East is East

This column has heard that at a recent meeting of the Resident Executive of N.Z.U.S.A., our National Union, there was great flurry over the fact that N.Z.U.S.A. had not been invited to an Asian Student Leaders' study seminar at Aloka from the end of July.

This column believes that New Zealand's place of the future does not lie as a part of Asia. We are not, and we cannot be, ethnically close. Geographically, we are somewhat distant from the nearest Asian country, Indonesia. Certainly we might do well by cultivating trade with Asian countries to provide a surplus market for our butter and meat and cheese.

But we are not part of Asia. Surely our place in the future is, as was suggested by a speaker at the N.Z.U.S.A. Congress in January, that of "mediators between East and West". This column hopes that the Department of Asian Studies will be built up in time into one of the best, and that New Zealand graduates might spend time overseas bringing some of their inestimably valuable characteristics to the Asian, and particularly Southeast Asian, countries.

New Zealand students will do most, in the long run, neither by adopting an isolationist policy, nor by endeavouring to worm our way into Asia for varied and largely unconscious motives of fear. Idealism has a very real place in New Zealand policy; we will do most if we understand Asia as well as we can, and constantly act as mediators between East and West, a bridge which, no matter how solid, cannot be said to lean to this side or to that. A detachment would benefit New Zealand, geographically so isolated; and for all of the unfortunate concomitants of social security, this country has a great deal of lasting value, which can profitably be shared.