Is New Zealand a Good International Citizen? How New Zealand Political Elites Justified and Legitimised the Use of Force in Afghanistan

This paper focuses on how public acquiescence to, if not full support for, New Zealand military participation in the intervention in Afghanistan in response to the attacks on 11 September 2001was realised. It explores how a discourse of good international citizenship (re)produced New Zealand as a member of the so-called international community of liberal democracies with free-market oriented economies whose existence exemplified the benefits of a global order based on the Kantian peace theory. New Zealand’s participation in the defence and expansion of this political community, not only for its own benefit but for that of all peoples, was justified by discourses of life as an ongoing struggle by the good against the forces of evil and of civilisation against barbarism, and the necessity for even liberal democracies to resort to military force when the political community was threatened existentially. Participation in the intervention was legitimised through discursively merging national interests and values and thereby obscuring the contradictions inherent in claiming to stand with the United States in a pre-emptive strike against one of the poorest, most war ravaged countries in the world while at the same time claiming to act at the behest of the United Nations Security Council. In a context of overwhelming sympathy for the United States and fear of repercussions, states’ failure to criticise the United States claim to the right to self-defence has led to a more permissive interpretation of the role of pre-emption in self-defence under customary international law, which, contrary to New Zealand’s stated intentions served to undermine the United Nations. (257)