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New Zealand Identities

Departures and Destinations

Victoria University Press

Citizenship, Identity and Belonging: Addressing the Mythologies of the Unitary Nation State in Aotearoa/New Zealand

David Pearson

In January 2004, Don Brash, the leader of the National Party, delivered a 'state of the nation' address to the Rotary Club of Orewa. In that speech he argued New Zealand was heading towards 'a racially divided nation, with two sets of laws and two standards of citizenship' instead of a unified nation state (Brash, 2004). This destination, he averred, was mainly attributable to too much onus being placed on 'the principles' of the Treaty of Waitangi as a basis for nation-building by the current Labour Coalition government. For Brash, the Treaty should be seen as an antiquated founding document that represents a highly imperfect quasi-constitutional platform for establishing and consolidating a unitary political state based on Western conceptions of sovereignty and citizenship. Those concepts, in Brash's eyes, are the bedrock of liberal democracy since they support conventions about the state's ultimate public authority to govern, and individual forms of ownership and control of private resources for its members. Ideally, such citizens should be governed by the same laws, have identical rights and obligations, and share a common identity as members of the nation state. These ideas are ones shared by many New Zealanders, in part illustrated by the degree of support for many of Brash's comments after his speech. Indeed, some of the classical liberal philosophical principles underlying his views are ones I cherish myself. But the problem with citizenship (not to speak of the law), as this chapter will seek to demonstrate, is as much to do with practice as philosophy. So what is citizenship, and how does the concept relate to questions of political freedom and choice, forms of economic and social equality, and conceptions of community and belonging?

Citizenship, Nationality and Identity

I suspect most New Zealanders, if asked what citizenship most directly means to them, are likely to think of the passport(s) they might possess as a tangible example of the concept, whilst using their vote at election times best illustrates for them the process of acting as a citizen. Not surprisingly, both of these examples are legal and political. In Western liberal terms, the birth of citizenship can be traced back to the Ancient Greek and Roman city states where the legal idea and political actions associated with it were about being an individual member of a political community. This status, confined principally to a male elite, embraced ideas about rights, duties, participation and identity that eventually spread across the Western world and beyond (Heater, 1990). The origins and growth of liberal democratic citizenship were closely aligned with the emergence of the idea of the Western nation state as an individual's legal membership of a polity became increasingly tied to a sense of belonging as a co-national to a state-controlled bounded territory. These links forged between state, nation and territory also embraced the concept of sovereignty. States claimed a monopoly over the ultimate, legitimate use of force to maintain their own self-governance. Such authority gave them the formally recognised autonomy to design, implement and regulate their own administrative institutions, including citizenship. These conventions and practices remained under the control of political elites, but the concept of mass citizenship, much influenced by the ideas and struggles of the French and the United States revolutions, became more influential as forms of legal representation and political participation were gradually, and still imperfectly, democratised within 'the modern age' (Shinoda, 2000).

The introduction of passports, for example, which indicated that the holder is legally attached to a particular country, is a classic illustration of how states have established the exclusive right to control the movement of peoples in and out of specified territories (Torpey, 2000). This document served as a means of surveillance in authorising and regulating the rights and duties of citizens and those with particular rights of residence in designated areas and, to a degree, provided some protection for such people travelling and residing in other states. Similarly, possessing the right to vote (the franchise) denotes that the voter is legally entitled politically to participate in how they are governed, usually concerning a particular national community, commonly a state, but in some instances beyond this as, for example, members of the European Union (EU) demonstrate.

But citizenship, in the sense I am using it in this chapter, is a broadly-based concept that extends beyond narrow legal and political meanings into a far more holistic sense of membership of a state and 'national community'. For example, both the above legal-political examples of citizenship have important socio-economic conditions and consequences. Property qualifications, in terms of ownership and/or residence, are usually required before passports can be issued or voting rights bestowed, and as soon as one considers questions about state taxes or welfare payments, and who is expected or eligible to contribute to, or receive them, economic considerations come into play. If you are the wrong age or gender, or do not have an acceptable national or ethnic background, you may not be socially and/or culturally eligible for citizenship and the benefits (but also obligations) that this status carries with it. Consequently, citizenship is always double-edged, offering opportunities for some, whilst restricting or closing them off to others. These membership restrictions have important implications for questions of identity because the possession and act of citizenship is invariably based on norms of inclusion and exclusion, firmly focused on estimations of 'us' and them'; such assessments being based on prevailing ideas about national distinctiveness and belonging among those with the power to have their views put into practice. The history of New Zealand citizenship is no exception. In fact, the origins of New Zealand as a British settler state promoted a number of distinctive characteristics whose implications, as Dr Brash's opening statement and the general tenor of this book indicate, are still being debated today.

In this chapter, I want to demonstrate how New Zealand citizenship patterns historically reflect three major themes that link past and present debates about what it means to be a full or incomplete member of the state. Firstly, I will describe the creation and reproduction for much of our history of a dual British/New Zealand status where little substantive distinction was drawn between New Zealand-born subjects/citizens and incoming British migrants within an imperial and then Commonwealth system of states. Secondly, I will argue that out of this colonial heritage we can discern the formation of a marginalised indigenous minority that typifies the partial inclusion of Maori as British subjects and New Zealand citizens. Finally, I will demonstrate a consistent pattern of the exclusion and control of immigrant minorities, who were either completely denied legal citizenship or, in de facto terms, their legal status as citizens did not equate with the political, social and economic benefits enjoyed by the majority of New Zealanders. Let us examine each of these three themes in turn before returning to considering their current implications.

A Settler Society Legacy

For much of its history, New Zealand citizenship, as a formal legal status, reflects New Zealand's origins as a British settler colony, but it did not simply mirror conventions in its parent state (McMillan, 2005). The British model of subjecthood slowly evolved out of a history where the entitlements and obligations of feudal lords in relation to their monarch gradually gave way to a parliamentary system within a capitalist system marked by deep-seated class and male privileges (Everson, 2003). In contrast, New Zealand became a new state and emergent nation in a matter of decades, through the pivotal relationship between post-feudal colonisers and non-capitalist indigenous peoples with very different political conventions (Pearson, 2001). Before European contact, Maori had their own ideas and practices relating to forms of political membership and governance of their communities, and the different rights and duties of chiefs and commoners within hapu and iwi. But these were not legally codified in terms of individual property rights and their conceptions of sovereignty did not emerge from the Western traditions of statehood that clearly underpinned ideas about citizenship in the period of initial contact between settlers and indigenes.

The process of colonial settlement transformed Maori into a relatively powerless indigenous minority by virtue of territorial dispossession and the marginalisation of their local economies and socio-political ideas and practices. Nonetheless, they acquired and retained a unique, international aboriginal status by being 'in place' at the time of colonial contact and forming distinct political and legal relationships with the states that came to control and encompass them (Werther, 1992). Although aboriginality was a socio-legal concept in all British settler states, in New Zealand, the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi illustrates an unparalleled collective agreement with indigenous representatives. In contrast to Australia, for example, where Aboriginal people were cast into 'a citizenship shadow land' (Thornton, 2000, p. 218) by a terra nullius doctrine that proclaimed they were uncivilisable and therefore could be safely ignored, Maori were incorporated en masse as British subjects by treaty. Initially, James Busby, the British Resident in 1834, sought to establish a localised agreement between the British Crown and representatives of mainly northern hapu and iwi, who called themselves He Whakaputanga o te Rangatira o Nu Tireni (The United Tribes of New Zealand), which he subsequently sent to England the following year. His initiative was designed to pre-empt other colonial claimants to Aotearoa and to expedite international trade (see Stenson, 2004, pp. 43-44). The document signed at Waitangi and circulated round the country for more Maori signatories in 1840 proved to be considerably more far-reaching, since it provided the foundation for the ensuing creation of particular forms of political state membership and a specialised symbolic niche within myths of an emergent 'nation' (Evans et al, 2003).

The terms of agreement, however, were far from clear-cut, given Maori and English versions of the Treaty and its three central Articles. Different transliterations and interpretations of the degrees of acknowledgement of British sovereignty in Article One and the retention of forms of chiefly authority in Article Two were to prove highly contestable. There was also considerable tension between British conventions of individualised, property-based subjecthood in Article Three and the allusion to collective membership of indigenous political communities in Article Two. These Articles, simultaneously, made Maori individual subjects of the British monarch whilst recognising their continued allegiance to forms of governance within their hapu and iwi. Article 3 of the Treaty did not grant all Maori (or Pakeha for that matter) equal citizenship; it conferred the status of imperial subjecthood constrained by ideas of individual, male propertied superiority that inserted eligible Maori into an expansive framework of rights and obligations relating to movement within the British Empire. Consequently, subjecthood incorporated indigenes and settlers into an international state system within which, legally, if not substantively speaking, Maori shared the same de jure and formal political status as British subjects back in Britain, whilst 'the British' in New Zealand had their position protected despite their movement from Europe to the Pacific (McMillan, 2005). This blending of modern Western and pre-modern Maori notions of political community, and individual/collective ideas about rights and obligations, remained persistent points of contestation from their Treaty inception to the present day (see James Liu, this volume).

Compared with politico-legal agreements in other British settler states, therefore, the Treaty paved the way for a unique subject/citizenship regime for Maori as, on the one hand, legally recognised co-members in the state and, on the other, as 'intimate others' with a recognised position within visions of a yet-to-be-created 'nation'. Subsequent events confirmed this indigenous minority status of partial inclusion. Continued conflict emerged, under New Zealand parliamentary conventions, between collective forms of hapu/iwi/Maori autonomy and the state's concern for individual assimilation, as the history of the franchise reveals (Sullivan, 2003). For example, the creation of four Maori designated seats in Parliament (in 1867) free of the individual property eligibility that had effectively disenfranchised the vast majority of Maori males since the Constitution Act of 1852 (Sorrenson, 1986) preserved a degree of formal, autonomous political recognition. But, in reality, this marginalised form of political representation was unable effectively to combat continued widespread land loss, social and economic neglect, and disregard of Treaty rights (Sullivan, 2003). Far from being designed to provide an effective parliamentary voice for Maori, specialised Maori representation was introduced as a temporary expedient by a settler government wishing to safeguard North Island political control (most Maori residing in this region), and 'to placate Maori loyalists who had supported the British in the Land wars, as well as the liberal lobby in "mother England", which was seeking a more "enlightened" colonial attitude towards the indigenous peoples of New Zealand' (Sullivan, 2003, p. 220).

By 1896, the New Zealand franchise had been extended to women (including Maori) and the property qualification had been abolished, but only 'half-caste' Maori were allowed to vote or stand in general (non-Maori) electorates, and the Maori seats did not acquire a secret ballot until 1937 or compulsory enrolment until 1956. These supports for citizen participation were offered to Maori well after such conventions had been introduced in the general seats. Nevertheless, the Maori status as British subjects and subsequent New Zealand citizens ran in parallel to their international aboriginal standing as a basis for claims about special indigenous entitlements and obligations that underpin current reparative and distributive judicial and political processes.

If the majority/minority relationship between Pakeha settlers and Maori indigenes forms the most distinctive feature of subjecthood and citizenship in the history of Aotearoa/New Zealand, on-going migration forms another key element in tracing the development of patterns of identity and governance of the settler state (Pearson, 2005). As this phrase implies, mass British settlement cemented the power base of the majority, and patterns of migration further illustrate the inclusionary and exclusionary character of citizenship. On the one hand, we can see a long-term, predominant inflow of what McKinnon (1996) has called British 'kin migrants'. These migrants formed part of a world-wide British diaspora, which created and maintained sets of institutions, myths and memories by settlers and their successors: 'sharing the family status of monarchical subjects, bound together by ties of "race" and national origin, within and across the metropolis and its colonial outposts' (Pearson, 2002, p. 994). Consequently, little distinction was drawn between notions of 'British' citizenship and New Zealand nationality in a family of Empire model. The result was a very 'thin' kind of New Zealand citizenship lacking any sense of de jure independence until the 1940s.

At this juncture, even though the British state's Nationality Act of 1948 allowed its dominions to develop their own citizenship whilst still remaining within the realm of British subjecthood, the New Zealand government was very reluctant to do so. For example, the form and ordering of wording in the front of newly introduced travel documents in the late 1940s, 'British passport, New Zealand', firmly expressed official sentiments. The legal distinctions now drawn between local-born citizens and incoming British permanent residents had only minor substantive consequences. British migrants could not become Members of Parliament or hold office in certain public service departments (for example, in Foreign Affairs or the Security Services), but they could still vote and had full access to state services. Newly-arriving British migrants therefore often saw little reason to become New Zealand citizens, while most local-born New Zealanders (including the children of recent British arrivals), continued formally to maintain their allegiance to the Crown as British subjects. Thus, both groups continued to retain free rights of entry and residence in the United Kingdom.

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Excerpted from New Zealand Identities by James H. Liu, Tim McCreanor, Tracey McIntosh, Teresia Teaiwa. Copyright © 2005 editors and contributors. Excerpted by permission of Victoria University Press.
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