that their government take particular care to nurture and defend its unique traditions and values?

If a multicultural immigration policy imposes no obligation on immigrant communities to acknowledge and ultimately embrace their host nation’s most cherished traditions and values, then how is that nation to prevent itself from being reduced to a collection of inward-looking and self-replicating ethnic and cultural enclaves?

Though the ashes of our fathers be scattered and dispersed; and the temples of our gods stand cracked and blackened; should not the voices crying out to save such treasures as still remain within – be heeded?

This essay was originally posted on The Daily Blog of Friday, 15 November 2019.

The Great Tightening 2.0

Trading Sovereignty For Investment Capital - Again: The suppression of local democracy is absolutely crucial to the success of the second “Great Tightening” exercise in New Zealand history. Unless the responsibility for making critical resource allocation and/or conservation decisions is taken out of the hands of elected local representatives and placed in the hands of unelected officials appointed by central government, then foreign investors will not feel sufficiently confident to risk their capital in major development projects.

 

ECONOMICALLY SPEAKING, it is difficult to define New Zealand as anything other than a colony. Its biggest export earner, agriculture, remains a price-taking not a price-making industry, and the other big foreign exchange earners: tourism and education; are essentially extractive. The former “mines” our spectacular scenery; the latter our status as a first-world, English-speaking nation.

 

That New Zealand is able to classify itself as a first-world nation is actually rather remarkable. A reliance on agricultural commodity exports and tourism is an economic condition generally associated with third-world states – most of which, only a century ago, were colonies of the major European powers. Officially, these former colonies are now free and independent states. But, if post-war history teaches us anything, it is that winning political independence, and becoming economically independent, are two very different things.

 

In order to grow and prosper, price-taking economies require a patron. For most of New Zealand’s history that role was fulfilled by Great Britain. It was British capital which financed the extensive infrastructure of its far-off farm, and it was in British markets that the produce of that far-off farm was sold. Without her capital and her markets, Great Britain’s far-off-farm would have failed. Certainly, New Zealand’s home-grown capitalists were too few and too poor to build a “Better Britain” in the South Pacific on their own.

 

More recently, the role of New Zealand’s principal economic patron has been taken over by China – which currently absorbs the lion’s share of New Zealand’s agricultural exports. If its history as a British colony is any guide, then the capital required to finance New Zealand’s future development will, increasingly, come from the Peoples Republic.

 

Like their British predecessors, Chinese investors are already attempting to secure control of the key supply chains to their domestic market. Just as New Zealand lambs were once raised on farms financed by British-owned banks; slaughtered in British-owned freezing works; transported to Smithfield in British-owned ships; and their frozen carcasses sold to British-owned retail outlets: New Zealand milk will soon be extracted from Chinese-owned cows; raised on Chinese-owned farms; processed into infant formula in Chinese-owned factories; shipped in Chinese-owned containers; and sold in Chinese-owned supermarkets.

 

One of the most interesting themes developed by the New Zealand historian, James Belich, in his 2001 book, Paradise Reforged, is what he calls “The Great Tightening”. In a nutshell, this describes the ways in which New Zealand politicians bound their countrymen ever more tightly to the British economy. New Zealand’s primary production went out to Britain; British manufactured goods came back; and woe betide anybody who got in the way (like visionary economic nationalists, socialist trade unionists, and other assorted pests).

 

It is rapidly becoming clear that a very similar tightening exercise is underway in twenty-first century New Zealand. In order to attract the foreign direct investment it believes New Zealand must have to keep its economy growing, the National Government of John Key is methodically emptying the statute books of every legislative impediment to economic development.

 

The suppression of local democracy is absolutely crucial to the success of this second “Great Tightening”. Unless the responsibility for making critical resource allocation and/or conservation decisions is taken out of the hands of elected local representatives and placed in the hands of unelected officials appointed by central government, then foreign investors will not feel sufficiently confident to risk their capital in major development projects.

 

Stripping local politicians of their power to manage and develop key infrastructure is an equally vital element of the same tightening programme. It’s what lies behind the draconian provisions of the Local Government Reform Bill currently before Parliament. Under this new law the unelected Local Government Commission will have the power to force local councils to hive-off key services, such as water reticulation, energy, ports and transportation to so-called “Council Controlled Organisations”. These Orwellian entities are, of course, anything but council controlled – as anyone living in Auckland, where they have been operating since the creation of the “Supercity” in 2010, will attest.

 

Auckland has not been the only laboratory in which the anti-democratic elements of National’s tightening have been tested. The people of Canterbury have been without democratic representation at the regional level since the Government sacked Ecan’s elected councillors and replaced them with appointed commissioners – also in 2010. With commissioners safely installed, the irrigation schemes deemed essential to dairy intensification in Canterbury could proceed without fear of democratic interference.

 

When most of the population of colonial New Zealand could trace their origins directly to Great Britain; and when the patriotic mists of Imperial Albion largely obscured the predatory commercial interests of the City of London, the first Great Tightening proved broadly acceptable.

 

The second will be very different. Those wondering how it feels to see one’s country subordinated to foreign interests should probably consult a Maori.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 6 September 2016.

Chinese Whispers.

New Imperiums For Old: China now stands where Britain stood: an economic colossus with expectations of this country that New Zealanders are only reluctantly beginning to comprehend. The thought that the Chinese might want something in return for opening up their market to our milk powder and baby formula has come very late to the ordinary Kiwi.

 

SONJA DAVIES was only in Parliament for six years. But, she could hardly have chosen a worse six-year period to be a Labour MP. Her time as MP for the Wellington seat of Pencarrow (1987-1993) coincided with the crescendo of Rogernomics and the splitting of the Labour Party. It was not a happy time for the celebrated feminist and trade union fighter, and she was only too happy to hand her seat over to Trevor Mallard and get out.

 

It wasn’t just the awfulness of life in the Labour Party in the late-1980s and early-90s that depressed Sonja Davies. As a shrewd observer of both local and international politics, she rapidly became aware that New Zealand was passing through a period of fundamental cultural and economic re-orientation. What concerned her most was how little New Zealanders were being told and, therefore, how little they knew, about the changes that were radically reshaping what it means to be a New Zealander.

 

“If people had any idea about the scale of these changes,” she confided to me early in her first term as MP for Pencarrow,” they’d be horrified. It’s been decided that New Zealand’s future lies in Asia. That’s got massive implications – but most people haven’t a clue. No one asked them and certainly no one’s telling them.”

 

Sonja Davies: People would be horrified.

 

New Zealand’s embrace of Asia (remember Jim Bolger’s startling comment that “New Zealand is an Asian country”?) was a policy driven by the same elite group of bureaucrats and businesspeople that had sponsored Roger Douglas’s “Quiet Revolution”. New Zealand’s once heavily-protected economy had been thrown open to the world in anticipation of the world’s major economies doing the same.

 

Significantly, the corollary of the free movement of capital, goods and services across international borders – the free movement of peoples – remained largely unexamined. Most New Zealanders simply did not realise that if their country was determined to trade freely with the whole world, then, more and more, its population would come to resemble the people with whom it was trading. If most of those people hailed from Asia, then New Zealand would, indeed, become “an Asian country”.

 

Why Asia? Simply because the traditional destinations for New Zealand’s exports, Europe and the United States, were largely satiated markets. Even worse, they remained highly protected markets. Throughout Asia generally, however, and, more specifically, in China, it was evident that millions of hitherto poor peasants and workers would soon be entering the ranks of a new and materialistically inclined “Middle Class”.

 

And, if history was any guide, one of the principal effects of these millions of Chinese becoming wealthy would be a dramatic change in their dietary habits. The demand would go up for protein, protein and more protein. And protein was – and is – what New Zealanders do best. Increasingly, the diplomatic and trade focus shifted from the global free trade chimeras of APEC and the Doha Round of the WTO, to the golden prize of a single, bilateral, free trade agreement with the People’s Republic of China.

 

That agreement was the crowning achievement of the Helen Clark-led Labour Government (1999-2008) and there can be no disputing its enormous and beneficial impact on the New Zealand economy. Equally indisputable, however, are the profound socio-cultural and political impacts of China becoming this country’s largest trading partner.

 

The New Zealand historian, James Belich, describes the political and socio-cultural effects of New Zealand being transformed into Britain’s “protein factory” as “The Great Tightening”. Essentially, this country was re-colonised by British capitalists and its population re- educated accordingly. That the process was carried out by people who looked like us and talked like us – our own kith and kin, as it were – did not make it any less destructive of our national sovereignty. More than 18,000 young New Zealanders’ died in World War I: their blood exchanged for our butter’s guaranteed access to the British market. New Zealand’s Prime Minister, William Massey, was happy to pay the butcher’s bill.

 

China now stands where Britain stood: an economic colossus with expectations of this country that New Zealanders are only reluctantly beginning to comprehend. The thought that the Chinese might want something in return for opening up their market to our milk powder and baby formula has come very late to the ordinary Kiwi.

 

That Labour is leading the discussion about how much, precisely, the Chinese have a right to expect from New Zealanders is entirely fitting. After all, it was Labour who sealed the deal. It was Labour, too, who presided over the electorally unmandated “turn” towards Asia in the late-80s. That they are, at last, addressing the misgivings expressed to me by Sonja Davies’ all those years ago, is to be applauded – not condemned.

 

Labour’s Chinese whispers have nothing to do with racism. They’re about national sovereignty and the people’s will.

 

This essay was originally published in The Press of Tuesday, 14 July 2015.