Aaron Jackson

PhD Candidate in History
School of History, Philosophy, Political Science and International Relations

aaron.jackson@vuw.ac.nz

Qualifications

Mississippi State University - dual MA French and History

Bethlehem Tertiary Institute, Tauranga - Diploma in Secondary Education

Profile

I taught high school for ten years. After trying positions as a school principal and as a “dean of academics” at the high school level, I decided to go back to post-grad for degrees in history and French language.

After focusing on modern European history for the MA, my focus and interests shifted towards the history of US foreign relations during the Cold War. From there I started asking what US foreign policy looked like when viewed from foreign countries, and this led me to my current research. In broad terms, my research interests centre around the intellectual history of the Cold War, and specifically on thinkers and actors who attempted to break out of the excessively dualist atmosphere of Cold War mindsets.

Thus, my current research started by focusing on the ways that New Zealand represented a case study of breaking out of Cold War dualism. New Zealand’s strongly anti-nuclear foreign policy was a thorn in the side of US policymakers at the end of the Cold War. I am interested in how late 20^th century NZ foreign policy grew out of a deeply embedded grassroots reaction to French nuclear testing and American overreach and entangled itself with an emergent New Zealand national identity and native Maori heritage. In my research I also seek to re-cast the narrative in light of recent revelations about “Five Eyes,” since we are now learning that even as officials publicly made great fuss about “the end of ANZUS” in the 1980s, the two countries deepened their intelligence-gathering and intelligence-sharing relationship.

In some sense, my current research is a reflection of my own experiences, having lived and studied in France, New Zealand, and the United States for several years each. I came to realize that these three countries – all three my “home” at various points in my life – have an unusual triangle of relationships among them. My current working thesis title is “Caught between Nuclear Nationalisms: La Force de Frappe, New Zealand Identity, and the US Nuclear Deterrent”. It seeks to examine how French nuclear testing helped engender an anti-nuclear New Zealand national identity which in turn made the ANZUS alliance unworkable on terms the US felt they could accept. When I explain in simpler terms, I like to point out how most New Zealand readers are familiar with the Rainbow Warrior incident in 1985; my research seeks to explain what sometimes seems like the 20-year background story to this well-known event. Most histories look at New Zealand’s relationships with France and the United States as separate questions. I show them as linked, while also discussing the secret nuclear sharing between the US and France that completes the “triangle” of relationships between these three countries.

I remember a particular incident that seeded my interest in NZ relationships with the US and France. It happened at a parent-teacher night when I was teaching high school in Whanganui. As he got up to leave after discussing his son’s progress in my class, a parent mentioned the incident where the NZ government had refused port entry to the USS Buchanan in 1985. I was embarrassed to know so little about it at the time, but as I read more about it, I came to realize that something rather unique in geopolitics had happened in New Zealand. This “New Zealand exceptionalism” remains a topic that fascinates me.

One of my previous projects focused on the 1968 Prague Spring as a key contributor to the mindsets of socialists and “fellow travelers” around the world. My interest in the 1968 Prague Spring was first sparked when I was a student in Paris, staying in the apartments of Dr. Regina Tinelli (RIP 2007), a retired research microbiologist at the Pasteur Institute. This accomplished scientist had travelled the world for her work, including a visit to Prague during the famous events of 1968. Hearing these events told from a first-person perspective fascinated me. Later, when I was working in New Zealand, I discovered that a native New Zealander named Ian Milner had been living in Prague during the same era. I was able to access his numerous letters in the Alexander Turnbull National Archive Library in Wellington. Seeing the Prague Spring through the eyes of this convinced socialist intrigued me and gave me a desire to pursue this topic. My paper traces the changes in the mindset and motivations of someone who spied for the Soviet Union in the West and then ended up living behind the Iron Curtain.

Another of my recent projects examined the subculture of Cold War codebreakers in the West and the effect that this quiet but powerful group had on the foreign policy decisions that started the Cold War under the Truman administration. (Having been a Ham Radio operator for several years and working with various radio transmission encoding schemes has probably played into my interest in this topic.)

My historical side “hobby” includes some topics of medieval intellectual history. One of my past projects examined how attitudes towards various reforms of the Catholic liturgy have evolved over the last several centuries. I argue that certain theologians have, in some cases, attempted to project modern theology onto liturgical practices of centuries past, resulting in distorted assumptions about historical practices. I have a published article on “Western Medieval Offertories” that translates and explores a few texts from the now-vanished medieval liturgical world and uses these texts as counter-examples to some over-hasty modern theological conclusions.