Colin James: Future leaders will build the nation on an original idea

This evening 50 emerging leaders of the coming generation will assemble to muse on this nation's shape in 2020. Tomorrow afternoon they will join 400 local and foreign notables in the second Knowledge Wave talkfest.

Their designation as "leaders" suggests qualities that destine them to lead us to that 2020 nation. Indeed, nation-building is the theme of the conference, which is called a "leadership forum". A formidable amount of brainpower will be on display.

They meet in two contexts that generate a lot of "leadership" talk - a war-substitute (the America's Cup) and the shadow of real war in Iraq (a more bitter American cup).

The Iraq venture, though tied in rhetoric to this century through September 11, 2001, is vintage 20th-century in its recourse to old-fashioned military muscle.

The result for the United States, one cogent school of American analysis argues, will be transformation to an empire.

It has taken over other countries before (Hawaii, the Philippines, for example) and meddled in many during the long Cold War on communism. Its popular culture (Hollywood, hamburgers) seduced the world and its multinational companies wield enormous economic power.

But hitherto Americans could sustain a belief that their nation was a republic as in 1776, unentangled in territorial hegemony.

And therein lies a clue for our "emerging leaders".

The American republic was founded less than two centuries after white settlement. It chose a radical and untested basis for political organisation, the values of the Enlightenment. It might easily have failed, but it survived as a beacon of liberty.

The American republic's singularity was to be founded on an idea. Older nations grew out of long and deep occupation, melding culture with place, as in France.

This evening's emerging leaders are now two centuries from the beginnings of white settlement here. So they can be as free of national tradition as the founders of the American republic. And they are as much in need of a defining idea, for we would need very many more generations to make a nation the French way.

Of course, Maori have been here longer - but they were uprooted from tradition and land by colonisation. And they are a minority. Their nation, if there was one, is not the nation of 2020.

Nevertheless, if there is to be an idea that binds a nation here, Maori are indispensable to its definition. Their renaissance, in numbers and in culture, makes that inescapable. That is a stern challenge for the many who are nostalgic for British or local colonial tradition or revere the American idea.

But aren't we a nation? Not yet.

We freed ourselves from colonial ties in the 1980s, first through the arts and then by a policy and economic upheaval.

But that taking of independence was the work of the'60s generation: those who were in their 20s in the 1960s or early 1970s and are now the power elite. It is an unsteady and uncertain generation, despite its brashness.

The Maori of that generation are too brittle in their recovered culture and the'60s generation descendants of Britain spent too much energy tearing up their culture to have the confident creativity of the American republican founders.

That is for the emerging leaders of the next generation - or their descendants.

Now hear a voice from the upper end of that next generation.

John Tamihere, cabinet minister and maverick, spent his 20s in the 1980s. He wrote in the Herald on Waitangi Day: "We are in the middle of the hard yards of nation-building. The heat and passion of the treaty debate will abate. We have a process in place and are settling and reconciling our great nation."

That is an arrestingly different message from 20 years of anger at Waitangi. And maybe timely: this year's tone did seem marginally different, a base at last, perhaps, to build on.

Anzac Day, which some have toyed with as a national day, will not do. That day commemorates defeat, and defeat cannot be a founding national idea.

But neither will the old "one people" Waitangi Day do. As the Governor-General said (quoting her un-PC 1980s predecessor, Sir David Beattie), we are not one people.

In any case we are separated from "one-people" Waitangi Days by two decades during which that day symbolised strife and division, experiment and bewilderment. There is no delineated framework yet for national self-definition. It is, as Tamihere wrote, the time of the "hard yards".

Where might those hard yards lead to? Perhaps to an idea as experimental and untested as the American republicans': a hard-headed deal between two respectfully distinct but inextricably intermingled peoples who interweave their cultures instead of separating them out - an idea that workably mixes indigeneity and modernity. No nation has done that yet.

That's my wild guess. But I am of the'60s generation, so my muddled musings don't amount to a row of beans. I will be listening to the emerging leaders.

* ColinJames@synapsis.co.nz

Herald Special Report - February 18, 2003:
Knowledge Wave 2003 - the leadership forum

Herald feature: