Dependency’s Legacy

Afamasaga Toleafoa

The decision by Australian Prime Minister John Howard to have Australia re-engage more actively in the affairs of its Pacific Island neighbors should not come as a surprise. For it demonstrates the failure of what was always going to be an unrealistic expectation about what will happen when the colonial powers left the Pacific.

One can understand the rush with which former colonial or administrative powers got out of the Pacific in the 1960s and 70s. The exceptions were the Americans and the French who had their own strategic reasons for staying. Most other parts of the world had been decolonized by then. With the Cold War raging, the communist countries were only too happy to seize on the remaining vestiges of colonialism to embarrass their Western rivals.

In some cases, the reasons colonial powers had hung on to some remote island or group of islands had gone. For instance, the year that Kiribati received independence from Great Britain was the very year that phosphate deposits ran out on Ocean Island.

By the 1960s and 1970s, it was also no longer necessary to own colonies in order to have access to natural resources or markets. The industrial nations' technological and financial power was such that they had control of world trade and markets for most commodities. When the European Common Market countries signed the first 10-year Lomé Convention in the mid-1970s with 70 odd African, Caribbean and Pacific states, for example, the arrangement had all the appearance of a mutually beneficial exchange of natural resources from the latter group, in return for aid and technology from the Europeans.

It later transpired that many of them were nowhere near ready to govern. The Polynesian countries were more fortunate in this regard. The new apparatus of modern statehood was simply planted onto existing traditional ruling structures, and life continued as much before. The situation did not make for dynamic economic or social change, but it afforded a political and social stability that was lacking in the more fluid and disjointed Melanesian societies.

Prime Minister Howard of Australia is correct when he says the Pacific countries will have to work together to pool resources and achieve economies of scale. The language is not new, for this has also been the rationale for the plethora of regional bodies that have sprung up, out of the ocean so to speak, in the past 30 years in the Pacific.

In reality, Pacific Island states do more business with Australia, New Zealand, the United States and Asian nations than with their Pacific Island neighbors. That shouldn't come as a surprise. Promoting intra-regional trade was one of the promises of the Forum Secretariat predecessor, for instance. Hardly any trade happened.

But having decided to re-engage more forcefully in the affairs of the Island countries, Australia and New Zealand will need to do a great deal more than reform the way their aid is managed and used, or send soldiers in when governments fail. The focus on corruption also takes away the focus from the more substantial work that needs to be done by the region's two superpowers.

Corruption, weak governance, and poor capacity to manage are all part of underdevelopment, and cannot be treated in isolation.

Addressing underdevelopment will be much more challenging, and effective. Movement of labor, migration, trade and investment, transfer of technology to the Pacific Islands, human resource development, are only some of the elements that have to be addressed.

The Islands for their part will need to reassess their own notions of independence in the light of increasing dependence on aid, and deteriorating economic and social indicators. The challenges and opportunities of today's global environment are nudging even the most powerful countries to relinquish long cherished sovereign powers.