Self-Determination, Nationalism and Maori Treaty Rights

The New Zealand election campaign brought with it the usual xenophobia from looney right-wing parties such as New Zealand First and Conservative, and at the same time we heard that the Government is to guarantee the Maori tribe Tuhoe some degree of self-determination under a settlement of their Treaty of Waitangi land claim.  All this was against a background of the Scottish vote on independence from Britain and the territorial gains by the so-called Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS), and it got me thinking about self-determination and how far it should be taken as a matter of rights.

I am a keen student of American history and I am particularly interested in the Civil War, that most ignominious conflict in US history. At a political level the US Civil War was about self-determination - the right of the states to determine their own laws versus the right of the US federal government to impose overarching laws on the states. Of course, it was also about the morality of slavery but that was in many ways secondary as a cause of the conflict to the issue of 'states rights'.

My views on self-determination come from my libertarian politics and the Objectivist philosophy on which those political views are based. I believe that individuals are inherently sovereign and that governments are (to borrow a phrase from an important American document on the subject) "instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed." This means that self-determination, if it means anything at all, must apply at the individual level - in other words I should be able to determine how I am governed. But many would say that individual self-determination is impossible, or at least in practice it would amount to anarchy. After all, how can the individual self-determination of 4.5 million New Zealanders (or 300 million Americans for that matter) possibly be compatible with good government?

The answer is, it depends on what you mean by "good government". The American founders defined the ideal as government that protects the rights of its citizens, that is the rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. To those good men, government had no other function than to protect the individual rights of its citizens. Good government is, by their definition, the collective expression of the self-determined and voluntary will of the people to protect their rights. They understood rights as being inherent in man and that the rights of one individual could not infringe upon the rights of another (their heinous error in not applying rights to slaves notwithstanding). They accepted that in order to maintain individual rights, governments must act to prevent individuals abrogating the rights of others and should arbitrate in disputes over rights between individuals. In other words, they understood that as long as governments only protect individual rights and do nothing else, there is no inconsistency between individual self-determination and collective government.

Taken to its logical conclusion, self-determination means that any group of individuals should be able to decide to opt out of any existing governing structure (be it nation, city or neighbourhood) and set up an alternative. This is, of course, exactly what the American founders did. Which brings me back to the Tuhoe, the Scots and ISIS. The problem with all of these groups' aspirations for greater self-determination is that none of them wants to protect individual rights. Tuhoe want to impose a traditional form of Maori government, wherein political power was seized by the strongest and most brutal members of the tribe, and women, slaves and outsiders had no rights at all. The Scots independence campaigners wanted to retain and enhance their socialist economy wherein taxpayers are forced to part with an ever-larger portion of the fruits of their labour to pay for whatever the government wants to spend it on. And the Islamic State rebels want to impose Sharia law wherein women and 'infidels' are second class citizens and no one is free to choose what religion they practice, who they marry and what they say. In all of these cases the alternative form of government is less protective of individual rights than the one they are seeking to replace. That is not self-determination in my book.

I have no truck with nationalism. All nation states are artificial constructs, no matter how old or grand they are, and there is nothing inherently good in one national structure versus another. I'm all for tearing down anachronistic national or empirical structures where they do not serve the citizens they should be serving. I believe that smaller, more local government is generally better at protecting individual rights because it is easier to hold accountable than larger, more geographically spread government. But self-determination is not worthy of the name unless it protects individual rights.

Scottish Yes Vote the End of 'Great' Britain

While here in New Zealand we wrestle with the choices of who is the least bad political party in a crowded general election field, on the other side of the world a more crucial vote is about to take place. I am writing, of course, about the Scottish referendum on independence, which, if you believe the polls, is going down to wire.

Like most distant international observers, at first I regarded this referendum as something of a sham. Early indications were that the 'No' vote would win by the best part of 20 percentage points and that the Scots would soon get back to complaining about the weather and their lack of success on the football turf. My reaction to the latest poll, which has the 'Yes' vote one point ahead, initially was shocked disappointment. Britain is the country in which I have lived the most years of my life after New Zealand and I have a immense fondness for the place.  But on consideration, another part of me concludes that 'Great' Britain died a long time ago and the dismembering of the corpse is overdue.

Britain today is a country that ignores mass child abuse in the name of tolerance. It is a country where you can be arrested for quoting its greatest prime minister. And it is a country that chose to launch the Olympic Games with a celebration of a moribund public health system in which people are much less likely to survive cancer than in other countries. In other words, it is not a country its citizens should be particularly proud of. However, does that justify the Scots seceding?

The problem for the Scots is that the things they want to preserve by becoming independent are the things that have caused Britain to decline from its former glory. They want more National Health System, more welfare and more government interference in their social and economic lives. They think they are a more caring society than the rest of Britain and they want even more of it. The problem for the Scots is that England, or more specifically the Southeast of England, pays the bill and they delude themselves that North Sea oil will continue to pay for their already over-extended Socialist economy. Nothing could be further from the truth. North Sea oil is already starting to run out and without it the Scottish economy will look more like that of Greece or Portugal.

But in my view the worst thing about a Yes vote in the referendum is that it is a point of no return. Britain seemed like a lost cause once before - in the 1970s - but Maggie Thatcher dragged it kicking and screaming back into a position of world political and economic leadership. I have liked to think that the decline since Thatcher was just one more good prime minister away from being reversed. A Yes vote will lock in that decline and Britain will never be Great again. Personally I feel that is a very great shame.