Can we negotiate our future and hold on to symbols of our past?

OPINION: I was out of the country on Waitangi Day - along with a million-odd other Kiwis. That didn't stop me reading, as I always do, the "state of the nation" musings of New Zealand's most thoughtful political commentator. Colin James has become a rare institution in New Zealand - a journalist who has managed to keep thinking and still be published.

As New Zealand has provincialised, his sober commentaries seem increasingly to one side of mainstream columnists reliant on hyperbole, or snide, shallow irony.

James has just taken yet another wry, gently mocking shot at the patchwork quilt of our institutions. As a patient republican, he has long jibbed at what he sees as an incomplete nationhood blighted by the detritus of a colonial past. He takes symbols seriously. His summary is not flattering: "still part-British-royal yet independent; a Supreme Court in Parliament's and the Cabinet's shadow; a flag that gets mixed up with others; a name from somewhere else; and an anthem entreating God to defend us and make us great".

James is a bit older than me, which may account for the strength of his feelings. Somewhere in the 1970s the fustiness of postwar New Zealand was mentally discarded. I don't know exactly when that happened. But there must be a cohort of New Zealanders for whom the break point between a world of cheering crowds during royal visits and jeering anti-Springbok protesters is most keenly focused. New Zealand discarded a lot of British baggage but plenty of symbols were left behind. For those able to remember the old New Zealand, these relics of an imperial high water mark must be a deeply irritating shadow on the title of national identity.

I'm not quite old enough to hold that fracture point in sharp relief. My political consciousness was formed in the Muldoon era. He was deeply conservative, but the society he grappled with had been unshackled. Once-potent symbols were on their way to becoming eclectic. The question today is whether you believe they need to be positively swept away, or whether you accept at least some of them as undeniable parts of our history and move organically to supplement them. It's a choice between self- conscious nation-building or a process of national accretion.

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Or is it? Because James rightly identifies a provincialism and a capacity for thinking small that could just as easily turn accretion into erosion. It has to be asked whether four million people have the capacity to erect the full array of serious institutional artillery that goes with independent statehood.

I have said it repeatedly over the past 25 years: New Zealand is the only small developed nation that is not part of a much larger political enterprise. All our comparators are in one way or another bound up in the European enterprise. The other small emerging states in the world are either surrounded by populations of hundreds of millions (the entrepot states like Singapore) or extracting rent from fabulous natural resource endowments (the oil states).

By contrast, we're in very clear air almost beyond earshot of the neighbours. The financial gotterdammerungs being played out in Iceland and Greece are European affairs. Europe has worked out a hugely complicated and expensive way of preserving national identities as part of a larger enterprise.

But if we went beyond the tipping point - and we have lived for far too long on other people's savings - I wonder what an Australian rescue would mean for the nationhood that James' generation would like to see crystallised?

I agree with his diagnosis of provincialism. And I agree that symbols matter. The new Supreme Court, as he notes, is neither as distinct nor as grand as a country that took its symbols seriously would have made it. Placed in the centre of a huge, formal rectangle of grass laid out by some latter-day Le Notre, it might have worked. But amidst the jumble of downtown Wellington, it is just another curiosity to join the many one-offs that give our capital's architecture such a splendidly experimental, eclectic feel. (Think about it: St Paul's, Te Papa, the Carillon.)

Maybe that's what New Zealand is - an eclectic and experimental venture that hasn't the time or money to be distinct and grand but must constantly improvise to stay afloat. The nationhood debate is increasingly passe. We should stop trying to airbrush history aside and enjoy some of the eclectica like knighthoods. The flag could be rescued from terminal confusion with Australia's, but I'd still find a way of combining British and Maori motifs. Our history did happen.

But this is a sideshow. Any constitutional review should focus on workable institutions that can cope with whatever accommodations we may have to make in a world shorn of Western hegemony. What sort of sovereignty might the future hold? What sort of constitutional plumbing would still enable us to improvise and negotiate?

- © Fairfax NZ News

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deemac   #1   12:15 pm Feb 09 2010

one day we will be part of a joint enterprise with our nearest neighbours Australia - better to do it now while we can have say in how we maintain our identity than wait till we are desperate.

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