march/april 2013 vol 38, no 2 - nziia.org.nz · rinternational new zealandeview march/april 2013...
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NEW ZEALAND INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
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New Zealand International Review1
New Zealand
International
ReviewMarch/April 2013 Vol 38, No 2
2 Preventing state failure Phil Goff examines New Zealand’s decision to intervene in the Solomon Islands.
Binoy Kampmark casts a critical eye over intellectual property aspects of the proposed TPP.
10 The legacies of super power Terence O’Brien looks at influences that henceforth will shape international events and considers
their impact on New Zealand.
15 Making a difference: another perspective Gerald McGhie reflects on New Zealand’s place in the world in light of recent comments by the
Labour Party’s foreign affairs spokesperson.
19 Training Papua New Guinea diplomats Peter Nichols and Peter Kennedy report on the NZIIA’s involvement in the second foreign service
training course in Port Moresby in November 2012.
20 When truth is twisted and facts are ignored Mordechai Kedar challenges the views about Palestine advanced by Lois and Martin Griffiths in
a recent article.
23 CONFERENCE REPORT China–New Zealand: an endless work in progress Brian Lynch reports on the second China–New Zealand symposium, held in Beijing last
December to commemorate the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries.
27 BOOKS David Hackett Fischer: Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies: New Zealand
and the United States (Jon Johansson).
Lindsey Hilsum: Sandstorm: Libya in the Time of Revolution (Anthony Smith).
Gregory Johnsen: The Last Refuge: Yemen, Al-Qaeda, and America’s War in Arabia (Anthony
Smith).
George Morgan and Scott Poynting (eds): Global Islamophobia: Muslims and Moral Panic in the West (Michael Appleton).
David Tucker: Illuminating the Dark Arts of War: Terrorism, Sabotage and Subversion in Homeland Security and the New Conflict (Beth Greener).
32 CORRESPONDENCE
33 INSTITUTE NOTESManaging Editor: IAN McGIBBONCorresponding Editors: STEPHEN CHAN (United Kingdom), STEPHEN HOADLEY (Auckland)Book Review Editor: ANTHONY SMITHEditorial Committee: ANDREW WEIRZBICKI (Chair), ROB AYSON, BROOK BARRINGTON, PAUL BELLAMY, BOB BUNCH, GERALD McGHIE, MALCOLM McKINNON, JOSH MITCHELL, ROB RABEL, SHLINKA SMITH, JOHN SUBRITZKY, ANN TROTTER, JOCELYN WOODLEYPublisher: NEW ZEALAND INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRSTypesetting/Layout: LOVETT GRAPHICSPrinting: THAMES PUBLICATIONS LTDNew Zealand International Review is the bi-monthly publication of the New Zealand Institute of Affairs. (ISBN0110-0262)Address: Room 507, Railway West Wing, Pipitea Campus, Bunny Street, Wellington 6011Postal: New Zealand Institute of International Affairs, C/- Victoria University of Wellington, PO Box 600, Wellington 6140Telephone: (04) 463 5356Website: www.vuw.ad.nz/nziia. E-mail: [email protected]: New Zealand $50.00 (incl GST/postage). Overseas $85.00 (Cheques or money orders to be made payable to the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs)
The views expressed in New Zealand International Reviewnon-partisan body concerned only to increase understanding and informal discussion of international affairs, and especially New Zealand’s involvement in them. By permission of the authors the copyright of all articles appearing in New Zealand International Review is held by the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs
New Zealand International Review2
Three simultaneous crises in the Pacific that confronted New
Zealand in the first year of the fifth Labour government took up
much of my time as foreign minister. East Timor, Fiji and the Sol-
omon Islands all presented us with different problems requiring
different responses.
In East Timor, New Zealand and Australia intervened with
military forces on a large scale to prevent further slaughter and
destruction. That was followed by a United Nations led effort
through military, police and civil support to help rebuild East Ti-
mor and create a new nation. In Fiji, yet another coup overthrew
an elected government. Military intervention was never consid-
ered, but we embarked alongside Australia and the Pacific Forum
in prolonged diplomatic efforts to restore legitimate government.
In the Solomon Islands, as that country faced increasing vio-
lence, New Zealand and Australia initially resisted calls from the
government of the Solomon Islands to send personnel to restore
order. But as the country descended further into chaos, Australia
and New Zealand, with the support of the Pacific Forum, made
decisions which culminated in the creation of the Regional Assis-
tance Mission to the Solomon Islands, to respond to state failure.
How and why was the decision made to intervene? What
processes did we follow in doing so, including achieving region-
al support to assist the Solomon Islands? How effective has the
intervention been in achieving its objectives, and what were the
constraints and limitations on doing so?
First visitI first visited the Solomon Islands in March 2000. I reported to
Cabinet that it was a country where ‘fear and tension were palpa-
ble’ and that ‘the situation of violence and lawlessness could wors-
en with little warning’. In the preceding two years violence had
broken out as a result of long-standing resentment by the people
of Guadalcanal against settlers from neighbouring Malaita who
had married local women and taken control of land. This resulted
in Gwale militia groups embarking on ethnic cleansing of over
20,000 Malaitans. The Malaitans in response formed their own
militia, the Malaitan Eagle Force (MEF), which quickly seized
control of Honiara. Fighting erupted in which dozens were killed.
Law and order collapsed, with the Royal Solomon Islands Police
Force corrupt and dysfunctional at senior and middle levels.
The prime minister, Bart Ulufa’alu, sought assistance from
Australia and New Zealand, but both countries declined to in-
Preventing state failure Phil Goff examines New Zealand’s decision to intervene in the Solomon Islands.
Hon Phil Goff MP is the Labour Party’s spokesperson on foreign affairs. This article -
tervene with military or
police. We argued that
as outsiders we could not
impose solutions on do-
mestic problems and that
Solomon Islanders them-
selves needed to accept
responsibility and act to
resolve them.
In response to the
prime minister’s request,
we did however agree to
provide a neutral venue
for parties to the violence
to discuss their differenc-
es. This had proven a use-
ful form of assistance ear- Bart UIufa’alu
lier in the conflict on Bougainville, resulting in the parties moving
forward to resolve a war where 10,000 had died. With a repeat of
the Burnham Camp style peace talks, we hoped to head off full
scale conflict.
Violent confrontationsBy June, however, events took their own course with Prime Min-
ister Ulufa’alu taken hostage by the MEF and violent confronta-
tions escalating around Honiara. In response, I went to Honiara
with an RNZAF plane to evacuate New Zealanders, and to par-
ticipate as a member of the Commonwealth Ministers’ Action
Group visit.
The Commonwealth had earlier sent Sitiveni Rabuka as an en-
voy to seek resolution of the issues through dialogue, but that was
not successful. The conflict worsened and the economy and pro-
vision of government services ground to a halt. Australia worked
with both sides to broker a ceasefire agreement. The militia groups
were brought together by Australia and New Zealand in Queens-
land and persuaded to sign the Townsville Peace Agreement.
Under the agreement, Australian and New Zealand un-
armed peacekeepers — the International Peace Monitoring Team
(IPMT) — were deployed to supervise the handover of arms and
rebuild confidence in the rule of law. New Zealand contributed
fourteen of the 47 members. The IPMT would not itself impose
law and order but rather would receive and hold weapons and
monitor adherence to the peace process. An indigenous Peace
Monitoring Council was set up to keep ownership and resolution
of the problem in the hands of local people.
In my paper to Cabinet I said that taking no action would be a
recipe for sharp deterioration in the situation. I added that ‘an in-
ternational presence will increase the odds that the peace process
will hold, but cannot guarantee it’.
Labour government (along with East Timor and Fiji). As the violence escalated, New Zealand initially resisted calls for intervention, believing that outsiders imposing solutions on domes-tic problems was inappropriate. But after the situation deteriorated in mid-2003 New Zealand
-
New Zealand International Review3
In the meantime, in response to
the crises in both Fiji and the
Solomons, Australian Foreign
Minister Alexander Downer
and I sought to engage coun-
tries in the region to help find
solutions. In August 2000 we
convened the first Pacific Fo-
rum foreign ministers’ meeting
in Apia, chaired by Tuiliepa.
We achieved a significant ad-
vance in having Forum mem-
bers agree to collectively address
underlying causes of conflict in
The International Peace Monitoring Team had some success.
A substantial number of weapons were surrendered but many
remained in the hands of the militias and criminal elements. I
said in a paper to Cabinet at that time that ‘the commitment of
the militias to the peace process was uncertain and that without
effective law enforcement, the law of the gun would continue to
hold sway’.
Sadly that proved true. There needed to be political commit-
ment within the Solomons to solving the problems and this was
at best patchy. Both Australia and New Zealand increased contri-
butions to strengthening policing but this proved inadequate in
the face of intransigence from the militias.
In June 2003, a new prime minister, Allan Kemakeza, again asked
for military assistance from Australia and New Zealand after mi-
litias burned villages and killed people on the Weathercoast, and
took captive over a thousand villagers. I had personally come to
the conclusion after six visits to the Solomons that intervention of
this nature was necessary to prevent social, economic and political
collapse. I had to work hard to persuade my Cabinet colleagues
and leader of this. They had justifiable concerns about the efficacy
of intervention, the difficulties of then finding an exit strategy and
the risks to the lives of the people we would deploy.
Alexander Downer
the region and engage in situations which had region-wide im-
plications and impacts. The Apia Outcomes Statement read that:
‘Ministers recognised the need for regional action to be taken on
the basis of all members of the Forum being part of the Pacific
Islands extended family.’
We drew up recommendations which would be referred to
leaders in the Pacific Islands Forum in October in Kiribati, which
formed the basis of the Bikitawa Declaration. The Apia statement
set out fundamental principles such as freedom under the law,
equal rights for all citizens and the right of every person to partici-
pate by means of a free and democratic political process in making
decisions about their society.
It talked about upholding democratic processes and institu-
tions — the peaceful transfer of power, the rule of law, independ-
ence of the judiciary, and just and honest government. It called
for equitable economic, social and cultural development. The
statement also outlined mechanisms by which the forum would
respond to the breach of these principles, which ranged from a
declaratory statement, a fact finding mission, mediation and the
imposition of sanctions.
Prime Minister Helen Clark, following the subsequent adop-
tion of the Bikitawa Declaration, reported to Cabinet that
The Forum moved from its hitherto passive stance. For the
first time it agreed to institutionalise procedures for respond-
ing collectively to political and security crises in the region.
Some have criticised the concepts in the Bikitawa Declaration as
being Western values and principles. When the underlying cause
of the crises in the Pacific often had their origins in colonialism,
they asked how these Western concepts would be seen as relevant
in the indigenous context.
I do not disagree that the colonial legacy underlies subsequent
state failure. In the case of the Solomons the colonial power, Brit-
ain, had brought together ethnically diverse peoples into an arti-
ficial state without creating any sense of national identity. It had
also ill-prepared the new nation, with only seventeen graduates in
the Solomon Islands at independence. Britain had established a
Westminster system of government which bore no resemblance
and had little relevance to traditional custom and authority.
I do not, however, accept that the principles of the Bikitawa
Declaration are invalid. I see them as universal values relevant to
the well-being of people in any country. Yet that does not answer
the question of how those values can be inculcated into the think-
ing of the leaders and elites in countries like the Solomons.
Australia was more easily
persuaded that the time had
come to adopt a new strategy.
The world had changed since
they had last declined the invi-
tation to intervene. The events
of the terrorist attack of 9/11
and the Bali bombing in 2002
had increased concerns about
failing states providing a po-
tential haven for terrorists.
The doctrine of the re-
sponsibility to protect was
also being debated in the Allan Kemakeza
United Nations. The spectre of innocent people dying in the Sol-
omons while we sat back and watched was as unacceptable as it
had been in East Timor. The decision was made on both sides
of the Tasman that we had little option, but we needed to do it
in the right way. There needed to be a formal invitation from all
sides in the Solomons. The intervention needed to involve more
than simply the large, wealthy white countries in the south of the
Pacific in supporting the action.
Downer convened a further meeting of the Pacific Forum foreign
ministers in Sydney, and he and I set out the case for action. We
secured unanimous support for an intervention involving armed
forces. Commonwealth support and UN concurrence was at-
tained.
The intervention would be a comprehensive one in order
to maximise the prospect of its success. The armed component
would stabilise the short-term situation but there needed to be
thorough on-going reform of the police, the justice system and
financial management for long-term results. Australia was pre-
pared to commit big dollars and New Zealand to lift its level of
development support. However, a precondition of contributions
New Zealand International Review4
from both countries was not to allow that investment to be wasted
through incompetency and corruption.
On 24 July 2003 the first RAMSI personnel were deployed,
with most of the 1800 troops Australian but backed by a strong
New Zealand contingent and also regional forces from Fiji, Papua
New Guinea and Tonga. The mission received an overwhelming
welcome by the Solomon Islands people on the ground. It suc-
ceeded in collecting in 3000 firearms and 300,000 rounds of am-
munition. Militants like Harold Keke who had terrorised people
and murdered opponents were arrested.
Over 300 RAMSI police officers assisted in restoring law and
order. Comprehensive reform of the Royal Solomon Islands Police
Force (RSIPF) began. Financial management systems which had
collapsed were restored. Government services including justice,
health and education that had ceased to operate were resumed.
The mission was effective in restoring normality to the Solomons
and security to its people.
Underlying causesWhat was and is harder to change are the underlying causes of the
conflict and the endemic corruption in the Solomons’ political
system. In April 2006 conflict re-erupted with the burning down
of Chinatown in response to the election of Snyder Rini as prime
minister. The riots, not foreseen by RAMSI, were highly orches-
trated. Among those arrested were politicians who had just been
appointed as Cabinet ministers.
Order was again restored. However support for the mission
among the political leadership waned, as some politicians saw
RAMSI as blocking their ability to benefit from the perks of
power. Members of Parliament I met in the aftermath of the ri-
ots questioned whether the mission had broadened its mandate
beyond the original intentions. I reported to Cabinet that they
wanted RAMSI ‘to provide more order and economic develop-
derlying problems remain.
There has now been a sufficiently long period of calm and sta-
bility in the Solomons for the military component of RAMSI, al-
ready down to a small number, to be withdrawn, though assistance
to policing and through development aid will continue.
RAMSI has involved an enormous financial investment by
New Zealand of over $400 million dollars and more than three
times that amount by Australia. Yet the assessment by many is
that once RAMSI is withdrawn, what has been achieved will be
at risk. In cables released in the Wikileaks, US officials approving-
ly quoted the assessment of diplomatic contacts in Honiara that
if RAMSI left it would take about a week for trouble to break
out since none of the underlying issues which caused widespread
ethnic violence have been addressed. ‘Over the 28 years since in-
dependence modern government has failed to take root’, it was
reported.
Continuing fragilityThe Independent Experts Team which does annual evaluations
reported in 2010 that ‘corruption and misuse of political pow-
er continue to be a major concern’. The RSIPF remains ‘fragile
and is unlikely to be self-sustaining by 2013’. There remains a
shortage of qualified local personnel across the board. New finan-
cial management systems and the economy were doing well but
‘would easily be rolled back without explicit and ongoing political
support’. ‘While Ramsi has succeeded in suppressing the violent
manifestation of conflict, the issues underlying the tensions have
largely not been resolved and will continue to be potential triggers
for violence’, it stated.
In summary, the RAMSI achievements in pulling the Solo-
mon Islands back from the brink of economic, social and political
collapse are real and deserve credit. There are, however, critical
underlying issues that outsiders have not and perhaps cannot ad-
dress. As Canterbury University political scientist John Hender-
son has concluded on governance and constitutional issues: ‘To
be lasting and effective the political systems that emerge in the
Solomon Islands and elsewhere in Oceania will need to be home
grown. This will take time’.
The winding up of the Regional Assistance Mission is accept-
ed on both sides as being necessary. The lasting impact of the
intervention will be put to test as RAMSI withdraws.
Members of the RAMSI mission
Manasseh Sogavare ment but less law and gov-
ernance’.
Under the subsequent
prime ministership of Ma-
nasseh Sogavare tensions
between RAMSI and the
Solomon Islands govern-
ment rose, peaking with
the expulsion of Australian
High Commissioner Pat-
rick Cole in 2007. Under
subsequent prime ministers,
tensions eased, but the un-
New Zealand International Review5
‘You know, many of you who know me know that I go on and
on and on and on and then some talking about [the] TPP and
why it’s, you know, the greatest thing in the entire world.’
(Ambassador Demetrios Marantis, 8 August 2012)1
As the Obama administration’s first term came to a close, a con-
siderable strategic dimension started to become clear. The focus
on the Asia–Pacific region would start to take precedence over Eu-
ropean, Middle Eastern and Latin American issues. Washington,
it was announced, was going to ‘pivot’ towards the Asia–Pacific
region in a new realignment of interests. This would entail the
redeployment of naval forces to the Pacific, a ‘rebalancing’ that
would place 60 per cent of US naval assets in the region.2
In all of this, there has been another dimension that has lacked
serious attention. Analysis, certainly from official circles, has been
conspicuously absent. The United States, along with a group of
Illiberal trade interests:
Binoy Kampmark casts a critical eye over intellectual property aspects of the proposed TPP.
Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: [email protected]
countries, is playing the cardinal role in creating what has come
to be called the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement. Touted as
a ‘free trade’ agreement, it is currently being negotiated by the
United States, Australia, Brunei Darussalam, Chile, Malaysia,
New Zealand, Peru, Singapore and Vietnam. With the military
‘pivot’ comes that of finance, and the Obama administration has
made it clear that as 60 per cent of US export goods finds its way
to the Asia–Pacific region, along with 75 per cent of its agricultur-
al produce, it is the vital region of interest for the United States.
The shift of focus may well in time become one of the cor-
nerstones of the Obama administration’s second term, should the
TPP combine with Washington’s strategic ‘pivot’ to the Asia–Pa-
cific region. Others are less than impressed. The TPP has been
described as ‘NAFTA on steroids’.3 Billionaire and former US
presidential candidate Ross Perot suggested that if such an agree-
ment were to be implemented, a ‘giant sucking sound’ would be
heard as millions of jobs left the country.4
What exactly lies at the heart of the TPP? The United States
first entered into negotiations in March 2008. There have been up
to fourteen rounds of negotiations, all highly secretive. The degree
of secrecy, for one, is striking. Only large corporate figures, as op-
posed to public interest advocates, have been allowed to cast an
New Zealand International Review6
eye over the provisions. This has not
stopped the US State Department
from telling media representatives
that ‘stakeholders’ far and wide are
being mined for their wisdom. The
only official document we have to go
on in this regard is a leaked US draft
proposal from February 2011 detail-
ing matters touching on copyright.5
Other bits of the puzzle have only
come about because of other leaks,
totalling five, and press briefings that
offer little by the way of substantive
information.
The lack of official debate on the
subject has not prevented a very active
discussion from taking place among
observers of internet regulation, nota-
bly on the chapter covering intellec-
tual property. The Electronic Fron-
tier Foundation, to take one, has not
been impressed. Two problems are
identified by the organisation — IP
restrictions and a lack of transparency.
In terms of the first, ‘the IP chapter
would have extensive negative rami-
fications for users’ freedom of speech,
right to privacy and due process, and
[would] hinder peoples’ abilities to cess is a regional means of replacing the World Trade Organisa-
tion (WTO) agreements that failed after the Uruguay Round
(1986–94). The WTO’s efforts to complete the Doha Develop-
ment Round, launched in 2001, remain fractious and potentially
unresolvable. The document that would be produced at the end
of the negotiations would be ‘a take-it-or-leave-it document’ that
would essentially be approved by the Cabinet then given a formal
‘rubber stamp’ in Parliament. 8
Comprehensive overviewIn a talk at the Wilson Centre in Washington in August 2012,
US Ambassador Demetrios Marantis, deputy US trade represent-
ative, provided a somewhat more comprehensive overview of the
TPP’s implications. The TPP had to be comprehensive and sin-
gular in that it had to cover both goods and services, current and
future. It had to allow the United States to conduct its engage-
innovate’. The second was characterised by a grand ‘shut out’ of
‘multi-stakeholder participation’.6
New Zealand’s minister for trade, Tim Groser, articulates the of-
ficial TPP line. The government’s premise is that the TPP will
improve New Zealand’s export performance through the removal
of trade impediments. A familiar rhetorical tactic is used: quote
trade percentages and then link them to the direct outcome of
free trade.
Nearly 50 per cent of New Zealand exports are now covered
by free trade agreements. The Trans-Pacific Partnership is the
centrepiece in our current efforts to push forward the process
of trade liberalisation.7
The premise then is that the TPP improves competition (though
Groser does not say how), a wise policy as opposed to the ‘dumb’
policy of protectionism. To remain competitive in such areas as
world manufacturing ‘and be part of the global value chain, you
must ensure your manufacturers can access world-class inputs at
competitive prices’.
Having showered the protectionist philosophy with its due
share of abuse, Groser yields nothing in terms of how a TPP
might, given the range of variable economies and strengths in-
volved in the negotiations, actually contribute to ‘competition’
and the allowance of access of New Zealand companies to the
TPP market. It is merely sufficient that the regime is liberal, and
that it be open. The mechanics of how this will be implemented
is rarely touched upon.
The same oblique story can be found across the Tasman.
According to an Australian Department of Foreign Affairs and
Trade stakeholder briefing on 14 November 2012, the TPP pro-
Tim Groser
New Zealand International Review7
ment in regional supply chains in the Asian region from home
soil, in distinction to the NAFTA model that saw the off-shoring
of jobs. The agreement had to remove non-tariff barriers — in
other words, the removal of those behind the scenes ‘regulations’
that become inadvertent ‘tariffs’. (Marantis gives the example of
sanitary and phytosanitary measures.)
The clincher lies in the overall framework of regulation as it
relates to non-US partners in the negotiations. The US delegation
was ‘trying to ensure that TPP partners follow good regulatory
practices like we do in the U.S.’ 9 The statement is unblemished
in its parochialism, but it states the position clearly: other negoti-
ating teams will have to mirror American practices. The level play-
ing field, in short, is uneven before it even starts, skewed towards
Washington’s vision of ‘best practice’.
It is not surprising that this sentiment is echoed in Congress,
where US senators are pressuring the administration to privilege
American interests when it comes to intellectual property rights.
Liberalisation can seem somewhat illiberal depending on how
it is employed. In a letter to the White House, 28 senators ex-
pressed the view that ‘A TPP agreement with strong protections
for intellectual property promises to be an important means of
ensuring that US companies can continue to innovate and grow
in this global economy.’ The emphasis here is on keeping jobs in
the United States, not allowing an advantage for other economies
to capitalise under the regime. This position was much lauded
by the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America.10
The short of it is, keep competition American.
There are smidgens of what a TPP would not do, anecdotal
suggestions coming from, to take one example, Carol Guthrie,
assistant US trade representative for public and media affairs. At
a phone briefing in July last year, Guthrie, in response to a ques-
tion covering AFL–CIO concerns on the possible undermining of
labour regulations (overtime payment and maternity leave), sug-
gested there was nothing to be concerned about. There were ‘mis-
conceptions’ floating about as to how the TPP and other trade
agreements dealt with such matters as the arbitration of inves-
tor disputes. Nothing being negotiated, assured Guthrie, would
prevent any of the participating governments ‘from regulating in
the public interest … — whether it’s in the financial sector, in
the public health sector with regard to safety or the environment
or other regulatory areas’.11 Again, her statements proved thin on
detail.
Intellectual propertyThe advocacy organisation Public Knowledge has set up a site
with details on the TPP. The organisation is most concerned by
intellectual property implications, which it sees as excessive, hav-
ing an adverse effect on ‘the ability of creators to create content,
the ability of technology companies to make innovative products,
and that ability of users to use content in new ways’.12
Negotiators of the TPP seem to be pushing the agreement in
the direction of the flawed US Digital Millennium Copyright Act
(DMCA). Provisions, commentators have noted, seem to mirror
the US statute, with the intention that other countries will adopt
them. That would mean that a range of innovative copyright re-
gimes already in place will have to be adjusted, which is exactly
what US trade representatives want. Of significance are the provi-
sions in the DMCA that govern the liability of online service pro-
viders for their users’ infringements. Significant in this regard are
the ‘notice-and-takedown’ provisions that mandate online service
providers to remove material after an owner of copyright submits
a notice alleging that the material is of an infringing nature.13
That said, the DMCA in its current form retains rules on safe
harbour — web hosting services may rely on safety from copy-
right liability provided they satisfy various provisions: lacking
knowledge of the infringement, not financially benefiting from
the infringement, and taking down allegedly infringing material
after receiving a notice from a copyright owner.14 Given all that, it
is worth noting that the DMCA is a creature of 1998. With the
accelerated transformations in online technologies — the emer-
gence of YouTube, the continued domination of Google — these
rules may well be adjusted.
Article 16.3(a) of the TPP proposal requires signatory coun-
tries to create ‘legal incentives for service providers to cooperate
with copyright owners in deterring the unauthorized storage and
transmission of copyrighted materials’. This shift of the burden to
online platforms has the effect of pecking away at such exonerat-
ing provisions as safety harbours.
Another modelAnother model here is the American SOPA or the Stop Online
Piracy Act, which also turns such internet entities as Facebook,
Google and anyone with a website ‘into a copyright cop’.15 As a
creature on its own, it was derailed in Congress, but has found
American protestors rally against the TPP
Carol Guthrie
New Zealand International Review8
shape in the provisions of the TPP. Key industries may benefit
from this — the entertainment and pharmaceutical industries,
for example. The latter is particularly keen on enforcing monop-
olies on data exclusivity with patent protection, stifling the threat
posed by generic competitors. In this sense, a free trade agreement
patterned on such premises becomes not so much free as a matter
of keeping it free for some corporate interests over others.
An analysis conducted by several advocacy groups on the
leaked US paper on patents goes into further detail. Australian
law, as it stands, provides the grounds of pre-grant and post-grant
challenges to patents. Even after the publication of a patent ap-
plication that has been accepted, a person can oppose that ap-
plication within three months under the Patent Act 1990. Such
procedures are present to prevent the abuse of the patent process,
but Article 8.7 of the leaked US TPP proposal suggests the remov-
al of this entire procedure.16 Furthermore Article 8.6 stresses the
need to avoid ‘unreasonable or unnecessary delays’ affecting the
patent process.
Advocacy groups have attacked a few specific features. The
TPP targets ‘incidental copies’, or those creations made by com-
puters in the moving of data. Temporary reproductions in such
cases do occur, and deeming this an infringement in the absence
of the copyright holder’s permission has been previously frowned
upon. This was certainly the case at the inter-governmental diplo-
matic conference that created two international copyright treaties
in 1996 — the WIP Copyright Treaty and the WIPO Perfor-
mances and Phonograms Treaty.17
Such buffer copy protection will mean a more onerous licens-
ing regime at the behest of the copyright owner. According to
Public Knowledge, there should be no criminalising of small in-
fringements — the downloading of music, to take an example.
Nor should users be ‘kicked’ off the internet for alleged infringe-
ments.18 The latter is deemed particularly worrying, introducing
what will amount to a ‘three strikes’ policy — the user could be
barred from their internet connection after three accusations of
infringement. In this case, the agreement will leave the role of
policing to the ISPs.
Potential isolationThe TPP is also a mechanism of potential isolation. The BRIC
powers are not included in the discussions, and an argument has
been made suggesting that one of the key targets of the arrange-
ment is China and its disposition to flouting international copy-
right arrangements.
This is not something that Chinese authorities will necessar-
ily want to let on. Discussion on the matter, when available, has
often been subtle and diplomatic. A publication by Professor Cai
Penghong, director of the APEC Research Centre at the Shanghai
Academy of Social Sciences, sees the various trade options in the
Asia–Pacific region as ‘complementary’ rather than a ‘zero game
relationship’. ‘Our understanding is that TPP like others such as
ASEAN +3, ASEAN +6 is a critical tool to the APEC destination
in Asia Pacific.’19
Other countries in the Asia–Pacific region have only shown
qualified support for the TPP, suggesting that such an agreement
has to take place within a broader framework of treaties. Japan’s
position is a good example of this. The Japan Business Federa-
tion (Nippon Keidanren) has, through its ‘Proposals for Japan’s
Trade Strategy’, argued for a ‘proactive and strategic trade policy’
that would involve concluding the WTO Doha Round and pro-
A protest against the TPP in Nelson in December 2012
Aucklanders protest against the partnership in February 2013
moting ‘the conclusion of EPAs with the United States, China
and the EU... through the frameworks of the TPP, ASEAN+6,
and Japan–EU EIA’.20 The Japanese Ministry of Economy, Trade
and Industry has been less sure, encouraging the use of free trade
agreements as a means of boosting Japanese economic recovery
while stating that it ‘might be desirable’ for Japan to join the TPP.
Purpose defeatedThere is nothing unreasonable about Washington promoting its
own interests in the global economy, ensuring that US companies
have first bite of the cherry in such areas as innovation and devel-
opment. But the use of such agreements as the TPP, ostensibly
designed to create a free trade zone that is not so much free as
selectively liberal in favour of Washington’s own laws, defeats the
purpose. The project, if anything, is designed to arrest the innova-
tive challenges posed by the emerging powers, of which China is
the primary target, and more broadly speaking companies in the
developing world. We must take the arguments from the smaller
delegations (Australia, New Zealand, Peru, to name but a few) as
not merely ill-informed factually but ideologically misplaced and
unreliable.
It is true that until the agreement is published in full, with its
provisions stated and discussed in a broader forum, some of these
assertions will have to be qualified. The public record, thin as it
is, is not encouraging. Press briefings, coupled with the various
leaks, do nothing to rebut the suggestion that the TPP remains, at
its core, an exercise in threatened US power in search of allies to
protect its interests. Free trade remains a dogma that cannot learn
new tricks, which is not surprising, given that it barely exists to
begin with.
NOTES1. Demetrios Marantis, deputy US trade representative, ‘The
Trans-Pacific Partnership and the Future of International
New Zealand International Review9
Trade’, Wilson Centre, Washington,
8 Aug 2012, Washington Newsmaker
Transcript Database, 18 Jan 2013.
2. See Congressional Research Service,
‘Pivot to the Pacific? The Obama Ad-
ministration’s “Rebalancing” Toward
Asia’, 28 Mar 2012 (www.fas.org/sgp/
crs/natsec/R42448.pdf).
3. The Nation, 27 Jul 2012.
4. Noted in Matt Mitchell and Bill Davis,
‘The Take-it-or-leave-it Trans-Pacific
Partnership’, Independent Australia, 21
Nov 2012 (www.independentaustralia.
net/2012/business/the-take-it-or-leave-
it-trans-pacific-partnership/).
5. The leaked text on the intellectual
property chapter is available at keion-
Protestors in Japan in April 2012
line.org/node/1091.
6. Electronic Frontier Foundation, ‘Trans Pacific Agreement’,
nd (www.eff.org/issues/tpp).
7. Tim Groser, ‘Stoking the engine of growth’, NZ International Review, vol 37, no 6 (2012), pp.12–16.
8. Mitchell and Davis, op cit.
9. Marantis, op cit.
10. US Senate, Letter to the President, 17 May 2011, available
at www.phrma.org/sites/default/files/1245/2011.05.17_fi-
nal_hatch_cantwell.letter.pdf; ‘PhRMA Applauds Biparti-
san Senate Support for Strong Intellectual Property Protec-
tions in the Trans-Pacific Partnership Agreement’, Statement
on 19 May 2011 (www.phrma.org/media/releases/phrma-ap-
plauds-bipartisa-senate-support-strong-intellectual-proper-
ty-protections-tra).
11. Telephone Briefing by Carol Guthrie, Subject: Closing of
Round 13 of Trans-Pacific Partnership Talks, San Diego,
California, 2.14 pm, Tuesday, 10 Jul 2012, Washington
Newsmaker Transcript Database, 13 Jul 2012.
12. Public Knowledge, ‘The Trans-Pacific Partnership’ (tppinfo.
org, acc 17 Jan 2013).
13. Jodie Griffin, ‘Failing to Understand the Needs of the 21st
Century: The TPP and the Notice-and-Takedown System’,
Public Knowledge, 14 Sep 2012 (tppinfo.org/2012/09/14/
failing-to-understand-the-needs-of-the-21st-century-the-tpp-
and-the-notice-and-takedown-system/).
14. Ibid.
15. Dean Baker, ‘The Pacific Free Trade Deal that’s anything but
Free’, The Guardian, 27 Aug 2012.
A large banner at a protest rally in San Diego in July 2012
NOTE FOR CONTRIBUTORSWe welcome unsolicited articles, with or without illustrative material photographs, cartoons, etc. Text should be typed double spaced on one side of the sheet only. Text or
-come. Facsimiles are not acceptable. Copy length should not be more than 3000 words though longer pieces will be considered. Footnotes should be kept to a minimum, and only in exceptional circumstances will we print more than 15 with an article.
16. Burcu Kiliç and Peter Maybarduk, ‘Comparative Analysis of
the United States’ TPPA Intellectual Property Proposal and
Australian Law’, Public Citizen, Aug 2011 (www.citizen.org/
access).
17. Electronic Frontier Foundation, ‘Trans Pacific Agreement’.
18. Public Knowledge, ‘Trans-Pacific Partnership’.
19. Cai Penghong, ‘The Trans-Pacific Partnership: A Chinese
Perspective’, Presentation, nd, noted at www.pecc.org. Pres-
entation available at www.pecc.org/resources/doc_view/1752-
the-trans-pacific-partnership-a-chinese-perspective-ppt.
20. Aurelia G. Mulgan, ‘Industry versus agriculture in Japan’s
TPP debate’, East Asia Forum, 27 Jul 2011 (www.eastasia-
forum.org/2011/07/27/industry-versus-agriculture-in-ja-
pan-s-tpp-debate/).
CORRIGENDUM
In the article ‘Taiwan update: domestic reform and soft
power diplomacy’ by Stephen Hoadley in the last issue (vol
38, no 1), it was stated that Taiwan’s Pacific aid is concen-
trated in its ‘five islands diplomatic partners — Solomon
Islands, Nauru, Marshall Islands, Tuvalu, and Palau — but
projects are also directed to Fiji, Papua New Guinea, and
Kiribati even though they are diplomatic partners of Bei-
jing’. In fact Kiribati and the Taiwan have been in diplo-
matic relations since 7 November 2003 and Kiribati is one
of the Taiwan’s six diplomatic partners in Oceania.
New Zealand International Review10
The very idea of super power is an invention of the 20th century.
It is the product of that era of two immensely destructive world
wars and a 40-year long Cold War that imposed an ideological
straitjacket on our world, which still, some 20 years after its end,
influences mindsets of some policy-makers in powerful capitals.
According to the dictionary, the term ‘super-power’ was first em-
ployed by an American historian, W.T. Fox, in 1944 to describe
the situation created by the end of the Second World War where,
he concluded, that ‘great power plus great mobility of power de-
fined a superpower’.1
Fox identified the United States, Soviet Union and Britain as
possessing the required attributes, but, of course, events transpired
in such a way that Britain, exhausted by war and confronted by
an empire restless for independence, slipped irresistibly from pole
position — leaving the United States and the Soviet Union as
sole contenders. The Soviet Union claimed communism as the
ideology of true progress and social justice for the world, while
the United States, which had organised itself impressively for
both war and victory as well as escaping the scourge of conflict
on home soil, promoted democracy, rules-based international be-
haviour and free competition of ideas and interests as the basis for
human improvement. Each super-power assembled around it a
group of like-minded states and East/West competition was born.
New Zealand dutifully took its place amongst the West. The great
majority of states comprising the international community, new
and old, however remained uncommitted to either camp — in
the non-aligned movement.
With the benefit of hindsight it is clear now that the Sovi-
et Union, in terms of wealth and welfare when compared to the
United States, was never really a super-power. Indeed, the Cold
War witnessed sustained advance by the United States to a posi-
tion of supremacy. When the Cold War ended in 1989–90 with
the break up of the Soviet Union, there was a deep American sense
of accomplishment that amounted to triumphalism. It heralded,
according to one American mandarin, ‘the end of history’. The
United States was now the super-power. This, however, created
paradoxically the need to define afresh the United States’ national
interest in a world that it now dominated. It is proving in prac-
tice quite difficult to define US true interests other than that the
maintenance of America’s supreme standing requires, at least in
The legacies of super power
the minds of many policy-makers, that it permanently out-per-
forms all other nations in every direction. This led one European
leader to re-brand the United States as ‘the hyper power’.
Legacies are, in one sense, bequests passed on to others when
the originator departs the scene. That is not the sense intended by
this contribution, which conceives super-power legacies as influ-
ences that henceforth shape international events, including the
positioning of smaller countries like New Zealand that delve well
beneath the stratospheric dimensions of super-power existence.
There are in this sense three inter-connected parts to America’s
super-power legacy and, as suggested below, all three variously in-
fluence New Zealand’s situation.
Manifest destiny First, there is America’s traditional sense of its manifest destiny
to change the world and its values into an image of America it-
self. This constitutes a profound influence upon international
relations. According to this script, Providence has selected the
United States as ‘the indispensable nation’ to lead an unregenerate
world to a better future. Yet experience shows that leadership in
international affairs politically, economically or militarily is either
bestowed or it is asserted. This is especially true in the globalising
economy that increasingly shapes political, economic and cultural
life on this planet. Leadership that is bestowed enjoys essential
legitimacy, while leadership that is asserted in coercive ways does
not.2
The energy and imagination displayed by the United States
when creating the institutions and rules of international affairs
(for example, the United Nations, WTO, IMF) revealed Wash-
ington’s acute realisation that legitimacy as a super-power would
be enhanced by mediating leadership through international in-
stitutions that command wide support. Indeed, institutions help
of the burgeoning capacity of the United States, Soviet Union and Britain. By the end of the cen-tury the United States had been left supreme as the other super-powers fell behind. The rest of the world has been left to contend with the legacies, both positive and negative, of the United States’ rise to pre-eminence. These include the elevation of human rights in an unprecedented fashion, the militarisation of modern international relations and the vast increase in the power of persuasion.
New Zealand International Review11
create habits of co-operation amongst nations that are in the end
as important as the rules of co-operation.3 But the era of decolo-
nisation and the emergence of a whole host of new nations dur-
ing the course of the Cold War inexorably altered the balance of
membership and of interest inside the international institutions.
Thus the United States grew hesitant and disillusioned with its
own handiwork. The ‘indispensable nation’ was no longer able to
direct or supervise the institutions in ways that privileged its own
interests. A preference for working with, or alongside, smaller
coalitions of like-minded countries increasingly influences actual
US international behaviour whether on peace and security issues
with NATO, a notable legacy of super power now being extended
with a global role to rival or supplant the United Nations, or in
economics and trade, with the United States preferring to work
with a handful of governments like the Trans-Pacific Partnership,
in which Washington’s interests can be the more assertively and
successfully secured.
Foremost legacyA foremost super-power legacy of the 20th century is the way
in which the United States succeeded in elevating, for the first
time in history, the basic values, interests and aspirations of the
human individual into a universal charter for human rights. This
was memorable, although in our world of widely differing cul-
ture, tradition and religion, the secular elevation of values driven
international relations in this way is a sensitive, even provocative
business, and so it has often proven to be. Toleration of diversity,
after all, is a real value also in and of itself. The spread of human
rights and democracy by coercion, moreover, creates resistance in
places where realities or aspirations are different; and especially if
persuasion is perceived, rightly or wrongly, as moralistic cover for
pursuit of other US material or security interests.
Yet America’s capacity to maintain, and expand, super-power
influence depends on preserving its image as the focus of a shared
system of values even more than superior military or even eco-
nomic performance.4 However, in the more than twenty years
since the end of Cold War, where the United States has found
itself in a state of almost constant war fighting, the blithe asser-
tion of common values has been complicated by American resort
to torture, rendition, imprisonment without trial, pre-emptive
military strikes and other tendentious action. Likewise in the
economic realm, whilst the United States remains the largest
economy, its insolvency and its economic model of debt fund-
ed growth, its practice of printing new money, lowering taxes
and inadequate financial regulation, coupled with a paralysis of
governance gripped by partisan politics and wealthy special in-
terests, are now creating real problems in the global economy for
everyone and tarnishes US credentials for responsible leadership.
At this poignant moment New Zealand finds itself negotiating
complex economic integration with the United States through the
Trans-Pacific Partnership. There are no bankable assurances yet on
offer, but the implications for New Zealand sovereign economic
policy making are real. This negotiation breaks new ground for
New Zealand as the first ever such bargaining over economic in-
tegration with a super-power but one whose priorities are its own
recuperation from massive insolvency. The veil of secrecy that in-
evitably governs such negotiation is creating, in the absence of any
clear indication or public debate about the New Zealand bottom
line, some domestic controversy. In the past America’s adaptabil-
ity, resourcefulness and innovation have carried it through periods
of stress and difficulty, but the present tribulations will not easily
or readily be surmounted.
Militarised approachA second and related consequence of super-power legacy is the
way that 40 years of Cold War, involving intense US and Soviet
nuclear confrontation plus large sophisticated conventional forces
opposing one another, militarised the conduct of modern interna-
tional relations. When the Cold War ended there was enormous
relief everywhere, New Zealand included, that the threat of nucle-
ar doomsday had receded. But practically speaking there is little
change in the way militarisation continues to shape international
affairs. Strategic security policy-makers, especially in the United
States, forecast an uncertain post-Cold War world, warning that
it is dangerous to lower America’s guard, and vital to retain and
enhance clear military supremacy. Nuclear weapons, therefore, for
example, remain on hair-trigger alert.
At the same time real danger has emerged that nuclear weap-
ons might spread into less desirable hands. The issue of non-pro-
liferation has, therefore, become the major post-Cold War secu-
rity preoccupation, with counter-proliferation measures being
defined in the United States and the United Kingdom to include
first strike attack against would-be proliferators. Mere suspicion
of ownership is judged sufficient cause to launch war, as the 2003
assault on Iraq demonstrated and threats against Iran confirm.
Pre-emption like this grounded in suspicion of weapons posses-
sion alone is unprecedented in the annals of warfare. It is par-
alleled by determination on the part of the traditional nuclear
weapon owning countries to resist all calls themselves for effective
nuclear disarmament, thereby reinforcing their own monopoly
and perpetuating a destabilising international double standard.
But it is the way that the United States chose to respond to
the hideous 9/11 terrorist attacks on the American mainland that
guarantees the enduring militarisation of international affairs. The
assaults were criminal actions of stark horror, but the US govern-
ment elected to interpret them as acts of war where the only re-
sponse could be war itself — an open-ended global war on terror.
Washington sought to enlist international support with a cryptic
message of ‘either you are with us, or with the terrorists’. Two wars
of choice have ensued in Afghanistan and Iraq, where the very
nature of the conflict means it is impossible to define victory in
either case. The overall result is severe destabilisation throughout
neighbouring regions. It is an open question, moreover, whether
Afghan men listen to speeches, as Afghan and US soldiers stand guard in the background, in Washer district, Helmand province, south of Kabul, Afghanistan, in August 2012
New Zealand International Review12
the global war on terrorism actually provides a galvanising instru-
ment for sustaining or extending US global leadership. For the
great majority of governments in the world, terrorism is not their
number one priority. The delicate question is whether America’s
virtual continuous waging of costly war is principally to secure
peace, or to secure primacy?
Diversionary effectThe global war on terror serves as well to divert serious attention
away from identifying actual causes of internationalised terrorism.
Conclusions reached in Washington, London and some other
places that 9/11 and similar outrage elsewhere represents gravely
irrational response by radical Islam to Western success, driven by
deep envy and shame at Islam’s own failures and a product of
dismal economic performance in the Arab world, are at best par-
tial and, at worst, misleading. No other region on the planet has
suffered more than the Middle East over a period of more than a
century and a half from persistent interference, manipulation or
invasion from the Euro-Atlantic world and others. While it is true
that Islam in common with Christianity is presently embroiled in
struggle between conservative and liberal forces within its faith, it
is dangerous self denial not to acknowledge that Western political,
economic and military intrusion designed to privilege external
interests constitutes a key provocation, creating turmoil that has
produced al-Qaeda and brutal indiscriminate terrorism.5 This is
not a justification for infamous barbaric behaviour but is reason-
able explanation for events without which any genuine effort to
understand and resolve basic causes is unavailing.
US policies in the Middle East to protect Israel even while it
provocatively sustains and expands illegal new Jewish settlements
on Palestine territory, to contain Iran, to supervise the sources of
Middle Eastern oil, to destabilise and unseat uncongenial region-
al regimes and to expand formidable forward military presence
are the ingredients of militarisation in the region. At the wider
international level America’s determination to reinvigorate global
leadership is reflected in sumptuous defence spending, even in
times of economic stringency, of $700 billion annually plus the
costs of stewardship of the US nuclear deterrent, which brings
the figure nearer to $1 trillion. No other country even remotely
matches such an effort. A network of more than 600 military bas-
es or installations throughout the world, together with the most
sophisticated high precision long distance weaponry and exten-
sive outsourcing of military and security responsibilities to largely
unaccountable American private contractors in Iraq, Afghanistan
and elsewhere,6 provide the foundations for pervasive militarisa-
tion of overall US foreign policy. Yet in practice indisputable US
military prowess has not proven decisive in those wars of insur-
gency and of separatism that have dominated the international
security landscape since the Cold War.
The status of sole super-power does not confer omnipotence
upon the United States, as numerous Americans themselves ac-
knowledge. The United States cannot act alone as world police-
man.7 In particular the question of just how far can a massively
insolvent US economy bear the heavy debt of its chosen role as
unrivalled global leader is one that severely exercises the present
generation of American policy-makers. In some quarters the very
extent of US insolvency becomes, however, an argument for sus-
taining a colossal military industrial complex in order to generate
productive capacity and spin off to meet the demands of an over-
stretched economy. American armament exports are by far the
largest in the world and it was, after all, so the reasoning runs,
the supreme military effort of the Second World War and its af-
termath that lifted the US economy out of the last great global
economic depression of the 1930s.
Persuasion power The third super-power legacy is what can be termed the power of
persuasion. Forty years of Cold War between the United States
and the Soviet Union was a period of bluff and counter-bluff as
the two amazons sought to unsettle or mislead one another, and/
or rally support domestically and internationally for their respec-
tive strategic policy choices. Exaggeration of threat became stock-
in-trade in Moscow and Washington to justify increases in the
numbers and lethality of enormous military arsenals. A multitude
of strategic security think tanks, especially in Washington, Lon-
don and other places, dutifully fuelled the fervour with dire pre-
dictions of uncertainty. That legacy survives the end of the Cold
War stoked by the grim experience of 9/11 and the US quest for
an impracticable goal of total security for itself that drives the
ceaseless and costly pursuit of full spectrum military supremacy,
including in space; as well as a massive programme of homeland
security involving unprecedented executive power that allows
encroachment upon individual civil rights and, even, due legal
process.
Persuasion is exerted upon America’s friends and allies to rep-
licate such measures and precautions for America’s protection.
Exaggeration of threat, of course, produces excessive fear,8 and the
striking paradox is that the most powerful military nation ever
in world history, with its dazzling leadership in such things as
innovation, technology, science, medicine and space, professes a
sense of continuous threat to its physical existence and well-being.
A messianic quality is, moreover, injected into this legend when
presidents like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush insist that the
world is imbued with ‘evil’ states whose overthrow is America’s
duty — through regime change, pre-emptive war or clandestine
suppression.
No surpriseIn an age dominated by the technologies of communication, it is
no surprise that the practise of ‘spinning’ information influenc-
es many governments, New Zealand’s included, in the conduct The last vehicles in a convoy of the US Army’s 3rd Brigade, 1st Cavalry Division cross the border from Iraq into Kuwait on 18 December 2011
New Zealand International Review13
of their external interests. The desire to present their actions and
motives in the best possible light is perfectly understandable. On
top of this, a time-honoured feature of international relations is
that governments share intelligence with one another with a view
to persuading others to accept the interpretations, as well as the
consequential actions, of the provider. There is a veritable mass of
government intelligence in this global information age, so much
that it becomes practically indigestible at any one time. One per-
verse legacy of the super-power era is the deliberate misrepresenta-
tion even fabrication of intelligence to justify courses of action —
the 2003 attack on Iraq by a US coalition of the willing is a recent
example, but similar misrepresentation at the start of the Vietnam
War, during the Iran Contra scandal and at other times has been
used to justify armed actions.
Having said all of that, it is undeniable that among the powers
of persuasion, American soft power remains a vital part of US
potential. The attraction which American accomplishments hold
for others — inventiveness, resourcefulness and self belief — are
compelling. American ideas, taste, fashion and culture have world-
wide impact. Indeed US ability to persuade others to accept US
preferences does not, or cannot, rest simply on military strength,
although that remains very important. Soft power co-opts rather
than coerces other countries to support America’s preferred out-
comes. At its best it is something more than image, public rela-
tions or ephemeral publicity. In international relations it does de-
pend, nonetheless, upon the perceived legitimacy and credibility
of US policy. The nature of the US response to terrorism in the
post-9/11 world has at times severely tested that legitimacy and
credibility, and US soft power suffered as a consequence.9
Local impact How does the super-power legacy affect New Zealand? This coun-
try’s emergence into the world of international affairs, which oc-
curred over the 20th century, was deeply imbued by experience
of global war and Cold War. The need for physical protection led
New Zealand into alliances with the United Kingdom and with
the United States, and the contribution we made to defeat of the
common foe helped shape, along with our colonial inheritance,
a sense of modern New Zealand national identity. But it is not a
static experience. Foreign policy and domestic policy for all coun-
tries, great and small, continue to interact one with another and
globalisation now reinforces those interactions. Transformation to
the centre of economic gravity in the world is occurring as the
complexion of New Zealand itself is also changing — the new
mix of its population and the widening and deepening external
connections.
Many things do not, of course, change. New Zealand’s relative
size, remote geography and the impalpable impact we make on
the world of international affairs mean we exist and operate below
the radar screens of the powerful. That strategic invisibility, how-
ever, we have learnt, offers advantage and opportunity providing
we equip ourselves with knowledge and discernment. For over
twenty years we were estranged from the United States (as a friend
but not an ally) because of the New Zealand non-nuclear poli-
cy. Over that period under successive governments New Zealand
proved an effective operator below the radar screens by substantial
constructive internal change, broadening external relationships
and maturing foreign policy. Unsurprisingly, not all the domes-
tic change was uniformly applauded inside our society, but New
Zealand conclusively demonstrated that it had not ‘lost its way’
because of its nuclear policy, as asserted by domestic and other
opponents who dismiss the policy as disreputable and misguided.
Restored relationshipNew Zealand has now restored a relationship with the United
States through the recent Washington Declaration, and earli-
er 2010 Wellington Declaration. This is a positive development
made the more interesting because the initiatives for improve-
ment came as much from the United States as they did from New
Zealand. The abrasive years of the George W. Bush administra-
tion had prompted Washington to undertake a task of diplomatic
fence mending abroad,10 and it decided to include New Zealand.
The restoration does, however, place the question of super-pow-
er legacy back squarely before New Zealand. How far will it, in
Washington and Wellington, be a case of turning back the clock
and the relationship to previous times, ignoring in the process
the substantial transformation that has occurred in the world and
indeed in New Zealand’s own circumstances and interests?
In the background to New Zealand–US relations it is not clear
yet just how far the United States can or will adjust to the realities
of a more pluralist world. America’s 20th century international ex-
perience involved large sequences of adversarialism — the pitting
of the United States against important competitors or aggressors.
This had the effect, indeed, of bringing out the best in America.
If the United States cannot now, however, accept a vital need to
accommodate and conciliate the interests of large newly emerging
countries, and in particular China, then international relations,
and New Zealand’s positioning therein, are in for difficult times.
In East Asia, although it does not challenge the United States
globally, China clearly anticipates respect and regional primacy,
given its achievements and potential as the dynamo for East Asian
economic success. The leading Australian strategic thinker Hugh
White argues that the United States has in effect little option but
to allow China a larger role.11 China confronts a real challenge,
nonetheless, to provide on-going reassurances to regional neigh-
bours about its peaceable intentions. At the same time, the US
administration is re-asserting US leadership in the region on the
back of enhanced military superiority. Asian governments want
the United States to be engaged, but it is not clear that they are
as amenable to Washington’s leadership, let alone any notion of
containment of China. In the super-power mentality there are,
of course, no differences between engagement and leadership.
Senior US and Soviet commanders General John R Galvin (left) and General Moiseyev meet in 1990
New Zealand International Review14
China has responded negatively to what it perceives as Cold War
instincts behind US declared policy.
Much effortUnder successive governments New Zealand has invested much
diplomatic effort in East Asia, and in particular China, to build
rewarding relationships. New Zealand is particularly gratified by
the fact it remains the only Western economy to enjoy a formal
free trade agreement with China, which is proving of immense
benefit. Americans who are well connected in Washington, how-
ever, openly caricature New Zealand as naïve about China, and
one can be pretty certain that such opinions are expressed pri-
vately to the New Zealand government — perhaps more readily
following signature of the Washington Declaration. This capri-
cious judgment includes, however, a good dose of old Cold War
thinking and the super-power legacy, according to which there
exists a seamless web of Western security which no member of the
network should risk breaching.
This was exactly the same message preached at New Zealand
by powerful governments in the Cold War at the time of our nu-
clear free legislation. For New Zealand such a seamless web, if in-
deed it exists, has surely to encompass both political and econom-
ic security, but those powerful governments were, and still are,
simultaneously strenuously protecting their markets against New
Zealand competition. We need to be ready still to resist seamless
web arguments. What is more, given the compulsive preoccupa-
tion with nuclear non-proliferation on today’s international se-
curity agenda, New Zealand’s non-nuclear policy is proving to
be on the right side of history. Today, moreover, as far as China
is concerned, New Zealand is surely on the side of Hugh White
of Australia.
A sense of change to New Zealand’s external profile can be
captured by speculating about the manner in which the govern-
ment presents the New Zealand case for a non-permanent seat
on the 2015–16 UN Security Council. The campaign against
formidable competition will intensify in 2013. In the successful
bid, also against formidable opposition, the last time New Zea-
land sat on the council in 1993–94, the New Zealand case was
built around the fact that it was a friend but not an ally of any of
the five permanent members of council (United States, Russia,
France, China, United Kingdom), that it was not a member of
NATO, or the European Union, that it brought an Asia–Pacific
viewpoint to bear on the basis of an independent foreign policy
that included non-nuclear policy. There were other arguments
but, in the context of super-power legacy, these are relevant be-
cause they differentiated New Zealand from the competition. The
Cold War had just ended and there was much expectation about
what the future would hold. The majority of the UN membership
voted for New Zealand, although the majority of Western states
did not.
Different scriptFor the 2015–16 campaign the script will obviously be different
— New Zealand is a now a de facto ally of the United States, has
a close and valued defence relationship with NATO, its Asia–Pa-
cific relations are conditioned heavily by trade and the goal of
economic integration with the United States. The non-nuclear
policy, while still formally in place, figures very little in the current
New Zealand foreign policy narrative. These attributes do not ac-
tually much distinguish New Zealand from its competitors, but it
is twenty years since New Zealand last sat on the Security Coun-
cil. A new and different campaign script is inevitable. The issue is
just how far the presentation of our Security Council case will ac-
tually reflect the changing pluralist world and New Zealand’s own
situation; or alternatively reveal attachment to the conventional
loyalties of a timeworn ‘Cold War’ pecking order.
Finally, a last word on how the super-power legacy extends
into New Zealand’s South Pacific policy. Our vital national inter-
est rests with helping ensure a neighbourhood that is prosperous,
stable and well disposed to New Zealand. Given all the realities of
the South Pacific, this provides a stern test for New Zealand. Yet
we, and particularly Australia, increasingly frame our Pacific poli-
cy in terms of providing dependable stewardship of a challenging
region on behalf of the super-power, thereby lightening America’s
load. We need to recast this frame of mind so that New Zealand
sees itself as a country in and of the Pacific committed to concili-
ating and assisting its neighbours as a matter first and foremost of
our own national interest and responsibility. Other countries like
the United States and China are involved in the South Pacific, and
New Zealand needs to co-operate where appropriate with them;
but not in the sense that we are performing a task devolved upon
us from on high by the resident super-power, which then becomes
the judge of our performance.
NOTES1. Graham Evans and Jeffrey Newman (eds), Penguin Diction-
ary of International Relations (New York, 1998), p.552.
2. David P. Calleo, Follies of Power: America’s Unipolar Fantasy
(Cambridge, 2009), p.127.
3. Ralf Dahrendorf, ‘Towards the Twenty-first Century’, in Mi-
chael Howard and Wm. Roger Louis (eds), Oxford History of
20th Century (Oxford, 1998), p.341.
4. Michael Howard, The Lessons of History (Oxford, 1991), p.135.
5. Michael Howard, ‘The New “Great Power” Politics’, in Rob-
ert Harvey (ed), The World Crisis: The Way Forward After Iraq
(London, 2008), pp.183–4.
6. Rachel Maddow, Drift: The Unmooring of American Military Power (New York, 2012), pp.157–87.
7. Nancy Soderberg, The Superpower Myth, The Use and Misuse
of American Might (New York, 2005), p.328f.
8. Dr Zbigniew Brzezinski, ‘Uniting Our Enemies and Divid-
ing Our Friends’, in Harvey, p.50.
9. Joseph S. Nye Jr, Soft Power, The Means to Success in World
Politics, Public Affairs (New York, 2004), pp.127–47.
10. Calleo, p.40.
11. Hugh White, The China Choice, Why America Should Share Power (Collingwood 2012), p.5f.
The Chinese aircraft-carrier Liaoning, earlier a partly built carrier constructed in Russia named the Varayag and purchased clandestinely by China, undergoing sea trials in 2012
New Zealand International Review15
The last issue of the NZIR (vol 37, no 1) contains the text of a talk
given to the NZIIA’s Wellington branch by Phil Goff, the former
minister of foreign affairs and, later, of defence. Now Opposition
spokesman for foreign affairs, he drew on his lengthy experience
in both portfolios to discuss New Zealand’s place in the world.
As Goff explained, the fundamentals are clear — New Zea-
land, small and isolated is deeply dependent on overseas markets.
Even so, we have played an almost disproportionate role as an
international citizen, particularly in overseas wars. The First and
Second World Wars1 gave us the credentials for an early seat at the
major international organisations, particularly the League of Na-
tions and the United Nations, where we have played an active part
in discussions on major international issues including the work of
the specialised agencies. Goff expressed opposition to the United
Nations Security Council permanent members’ veto and was crit-
ical of the ‘lack of will and commitment’ among member states to
reach agreement on solutions and implement them.
Making a difference: another perspective
ferent viewpoints on a given issue. Perhaps foreign policy com-
mentators have a similar disposition. Be that as it may, I offer the
following as a supplement to Goff’s views.
Walter Lippmann3 considered that to establish a balanced for-
eign policy a nation must maintain its objectives and its power in
equilibrium; its purpose within its means; its means equal to its
purposes; its commitments relative to its resources; its resourc-
es adequate to its commitments. Without these factors in line it
would not be possible to undertake an effective foreign policy.
Lippmann’s comments provide a valuable foreign policy perspec-
tive — for both small countries (New Zealand) and large (the
United States, now the world’s largest debtor nation).
The global financial crisis, the rise of militant Islam (not Islam as
such) and the growing international presence of China are signif-
icant factors for change in the current international scene. Many
countries are having to rethink both domestic and international
policies as a result of mounting debt levels. The end result may
not mean radical shifts in foreign policy, but, as the United States
has shown in relation to the Pacific, a certain on-going process
of re-emphasis and de-emphasis is required to adjust to the new
realities.
Given Hillary Clinton’s attendance at the most recent Pacific
Forum and the statements she has been making, it is surprising
then that Goff made only the briefest reference to the South Pacif-
ic — our Near North. In March 2011 Clinton made her position
quite clear. ‘Let’s... talk straight Realpolitik’, she told the United
States Senate Foreign Relations Committee. ‘We are in compe-
tition with China. We have a lot of support in the region which
embraces our values.’4
Troops from Nelson who fought in the South African War of 1899–1902
The Opposition spokesman
wants to see Wellington making
its own decisions on what alli-
ances and international commit-
ments New Zealand enters into.
In deciding on the key issues, a
Labour government would be
guided by the values and princi-
ples that underpin New Zealand
society. Those principles fit us
well to become involved in in-
ternational conciliation and me-
diation issues.
It is not possible to cover in
detail the comprehensive range
of issues discussed by Goff, Phil Goff
which included climate change, Doha, disarmament, non-pro-
liferation and conflict prevention. He also referred to his wish to
rebuild the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade.2
There is a comment that four economists will express five dif-
-
New Zealand International Review16
In a statement at the 2012
Forum, she modified her posi-
tion to say that the Pacific was
big enough for both China and
the United States to work to-
gether in, but an early indica-
tion of the continued competi-
tive context is the Trans-Pacific
Partnership negotiations, the
terms of which we do not yet
know but which promise to
have a profound effect on our
trading relationships and inter-
nal regulatory processes. China
is not a party to the TPP and is
watching developments closely,
particularly as New Zealand’s
military/defence relation-
ship with Washington firms
up. US Assistant Secretary of
State Kurt Campbell wants to
see New Zealand undertake
‘strong dialogue’ with China,5
but it will require refined dip-
lomatic choreography for New
Zealand to maintain an appro-
priate balance in relations with
the two major powers and Aus-
tralia. The situation is rendered
even more complex by the
ready embrace of our closest
with the Pacific, we might also adopt some fa’a pasifika attitudes.
Dealing with the Bainimarama government is no easy task. Suva
is unhappy with the language and attitudes displayed by Canberra
and Wellington since the 2006 coup and remains confused by a
sanctions policy which most recently denied a visa to the CEO of
the National Provident Fund to hold a series of meetings in Aus-
tralia with investment advisers. If sanctions are designed to target
only those involved in the coup, this particular visa refusal would
appear to go further and affect every Fijian worker. Perhaps the
narrow interpretation given to sanctions by Canberra is more in-
dicative of internal trade union politics in Australia than the over-
all requirements of relations with an important Pacific partner.
Elections callsFor their part Australia and New Zealand continue to stress the
need for elections in Fiji. Surely elections are only part of what
a functioning democracy is all about. Governance, the rule of
relevant law and working governmental structures are also vital.
There have been ten elections in Fiji since 1972 and five coups.
That represents a coup every two elections or every eight years.
Elections as such seem not to hold the answer to Fiji’s deeply com-
plex socio-political problems. In relation to the latest problems
concerning constitutional reform, Murray McCully, New Zea-
land’s current foreign minister, said that ‘these things are often
more complex than they appear on the surface’.8 That indeed is
the beginning of wisdom. It might also be said that in the Pacific
states generally the basic requirements of democracy are not no-
ticeably in evidence. Corruption is endemic.
As other powers become more involved in the Pacific, it is
time to recognise that Fiji’s isolation has worked to exclude the
dominant South Pacific state from a leading role in a number
Walter Lippman
Hillary Clinton
ally, Australia, not with New Zealand but with the United States.
Understandable comments Goff welcomes New Zealand’s bilateral co-operation with these
countries, but he does not wish to surrender decision-making to
the judgment of officials or statesman in Washington and Can-
berra. Given New Zealand’s long-term desire for an ‘independent’
foreign policy, Goff’s comments are understandable. The difficul-
ties, however, lie in the detail.
China is deeply involved with Fiji, a contact Suva welcomes.
Moreover, at their celebration of 50 years of independence in 2012
the Samoan prime minister welcomed Chinese aid to his coun-
try, noting that Beijing could provide development assistance that
neither Australia nor New Zealand could. So far, China has made
aid commitments of about US$600 million for infrastructure,
technology and agriculture in the Pacific. According to a report by
the ANZ Bank, trade between China and the Pacific Islands has
risen from US$180 million in 2001 to US$1.5 billion in 2010.6
Some commentators consider Chinese aid to be ‘non-transparent’
and debt-generating. As Steven Ratuva says, however, ‘the Pacific
Island states realise they need to move on as mature global citizens
and look for alternative alliances outside their immediate post-
colonial circle controlled by Australia and New Zealand’.7
There is a further dimension. In spite of some rapprochement
the relationship between New Zealand and Fiji remains strained.
Let me state again, I do not condone coups. But if we are talking
about realism in foreign policy (as Hillary Clinton says she is)
and we continue to see ourselves as having a special relationship
Suva
Murray McCullyof key issues currently exercising
all the Forum states, particular-
ly those framing adjustments to
regional policies on trade agree-
ments being negotiated with
Australia and New Zealand and
the European Union. Pacific
states’ unease about these nego-
tiations has been expressed by
their seeking an independent ad-
viser on the regional trade nego-
tiations — Pacer Plus — as well
as for the Economic Partnership
Agreement with the European
New Zealand International Review17
Union. Fiji may not at present
be a full member of the Forum.
It is, however, a fully accepted
and respected member of the
Melanesian Spearhead Group,
which contains the wealth and
power of the Pacific. In 2013 Fiji
takes over as chair of the Non-
Aligned plus China group.
The Pacific Forum and oth-
er countries have produced the
Cairns Compact, an agreement
open door.
In 1973 Norman Kirk, then prime minister and minister of for-
eign affairs, said:
To base our foreign policy on moral principles is the most en-
lightened form of self-interest. What is morally right is likely
to be politically right. What appears in the short term to be a
part of expediency is all too likely to lead into a blind alley.’10
Like Goff, Norman Kirk saw New Zealand pursuing a more in-
dependent foreign policy. He wanted frankness and openness in
the government’s public discussions of foreign policy and a more
magnanimous approach to the distribution of development assis-
tance. It is 40 years since Kirk’s comments, but President Obama
has underlined the problems in our new world of an over-empha-
sis on morality in foreign policy.
Veto criticismPhil Goff is critical of the Security Council veto to block a col-
lective response to assist opponents of the Assad regime in Syria.
Perhaps New Zealand can best support multilateralism through
promoting what Goff describes as a ‘values and evidence-based
approach’ to the problems the world confronts. This may be so,
and if New Zealand is elected to the Security Council next year we
could usefully work for reform at the United Nations, including
the veto. There is no denying the terrible crimes committed by the
Assad regime (and other similarly disposed authorities elsewhere).
The question is, if New Zealand, through the United Nations, in-
tervenes in Syria then what? Collective will and a sense of purpose
are not sufficient. Nor should we imagine that the global rule of
law is an inevitability. The real question is whether powerful states
will live up to their responsibilities. On the evidence to date the
reply would seem to be not really.
Goff refers to the problems of countries ‘acting in their self-in-
terest and not the interests of the wider international community’.
Has it ever been different? Thucydides records an early example
of ruthless self-interest in the Athenian dialogue with the hapless
Melians during the Peloponnesian War.11 This may be an extreme
example of so-called realism in foreign policy, but international
relations cannot be divorced from the realities and complexities
— even perversities — of human nature.
Syria may be a headline issue which, with some justice, pro-
duces a sense of outrage within the international community. But
a well-founded foreign policy assumes a strong domestic policy.
Peter O’Neill
designed to co-ordinate aid to the Pacific. China has rejected an
invitation to join the compact. Clearly Beijing wants to run its
own development assistance programmes. Pacific countries are
well aware of China’s position.
Aid realignmentPerhaps the developing situation in the Pacific was reflected in the
remarks made recently in Sydney by PNG Prime Minister Peter
O’Neill, where he called for Australia’s aid strategy in Papua New
Guinea to be geared towards his government’s development pri-
orities and programmes. He emphasised economic infrastructure,
education and public service and stated that what he wanted was
a ‘total realignment’ of the Australian aid programme.9 O’Neill’s
unease will have a sympathetic resonance among Papua New
Guinea’s Pacific partners.
It would have been useful to have Goff’s analysis on how he
sees a Labour government dealing with these complex and devel-
oping issues in the area in which, internationally, New Zealand is
Norman Kirk
Barack Obamaregarded as having some pre-em-
inence.
Goff mentions human rights
as an issue with which, during
his time as foreign minister, he
was closely identified. His po-
sition reflected New Zealand’s
long and well-documented in-
volvement in human rights is-
sues, but when deciding current
priorities it is pertinent to recall
President Obama’s salutary re-
marks on accepting the 2009
Nobel Peace Prize:
the promotion of human
rights cannot be about ex-
hortation alone. At times,
it must be coupled with
painstaking diplomacy. I
know that engagement with
repressive regimes lacks the
satisfying purity of indigna-
tion. But I also know that
sanctions without outreach
— and condemnation with-
out discussion — can carry
forward a crippling status
quo. No repressive regime
can move down a new path
unless it has the choice of an
New Zealand International Review18
With debt levels at an historic high and some of our tradition-
al markets showing signs of weakness, New Zealand needs to be
cautious about spreading itself too widely internationally. Many
Western governments struggle to present an appearance of busi-
ness as usual, but, after four years of the Great Recession, there is
little realistic prospect of a return to the ‘old normal’. As Colin
James says in ‘Making Big Decisions for the Future’ (3 December
2012) after the global financial crisis, which he characterises as a
disjunctive event, ‘the social, economic and political landscape,
the context for fiscal decisions, will be qualitatively different’.
James looks to fiscal policy to be resilient. As with fiscal policy so
with foreign policy.
Varied problemsNew Zealand’s problems are varied and solutions will inevita-
bly need to be eclectic. This in no way ignores the need for a
wide-ranging, hard-headed and realistic assessment of the op-
tions, but it does mean introducing not only a great deal more
pragmatism (until recently a strength in New Zealand) but also an
understanding of the processes of human motivation, psychology,
anthropology (particularly in the South Pacific) and organisation-
al behaviour. The economist John Kay emphasises the need for
meticulous observation of what people, businesses and govern-
ments actually do.
We cannot foresee the full range of outcomes or the options
available but, as noted in a previous article,12 leadership must
ensure that policies reflect the basic principles that nurtured our
own economy and society. But no policy or society remains stat-
free trade agreements are used by other countries as vehicles for
their own agendas. It is well to remember, however, that aspects
of the TPP do not sit easily with the view expressed in some quar-
ters that it is a ‘model free-trade agreement’.13 International trade
agreements are not just to do with trade. They may influence,
shape, limit and even on occasion pre-empt domestic social poli-
cy. For this reason, the proposed TPP should be open and subject
to challenge.
Important contributionsIn the previous article mentioned above, I have referred to the
contribution made by David Skilling to the foreign policy debate.
The current secretary to the Treasury, Gabriel Mahklouf, has also
outlined some issues relevant to New Zealand’s foreign policy —
New Zealand’s dependence on foreign capital and the need for
foreign direct investment as providing a direct line to internation-
al expertise, technology and ideas. The government’s former sci-
ence adviser, the late Sir Paul Callaghan, emphasised the need for
technical and entrepreneurial innovation if our society is to meet
our expectations in a changing world of the 21st century. There is
no question that these aspects are important as we consider inputs
to foreign policy.
This all adds up to the need for a coherent national debate on
foreign policy settings. A new government could greatly assist by
establishing the structure and key issues for that national debate.
Globalisation has deeply affected New Zealand as a country, the
way in which we approach international issues and particularly
our way of life. People now expect to become more involved in
decision-making processes at all levels of society as, increasingly,
foreign policy decisions are included.
Foreign policy is an area where not only the Opposition but
also the government could now demonstrate a willingness to un-
dertake collaborative governance in relation to issues such as those
commented on above, particularly by providing full disclosure of
terms of any proposed agreements (the TPP for instance) well be-
fore any commitment is made.
NOTES1. Our first overseas intervention was, of course, the South Af-
rican War of 1899–1902, where New Zealand was quick to
offer troops to support the British cause.
2. The process of ‘restructuring’ MFAT may by now have ad-
vanced to the point where a ‘rebuild’ would amount to a total
reconstruction.
3. Walter Lippmann (1899–1974), journalist, media critic, phi-
losopher.
4. Financial Times, 4 Mar 2011.
5. Kurt Campbell, Dominion Post, 17 Dec 2013.
6. Quoted in Steven Ratuva, New Zealand Listener, 7 May 2011.
7. Ibid.
8. Hon Murray McCully, interview, Radio New Zealand, 3 Jan
2013.
9. Post-Courier (Papua New Guinea), 29 Nov 2012.
10. Norman Kirk, Introduction to the Annual Report of the Min-istry of Foreign Affairs for the year ended March 1973.
11. Thucydides 431 BC, The Peloponnesian War, Ch. XVII: ‘The
Fate of Melos’.
12. Gerald McGhie, NZ International Review, vol 37, no 5 (2012).
13. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health, vol 35,
no 6 (2011).Sir Paul Callaghan
Gabriel Mahklouf
ic. With some 30.7 per cent of
New Zealand’s population now
categorised as non-European,
New Zealand’s traditional val-
ues may be subject to a rather
different emphasis in the 21st
century. In projecting New Zea-
land’s values and interests over-
seas, a new government could
greatly assist in rethinking, if
not the traditional values of our
society, then at least the shift of
emphases emerging from our
increasingly multicultural so-
ciety. New Zealand must take
into account the implications
for our foreign policy not only
of multiculturalism but also of
the adjustments to our internal
structures that have occurred in
the light of the on-going finan-
cial crisis and the emergence of
new markets.
The implications of the
Trans-Pacific Partnership could
well play a central role in such
a debate. Free trade agreements
as such have been used by New
Zealand for opening up mar-
kets for years (the Australian
apple market, for example), so
we should not be surprised if
New Zealand International Review19
In November 2012 a team from the NZIIA went to Port Moresby
at the invitation of the Papua New Guinea Department of For-
eign Affairs and Trade to provide diplomatic training to 30 new
foreign service officers. This followed an earlier course in March,
which was reported on in the July/August 2012 issue of the NZIR
(vol 37, no 4). Those invoved were the NZIIA director, Peter
Kennedy, Lance Beath, a senior lecturer in Victoria University of
Wellington’s School of Government, and Peter Nichols, the NZI-
IA Wellington branch chair.
The second training course was fortunate in that the New
Zealand Minister of Foreign Affairs and Trade, Hon Murray Mc-
Cully, was in Papua New Guinea and took time out from his busy
schedule to address the course and to give the participants the
benefit of his perspective on what he expects from diplomats. Mc-
Cully emphasised that ministers are very busy and managing time
is challenging. Accordingly, policy advice from advisers needs to
be concise, coherent and well argued. Lengthy papers that repeat
points can be frustrating and waste time. Additionally, he said,
the real foreign minister is the prime minister, and he, or she, will
undoubtedly be even busier. The quality of foreign policy advice
must be sound and if there are errors, then the prime minister will
have a poor image of his minister and the department.
In response to a question about the qualities and characteris-
tics that define a good diplomat, McCully reiterated that a diplo-
mat’s advice needs to be concise and coherent. But the qualities
of a good diplomat are more than that. He stated that diplomats
need to be enthusiastic about their profession and committed.
Training Papua New Guinea diplomatsPeter Nichols and Peter Kennedy report on the NZIIA’s involvement in the second foreign service training course in Port Moresby in November 2012.
Foreign Minister Murray McCully calls on the PNG Diplomat Training Course conducted by the NZIIA. He is pictured with Peter Kennedy, Lance Beath, Peter Nichols, Lucy Bogari (the acting secretary of the PNG Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade), members of the minister’s delegation and trainee PNG diplomats
With regards to leadership, he suggested that in the space of half
a day, a minister could quickly get an understanding about how
well a post is operated. He suggested most posts he visited had
motivated staff who were well led, knowledgeable about all as-
pects of the region they were serving in and well connected.
Asked about women diplomats, McCully said that both wom-
en and men are promoted based on their individual merit. To fur-
ther questions, he responded that New Zealand very much values
its relationship with a growing China, but New Zealand also has
very strong relations and interests in the South Pacific and espe-
cially with Australia.
The Papua New Guinea diplomats very much appreciated the
opportunity to hear McCully’s remarks, which were both timely
and apt for this second training session for PNG foreign service
officers.
The course in session
New Zealand International Review20
With much concern I read what Lois and Martin Griffiths wrote
under the title ‘The Palestinian story: to exist is to resist’ in the
NZIR (vol 37, no 5 (2012), pp.4–9). Unfortunately the Griffiths’s
article shows a clear lack of background knowledge about the is-
sues brought to our attention.
The authors do not differentiate between Palestinians who live
inside Israel and therefore are citizens of Israel, and those who are
not, and the reader who does not know where places mentioned
in the article are has no idea whether a story is about people who
are citizens of Israel or those who are living under the authori-
ty of the Israel Defence Forces in the West Bank. These are two
different populations. The Griffiths omit to mention that every
Palestinian, a citizen of Israel or not, has the full right of appeal
to the Israeli Supreme Court. Indeed, Palestinians often win their
cases — for example, Supreme Court decisions have made the
government change the siting of the security barrier in a way that
balances Israel’s need for security with the Palestinians’ need to
reach their fields. I would expect that the Griffiths would men-
tion that the security barrier that Israel built was the result of the
dreadful Palestinian terrorist attacks in which more than 1000
Israelis were killed in buses, restaurants, malls and hotels; and the
rate of these attacks dropped sharply because of this defensive bar-
rier, which killed nobody. Israelis who were killed cannot return
to life; the fence and the wall, on the other hand, can be removed
after peace is achieved.
For Israelis, the credibility of what the Griffiths write is not
enhanced by their quotations of Dr Ilan Pappe and Gideon Levy.
Pappe (now teaching in the United Kingdom) was discredited as
an academic at Haifa University, was a former Communist Party
candidate for the Knesset (the Israeli Parliament) and support-
When truth is twisted and facts are ignoredMordechai Kedar challenges the views about
in a recent article.
Mordechai Kedar is a member of the Department of Arabic atBar-Ilan University in Israel.
ed an MA thesis which was found in court to be a forgery and
libel. Gideon Levy of the Israeli left-wing tabloid Ha’aretz does
not speak or read Arabic and thus relies on translators who are
uniformly hostile to Israel.
The Griffiths relate to all the Palestinians as indigenous people
of this country. This shows an ignorance of our history. Many
‘Palestinians’ still carry names which testify that they are not
originally from Palestine, such as al-Iraqi, al-Masri (the Egyp-
tian), al-Hourani and al-Halabi (Syrians), al-Sourani, al-Tarabulsi
(Lebanese), al-Zarqawi, al-Karaki (Jordanian) and many similar
names. Most of them immigrated to this country during the first
half of the 20th century, mainly to work in the villages and towns
which Jews built after the establishment of the British Mandate.
It is particularly strange to read in the Griffiths article that
Israel is responsible for the situation of Christians in Bethlehem.
Christian emigration from Bethlehem has accelerated since the
transfer of power to the Palestinian Authority in 1995; the decline
came about because the Muslims confiscated their assets, dese-
crated their churches and intimidated them. And, in fact, Israel is
the only state in the Middle East where the Christian population
is stable; Christians are leaving all Arab countries.
Untenable claimThe Griffiths claim that ‘the issue of Israel and the occupied ter-
ritories is not religion’. If they only bothered to read the Hamas
charter they would see how deeply Palestinians are committed to
holy jihad against the Jews, not because they are Israelis or Zion-
ists, but because they are Jews, to wit:
The time will not come until Muslims will fight the Jews and
kill them; until the Jews hide behind rocks and trees, which
will cry: O Muslim! there is a Jew hiding behind me, come
on and kill him! This will not apply to the Gharqad, which is
a Jewish tree (cited by Bukhari and Muslim).
The entire state of Israel — according to Hamas — should be
wiped off the map. And, to remind the Griffiths, Hamas won
the majority of the seats in the Palestinian Legislative Council in
2006.
A UN investigation, headed by New Zealander Sir Geoffrey
Palmer, concluded that Israel has the full right under international
law to blockade the streaming of arms and ammunition to Gaza
by sea. It is pathetic to read that the Griffiths still think that the
Mavi Marmara, which carried dozens of terrorists and unidenti-
fied cargo to Gaza, had the right to do so.
Seemingly, the Griffiths think that once the Israeli–Palestini-
an struggle is solved, all the problems of the Middle East will be
solved as well and peace will reign all over the region. Apparently
they think that Israel — 64 years old — is responsible for the
Sunni–Shi’ite struggle which started 1350 years ago; for the mil-
lion killed in the 1980–88 bloody war between Iran and Iraq; for
the fact that the Alawi regime of Assad in Syria has butchered so
far some 37,000 Syrian citizens; for the agonies of the Christian
Copts in Egypt; for the fact that half a million Algerians were
slaughtered by their brethren between 1992 and 1998; and for
the tribal fights in Libya.
Dr Ilan Pappe Gideon Levy
New Zealand International Review21
Great catastrophePalestinians and others relate to the Israeli–Arab struggle as a ‘nak-
ba’. The word in Arabic means an enormous, gigantic tragedy, a
catastrophe. This is the word used in the Arab–Islamic discourse
to denote the start of the ‘Palestine’ calamity, in which Islam’s
Holy Land of Palestine fell captive in what Arabs consider as a
modern-day crusade by Zionism, the emissary of European impe-
rialism. When Israel’s 1948 War of Independence ended, 600,000
Arabs, formerly of Palestine/Eretz Israel, remained in refugee
camps in Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Judea and Samaria (under Jor-
danian occupation), the Gaza Strip (under Egyptian occupation),
Egypt and Libya.
The catastrophe was indeed great and its dimensions stemmed
not only from the physical disaster that befell the Arabs but also
— and perhaps primarily — from the psychological tragedy that
has accompanied the physical for 64 years: Israel survived the War
of Independence and the later wars it was forced into. It succeed-
ed, developed, expanded and flourished while the Palestinians
were left with only a shattered dream. The state of Israel is the
mirror in which the Arabs perceive their failure; while the Jew-
ish people celebrates its 64 years of renewed independence, after
about 1900 years of exile, the Arabs mark 64 years of continuous
shortcomings.
To an extent, the years of struggle against Zionism served to
unite the Arabs in Palestine/Land of Israel under the leadership of
and the state of Israel was established three years after their defeat.
Partition voteAfter the UN partition vote in November 1947, the Jewish pop-
ulation in Israel accepted the UN decision while the Palestinians
together with five Arab states declared war on Israel. They did not
succeed in destroying Israel, and the Arab-allotted territories in-
stead were occupied by Egypt [Gaza] and Jordan [the West Bank].
For nineteen years they could have established a Palestinian state,
but the Palestinians and the Arab states did not.
The Jewish people of Israel dried up swamps and erected com-
munities, while the Palestinians were kept in refugee camps in
the Arab states. In Israel the immigrant transit camps disappeared
during the 1950s and Jewish immigrants created a new, optimis-
tic Israeli society; the Arabs (and their descendants) were forced
to remain as refugees to this day, ‘branded’ by their host countries
so that they do not integrate into their populations. Israel built a
new society, which has, over the years, increasingly bridged the
cultural gaps among the various Jewish groups who have returned
to their homeland from the four corners of the earth. The desire
to achieve economic independence powered the wheels of Israel’s
economy and brought it to the forefront of the developed world.
Israeli industry expanded into all types of products; Israeli agri-
culture and technology are world-renowned; the shekel is one of
the world’s strong currencies. The Palestinians, on the other hand,
have made a vocation of their refugee status, developed beggary
into an art and transformed their misery into a tool used to weigh
on the conscience of the world.
From its inception, Israel broke up all the Jewish armed groups
that had been operating prior to the establishment of the state: the
Haganah, the Irgun (Etzel) and the Lehi were disbanded and their
arms were confiscated. Events came to a head in June 1948, when
the Altalena, a ship carrying Etzel weapons needed for the battle
over Jerusalem, was sunk. Ben Gurion, acting out of a sense of
state primacy, would not even sanction this arms shipment. With-
out debating whether or not he acted justifiably, it is undeniable
that Israel survived its first few years, which were immeasurably
more difficult than any in its history, because the nation acted
‘as one person’, if not always ‘with one heart’. State primacy tri-
umphed over factionalism, and the state gained ascendancy over
all the groups under its wing, including those imposed by force.
Splintered opposition The Palestinians, by comparison, became progressively more
splintered; one after another, there arose armed groups such as
1948
Grand Mufti Haj Amin al-Hu-
seini, who was wanted by the
British during the Second World
War for his pro-Nazi activities
and resided in Berlin during
the war. He recruited thousands
of Balkan Muslims for the SS.
Many, including some of us Is-
raelis, are unaware of this point:
the leader of Palestine’s Arabs
was part of the machinery of
destruction used to murder Eu-
ropean Jewry. Nevertheless, Hu-
seini and his Nazi patrons failed
Altalena
New Zealand International Review22
al-Qawmiyun al-Arab, al-Feda’iyun, al-Sa’iqa, al-’Asifa, Fatah,
the Popular Front, the Democratic Front, the Arab Liberation
Front, Islamic Jihad, Hamas, and many others. Not only did these
groups not co-operate; they often fought one another and spilled
each other’s blood. The last round of violence occurred in June
2007 when Hamas’ militias took over the Gaza Strip, mercilessly
shooting Palestinian Authority security personnel and hurling to
the street those who had fled to the upper floors of multistory
buildings.
Immediately after its establishment, the state of Israel was
awarded international recognition and later joined the United
Nations as a member state. Israel has never been involved in war
against a non-Arab or non-Islamic country, and there have even
been talks about its joining NATO. The Palestinians, by contrast,
have become embroiled in strife with everyone around them, and
their Arab ‘brethren’ have killed far more of them than have been
casualties of their conflict with Israel: in September 1970, the Jor-
danian Army killed approximately 20,000 Palestinians because
they managed to dominate large areas in the north of the country;
in August 1976, the Syrian Army butchered thousands of Pales-
tinians at Tel al-Za’tar; in September 1982, the Lebanese Chris-
tian militias killed hundreds of Palestinians in Beirut’s Sabra and
Shatilla refugee camps (these killings are attributed by the Grif-
fiths to Israel because IDF forces were in the vicinity and allowed
the Lebanese Christian Maronites freedom of action); in August
1990, the Iraqi Army invaded Kuwait and destroyed the country,
with Arafat supporting Saddam Hussein wholeheartedly. When
Kuwait was liberated in March 1991, the Kuwaitis expelled an
estimated 300,000 Palestinians who had been working in Kuwait
for many years, in revenge for the latter’s support of Hussein; Lib-
ya banished thousands of Palestinians from its territory after the
signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993; in April 2003, immediately
after Saddam Hussein was toppled, hundreds of knife-wielding
Iraqis burst into Baghdadi Palestinian homes in order to exact
revenge for years of Palestinian support of Saddam Hussein, and
four new Palestinian refugee camps were created as a result.
Equal rightsThe citizens of Israel — both Jewish and Arab — enjoy equal
rights under the law, while the Palestinian refugees in Lebanon
have not been awarded citizenship to this day. Moreover, the Leb-
anese constitution expressly specifies that Palestinian refugees will
never gain citizenship, even though some of them emigrated from
Lebanon to Israel prior to the War of Independence (1948), pri-
marily in order to work in then-developing Haifa and in various
Jewish communities established in northern Israel, such as Rosh
Pina, Ilaniya, Zichron Yaacov and others. For more than 60 years,
Lebanese law has barred Palestinian refugees from employment in
close to 70 different professions. This discriminatory list of for-
bidden professions has recently been shortened to about twenty
different occupations; no one on earth has uttered a single word
about this blatant discrimination. By contrast, an Arab in Israel
can study and work in any profession he or she wishes to engage
in. No wonder then that Arabs make every effort to live in Israel,
be it via fictitious ‘visa marriages’ to Israeli Arab women or by
infiltrating the borders, primarily in the south.
I am far from claiming that Israel is a heaven on earth, but the
Griffiths forgot to mention that thousands of Palestinians who
live in Jerusalem applied to become Israeli citizens, and the same
is happening with the Druze on the Golan Heights, which were
occupied from Syria in 1967. Apparently these people prefer to be
citizens of Israel rather than of any Arab or even Palestinian state.
Palestinians — both Israeli and not Israeli citizens — watch with
great concern what is happening all over the Arab world since
December 2010: the atrocities in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen,
Bahrain and especially Syria are heart-breaking to any human
being, and many Palestinians draw the inevitable conclusion —
with all the problems, it is much better to live under Israeli rule
of law than to suffer under the corrupt rule of the Palestinian
Authority or Hamas, which is internationally defined as a terror
organisation.
Things are not ideal in the Middle East, no doubt, and a dem-
ocratic state like Israel has to find the balance between its security
and livelihood of people who are hostile to it, especially if terror
attacks come from their places.
Unlike other people who immigrated to places in new parts
of the world, we — Jews — returned to our forefathers’ land
from which we were expelled 1942 years ago and renewed our
independence. We do not seek wars with our Arab neighbours
and wish to find a way to live in peace with them. Unfortunately,
peace in the Middle East is given only to the invincible, and as
long as they still dream of getting rid of us we will not enjoy real
peace. When our neighbours accept Israel as a legitimate state of
the Jewish people, peace will be achieved.
Palestinian children killed by the Syrian Army
Iraqi soldiers enter Kuwait in 1990
New Zealand International Review23
The second in a two-part series of symposia to celebrate the 40th
anniversary of diplomatic relations between China and New Zea-
land was held in Beijing on 4 December 2012. It was hosted by
the highly respected Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (CASS),
in partnership with the New Zealand Contemporary China Re-
search Centre at Victoria University of Wellington(VUW) and
the New Zealand Institute of International Affairs. The next gen-
eration tasked with carrying these important bilateral ties forward
was well represented in the audience by CASS scholars and no-
tably by a group of nearly 30 VUW students on a study tour to
China.
Unsurprisingly there were some similarities in the two pro-
grammes, but they were not mirror images. The one offered in
Wellington on 5 September 2012 had a more distinct reflective
aspect to it, which was appropriate for the first in the series. That
provided in Beijing was more obviously focused on ‘where to from
here?’ As the first symposium had done (see the report on it in the
NZIR, vol 37, no 6) but this time to a largely Chinese audience,
the Beijing programme, too, had a strong emphasis on the devel-
opment of the bilateral relationship and its current trends, and on
opportunities to broaden and deepen the two-way engagement.
In his welcoming address the secretary-general of CASS,
Huang Haotao, set a positive tone in observing that distance had
been no barrier to the growth of strong and comprehensive links
underpinning a mature, mutually beneficial and respectful re-
lationship. He referred to ‘multifaceted ties’ in fields as diverse
China–New Zealand: an endless work in progress
CONFERENCE REPORT
Brian Lynch reports on the second China–New Zealand symposium, held in Beijing last December to commemorate the establishment of diplomatic relations between the two countries.
as disaster relief, the environment, finance, food safety and food
security. At the people-to-people level, understanding was be-
ing encouraged by the growth in two-way tourism and student
numbers and by the fact that 29 cities and provinces in China
were now ‘twinned’ with New Zealand counterparts. The boom
in trade since the free trade agreement was signed in 2008 came
in for special mention, as did New Zealand’s continuing unique
position of being the only developed country to have established
formal trade accords with both China and the Hong Kong special
administrative region.
Following the CASS secretary-general, the VUW deputy
vice-chancellor, Professor Neil Quigley, also spoke of the impor-
tance of the economic interaction, including investment that was
a model for others, and valuable educational co-operation, of
which a good example was the staff exchange scheme between
VUW and CASS. He noted that the free trade agreement had
helped cushion New Zealand against the most severe impacts of
the global financial crisis and identified development assistance in
the South Pacific as an emerging area of worthy bilateral co-op-
eration.
Huge importance The first session of the symposium, chaired by the current presi-
dent of the NZIIA, Sir Douglas Kidd, featured two former am-
bassadors from each country and the present New Zealand am-
bassador. In his introductory remarks, Sir Douglas recalled the
acceptance by New Zealand in 1972 that the country could not
afford to continue to ignore ‘one quarter of humanity’. He de-
scribed today’s relationship as ‘hugely’ important to New Zealand
and a dominant factor in encouraging recognition by New Zea-
landers of their country’s Asian destiny. Chen Ming Ming had
been China’s popular ambassador to New Zealand from 2001 to
2005. He gave some intriguing insights into the initial discussion
about exploring a free trade agreement, where he had been instru-
mental, and the eventual bilateral decision to press ahead that by
normal standards had been reached remarkably quickly. He saw
significant promise for future collaboration in dairy farming, the
film industry and food safety, tourism and education, and co-op-
eration in regional forums where New Zealand was able to help
China understand and ‘navigate’ the complex emerging architec-
ture.
Chris Elder, New Zealand’s ambassador to China 1993–98
and a long-time practitioner in the relationship, will author the
volume that will provide a permanent record of the two sympo-
sia. In Beijing he revisited with a light touch some of the trials
and tribulations New Zealand had encountered in establishing its
early presence in China. Overviewing the state of the relationship,
his memorable concluding comment was that ‘history interests
us but the future compels us’. His very recent personal contribu-
tion to the China–New Zealand story has just been published by
Victoria University Press under the title of New Zealand’s China
Delegates to the symposium
New Zealand International Review24
Experience: Its Genesis, Triumphs and Occasional Moments of Less
Than Complete Success and contains many compelling examples
of cross-cultural encounters. Zhang Yuanyuan was China’s senior
representative in New Zealand from 2006 to 2008. He said the
relationship showed how, despite different social and political sys-
tems, two partners could still build trust and co-operate produc-
tively. Examples he gave of where New Zealand experience was of
interest to China were environmental protection, the rule of law
and racial interaction.
Tony Browne had been ambassador in Beijing in the very
formative years of 2004–09 and like Chen Ming Ming had
played an influential role. He emphasised that both countries had
real if different interests at stake at the time, and had seized the
short-term window of opportunity to lock into place the much
acclaimed ‘four firsts’: recognition by New Zealand of China as a
market economy, conclusion of the negotiations on China’s access
to the WTO, and to have started and successfully completed the
free trade agreement deal. The current New Zealand ambassador
to China, Carl Worker, described the free trade agreement as the
‘practical, bed-rock base’ of the relationship and noted that bilat-
eral trade was approaching the balance point. His focus was firmly
on likely measures to realise gains in areas highlighted in the gov-
ernment’s ambitious ‘China Strategy’, and drew special attention
to research and development co-operation and exciting potential
he saw in the services trade, including direct investment.
Wider region The second session shifted the symposium’s agenda to the wid-
er Asia–Pacific region and to where the two countries’ interests
might converge on issues around security and regional integra-
tion. In the latter context a topic of interest was the risk of com-
petition rather than complementarity between the Trans-Pacific
Partnership, to which China does not currently belong, and the
Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP), which
excludes the United States. Zhang Yunling
(CASS) expected countries in the region to
concentrate more on stimulating domestic
consumption, reducing the role of exports
in their growth strategies, and finding new
markets. He asked where the scope lay to
inject new dynamism into regional growth
and believed this would require big changes
to fiscal and monetary policies including on
the part of but not only the United States.
Of interest to New Zealand, which is an
active participant in both the TPP and the
RCEP, Professor Zhang thought work on
the planned China–Japan–South Korea free
trade agreement could move faster than ei-
ther of the more broad-based schemes.
Clare Fearnley is director of the Asia Re-
gional Division in the New Zealand Minis-
try of Foreign Affairs and Trade. She noted
that countries of the Asia–Pacific region had
not had a history of shared regional identity.
The regional architecture was still at a com-
paratively early stage of development. The
evolving constellation of regional groupings
and processes was inevitably messy at this
stage with identifiable gaps and overlaps.
Brian Lynch and Sir Douglas Kidd
However, this was not a major concern for New Zealand and
there was no obvious ‘big bang’ architectural solution. There was
a high degree of complementarity possible between the TPP and
RCEP. Ministers had made clear that New Zealand saw the TPP
as an inclusive piece of regional architecture that was open to Chi-
na and other regional players. There was still a definite place for
APEC in bringing major economies together and in fostering the
Free Trade Agreement Asia Pacific. On security issues Fearnley
said New Zealand emphasised the importance of promoting the
habit of regional co-operation on difficult issues. It was slow going
but the direction of evolution was positive. Han Feng (CASS) said
China’s priority was to advance domestic reform; its approach to
its close neighbourhood was one of ‘diluting regional contradic-
tions’.
Marc Lanteigne (VUW) noted the contrast in the region
between ‘anarchic regimes’, where the emphasis is on consen-
sus-building, and ‘hierarchic regimes’ that are alliance-based. De-
spite that difference he noted there had been good progress in
addressing common issues arising from traditional and non-tra-
ditional security threats. He acknowledged the US ‘rebalancing’
in Asia was a significant new factor, as was the emergence of the
East Asia Summit as an influential new economic entity. Neither
he saw as potentially destabilising developments. In his view the
return of ‘balance of power’ behaviour familiar from an earlier
era was unlikely. There were two discussants in this session: Shi
Yongming (China Institute of International Studies) and Profes-
sor Xiaoming Huang, the director of the China Research Centre
at VUW. They both referred to the need for big power interests
to be reconciled in the South Pacific as well as in the context of
emerging regional architecture.
Soft powerThe third session took the conference away from the realm of high
policy with its focus on risks, options and scenarios into the field
New Zealand International Review25
of ‘soft power’, where some would argue ‘things actually get done’.
Wen Powles is international strategy adviser at Te Papa, Museum
of New Zealand. She spoke of the contribution of ‘cultural diplo-
macy’, which as a factor in New Zealand’s links with China can
be traced back to an exhibition of Chinese arts and artefacts as
early as 1937 that had a significant impact in New Zealand. In
the 40th anniversary year Te Papa partnered with major Chinese
museums to host three exhibitions that offer Chinese audiences a
direct experience of New Zealand culture and heritage. Professor
Liu Shusen, the director of the New Zealand Centre at Peking
University, outlined the programme of courses, studies and staff
exchanges that underpin the robust health of China–New Zea-
land educational links. There was growing bilateral momentum
in areas of study where New Zealand had particular expertise and
China had identified special needs, such as pastoral irrigation and
sheep breeding.
The largest non-China producer of documentaries on Chi-
na is a company called Natural History New Zealand, which has
been based in China for the past seventeen years. Its work is car-
ried in 180 countries, and has been led throughout by Michael
Stedman. His credentials were impeccable for this occasion. He
stressed that one could not visit China and be indifferent, and
noted that the ‘China experience’ was a journey without end. He
had learned that the path to building constructive relationships
required patience and persistence, a genuine interest in Chinese
culture, and a willingness to step outside what most Kiwi expa-
triates might normally regard as their comfort zone. Paul Clark,
Auckland University, and Guo Chunmei, China Institute of Con-
temporary International Relations, provided additional commen-
tary for this session. Professor Clark perceived a dearth of knowl-
edge about each other in both countries; for its part New Zealand
had to make greater efforts ‘to open up more to China’. He and
Guo Chunmei agreed that cultural activities including those of
the Confucius institutes were a critical component of the bilateral
relationship.
Economic aspectsAn overview of economic and trade aspects of the relationship in
the fourth session ended the symposium. The New Zealand trade
commissioner, Alan Young, drew on his long experience to make
some sobering points. There were pleasing trends showing up in
the trade balance and New Zealand was sending lower volumes
of unfinished or partly finished products. The services trade was
becoming more prominent, driven by higher student and tourist
numbers and most notably by the substantial increase in two-way
direct investment; he noted that Fonterra was aiming to establish
a new dairy farm in China every two to three months. However,
there were still downsides to be addressed. The free trade agree-
ment had unleashed a surge in trade, but New Zealand compa-
nies had yet to take full advantage of its potential. They needed
to better equip themselves for operating in China’s complex and
challenging regulatory environment, and to recognise the possi-
bilities available in the exponential growth occurring in China’s
corporate capability.
Professor Pei Changhong (CASS) also highlighted the free
trade agreement’s early success and believed the commodity trade
could reach NZ$15 billion by 2015 with New Zealand being in
surplus. His view, too, was that there was substantial upside to
the services trade yet untapped. Li Xuesong (CASS) is a specialist
in quantitative economics. He applied those skills to a detailed
analysis of optimistic, baseline and pessimistic scenarios over the
periods of China’s next three five-year plans. He forecast that the
economy would grow between 6.4 per cent and 7.4 per cent, with
steady improvement in per capita income and personal consump-
tion levels. China’s development priorities, in his view, were in-
creased investment in education and research, financial reforms,
faster urban growth and the reform of monopolised industries.
Jason Young (China Centre, VUW) pursued an interest in the
impacts that higher investment could have on economic growth.
Despite publicity given to recent Chinese investment in New
Zealand, especially in agriculture, total Chinese involvement in
the investment sector was still below 1 per cent overall and well
out of proportion to the high ranking China now held as New
Zealand’s second largest trading partner.
Rodney Jones, Wigram Capital Advisors, was the first of three
discussants in the final session. He also observed that while trade
was approaching parity China’s investment profile in New Zea-
land was still very low. It was important for New Zealand interests
in China or those with aspirations to establish a presence there to
be constantly aware of the need to maintain relevance; in GDP
terms the New Zealand economy would rank 22nd among the 31
Chinese provinces. Ma Tao (CASS) and Ding Dou (Peking Uni-
versity) both focused on the benefits to be realised from the free
trade agreement, the latter cautioning that New Zealand export-
ers should look for profitable niche opportunities and not expect
to be able to compete across the
breadth of the Chinese econo-
my.
Leadership changesThe timeliness of the symposi-
um was reinforced by its taking
place immediately after the ma-
jor political leadership transition
in China announced a few days
earlier at the 18th Party Con-
gress. This was not a subject for
the agreed agenda. However,
there were some interesting in-
formal assessments and asides
which gave a glimpse of the
expectations at least some Chi-
nese participants had of the new
Xi Jinping
The venue for the symposium
New Zealand International Review26
1989 Mark Pearson, Paper Tiger, New Zealand’s Part in SEATO 1954–1977, 135pp
1991 Sir Alister Mclntosh et al, New Zealand in World Affairs,Volume I, 1945–57, 204pp (reprinted)
1991 Malcolm McKinnon (ed), New Zealand in World Affairs, Volume 2, 1957–72, 261pp
1991 Roberto G. Rabel (ed), Europe without Walls, 176pp1992 Roberto G. Rabel (ed), Latin America in a Changing
World Order, 180pp1995 Steve Hoadley, New Zealand and Australia, Negotiating
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Rights, 35pp1999 Gary Hawke (ed), Free Trade in the New Millennium,
86pp1999 Stuart McMillan, Bala Ramswamy, Sir Frank Holmes,
APEC in Focus, 76pp1999 Seminar Paper, Climate Change — Implementing the
Kyoto Protocol1999 Peter Harris and Bryce Harland, China and America —
The Worst of Friends, 48pp1999 Bruce Brown (ed), New Zealand in World Affairs, Volume
3,1972–1990, 336pp2000 Malcolm Templeton, A Wise Adventure, 328pp2000 Stephen Hoadley, New Zealand United States Relations,
Friends No Longer Allies, 225pp2000 Discussion Paper, Defence Policy after East Timor2001 Amb Hisachi Owada, The Future of East Asia — The
Role of Japan, 21pp2001 Wgton Branch Study Group, Solomon Islands —
Report of a Study Group2001 Bruce Brown (ed), New Zealand and Australia — Where
are we Going?’, 102pp2002 Peter Cozens (ed)
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Zealand–Singapore CEP Agreement, 107pp2002 Malcolm Templeton, Protecting Antarctica, 68pp
2002 Gerald McGhie and Bruce Brown (eds), New Zealand 128pp
2004 A.C. Wilson, New Zealand and the Soviet Union 1950–1991, A Brittle Relationship, 248pp
2005 Anthony L. Smith (ed)A History of Regional and Bilateral Relations, 392pp
2005 Stephen Hoadley,Diplomacy and Dispute Management, 197pp
2005 Brian Lynch (ed)A Tribute to Sir George Laking and Frank Corner, 206pp
2006 Brian Lynch (ed)Foreign Policy Issues, 2005–2010, 200pp
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Implications and Outlook, l43pp2012 Brian Lynch (ed),
Issues Facing New Zealand 2012–2017,218pp
Wellington 6140.For other publications go to www.vuw.ac.nz/nziia/Publications/list.html
NZIIA PUBLICATIONS
administration led by Xi Jinping, who is scheduled to become
president in March 2013. These comments were generally along
the lines that the new leadership would continue the emphasis
on peaceful internal development, reinvigorate the process of
economic and financial reform, persist with measures to enhance
domestic consumption, be tougher in combating corruption,
and continue to promote urbanisation as the primary ‘growth en-
gine source’ but give a higher profile to actions to improve living
standards in the rural hinterlands.
The symposium was told the priority for China offshore
would be to consolidate its standing as a responsible member of
the international community. One participant said ‘in the recent
past the world changed China, now we are told China is chang-
ing the world and we’re not sure how to manage that expecta-
tion if it is true’. It was also said: ‘in the past rising powers have
been the source of conflict; that is not to be expected of China’.
There would be no room for ‘adventures abroad’, for China had
to direct all its available resources to the pursuit of peaceful do-
mestic reform. Despite continuing tensions in the South China
Sea, there was a ‘relatively optimistic’ view expressed by Chinese
speakers that serious incidents that might lead to conflict could
be avoided. Speeches at the 18th Congress and subsequent public
remarks suggested, it was said, that the Xi Jinping administration
would be more open to the world and find ways of co-operating
with its neighbours and globally to resolve major issues.
Final observationsAs there had been at the 5 September 2012 event in Wellington,
again in Beijing there was a significant degree of satisfaction at
what the two countries had together achieved to date in build-
ing areas of useful interaction from the modest beginnings in the
early 1970s. Admittedly, from the New Zealand perspective and
notably since the free trade agreement fell into place, it has been
the commercial features of the relationship that have attracted
most attention and provided the prism through which many New
Zealanders now view China. The Beijing programme offered en-
couraging evidence that other worthwhile activities are going on
besides the business connections, in the creative, cultural, educa-
tional and research fields, and in day to day people contacts.
What did not emerge in Beijing was any pervasive sense of com-
placency from speakers on either side that ‘we’ve got it right’. A
theme prominent at the first symposium was replayed in Beijing:
this particular relationship, certainly for New Zealand, will never
be one to take for granted but always be ‘a work in progress’; never
merely transactional and technocratic but constantly in need of cre-
ative input and fresh energy and to be strategically driven.
New Zealand International Review27
Notes on reviewersDr Jon Johansson is a senior lecturer of comparative-
politics at the School of History, Philosophy, Po-litical Science and International Relations at Vic-toria University of Wellington.
Dr Anthony Smith is a fellow of the Centre for Strategic Studies, Victoria University of Wellington.
Michael Appleton, a diplomat, wrote his master’s thesis in 2004 at the University of Cambridge on the political attitudes of young British Muslims in the United Kingdom.
Dr Beth Greener is a senior lecturer in the Politics Programme at Massey University.
BOOKSFAIRNESS AND FREEDOM:A History of Two Open Societies: New Zealand and the United States
Author: David Hackett Fischer
Published by: Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2012, 656pp,
US$34.95.
In The Politics of Equality Leslie Lipson, when discussing the per-
ennial tension between the values of freedom and equality, made
the telling point that the trick was to keep them in some sort
of balance. Too much freedom could breed inequalities by the
ruthless and strong. Too much equality could result in crushing
uniformity as well as stifle freedom and innovation. Lipson also
contrasted the pre-eminence of American liberty, symbolised by
the Statue of Liberty guarding New York Harbor, against New
Zealand’s historic preference for equality: ‘if any sculptured alle-
gory were to be placed at the approaches of Auckland or Welling-
ton harbor, it would assuredly be a statue of equality.’1
With this backdrop or, more aptly, bedrock in mind, Da-
vid Hackett Fischer’s comparative study of two open societies,
America and New Zealand, is a valuable new contribution for
any who may seek to understand the central organising principles
that drive each liberal democracy. In the United States the dom-
inant cultural theme of liberalism vacillates around competing
conceptions of economic and democratic individualism.2 This is
self-evidently not so in New Zealand, where the lack of organising
principles has seen a more diffuse tension between liberty and
equality emerge, with equality the dominant value through most
of our history.
Fischer believes earlier critiques of New Zealand culture erro-
neously attribute the influence of ‘Mother Country’, geographi-
cal isolation, and the resulting insecurity as shaping the nation’s
cultural preference for egalitarianism. He rejects these by arguing
that differences between American and New Zealand values is
centred more on timing; essentially the difference between the
first and second British Empires and the pre- and post-enlight-
enment mental worlds that fore-
shadowed them. This explained
for Fischer the different attitudes
and treatment of respective set-
tler populations to developing
nascent political structures, their
interactions and policies towards
indigenous populations, their
patterns of settlement, and ap-
proaches to domestic and for-
eign policy challenges through
the centuries.
This claim is largely self-ev-
ident but Fischer does dismiss
rather glibly long-standing ex-
planations about the forging of a uniquely Kiwi culture. He re-
jects the impact of our physical isolation too easily for this re-
viewer’s taste. Size matters and so do resources (both physical and
human). Perhaps it depends upon which end of the telescope one
looks through, but the insightful Frenchman Andre Siegfried un-
derstood our ‘chronic smallness’ in a vein identical to New Zea-
land’s great historian J.C. Beaglehole, who described our islands
as a ‘geological exile,’ adding, ‘The springs of its more irritating
failings, as of its more characteristic virtues, rise, like its lakes and
torrents, in its own heart.’3
A curiously schizophrenic form of insularity is one result.
On one hand, New Zealanders travel in a fashion incomprehen-
sible to the average American. Located at the periphery of civ-
ilisation, New Zealanders seek it out in larger local, regional or
global centres. In America, an epicentre of civilisation of its own
making, people feel this need less. They are more content within
their physical surrounds, and are thus more unaware of differ-
ences. On the other hand, and despite our greater worldliness,
New Zealanders are suspicious of high rhetoric or grand visions,
purposes or challenges. A bold Declaration of Independence or
even a French-styled republic could find no fertile soil here —
indeed André Siegfried could not find one republican in the col-
ony during his stay — while America is at its most brilliant when
looking outward; to the west initially, then to other nations, and
ultimately to space once a continent’s riches, both physical and
human, had been mastered and put to the most expansive pur-
poses imaginable.
Fischer is at his eloquent best when describing the parallel
tracks of New Zealand and American development. His research
is voluminous and his enthusiasm evident as he brings an outsid-
er’s sense of discovery to his depictions of New Zealand’s historical
progression from colonial outpost to global citizen and beacon of
equalitarianism. There is little to fault in his descriptive analysis,
although his post-1984 interpretation of New Zealand is weaker
than earlier sections. Rogernomics introduced a new (neo-liberal)
language, to be sure, but it barely made an effort to piggyback
the old. Rather, an imported language was introduced by stealth
and was less about fairness than, according to its architects, the
absence of any alternative. Also, perhaps our Bill of Rights has
not attained the elevated status of that of our Americans cousins
because it has the same status as a rabbit control act, and we do
not remember the specifics of them either.
Fairness and Freedom does possess many annoying errors. As
notoriously reluctant as New Zealand’s political elites were to ac-
quire sovereignty over their law making, through the adoption of
New Zealand International Review28
the Statute of Westminster Act 1931, we did manage it a full dec-
ade earlier than Fischer claims. Second, the epiphany that struck
him on a Banks Peninsula road (the central rhetorical trope which
frames the book’s central theme from its introduction in his pref-
ace to its unveiling to begin his conclusion) will be lost on all of
those (mostly American) readers who fail to realise that the road
to Akaroa is the same as the road to ‘Alcaroa’. Thirdly, Fischer
felt that the prominence of fairness in American public life faded
after Truman’s consolidation of Roosevelt’s New Deal. Yet Lyndon
Johnson’s Great Society and the civil rights breakthroughs of the
1960s were a triumph for fairness, or perhaps its last hurrah, but
fairness nonetheless. Obamacare represents another late bloom-
ing, which is precisely why it was so despised by America’s right,
seeing as it grants at least 30 million of Fischer’s fellow citizens
equal protection from health-related financial ruin.
Obama’s re-election in 2012 highlights Lipson’s tension be-
tween liberty and fairness well. Republican challenger Mitt Rom-
ney’s contempt towards 47 per cent of his fellow citizens embodies
one aspect of it. Obama’s coalition of Blacks, Hispanics, women
and the young on both coasts represents another, with a majority
of voters from the rust-belt states helping to decide the election
in Obama’s favour on the back of his bailout of the auto indus-
try, part of a massive government response to the global financial
crisis. Romney’s promised freedoms lost out to Obama’s defence
of, and call for, greater fairness. In New Zealand, now into its
28th year of a post-Rogernomics cycle of politics, policy-mak-
ers are meanwhile awkwardly fine-tuning the consolidation of
greater freedoms into the nation’s cultural DNA. Reaction and
counter-reaction are a weak force as the now old language of the
neo-liberals has all but stalled, and with the direction we are head-
ed not easily glimpsed no compelling or strong new language has
emerged.
Perhaps then a more salient question for any comparative
study of the United States and New Zealand is less about the ori-
gins and manifestations of cultural values that forged each coun-
try’s identity, its politics and wider society, than how each nation,
however existential its journey has been, adapts to change and
the extent to which respective political systems can effect change
responses. Managing the tension between fairness and freedom
is one aspect of this but only one — the role of leadership, the
extent to which constitutional/institutional architectures create
system inertia or dynamism, and the quality of policy responses
are three of many other variables — so Fischer’s study is a valuable
if not definitive contribution to New Zealanders and Americans
learning how to learn from each other, from different ends of the
telescope.
JON JOHANSSON
NOTES1. Leslie Lipson, The Politics of Equality: New Zealand’s Adven-
tures in Democracy (2nd ed), Introduced by Jon Johansson
(Wellington, 2011), p.7.
2. See Erwin Hargrove, The President as Leader: Appealing to the Better Angels of Our Nature (Kansas, 1998), pp.52–7; and Ar-
thur M. Schlesinger Jr, The Cycles of American History (New
York, 1986), pp.1–48.
3. Andre Siegfried, Democracy in New Zealand (2nd ed), Intro-
duction by David Hamer (Wellington, 1982); J.C. Beagle-
hole, New Zealand: A Short History (London, 1936), p.158.
SANDSTORM: Libya in the Time of Revolution
Author: Lindsey Hilsum
Published by: Faber and Faber, London, 2012, 288pp, £17.99.
THE LAST REFUGE: Yemen, al-Qaeda, and America’s War in Arabia
Author: Gregory Johnsen
Published by: Scribe, Melbourne, 2012, 352pp, A$32.99.
Two of the countries most im-
pacted by the Arab Spring upris-
ings, Libya and Yemen, are the
subject of recent volumes.
British journalist Lind-
sey Hilsum writes an excellent
volume on the overthrow of
Muammar Gaddafi. Hilsum
notes that to the outside world
Gaddafi was often seen as ‘a
clown’ or ‘an oddball’, but to the
Libyan people he was a terrifying
figure. Gaddafi’s 42-year reign
over Libya would end when the
leader was found in a ditch, and angry rebels beat, tortured and
executed him. Hilsum is able to outline the nature of Gaddafi’s
despotic rule and his support for revolutionary movements world-
wide, his (partial) alignment with the West during the last dec-
ade of his rule, and the popular uprising that ultimately deposed
him. Sandstorm offers some interesting insights into the deal that
Gaddafi struck with Western countries after 9/11. There has been
an interpretation that Gaddafi decided to give up his weapons
of mass destruction programme after the demonstration effect of
the war in Iraq. Hilsum offers more texture here. It is clear that
Gaddafi, to some extent less interested in exporting revolution in
his later years, was looking for a means to come in from the cold
anyway, and 9/11 offered him the opportunity to do so. In the
‘war on terrorism’, some may have considered the Libya regime
a useful ally. Hilsum, writing from the British angle, is quick to
point out some of the effusive statements that Tony Blair made
about Gaddafi, and how many, probably as the result of a West-
ernised façade, misjudged Gaddafi’s son, Saif al-Islam, who would
subsequently prove to share the despotic instincts of his father.
Despite Blair’s analysis, Libya was in fact a major source of jihad-
ists and suicide bombers in Iraq, many coming specifically from
the Cyrenaica region, which included the city of Benghazi. Beng-
hazi was notable for two social/political movements — religious
conservatism and hatred for the Gaddafi regime. Hilsum quotes
the late US Ambassador Chris Stevens (tragically killed in Beng-
hazi by extremists in 2012) as saying that elements radicalised by
the Gaddafi regime were willing to strike at the regime’s perceived
backer, that is, the United States. Once again it becomes obvi-
ous in hindsight that Middle Eastern dictatorships provided fer-
tile ground for al-Qaeda to recruit in, and this was notably so in
New Zealand International Review29
Libya. The NATO intervention
to prevent Gaddafi’s military
machine massacring its oppo-
nents changed that equation in
the eyes of many Libyans. Still,
some awkwardness remained. As
Hilsum notes, the Islamist leader
who led militia forces from Lib-
ya’s west to ‘liberate’ Tripoli and
finally topple the Gaddafi family
was one Abdel Hakim Belhaj,
who claimed to have once been
the subject of an ‘extraordinary
rendition’ by the United States
on the grounds that he might have been an al-Qaeda suspect.
Gregory Johnsen, formerly a journalist and currently at
Princeton University, writes an important account of al-Qaeda in
Yemen. The Last Refuge outlines the emergence of al-Qaeda in the
Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), or at least the most recent version of
it, from the remnants of former inmates of Guantanamo Bay and
Yemen’s own prison system. According to this account, AQAP
has become perhaps the most serious of the al-Qaeda spin-off
groups to threaten the outside world, as a number of attempted
external attacks in recent years would indicate. This has given rise
to drone strikes in response, some of which have targeted those
with US citizenship, most famously Anwar al-Awlaki, the Yeme-
ni-American cleric dubbed the ‘bin Laden of the internet’. In fact,
as Johnsen notes, jihadist groups have operated in Yemen for quite
some time, including the Yemen-based al-Qaeda cadre that made
the pre-9/11 attack on the USS Cole. The Last Refuge is able to
situate the emergence of AQAP within the wider political context
of Yemen’s politics and general turmoil. We also learn the role
that former long-term president (and former soldier) Abdullah
Ali Salih played in co-opting Islamist political forces and militias,
including to help him subdue southern Yemen in the 1990s, and
then subsequently maintaining some (including the ‘Afghan Ar-
abs’, that is, Yemeni veterans of the anti-Soviet war) on retainers.
Still, Yemen has always been a notoriously difficult country to
draw together, as demonstrated by events since early 2011, to in-
clude Salih’s departure after Arab Spring opposition in the streets
and the centrifugal tendencies of the provinces and regions. One
element of Johnsen’s account that needs to be remarked upon is
the sourcing of the material. Attempting to outline groups like
AQAP, or similar entities in other countries, poses considerable
research problems for scholars, which probably defy any kind of
access to documentary sources that would constitute the trade of
a careful historian. Yet much of Johnsen’s account, which, it must
be acknowledged, is a terrific (almost screen-play like) narrative,
is presented with a degree of certainty that the ascribed source
material cannot fully sustain. We are given words and actions at-
tributed to key figures, to include President Salih, without really
being able to pin down where this all comes from. Current AQAP
leader and former bin Laden bodyguard Nasir al-Wihayshi is said
by the author to have been judged by bin Laden himself as ‘too
short to be intimidating and too smart to be wasted’. One won-
ders about the basis of that judgment, which seems to rest on a
lot of assumptions. Johnsen also appears to have derived a lot of
material from newspaper accounts of interviews with extremists
and former extremists themselves, and seemingly accepted these
accounts at face value despite their likely self-serving nature. In
short, Johnsen’s book, while it contains material and judgements
that could use greater clarity, remains an important piece of the
puzzle in examining the extremism problem. One cannot think of
too many available publications that cover Yemen’s corner of the
al-Qaeda story in such a comprehensive way.
ANTHONY SMITH
GLOBAL ISLAMOPHOBIA: Muslims and Moral Panic in the West
Edited by: George Morgan and Scott Poynting
Published by: Ashgate, Farnham, Surrey, 2012, 240pp, £55.
In March 2009, a 24-year-old Somali woman named Nadifa was
pulled out of her bed in the middle of the night, dragged to the
floor of her London apartment, handcuffed, and screamed at.
Nadifa’s description of her experience at the hands of police —
of shock, embarrassment and shame — is compelling. But it is
telling that her story does not appear in this book’s pages until the
penultimate of its twelve chapters. For the vast majority of Global
Islamophobia, the voices of individual Muslims in the West, and
how their lives have been affected by prejudice, are conspicuously
absent.
Global Islamophobia is a collection of eleven case studies from
around the Western world — North America, Western Europe
and Australia — which seek, in their sum, to demonstrate that
Islamophobia (irrational fear of Muslims or Islam) ‘permeates’ the
West, with ‘momentous’ consequences. The case studies are var-
ied and generally interesting and well-drawn — ranging from the
ability of the German state education system to deal with racially
heterogeneous student bodies in lower socio-economic commu-
nities to the use of crude anti-Muslim propaganda in a political
campaign in western Sydney.
The underlying analytical concept organising the case studies
is moral panic. Muslims in the West are described as being the
victims of a ‘volatile’, ‘hostile’ and ‘disproportionate’ moral panic,
and as being built into ‘folk devils’ who are blamed for many of
the underlying social and economic problems of the Western so-
cieties in which they live.
Evidence to support this thesis is sprinkled throughout the
book. Political movements, such as those described in this vol-
ume in Sweden and Italy, that present Islam as the primary source
of Western moral and social decay and as being fundamentally
inconsistent with ‘Western values’ exist throughout Europe. Tra-
ditional news media organisations, especially in the wake of psy-
chically challenging events such as terrorist attacks, can tend to
exaggerate, engage in demagoguery and simplify, including on
matters of religion and race. And some Western governments
have taken actions over the past decade that have been experi-
enced by Muslims as confronting, victimising and unfair.
But, as a work of media analysis or political sociology, Global
Islamophobia feels like a lengthy and repetitive exercise in stating
the obvious. It leaves many important questions either completely
New Zealand International Review30
or largely unanswered.
For example, the scale,
scope and effects of the Is-
lamophobia problem are not
convincingly addressed. How
widespread is anti-Muslim
prejudice in a range of West-
ern countries? Is it more severe
and/or more common than
that prejudice experienced by
other minorities now or in the
past? How does it impact on
the lives of Muslims living in
the West — whether in terms
of their ability to access qual-ity education, travel unimpeded, secure affordable and sanitary
housing and be given equal consideration in employment sit-
uations? Without this sort of sketch of the problem, it is hard
to discern whether the authors are arguing that Islamophobia is
an epochal crisis pervading every aspect of Western society and
threatening to fundamentally undermine its values (that is, that it
is analogous, say, to the civil rights crisis facing the United States
in the 1960s), or whether what they are describing is something
much more limited in its depth and effects.
The book, taken as a whole, also does little to address the
range of responses by Muslim communities to Islamophobia and
more generally to the process of living in majority non-Muslim
societies. What strategies have worked and what have not? In
terms of government policies, which approaches have generally
led to greater cohesion and social harmony; and which have in-
flamed tensions? It might be difficult to answer these questions in
a general way — because the situations in each Western country
are surely different. However, by providing an essentially ahistori-
cal and a-contextual account — one which concentrates more on
flashpoints and media controversies than on government policies
and structural factors — the author has made it difficult to discern
any lessons from the book’s accumulated evidence. More gener-
ally, the tension at the heart of liberal society — acceptance of
difference whilst observing universal norms — is left untouched.
One particularly surprising blind spot is the book’s almost
complete failure to come to grips with the role of new media tech-
nologies in the shaping of how Muslims are perceived, as well as in
how they construct their own senses of identity. For a study that
leans heavily on media content analysis, there is a strangely 20th
century feel to its methodology. In an age when a new generation
of followers of Islam is using a range of social media technologies
to create their own understandings of being Muslim in the West,
Global Islamophobia tends to concentrate instead on an analysis of
newspaper clippings.
For all that, this collection of essays addresses an important
issue that is worthy of further study and debate. More than a dec-
ade after 9/11, antipathy towards Muslims continues to bubble
up, including in the United States, where the experience of Mus-
lims — in terms of educational and economic outcomes — has
in aggregate been far better than that of their European co-reli-
gionists. Why such prejudice lingers, and what steps might be at-
tempted to combat it, are weighty matters. Unfortunately, Global Islamophobia does not convincingly address them.
MICHAEL APPLETON
ILLUMINATING THE DARK ARTS OF WAR: Terrorism, Sabotage and Subversion in Homeland Security
Author: David Tucker
Published by: Continuum Press, New York, 2013, 271pp,
US$32.95.
The first paragraph of Tucker’s book provokes interest. He asks
what should we think about a secretive religious minority living in
the United States that is radicalised and willing to use violence? In
the final sentence he points out that he was discussing Catholics
in the 19th century, prompting embarrassment in those, like me,
who leapt to the assumption that he was discussing radicalised
Islamic sects in contemporary times. The paragraph also, howev-
er, prompts some uncertainty about the book and the solidity of
some of these claims, as Tucker states that he will explore this case
further but fails to do so.
The rest of the book continues on in a similarly slightly discon-
certing but intriguing way. Tucker’s text is a discussion of different
aspects of violence: terrorism, sabotage and subversion. These are
for the most part nicely defined, and, again for the most part, he
seems to be putting forward a balanced view. For example, in dis-
cussing the possible threat of a weapons of mass destruction attack
on the United States by a terrorist group, he downplays the hype.
He notes that such groups would need to: be willing to attack the
United States in an indiscriminate way; be willing to use weapons
of mass destruction; and be able to do so. This is an important
recognition of the difficulties such groups would meet, given the
scaremongering that exists around this particular topic. He also
suggests that evangelical Christianity might be just as much of a
threat to the United States as radical Islam given how he defines
threats to secular statehood — a controversial if interesting claim.
However, at times the balance of the view being brought across
frays a little. For example Tucker relays a Cold War argument that
‘Nazism and Communism were in principle the same. Nazism
denied equality on the basis of race; Marxism on the basis of class’.
This is not referenced, and a follow up sentence two pages later
sees Tucker himself assert that there was a real threat of subversion
from communists within the United States. The weakness here is
that there is no real outlining as to why communism was subver-
sive, no tackling of issues such as capitalism and different forms of
democratic process. Given the helpful definitions provided else-
where — for example, he does outline why radical Islamism is
seen as subversive as it requires a doing away of the separation of
politics and religion — this is an important oversight. This case
also highlights another weakness of the book — additional ref-
erencing would provide weight of evidence for the claims made.
Some literature also seems lacking. For example, Tucker discusses
the idea of the ‘new terrorism’ but does not mention Walter La-
queur, nor is Laqueur in the bibliography — and Laqueur wrote
The New Terrorism.
These issues aside, this is still a very interesting book, not
in the least because it demonstrates that political violence has
long been a feature of American life. The first substantive chap-
ter sketches a history of lynching, civil war, riots, mob violence,
New Zealand International Review31
and home-grown terrorism by Black Liberation Army, Puerto
Rican separatists, Klu Klux Klan members, the Unabomber and
the Weathermen amongst others. (Tucker also helpfully points
out that domestic political violence, particularly terrorism, has
been on the wane since the 1970s, though international attacks
have increased.) In providing this survey of political violence, the
book also describes something about the American political psy-
che. For example, Tucker discusses the role of the Declaration of
Independence in trying to understand just what terrorism and
subversion might be when the declaration both emphasises rights
and justifies the use of might. He sketches debates over ‘clear
and present danger’ in outlining the controversial McCarran Act,
which strongly discriminated against members of the Commu-
nist Party during the Cold War. Most striking about this book,
then, is the way in which it manages to directly or inadvertently
highlight the strong tensions within the US political system and
the various interpretations of rights, freedoms and understand-
ings as to how to avoid a tyranny of the majority when consent
is all important.
In terms of other themes, Tucker also spends a fair amount of
time discussing the implications of technology (Chapter 3) and
organisational forms (Chapter 6) in considering the key question
of state versus non-state actor power. He argues that technology
has not really made much of a difference. It gives non-state actors
new ways of organising but also lends state actors new ways of
responding. And some things remain the same — for example,
Tucker points out that building trust still requires face-to-face
interaction. In considering institutional forms, he suggests that
there are also pros but cons to the more horizontal, decentralised
and autonomous nature of non-state actor networks. He does not
ascribe to the notion that states need to ‘be a network to fight a
network’, and argues that states still have supremacy over non-
state actors, particularly in terms of accountability and legitimacy.
In making this claim Tucker is willing to admit that US authorities
are fallible. For example, he notes how federal counter-terrorism
capabilities came late to the fray in the 1970s, and suggests that
‘not having been designed for such a role the federal government
did not handle its growing power and authority gracefully’. Over-
all, this is an intriguing book. It touches on significant themes,
such as the power of states in an information age, and provides
interesting details, such as Tucker’s description of the effects of
Stuxnet (a programme that was designed to sabotage Iran’s nu-
clear programme). Worth a read, but some points made could be
more convincing.
BETH GREENER
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New Zealand International Review32
Sir,
A variety of recent publications provide valuable complements to
the continuing debate on New Zealand’s international position,
particularly in regard to China, and how we are to maximise our
interests in the future. These publications include the NZIR in its
last two issues and the two 2012 CSS discussion papers 11 and
12.1 While most of the discussion understandably focuses on bi-
lateral relations in a regional context, we suggest that such an anal-
ysis needs to be broadened to include a greater global perspective,
as well as a more rigorous assessment of the role of multilateralism
and the United Nations in particular.
A global perspective is necessary to properly recognise China’s
interests as it increases in economic reach and becomes a glob-
al power. While regional relations with its neighbours, and the
United States in particular, are vitally important, China’s demand
for resources is prompting it to strengthen ties with countries out-
side the Asia–Pacific region, such as in Africa and Latin America.
These relations will be an important influence on the way that
China develops its international perspectives and strategies.
A much more vital global perspective, however, is an appre-
ciation of overall collective, global benefit. To what extent do na-
tions, and big powers in particular, see the rest of the world as
resources to be competitively exploited, or as common assets to
be collectively nurtured based on agreed rules and principles? Are
nations principally interested in asserting narrow self interest in
whatever way they can, or in developing systems to enable col-
lective promotion of mutual interest? In short, what is the role of
multilateralism, and the United Nations in particular?
New Zealand has always recognised the critical importance of
global multilateralism and the rule of law, particularly for small-
er nations. It contributed significantly to the formation of the
League of Nations and the United Nations. However, the viability
of such systems depends vitally on the involvement of the major
powers, an issue which has been amply demonstrated by subse-
quent events in both the League and the United Nations.
A vital objective of New Zealand diplomacy would, therefore,
include promoting big power commitment to multilateralism.
In their CSS paper Chris Elder and Rob Ayson demonstrated
the significant impact that China has been having in our multilat-
eral institutions, becoming, in some ways, a de facto leader of the
developing world. China is playing a prominent role in the G77
and challenging Western liberal dominance of the major econom-
ic institutions. The Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) provides a vital
basis in which many nations can address potential disputes and
its recognition is particularly relevant to the oceans around China.
The key question is, to what extent will China seek collec-
tive security by strengthening the United Nations and working
through its provisions, or alternatively by manipulation of the
international machinery in its own interests and the coercion of
individual countries? A critical case is presented by its maritime
borders. While it has ratified the UNCLOS, it insists on address-
ing its various disputes on a bilateral basis. This ‘divide and con-
quer’ tactic thus undermines the legitimacy of the UNCLOS and
has placed enormous strains on ASEAN.
China’s behaviour, of course, must be seen in the context of
the attitude of other powers towards multilateralism and the ex-
CORRESPONDENCEtent that disrespect for the rule of law has been tolerated by other
countries such as ourselves.
In pursuing New Zealand’s interests with respect to a rising
China we must undertake substantial analysis of the roles that
the various forms of multilateralism have played, the factors that
have strengthened and weakened their influence, and the record
of China’s engagement. Above all, we need to promote China’s
appreciation of how its long-term interests can be pursued more
effectively through a co-operative multilateral framework. Such a
strategy will involve not only our direct relations with China but
also our relations with many of the other countries that have re-
lations with China and see the value in a co-operative rules-based
environment, rather than a competitive power-based one.
Tim Groser’s paper ‘Governance and multilateralism in the
21st century’ (NZIR, vol 38, no 1) does provide a global and an
historical perspective of the benefits of multilateralism, as well as
some interesting insights into the nature of multilateral negoti-
ations. However, he fails to do justice to the breadth and depth
of multilateral governance systems by making only the briefest
mention of the extensive UN system, and virtually ignoring the
complex of other regional and specialist institutions.
John Allen, secretary of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and
Trade, in his presentation in Wellington to mark UN Day last
24 October,2 highlighted the crucial importance of the principles
of the United Nations and the great need for a much greater ap-
preciation of its role. He also emphasised the considerable contri-
bution that small states can make in promoting those principles
and establishing the framework for the rule of law, in contrast to
the rule of war. Further, he argued that New Zealand can make
a distinctive contribution due to the special role that respect and
partnership plays within it.
While the articles that we have seen to date make important
contributions to our understanding of our interests, we look for-
ward to a broader analysis that does justice to New Zealand’s long-
term interests in a co-operative multilateral, rules-based interna-
tional order. Is there a risk that a relationship too narrowly focused
on bilateral dimensions undermines these broader interests?
We hope that New Zealand will re-discover the inspiration
and vision that led it into the creation of the United Nations, and
motivated its extensive contributions to the development of that
system.
GRAY SOUTHON
Special Officer for UN Renewal
United Nations Association of New Zealand
NOTES1. Chris Elder and Robert Ayson, China’s Rise and New Zea-
land’s Interests: A Policy Primer for 2030, Discussion Paper
No 11 (Wellington, 2012); Zhu Feng, U.S. Rebalancing in the
Asia–Pacific: China’s Response and the Future Regional Order, Discussion Paper No 12 (Wellington, 2012).
2. www.unanz.org.nz/Home/tabid/288/EntryId/41/MFAT-
Secretary-John-Allens-address-at-UNANZ-UN-Day-Recep-
tion-at-Premier-House.aspx.
New Zealand International Review33
INSTITUTE NOTES
From 29 October till 16 November an NZIIA team consisting
of Peter Kennedy, Lance Beath and Peter Nichols carried out the
second session of the Papua New Guinea Foreign Service Train-
ing programme in Port Moresby. Foreign Minister Hon Murray
McCully, visiting Papua New Guinea with a business delegation,
gave an address on ‘The Requirements of a Foreign Service Of-
ficer’ to course members on the second day. (A report on this
effort is to be found elsewhere in this issue.)
The book New Flags Flying, by Michael Powles and Ian John-
stone, was launched at a reception in Wellington on 27 Novem-
ber, with 75 present.
A delegation from the NZIIA led by Sir Douglas Kidd took
part in the China–New Zealand Symposium held in Beijing on
4 December.
NelsonOn 4 December Peter Kennedy, the director of the Institute and
former ambassador to the European Union, gave an address enti-
tled ‘Europe: Who’s in Charge’.
Palmerston NorthOn 31 October, Ian McKelvie MP addressed the branch about
the role of New Zealand in promoting sustainable agriculture for
international food security. As a local businessman and politician
with a long farming background, he demonstrated his awareness
and appreciation of the implications and challenges for New Zea-
land’s ability to compete effectively in a globalised world. Hin-
dered by a small domestic market, an inability to reach critical
mass without going overseas, and a lack of sufficient infrastructure
to ‘grow’ industry efficiently, while sufficient talent and expertise
is right here in New Zealand, many of our success stories have
meant taking a more pro-active approach.
McKelvie’s key argument was the need to increase the under-
standing of the importance of agriculture for New Zealand as its
primary industry. He believed that New Zealand’s future is in
high quality food production. This is necessary throughout socie-
ty as a whole. For many, this would involve a change in mindsets
in making agriculture and sustainable living more attractive as a
career or lifestyle. McKelvie lamented the lack of rural infrastruc-
ture and relatively higher costs of this choice as a barrier, and dis-
cussed possible solutions by commenting about his own personal
role in pushing these topics in government circles, and raising the
level of emphasis on rural concern, which in his opinion are not
given sufficient attention or priority.
The second point was making better use of technologies and
efficiencies to remain competitive — perhaps with more research
and development for value-added processes in building up New
Zealand’s role as a leading producer and exporter of high quality
food products. Some goals were to promote a coherent agri-food
strategy or precision agricultural techniques. To enhance this as-
pect of the knowledge economy, the role of education is vital.
There has to be a change in thinking amongst industry and soci-
ety so that sustainable agriculture is accepted and embraced as an
attractive option for students.
Tauranga On 25 October Sir Douglas Kidd formally opened a new
NZIIA branch at Tauranga. The ceremony was attended by a di-
verse group of business people and teachers from the local com-
munity. Director Peter Kennedy also participated. The driving
force behind the new branch is Murray Denyer, a former MFAT
officer and general counsel for Zespri, who is now a partner in
ConneyLeesMorgan. He was elected chair. As a major commer-
cial hub and port it is expected that Tauranga will provide a vi-
brant environment within which the new branch will grow.
WairarapaOn 19 November Rob Robinson CNZM, former commissioner
of police, addressed the branch on ‘International Police Plan to
Combat One of the World’s Biggest Killers’. He is leading a pro-
ject to establish the new International Road Policing Organisation
(RoadPOL) in Singapore. The Singapore government is hosting
the World Bank-initiated venture, which aims to improve road
safety enforcement in low and middle-income countries.
In January the NZIIA’s
national office gained
a new executive officer,
replacing Ngaire Flynn,
who has retired. She is
Synonne Rajanayagam,
who comes to us high-
ly recommended after
fourteen years as execu-
tive officer at the Cen-
tre for Strategic Studies,
Victoria University. Syn-
onne, who has diplomas
in journalism and child
psychology and develop-
ment, worked previously
NZIIA President Sir Douglas Kidd with Murray Denyer, the chair of the new Tauranga branch
for the New Zealand office of UNICEF. Prior to this she
was employed in the International Recruitment Office of
King Faisal Specialist Hospital, Riyadh. Synonne may be
contacted on [email protected] or 04 463
5356.
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