Are the forces of nationalism finding their way to Aotearoa or have they always been here?

The case for a Māori nationalism

The nakedly conspiratorial anti-lockdown protests on New Zealand parliament grounds in 2022 brought together an eclectic and motley group of ideologically incompatible movements in a way that we had perhaps not witnessed before in Aotearoa. For example, Māori evangelical preachers whose ‘flock’ tend to be poor and working class Maōri were protesting the government alongside of white supremacist nationalists and right-wing conspiracists. What were we to make of this apparent madness and what if anything, does it say about the state of Māori politics?

In one way the anti-lockdown protest was confirmation that the world’s emerging disorder had properly and emphatically arrived in Aotearoa. The phenomenon here is absolutely connected to the global forces which have turned traditional politics on its head and thus we have and are witnessing unholy political alliances forming across once huge ideological divides. For those with strong ideological commitments to the traditional political continuum from either some version of the socially progressive/liberal left on one hand or some version of the libertarian/conservative right on the other, this is all very discombobulating. Because of the right’s proclivity towards nationalist discourses - which in its extreme form manifests as fascism, think here for example of Adolf Hitler or Benito Mussolini – the conservative right seems to have adjusted much more instinctively and maybe even seamlessly to the new political landscape than the left.

Liberal democracies in the Global North (often referred to as the ‘West’) are engaged in an internal struggle with the forces of nationalism. Despite the post-WWII rhetoric of spreading democracy, and championing so-called “Open and Free” societies – enthusiastically embraced with the same Christian missionary zeal that constituted the vanguard of colonial endeavours since 1492 - in the former colonies of the Global South, are liberal democracies now doing a 180 degree turn and retreating inward? No example of this retreat is more stark than that of the current US administration.

The current and former US administrations have revealed their naked contempt of international institutions of law and order. Not to be outdone, Europe too have been disregarding international humanitarian commitments in response to nationalist forces from within that have fomented opposition and urged European governments to close its borders to the flow of Syrian refugees - a crisis instigated by the US - and to sub-Saharan African refugees crossing the perilous Mediterranean Sea in search of economic opportunities. One could argue that such institutions, principles and values were only ever to be used as weapons against the enemies of the US and the Global North to ensure the ongoing supremacy of their national political and economic interests. We could call their collective interests a form of Global North trans-nation-state nationalism. The Global North interests’ intersect with one another, and they have designed institutions to protect and advance their collective national interests while presenting such institutions as if they serve a ‘global good’.

Somewhat cheekily, we might ask whether what we are now witnessing is decolonialisation proper? Not the faux decolonisation programme of the 1960s, but a material withdrawal by the Global North from the Global South? We may have witnessed a formal withdrawal of colonial powers from Africa and Asia between the 1950s-1970s, but the economic regimes and international institutions which facilitated the flow of wealth from the Global South to the Global North during formal colonisation have continued formally, informally, and largely uninterrupted and unabated since the 1970s. Whilst these current events could be promising signs for the Global South, what of the Global South populations in Global North nation states i.e., the indigenous peoples of Australia, Canada, the US, and Aotearoa where legacy settler colonial power regimes persist?

At the same time there is a glimmer of hope that the Global North is retreating, China, often pilloried by US and European media as a regressive communist backwater, is continuing an expansive approach to trade and international alliances, exemplified by its colossal and prescient Belt and Road Initiative. China has remained actively engaged in international institutions that have contributed to the semblance of global order since WWII. Furthermore its expansive approach embodies the aspirations of the historic 1955 Bandung Conference where Asian and African Global South nations emphasised opposition to colonialism in all its forms and development based on “peace and cooperation”.

The post WWII global order that is now in a state of chaos and flux is the broader formative context in which we can locate dialogue on Māori politics. How could we navigate this period of profound historical change? I proffer part of the answer is in the development of a more coherent Māori nationalist politics which has, in my view, become amorphous and less coherent than at any time in our recent history. Whilst there have often been different views in Māoridom about how to achieve political goals, the goals themselves were consistently coherent: equitable social, economic and political outcomes for Māori consistent with the text and intent of Te Tiriti o Waitangi. Perhaps the apparent lack of coherence is reflective of much greater diversity within Māori communities and also the broader range of information sources Māori communities access i.e., social media, and therefore the presence of increased agendas and somewhat intersecting interests. Māori politics was once largely tribal and/or pan-tribal. The 1970s saw the beginnings of an emerging urban Māori politics. Over the last 20 plus years there has been a further fragmentation or diversification through solidarity with other social justice movements that share parallel or adjacent goals. For example, the climate justice movement and LGBTQI+ movements. On one level these movements are obviously synergistic and symbiotic with Māori politics, yet, at another level, and maybe even fundamentally so, they are not. At the heart of old Māori politics is something that could make for uncomfortable bedfellows with currently allied social justice movements: Māori nationalism.

Nationalism is generally antithetical to the liberal progressivism of social justice movements, largely because of the almost reflexive association with extreme forms of nationalism, i.e., white nationalism and fascism. However, there is something even more problematic with liberal progressivism. As it embraces so-called difference and diversity and perpetuates the appearance of being a ‘broad church’ so to speak, ultimately that gives away to the reality of being a ‘broad church’, that is, it has to be done on somebody’s terms, and that somebody is almost inevitably middle-class white folk. Or said another way, maintaining the church metaphor which appropriately evokes the spectre of colonialism, the church may be open to all but there is one true God, for all to observe. Liberalism, then, has its limits where it slips seamlessly when pushed into illiberalism. The spawning of the far-right Act Party by former left Labour Party politicians, Sir Roger Douglas and Richard Prebble are local examples of the apparent seamlessness between the left and right of the political continuum.

For the record, I value broad based social justice movements and activism, but our support and participation needs to be done from a position of clarity about what our political goals are - political goals that are driven from and socialised from within Māori communities - and on what terms we engage and support other social justice movements. Let me be clear, this is not a criticism of the goals of those social justice movements, but rather, I am trying to map out what a more coherent Māori nationalist politics might look like.

Māori political activism and advocacy has always benefitted from important alliances whether that be with Pākehā or our Pasifika relations. That support, however, doesn’t mean an absence of tension. In the canonical Māori Sovereignty (1984), Donna Awatere recounted tension with allies, the Polynesian Panthers, whose influence she thought had detracted from, and was ultimately unhelpful to a Māori sovereignty politics. Awatere had a clear vision about what Māori sovereignty politics entailed and what was helpful and unhelpful to the cause. She worked hard to maintain that focus, and if it meant calling out allies, then so be it.

A further contributing factor is the retreat over the last 20 years of Māori tribal leadership from public discourse, favouring internal dialogue and direct negotiations with (and sometimes litigation against) the government of the day. There are obvious strategic benefits from this approach. Tribal leaders are able to convey their concerns directly to the government and presumably have such concerns acted upon away from the glare of the public gaze. Tribes can choose this path because of their considerable political clout and economic heft. The considerable leverage tribes enjoy makes the retreat more regrettable in that much pressure could be bought to bear upon government to achieve greater macro political gains. However, by their very nature tribal leadership is, well, tribal and thus their purview is - and unnecessarily so in my view - myopic. Yet historically there were figures who transcended tribal myopia, like the Kingitanga, prophets Te Kooti, Te Ua Haumene and Wiremu Tahu Pōtiki Ratana, early Māori politicians like Ngata and Pomare, leaders like Dame Whina Cooper, and then more recently Dame Tariana Tūria and Sir Pita Sharples, that championed a more macro-Māori politics while arguably also achieving tribal political gains. Kingi Tūheitia, before his death, also provided us an important reminder of what that looks like.

A perhaps unintended consequence of the retreat is that Māori political public discourse doesn’t benefit from Māori tribal leadership voices and, in the absence of their voices and others, the discourse gets populated by a narrower range of political actors. Just as importantly, narratives are manufactured - to borrow from Edward Herman and the indomitable Noam Chomsky - and reported through the lens of mass media where normative and dominant interests prevail.

MPs Tamatha Paul and Shane Jones are two recent cases in point. Greens MP Tamatha Paul recently spoke out cogently and powerfully about the genuine fear held within Māori communities of police interactions and advocated the use of alternative means of ensuring public safety, e.g., Māori Wardens etc. As an aside, recently a cousin of mine, who is not unfamiliar with police interactions, told me that police have become noticeably more violent and speculated that since the gang patch ban police perhaps now felt unleashed. Whatever the reason, the concerns Paul conveyed are genuinely held within Māori and other communities. Yet the media furore around Paul’s advocacy for Māori constituents was to collapse it into simply ‘leftist’, ‘woke’, ‘Greenie’, ‘defund the police’ rhetoric. Paul’s advocacy can be linked to the very same concerns about government ‘services’ some 40 years earlier, that gave rise to the seminal 1986 Pūao Te Ata Tū Māori Ministerial Advisory Report into Social Welfare services. The effect is to ignore and silence genuine concerns held within Māori communities around police use of force against, and hyper surveillance of, Māori.

Similarly, but from the other side of the political spectrum, NZ First MP Hon Shane Jones has advocated opening up tracts of land for mining since entering government. His argument is that doing so will help boost the local economy and provide much needed jobs in smaller, rural NZ communities. Work and employment opportunities for Māori are and ought to be a key platform of Māori politics. The response in the media to Jones’ advocacy of mining was to imply his relationship with trans-national mining companies was inappropriate for a minister, and equally that mining was antithetical to NZ’s so-called “100% Pure” image and the environmental justice agenda. Jones has a solid record as the former Minister of Local Government of improving industry and business growth for smaller, rural communities where large numbers of Māori still live. I recently heard this very point made about Shane Jones by tribal leaders from the East Coast. Underlying Jones’ advocacy of mining was a desire to address employment opportunities for Māori and the poor. Again, a message that should be central to Māori politics is lost. Personally, I do not think the returns to the local economy from the proposed mining activity - as articulated by Jones early on – are proportionate to that which each party brings to the table, i.e., a disproportionate share of the wealth from this activity will simply be transferred abroad. However, if a more favourable set of figures and conditions was negotiated – something that perhaps involved the transfer of industry knowledge and direct access to markets – in my view that proposal should be seriously considered.

I can hear younger generations of activists, Pākehā and Māori alike, bristling at this suggestion, and this is exactly my point. For environmental justice activists, Māori and environmental justice politics are more than symbiotic but synonymous and thus any environmental justice activism is a win-win. The “win-win” argument is a cliché that rolls off the tongue easily when you have been always “winning”. But for poor and working-class Māori - or who I refer to in my work as te hāpai ō - environmental justice is both a necessity because the poor often disproportionately bear the burden of environmental degradation, and a luxury that simply lacks the same urgency that paying rent and buying food demands. My concerns here are not dissimilar to the Global South criticisms of wealthy Global North nations that admonish emerging industrial nations of the Global South for not agreeing to equal carbon emission reduction targets when the Global North has historically been the largest contributor to carbon emission pollution.

The messaging loss that is occurring here is not simply a product of Māori political actors’ engagement from a range of political parties, in this case the Greens Party and NZ First, but rather a problem of clarity around a Māori politics. Enter Te Pāti Māori.

The latest iteration of Te Pāti Māori effectively mobilised support in response to the Treaty Principles Bill. Their social media presence, reach and nous is powerful, as evidenced by the haka in parliament that went global, led by the inspirational and fearless Hana-Rawhiti Te Maipi Clarke. However, it was the first few iterations of Te Pāti Māori, particularly under the leadership of Dame Tariana Tūria and Sir Pita Sharples, that led with a clear vision and a hard-nosed, pragmatic approach to politics that has been somewhat absent since. In part, this could be attributed to the fact that the party was formed in direct opposition to the 2004 Foreshore and Seabed Act, passed by the Helen Clark Labour government. Their kaupapa was clear: repeal the Foreshore and Seabed Act. There were other factors too. Whatarangi Winiata, the first president of Te Pāti Māori advocated against making ideological commitments to the traditional political continuum of left or right – despite the long history Māori had with the left - in favour of a pragmatic approach to determining potential political partners, however temporary the partnership. In doing so, they transformed the culture of parliament by working across ideological divides and demonstrating a Māori approach to politics. The approach was exemplified by Te Pāti Māori when they joined Sir John Key’s right-wing coalition government in 2008, and to be fair, it was Key who invited Te Pāti Māori, even though he had enough seats to form a government. In my view, Hone Harawira’s unfortunate departure was a pivotal moment and a big loss for Te Pāti Māori. Harawira could not hide both his discomfort with and disdain for right-wing politicians. However, Te Pāti Māori leaders, Dame Tariana Tūria and Sir Pita Sharples, benefitted from Harawira’s unwavering and longstanding commitment to Māori nationalism, as did Harawira from Tūria and Sharples ability to reach across the floor to achieve pragmatic political outcomes. Te Pāti Māori was most effective when political pragmatism was partnered with a resolute commitment to Māori advancement.

Parliament is the site for wholly pragmatic politics to secure resources and policy gains. Whilst governments do indeed wield significant political power, government is not the only site where Māori politics is played out, nor perhaps even the most significant. It is in Māori communities, rural and urban, tribal and pan-tribal, where the most potent political forces reside. Dame Tariana Tūria understood this intimately and her pragmatic politics enabled her to secure funding for the most transformative government social policy since perhaps the 1975 Treaty of Waitangi Act, and that was Te Whānau Ora. Te Whanau Ora’s transformative potential is perhaps the very reason why the current government is quietly going about dismantling it. Te Whānau Ora builds and strengthens, from within, Māori communities. However, the most transformative Māori social policy did not involve the government at all: the Kohanga Reo movement. The Kohanga Reo movement has all the hallmarks of what makes Māori politics potent. The Kohanga Reo movement was driven from within Māori communities and provided the impetus for a massive mobilisation of resources and energy that was bought to bear upon ensuring the survival of te reo Māori. Just as importantly, it had the effect of strengthening capacity and infrastructure within Māori communities that met the demands of the moment. Māoridom continues to benefit from its impact and influence, and the social architecture and infrastructure that it created.

So far, I have argued that the main challenge moving forward for Māoridom is a more coherent politics and I have alluded to it taking the form of a Māori nationalism. I am aware that nationalism is a bogey word for those that preach, but increasingly practice less, liberal democratic ideals. More on that soon. A coherent Māori nationalism would involve a broad range of potential actors: from traditional politicians in the political parties represented in parliament, to tribal leadership who have much heft to bring to bear upon the moment, right through to Māori community leaders at marae, churches, gangs, sports organisations, business enterprises, and Māori educational leaders etc. Many of the leaders in these institutions and organisations have made and continue to make significant contributions to transforming Māori society and therefore are integral to developing a coherent Māori politics.

I have also pointed to the fact that this moment is both profound and historical. The once stable global order – a stability enjoyed in the Global North at least – is slowly crumbling. For decades we have heard analysts speculate the demise of the American Empire. The apotheosis of an empire is very difficult to identify in real time and can only be more accurately assessed retrospectively. Political scientist John Mearsheimer has argued that we shifted from a unipolar (where the US was dominant) to a multipolar world (as the names suggests to multiple polarities of power) around the mid-2010s. I am certainly not suggesting that the US is suddenly an insignificant global political force; on the contrary, the US may still be the single most powerful force but it is no longer able to exert absolute dominance against coalitions of less powerful nations. But, “The US…”, as Marxist economist Richard Wolff declares, “…is an empire in decline”. And an empire in decline tends to generate chaos and violence. Mate atu he tētēkura, ara mai he tētēkura.

On the other side of the equation, China is no longer an emerging economic power. China has completely emerged from its ‘century of humiliation’ to take its place as a global power, befitting its long, proud dynastic tradition that extends well beyond Euro-American global dominance. Some commentators argue China is misunderstood and therefore its rise appears more threatening than it really is, but there is a fine line between being ‘misunderstood’ and being wilfully ‘misunderstood’. Claims that China is misunderstood in my mind simply provide cover for Sinophobia and Global North propaganda that vilifies China. China has simply chosen to rebuild itself. How China chose to do that was of course China’s prerogative. The Global North’s fear of China is grounded in the belief that the Euro-American vision of modern progress and development ought to be followed by so-called Third World nations. Such is their narcissism and hubris that progress and development had to be achieved in the mirror image of Europe and America. Any deviation from that blueprint was a corruption and thus, potentially, relative to the scale of alleged corruption, interpreted as monstrous, deviant or simply evil. The bogeyman has never left the imagination of Europeans, they could always find one wherever they went.

Economist Keyu Jin, in her book The New China Playbook, argues that a feature of the Chinese development model is that “political centralisation is paired with economic decentralisation”. “Political centralisation” is often interpreted in the Global North as authoritarianism and communism but as Jin notes, China has a strong ethos of children respecting parent’s authority and thus respecting the government’s authority is simply an extension of the familial practice. Equally “economic decentralisation” in China does not equate to a laissez faire approach to the market. As the subtitle of her book states, China is moving Beyond Socialism and Capitalism; the clichéd Manichaean binary of the inherent good of capitalism and the inherent evil of socialism is rejected and a new path is being forged. Rather, Jin writes, “[i]n the new era China will strive to move beyond a socialism stained by shortages and capitalism stigmatized by inequality”.

China has implicitly rejected or seen through the promises of what so-called liberal democracies and unbridled capitalism delivers. In retrospect, the promises of freedom and prosperity that membership into the global liberal democracies club - as we have witnessed over the last year and a half, if not going back to the Iraq war or even further - was always a hollow promise. Noam Chomsky, a consistent and courageous critic of US foreign policy, has argued trenchantly that the US has long intervened either directly or through proxies in the internal politics of sovereign nations with the aim of advancing US interests. These interventions have led to civil wars and conflicts all over the world, quite literally resulting in the deaths of millions upon millions of people, from Iran, to Indonesia, to Vietnam, to Nicaragua, to Venezuela, to Congo, to Burkina Faso, to apartheid South Africa, to Syria and Libya, and yes to Palestine. In the last decade the United States has been preparing for war with China in Taiwan or the South China Sea, and now they are talking about invading Iran. The Global North cares about international law and order only to the extent such institutions enhance Global North power. They are engaged in what Mearsheimer describes as “realist politics”, where power determines how one assesses, and negotiates relationships and alliances, and the nature thereof. For Mearsheimer, there is no appeal to morality, ethics or international law to assess the ‘justness’ of a particular cause, because there is no external authority who might arbitrate; there is just power. The trick is, and always has been, to make the international social and political institutions of probity, morality, ethics and law appear to matter, and make it appear that power has a system to keep it in check.

As I asserted at the beginning of this paper, the worlds turbulent political winds have emphatically arrived in Aotearoa. The global battle between the forces of nationalism and liberalism, and power politics that are being played out on the world’s stage are making their presence felt here. The appearance of probity that the Global North has long weaponised to cajole, harass or coerce sovereign nations to be more like them has, I would suggest, been revealed for the duplicitous narcissism that it is. The obvious exemplars of that locally are Don Brash and David Seymour. Both have appealed to pillars of liberal democracies like free speech, one person-one vote, the same rights for all in making assertions about so-called Māori privilege, demonstrating a wilful blindness to longstanding inequality and inequities that Māori have consistently experienced decade after decade. The audacity demonstrated by these two would make even our most famous trickster Maui blush. In my mind, Brash and Seymour, like a long line of formally and informally colonial, administrators and political actors before them are nationalists hiding behind liberal fig leaves. Nationalists who have inherited and perpetuated a regime and form of politics that was imported to these isles, not born of these isles. They perpetuate such a regime because they can. Politics is not about morality and probity. As both Mearsheimer and Chomsky have demonstrated with their analyses of the US empire; its actions are in not calibrated by the law, righteousness or what is just. Politics is about power and understanding where power resides, and doesn’t. That’s it. Nothing else.

The national conversation that had been ongoing in this country for the last 40-50 years from around the 1975 Treaty of Waitangi Act was a bold, if not at times naïve attempt to create a new sense of the national; negotiated and socialised in these isles blending our different traditions. But let’s be clear, this was a conversation that was not entered into willingly by the powerful. Such wins had to be fought for by Māori leaders, nationalists and our allies. And, despite the social transformation Aotearoa has been going through, the powerful have not once relinquished any modicum of real power. Again, it’s the appearance of substance that matters, not the substance.

Nationalism in modern times has got a well-earned negative reputation. Ultra-nationalism manifests as fascism and has led to all sorts of atrocities in the modern era. However, it is the ‘ultra’ – the zero-sum game or ‘my nationalism depends on your subjugation’ logic - in ultra-nationalism which has led to atrocities not nationalism in and of itself. So long as humans choose to continue to organise as collectives or as nations, then nationalism will always exist. Seymour and Brash in many ways are simply archetypal figures of legacy colonial nationalism quite literally connected to a global imperial order. We have seen these figures before and we will see more. Our current politics in Aotearoa, has all the constituent features of an emerging ultra-nationalism hiding behind meaningless liberal tropes and flaccid conservative leadership, though in my view it will ultimately lack the demographic heft to generate a more radical ultra-nationalist agenda that we are witnessing in other parts of the Global North.

On the other side of the equation, we cannot rely on demographic heft to achieve political change. The demographic heft I am referring to here is a blend of the ideological and human and is a result of a liberal-democratic nation state that was moving towards a new national consensus, a youthful Māori population that continues to grow and build relationships, sometimes quite literally, with a broader Aotearoa demographic, and finally, as renowned Māori educationist Wally Penetito would often remind us; - an indomitable will amongst Māori to continue to be Māori despite enduring a system designed to destroy that will. All these factors are most definitely important constituent features of a healthy, vibrant Māori nationalist politics.

Working towards a consensus of what the new national looked like premised on a commitment to liberal democratic ideals of dialogue, free speech and the contestation of ideas was always going to find the limits of liberalism. Making a blind faith commitment to liberalism and liberal ideals is a sleight of the hand - a trick played by the powerful. Liberalism remember, is fickle and slips easily into illiberalism. Illiberalism and, in our context, legacy colonial nationalism, are two sides of the same coin, and will need to be confronted directly. Change, then, will need to be fought for and that could happen either gently or less gently. A Māori nationalist politics will need to leverage its collective resources, and alliances, both old and new, to confront the latest iteration of legacy colonial power. A more coherent coordinated politics clear in its kaupapa and a will to leverage its collective resources to political ends is required. That will entail a willingness to work with those who may not be traditional allies, a willingness to pay close attention to global forces and the possibility of establishing new relationships afar, to force a resumption of the incomplete experiment. That experiment is a national conversation that moves towards transgressing legacy colonial nationalism and creating a new picture what Aotearoa will look like constitutionally, including a more equitable distribution of power and resources that honours the original Treaty commitment made some 185 years ago, and one meets the demands of this moment - a world that is in a profound state of flux.