Settler Societies, Open Societies, and Colonialism

During the presidency of George W. Bush, it was commonplace for politically progressive Americans to claim that, if things got bad enough in the United States, they were going to move to New Zealand. Although usually unmentioned, New Zealand’s attractiveness to would-be expats stemmed first and foremost from linguistic and cultural similarities rooted in both countries’ British colonial pasts. It was, however, the perceived differences between the two that were crucial to the public face of this comparison. New Zealand did not fancy itself an imperial power. Its race relations were considered superior, as were its attitudes toward the environment. It had a low crime rate and tight regulation of guns. Conservative religious values did not overly influence its centrist, if not left-leaning politics, which were manifested by a national health system. Although much of this is true of Canada too, New Zealand, in addition, has that well-publicized Lord of the Rings landscape.

If New Zealand occupying this particular place in the imagination of some Americans is relatively new, the interest in comparing the two nations is much older. For well over a hundred years pundits and intellectuals have been writing about the relative merits of the two countries; but none has considered the question to the extent that David Hackett Fischer does in his latest book, Fairness and Freedom: A History of Two Open Societies. Over more than 600 pages, Fischer shows that, far from just interesting cocktail talk, putting the two countries side-by-side reveals facets of their history that often lay in the shadows. For Fischer there is a second payoff to the comparison: it also sheds light on the operation and possible trajectories of open societies, the social and political system first described by Henri Bergson and elaborated on by Karl Popper, which increasingly defines nations around the globe.

Fischer’s basic argument is that “fairness” is the overriding characteristic of New Zealand, “freedom” that of the United States, and that the reason two seemingly similar open societies have followed these different guiding principles can be found in their histories. Fairness and Freedom elaborates extensively on these points, and in so doing provides a wide-ranging history of both nations. It is the sort of deeply researched, highly erudite, and eminently readable work of scholarship that we have come to expect of Fischer. However, because it raises but fails to adequately address important questions about the intertwined and multivalent aspects of fairness and freedom, the complex character and history of both countries and the transnational Pacific connections that link them, and the place of colonialism in these two open societies, it is ultimately a frustrating book.

Fairness and Freedom consists of an introduction, conclusion, and thirteen chapters broken up into three sections—“Origins of Open Societies,” “Nation Building as Open Processes,” and “Open Societies in World Affairs.” In a helpful introduction, Fischer examines the language of fairness across English-speaking countries, one of the numerous places where this book offers unexpected rewards. (He does not provide an equally nuanced treatment of “freedom,” perhaps because he published a book on the concepts of freedom and liberty in U.S. history not long ago.) A variety of evidence, including the remarkable number of terms New Zealanders use to delineate types of fairness and unfairness, like “fair dinkum” and, intriguingly, “yankee grab,” suggest the importance of the concept (p. 14). However, although they share an affinity for fairness, Fischer notes that what it means to put it into practice is and has been a point of contention. Some New Zealanders put “fairness to the individual first” (p. 8), while others had a collectivist ideal. New Zealand feminists argued that fairness had to apply to employment, whereas business leaders held “a true concern about equity must emphasise individual freedom and opportunity” (p. 9). Māori, New Zealand’s indigenous peoples, critiqued the application of the idea of fairness...