New Zealand Faces North

W.5 TRITING only four years ago, F. L. W. Wood described New Zealand as perhaps most stable nation tormented world. But, to the general her social and economic structure and the direction of her interests and sentiments, he noted one important exception. He discerned a new note of reality her consideration of the Pacific, realization that she is in new sense within the American political sphere.' This was I949, before Peter Fraser's fourteen-year-old Labour administration gave way December of that year to the conservative National Government of Mr. Holland. It was before the outbreak of the war Korea, to which New Zealand has since contributed proportion of her man power as great as that of any other member of the United Nations except the United States. It was before the institution of the Colombo Plan for the economic amelioration of Southeast Asia as part of the Commonwealth's effort to contain international communism. It was thus an early and sensitive reaction to drift of world events that suddenly brought home to New Zealanders the vulnerability of their way of life. They had had shocks before. There had been the depression of the early I930s, underlining the fact of their precarious dependence on single British market. And there had been the experience of being laid open to Japanese invasion after the American disaster at Pearl Harbor. But each case the recovery had been quick and complete, credit for the one being given, with limited justice, to the Labour Government's economic and social controls, and for the other, with undeniable justice, to the arrival of armed American support. The emergency once past, there had been swift reversion to traditional ways of behaviour and thinking. Since I949, however, the diversion of the focus of world tension from Europe to Asia, from Berlin to Korea, by its persistent and cumulative effect has developed just that warmth and continuity New Zealand's Pacific interests which that year Professor Wood considered to be lacking, being then mainly a matter of intellectual calculation.2

Geography · Australian History and Society · Geology · Island Studies and Pacific Affairs

• The “Exclusion” of the United Kingdom from the Anzus Pact

  Open Access•Dean E Mchenry, Richard Rosecrance et al.•International Organization•1958

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