Smarts and Sovereignty

Scott Whitney, Editor

Not all the brains in the Pacific reside at AusAid, or at ANU or the East-West Center or the U.S. Department of the Interior. With the war cries of governance! and accountability! it often seems that the consultants from these and similar institutions shall inherit the earth while Island states are doomed to failure without them.

Political scientists have said for years that "all politics is local," and the generation of anthropologists to follow Clifford Geertz has insisted that "all knowledge is local." Yet the trend these days in the Pacific is to imply, or to say outright, that local knowledge has failed to give us effective, efficient governments in the region. This implies that all the brains are in Hawaii, D.C., Wellington and Canberra. (And there is some truth to this as bright Island youngsters go off island to study and frequently stay off island to make better money and have better career opportunities.)

In our pages, however, we can see that this is not always the case. In this issue, we mourn the passing of one of the brightest intellects in the region, economist Savenaca Siwatibau who, since March 2001, had been vice chancellor of the University of the South Pacific. He was held in quite high esteem by the faculty there-quite an achievement, actually, since academics are notoriously hard to keep happy. And the students loved him. A year ago he told USP graduates that, "Maturity means recognizing that you exist in an inequitable community of people, with wide disparities of opportunities, of incomes, of privileges and of power or access to resources. Maturity recognizes your privileged situation within that community … We are all in this world to serve."

I like to think that some of the brains of the region have a voice in this magazine. People like John Haglelgam from Yap, whose analysis is always on the money, or Robert Underwood of Guam, who knows the ins and outs of Washington's Pacific agenda. Tarcisius Kabutaulaka of the Solomons is another astute voice heard in these pages-as is Fr. Fran Hezel in Micronesia and Afamasaga Toleafoa in Samoa, who both have pieces in this issue.

Afamasaga suggests in his Voices column that we may have to revise our notion of sovereignty in the region, as the Australian intervention in the Solomons, and potentially in PNG, have shown us. Melanesia, as Afamasaga points out, not too politically correctly, has been stereotyped as the land of the failed states. But this is a very selective vision.

For instance, the U.S. government has played the role of critical parent in the Compact II negotiations with the Federated States of Micronesia and the Republic of the Marshall Islands, which have a "freely associated" sovereignty. Yet the three Pacific territories that the U.S. has direct responsibility for, and which are not independent-Guam, the Northern Marianas and American Samoa, might just as well be called "failed territories." They each have deep fiscal, efficiency and management problems and are, in some ways, in worse shape than either of the three independent, freely associated states.

In this issue we take a close look at how American Samoa and the FSM are doing. The former, not too well; the latter, not too badly. One cannot blame the shortcomings of American Samoa on culture. Right next door, independent Samoa is thriving and has a government that is a model of transparency and fiscal skill. One reason for this is that the brains came home, and they combined the first-world savvy from their off-island educations with their local, traditional knowledge to get political power, and then to use that power wisely.

It could also happen in American Samoa. When I asked Gov. Togiola how one department in American Samoa, the power authority, has achieved a stellar reputation around the region, his answer was simple: "Smart young Samoans."