From Empire to Globalization: The New Zealand Experience

What does nationhood mean, what do national courts do and what effect have the pressures of globalization had on the meaning of nationhood and the role of national courts? I want to bring a small commonwealth country perspective to these questions in order to suggest that the experiences of empire and globalization may share important elements in common.

Nationalism is not, of course, an incontrovertible good. Some of the worst atrocities of our recent history have been visited on peoples in its cause. For small countries in the commonwealth such as New Zealand, becoming a fully self- governing nation was held out as something to aim for, a glittering prize for proving oneself as loyal, responsible, and having learnt well the art of British government. In the colonial context, nationhood has been portrayed as an idealized goal. By the time New Zealand achieved the formal goal of nationhood, however, the very meaning of nationhood had changed—as it had to do to accommodate the expanded number of states. At the turn of the twentieth century, the British Empire covered one-fifth of the earth’s surface: some 11,400,000 square miles and 410 million people. Acknowledged states numbered only fifty. Now there are nearly 200 states. ‘Nationhood’ for newcomers to the “family of nations” could not but be shaped by the history of the Empire itself.

I begin by tracing New Zealand’s (often ambivalent) progress from Dominion to nation-state status during the course of the twentieth century. I go on to suggest that the increasing impact of international human rights and economic agreements on New Zealand’s legislature and courts means there is no “national law” meant in a discrete and autonomous sense. How much “international” law is adopted rather than imposed is more difficult to assess. What is clear is that the early twentieth century version of the nation-state has evanesced.