Lessons Learned? Professor Jane Kelsey addresses the 50th Otago Foreign Policy School on New Zealand and the Trans-Pacific Partnership. The most important lesson to take home from the school was that if the people stop making their own foreign policy, then somebody else will make it for them.
IF IT WAS A SCHOOL, what did we learn? Flying back to
Auckland, after three frigid days in Dunedin, that’s what I wanted to know.
Were any of us any wiser about the past, present and future of New Zealand
foreign policy? Well, yes and no. There’d been presentations that contained
material which many attendees were surprised to learn. Like New Zealand’s proud
record of support for the Palestinian cause at the United Nations. I had no
idea we’d been willing to defy the USA and Israel quite so often. For the most
part, however, the University of Otago’s Foreign Policy School wasn’t so much
about learning new things as it was about reaffirming old things.
Fifty years ago the idea that New Zealanders deserved a
chance to be schooled in the theory and practice of foreign policy was both new
and vaguely subversive. The conduct of diplomacy and the formulation of foreign
policy has for centuries been more or less the exclusive preserve of the
executive branch of government. That the Department of University Extension was
proposing to subject this elite process to academic exposition and debate would
have struck many as not merely unorthodox but even a little risky.
University Extension had, itself, grown out of the movement
for the democratisation of higher education, represented in the 1930s by the
Workers’ Educational Association. Now, in 1966, barely twelve months after a
very reluctant Keith Holyoake had agreed to join the USA and Australia in South
Vietnam, the Department’s Arnold Entwisle was proposing to induct ordinary
citizens into the mysteries and complexities of foreign policy. No wonder the
Department of External Affairs felt it advisable to “enrol” a staff member or
two in Mr Entwisle’s “school”.
And so the battle lines were drawn. On the one hand, the
democratisers: determined to encourage public questioning of, and participation
in, the formation of New Zealand foreign policy. On the other, the
professionals: elite defenders of the Crown’s prerogatives and uncompromising
protectors of her secrets. Over the 50 years of the Foreign Policy School’s
existence, these two fundamental and contradictory impulses have vied with one
another for supremacy. There have been times when it seemed that the annual
two-day colloquia were convened for no better purpose than to explain the ways
of MFAT’s gods to ordinary men. Through half-a-century, however, the impulse
towards democratisation and public participation has maintained a critical
presence.
So much so, that the professionals are now quite happy to
cite the achievements of the popular movements inspired by this country’s
foreign policy choices as evidence of New Zealand’s “independent” national
temperament. That the campaigns against New Zealand’s participation in the
Vietnam War; her relationship with Apartheid South Africa; and her reliance on
nuclear “deterrence” and the ANZUS alliance for her national security, were all
regarded with deep suspicion (if not outright hostility) by the “professionals”
of those Cold War years has, conveniently, been forgotten.
But, as Professor Kevin Clements, Chair of the National
Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Otago (and a long
time attendee of the Foreign Policy School) told us on Sunday morning: “there
is no national identity outside the people”. The New Zealand character, he
said, had been “born out of movements” and “shaped by struggle”.
If we’re regarded as egalitarian, it’s only because the
struggles of our labour movement made us so. And if we’re “nuclear free”, it’s
only because the grass-roots Nuclear-Free New Zealand movement’s astonishing
reach and intensity made it impossible for the fourth Labour government to be
anything else.
Over its 50 years, the Foreign Policy School has played its
part in educating and inspiring many of the key participants in the dramatic
foreign policy shifts of New Zealand’s post-war history. As it contemplates its
next 50 years, however, misgivings must multiply. The foreign policy upheavals
of the post-war era were, pre-eminently, the achievement of the Baby-Boom
Generation. But as the Boomers’ hair whitens, their places in the front ranks
of social change are not being filled by a new generation of idealistic
activists.
Indeed, after 50 years of struggle, it’s the professionals
who now seem to have the edge over the democratisers. Maybe that’s the lesson
to take home: that if the people stop making their own foreign policy, then somebody
else will make it for them.
This essay was
originally published in The Waikato Times, The Taranaki Daily News, The
Timaru Herald, The Otago Daily Times and The Greymouth Star of Friday, 3 July 2015.
