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Salient. Victoria University of Wellington Students' Newspaper. Volume 31 Number 15, July 9, 1968

The Right Left and The Wrong on Nationalism

page 4

The Right Left and The Wrong on Nationalism

Assertions made by Walter Murphy, in a recent article in Salient, concerning configurations of the current international political system should not pass unchallenged. With a certainty I envy, he says—"the notion of sovereignty (in nation states) is more and more a fiction and therefore the moral values attached to it are incapable of being supported".

At the outset, let us disregard whether moral values are attached to sovereignty, and equally let us disregard whether such values, if they exist, are capable or incapable of being supported. What we cannot ignore are statements in the article such as "the nation of a nation-state, even, is hard to relate to reality",—or—"the notion of a sovereignty is always a woolly notion", presumably applying to nation states.

However, further in the article we are told—"primitive and traditional societies attach themselves to nationalism and the nation state is their ideal". Although no satisfactory or adequate definition of what is meant by traditional or primitive societies appears, we can take it Mr Murphy would agree the greater bulk of both nation-states and population of the globe would fall into this category. At any rate, a sufficient number of nation states exist as viable political entities to dispel any ambiguity as to either their reality, number, or importance.

The confusion is complete. Either Mr Murphy believes in the nation state as a practical entity on the world scene, or he doesn't. Our only guide here is his admission that the international political system is a complex one, something we suspected anyway—and that his elaborations on the questions consist of subjective conceptions. Equally, something we suspected.

Then there is the unfounded assumption in Mr Murphy's article to the effect that as states become more co-operative and "modern", they become less nationalistic. There is plenty of evidence to suggest the contrary, as there is plenty of evidence to suggest that states can play on successive themes of cooperation, national unity, alliance solidarity and independence, just as it suits them. Imagination, flexibility and subtlety in foreign policy is the preserve of no particular ranking in some crudely elaborated classification of development. The foreign policies of Rumania, Pakistan, Czechoslovakia, Canada, Tanzania, and Cambodia, as well as many other states, rapidly make nonsense of any attempts to classify statecraft according to economics, or even political development.

National interests are as jealously preserved within the EEC as in Latin America. Many of the Francophone states of Africa have abstained from endorsing the nuclear non-proliferation treaty at the General Assembly of the United Nations. Acting as a bloc, they hope to trade votes on the issue with the major powers in order to alter the situation in South-West Africa. They may integrate their diplomatic posture on this issue but not on others. Similarly more advanced societies will tolerate certain levels of international and regional co-operation, but refuse, in the name of their national interest, to close their options concerning the control and manufacture of nuclear weapons.

To then go on, as does Mr Murphy, and suggest that both Australia and New Zealand, on account of their prosperity, should be drawn closer together by "the general integrative forces" is largely irrelevant. No matter how much our government would wish it to be true, we are not "irrevocably in the camp of the well to do" as Mr Murphy suggests. Nor can we take very seriously the lame view expressed that the decline in tension in the cold war has made non-alignment less relevant. If anything it has opened more alternative for skilful diplomatic, trading, and cultural initiatives to any genuinely independent state with a clear perception of its own self interests.

Correctly enough, the article suggests that military alliances function best where there is a common perception of a common threat. But a military alliance geared to economic and cultural needs, as suggested by Mr Murphy, is a contradiction in terms. Military alliances are either geared to go about the business of killing people effectively or they are nothing.

Concerned with military stability and security alone, they are totally unsuited to promote political and economic change. Why should they? There has been a completely understandable stagnation in NATO, the Warsaw Pact, and SEATO when these groupings have been confronted with the very political or diplomatic initiatives that would make them redundant.

The U.N. is criticised for "being helpless in the face of trouble in Asia". The absence of Communist China from the U.N., combined with a deep American suspicion of the role of that organisation in Vietnam, have left it little choice.

This catalogue of hasty generalisations, ambiguities, and inconsistencies appearing in the article could go on. Hopefully, Mr Murphy will redraft some of his ideas on this complex subject and then contribute to the emerging debate of New Zealand's role in the international community of nations.

Roderic Alley,

Roderic Alley, Teaching Fellow in the Department of Political Science. Bursary issue

Roderic Alley, Teaching Fellow in the Department of Political Science. Bursary issue

page 5

There are occasional times when one sits back and wonders all kinds of views about foreign policy in fashion equally naive. This intellectual claustrophobia is intensified by close scrutiny of Mr W. E. Murphy's Salient article last week and Mr Roderic Alley's reply. As somebody whose main interest is in overthrowing the Government, my concern about foreign policy is limited to trying to guess how a genuinely socialist government in New Zealand could survive in a hostile world. We will begin to have some idea about this only when we actually have a socialist government and see what the world is like then.

My interest in other people's ideas of foreign policy therefore is purely destructive—most foreign policies end us up in equally disastrous predicaments, and all rest on the naive assumption that any conceivable New Zealand capitalist government could do something of importance about world problems. But as I want a non-capitalist government, these quandaries I repeat are not mine.

The reason that I am intervening in the Murphy-Alley debate is merely to prevent all the left being associated with the particular version of revamped Mazzini-type Nationalism that Mr Alley and a few other people seem to think is the special properly of the left, Most unhappily, it has been left to Mr W. E. Murphy to point out that so-called "old-tyle Marxists"—I accept the identification under protest—reject National identifications; this is still true. New Zealand as a national entity is simply economically unviable; the nation-state is just as much a check on the development of technology for the benefit of all, as is private ownership and control of the means of production. This is, of course, not an "ideological" view but a hard economic fact. We could import our consumer goods more cheaply from Australia, and lower the average wage-earners cost of living. It is an economic truism that our ramified protectionism coddles inefficient industries that any international economic rationality would never tolerate. I am rather tired of pointing these things out in every article I write, but they are true and people have built-in defence mechanisms about these facts because they are unpleasant. All one can do, is to set them down in print and hope that the Reality Principle is more powerful than Freud thought.

It is because of all this that Mr Murphy's unconscious Marxism in linking internationalism and economic development must be treated less cavalierly than Mr Alley treats them. It is not true that nationalism has disappeared in the developed countries—Mr Murphy never said it had; but there is more internationalism penetrating into the relationships between developed than in underdeveloped countries. This is all one need establish for this part of Mr Murphy's case to be validated. Neither Rumania nor Czechoslovakia have contracted out of COMECON; France has not withdrawn from the EEC. Compare the careers of COMECON, and the EEC—however troubled—with the Ghana-Guinea union, or the utter bankruptcy of pan-Arabism and Mr Murphy's point is made. Even if one looks at the most successful example of Third World internationalism, the Malaysian Federation, this has far more serious and deep-going rifts than either of the two European economic associations, and one of the original partners in the federation, Singapore, has withdrawn. In the West, nationalism is simply reactionary, the ideological defence as in New Zealand, of the most backward sectors of the economy. Only in a very few cases in Asia, is nationalism still anything but the Right's last defence against socialism. This is not to deny nationalism as still powerful: Stalinism, a perverse compound of nationalism and bureaucratic socialism, still hinders the socialist world from unity and prevents it achieving full rationality as a trans-national economic grouping. But nationalism is being countered by a powerful movement in the opposite direction; which is why the 1968 Labour Party Conference's definite espousal of so-called nationalism spells political death for Big Norm and his friends.

Where Mr Murphy's arguments break down is in his strangely unargued assumption that since the trend in the West is to association between states and the opposite is true elsewhere, the violence and irrationality of nationalism (never, let us agree, a very empirical, or non-emotional political ideology) can only be countered by force; "if necessary nuclear weapons." Let me admit at this stage that for purely polemical reasons. I prefer apologists for capitalism and the R.S.A. to defend nuclear brinkmanship: it gives me the advantage of being obviously more sane. On the other hand, these people may use the weapons they enthuse about, and they are our rulers, so however politically predictable their nuclear meglomania, one would prefer mental health.

These people think—like the vulgar Marxists, incidentally—of the world as a battlefield between two opposed forces one national, one not, where one must militarily defeat the other. Mr Murphy's battlefield is just slightly more sophisticated than Mao Tse-tung's, and he does not talk about it too much (fully stated, it might sound absurd). But nuclear brinkmanship is the only way of seeing society if one thinks the gulf between rich and poor unbridgeable; if one despairs of international society solving its own problems peacefully. But obviously nationalism as a political stance can best be undercut by exhibiting the overwhelming economic advantages of economic association between affluent and non-affluent states, not by war it is a political and economic, not a [unclear: mil] tary problem.

The reason, of course, why people are not always rational about economic matters is that they may be members of social group whose existence might be threatened [unclear: b] economic rationality. These people in the medium term are converted to rationall (sic) neither by force nor argument but [unclear: b] economics; but as man does not live [unclear: b] economics alone considerations of materia interest have to be reinforced by political action. There are people in the West who fear any form of international assoclatior between rich and poor nations because [unclear: i] might impoverish the rich, and specifically them, while people in the poor countries are afraid of such an event because [unclear: i] might threaten their political and economic dominance. For these problems created by economic nationalism to be solved these classes must be made power less, and this can be done internally by those concerned about economic common sense (i.e. socialist) in both affluent and non-affluent societies This is not foreign policy problem: it simply is a matter of who we want to run our country. The reasons why the West does not share it technology or affluence with the rest of the world are simply the values of the men [unclear: wh] govern these countries, not the economic determinism Mr Murphy propounds wher no force on earth can prevent dissociative nationalism and economic underdevelopmen being bedfellows, so our only hope is the Bomb. The onus for ending the division between the primitive traditional and [unclear: mo] ern—ultramodern segment of the world rests with the latter, for, after all, only as sociation can prevent dissociation.

— Owen Gager