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REGIONALISM IN THE PACIFIC:
A NEW DEVELOPMENT STRATEGY
Robbie Robertson[a]
The Pacific Plan is potentially very different from earlier initiatives of the Pacific Islands Forum[b](PIF), the political body for Pacific regionalism. That difference lies principally in the challenge it presents to Australia and New Zealand to engage with Forum Island Countries (FICs) as equal partners in Pacific development rather than as honorary members on the sidelines[1]. However, it also presents a substantial challenge to Island Countries; they need to move beyond postcolonial posturing and acknowledge the problems older strategies for development have created for their own peoples. Both challenges are immense and if not addressed will undermine the Pacific Plan.
WHY IS THERE NEED FOR A PACIFIC PLAN?
The Pacific Plan has not emerged from a vacuum. The region does face challenges and many of these, while not new, have assumed greater importance during the past decade.Since regionalism has long been recognized as a way of overcoming national constraints, the Plan seeks to transform the architecture for regionalism to better address the region’s major development difficulties. Some of these difficulties are similar to those experienced in other regions, but there are many differences also. With the possible exception of PNG and the Solomon Islands, the Pacific does not confrontthe same problems associated with interconnectedness experienced, for example, in sub Saharan Africa. If anything, it is the lack of connectedness which most distinguishes the Pacific, despite the obvious commonality of problems concerning communications infrastructure, political will, and the lack of a critical mass of countries to drive change[2].
The PacificIslands are scattered across the world’s largest ocean. With their Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs), they encompass one sixth of the world’s surface. Distances within island groups or between them impose large transportation costs that often weaken intra island trade; certainly remoteness from major markets impedes international trade. Kiribati, for example, contains 33 islands spread over 3.5 million sq km of sea, an area larger than Western Europe. But Kiribati demonstrates other characteristics common to many of the Pacific’s small island states. Most of its islands are less than 5 metres above sea level. Nearly half of its 100,000 people are crowded into South Tarawa which has a population density of 2,300 people per sq km. Such communities are highly susceptible to natural disasters and environmental damage, in particular from rising sea levels and poor waste management. Cyclones have the potential to reduceannual domestic economic growth by as much as 9 per cent[3].
In addition to being widely dispersed across thePacific, Island populations are also often highly fragmented within their own countries.The PacificIslands may contain only 9 million people, but they possess close to 1000 language groups. Fragmentation creates difficulties for national development, especially in the larger Melanesian countries where civil unrest has contributed greatly to declining annual domestic economic growth. In the Solomon Islands ethnic tension reduced per capita income by 40 per cent between 1997 and 2000. Fiji’s 3 coups cost an estimated US$4.3 billion between 1987 and 2000, an annual loss of US$5,456 per person[c][4]. It needs to be borne in mind, that despite the diversity and dispersal of Pacific peoples, 88 per cent of them live in 5 Melanesian states[d] and 75 per cent live in Papua New Guinea (PNG). These 5 states make up 98 per cent of the region’s land mass[5].
Internal fragmentation is not unique to the Pacific. Size, distance and scattered diverse populations raise the cost of services and government business in other regions also. These costs fall heaviest wherever state intervention in economies has drained public resources, discouraged private sector initiatives, and –in some instances- contributed to the emigration of skilled personnel. They reduce the capacity of communities to participate in and benefit from new international linkages.
In the Pacific, as in many other regions, external linkages are extremely important as most exports go outside the region. Changes to the nature of markets due to ‘globalization’, or more accurately economic liberalization, have ended or reduced in value the preferential access many Islands enjoyed for their exports of sugar, garments and fish, an advantage that for a time reduced the impact of their inability to diversify and add greater value to their products. This weak capacity and economic openness has rendered FICs doubly vulnerable to external shocks over which they have little control.
Postcolonial strategies have failed Pacific communities in other ways also. Dependence on tariffs for government revenues and import substitution strategies has made adjustments to global trade changes more difficult. In addition it has raised consumer and business costs, and left many islands susceptible to political pressure from the small number of beneficiaries of such policies, thereby weakening political commitments to reform. When combined with rapid population and urban growth, and high proportions of young people, human security has been severely compromised. In many instances, large numbers of underemployed people are susceptible to political mobilization by disaffected elites or prey to criminal elements.
Often postcolonial governments have also failed to build national consciousness, with the result that traditional obligations take precedence over national interests and weak state institutions easily fall prey to the opportunism of politicians and bureaucrats. In this way poor governance contributes to low economic growth, which combines with rising populations and rural decline to weaken human security, reduce educational opportunities, accelerate squatter settlements, and render large numbers of people susceptible to communicable diseases (HIV-AIDS, influenza, and malaria) and lifestyle illnesses. AIDS has the potential to reduce PNG’s labour force by 40 per cent and its GDP annual growth by 7.5 per cent by 2020. Today 15 per cent of Fiji’s population suffers from diabetes[6].
Of course not all security threats are internally generated. They derive from communicable diseases, transnational crime, financial crises and climate change. FIC responses to these threats are constrained by lack of capacity, internal fragmentation and poor governance.
Together these factors restrictsustainable development. Even countries with significant natural resources such as PNG have not been able to provide adequately the human security its people desire; indeed its per capita GDP has fallen 10 per cent since independence in 1975. Similarly poor management and governance has seriously depleted forestry stock in the Solomon Islands (at one point 97 per cent of the country was licensed for harvesting), polluted lands and sea resources, and left entire communities without adequate means of sustenance[7].
It is significant that the countries with the highest Human Development Indices(HDI) in the Pacific are resource poor micro states like Palau (0.77), Cook Islands (0.78) and Niue (0.74). What they share in common is a link to large external markets for their people. Tuvalu (0.65) and Kiribati (0.59) are also micro states but lack the same external opportunities for their people; so too the comparatively large states -Vanuatu (0.59) and Solomon Islands (0.41)[e]. They share the common distinction of being listed by the UN as Less Developed Countries (LDCs)[8].
The Pacific Plan’s consultants noted that whereas the Pacific’s distance from the outside world once provided a measure of security, today isolation threatens its ability to meet popular expectations for development. Consequently service provision suffers, governments become less effective, and national autonomy –the ability to carry out national policies- is eroded[9].
NEW REGIONALISM OR NEOCOLONIALISM?
Both Australia and New Zealand are members of the Pacific Islands Forum. This, one writer notes, ‘is one of the most striking differences between the Pacific and [other] … regional arrangements, broadly equivalent of having the US and Canada as full members of the Caribbean Community –an unthinkable concept for the independent Caribbean states’[10]. One consequence, of course is that many academics focus on Australia’s hegemonic role in the region. Stewart Firth believes that no other region is so lopsided; that Australia has in fact established a kind of patron-client regionalism[11]. William Sutherland has written of donor pressure for stronger compliance from PacificIslands. Their reform agenda in the 1990s has now become a push for regional integration and stronger compliance regimes[12].
These arguments are not without justification. With a population of 20 million, Australia has the strongest economy in the region and the greatest influence. Together with the smaller New Zealand (4 million people), its past actions in the Pacific have often exposed it to severe criticism. Its stand on Fiji’s coups, corruption in PNG, support for democratic reform in Tonga, demands for judicial immunity for its police serving in PNG, and refusal to sign the Kyoto Protocol have, according to Jane Kelsey, reconfirmed an us-them attitude withinthe Forum. Her recent report -“Big Brothers Behaving Badly”- rounded on Australia(and New Zealand) for bullying PacificIsland states during trade negotiations in 1999[13].Tony Hughes notes that ‘From time to time such irritations have led to suggestions of a change in membership status for one or both of the two countries [but] … no one is currently suggesting it …[although] the idea remains in [FIC] self consciousness.’[14]
Nonetheless, we should not see Australia's position as irregular. Many regions are dominated by large states: the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) by the US, Mercosur by Brazil, the East African Community (EAC) by Kenya, the Southern African Development Community (SADC) by South Africa, the Communauté Economique et Monétaire de l’Afrique Central (CEMAC) by Cameroon,and the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) at least potentially by Nigeria. We could even argue that much of the early success of the EU relied on the economic strengthof Germany and France. What is more important is how regionalism transforms dominance to the benefit of all parties[f][15]. Economic integration alonecannot guarantee such an outcome. In the Pacific this issue is only now being confronted for the first time.
Although economic integration has been on the agenda of the Forum since it was founded in 1971, it did not survive the strong national drive for self determination and self sufficiency in the 1970s and 1980s. During the early 1990s it resurfaced, eventually being raised formally at a Forum Economic Ministers Meeting (FEMM) in 1997. The FEEM endorsed a proposal for a two stage free trade agreement to incorporate the Islands over a ten year period, followed byAustralia and New Zealandduring a second ten year period. However, the plan fell foul of World Trade Organization rules, and the Forum decided instead to adopt an islands-only agreement, eventually known as the Pacific Island Countries Trade Agreement (PICTA). Although evidence existed that PICTA would produce few gains for the Islands, at least one commentatorbelieved that the FICs were given no reason to believe that they would be worse off without Australia and New Zealand. Perhaps all sides had reasons to be blind to realities. Australia wanted to avoid substantial costs and the Islands welcomed PICTA as a means to set their own pace of change and gain political influence as a grouping before tackling greater integration[16].
Everything changed however when the African Caribbean Pacific (ACP) bloc and the EU agreed to sign a successor agreement to Lomé at Cotonou in 2000 which foreshadowed6 new reciprocal Regional Economic Partnership Agreements (REPAs) within 8 years. Because a Pacific REPA held the potential to advantage European goods over Australasian goods in the Pacific, Australia and New Zealanddecided in 1999 to establish an umbrella Pacific Closer Economic Relations (PACER) Agreement to ensure that the FICs negotiated a similar agreement with them. Negotiationsfor PACER would begin no later than 2011; sooner if FICs began free trade negotiations with the EU.
Did the events of 1999 indicate that the Forum Island Countries had lost the ability to take the initiative, that they were victims of Australasian neocolonialism? The history of FIC-Australia-New Zealand relations suggests otherwise. The Forum came into being as a statement of regional determination in defiance of the older colonially established South Pacific Commission, headquartered in French Noumea, which refused to allow political discussions on French nuclear testing and independence at its meetings. During the 1970s and 1980s the new regional body successfully negotiated a raft of agreements: the Lomé Convention with the EU, the South Pacific Regional Trade and Cooperation Agreement (SPARTECA) with Australia and New Zealand, and the International Law of the Sea Treaty. In addition, the Forum successfully opposed Japan’s attempts to dump nuclear waste and US proposals to incinerate chemical weapons in the North Pacific, declared a South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone against the wishes of Australia, the US and France, and successfully concluded a Convention to Prohibit Fishing with Long Drift Nets in the South Pacific[17].
Although some early Forum attempts at regional services failed (Air Pacific and the Pacific Forum Line survive as commercial entities with limited regional reach), others like the University of the South Pacific (USP)succeeded in satisfying national aspirations by providing a quality institution at relatively low cost[g],by maintaining a degree of decentralizationand by committing resources to distance education[18]. Aside from specialist research and project bodies such as SOPAC (South Pacific Applied Geoscience Commission), which focuses on the development of natural resources, and SPREP (South Pacific Regional Environment Program), the most important success story of the 1980s was the Forum Fisheries Agency (FFA) which oversees fish licensing in the Forum’s EEZs, the source of 40 per cent of the world’s tuna supplies. It has substantially increased returns on licensed fishing, now delivering on average 7 per cent of FIC domestic incomes (21 per cent for Kiribati), secured US compliance with the Law of the Sea Treaty, concluded a treaty to prevent fishing with long drift nets, and helped establish a Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission to manage high sea zones[19].
Pacific regional organizations remain relevant to the region because of their successes and because they have developed skills for dealing with the region’s diversity. Australia and New Zealand, which fund up to 87 per cent of their core budgets, recognize their expertise, although Hughes argues that regional cooperation ‘can be mobilized in practice only if it is perceived by Australia and New Zealand to be in their interests …[that] they tend to have a prominent role in defining when and where cooperation should take place.’[20]. Not surprisingly balancing regional differences and leverage from Australia and New Zealand is difficult for regional organizations, but not impossible. The Pacific Plan is one example.
The Forum’s decision in 2003 to appoint an Eminent Persons’ Group (EPG) to review its activities came after the intense negotiations of 1999, civil strife in Fiji and the Solomon Islands in 2000, and the near financial collapse of Nauru[h][21]. Although part of the motivation for a review derived from Australian and New Zealand’s insistence that regionalism more effectivelyimprove governance and lay a better basis for economic growth (an insistence that had already found expression in the Regional Reform Agenda of the 1990s)[22], the EPG was no mouthpiece for Australia and New Zealand[i]andits goals were very different from those that emanated from the Australian Government.
For a start,Australiararely sees itself as part of the region; if anything, it regards the Pacific as its ‘backyard’. Further, in the wake of 9-11, the Western Pacific loomed largely in its consciousness as an arch of instability that could host transnational criminals and terrorists.Accordingly security became the principal Australian concern, demonstrated by its so-called ‘hands-on’ approach to law and order and governance issues in Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Nauru, and its push to place an Australian as Director-General of the Forum[j]. In justification Australia claimed it had a special responsibility for the region[23], but critics argued that it sought to recolonize the Pacific or to establish a patron-client relationship[24].
Despite its massive expenditure, Australia’s forte has never been long term strategic development planning. Instead its engagement with the Pacific often seems motivated by national concerns or international commitments that occasionally overlap with the region: strategic denial during the 1980s and War on Terror after 2001[25]. Although Pacific countries thwarted Australian objectives in the past (signing a nuclear free treaty, reaching fisheries agreements with the Soviet Union), with the end of the Cold War their leverage declined.