Breakthrough in the South Pacific

It’s 236 years today since the fall of the Bastille, the accepted starting date of the French Revolution, marked by France’s national day. But there hasn’t been much to celebrate recently for president Emmanuel Macron and his prime minister François Bayrou, the latter clinging to power in the face of a hostile parliament. Until Saturday, when negotiations on the status of New Caledonia unexpectedly yielded agreement.

Longer-term readers will remember the story, but for the rest here’s a quick recap on New Caledonia. The territory, which is about 1,200km from the Australian coast, was forcibly seized by France from its indigenous inhabitants, the Kanaks, in the second half of the nineteenth century. Kanak demands for independence led to violent conflict in the 1980s, followed by a peace deal in 1988 and later agreement for increased autonomy over a transitional period leading to a referendum on independence.

The referendum was finally held in 2018, with 56.7% voting to remain part of France. In a second referendum two years later that figure dropped to 53.4%. The third and supposedly final referendum was therefore expected to be very close, but the French government insisted on holding it (despite the Covid epidemic) earlier than expected, in December 2021, and it was therefore boycotted by the pro-independence forces – and accordingly voted overwhelmingly against change.

Macron took the issue up again after the 2022 presidential election, with a view to reaching an agreement on some new status that could then be voted on afresh. But neither side was keen to give ground: on the one hand, the momentum seemed to be with the pro-independence side; on the other hand, its strength was partly artificial, since post-1998 immigrants were excluded from voting. When the government tried to address the latter point with an electoral reform last year, an outbreak of violence forced it to back down.

The key problem is that, almost alone among colonial territories, New Caledonia ended up with a rough numerical parity between colonists and natives. Neither Europeans nor Kanaks command a majority; the balance is held by immigrants from elsewhere, mostly other Pacific islands. Politics therefore demands compromise, and as I put it when previewing the 2018 referendum, “independence is the one thing that can’t really be compromised on: a country is either independent or it’s not. There is no middle way.”

But now the negotiators claim to have found just such a middle way, or at least a form of words that will obscure its absence. New Caledonia, already with a unique constitutional status (a “sui generis collectivity”), is to become instead a “state”, with its own citizenship rules and international personality, but will remain tied to France, with generous subsidies from the French taxpayers. All residents will have voting rights subject to a ten-year residence requirement.

Bringing the pro- and anti-independence leaders together on the same text, after ten days of negotiations, is a triumph for the government and for former prime minister Manuel Valls, now minister for overseas France, who led the talks. It’s by no means the end of the story; the resulting constitutional amendment will need to be approved by a joint sitting of parliament in France and then by referendum in New Caledonia, neither of which can be guaranteed.

In France, the far right is unhappy with the deal; Marine Le Pen, not unfairly, called it “deeply ambiguous”. In New Caledonia, there is concern among both Europeans and Kanaks that their respective leaders have given away too much. But there is also praise and relief for what seems like a bold step forward. As Le Monde’s editorial puts it, “The stakeholders who are choosing to engage are taking significant risks, but they also stand to gain a great deal.”

If the agreement is approved and applied, it seems that it will create something like what in the British empire used to be called “dominion” status – the status that Australia enjoyed at least until the passage of the Statute of Westminster in 1931. The dominions were self-governing without being fully-fledged independent states, but the degree of control that Britain could exercise over them was always vague, and over time diminished to vanishing point.

Importantly for New Caledonia, what the British case demonstrated is that once a certain level of self-government has been granted, the decision as to whether to proceed to full independence is one for the territory itself, not the imperial power. If the pro-independence forces win a majority in New Caledonia they will be able, in practice if not in theory, to cut the remaining ties with France by themselves, although of course that may come at a financial cost.

Their main task, however, remains unchanged: they and their opponents need to stop thinking of themselves just as distinct communities and forge a single (albeit diverse) national identity for the new state. Now at least they’ve made a start.