Soclat œd Economic Studies 56:1&2 (2œ7): 182-208 ISSN: 0037-7651

THE LIMITS OF SELF-DETERMINATION IN

OCEANIA

TERENCE WESLEY-SMITH*

ABSTRACT

This article surveys processes of decolonization and political development

in Oceania in recent decades and examines why the optimism of the early
years of self government has given way to a persistent discourse of crisis,
state failure and collapse in some parts of the region. It argues that the
essential context for understanding .these trends lies in the limits to
genuine self-determination imposed by the process of decolonization itself,
and by the universalized ideas of state and nation it introduced. Despite
their awkward fit with indigenous institutions and practices, these
institutions are continually reinforced through significant international
pressures including intervention.

Generations of students have viewed political developments in

Oceania through the lens of national self-determination. An
influential account in this genre is David Robie's Blood on their
Banner: Nationalist Struggles in the South Pacific, first published in
1989. Challenging media coverage informed by the trope of
Paradise, the book explored the "ugly side of Oceania" through a
survey of violent conflicts in East Timor, West Papua, New
Caledonia, French Polynesia, Palau, Vanuatu, and Fiji. For Robie,
these events reflected the inevitable confrontation between
colonialism and the liberation movements it provoked, "a quest for
national sovereignty that takes into account the legacy of more than
two centuries of colonialism" (Robie 1989: 23). Here Pacific peoples
are represented as latecomers in a grand narrative of anticolonial
struggle, complete with references to Che Guevara, blood sacrifice,
and nationalist banners symbolizing "the dawn of hope and a new
future" (Robie 1989: 23). This is a narrative that seeks salvation for
oppressed peoples in a global process of decolonization and, at least

* An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Sixth Conference of the
European Society for Oceanists, Marseille, France, 6-8 July 2005. Thanks to the
anonymous reviewers for extremely useful comments on the original submission.
 The Limits of Self-Determination 183

by implication, vigorous post-colonial projects of "modernization"

and "development."
The conceptual framework Robie used to make sense of the
events of the 1980s appears distinctly problematic today. Even if
there was a time when "nationalist aspirations" defined regional
politics, then that moment has well and truly passed. The optimism
of the early years of self-government has given way to a persistent
discourse of crisis, state failure and collapse in some parts of
Oceania. By early 2003, after 25 years of independence, state
institutions in Solomon Islands had effectively ceased to function,
and today the country remains under the control of the Australian-
led Regional Assistance Mission to the Solomon Islands (RAMSI).
Writing in 2005 as Papua New Guinea marked three decades of
sovereign statehood. University of Papua New Guinea Professor of
Politics Allan Patience described debauched political institutions,
collapsed essential services, gratuitous human rights violations,
and "thousands of people suffering needlessly and dying
prematurely" (Patience 2005: 1-2). Meanwhile, senior Australian
journalist Graeme Dobell speculated that "it would take only two or
three years of bad luck and bad leadership" to push Vanuatu into a
similar downward spiral towards state collapse more than 25 years
after the colonizers withdrew (Dobell 2005: 8).
The problem with Robie's approach is not necessarily its
emphasis on colonialism. If anything he underestimates
colonialism's ability to redefine lifeways and aspirations, and even
to determine the essential characteristics of the political community
(or "nation") waiting to be liberated. More important, Robie
misunderstands the United Nations-organized process of
decolonization that commenced after World War II. Significant as it
was, that initiative could not represent a definitive break from the
colonial past, since the traces of that past were too deeply etched
into the economic, political, cultural, and even physical landscapes
of Oceania. Indeed, the process was not designed to achieve such a
rupture. Nor did decolonization reflect the spontaneous emergence
of new national communities somehow awakened by the inevitable
pull of modernity, as Benedict Anderson (1991) and others have
suggested. Control and conformity, rather than spontaneity and
innovation, have been the hallrnarks of the international system of
states over the last half-century.
184 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC STUDIES

Decolonization was not so much the natural expansion of an

established global political order as the deliberate construction of a
new one. This is a global system based on ideas of state, nation, and
sovereignty that took on novel forms after World War IL Since then,
local social processes and practices have everywhere unfolded
within the context of a universalized model of the nation-state. Not
only is this model projected as normal and desirable, "the natural
choice of every people modern and free, past, present, and future,"
but its precepts and protocols are continually reinforced through
significant international pressures of one sort or another (Kelly and
Kaplan 2001, 20),
The recent history of the postcolonial entities of Oceania is not
really about the linear quest for national sovereignty informing
Robie's account, or even the dialectical struggles between
"traditional" and "modern" forms of politics and economy that
continue to structure much analysis of the "developing" world.
Rather, it is about the constant renegotiation of the awkward fit
between, on the one hand, local institutions and practices formed or
reformed during the colonial era and, on the other, superimposed,
externally monitored ideas of state and nation. The result is the
wide variety of political forms found across the vast reaches of
Oceania. These forms might be considered hybrid except for the
significant power imbalances involved; they emerge within the
strict limits established by the intrusive model of the nation state.
They can, however, be seen as more-or-less functional in the ways
they maintain day-to-day order and distribute resources, and in
some cases political tensions have burst through the patchwork of
local and global constraints to produce disorder and violence.
The essential context for understanding the "ugly side of
Oceania" today does not lie in the quest for national sovereignty,
although elements of this persist, but in the limits to genuine self-
determination encountered after independence has been achieved.

Self-Determination in Oceania
Although undoubtedly "one of the most important political
developments in the twentieth century," decolonization was not
necessarily driven by the noble principle of self-determination as
Robie and others would like to believe (Duara 2004: 1). Indeed, the
idea of self-determination was recently described by Marc Weiler as
 The Limits of Self-Determination 185

a "legitimizing myth" for the international system and a "trap" for

those seeking to free themselves from oppression and exploitation
(Weiler 2005). If anything, the proposition that self-defined human
communities should be allowed to determine their own political
futures has been used to add moral weight to a process motivated
by other, more pragmatic, concerns.
In a celebrated resolution in December 1960 (1514 XV), the
United Nations General Assembly condemned colonialism in no
uncertain terms before declaring that "All peoples have the right to
self-determination; by virtue of that right they freely determine
their political status and freely pursue their economic, social and
cultural development" (United Nations 1960). This is an
extraordinarily bold statement if only because an untrammeled
right to self-determination conflicts with key provisions in
international law designed to protect the territorial integrity of
existing states (Emerson 1960: 295-328). In fact those who voted for
this resolution were well aware of the radical nature of what they
proposed - and took explicit steps elsewhere in the resolution and
in subsequent international practice to limit its impact. As a legal
right, self-determination is largely confined to specific colonial
populations and territories designated as non-self-governing or
trust territories by the United Nations after World War II. Those
privileged entities, whose names are inscribed on a master list, have
a one-off opportunity to choose a new political status, and
independent statehood has always been the preferred outcome
(Welhr 2005:10).
Understanding the norms of self-determination established by
the United Nations helps us understand why the process of
decolonization occurred the way it did in Oceania. The focus on
decolonization in this prestigious world body put significant
pressure on the colonial powers to move their colonies towards self-
government. New Zealand, for example, decided early on to rid
itself of the colonial taint, and worked hard to decolonize Western
Samoa, Cook Islands, Niue and Tokelau as soon as possible and in
ways that would win kudos at the General Assembly. By the early
1970s, Australia had abandoned its long term "uniform
development" plans for Papua New Guinea in the face of
international pressure to grant independence sooner rather than
later.
186 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC STUDIES

The self-determination regime v^^as also significant because it

discriminated among the colonized peoples of the Pacific. Only
those colonies listed as non-self-governing or trust territories were
subject to the scrutiny of what became known as the Committee of
Twenty-Four, the UN body established in 1961 to monitor the
decolonization process. By that time France had removed New
Caledonia, French Polynesia, and Wallis and Futuna from the
United Nations list, on the grounds that the peoples of those
territories had voted in favor of a new constitution for the Fifth
Republic in 1958.^ Similarly, the United States argued successfully
that the 1959 vote on statehood for HawaiM constituted a valid act
of self-determination, and that there was no further need to report
to the United Nations on political developments in that key Pacific
territory.
Status differences produced contrasting outcomes for East
Timor and West Papua, both colonies of European powers forcibly
taken over by Indonesia. The United Nations strongly condemned
the invasion of East Timor shortly after it achieved independence
from Portugal in 1975. Its eventual emergence to a second
independence under UN auspices in 2002 was justified with
reference to a pre-existing right to self-determination. The takeover
of disputed West Papua, on the other hand, came as the result of a
1960 agreement between Indonesia and the Netherlands, the
departing colonial power, and brokered by the United States.^ The
United Nations endorsed the 1969 Act of Free Choice in the territory
as an appropriate expression of local wishes, even though Indonesia
had been in complete control there for nearly a decade and only a
select group of Papuan leaders were "consulted" about the
territory's future (Saltford 2002). As a result, the people of West
Papua have no further recourse to the decolonization provisions of
the United Nations. Still other indigenous peoples, notably in
Australia and New Zealand, fell completely outside of the
decolonization rubric, because they happened to live in settler-
dominated colonies that had achieved political independence from
Great Britain earlier in the century.

1 In 1986, after concerted lobbying by Pacific Islands members, New Caledonia was
put back on the UN list of territories to be decolonized.
2 The United States was not a neutral party to the talks, making it clear that it's own
strategic interests were best served by a resolution of the conflict in favour of
Indonesia.
 The Limits of Seif-Deternnination 187

Despite a commitment to bring a "speedy and unconditional

end [to] colonialism in all its forms and manifestations," the United
Nations ignored some of the peoples in Oceania most affected by
exploitative external influences (United Nations 1960). Further-
more, a narrow focus on international law distracts attention from
the realpolitik shaping the history of decolonization in Oceania. The
single most important factor determining whether a particular
island entity would get full sovereign independence, remain
dependent, or enter into a relationship of "free association," was
undoubtedly the interests of the colonial power. In a comprehensive
survey of Pacific patterns of decolonization, Stewart Firth argued
convincingly that
Generally, the greater the strategic value of an island territory,
the less likely that territory has been to proceed to sovereign
status. The map of Pacific Islands sovereignty has been drawn
largely according to the strategic needs of external states (Firth
1989: 75-76).

This proposition helps explain the disposition of the Pacific

territories controlled by the United States and France, which
together account for many of the entities that have not achieved
sovereign statehood, or whose independence is qualified by
ongoing legal ties to the metropolitan power. Status negotiations in
the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands were heavily influenced by
America's military interests in particular parts of Micronesia, and
an uncompromising commitment to prevent potentially hostile
powers from establishing strategic relationships with emerging
island entities. By the mid-1960s, France's Pacific interests centered
around its nuclear testing facility at Mururoa in French Polynesia,
and in maintaining a network of small territories to project French
cultural, economic, political, and military power around the globe.
If full sovereign independence was simply not an option for
the Pacific territories administered by the United States and France,
it was the only option offered to colonized people in other parts of
the region. After reassessing its own interests in alternatives,
Australia declared in 1969 that full independence was the only
acceptable outcome for Papua New Guinea. Great Britain decided
unilaterally to withdraw from the region, leaving only the terms
and timing of independence to be negotiated with the colonized in
Fiji, Solomon Islands, Gilbert and Ellice Islands (which split into
Kiribati and Tuvalu). New Zealand was interested in severing its
188 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC STUDIES

colonial relationships as well, but proposed a treaty of friendship

with Western Samoa and "free association" arrangements with
Cook Islands, Niue, and Tokelau in recognition of its ongoing
economic and social entanglements with these small entities.^
If the decolonization process thrust independence on some
Pacific peoples who were less than enthusiastic about receiving it,
others continue to demand their place in the sun. Self-
determination is still a rallying cry for indigenous sovereignty
movements in Australia, New Zealand, Hawai'i, Guam, New
Caledonia, French Polynesia, and West Papua. It is telling to note,
however, that of these places only Guam and New Caledonia are
still under the scrutiny of the UN Committee of Twenty-Four as it
reaches the midpoint of its Second International Decade for the
Eradication of Colonialism. The focus, it seems, is more on clearing
the remaining 16 non-self-governing territories off a list originally
prepared more than fifty years ago, than on any genuine attempt to
rid the world of colonial forms and practices.

Making States and Nations in Oceania

Restrictions imposed by the United Nations together with the
continuing dominance of colonial interests resulted in the uneven
application of the principle of self-determination in Oceania. Even
more significant in the longer term was the central role of imposed
institutions, notably the western-style nation-state, in the
decolonization process. Indeed, the whole idea of self-
determination as it was promulgated by the United Nations after
World War II makes sense only within the context of an emerging
world order made up entirely of such entities. The "self" in "self-
determination" was not any auto-identified cultural group, but a
colonized political community imagined to be a "nation," or at least
assumed to have the potential to become one. These subject
communities would be given the opportunity to have their own
sovereign states to help fill the political vacuum created by the
global retreat of empire.

3 Cook Islands and Niue accepted these new arrangements in 1965 and 1970
respectively, but the people of the tiny atoll territory of Tokelau continue to resist
decolonization. In February 2006, after more than forty years of pressure from the
UN and New Zealand, the people of Tokelau voted against entering into a free
association arrangement with New Zealand.
 The Limits of Self-Determiñatioñ 189

The movement for decolonization was ostensibly premised on

the notion that colonized peoples should be liberated from the
racism and exploitation of European imperialism. Although most
indigenous societies had been profoundly reorganized by colonial-
ism, some leaders, including India's Mahatma Gandhi, advocated
the restoration of damaged cultural practices and institutions, albeit
within the context of global interdependence. For other
intellectuals, like Frantz Fanon, the only way to escape the
economic, cultural, and psychological grip of colonialism was to
create an entirely new path, one that recognized that the
circumstances — and opportunities — facing indigenous peoples
had changed radically since colonization began (Kelly and Kaplan
2004:145-150). In general, the process of decolonization was neither
rehabilitative nor particularly innovative. Instead, the norms that
guided this global movement were essentially imitative of
European models of economic and political development. Yet the
process itself altered the international system and its constituent
parts in fundamental ways. According to John Kelly and Martha
Kaplan (2001: vii), "Decolonization constitutes the nation-state as
we know it."
Decolonization represents a profound shift from an
antagonistic world of colonial empires structured by ideas of
civilization, superiority, race and progress, to a formally
symmetrical world of nation-states informed instead by notions of
universal human rights, freedoms and needs. As Kelly and Kaplan
argue, this remarkable transition was not the preordained result of
historical forces, or the inevitable triumph of modernity. Rather it
was a deliberately engineered process, designed to reflect a new
vision of world order promoted by the United States, fast emerging
as the world's dominant power and the principal architect of a
range of influential multilateral institutions including the United
Nations. This US vision emphasized untrammeled access to
overseas resources, rather than imperial acquisition of territory,
protected global trade, and preferred aid to military action when
problems arose. This was to be a world rid of war, where "only
corporations, not nations, are free to pursue dreams of domination"
(Kelly and Kaplan 2001: 59),
It was clear that this new decentralized world order, with its
emphasis on global commerce and newly-discovered ideas of
"development," would require the organizing capacity of
 190 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC STUDIES

centralized territorial states similar to those that had emerged in

Europe from the Sixteenth Cenhiry on. For the first time, however,
these entities, complete with comprehensive systems of law'
government, and bureaucratic administration, would cover all parts
of the globe and, a.so for the first time, be subject to a
comprehensive set of global protocols regarding acceptable civil
and political practices. It is testimony to the extraordinary power of
this new "common sense" about global political order that the
elements of what constitutes a "proper" state were quickly
established, if not always realized in practice.
More problematic was the "nation" or community part of the
nation-state model as it was developed after World War II. United
Nations pronouncements on decolonization conjure up images of a
world neatly divided into coherent cultural units, with some free
and others under colonial control. However, not only did the former
colonies usually contain multiple and disparate communities, but
these communities were often asymmetrically configured to suit the
economic and political needs of colonial administration. The task,
then, was to construct national communities where none existed,
and the justification for doing so was to facilitate larger processes of
"progress" or "advancement," usually understood in essentially
economic terms. Early theorists of "new nations," such as Clifford
Geertz (1963), represented nation-building as part of an ongoing
struggle between "modern" institutions and a constellation of pre-
existing practices lumped together as "tradition" before being"
dismissed as outmoded. It is remarkable how quickly bold new
categories such as "developed" and "underdeveloped" were
normalized after World War II, and come to define the essential
characteristics of the new world order (see e.g Escobar 1995).
Nor is the model of the nation as an "imagined community"
popularized by Benedict Anderson entirely satisfactory. It is
certainly useful to think of nations being constructed rather than
existing naturally. It may also be useful to think about the idea of
the nation being modular or portable and available for borrowing as
Benedict suggests. However, it is important to remember the
limitations of Benedict's proposed "pirating" process (Anderson
1991). Peoples may be free to imagine a nation, but they must
imagine it within the parameters set by the international
community on the one hand, and by the colonial legacy on the
other.
 The Limits of Seif-Determlnation 191

State-building in Oceania has involved considerable

challenges. Although some of the requisite bureaucratic and
administrative infrastructure was already in place in the form of the
colonial state, these were often neglected, rudimentary structures
with limited resources and incomplete territorial reach, sometimes
existing uneasily alongside local institutions that had persisted
through the colonial era. Furthermore, the process occurs largely
within colonial entities whose boundaries were established with
scant regard for any pre-existing cultural and political features of
Oceania.* This was the case even in culturally homogenous and
politically centralized Polynesia, where only Tonga stands as a
possible exception. The Cook Islands, for example, contained
several culturally distinct island groups scattered over thousands of
square kilometers of ocean. The neighboring colonial entity now
known as French Polynesia brought together no less than six
culturally distinct archipelagos, none of which constituted a single
traditional polity.
In the larger and much more culturally diverse islands to the
west, colonial boundaries were almost completely arbitrary. The
huge island of New Guinea was divided down the middle by the
Dutch who chose a line of longitude - 141 degrees East - to define
the eastern extent of their claim. The eastern portion of the island
was split horizontally into German New Guinea and British Papua
- only to be reunited later as Papua New Guinea under Australian
rule. The boundary between German (later Australian) New Guinea
and the British Solomon Islands Protectorate, defined at the 1899
three-power conference in Berlin, arbitrarily bisected the narrow
straits between Bougainville and the Shortland Islands (van der
Veur 1966). Similarly, the boundaries organizing the thousands of
scattered islands further east and south into colonial entities called
thé New Hebrides (later renamed Vanuatu), New Caledonia, and
Fiji could easily have fallen quite differently under even slightly
altered historical circumstances.
Much the same could be said for the administrative nets cast
by the colonial powers over the diffuse scattering of mostly tiny
4 Colonial boundaries remained intact throughout most of the Pacific. The major
exceptions were the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands, which splintered into
the Northem Marianna Islands, Marshall Islands, Palau, and the Federated States
of MiCTonesia; and the Gilbert and EUice Islands Colony, which split into Kiribati
and Tuvalu.
 192 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC STUDIES

islands north of the equator. Some that happened to attract the

attention of the Spanish were later passed on as a territorial package
to German, Japanese, and American rulers (Hezel 1995). Others
were collected one-by-one or in groups by the British, to be
organized and reorganized later for administrative convenience.
Thus the administrative unit that had earlier brought together the
Gilbert and Ellice Islands, which were themselves culturally very
different, expanded "umbrella like" after 1916 to include
phosphate-rich Ocean Island (Bañaba), the Line Islands, Tokelau
(later transferred to New Zealand), and the Phoenix Islands.
Containing a total land area of less than a thousand square
kilometers, this unwieldy colonial entity sprawled over more than
four million square kilometers of open ocean (Macdonald 1982: vi).
In the previously colonized world the perceived benefits of
statehood may well be outweighed by the costs. These costs may be
economic, for as Christopher Clapham points out "states, with their
extensive hierarchies and permanent employees are expensive to
maintain" and the necessary resources have to be extracted from
citizens in the form of taxes (Clapham 2003: 28). Or they might be
social, as the state meets resistance from clan or tribal collectivities
grounded in subsistence-based economies and animated by quite
different cultural and political values. Historically the process of
state-making, of accumulating power in the hands of a central
administrative apparatus, has almost always involved coercion and
collective violence. This was certainly the case with the "organized
crime" of state formation in Western Europe, which Charles Tilly
notes "cost tremendously in death, suffering, loss of rights, and
unwilling surrender of land, goods and labor" (Tilly 1975: 71 1985-
169-191).
Nor is it surprising that a strong sense of nationhood has been
difficult to achieve in many parts of Oceania (see e.g. Foster 1995;
Howard 1989; Otto and Thomas 1997). This is particularly the case
in places like Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu
where extreme cultural and linguistic fragmentation defies the
creation of common identities, and in territories that have attracted
significant numbers of permanent settlers from Europe or Asia.s It
is not easy to foster a sense of solidarity between indigenous Fijians
and the descendants of migrant workers from India, who now
5 About 75 different indigenous languages are spoken in Solomon Islands, 110 in
Vanuatu, and more than 850 in Papua New Guinea.
 The Umits of Self-Determination 193

represent more than 40 percent of the population of Fiji, especially

considering the persistence of stark communal hierarchies
established during a century of British rule. Nor is it easy to
persuade fragmented indigenous Kanak tribal groups that they
share a national identity with each other, let alone the settlers of
European, Asian, and Polynesian origin who have been numerically
and economically dominant in New Caledonia for many decades.
But even in culturally homogenous places like Samoa, political life
has long been focused at the local level, and the assertion of
centralized state power alongside appeals to national identity are
still regarded with suspicion.
Nation-making is often assumed to be inseparable from the
operation of the state, to occur primarily through state-organized
programs of education or political socialization. For example, two
of Christine Jourdan's three "stepping stones" to national
consciousness in the culturally diverse Solomon Islands (schooling
and the use of Pijin as the lingua franca) are state-sanctioned
activities (Jourdan 1995). Pacific states employ the standard array of
national symbols such as flags, distinctive currencies, and national
anthems. However, as Robert Foster observes with regard to
Melanesia, "there are no panoptical regimes expeditiously
disciplining, surveying and producing national citizens...through
pervasive social regulation" (Foster 2002: 3). Instead, he argues, the
idea of the nation may develop in association with the activities of
other institutions, such as the church. Or it may be insinuated into
multiple contexts of everyday life through the consumption of a
wide range of media images and consumer goods including Coca-
Cola, rice, and bettlenut (Foster 2002:1-19).
Despite the imposed nature of the nation-making project, and
the colonial nature of the spaces in which it operates, there is no
doubting the contemporary relevance of the nation-state in Oceania.
It is a model to be emulated or rejected, but rarely ignored (Foster
2002:11).

State Success and State Failure in Oceania

Given these rather inauspicious circumstances, the state-making
project in Oceania has been remarkably successful. Most of the
region's island entities have remained politically stable over the last
four decades. Not only has conflict been the exception rather than
194 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC STUDIES

the rule, but where upheavals have occurred, for example in New
Caledonia, Vanuatu, and Fiji, they have usually been relatively
short-lived. Even if recent crises in Papua New Guinea and
Solomon Islands have proved much more costly in human and
material terms, they pale in comparison to the conflicts that
characterize many other parts of the previously colonized world.
Concerns about state performance in Oceania are often framed
in terms of putative measures of what should or could have been
achieved. In particular, commentators have tended to focus on the
apparent lack of economic growth in the region despite large
transfers of development assistance, a phenomenon labeled a
"Pacific paradox" by the Word Bank. For example, Australian
economist Helen Hughes argued that Pacific governments are
"failing their people" by spending aid funds on consumption rather
than investment, and that lack of economic growth "means serious
trouble" down the road, especially in places where population
growth is rapid (Hughes 2003:1).
Economic issues are clearly among the factors associated with
state instability in the Pacific. But the situation is by no means as
straightforward as Hughes suggests, and there is not necessarily a
direct and positive relationship between state strength and
economic development. Indeed, some types of recent economic
activity have been so disruptive, particularly of local communities,
as to weaken rather than enhance state capacity. This is particularly
the case with the mining and logging industries in the Pacific.
Large scale mining projects in Papua New Guinea have had
massive impacts on local communities often ill-equipped to deal
with new demands on land and labour, the large influx of outsiders,
and the rapid transformation of the cultural and physical
environment. Even the injection of substantial amounts of money in
the form of wages, compensation, or rent has proved traumatic for
societies geared to the production and distribution of quite different
forms of wealth. Indeed, it was just such concerns that threw into
turmoil village communities in the vicinity of the giant Panguna
copper and gold mine in the late 1980s, and sparked what became
known as the Bougainville crisis. Despite the deployment of all of
the political and military resources at its disposal, the Papua New
Guinea state was unable to impose its will in a rebellious province
and retain control of a key economic asset (see, e.g Dorney 1998;
Regan 1998),
 The Limits of Seif-Determination 195

Logging has also had corrosive effects on state power,

particularly in the Solomon Islands. Like mining, the logging
industry in the Pacific is largely foreign owned and controlled,
extracts natural resources with minimum in-country processing,
and causes massive and irreparable environmental damage. Unlike
subsurface minerals, the state has no legal claim to forestry
resources, and state revenue streams from logging have been erratic
at best—or captured for personal and political gain by high-level
state operatives. Furthermore, while the state is fully aware of and
complicit in mining industry practices, logging companies have
generally managed to circumvent state attempts to regulate the
industry. When the logging company moves on, it typically leaves
behind little more than a denuded ecosystem, a few rough haulage
roads, and a rural community in disarray (see, e.g. Bennett 2000). It
also leaves local communities angry about the state's failure to
deliver "development" and cynical about the corrupt and self-
serving practices of urban-based elites. However, as Foster points
out, the perceived failures of the state in Pacific places may itself
provoke the formation of new more all-encompassing identities as
people begin to see themselves as part of a betrayed collectivity
(Foster 2002: 9).
All development activity is by its very nature disruptive of
preexisting cultural and economic practices. In theory, one of the
primary functions of the modem state is to manage this process of
change and deal with any conflicts associated with it. Weak states
are often simply unable to do this and, as in Papua New Guinea and
Solomon Islands, the results can be devastating. The sprawling
squatter communities found on the outskirts of many Pacific towns
today, and a swelling army of unemployed youth, are symptoms of
a development process that can as easily produce poverty and
insecurity, as affluence and stability.
Perhaps the most important factor impacting the success or
failure of state-building efforts in Oceania is the existing basis for
statehood. In general, those places with hierarchical traditional
political systems, culturally homogenous populations, and a
colonial history that has served to reinforce such institutions, have
weathered the traumas of state building better than places lacking
such attributes. In Samoa, for example, successive colonial powers
(Germany and New Zealand) worked through and thereby
reinforced at least certain aspects of traditional political structures.
196 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC STUDIES

Tonga also has a long history of grafting modern political

institutions onto quasi-traditional ones. Although certainly not
without their problems, these states have been relatively stable for
decades.
In some ways the colonial history of Fiji also appears to
provide a promising foundation for state-building efforts. Here the
British adapted existing chiefly structures of power to form a
comprehensive system of native administration. However, not only
were some chiefly confederacies disadvantaged by this scheme, but
the large numbers of plantation workers imported from India were
subject to separate (and harsher) treatment under the colonial
regime. These colonially reinforced communal asymmetries have
proved difficult to overcome in post-colonial Fiji, as demonstrated
by the military coups of 1987 and George Speight's civilian coup of
May 2000. Although ostensibly carried out to protect indigenous
land and political rights from an encroaching Indo-Fijian
population, these coups have reflected as well serious tensions and
rivalries within the indigenous Fijian community.
The thousands of small, autonomous, and culturally distinct
societies thrown together to form Papua New Guinea, Solomon
Islands, and Vanuatu have provided the most daunting conditions
for would-be state builders. These are communities that survived
for many thousands of years without anything resembling a state.
These are also places that were changed but hardly transformed
during a colonial interlude that was both brief (effectively less than
30 years for the highlands of Papua New Guinea) and superficial.
As Sinclair Dinnen put it, in each of these countries "the
entanglements of pre-colonial and colonial forces is implicated
deeply in the challenges of the post-colonial present" (Dinnen
2004a: 72).
The most important variables in Statebuilding activities in the
Pacific are historical and cultural, rather than technical or economic.
The challenges have been most acute in entities like Papua New
Guinea, Solomon Islands, and Vanuatu where thousands of small,
vibrant, and largely autonomous societies resist the imposition of
modern state institutions. The problem with these Melanesian
states is not so much that they are prone to falling apart — or
"failing" — but rather that they have never really been put together
(Finin and Wesley-Smith 2001: 4).
 The Limits of Seif-Determination 197

Recolonizing Oceania
With a global legacy of economic and political institutions cast in its
own image, it is tempting to see decolonization as marking the
triumph of imperialism rather than its demise. Furthermore, the
new nation-states joined an international system that increasingly
demands conformity and restricts the possibilities of genuine
political or economic self-determination. As Kelly and Kaplan put
it, the former colonies entered "a new world order already tooled
for purposes at best different than the aims of the anti-colonial
movement, and at times clearly obstructive of them" (Kelly and
Kaplan 2004,140).
The norms and expectations associated with statehood have
changed significantly since Pacific entities achieved independence,
as has the nature of external involvement in their affairs. Readiness
for independent statehood, however defined, was clearly not the
most important variable influencing whether or not a particular
territory would achieve sovereignty.^ However, in the early years of
independence strategic interests framed by Cold War concerns
motivated extensive efforts on the part of regional powers to
support island states. These efforts often took the form of large
annual transfers of "development assistance," and by the early
1980s per capita aid flows to Pacific Islands nations were among the
highest in the world. Since the primary objective of this assistance
was to keep the new island leaders "on side" in the struggle to
exclude the Soviet Union and its surrogates from the region, these
generous transfers came with few economic or political conditions
attached.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1989, and the
temporary retreat of the security imperative in regional affairs, the
emphasis shifted away from largely unconditional transfers of aid,
to what became known in the region as the "reform agenda." The
intention here was to use aid conditionality and influence in
regional organizations to encourage market-led economic growth,
6 Tuvalu, with a population of less than 8,000, for example, had almost no
administrative infrastructure in place when it achieved full independence in 1978,
and only limited capacity to generate revenue for government services. In 1975
leaders in Papua New Guinea faced a population of three million people
speaking more than 850 languages, a secondary education system that was less
than a decade old, and no roads connecting the capital city to other centers of
population.
198 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC STUDIES

trade liberalization, and "good governance" practices, a set of ideas

about "development" associated with the so-called Washington
Consensus (Williamson 1990). This represented a shift from an
emphasis on state maintenance to an apparent determination to
engineer the transformation of island economies and societies.
It is not clear how these small and vulnerable economies will
fare in the hard-nosed world of free trade (Kelsey 2004). But it is
clear that the ongoing reform agenda requires structural
adjustments that are by their very nature disruptive of economic
and land use patterns that have guaranteed the social integrity and
subsistence security of island societies for centuries. Ironically, the
reforms also insist on public sector downsizing that probably makes
island states even less capable of managing large-scale change —
and keeping a lid on conflicts when they emerge. Changes that
ostensibly aim to make weak states stronger may actually end up
weakening them even more. It is perhaps encouraging to note that
even the World Bank seems to have had second thoughts about the
reform movement it has so vigorously promoted for more than a
decade. A comprehensive Bank review published in 2005 urged a
move away from formulaic remedies for complex problems (World
Bank 2005). As Dani Rodrik notes, the report is "an ode to humility"
which identifies the "folly of assuming that we know too much"
(Rodrik 2006: 16). However, there is little evidence to suggest that
this message has had any significant impact on the barrage of
external policy advice aimed at the island states of Oceania in recent
years.
Australia's policy of "cooperative intervention" announced in
June 2003 marked the return to prominence of security
considerations in regional politics, this time driven by concerns
about global terrorism. The new policy represented a further and
dramatic shift in the expectations attached to statehood in Oceania,
and signaled a new emphasis on "hands on" involvement in the
internal affairs of Pacific Island states (Fry 2005). The change was
justified with reference to the "failed state" paradigm that has
become prominent in international relations discourse in recent
times.
The term "failed state" first emerged to describe the major
human rights and humanitarian disasters of the 1990s in places like
Somalia, Haiti, Cambodia, Bosnia, and Kosovo. These situations
attracted the attention of scholars and policy-makers because of the
 The Limits of Seif-Determination 199

enormous suffering involved, as well as the massive international

interventions they provoked. Indeed, these developments have
given considerable impetus to the idea that the international
community has a responsibility to protect populations from serious
harm when sovereign states are unwilling or unable to do so (ICISS
2001; Held 2003).
More important, these crises raised the specter of the
imminent breakdown of the state-centered global order created in
the era of decolonization that had been relatively stable in the Cold
War era (see e.g. Milliken 2003; Rotberg 2004). This doomsday idea
was popularized by journalist Robert Kaplan in an article called
"The Coming Anarchy" where he predicted the withering away of
the modem nation-state in favour of tribal domains "city-states,
shanty-states, and nebulous and anarchic regionalisms" (Kaplan
1994: 24). Since the 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States,
questions of "failed states" and what to do about them have become
firmly linked to concerns about terrorism and the deployment of
weapons of mass destruction. The problem is not only that the
decline or collapse of states such as Afghanistan, Angola, Sierra
Leone, Sudan, Somalia, Burundi or Liberia threatens the welfare of
the citizens involved. It is also that failing and failed states are
assumed to be vulnerable to the overtures of a variety of nonstate
actors, including transnational criminals. These elements could, the
argument goes, threaten the economic, security, or political interests
of other states (Rotberg 2002).
These ideas were an important part of the justification for the
Australian-led military intervention into the Solomon Islands in
July 2003 to deal with continuing skirmishes between armed militia
and the breakdown of state institutions. An influential report
released just before the launch of the RAMSI initiative argued that
the situation in the Solomon Islands engaged Australia's "most
enduring strategic imperatives," not least because it could become
a "petri dish for transnational threats" including drug and people
smuggling, gun-running, and terrorism. Continuing its epidemiolo-
gical analogy, the report suggested that such problems could "prove
contagious to other countries in the region" (ASPI 2003: 3,13-14).
It is arguable whether this renewed emphasis on regional
security is justified by the current situation in the islands. Apart
from money-laundering activities associated with some offshore
banking facilities, transnational criminal activity in the Pacific is
200 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC STUDIES

relatively minor compared to other regions of the world. There is no

evidence of international terrorist cells becoming established
anywhere in the islands region (see e.g., Rolfe 2004). Arguments
that emphasize these security considerations are necessarily based
on future possibilities, and policies justified in these terms must be
regarded as preemptive in nature.
The fact that vital security considerations have been invoked
is highly significant for a number of reasons. It gives the Pacific
policies of Australia, and to a lesser extent. New Zealand, a
domestic priority that they would not otherwise have, and has lead
to significant increases in aid and other resources directed towards
the region. Perhaps more important, it makes it easier to justify the
idea of "hands on" or direct intervention in the domestic affairs of
island nations than would otherwise be the case. It is clear, for
example, that the situation in Papua New Guinea looms large for
Australian analysts and policy makers (Windybank 2003;
Windybank and Manning 2003). An agreement completed in late
2004 provided for the deployment of 300 Australian police and
public servants to take up line positions in the Papua New Guinea
bureaucracy (Dinnen 2004b: 8-9; Patience 2005).^
These sorts of interventions raise tricky issues regarding the
internationally recognized sovereignty of Pacific states (Ottaway
and Lacina 2003). Indeed, there are a growing number of
individuals and groups who see recent developments in terms of an
ongoing process of "recolonization" (Underwood 2004; Kelsey
2004). Australia has worked hard to avoid accusations of
neocolonialism in Solomons and Papua New Guinea by
emphasizing that these are invited or negotiated solutions to
internal problems, and by building regional support for or
involvement in these actions.* But there may well be future
situations where it is difficult to determine exactly who in a conflict

7 In May 2005, Papua New Guinea's Supreme Court ruled that some of the
provisions of the Enhanced Cooperation Program were unconstitutional, leading
to its suspension.
8 The RAMSI intervention force includes troops and police from several island
countries, including Fiji, Kiribati, Samoa, Tonga and Vanuatu. The collaborative
aspect of the intervention was pursued according to the guidelines for regional
responses to crises established by the Biketawa Declaration, endorsed by
members of the Pacific Islands Forum in October 2000. Like other regional
security initiatives, such as the 1997 Aitutaki Declaration, and the 2002 Nasonini
Declaration on Regional Security, Biketawa was itself an Australian-led initiative.
 The Limits of Seif-Determination 201

ridden "failed" or "failing" stete is authorized to invite such

involvement. And there is likely to be increasing resistance on the
part of island leaders and observers to multilateral initiatives that
appear to reflect the agendas and aspirations of metropolitan rather
than island members of regional communities.

State Rehabilitation and Reconstruction

Increasing concern about "failed" and "failing" states raises
difficult questions about state rehabilitation or state reconstruction,
especially in Pacific places where these institutional structures have
never been particularly effective. In Solomon Islands, for example,
there are obvious dangers associated with attempting to resuscitate
an institutional order that by most measures did not perform very
well in the twenty-two years prior to its virtual collapse in mid-2000
(Hegarty, May et al. 2004). The problem is not necessarily with the
post-conflict phase of intervention, and RAMSI successfully
restored some semblance of law and order in Solomon Islands
within six months of its arrival.
Much more problematic is the second and critical phase,
which for the Solomons involves "working with Solomon Islanders
to rebuild their political and security institutions, to ensure effective
long-term service delivery, functioning democratic processes and a
revived economy" (Wainwright 2003: 495). So far, the emphasis has
been on strengthening some administrative aspects of central
government, the management of public finances, and on finding
ways to stimulate growth in the national economy. While not
denying the potential value of these centralized efforts, critics
charge that they repeat some of the mistakes of the past. According
to a recent report, the central challenge "is to build a bridge between
state and society" and to improve conditions in the rural areas and
outer islands where the bulk of the population actually live (Oxfam
2006: 7).
The issue here is not really the availability of resources or
administrative expertise. Institutional structures can be readily
designed by consultants and established or reestablished with the
help of skilled and experienced expatriates. Capacity building
efforts can also yield promising results, at least in the short term.
What is much more difficult for outsiders (or insiders for that
matter) to change is the wider political culture in which western-
202 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC STUDIES

Style state institutions must operate over the longer term.

Competing economic formations, ideologies, and identities remain
resilient in most of the Pacific places considered likely candidates
for state failure. Universal, "common sense" ideas about society and
government projected onto Solomon Islands or Papua New Guinea
from global centers of power are highly unlikely to be internalized
any time soon.
The idea of somehow engineering the wholesale trans-
formation of the central values and practices of Oceanic societies to
fit the mould of western style administration is deeply troubling —
especially if this is essentially to further the security interests of
external powers. Such "development" efforts may even have helped
create the unstable conditions we now confront in places like
Solomon Islands or Papua New Guinea. On the other hand, some
state-like structures of organization and control are undoubtedly
necessary, if only to provide the sorts of educational, health, and
"law and order" services that most Pacific Islanders now find
valuable.
To have any measure of success Statebuilding activities will
have to work with existing institutions and ideologies of
governance. They will also require much time, modest expectations,
and perhaps even a willingness to redraw political boundaries.
Above all these are tasks that can only be accomplished by islanders
themselves. The alternative may be continuing external control,
perhaps through some revived form of international trusteeship or
system of mandates. According to former Guam Congressman
Robert Underwood, any moves that smack of recolonization are
simply unacceptable (Underwood 2004: 5). This is a sentiment that
is widely shared across the wide expanses of Oceania.
If there is cause for hope and renewed faith in the noble idea
of self-determination, then perhaps it is to be found in the unlikely
case of Bougainville. On the face of it, the Bougainville crisis, which
began in late 1988 as a localized protest against large-scale mining
and escalated into a secessionist war against the Papua New Guinea
state that cost the lives of at least 10,000 people, represents one of
the most spectacular and tragic failures of the promise of self-
determination in the region. Here ideas of sovereignty and
territorial integrity trumped any local claims to self-determination,
and gave the Papua New Guinea state virtual impunity to use all
means at its disposal to reassert control over dissident groups —
 The Limits of Self-Determination 203

including outsourcing the task to a London-based provider of

mercenary services (Dorney 1998). And yet its inability to do so
ultimately left no option but a negotiated solution.
The 2001 Bougainville Agreement allows Bougainville a
considerable amount of autonomy under the terms of its own
constitution, and provides for a referendum on full independence
from Papua New Guinea after a decade of self-government. The
Bougainville peace process is notable in several respects, not least
because it allowed local sensibilities about reconciliation and
decision-making to influence the process of state rehabilitation and
reconstruction in meaningful ways (Regan 2002). It is also likely
that the extended war with the Papua New Guinea state helped
foster an emerging sense of a separate Bougainvillean identity. The
situation is, of course, not without its problems. The whole
peacebuilding initiative is still ultimately based upon "pirated"
institutions, and it is not yet clear whether state and nation-making
efforts will prove any more successful here than in other parts of
Melanesia. Furthermore, prevailing common sense dictates that
"proper" nation-states pay close attention to the requirements of
the global marketplace and provide the necessary legal, political,
social, and economic environment to safeguard the interests of
investors. The provision of these facilities may encourage just the
sort of activities that led to the eruption of the Bougainville crisis in
the first place.

The Limits of Self-Determination

David Robie's enviable faith in the liberating potential of national
sovereignty for the colonized in Oceania may have been misplaced.
Not only has the principle of self-determination been rather
selectively applied, but it has produced some unanticipated and
unfortunate results. In places like Solomon Islands and Papua New
Guinea, day-to-day conditions for many may have got worse rather
than better since independence. This is not necessarily to deride the
intrinsic value of sovereign independence, and certainly not to
provide support for those in the region who express nostalgia for
the colonial era. It is simply to suggest that the problems associated
with making states and nations capable of reconciling local and
global needs and expectations, and with the development project
generally, can easily serve to frustrate expectations of "hope and a
new future" (Robie 1989: 23).
204 SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC STUDIES

The idea of self-determination promises much more than it

can deliver in a global era. The limitations start with definitions of
the self that will exercise this political choice. Controlled by the
powerful actors of the day, the United Nations opted for a very
restricted definition of the recipient of this right, one which
excluded significant numbers of colonized people in Oceania. But
the most important limitations have to do with the international
context in which this purportedly free choice is exercised.
Decolonization was an essential part of the construction of a new
global order, one that consists of nation-states. With no room for
radically different models of political and social organization, and
little possibility of opting out of the system altogether, the only real
"choice" for island societies was to join the "family of nations" on
already established terms. Furthermore, membership has its price
and the system continues to demand conformity.
It is worth noting how international practices have adjusted to
reflect the new realities of world order and disorder in the
postcolonial period. Development assistance coupled with extern-
ally-generated reform programmes have become the main
instruments used by powerful international actors to counter
destabilizing or threatening trends in the sovereign states of the
previously colonized world, including Oceania. At the same time an
emerging international human rights regime has developed
regulations that are, in principle, indifferent to state boundaries and
serve to significantly modify previous legal constraints on
interfering in the internal affairs of sovereign states (Held 2003:
169). Coupled with the perceived security imperatives associated
with "failed" and "failing" states, this has accelerated a transition
from a "culture of sovereign impunity to a culture of national and
international accountability," and increased the possibility of more
direct forms of international intervention in the future (ICISS 2001).
The pressures to conform are acute and felt everywhere, not
least in the small island states of Oceania. Here, according to Foster,
"political, cultural, and economic visibility on the world stage
requires dressing up in the garb bequeathed, or, rather, imposed, by
powerful outsiders" (Foster 2002: 2), It is hardly surprising, then,
that the nation-state remains the most important frame of reference
for societies in every corner of the globe, even where such
institutions are weak or dysfunctional. But it is also clear that the
human and other costs of this conformity can be extremely high.
 The Limits of Self-Determination 205

Where states collapse or becon^e overwhelmed by other forces, the

impulse is to intervene to redouble state-building efforts. However,
as conservative scholar Francis Fukuyama (2004: 103) notes, such
efforts have met with limited success: "Neither the United States
nor the international community has made much headway in
creating self-sustaining states in any of the countries it has set out to
rebuild." This is the major concern associated with Australia's new
policy of "cooperative intervention" in the Pacific, where long term
involvement in Solomon Islands and Papua New Guinea seems
increasingly likely, and similar "hands on" involvement in the
affairs of other island states remains a distinct possibility.

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