GUEST BLOG: Mick Hall – Colonialism as a Bulwark Against China

The 53rd annual Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), which opened Monday in Tonga, takes place amid a backdrop of simmering violence and confrontations between French security forces and protesters in New Caledonia that has so far left a dozen dead, as well as increased geopolitical tensions between China and the U.S. with its regional allies.

On the agenda are talks on the impact of climate change. But for the West, the political thrust of the gathering is keeping Pacific nations outside of China’s orbit and enmeshed instead in Western military architecture.

The five-day meeting, which runs until Friday, is being attended by the 18 leaders of strategically important islands and archipelagos spread across the vast Pacific Ocean, as well as think-tank analysts and politicians from sub-imperial countries like Australia and New Zealand who are sounding the alarm over the supposed dangers of “malign” Chinese influence in the region.

China will be given a key focus at the forum, the region’s top political consensus body established to enhance trade cooperation, peacekeeping and a shared vision of good governance.

Some are openly arguing that colonialism in the region is instrumental in keeping China’s rise — within a multipolar context — contained.

Many Pacific nations have close trade and development ties with China and some, like the Solomon Islands, have signed security agreements.

New Zealand Hawkish on Beijing

New Zealand Foreign Minister Winston Peters in particular will be keen to discourage its members from pursuing relationships with China, his own country’s biggest trading partner.

Peters told Associated Press on Friday that the U.S. and its allies, including New Zealand and Australia, had failed to engage enough in the region, leaving a power vacuum for others to fill, meaning China.

Prior to the summit he had visited 14 Pacific countries this year. New Zealand is increasingly exercising sub-imperial power in the region, trading on its anti-nuclear tradition and its constitutional guarantee of indigenous Maori rights so it can deceptively present itself as a honest broker to members of the ‘Pacific family’.

That image is unraveling fast with its increasing alignment with the U.S.-led military architecture in the region and the Australian defence posture, as articulated by Prime Minister Chris Luxon at a speech to the Lowy Institute in Australia this month.

Just as worrying is a New Zealand Defence Ministry briefing document obtained under the Official Information Act (OIA), which reveals New Zealand has been pushing for the PIF to be structurally linked to the Western-aligned South Pacific Defence Ministers’ Meeting (SPDMM).

The group last met in December in New Caledonia.  It consists of defence ministers and senior civilianand military officials from Australia, Chile, Fiji, France, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and Tonga, as well as observers from Japan, the U.K. and the U.S.

The SPDMM brings together regional defense ministers on military cooperation issues in the South Pacific and is broadly focused on maintaining U.S. hegemony, as well as pursuing military interoperability.

Last year’s SPDMM summit, hosted by France in New Caledonia, was attended by senior civilian and military officials from Australia, France, New Zealand, Papua New Guinea and Tonga, as well as observers from Japan, the U.K. and the U.S..

Briefing papers for NZ Defence Minister Judith Collins revealed her mission during a discussion with Tonga at the summit was to “convey New Zealand’s position that there should be a link between the SPDMM and the Pacific Islands Forum.”

The heavily redacted document noted that:

“The PIF architecture and defence architecture have separate but overlapping countries involved. This reflects that defence responsibilities in the region do not align with political representation… Linking the PIF architecture and the SPDMM is likely to enhance security discussion across both organisations.”

There is now concern that a parallel or overarching securitised regional architecture is being created. It remains unclear to what extent the issue will feature in discussions at the PIF summit this week.

Focus on New Caledonia 

A definite focus will be put on French colony New Caledonia, where a dozen people have been killed in clashes between Kanaks and French security forces since May. Protests erupted after a vote in the French National Assembly on May 13 to pass a constitutional amendment to increase the number of French ex-pats eligible to vote in the island’s elections, hence diminishing decolonisation provisions of the Nouméa Accord.

The 1998 peace agreement promised independence for Kanaks if a majority voted for it via a referendum. French President Emmanuel Macron suspended the proposed law in June.

The Pacific Islands Forum leadership was scheduled to visit the archipelago on a fact-finding mission amid a crisis made worse after France arrested and deported independence figures to prisons in France as an increasingly militarized presence took hold. France now has thousands of troops and police stationed in the archipelago.

The Forum mission was postponed over what it said were “issues regarding due process and protocol that will need to be addressed.” Macron had said the mission needed to be within certain “guiding principles” of addressing issues like social and economic stability.

Fears have been expressed publicly about where New Caledonia would sit geopolitically if it gained its independence.

Anti-China scholar Anne-Marie Brady, writing for Western defense-aligned think tank the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) this month, effectively argued for the merits of colonialism as a bulwark against Chinese influence.

She argued that if New Caledonia were to become independent without France’s continued financial and security support it would “weaken regional security in the Pacific.” She said the independence coalition Front de libération nationale kanak et socialiste (FLNKS) would align closer with China.

She said:

“French military assets are one of the factors standing in the way of China changing the power balance in the Indo-Pacific, and in the South Pacific more specifically. France and the U.S. are the only actors in the region with networks of military bases worldwide, and with global military communications networks based on sovereign territory. 

“If France were to lose any of its Pacific territories, and access to the vast maritime area they provide, its global influence and status would decline significantly. That situation would suit the interests of China and Russia. France’s Pacific territories of New Caledonia and French Polynesia provide a major logistics base for NATO military assets and the European Space Agency.”

Brady added New Caledonia was now dependent on the Chinese market for its exports, which posed a “strategic risk.” She said: “The territory needs to rebalance its economy and return to a more diversified portfolio of markets.”

Former U.S. State Department security advisor and geopolitical analyst Van Jackson told Consortium News such Western interventionist attitudes were stopping the Pacific region from becoming a “zone of peace,” a phrase championed by Fiji’s Prime Minister Sitiveni Rabuka at last year’s PIF summit.

He argues Western talk of maintaining a “free and open Indo-Pacific” is rhetoric masking the true nature of relationships in the region. Jackson said:

“The existence of a non-sovereign Pacific — approximately a third of the region lacks sovereignty in some way — is actually the region’s primary source of insecurity. Outside powers want the Pacific to serve as a geopolitical buffer, but they think the only way to do that is by exercising exclusionary control themselves.

It’s that dynamic that’s leading to a carve-up of the Pacific. But if the Pacific were truly independent, cohesive, and self-determining then the region could credibly be a buffer that limits impositions by outside powers.  Colonialism is what is currently standing in the way of great-power stability.”

Chinese Investment

Western political messaging and news media narratives have cast China’s “increasing assertiveness” as a challenge to the “geostrategic balance” in the region that must be checked.

China has invested heavily in the Pacific, with its pragmatic global infrastructure development strategy, the Belt and Road Initiative, also extending into the region.

Australian thinktank the Lowy Institute released a report ahead of the summit pointing to the BRICS member becoming a major player in development aid, including ports, finance, airports and telecommunications and that it had sought a greater role in the military, policing, digital infrastructure and media.

It warned the 18 Pacific islands members faced challenges of compromised good governance and transparency amid “unbridled strategic rivalry” between the U.S., its Western allies and China for influence.

“Faced with this new ‘great game,’ Pacific countries have become diplomatic price-setters and are leveraging increased competition to maximise development benefits,” the report said.

China’s Pre-Forum Summit

China hosted leaders of the Solomon Islands, Vanuatu and Fiji ahead of the PIF summit. The visit of Fiji’s Rabuka, who met Chinese President Xi Jinping in Beijing last week, came after Google announced it would build a $US200 million data center in the country to support a new subsea cable.

Overshadowing aid assistance and investment is a battle over who has access to their strategic locations, with rival nations seeking to monitor and control naval movements across the Pacific Ocean.

The Lowy Institute report pointed out even seemingly benign and altruistic offers to mobilize naval and air assets for disaster response involves securing rights to use ports, airstrips and maritime routes around Pacific Islands, so U.S. allies and China are keen to offer assistance.

Sentinel States for the West

The U.S. and its allies have long wanted to turn the region’s nations into sentinel states, joining the likes of Japan and the Philippines in encircling China with military assets as the increasingly belligerent hegemon seeks to contain a growing challenge to its imperial rules-based international order.

A New York Times story last week said that the U.S. has reorientated its classified nuclear deterrence strategy to focus on a threat from China, increasing tensions further.

Jimmy Naouna, a leading figure in the pro-independence alliance of political parties, Front de libération nationale kanak et socialiste (FLNKS), said decolonisation would make it much harder for great powers to use his country as a pawn in the great power game now underway.

“That’s why we in FLNKS are calling for our independence, so that we are able to manage our own affairs, both at national and international level,” he told Consortium News.

“Taking into account this Indo-Pacific strategy that France is pushing ahead with in the region, they are basically using New Caledonia and French territories as its forward posting in the region.

“We believe that when we are able to manage our affairs we will be able to also manage geopolitical competition in the region and be able to align ourselves according to our national interests.

“But the fact that we are not fully sovereign means we don’t have that capacity. It’s very important for us that we’re able to play a leading role in negotiations. We don’t want to be used by the players in this political game between the two major powers, China and the U.S.”

Central to New Caledonia gaining independence is securing and winning a fourth referendum, an outcome the French electoral “reforms” endanger.

Macron showed his partiality towards French loyalism in the country when he declared a third referendum in 2021 legitimate after independence groups boycotted the vote because it was being held in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic. That vote delivered a mere 3.5 percent backing for independence, down drastically from a 46.7 percent pro-independence vote in 2020.

The PIF has acknowledged the referendum failed to meet U.N. principles, having had observers at that vote, although countries like Australia have not publicly stated it was illegitimate.

“I don’t think France will go back and say that that referendum was not legitimate,” Naouna said. “But what we’re going forward with now is a plan to negotiate a new referendum on self-determination that will overcome this issue of a defective referendum.”

France’s apparent decision to restrict the PIF’s fact-finding mission to New Caledonia, leading to its postponement, has in effect stifled the possibility of meaningful statements coming out of the leaders’ engagements at this week’s forum.  Without being adequately briefed on the situation, a further planned high-profile visit of PIF leaders to the country to add impetus and direction to peace talks has been made difficult.

Instead, Western security architecture in the region is likely to have a significant bearing on any resolution of New Caledonia’s crisis of sovereignty, ultimately responsible for the current bout of instability and violence.

The next SPDMM summit is due to take place in November hosted by New Zealand, with New Caledonia also a key focus. With that military grouping set on maintaining the colonial dynamics of the region as a means of maintaining the geopolitical status quo, prospects for an immediate just settlement in the country may be low.

Mick Hall is an independent journalist based in New Zealand. He is a former digital journalist at Radio New Zealand (RNZ) and former Australian Associated Press (AAP) staffer, having also written investigative stories for various newspapers, including the New Zealand Herald.