Write ‘N.Z.’ in butter?

Press, 26 February 1983, Page 16

Write ‘N.Z.’ in butter?

The European Community and New Zealand. By Juliet Lodge. Frances Pinter, 1982. 249 pp. Index. $45.

(Reviewed by

Stuart McMillan)

"Here lies one whose name was writ in water." says the epitaph on John Keats' tomb. There is a good argument for saying that the history of New Zealand should be writ in butter. To a certain extent that is just what Juliet Lodge has done. New Zealand sells more than butter to the Britain that has joined the European Economic Community, and to other members of the Community, but butter has dominated relations with the E.E.C. ever since Britain joined. Juliet Lodge is concerned about the picture of the E.E.C. she considers that New Zealand projects. Her preface begins: “In New Zealand the European Community (E.C.) is popularly portrayed as a marauding Eurocracy with an insatiable appetite for harmonising the trivial, exploiting the consumer, and filling the pockets of French farmers at the expense of other E.C. members in general and of a small, weak, efficient exporter of agricultural products — New Zealand — in particular.” Juliet Lodge is out to change that view and argues that although the European Community has not given New Zealand all that it demanded in various negotiations, those demands were always unrealistic. The Community that emerges is a more objective assessment than the caricature of her preface, though it is not a completely rounded picture of the Community either. From a European viewpoint it is easy to see New Zealand as obsessed by butter. It is a pity that Juliet Lodge tends to deal in the specifics of the negotiations so much. She writes as a political scientist. Now a lecturer in politics at the University of Hull, she formerly taught political studies

at the University of Auckland. She has published extensively on the E.E.C. and she has written frequently on the E.E.C. for the "New Zealand International Review." Too much of her book is taken up with the detail of negotiations: what position the E.E.C. took on such and such an issue: why Mr Taiboys went to Europe at such and such a time: and so on. This binds her to a narrative and some analysis. She makes reference to the various theoretical frameworks from which the negotiations can be viewed, but in the end one is left wondering about the purpose of the book. Admittedly, it documents the major negotiations and the arguments put forward during those negotiations. The beginning and the end of the book raise important questions about New Zealand's relations with the E.E.C. To the question of whether New Zealand could have done any different her answer seems to be in the negative. She thinks that some of the arguments that New Zealand puts forward — New Zealand’s loyalty to Britain during the Second World War and so on — are wearing a bit thin, and that New Zealand will have to deal more directly with the Community, and less through Britain, in the future.

But how? Is there some way of doing this that New Zealand is not using now? What about the argument of which Mr John Pryde. of Lincoln College, is the strongest advocate of appealing to consumer advocates within the Community?

Juliet Lodge writes about cheese and sheepmeat as,well as butter. Somehow the detail of trade negotiations, which seem to bog down so much of New Zealand's external relations, tend to bog down a book which nevertheless contains a great deal of valuable material.