Friends, foreign and domestic: (re)converging New Zealand's export education and foreign policies

Abstract

While there has been long-standing engagement between New Zealanders and Asia in a variety of ways (Didham, in press), the primary policy engagement has been first through defence and security, and then through foreign affairs.1 In foreign policy, Asian countries have had official diplomatic representation in New Zealand since the beginning of the 20th century (Friesen, 2009), while New Zealand has been represented diplomatically in Asian countries since the 1950s (Kember, 2009). The convergence of what amounted to (though was never called) ‘export education’ policy in the 1950s with foreign policy of the same period primarily centred on the Colombo Plan, which, as detailed further in this paper, was essentially the education of (South and Southeast) Asia’s élite in Western countries, including New Zealand. But a number of shifts, ideological, strategic and pragmatic, saw these two policies diverge to the extent that by the 21st century they held less common ground.