Taking a look at NRT yesterday I noticed this iconic picture and the attached byline. It is a truly great snap. Apparently the last atmospheric test at Mururoa was 1974, but it is timely reminder that nuclear testing is not some far-flung piece of imagination.
Naturally, I can’t make any explicit comment about the political ramifications of the election campaign NRT or Just Left (the source of the poster) are indicating, but the larger debate surrounding the campaign itself is fascinating to a politics geek like myself.
As someone with a passing interest in the processes of nationalism and nation-building, the one thing I see in this election campaign is the forces of said nation-building at work. The same goes for the most recent Australian election. When you’re gadding about the streets of Melbourne, the developmental direction of the Australian nation isn’t really something you think about to a great extent. Mostly it’s, where in the hell is my tram? Or, why do the ATMs only give out $50 bills? Or, god, how many pots of beer did I have, and who the hell are you?
But, around election time, when the focus of the average citizen is drawn towards the machinations of Canberra, it’s almost possible to avoid hearing leaders talking about the kind of Australian they’d like to see. We were mostly concerned with sitting outside next to the mint garden drinking bottles of Carlton Draught, watching the neighbours stroll by, and listening to ‘Permission to Land’, but that pesky damn politics just kept sneaking on in there.
Latham’s “ladder of opportunity" was an idea that particularly grabbed our imagination. In part, this was because it spoke about living in place where being born poor or different didn’t matter. If you needed a hand to get up, or were born black, yellow or Mediterranean, then Australia was the kind of place where you might find that help. Mind you, it was tempered by the statement that if you were just plain lazy then…
Howard on the other hand kind of ran a campaign aimed to discredit Labor. There was a bit of the ‘national imagining’ stuff, but basically it was without any overt statements about what the future of Australia looked like, other than as a direct continuation of the whiter Australia of the past.
There’s an author called Tom Nairn who calls this situation the ‘Janus Faces’ of nationalism. In part, nationalism and nation-building looks to the future. Statements about ‘my Australia’, or ‘our Australia’ tend to look to the way the speaker wants to see their country becoming something. Something like a place where people help each other out for example. The flipside of this approach is the way in which nationalism also looks to the past. Every good future needs to build on something from the past to provide social continuity. In a way, without our past, there can be no meaningful future.
I’m thinking that maybe that’s the reason why the reforms of Governments of both political persuasions throughout the 1980s and 90s were such a shock to many New Zealanders, because in a lot of ways we profoundly broke from our older traditions of collectivism, of helping one another, and started this new thinking of ‘me myself and I’.
It’s why the nuclear issue is so pertinent to many New Zealanders as well. In many ways, the no-nukes statement is not only an affirmation of the past we all embraced so readily during the insanity of mutually assured destruction, but it also indicates a time in our past when we stood up to the world and said we weren’t going to be the lap-dogs of any power. And in my mind that’s not a bad place for New Zealand to be, even today.
And when it comes down to brass tacks, that’s the sort of decision being made at any election. Sure, the devil is often in the details, and the habits of the bureaucracy don’t change dramatically between elections any more, but the future face of New Zealand is something we all need to think about. What kind of country do you want to live in? Because whether you realise it or not, that’s often the choice that is being presented.
Personally, I think that both faces are necessary to balance out the way today is. We need to take into account our collective pasts, and push the lessons we learn into our todays, to make better sense of how our tomorrows will become. Throwing away those lessons to enable better application of ideology and belief is a pointless exercise, and throwing away those lessons for short-term gain is foolish beyond reckoning.