I’m feeling more than a little embarrassed by New Zealand’s posture in the current little spat over the expulsion of our diplomat in Fiji.
Having consequently sent home the Fiji government’s representative here, our foreign minister Murray McCully tells us that this sort of “tit for tat” response is “sort of standard” in this type of situation. You could almost hear him shrugging his shoulders as he spoke. Ho hum.
I’d kinda hoped that we may have grown up a bit since these sorts of diplomatic games were taken seriously back in Cold War days and before. But no; we’re back in the playground retaliating for slights on our boyhood. You expel ours and we’ll kick yours out. Nah nah nah! So there! We’re tougher than you.
As well as the embarrassment factor, I’m also saddened and disappointed. Our tough-guy posturing over the Fiji “regime” (as we love to call it – no use of “government” allowed) over the past couple of years since the coup appears to have produced exactly nothing. Zip.
We love to think that beating our chests and talking down to those brown idiots (not the words I would choose) would make them change their minds immediately, call elections and revert to our wonderful (also not the adjective I would use) western-style democracy.
Instead, it seems pretty obvious that all we’ve achieved has been to harden the Fijian rulers’ resolve, antagonise them, and lessen the possibility of the two countries getting on again for many years to come.
No matter how affronted some of us may feel about Fiji’s latest actions, playing tit for tat is only going to satisfy the visceral need for revenge against uncivilised upstarts. It will not in any way help to develop longer term constructive relationships which should be New Zealand’s medium- and long-term priority.
And the longer these immature games (I was going to call them strategic games, but I doubt there’s much adult strategy involved) continue, any satisfactory and sustainable solution stretches further into the distance.
See also earlier comments on Fiji here.
