Sovereignty As Currency for Oceania's Island States Lizzie Yarina
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PEER REVIEW Micro- state- craft: Sovereignty as Currency for Oceania’s Island States Lizzie Yarina KEYWORDS Pacific Islands, Oceania, Sovereignty, Statecraft, Microstates Islas del Pacífico, Oceania, soberanía, política, micro-estados Yarina, Lizzie. 2019. “Microstatecraft: Sovereignty as Currency for Oceania’s Island States.” informa 12: 216–231. informa Issue #12 ‘Site Conditions’ 217 SOVEREIGNTY AS CURRENCY FOR OCEANIA’S ISLAND STATES Lizzie Yarina ABSTRACT population and dry ground. The smallest, Nauru, has only 10,000 people inhabiting a single 10- The sovereign archipelagos of the Pacific represent square kilometer island, much of which is no longer the distinctive typology of the ‘microstate.’ Emerging inhabitable as the result of phosphate mining. The in the global post-colonial era, they are many of combined surface area of these island microstates the smallest countries in the world in terms of both is similar to that of Rhode Island, as is the sum of population and land area. Still, as independent their 11 gross domestic products, or GDPs. Still, as states, each has earned a seat in the United Nations independent countries, each maintains a seat in the General Assembly, and other trappings of transna- United Nations General Assembly and all of the other tionally recognized sovereignty. This essay explores trappings of transnationally recognized sovereignty. the microstatecraft of Pacific Island nations—dis- This article explores the currency of sovereignty for tinct transnational negotiations made possible, Pacific microstates, and examines potential risks and desirable, or necessary by the unique characteristics opportunities associated with this ‘microstatecraft.’ of these small island, big ocean states. In particular, microstatecraft refers to the opportunities created In her book Extrastatecraft: the Power of Infrastruc- for these countries by leveraging their very status ture Space, architectural and urban theorist Keller as states. Rather than a ‘development failure,’ this Easterling examines forms of alternative statecraft subversion of sovereign status can be seen as an associated with the era of globalization. The epony- astute strategy for self-determination, rejecting the mous term describes “the often undisclosed activi- inequities perpetrated by global neoliberalism. How ties outside of, in addition to, and sometimes even in does microstate sovereignty operate differently? partnership with statecraft.”1 Various infrastructures This research article explores how Pacific Island including codes, zones, and networks provide the micro-states use their sovereignty as a form of spatial softwares2 for these extra-state activities. currency in the contemporary era, and considers the Similarly, the spatial and structural characteristics of potentials in this mode of operation. Pacific Island nations both explain their emergence as unlikely sovereign states, and their capacities for leveraging their statehood as a form of self-de- termined development, or even anti-development. INTRODUCTION Independent archipelagic states are a specific typol- ogy of ‘infrastructure space’: one created not by steel The Pacific covers one-third of the area of the or standards but rather by the forces of geography. planet; 14 independent states and an additional 20 The space of islands becomes infrastructural as a remnant colonial territories comprise this expanse product of their relationship to economic, social, of ocean. The Pacific is occupied by a diverse set of and political systems and results in both local and island dwellers who have adapted to fluid, archi- global implications. pelagic existences in concert with the powerful sea. However, the Pacific region, or Oceania, is sited in The intentions of this paper are twofold. First, the in- a kind of forgotten cartographic space, split apart cluded microstatecraft cases demonstrate the collision by West-centric maps and divided in time by the of free market worldviews with the legal framework International Date Line. In this under-looked zone of the contemporary state, suggesting broader recon- of our planet a new state formation has emerged siderations of how we, as a global society, would like as an unintentional byproduct of state-building to imagine the roles of nations and markets towards processes primarily designed by and for continental the good of all civilizations. Second, for Pacific Island nation-states. nations who have historically been at the mercy of colonial powers, and in some cases continue to expe- The island states of the Pacific embody a unique rience the ramifications of neocolonial activities, this territorial typology: the microstate. Defined by paper advocates for strategic and transparent lever- the UN as nations with one million people or less, aging of sovereign attributes by island state leaders as Pacific microstates only recently emerged during a mechanism for counteracting the negative forces of the post-colonial era. For the 11 independent small capitalist globalization while maintaining autonomy. island states of Oceania—excluding the peripheral This could be through manners suggested by the larger countries Australia, New Zealand, and Papua cases below or via as-yet unexplored ways. Coun- New Guinea, as well as offshore territories of larger tering framings of island microstates as small and states—the average population of these countries vulnerable, this alternative ‘microstatecraft’ can push is less than a quarter of a million people within an back against geographies of inequality established average land area of 5,800 square kilometers. These by continental, West-centric systems of economy are many of the smallest states in the world by both and governmentality. ‘Irregular’ uses of sovereign Yarina, Lizzie. 2019. “Microstatecraft: Sovereignty as Currency for Oceania’s Island States.” informa 12: 216–231. status are generally represented as signs of national which might distinguish societies, “is of only margin- instability in an international worldview; however, al interest; money and force, power and interests, are this paper argues that by subverting the colonial the engines of global change.”6 External multilateral and neocolonial developmentalist models imposed forces are thus the drivers of nation-state develop- upon them, these crafts are ingenious or even es- ment, not individual (i.e. microstate) actors within sential tactics for nations that wish to maintain their the system; statehood is a top-down societal force autonomy and may have little else to leverage in the which self-reproduces through embedded structures neoliberal global marketplace. and practices. THE MODERN [PACIFIC] NATION STATE Under post-colonial late capitalism, national sover- eignty has taken on new meaning as unlikely actors In the past, jurisdictional control was earned began to adopt the Westphalian model. Following through power and expanded through conquest. World War II, Western nations began the process of Nation-states established sovereignty by military decolonization in their Pacific Island colonies. For force and, in more recent history, commonly the century prior, the entire Pacific region had fallen maintain authority through the workings of their under colonial mandates during the ‘Partition of economy. The modern formation of the nation-state Oceania,’7 although actual involvement of Western emerged in Western Europe in the era following actors in their Pacific territories varied based on Renaissance restoration, as feudal society gave way the quantity and quality of possible extractable to independent nations. Many cite the Treaty of resources, or siting in service of military strategies. Westphalia (164–89), which ended the Thirty-Years For many Oceanic cultures, systematic Christiani- War, as the beginning of the era of the nation-state. zation, beginning in the nineteenth century, was the This document “overturned the medieval system of more powerful Westernizing force. Colonial actors centralized religious authority and replaced it with a re-mapped the Pacific, creating jurisdictions that decentralized system of sovereign, territorial states.”3 grouped together geographically and ethnically Therefore, the nation-state model is a territorial distinct groups.8 As Pacific Island nations began to mode of governance (state) which rules over a group establish independence from colonial powers, par- of people with a shared culture or background ticularly following the United Nations 1960 Dec- (nation). The Western European nations who estab- laration of Granting of Independence to Colonial lished this model contributed to its gradual spread Powers and Peoples, some newly-sovereign national across the globe through colonization, conversion, units re-established territories based on historical and trade. clan-based networks, such as the British colony of the Gilbert and Ellice Islands split into Polynesian A world of nation-states is composed of sovereign Tuvalu and Micronesian Kiribati, but many of the actors which “can exercise supreme authority within eccentricities of colonial territorialization remained. its own territorial boundary” and are “recognized For some island nations independence was a strug- by the other sovereign states and identified as an gle, and in several cases remains incomplete: my equal member of the international society.”4 Thus, particular focus is on independent Oceanic states. the nation state must be defined by external forces These states formed parliamentary democracies as well as internal ones. This defining