11 - The Material World Remade

Summary

The movement for a nuclear-free Pacific recast itself in terms of a Nuclear-Free and Independent Pacific, recognising that national sovereignty is a pre-condition of reasserting control over the environments. Resource bases had been ravaged by the extraction of resources and capital. As new governments struggled to build economic bases and coherent states, issues critical to the management of resources were often compromised. Nor are the issues contained within the nation-states, for Pacific peoples live in ecosystems dramatically affected by global processes, and have created regional organisations to negotiate their interests in the international arena.

CONTEMPORARY POLITIES

The last major region of the globe to be colonised by Europeans was also the last to be decolonised, a process not yet complete. France maintains sovereignty over French Polynesia, Wallis and Futuna, and New Caledonia. The United States maintains the territories of American Samoa and Guam, the latter claiming the right to United States commonwealth status, like its culturally similar neighbour, the Northern Mariana Islands. Tokelau remains a self-governing territory of New Zealand. After the Pacific War, the Netherlands tried to govern West Papua despite the claim of Indonesian nationalists to the whole of the former Dutch East Indies. In 1962 the province’s fate was determined when the United Nations endorsed an ’act of free choice’ organised by the Indonesian interim administration. Since then Irian Jaya has been a province of Indonesia, despite sporadic resistance in the name of the Oposisi Papua Merdeka (OPM, Free Papua Movement) who insist thatit was merely transferred from one colonial power to another.