Independence and Foreign Policy by Malcolm McKinnon

Author:Malcolm McKinnon [McKinnon, Malcolm]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781869405366
Publisher: Auckland University Press
Published: 2012-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Labour’s position on the war—and the discomfort it felt about the issue—was entirely explicable if we remind ourselves of its perspective on the independent foreign policy consensus of the preceding decade. The belief in economic and social, not military solutions, anti-militarism and hatred for war, support for détente, the Commonwealth and the United Nations—all can be identified in Labour’s attitude. So also can anti-Communism. Unfortunately for Labour, it was difficult to settle on a policy which accommodated all of these goals or values.

With the pressure from New Zealand’s allies to do something, with the party unwilling to break with the foreign policy consensus in any other respect, it found itself in an unappealing situation. Nordmeyer made a statement on 28 April 1965. He stressed that the issue should be handed over to the United Nations, that it was not for one nation, no matter how powerful, to decide, and that ANZUS did not pledge New Zealand to a war.42 This was definitely leaning to the side of opposition to the war without actually saying so. At the Labour Party’s annual conference in May the party decided to oppose the sending of New Zealand troops to Vietnam. Nordmeyer called for a negotiated settlement that would end Communist aggression. Any action to resist aggression should be undertaken only through the United Nations or any other international authority. Nordmeyer also told the conference, when speaking in support of the resolution against the deployment, that New Zealand’s integrity among the newly emergent nations depended on not sending troops to Vietnam.

The fact that Nordmeyer was talking in terms of Communist aggression gave an indication of the limits of Labour’s challenge to the government. Not only was Labour, like National, an anti-Communist party, it was either unable or unwilling to define the war as other than a war against Communism. Labour’s anti-Communism and its healthy respect for the public’s anti-Communism qualified that criticism: the comment above about ‘only fanatics, terrorists or communists’ wanting to fight the West was a classic instance of the demarcation line which even the anti-war movement (as distinct from the Labour Party) drew between Communism and legitimate dissent.

Was Labour’s position convincing though—opposition to the war and to New Zealand military involvement, but opposition also to Communism? Nordmeyer did argue that as the Americans had refused to send troops to Malaysia because they were too heavily committed in Vietnam, New Zealand should refuse to help in Vietnam because it was too heavily committed in Malaysia. But it was difficult to make that distinction, as the government itself had found. It served only to underline Labour’s dilemma. The connected set of assumptions had come adrift: on the one hand, the belief in economic and social rather than military solutions, always particularly strong in the Labour Party; on the other, anti-Communism.

Friction within the party was inevitable. A minority, led by Timaru M.P. Basil Arthur, rebelled against the party’s official policy; America should receive support, he said, for what the government was doing in Vietnam—North Vietnam was the aggressor.

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