Australia and New Zealand fought side by side at Gallipoli but are now drifting apart, writes Peter Hartcher.
WAR, as the great Prussian strategist Karl von Clausewitz said, is the continuation of politics by other means, and this week we saw that even the act of remembering war is carried out as an intensely political activity. The leaders of Asia’s two greatest powers, Japan and China, struggled to negotiate a mutually acceptable memory of World War II. Turkey resisted the recognition that it had committed genocide against the Armenian people on the 90th anniversary of that awful episode.
And the leaders of Australia and New Zealand, even as they shared a pre-dawn podium at Gallipoli, remembered Anzac Day in distinctly different ways to serve their divergent political agendas.
A war of the past was interpreted for the present to help these governments deal with the wars of the future.
“State memory is, even if individual bureaucrats are not conscious of it, purposive and manipulative; it seeks out symbols that reinforce its identity and its claims,” wrote a foreign policy scholar, Ian Gambles, in 1995.
And so New Zealand’s Prime Minister, Helen Clark, used the opportunity of the dawn service at Gallipoli to emphasise its power as a warning against war: “As the successors and descendants of the soldiers who fought here, it is our responsibility now to reflect on their service and sacrifice, and to work for a world in which future generations will not face the horror which these brave men faced with bravery and with honour.”
And in his speech, the chief of the New Zealand Defence Forces, Air Marshal Bruce Ferguson, drew the conclusion that Gallipoli was all about the need for the dominions to develop their own independent foreign and strategic policies.
“There was no glory 90 years ago; rather we look back now and see the tragedy of their sacrifice. Indeed, as we look back now, we see the folly of the high command of the time,” he said.
“Our military professionals today see in this campaign joint warfare at its worst, at least from the British side: lack of co-ordination, lack of focus, blunders, and the squandering of life.
“Perhaps the Gallipoli campaign was the high-water mark of our nations’ imperial subservience. We learned that we must shake off the shackles of colonial dependence.”
By contrast, John Howard’s speech at Gallipoli drew out none of these themes, reached none of these conclusions.
This is the chief lesson that the Prime Minister drew from the Gallipoli venture: “History helps us to remember but the spirit of Anzac is greater than a debt to past deeds. It lives on in the valour and the sacrifice of young men and women that ennoble Australia in our time, in scrub in the Solomons, in the villages of Timor, in the deserts of Iraq and the coast of Nias.
“It lives on through a nation’s easy familiarity, through Australians looking out for each other, through courage and compassion in the face of adversity.”
Not for Howard was the campaign an object lesson against war. He did touch on the role of the Anzacs in creating “a lasting sense of national identity. They sharpened our democratic temper and our questioning eye towards authority.”
But he took this thought no further. To do so might have led him in the same direction that Ferguson took. And Howard does not want to talk about an Australia that needs to break away from its great and powerful friends, whether Britain or the US, in the past or the present.
Sustaining the contrast between the two countries was the speech by the chief of the Australian Defence Force, General Peter Cosgrove. While he acknowledged the “terrible price” that the young diggers had paid at Gallipoli, to him they did indeed die in the glory that Ferguson had rejected.
In thinking about the same shared battle, speaking from the same podium, inhabiting neighbouring countries with similar histories as British colonies, these two countries’ leaders drew plainly different conclusions. The Japanese have an expression for this: “Same bed, different dreams.”
New Zealand dreams of itself as a pacifist country that rejects the US alliance, runs down its war-fighting capability and deploys forces only for peacekeeping and humanitarian purposes.
Australia sees itself as an active participant in global power politics, a staunch ally of the US, with a combat capability ready to defend the interests of the country and its ally.
A former Australian defence policy maker, the Australian National University’s Professor Emeritus Paul Dibb, once said that New Zealand was becoming “a strategic liability” for Australia, a free rider on its defence systems. This upset Clark at the time, but Dibb has not recanted.
Indeed, Dibb can only see the divergence growing wider as Australia pursues new combat acquisitions and New Zealand deliberately allows its strike capability to degrade – as it has with its air force, which no longer has any attack capability.
“They see themselves as a country located in the South Pacific with a great and powerful Australia to their west, and they think they can afford to move away from a balanced force structure and towards one that’s suited only for peacekeeping or peacemaking missions,” Dibb says.
“The risk is that we drift further away from NZ as the tech gap grows wider, let alone the gap in the force structure and the gap in the US alliance.”
One of the effects of the Gallipoli campaign had been to draw the young nations of Australia and New Zealand closer together.
The official Australian historian of the war, Charles Bean, wrote that “three days of genuine trial had established a friendship which centuries will not destroy”.
Perhaps, but the Anzac ceremony at Gallipoli illustrates how the two countries’ conceptions of themselves have grown apart.
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