France in the South Pacific: Power and Politics by Denise Fisher (review)

Denise Fisher makes a timely and unique addition to studies of the French-speaking Pacific with France in the South Pacific. Working to convey French thinking on the Pacific for an English-speaking audience, she offers important historical context for the forthcoming referendum on independence in New Caledonia and the recent reinscription of French Polynesia on the United Nations’ list of Non-Self-Governing Territories. Fisher’s service as an Australian diplomat in the French Pacific provides a distinctive lens through which she appraises, analyzes, and presents the role of France in past, present, and future Pacific worlds. Her analysis focuses primarily on politics and economics, with close attention to the intersections of France and Australia over the last century and the potential for closer ties between them as two of the larger powers in the South Pacific. France in the South Pacific: Power and Politics makes a clear argument that France will be a significant regional player as the twenty-first century unfolds.

The work is divided into three main parts, beginning with expansive coverage of the French Pacific presence before 1996. Fisher broadly outlines the motives for French colonization, the evolution of colonial administration, and the often-ambiguous French policies toward development and local political rights in the colonies. She suggests that French motivations in the Pacific act as a source of thematic continuity as national prestige, national security, and latent commercial ambitions drive French policy in each period. Notably, these policy orientations explain decisions to grant or rescind local autonomy, detonate nuclear devises, bomb the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior, or deploy special forces to storm the cave on Ouvéa to end the 1988 hostage crisis.

The second part of the book follows the end of nuclear testing in French Polynesia in 1996 and devotes most of its pages to the political shifts, debates, and elections in New Caledonia after the 1998 Noumea Accord in anticipation of an eventual vote on independence. This period is characterized by experimentation with new policies on the part of the French state in its shifting responses to autonomy and independence demands from its Pacific territories. Frequently, however, the state’s meddling in local politics is argued to have produced mixed results, as attempts to ensure that pro-French political parties remained strong sometimes misfired or backfired. The final section of the book examines the continuing motivations for France to remain in the Pacific: the international prestige of being a global military power and the commercial potential of its vast exclusive economic zones, submarine resources, and mineral reserves. Fisher asserts that France holds the potential to be a regional leader through its example of good democratic governance; through its ability to provide relief, aid, or expertise; and finally as a pillar of political stability as it resolves complex local issues of autonomy or even independence.

Fisher highlights the changing Pacific context in which France transitioned from an intense imperial rivalry with Great Britain in the nineteenth century, to part of a European brotherhood of colonial powers in the early twentieth, to a colonial holdout in an era of decolonization and independence at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first centuries. This transformation has greatly affected France’s diplomatic standing in the Pacific. Its reputation has frequently suffered when the state has acted unilaterally as though it was still a dominant colonial power unconcerned with the opinions of Island states or local publics. Fisher attributes this disconnect to the physical and mental distance between Paris and the Pacific. This distance becomes visible in enduring French national mentalities that figure the Pacific as economically insignificant and lightly populated, even though it comprises a geographically substantial part of France’s maritime territory. France has in the past acted as a distant government rather than as a regional power. Fisher...