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234 Chapter 8 Nation Building in Perspective This handful of black students...no longer listened to either their fathers or mothers and repeated slogans gathered in the schools in Paris. Jacqueline Sénès, Terre Violente (1987, 349) Twice solutions were found. From where we came from, it was almost miraculous. But these solutions are partial and provisional. Alain Christnacht (Nouvelles-Calédoniennes, 11 March 2011) The decolonization struggle of New Caledonia since World War II has been portrayed in various ways, from a strategic French delaying action pushed forward only by protests, through French efforts to maintain law and order while expanding local participation in political decision making, to a conundrum of polarized ethnic communities who are so different they can never see eye to eye about a future together. The pendulum swings of metropolitan French politics and changing regional and international contexts have also complicated the process, as have divisions and changes within loyalist and independence blocs. Before World War II, the colonial situation was clear-cut, as the Indigénat policy and native reserves segregated Kanak from other New Caledonians, while a minority of white colons had an advisory voice in government. But since 1946, two “transnations” with important ethno-cultural connections to outside regions (mainly Oceania and Europe) have increasingly interacted and overlapped. Kanak emancipation led to full citizenship and democratic politics, and the multiracial, progressive UC won elections for a generation. Paris then revoked self-governing powers in the 1960s in order to retain nickel-boom profits, build national prestige, and further strategic interests. But the price of regression (and ongoing social inequality) was revolt, as if France had learned nothing from Indochina or Algeria. Historian Louis-José Barbançon considered the nickel boom to be what ruined a sense of interethnic calédonitude nurtured by the UC and labor unions because it “swept away all this fragile but real equilibrium and dug a durable, deep separation between Kanak and Caledonians” (1992, 36–37). Activist Jean-Jacques Bourdinat said that boom migrants caused the Kanak awakening because the indigenous people, after experiencing new free- Nation Building in Perspective 235 doms, felt marginalized again by a fresh wave of outsiders: “That was equivalent in fact to legitimizing the colonial presence by a democratic artifice. During the Second World War, we can imagine that such a referendum would certainly have resulted in the annexation of France by Germany” (1982, 2263). The loss of political autonomy left the country’s elected leaders powerless, the opposite of what the two 1960 UN resolutions on decolonization (1514 and 1541) had proposed (UN 1960a, 1960b). New French and Polynesian migrants, with state encouragement, violated another UN resolution (2621 [UN 1970]); exacerbated the minority status of Kanak; and brought the colonial business elite back to power. Even after the Foulards Rouges and Groupe 1878 emerged and Jean-Marie Tjibaou organized the conciliatory Melanesia 2000 festival, most settlers continued to deny the Kanak a collective existence, preferring to assimilate them as individuals or as separate tribes into Jacques Lafleur’s multiracial, capitalist coalition. Kanak alone could not regain control democratically, so in 1982, with metropolitan Socialist support, they tried to rule jointly with the centrist FNSC. The Nainville talks of 1983 accepted Kanak “civilization” as equal to that of France and recognized the Kanak people as the territory’s first occupants who had “an innate and active right to independence.” But a settler backlash over land reform and failed Socialist promises caused the FLNKS Provisional Government to revolt in 1984. Without enough military power to defeat France, the FLNKS sought tactical leverage for renegotiation. Despite the creation of Kanak-run regions in 1985, Edgard Pisani’s “independence -in-association” idea was stillborn in a confrontational context. A conservative resurgence in metropolitan France in 1986 led to new tensions and the Ouvea tragedy, which forced Paris and the settlers to negotiate with Kanak leaders again, for the first time successfully. The peace accords of 1988 and 1998 were really more than that. They were in effect consensual treaties that have legal standing, after 135 years of French rule by decree. By 2004, a new generation of centrists emerged, and in 2010 the RUMP and the UC began trying to work together. The resurgence of Gomès’s Caledonia Together in 2012 shows that no one can be left out of the ongoing conversations among France, loyalists, and independentists. The expanded annual signers committee meetings constitute attempts to read the past of the country together...

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