upton-on-line
14th March 2002
Special Recolonial Recriminations Issue
Upton-on-line reflects on the great history curriculum hullabaloo
occasioned by James Belich’s bid to exorcise our recolonial demons,
some words of wisdom from Ferdinand Mount on monarchy as a user-friendly
source of authority and how the uncrowned but unquestionably aristocratic
Valéry Giscard d’Estaing is approaching the task of writing
up a constitution for Europe.
Celebrity shock
As someone who only studied history as far as the seventh form, but
reads more history today than anything else, upton-on-line has been
rather taken by nice little pocket skirmish that has broken out over
the teaching of history in New Zealand schools. Since few diasporans
(and possibly even resident New Zealanders?) read a publication entitled
the Sunday Star Times, it may be necessary to summarise the outbreak
of hostilities.
It all started in the edition of 3rd February of the said
tabloid in which James Belich, New Zealand’s very own answer
to Simon Schama, was reported to be variously ‘alarmed’, ‘shocked’
and ‘at his wits end’ about the state of history teaching. The source
of this celebrity anguish was said to be the following history gets
in secondary schools. Only 15% of school certificate students took the
paper in 1999.
History he claimed (and upton-on-line agrees) should be as important
as maths and English in secondary schools. "Most other countries
in the western world try to engage its [sic] young people in
their past so they can have a concept of how their present emerged …
a knowledge of a country’s history is crucial for our capacity to handle
a challenging future and accommodate differences."
Recolonial deconstructionism
It didn’t take long for Professor Belich’s signature tune to break
through. The most piquant (and piquing) statistic seemed to be the fact
that of the 5198 bursary students who studied history (out of a total
cohort of 27,000), 3243 chose the Tudor-Stuart option while only 1955
took the New Zealand history option. Professor Belich’s sardonic response:
re-name Waitangi day as Tudor-Stuart day.
Whilst careful to claim that he was not trying to push any particular
type of New Zealand history, Professor Belich (whose bushy beard, twinkling
eye and Gerald Durrellish sense of mischief make him such a hit) gave
us both barrels on the re-colonial bit – his latest contribution to
the rich and varied stew of post-colonial deconstructionism that is
emerging. The theory is scarcely subtle – which is why it is likely
to become overnight wisdom. It is banged away at relentlessly on every
page of Paradise Reforged – volume II of his magnificent re-write
of New Zealand history.
For years many (pakeha) New Zealanders laboured away at coming to grips
with the phenomenon of decolonisation as old European empires dissolved
in the solvent of first world war then cold war. Now another generation
is being urged to brace itself for a decolonisation of the mind. All
those inklings of national independence that people thought they were
witnessing (and Keith Sinclair believed he’d sighted) may have
been a mirage.
The Belich space telescope, blasted into orbit with the publication
of Making Peoples, has now delivered evidence of a sort of colonial
Doppler shift in which, from the 1880s onwards, the New Zealand mind
was ‘recolonised’ leaving a population unable to stand on its own intellectual,
historical and cultural feet. This in Professor Belich’s view has produced
a nation scared of difference and uncertain of their identity.
Insufficient sex?
This in turn, Belich alleges, has led New Zealanders to regard their
own national story as inferior.
"There’s a notion that there’s something parochial or
noble or second-rate about learning New Zealand history but that’s
bullshit. New Zealand history makes the ‘wild west’ look like an
old people’s tea party. There is sex and violence coming out the
ears of New Zealand history."
Historians, Belich claims, are not teaching an interesting curriculum.
He knows, as both intellectual and entertainer, that you don’t win young
minds away from their Play-Station 2 consoles with a dreary project
on the use of the Prerogative Courts in Carolinian England. Racier fare
is needed – a technique applied unstintingly in Paradise Reforged
where, amongst other little nuggets, we are informed that Te Papa resembles
"an architect’s wet dream".
Belich was quickly joined in the field of battle by the Chief Bursary
Examiner who pronounced the curriculum out of date. (Readers of the
Sunday Star Times were solemnly informed that the identity of
the said examiner was, in accordance with protocol, shrouded in secret
given the risk that teachers might seek to pressure him/her. One has
visions of a diminishing band of ageing secondary school teachers trying
to divine where this powerful personage stood on the great 1960s battles
over which social classes were in the ascendancy at the outbreak of
Civil War in 1642…)
Without cover of anonymity (but, one suspects, serious risk of a good
professional pillorying), some less celebrated members of the profession
hit back. The head of history at Belich’s alma mater, Onslow College’s
Margaret Pointer, politely pointed out that the same students
reading Tudor and Stuart history ("a different context for the
teaching of history skills [which] is also part of their heritage")
were also nicely immersed in such scrumptious topics as ‘isolation versus
community in settler society’. Brent Costley, a former teacher,
evenly noted that "many students at bursary level like the Tudor-Stuart
course because it is different in time and place from what they have
ever done" before going on to note that many teenagers felt the
need to escape the concentration on New Zealand for the exotic world
made real for them in movies like Shakespeare in Love.
Whose story is our history?
Upton-on-line inclines to the view that young kiwis probably treat
sex as a contemporary matter and need little in the way of historical
reassurance. He is more inclined to the verdict of Mr Costley and Ms
Pointer. But before venturing his own views on the matter he has to
make a clean breast of his own inescapable prejudices. Not only did
upton-on-line attend schools that, on the Belich view, were the steel
reinforcing of New Zealand’s recolonial concrete. He relished the Tudor-Stuart
option, especially the Stuart bit.
Upton-on-line’s special line in recolonial irrelevance was the religious
topic – the Elizabethan settlement of the question of the English Church
and the marvellous wreckage of the Laudian project on the rocks of fanatical
Puritanism. Arminianism, millenarianism and all those stubborn Scots
Calvinists were deliciously exotic. (What it lacked in sex, it certainly
made up in intolerance). It probably helped having a school chaplain
who celebrated Holy Communion on the feast day of King Charles Martyr.
But Milton on the one hand and Rubens on the other were
quite seductive enough if you needed worldly enticements.
Now one would have to remark that Inigo Jones’ Banqueting Hall
(where Charles I lost his head) was as far away from the realities of
the War Memorial Hall in Ngaruawahia as it is possible
to get – a tick for Mr Costley’s point about the exotic. But in another
sense, the Reformation encompasses one of the great watershed periods
in the history of western thinking, philosophy, and governance. The
cleavage between secular and ecclesiastical authority has left its scars,
in different ways, across the entire (unconsciously imbibed) heritage
of any country with a European strand to its history – a tick for Ms
Pointer.
It seems to upton-on-line blindingly obvious that it is impossible
to live in New Zealand today and have a proper understanding of how
the present emerged without coming to grips with the huge constitutional
and religious battles that shaped the modern age in Britain. And if
Professor Belich diagnoses irrelevance here, he has succumbed to terminal
parochialism.
How about a spot of romanticism?
That said, there’s a bit of a gap between the Stuarts and the early
Victorian age into which New Zealand was born – 126 years to be precise,
between the death of the last Stuart, Queen Anne in 1714, and the Treaty
of Waitangi in 1840. And if one had choose, there’s a strong case for
putting together a really interesting course on what was going on in
European (and in particular British) minds in the period between Cook’s
voyages of discovery, and the formal beginnings of colonisation.
When Cook first arrived in New Zealand waters making astronomical observations
while botanists and naturalists swarmed ashore to classify the strange
new biota, the first blast of scientific imperialism was underway as
the Enlightenment project sought to dissolve the shadows of superstition
in the spotlight of rational scientific enquiry (soon to be harnessed
in the cause of industrial production). By the time the Treaty was signed,
70 odd years later, Europe had gone through the convulsion of the French
revolution, the Napoleonic wars and the foundations of modern, technologically
integrated societies were being laid. Britain lost her American colonies
at the beginning of the period; by the end of it she had constructed
a vast new array of imperial entanglements as far away as China.
Over the same period, the authoritarian rational symmetries of the
Enlightenment were overthrown by romanticism, individualistic
introspection and a host of imagined or embroidered nationalisms. This
was a period of revolt on every front – intellectual, cultural as well
as political. It was an age in which Europe was consumed by the exotic
and by cultural difference. It is the world of the Counter-Enlightenment.
A lively grasp of what romanticism, imperialism, nationalism and economic
liberalism meant in the first decades of the 19th century
would do more to help young New Zealanders understand why their country
is as it is today than (God help us) extending New Zealand studies to
embrace ‘Think Big’ as some academics rushing to Belich’s side have
advocated. Why? Because one of the fascinating – and wholly unresolved
- debates of huge current relevance seems to turn on what was or wasn’t
in the minds of those who signed the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840.
There is no shortage of interpretations busily inserting fashionable
– or politically expedient – glosses. But shouldn’t we be trying to
delve into the attitudes, the education, and the cultural universe of
those military, diplomatic, missionary and political actors who were
running a global – and increasingly unchallenged – empire from the Colonial
Office and the Admiralty. In other words, the London that Hongi Hika
encountered when he visited England in 1820. (I’d send every bright
young 16 year old off for the summer holidays with a copy of Paul
Johnson’s The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830 –
it sets the stage with great élan).
In upton-on-line’s respectful view, modern New Zealand’s
history didn’t start in New Zealand. It started in Europe. And understanding
that part of our cultural, political and economic heritage as ‘ours’
(rather than something alien that occurred almost on another planet)
is the sine qua non of understanding ourselves in the modern world.
Understanding what romanticism did to the 19th century mind
might help us get to grips with the curious mirage of utopia that has
afflicted New Zealand. Understanding that there’s "sex and violence
coming out of the ears of New Zealand history" simply confirms
the dystopia we all know about!
[If anyone wants to get inside the 18th century backdrop
to all this, try Barbarism & Religion: The Enlightenments of
Edward Gibbon by J G A Pocock – probably New Zealand’s most
distinguished historian although marked for life for having been born
in London and educated at Canterbury thereby making him a near-super-saturated
recolonial.]
A quintessentially conservative position
All of this was fresh in mind when upton-on-line chanced upon a book
review by the TLS’s editor, Ferdinand Mount, (Issue of
Feb 1st 2002). Mount occasionally allows himself an essay
or a review in which to spell out some unfailingly intelligent and invariably
sceptical truths about the state of the Realm back in the Imperial homeland.
The review, in this case, was of a book whose subject matter must seem
unimaginable to confirmed republicans: God Save the Queen – The Spiritual
Dimension of Monarchy by Ian Bradley. It is, as the title
literally asserts, an essay on the sacral elements of monarchy.
Even upton-on-line thought this was a slightly improbable line to be
running in the early twenty first century, but Mount’s review makes
some points that are too easily swept under the kilim by progressive
types. If recolonial rigor mortis has not yet set in, subscribers
may find these Oakeshottian musings interesting – if only to underscore
how banal our own debate on constitutional issues has been to date:
"Since [1992] public opinion has revived somewhat in favour
of the monarchy, and the royal family approaches the Queen’s Golden
Jubilee chastened but not nearly as apprehensive as they would have
been if it had come five years earlier. All the same, you can feel
the undertow among the intelligentsia, especially in newspapers
such as The Guardian and the Independent, in favour
of either an immediate republic or a monarchy so deconsecrated and
deprived of all institutional support and political relevance as
to represent only a mournful little halt on the line to a republic.
Yet one man’s mumbo jumbo is another man’s epiphany. And the introduction
of a republic in Britain faces many more obstacles than its proponents
like to contemplate. The first is that nations are always reluctant
to change their fundamental constitutional arrangements without
an overwhelming reason to do so, such as catastrophic military defeat,
an economic collapse or a change in the national territory or population.
The result in the recent Australian referendum on the monarchy was
a neat little example of popular scepticism defeating fashionable
enthusiasm for change.
This reluctance to disturb stable arrangements has behind it a
deeper anxiety. Reformers are congenitally insensitive to the appalling
difficulty of achieving effective and lasting authority in a territory.
This task must logically come before all the more enthralling business
of establishing liberty, democracy, justice, equality and anything
else you fancy.
Three quarters of the world’s recent horrors derive from the absence
of such agreed and accepted authority: Afghanistan, Kosovo, Northern
Ireland, Rwanda. That is why the oath of allegiance to the Monarch
(or the Constitution or the Flag or the Republic) is not simply
a piece of antiquated flummery but the precondition of politics.
Speaker Boothroyd’s revulsion against allowing Sinn Fein members
to use the Palace of Westminster without taking the oath was soundly
based…
The dangers of undermining the basis of authority are not merely
political. If you bleach out the numinous element, you leave a materialist,
secularized nation in rather bleak surroundings. Princess Diana’s
funeral – both a royal and an anti-royal occasion, as Bradley points
out – provoked an outpouring of grief that made many observers uncomfortable,
because it so clearly signalled the desolation in which millions
of their fellow citizens lived.
In a world already so disenchanted, is it desirable to remove any
lingering social experience of the transcendent, leaving what Bradley
calls "the metaphysical imagination" confined to the private
realm? And isn’t it odd that so many of those who claim they want
to promote a sense of community should be so keen to dismantle the
one focus of national community that indisputably exists? There
is, of course, an alternative to intense monarchism, readily available
but not discussed by Ian Bradley, nor, come to that, by any of those
who argue for a republic or for a stripped-down secular monarchy.
The alternative is nationalism, raw and unrestrained by any higher
authority.
Nationalism is not simply a dangerous possibility when customary
loyalties have broken up. It is virtually inevitable. Infant republics
often aren’t quiet at all. On the contrary, they tend to be noisy,
querulous, paranoid. Even Scotland – a long established political
entity … - has its disagreeable, xenophobic side. All those advantages
of constitutional monarchy that constitutionalists rightly point
to – its ability to accommodate different races and religions, its
assistance in securing smooth and peaceful handovers of political
power, its customary restraints on the abuse of power – all these
derive from its deep-rooted hold on the hearts of the people. Loosen
that hold, and you may loosen a lot of other things as well."
Needless to say, New Zealand’s debate starts from different premises.
But neither, obviously, are they wholly divergent. Mount’s warnings
about the difficulties of securing a durable source of authority and
the corrosive solvent of nationalism are every bit as valid in the New
Zealand context (as they are just about anywhere). Upton-on-line finds
himself increasingly exasperated by the inability of many republicans
to get beyond trivial explanations of why New Zealand should discard
its current arrangements. As one who has no sentimental attachment to
monarchy or its personalities, he is stunned that critics can dwell
on the place of residence of the head of state or the ‘democratic deficit’
in her incumbency. (The Privy Council is entirely another matter).
The Crown in the case of New Zealand is a (literally living) metaphor
for an unbroken and seamless source of authority. I happen to think
an (effectively) powerless human is a rather nice way of enshrining
the idea of ultimate – but carefully constrained – authority which,
as Mount says, is the precondition for politics. It’s quite humane and
‘green’ (without having to get into Prince Charles’ gardening pursuits).
As a metaphor of continuity it’s unbeatable. All the alternatives can
offer is an anaemic, abstract principle which citizens are expected
to ritually re-endorse in the context of sordid ballot-box politicking.
What progressives risk is a neat dose of very unprogressive – and unconstrained
– populism.
This is commonly dismissed in the name of ‘growing up’, having ‘confidence’
in ourselves and exorcising recolonial demons. Ever the conservative
sceptic, upton-on-line thinks there’s already enough that’s at risk
in New Zealand’s constitutional underpinnings to warrant to let sleeping
dogs lie. Currently, we have one fixed – and completely benign – point
of reference to try to work our way over some very rocky terrain occasioned
by the new science of treatyology. Without it, we’ve lost our compass.
Just in case you still thought it was easy
Lacking military or economic catastrophes (the German budget deficit
doesn’t quite count) but facing significant enlargement, Europe (after
December’s Laeken Summit) is busily trying to concoct a constitution.
Euro-statesmen love to allege a ‘leadership role’ for Europe in all
they do. And this is no exception. It must be the first time in history
that a vast continent has embarked on the risky business of constitution
building spurred on in no small part by bureaucratic and governmental
paralysis. What could be more European than trying to ignite the excitement
and recklessness normally reserved for moments of high drama by appointing
a 105 person Convention?
There is rather a lot at stake. Despite bold pronouncements on the
need for harmonisation of everything from air traffic control to taxes
and the desire to play a big role on the world stage, the rate of progress
seems to have ground to snail’s pace. The prospect of a wave of new
entrants from eastern Europe coupled with growing public distaste for
some of the more federalist visions of Europe’s future has made the
case for reform – and some new element of popular legitimacy – increasingly
urgent.
Which makes the appointment of a former French President to chair the
Convention, Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, a little surprising
on the face of it. No spring chicken at 75, M. d’Estaing has spent much
of the last 15 years getting over his defeat at the hands of Francois
Mitterand. How the French people could have been so ungrateful to
such a distinguished and aristocratic personage is beyond upton-on-line.
But after so long on the sidelines one might have thought Europe had
moved beyond the messy years of the 1970s when he was last in harness.
But one look at the urbane but slightly foxy way he dispensed with
questioners on Christine Ockrent’s France 3 Sunday night current
affairs panel left upton-on-line in little doubt that Europe has appointed
a man whose condign smile will see him face down armies of milling eurocrats
and platoons of national politicians intent on extracting national advantages.
For New Zealanders who think they could walk into peace time constitution-building
and inspire the masses, here’s a sample of the sort of things Giscard
tried out in his introductory speech to the Convention (made up of assorted
representatives from member states, candidate states, national parliaments,
the European parliament and the Commission).
"Your very presence together in this room would have appeared
unimaginable, would have seemed like a dream to the British, the
Germans, the French and the Dutch less than sixty years ago, and
to the Czechs, Hungarians and Romanians less than fifteen years
ago. Europe has moved forward step by step, from Treaty to Treaty.
The road has been lined with partial agreements and with crises
which have quickly been overcome. The most striking feature is that
Europe may have appeared at certain periods to be blocked, but it
has never taken a step backwards…
At the same time, we must admit that these measures are reaching
their limits. The process of European union is showing signs of
flagging, as the Laeken Declaration makes clear. The decision-making
machinery has become more complex, to the point of being unintelligible
to the general public. Since Maastricht, the latest Treaties have
been difficult to negotiate and have not met their original aims:
discussion within the Institutions have often given precedence to
national interests over consideration of the common European good.
Finally, the abstention rate at European elections has reached a
worrying level: in 1999 it exceeded the highly symbolic 50% threshold
for the first time!
The shortcomings affect Europe in its present configuration. They
will be even more critical in an enlarged Europe. We must remedy
them in the interests of Europe, but also in the interests of the
world. Today’s world lacks a strong, united and peaceful Europe.
The world would fel better if it could count on Europe, a Europe
which spoke with a single voice to affirm respect for its alliances,
but also to proclaim, whenever necessary, a message of tolerance
and moderation, of openness towards difference, and of respect for
human rights.
Let us not forget that from the ancient world of Greece and Rome
until the Age of Enlightenment, our continent has made three fundamental
contributions to humanity: reason, humanism and freedom…
If we succeed, in 25 years or 50 years – the distance separating
us from the Treaty of Rome – Europe’s role in the world will have
changed. It will be respected and listened to, not only as the economic
power it already is, but as a political power which will talk on
equal terms to the greatest powers on our planet, either existing
or future, and will have the means to act to affirm its values,
ensure its security and play an active role in international peace-keeping."
Inspiring? Hardly – but it’s hard to know how you do the ‘vision thing’
in this context. Giscard explained that the Convention’s work centred
on answering questions under six broad headings:
- Europe’s role
- The division of competence between the EU and member states
- How to simplify the EU’s instruments of governance
- How to give the EU’s institutions some democratic legitimacy
- How to give the EU a single voice in international affairs
- How to go about writing a constitution
It’s vitally important stuff – and exactly the sort of thing laundromat
proprietors in Lille or upholsterers in Umbria leave to other people.
But Giscard remains undeterred:
"Let me conclude by calling on your enthusiasm. A word which
comes from the Greek "en-thousia", meaning "inspired
by a god". In our case, you might say "inspired by a goddess"
– the goddess Europa! We are often upbraided for neglecting the
European dream, for contenting ourselves with building a complicated
and opaque structure which is the preserve of economic and financial
cognoscneti. So let us dream of Europe!
Let us imagine a continent at peace, freed of its barriers and
obstacles, where history and geography are finally reconciled, allowing
all the states of Europe to build their future together…a space
of freedom and opportunity where individuals can move as they wish
to study, work, show enterprise or broaden their cultural horizons…
Europe has brought the world reason, humanism and freedom. It has
the authority to send forth a message of moderation, preaching the
quest for mutually acceptable solutions and a passionate attachment
to peace…"
As noted above, it must be the first time constitutional reformers
have been asked to respond to the intoxicating call of ‘mutually acceptable
solutions’. And if they fail? Then the former President’s prognosis
is grim indeed:
"If we were to fail, each country would return to the free
trade system. None of us – not even the largest of us – would have
the power to take on the giants of this world. We would then remain
locked in on ourselves, grimly analysing the causes of our decline
and fall."
Musing on Europe’s attachment to agricultural subsidies and trade barriers,
skies that are congested by the lack of a single European airspace and
so on, upton-on-line is not so sure returning to "the free trade
system" would be such a bad fate. After all, it has never existed
in Europe so it would be hard to return to it. Certainly, New Zealand
Ministers should be getting their minds around just what M. Giscard
d’Estaing means by success should Europe become the giant of its dreams.
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