John Roughan: Recognition of minorities earns loyalty to the state

Released from the daily grind, given a Qantas ticket to England, and invited to read and think for three months on any subject I chose, it had taken me about three minutes to nominate a topic. Nationhood. Or to be precise, the nationhood of indigenous minorities and how that might be satisfied by post-colonial states.

It seems to me to be the most important, but still largely unspoken, subject rumbling beneath our political surface.

The supervisors at Wolfson College, Cambridge, thought the topic too big to permit a conclusion in 10 weeks, and they were right. But they let me stick with it. And I let it lead me where it would.

It led me into some stimulating political theory and to the history and politics not only of former British colonies such as Canada, where native Americans now style themselves First Nations, but of the Balkans where nationality went bad and of Britain itself, where an assertive national minority, the Scots, seem satisfied so far with a devolution that falls short of sovereignty.

Nationhood was also the title of Don Brash's first Orewa speech.

He said he would return to the subject in his race relations address this week but he didn't. He simply restated his intention, given the chance, to abolish the seats reserved for Maori in Parliament, call time on the Waitangi Tribunal and possibly shut down almost all the "race-based" state services that give Maori some sense of self-government.

Nationhood, to Don Brash, and indeed to Helen Clark and the vast majority of voters, is a quality they confuse with loyalty to the state. To all of them there can be but one nation in this country and any suggestion that there may be two or more is fiercely resented as divisive, disloyal and dangerous.

But nationhood is not a quality that can be simply demanded. It is every person's strongest identity. Everybody has several levels of personal identity. You may be a New Zealander of Maori, Irish or Chinese descent, living in Auckland, practising a trade, subscribing to a sports club, a church, a political party, and at different times you will identify yourself by all those affiliations.

But only one of them always answers the internal question, "What am I?" To most of us, the comfortable answer is an automatic and unequivocal: "I am a New Zealander." That's what we tell any foreigner who asks. To ethnic minorities, immigrant or indigenous, the instinctive response may be different. "I am Chinese/ Samoan/ Russian." A person's dominant identity demands an expression of political power, which is what turns a social or cultural association into a "national" one. At a personal level everybody needs a certain sovereignty - the power to be themselves and be respected for themselves - and that holds true, I think, collectively.

The pride that immigrants feel in being Chinese, Samoan or Russian is derived from the fact there is a well-known place where people like them are sovereign and their culture and heritage is to be found.

For that reason, immigrant minorities have no need of a national expression in their new home. They normally ask no more of their adopted country than it should give them equal rights in its law and the freedom to practise what they wish to preserve of their own culture.

Indigenous minorities are different. Although they have migrated from somewhere in some ancient time, they long ago lost all memory of that homeland.

They have developed here in a distinctive way and there is nowhere else in this world where they are sovereign and their culture secure. Indigenous people need to establish their nationhood in states where they live as a minority. "National minorities" has become the preferred term for them in political scholarship. They might be more easily accommodated in countries where they predominate in some part of its territory, which Maori do not in any region of New Zealand.

But territory is of limited value to an aspiring nation. No state readily allows even an ethnically distinct territory to secede. In any case, secession is not an attractive prospect if you are contemplating an economy in the Australian Outback or a Canadian reservation.

Territory may be a hindrance where it allows minority nationhood to be quarantined and unnoticed.

To earn the description "post-colonial", countries such as this will have to make constitutional room for the nationhood of descendants of the dispossessed.

It is not hard to suggest ways to do so, but suggestions from the majority hardly serve to advance a minority's self-determination. Maori will decide how their nationhood is expressed - whether as iwi or in pan-Maori forms - and Brash's intended destruction of existing institutions could be the spur they might need.

A white majority could abolish seats and agencies but not the minority's nationhood. That would find an outlet in some way, probably by setting up parallel political institutions that the more radical among Maori have long advocated. Already at this election the Maori Party is offering an independent political course.

It is an exciting prospect, but there is no reason to worry unduly about it. Once we rearrange our thoughts about the nation and the state we will discover it doesn't take very much recognition of a national minority to earn its loyalty to a liberal state.

The First Nation councils of Canada have yet to gain much administrative power, yet the Cree, for example, became an earnest defender of the federation a few years ago when they contemplated the secession of Quebec.

If the liberal post-colonial state can give expression to a national minority as well as its majority it can command the allegiance of both. It stands to discover that members of its constituent nations find their ultimate source of pride and sovereignty in its recognition of their distinctions. It is at that point the state becomes one nation overall. This election may be a setback, but we'll get there.