NEW ZEALAND'S FOREIGN SERVICE: A History.

AuthorHensley, Gerald

NEW ZEALAND'S FOREIGN SERVICE: A History

Editor: Ian McGibbon

Published by: Massey University Press, Auckland, 2022, 576pp, $59.99.

The evidence suggests that the basic framework of every country's foreign policy is relatively unchanging, fixed by its geography, language and cultural outlook. The details and application to changing circumstances can be argued about and varied but the underlying foundations do not change. Russia with no natural land borders has for centuries been expansionist; China's view of itself as the Central State underpins its active foreign policy. Britain has followed a maritime strategy for centuries and felt so uncomfortable in the European continent that it left. Japan, a similar group of off-shore islands, has also opted for a maritime economy.

New Zealand, well offshore behind its extensive moat, is linked by history and language to another continent in a relationship sometimes uneasy but a fact of geography. Australia and New Zealand are, as Peter Fraser liked to say, 'a single strategical entity'. Their security is not divisible but the small populations of both leaves both dependent for ultimate protection on a larger country, once the United Kingdom, now and for the indefinite future, the United States.

As this thoughtful book shows, it was the Second World War that shook New Zealand into grasping the basic framework of its foreign policy. Despite Fraser's words, we were slow to accept the Australian link--we were more than halfway through the war before it was felt necessary to open an office in Canberra, well after we had opened in Washington and even Ottawa. Even so, both countries realised that they were henceforth dependent, not on a Britain with its back to the wall, but on the willingness of the United States to defend us. Despite their personal and cultural ties to Britain both countries based their wartime foreign policies firmly on this reality.

Two men shaped it in New Zealand, Peter Fraser, our great wartime leader, and Carl Berendsen, the head of his department. The book begins its survey of our foreign ministry logically enough with its 'accidental establishment' in 1943, the accident being Berendsen's move to Canberra when his ulcer could no longer stand the easy-going habits of the War Cabinet. But it was Fraser and Berendsen, with only the young Alister McIntosh to help, who from the earliest months of the war set the outlook inherited by the new department. Berendsen had no interest in...

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