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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