'Inclusive exclusion': managing identity for the nation's sake in Aotearoa/New Zealand.

• Jurisdiction: Australia
• Author: Turner, Stephen
• Date: 22 March 2007

The threat that fast-moving processes of 'globalization' pose to the nation, whether as shifting markets, more cheaply produced goods, new technologies, or regional alliances, nowadays motivates calls from all quarters that we be more competitive, entrepreneurial, innovative, excellent. But globalization is a curious 'threat' given that the nation was founded on the back of the globalizing British Empire. The desire behind this call to get on board Team New Zealand or to invest in New Zealand Inc. is hardly very new. The economic viability of 'New Zealand' has always been an issue--the idea that we 'export or die'--and establishes the reductive core of its national identity. Thinking about settler society in a local historical and global context, I consider the economic basis of New Zealand's national identity: I question the basis of popular national chauvinism, or at least the local management of it; and I ask whether 'our' history provides ways of thinking about identity and belonging that might work better for everyone than an increasingly branded citizenship--that is, an identity which you consume, like any other kind of goods.

I attend in particular to the prior difference in a 'new' country of indigenous people--the primary or base story of settler societies--that not only frames what I call a political economy of identity, but shapes, significantly, the future of the same place. The creeping 'maorification' of the public domain, despite ongoing vilification of special Maori rights, as against the rights of other New Zealanders, is self-evident (there is a real attempt in the media, for instance, to pronounce Maori words properly, and widespread acceptance of a role for Maori protocol in public life). The corollary of attending to a prior difference is not, I think, Maori separatism (dreadful to non-Maori), or Maori victimhood and guilty white colonialism, or white indigeneity (both disempowering for Maori). That said, one can hardly say 'first peoples' in New Zealand nowadays without getting an emotive and reactive response. The overdetermined response to 'first' anything at the very least indicates the force and charge of a long local history and, more deeply, illustrates a political economy or structure of national identity. I think there is much to be gained, given the increasing cultural diversity of my own neighbourhood in New Zealand, by recalling, and regaining, multiple modes of identity and belonging, and by softening the passive-aggressive posture of national identity--a posture which starts with a do-not-give-em-anything attitude towards tangata whenua (the local people of a place or people-place) and extends to other local people whose identities may not be based first and foremost in the nation.

Accepting that New Zealand has been an exemplary agent of 'globalizing processes', and that Anglo-settler societies continue to play a significant role in the current global order (or disorder), might make 'us' feel less threatened, and less prone to the knowledge-economy-speak of the national managers of the country. It might just make us less reactive, insecure and aggressive, all at once, and more open to the reality--the real differences and dynamism--of 'our' place.

Short History and Coming After

For settler societies the most intractable difference is anterior; someone was here before you and makes a claim to place on that basis. The sense of some other people and a different kind of place existing before you arrived which you then make your 'own' is what makes a settler society a settler society. (1) This original relation to place is the object, in New Zealand, of an 'inclusive exclusion': the condition of the nation-state's inclusion of anyone within its territory is the exclusion of non-national modes of identity and belonging, that is, of modes of identity and belonging that are not in the first instance related to the nation-state (so you are a New Zealander or Kiwi first, and whatever else you take yourself to be second). In this way, making a new country, resettling it, involves putting an older, longer history of place away or behind. Settler societies of new countries are oriented toward the future, not to the past of the place in which settlers find themselves. Meanwhile, correspondences between the present time and past of place--for instance, the intimate local knowledge that tangata whenua have of taniwha (spirit-ancestors associated with water)--recall the long or longer history of Maori inhabitation, stretch and warp the public domain of the nation-state, and suggest anterior grounds of place, anterior modes of understanding and inhabiting it.

I contrast the long or longer history of Maori occupation with the short, or shorter history of non-Maori settlement and a sense of identity and belonging--a need to identify oneself with the place, to belong here--that is based on short history alone. The relation of 'long' and short history at once precedes official biculturalism, and contests the view, based on de facto multiculturalism, that Maori difference is a 'cultural' difference which is more or less equivalent, or of equal weight and bearing, to other cultural differences. Multiculturalism, which might reasonably be offered as a counter-model of this settler society, reduces tangata whenua to the status of any other kind of people within the nation-state. The greater problem, however, from the point of view of a political economy of identity, is that both these models of a new country or settler society are circumscribed by the nation-state, and demarcate a national or nation-based identity. That is, in both models, differences of place are conceived in terms of the already existing nation, so that cultural differences are differences for the nation's sake, and otherwise have no foundation, or even reality, much less do they found alternative conceptions of place. This is the spike of Maori sovereignty.

The quasi-constitutional nature of the Treaty of Waitangi is symptomatic of the settler logic of conditional inclusion: the Treaty makes Maori fundamental to the constitution of the nation, and secures the authority of the new nation-state. It is referred to in individual acts of legislation, but nowhere does it explicitly empower the New Zealand government to make law. Nor does the government necessarily feel bound by the Treaty in making law (there is currently a movement on the parliamentary Right to remove existing references to the Treaty). The New Zealand Crown, as the law-making body is called, can decide whether or not it is acting under the auspices of the Treaty, whether, indeed, the Treaty in fact binds its actions (the Crown in New Zealand, despite the popular rhetoric of the Treaty of Waitangi, is historically the self-constituted entity of the second settlers). The uncertain status of the Treaty as a fully constitutional document thus negates the actually independent political status of Maori at the time of signing, and deprives the difference of being Maori for Maori, as opposed to being Maori for the nation's sake, of any political effect. So Maori are included in foundational claims to the settlement of the nation and the establishment of an authoritative law-making body--the Crown of New Zealand--but any claim Maori might make independently of the established nation is nullified by the Crown's refusal to accept that the document is a fully constitutional document that grounds its own authority. The Treaty is a working fiction for settlers, but a real political agreement for Maori whose ancestors signed it.

The 'inclusive exclusion' of official biculturalism, since this model of national identity was adopted in the 1980s, marks the cultural managerialism of an increasingly independent or 'independence'-minded settler nation. Considered globally, the main way in which the identity of the majority of the world's peoples is organized, or marked, at least politically or socially, and despite much talk of the end of the 'Westphalian era', is in terms of the national (2) (non-nationals include intra-national peoples, that is, first peoples or first nations and stateless peoples, and extra-nationals, that is, migrants, refugees and resident aliens). Put differently, no thesis of the 'end of the nation' has had quite the impact of the idea of the 'end of history'. Multinational capitalism has turned the national from an idea of the soul, spirit or essence of a people, a pre-given identity, into a mechanism for manufacturing or reinventing home, community and loyalty; something that is consumed, or consumable, like other kinds of goods. In marketing-speak the nation is what Kevin Roberts, CEO of Saatchi and Saatchi Worldwide, and committed New Zealander, would call a 'lovemark'. (3)

This process of invention marks the whole of the short or shorter histories of new countries, and is no more new or recent than globalization itself (which is after all contemporaneous with the settlement of 'new' countries). So the settler society of a new country, lacking any attachment to the history of the place in which it is founded--a place that predates the settler's conception of it--establishes an historical free trade zone, relatively unbeholden to local law or customs, in which an identity or mode of belonging is manufactured, alongside other goods, to secure a viable economy. The point of manufacturing an idea of place was, and remains, to secure the new country by amassing more settlers, consolidating a settler society by swamping first peoples.

A person whose identity primarily derives from identification with the nation of New Zealand, as opposed to any primarily non-national identification (whether Muslim, Kurd or local Tuhoe), is commonly called 'Kiwi'. Kiwi designates a kind of cultural capital. You get credit for being a Kiwi; it is a good thing to be, and to want to be. Kiwi not only denominates a New Zealander; it is the denomination, as cultural...