Premium
THE VIETNAM ANTIWAR MOVEMENT IN NEW ZEALAND
Author(s) -
Rabel Roberto G.
Publication year - 1992
Publication title -
peace and change
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1468-0130
pISSN - 0149-0508
DOI - 10.1111/pech.1992.17.1.3
Subject(s) - alliance , foreign policy , vietnam war , political science , criticism , political economy , intervention (counseling) , movement (music) , embodied cognition , cold war , sociology , law , politics , aesthetics , computer science , psychology , philosophy , artificial intelligence , psychiatry
New Zealand was one of two Western democracies to send combat forces to support the United States in the Vietnam conflict. Many of the divisions that the war precipitated in American society also arose in New Zealand, leading to the collapse of a domestic consensus on foreign policy and the rise of a vocal antiwar movement. New Zealand opponents of that conflict were influenced by the American antiwar movement in their style of protest and in their critique of the general Cold War assumptions on which Western intervention was based. But New Zealand critics of involvement in Vietnam were more successful in seizing the nationalistic high ground in the debate over the war. In so doing, they legitimized criticism of the country's alliance with the United States and popularized the quest for a more “independent” foreign policy—a quest most recently embodied in New Zealand's domestically popular antinuclear policies.