The sovereignity debate

The debate over whether Maori Chiefs intended to cede sovereignty when they signed the Treaty of Waitangi is an academic debate, that doesn’t actually impact whether or not the NZ Government today is sovereign.

The US is a sovereign state because it won a war against the former sovereign. Saudi Arabia became a sovereign state in 1932, not through a treaty etc. Sovereignty applies to geography, not races.

In the UK Scotland is semi-autonomous and the Scottish Government governs the territory of Scotland. But it does not govern Scots living in England (but it does govern English living in Scotland).

In the US some Native American tribes have a degree of sovereignty, but only on their tribal lands.

But it is still good to understand our history, so it is useful to try and understand as well as we can, what the intention of the signers was.

Don Brash summarised the view put forward on a recent Working Group podcast:

The argument which Mr Modlik advanced for why Maori chiefs had not ceded sovereignty in 1840 seemed to be based on the notion that it would have been ridiculous to expect some hundreds of chiefs, representing perhaps 100,000 people, to have surrendered ultimate authority to a couple of British officers and a handful of missionaries.  No, they had agreed to allow the British to have authority over the British settlers but Maori were to be free to continue as before.  At most, there was to be shared authority, a partnership between the chiefs on the one hand and British authorities on the other.  And indeed, that argument, taken in isolation, sounds plausible.

I’m always somewhat wary of an argument based on assumption/logic, than the historical record. But it is useful to look at this argument? Why would 100,000 people surrender sovereignty to a smaller number of people?

Is it plausible that the chiefs who heavily outnumbered the British in 1840 would have been willing to surrender to some distant authority?  Yes, when it is recalled that the previous four decades had seen almost unbelievable inter-tribal warfare, with tens of thousands of men, women and children slaughtered – more dead, it is believed, than all the New Zealand deaths in all the wars since 1840, including the First and Second World Wars.  The chiefs would have seen British authority as a way of ending that inter-tribal slaughter (and perhaps protecting them from French forces which some tribes believed, with some justification, were out for revenge of an earlier massacre of the crew of a French vessel). 

 Many of those who signed would also have been aware of how advanced Britain was at that time, and how powerful its naval vessels.

I didn’t realise more died in the musket wars than in WWI and WWII. Sobering.

It is worth reflecting what would have happened if the Treaty had not been signed? How much longer would the musket wars have continued? Would there be one country or multiple countries? Would there be democracy and the rule of law, and if so how much longer would it have taken to eventuate.

When one of the greatest of the Ngapuhi chiefs who signed the Treaty in 1840 died in 1871, his gravestone carried the words “In memory of Tamati Waka Nene, Chief of Ngapuhi, the first to welcome the Queen’s sovereignty in New Zealand”.

Interesting.