A pet peeve that has been building over the past few years is the natural tendency of any commentator, be they expert, lay or political to want to use the word ‘nation’ or ‘national’ as shorthand for ‘citizen’. Originally I wanted to give you all my two-cents worth on the looming abortion debate that’s just starting to kick off here in the Land of Flies, but if I have time on Thursday I’ll run through that one for you.
In the meantime though, here’s the only reasonable article I’ve noticed so far.
To be honest, I’m glad that New Zealand politics has meandered back towards a subject I think I have a modest expertise in. Fact is, you can’t spend six years arguing out the details of nationalism and not get a good understanding, and opining about abortion was always going to expose my own prejudices and cost me my last few ‘PC medals’. So I say we go for the safe option from the outset and save both of us the embarrassment.
As I said earlier, there’s a conventional wisdom in the public sphere that automatically equates nation with population and/or citizen. What this means in practical terms is that when Helen says ‘in the interests of the nation’, she’s implying everybody. This always kind of pisses me off though, because you only really have to scratch the surface of any nation-state world wide to see that the word nation is always a limiting term.
I don’t want to expand this one out too much for fear of boring the pants off you, but if you need more I’ll sell you a copy of ‘The National Cell’ when and if I get it published. The go is this. ‘Nation’ universally refers to the group that controls a country. If I say, America, the group in charge is ‘Americans’. Australia? Australians. Fiji? Fijians. You get the picture.
Now, regardless of the country, the type of government, the size of the population or its place in the hierarchy of nation-states, every sovereign state has a group that calls the shots. In some countries this group is politically contested by another group that doesn’t recognise its legitimacy (Spain and the Basques), in some this group dominates other group’s right to belong (Fiji and Fijian Indians), and in some this group is small in relation to the overall population (South Africa under Apartheid). But, there’s always that one group, and that’s the nation.
How and why nations exist was a hotly contested subject, but was largely settled in the academic world by the late 1980s after this guy called Benedict Anderson wrote a book called ‘Imagined Communities’, which radically transformed the way the boffins understood nations. Its most important contribution to the debate was to indicate that nations aren’t exclusively maintained by ethnic or familial links, but instead exist in people’s imaginations. This doesn’t mean that they are imaginary, but more that like other abstract concepts, they don’t have any real form.
A potentially inflammatory example is ‘God’. Regardless of your position on this subject, you have to admit that you can’t really ‘see’ God. Everyone has an idea of what it is, and everyone has an opinion on what it looks like or whether it exists, but because you can’t pick it up and look at it like ‘a rock’, it remains abstract.
‘Nations’ are exactly the same kind of idea. You can’t ‘see’ a nation, and you can’t concretely define it. Sure, you could try to define New Zealand nationality, but you’re always going to leave someone out of the loop. Not everyone follows Rugby for example. So saying, “you’re a New Zealander if you follow the Rugby” is untrue.
But, there’s still a bunch of people out there who think of themselves as ‘New Zealanders’. As a consequence, you have a big blend of all kinds of people who associate themselves with the nation. This is the catch you see. All too often boffins will try and comprehensively define national qualities, and they always fail because individuals themselves decide who and who isn’t a fellow national. The best example is migrants. A first generation South African may have New Zealand citizenship, and therefore be ‘a national’, but their accent sets them apart socially. First generation South Africans will almost always find themselves excluded from being a ‘real’ New Zealander.
There is one truth in all this relativity though, and that is the link between ‘the nation’ and ‘the state’. If you’re a member of a nation and live in a democracy you get to influence the structure of the state. Voting for social reform and representatives to run things for us is all about belonging to the nation. If you are excluded from belonging, for instance by only having partial citizenship, like temporary residency, then you have no say in the shape of the state.
Why the topic of the nation became so hotly contested back in the day is that a bunch of authors pointed to places like Nazi Germany as an example of what happens when ‘nationalism’ takes hold and things go pear-shaped. In particular they freaked out about ‘ethnicity’ or ‘tribalism’ being used to define who is and isn’t a national. This line of argument is misleading though, because ethnicity wasn’t the problem, it was the use of ethnicity as a means to exclude some people, Jews being the example.
The process of inclusion and exclusion is discussed fairly well by Andreas Wimmer, who I mentioned last week. The ideology behind it is ‘nationalism’ and the process itself is called ‘nation-building’.
Now, I can feel that half the readers have dropped off already, so I’ll try to bring this back to the beginning. When Helen uses the phrase ‘the nation’, she’s really only talking to the people included by the nation as both full citizens and authentic nationals. And nation-building is all about maintaining association with this group. But often when Helen says ‘the nation’ she assumes that she is talking in a republican sense to ‘all the New Zealand citizens’.
If and when this debate into ‘Treaty and constitutional’ issues kicks off, Wellington is going to have to ensure that the parameters of the arguments being laid out are sufficiently inclusive. My concern here is that if the National Party’s pitch to the redrubberneckers at Orewa is anything to go by, they’ll try and define a New Zealand that excludes Māori society in favour of some kind of ‘South Pacific melange’.
And frankly, that’s just not going to cut it.
Much like the old-school authors who freaked out about ethnicity, trying to exclude Māori society because of some misguided concern about ‘ethnic conflict’ or a penchant for a ‘one-nation’ mythology is both foolish and petty. If a constitutional debate is to take place, it has to occur within a framework that recognises the equality and ongoing relevance of both Māori and mainstream society.
I think I’m running out of space here, so I’ll try and wrap this up by saying that nation-building does not have to imply that a single type of national individual exists in a nation-state. Instead, nation-building is all about bolstering the ability of minority and majority alike to contribute to the ongoing development of how ‘the nation’ is imagined by individual citizens.
Excluding Māori society by trying to close down the nation-building that has already occurred around the role of the Treaty on the political landscape is a marked step backwards. Or, put another way, when Helen uses the phrase ‘the nation’ and this does not include a politically active and vibrant Māori society, we have made a grave mistake.