Too hard for Aotearoa New Zealand?
№ 7 | 17 December 2021
It takes a lot of work to sustain a small nation state like Aotearoa New Zealand, and from 2016 it got a lot harder. Nothing can be too hard for us intellectually, though.
Mt Ararat – photo Daniel Born (Unsplash)
Sonnet to Armenia
to Professor Theo van Lint
On my last flight, I saw the small nation
cradled up on Ararat. This happened
just before the end of aviation
as we knew it. Between the peaks fathoms
down – that nation grounded – in the closest
I have got to Lake Van and a glimpse
of Trebizond. Cones in synthesis
are waiting for the first snowfall since –
while the world has changed and they have not.
No ark – save the nation on its cantle.
For all nations, perhaps the pilot.
but certainly out there first. The mantle
has worn well, and that child held to its seat,
suckles from the fire and the Virgin teats.
¤ Oxford, UK, 3 September 2020
The virtue of good small nations
I flew past Mt Ararat on 9 November 2019, just as COVID was entering the world. Since then, Armenia and the Nagorno-Karabakh enclave have been in the wars, literally, with neighbouring Azerbaijan. Armenia has open borders only with Georgia and Iran; those with Turkey and Azerbaijan have been closed for a while now.
Nor is Armenia a world away from New Zealand affairs. Hugh Templeton reported for the UN on the enclave in 1995. Flying past it westwards I felt radial lines in all directions – SE to the Indo-Pacific, E to China, NE to Lake Baikal, N to the Urals and Pole, SE to the Rift Valley, W to Morocco and NW to Iceland.
What does it take to sustain a small nation in turbulent and volatile geopolitical conditions?
Coming from another small nation, a really small one, is the Geopolitical Intelligence Service report on AUKUS. Prince Michael of Liechtenstein makes an ambiguous observation that may be just about New Zealand, but may include other nations as well – the syntax is not clear. It is this: a strategy of conflict avoidance may lead to both compromised values and loss of Chinese markets. The article is incorrect on some points, and lacks the surefootedness he shows in other reports. This highlights the need for dialogue with responsible influencers about the virtue of good small nations at this time of lockdowns and quarantines.
I recall a seemingly milder epidemic in Wellington in 2011. A buzz phrase was ‘too hard for New Zealand’. There was a perception in academic and some official circles that a little was enough intellectually, and that there was no need to take on the stock of the complex governance thought going on around the world.
Ten years on, we may appreciate the damage that attitude might have done. A small nation is nothing if not its unique profile of capacities. New Zealand needs to know what is going on in Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) discussions and about the ‘refrigeration mode’, and we need to know the fluencies about the powers’ grand strategies, and their warfighting capabilities. Those involved in governance need these broad-brush fluencies. Boris Johnson by now is a dinosaur – the last of the mid-2010s crop of buffons and amateurs.
Since 2016, the Pacific and Europe have experienced a late 1930s feeling. We grew up as a nation in the Anglosphere – in the British family of nations first of all, in the international system instituted by the League of Nations and then the UN, then in the US-led Bretton Woods institutions. Woodrow Wilson envisaged a world in 1919 in which nations like New Zealand and Sweden – or the former Czechoslovakia or Uruguay – were the metric unit of nations.
It goes without saying that a resurgent China might have a different attitude. Its doctrine might be retro-Westphalian (in Eurocentric terms) as it establishes a tianxia-like order more to its liking. Unlike the Westphalian states between the 1490s and 1940s, nothing kinetic has happened yet. Different techniques now advance great power interests, and some of these techniques will be shared by several powers, while others will be a signature of China alone. ⁂
¤ Sonnet to Armenia is number 303 in my collection. Professor van Lint is the Calouste Gulbenkian Professor of Armenian Studies at the University of Oxford.
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Samoa
to Albert Wendt
Lights will start to go out where bonito
is fished, fleets will go out in the moonlight.
There are some who are scared the mosquito
slap dance will make them feel itchy from bites
as well. Others cast shadows in the sea
as they swim between the three islands.
These must be Tinilau and family
returning in radio silence.
There is a conspiracy aloft.
Look who’s going up and down the ladders.
Listen to who’s indignant and scoffing.
You will end up fishing for sea adders,
pipefish, if you let the ocean go dark.
Put out the moon on board your ocean ark.
¤ The Cross Tree, Byfield, UK, 3 June 2021
Tell your friends…
how much you are enjoying poetry & polis; surely they will too‽
How deep is an island?
Deeper than the ocean around it. It must be. The history of south Pacific island nations in 2021 may be summed up as: there was trouble in the Solomon Islands, there was no trouble in Samoa. Tinilau in the poem above is the same personage we know in Māori mythology as Tinirau: a very ancient memory of a navigator. Giant fishing fleets from China fish as far east as the Galapagos, and it would seem their responders are turned off at times. This is impacting Pacific and Latin American fisheries, and the marine ecosystem.
This is what the poem is alluding to. History is not the same for everybody. China is pushing the bounds in the Pacific just as Britain did in the age of Lord Palmerston. We had thought this sort of thing was over. From a Chinese perspective, British interests planted phosphate works on Kiribati and Nauru, and New Zealanders and Australians engaged in ‘blackbirding’ for the Queensland canefields between 1853–1903. Just because we thought it was over, does not mean that a new power will not try its chances.
Aotearoa New Zealand has seen quite a few imperial powers come and go since Māori and Pākehā started cohabiting in our land over 200 years ago. Spain was driven from Latin America in a long struggle between 1811–25, leaving the Philippines in 1898. The Netherlands left Indonesia in 1949, and Portugal abandoned Timor Leste in 1975. Great Britain withdrew and became the UK. France remains. Japan surged to great power status, and then surrendered. The United States has always been a presence on and about our shores.
A supertrawler – photo Pierre Gleizes (Greenpeace)
Now China has associated its Ming grand refus to continue deep sea navigation, with national decline and vulnerability. The cheering news is that no civilisation that was about the Pacific Rim of Fire two hundred years ago has been removed from it. The old western empires have left successor states and the Russians must rue Alexander II’s sale of Alaska. Many indigenous and most Asian polities are restored. We want to keep things that way.
Henry Kissinger’s book Diplomacy, a study of equilibrium theory premised on the statecraft practices of Prince Metternich for Austria, presents problems. Before becoming an American, Kissinger came from Zentropa. Is equilibrium theory really a sustainable paradigm? Different analogies have been drawn on over the ages to represent and analyse great power relations. Thucydides did not rely on a ‘Thucydides’s trap’. If anything, there are only Cocryra and other small island traps in Thucydides. He relied rather on disease metaphors and diagnostics. This was quite a fashion in that revolutionary imperial state, the Athenian democracy.
Sophocles the tragedian associated himself closely with the introduction of the cult of the god of medicine, Aesclepius, to Athens, allowing his house to become a clinic at one stage. Disease and healing are metaphors in his verse. In late antiquity, Fortune, or Fortuna, and her wheel became the construct. A ruler grabbed onto it and did their best to keep their balance. Success was remaining static and keeping a stance, from which we get the word ‘state’. Then, with the introduction of science and Cartesian mathematics, states were imagined cosmologically as exerting a gravitational pull on each other. The paradigm was derived from Newtonian celestial mechanics.
For a long time, though, we have had ‘fields’. Ever since Einstein in fact, and the work of Tullio Levi-Civita and his mentor Gregorio Ricci-Curbastro on tensors. We know now that space-time is folded by mass, and that it is no longer a question of ‘pull’. We can get rid of the Cuba Street bucket fountain image for international relations. We can appreciate a country like Australia as a regional tensor. We may assign values in gaming outcomes.
120 years after Einstein and his mathematical mentors, we now have quantum physics. ‘Which grain of sand made the roar?’, asked Heraclitus. We now know the behaviour of particles, and analogously we may track down which narratives in which area reach a tipping point of currency and credibility. You would be astonished, for instance, at who is saying that boosters should not be used with the AstraZeneca vaccine. (It is not an anti-vaxxer.)
We pay student loans for tertiary and postgraduate education. Minds and tertiary institutions need to be exposed to ideas and the intellectual counterpart of viruses. COVID has had a dampening effect on the exchange of ideas, but so has post-globalisation. The world is back to blocs now. It is more difficult to maintain any kind of nation state right now, let alone a small developed one like New Zealand. The skillset has shifted again.
Our universities and public institutions have to offer and operate in fluencies in much that would have seemed ‘too hard for New Zealand’ ten years ago. If you have not been exposed to all that is possible, you might have been shortchanged or cheated on your degree, especially in language-based disciplines. Too often, the student is graded on their ability to write to the expectations and parameters of a discourse, that may well have diminishing explanatory power.
The best thinking for New Zealand will come from mental and spiritual adventurers who can live responsibly and maturely outside of established norms, ideologies and practices. Much of what seemed critical theory now seems to have begged the question, or got the future wrong. What we need, surely, are people who can attend to the variables and navigate volatility. Not meat and three veg people, and not path-dependent people.
I wrote Crete 1941 as a contribution to this ‘quantum’ state of affairs, and have recently been composing Hölderlin poems, which are either villanelles or adapted villanelles. Crete 1941 is about when New Zealand last had to live in uncertain times and make bold and clear decisions for itself. The worst thing is not to decide at all. Hölderlin is the focus of revolutionary interest, as well as of Nietzcheans and followers of Heidegger. Yet he was a schizophrenic.
It is doubtful that such a person would make it onto a selective creative writing course these days. He would be accused of being too abstract and of being freighted with ‘irrelevant’ and elitist cultural references. Yet who was more radical than Hölderlin, even now? Discourses themselves may be schizophrenic dispensations, self-confirming echo-chambers, a wicker man in which the participants end up burning.
A disruptor like Hölderlin did not destroy iconoclastically. He created a new world and mental climate that thrust out the old. He was the pre-Nietzschean poet of a sane eternal return. He left a polysemic body of verse that does not tell us what to think. If we say that he is too hard for New Zealand, then creativity and our endurance in these times might be in question. ⁂
Celebrating Jeong Yakyong
We conclude this newsletter with a sonnet about Korea, a most intelligent and philosophically gifted nation. Jeong Yakyong (1762–1836) was an outstanding Confucian scholar and fine Korean language poet in the sijo form. He was the Secretary of King Jeongjo, who reigned from 1776–1800. When his elder brother converted to Catholicism in the 1790s, the entire family was punished, with the poet himself being sent into prolonged internal exile, even though he had objected to his brother’s conversion.
There have been pleas to use ‘understanding’ with China. This is a very open-ended request. Certainly, not trying to understand will not help. No one can understand 4000 years of a civilisation and be expected to pass exams in it before they make decisions about it. The whole point of training is to be able to make the best choices even with imperfect information.
Understanding is moreover a two-way street. How much ‘understanding’ is enough is a question Sir Apirana Ngata was pondering about Germany, when he delivered his July 1939 address in reply debate speech. He understood the German grievance against the Treaty of Versailles, but not the acts of aggression. This sonnet about Korean highlights aporiae of Confucian-based civilisation that are relevant even now. They are not going to go away.
Why is one person their brother’s keeper? Why is the family the prime enforcer, and why does the state demand such responsibility and conformity from individuals in collective contexts? Even if there were no Marxism in the PRC and DPRK, we might be working with similar problems. The poem, however, attempts to take a genial and fair-minded view, consistent with Jeong Yakyong’s own verse. And the west has its aporiae too. ⁂
City Traveller bookshop, Daejeon, Korea – photo Yonghyun Lee (Unsplash)
Sonnet to Jeong Yakyong
to AB Abrams
A pure land is known by how it honours
its ancestors and recapitulates
the classics. My elder brother sponsored
a novel doctrine that eradicates
all social ties – the first of several
I fear. He was my elder brother
nonetheless – long exile is a leveller
since we are responsible for others.
He said heaven is a world outside
and a life beyond. I say it is rites
performed, so that all people may provide
themselves with means to take part and requite
obligations. Brother Right – Brother Wrong –
surely eternity is all along.
¤ Oxford, UK, 27 August 2020