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[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] On New Caledonia(/Nouvelle-Calédonie/Kanaky) and Colonialisms
Jonathan Edelstein has done a roundup of the recent elections in New Caledonia. In another post, Jonathan provides a summary of the territory's history:

New Caledonia is one of the Pacific's few settler colonies. Like Australia, it began as a penal colony with many of the convicts choosing to stay after the completion of their terms; nickel and copper booms later in the 19th century led to further settlement. Unlike other regional settler colonies such as New Zealand and Hawaii, however, the indigenous Kanaks were never reduced to a small minority. Instead, the Kanaks and the descendants of settlers are at rough parity. The Kanaks are the largest group but are only a 42.5-percent plurality of the population, with Caldoches (whites) at about 37 percent and Asian and Pacific labor migrants making up the remainder. The higher birth rate of the Kanaks gives them a long-term demographic edge, but the relatively even numbers have led to sharp conflict.

In 1998, [. . .] the 1988 constitution was superseded by the Nouméa Accord, which is the current framework of New Caledonian government. The Nouméa document recognized Kanak cultural heritage for the first time and provided for reforms in personal law and land tenure, state-sponsored cultural development institutions and a "Customary Senate" to be consulted on matters affecting Kanak identity. Political authority was vested in a cabinet government with guaranteed power-sharing, and the number of provinces was expanded from three to eight. New Caledonia's status was also changed from an overseas territory to an "overseas country" - an arrangement in which it remained an integral part of France but had exclusive authority over internal matters. Finally, the Nouméa accord called for a referendum on independence sometime between 2014 and 2019.

Legally an overseas territory of France, New Caledonia is internally self-governing in every matter, except justice, police, defense, money and foreign affairs, the last of these being shared with the French government. The referendum on independence would simply transfer all of these powers directly to Nouméa, capital of the world's newest independent state. The problem with this vision, though, is that New Caledonians don't want to be independent.



The history of French imperialism can be divided into two periods, each period corresponding to a different phase of empire. As I wrote earlier in a review of Brian Moore's fiction,

[m]any observers divide France's colonial history in two: a pre-Revolutionary empire that reached its apex in the 1740s, with the vast North American landmass of New France and Indian trading posts flanking rich Caribbean sugar islands; and, a post-Revolutionary empire substantially created during the Second Empire, centred on North Africa and stretching deep into Africa and Southeast Asia. The French were notoriously relctant to emigrate to their colonies, to establish new societies on the model of British New England and Australia, Portuguese Brazil, or Spanish Gran Columbia and La Plata; Canada in the first colonial empire, and Algeria in the second colonial empire, were the closest approximations to this ideal in French colonial history.

France nearly colonized the South Island of New Zealand; one can only imagine what it would be like. New Caledonia does give us an idea.

A necessary digression: Unlike every other major European power in the 19th century, France didn't experience rapid population growth, its national population growing only by a third. There was never much pressure to emigrate from France; indeed, from an early date France received immigrants. In France's premier colony of settlement, Algeria, not only did immigrants fail to overwhelm the native population, but people of French origin were outnumbered by immigrants from elsewhere in southern Europe. The eventual rise and success of Algerian separatist nationalism owed much to the failure of the French to overwhelm the native Algerians with immigrants, to at least establish a South Africa-type situation with an entrenched European minority.

If Algeria failed to attract many immigrants, then New Caledonia--as an isolated subtropical island in the Southern Hemisphere--suffered from this problem in spades. In fact, many of the first immigrants were prisoners, Communards and common prisoners dispatched to build up the population of a future Antipodean France. Unlike Algeria, though, which had a large and densely settled native population numbering several million at the beginning of the French conquest, New Caledonia was populated by dispersed tribes with differing cultural heritages numbering in the tens of thousands, at most. Once large-scale immigration began around the turn of the century, the loss of the Kanak majority was inevitable. The caldoches developed as a coherent community during this time, existing alongside métros, more transient migrants. When the nickel mines opened, New Caledonia's migratory pull grew, including not only metropolitan French but attracting labour migrants from French Wallis and Futuna, Vietnam, and even Indonesia.

Kanaks now form a minority of the population, if a plurality. Kanaks will always be, if only in numerical terms, New Caledonia's dominant community. What the Kanaks will never be is large enough to win a referendum on independence. Like ethnic nationalists everywhere--Québec, anyone?--Kanak nationalists face the serious issue of being able to appeal beyond their ethnic base. In the case of Québec, this isn't too critical since Francophones form four-fifths of the province's population. In the case of New Caledonia, where Kanaks form only a plurality and are themselves strongly divided on the question of independence versus autonomy, it's the main reason why the Comptoirs Francais du Pacifique franc will remain legal tender indefinitely and why Nouméa won't host any embassies barring radical constitutional change in New Caledonia and France (and the European Union?).





In theory, French colonialism during its second phase claimed to integrate colonial territories and populations into itself on equal terms. Students of colonialisms often divide western European colonialisms into a Anglo-Netherlandic-German model concerned with compartmentalizing the colonies away from the metropole and a Latin model concerned with integrating the colonies into the metropole. In theory, the Latin model would allow the colonial subject in Algiers or Libreville or Saigon to be put on the same position as his metropolitan counterpart in Amiens, Lyons, or Strasbourg. In practice, this integration was only achieved in the case of the French islands, sugar islands in the Caribbean Sea and the Indian Ocean, as well as in the city of Dakar before Senegalese independence.

Simply put, there were far too many colonial subjects to ever integrate into the metropole without destabilizing the entire relationship. The extreme example was probably the Portuguese empire of the early 19th century, which would have become a Brazilian empire given that country's growth had the two future countries not agreed to separate. In the case of France, the integration of even the Muslims of Algeria--legally French territory--would have be politically impossible, to say nothing of being organizationally difficult and financially impossible. Absorbing the tens of millions of West and Central Africa and Indochina would have brought down the façade of Latin imperialism.

However, the Latin model of total integration--or, as the recent history of New Caledonia demonstrates, of selective integration chosen by the non-metropolitan partner--can work. All that's needed is a metropole substantially larger than the colonized area, which in turn should be fairly dependent on external support generally and see in the metropole a stabilizing source of aid. Arguably, that's the relationship of Newfoundland and Prince Edward Island to wider Canada; certainly, without transfer payments and membership in the Canadian common market, the economies of Canada's two insular provinces would be in sad shape. Puerto Ricans and Pacific Islanders--in Guam, American Samoa, and elsewhere--may see similar benefits from their relationship with the United States.

France, in its nine départements and territoires d'outre-mer--Saint-Pierre and Miquelon, Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Guyane in the Western Hemisphere, Mayotte and La Réunion in the Indian Ocean, French Polynesia, Wallis and Futuna, and New Caledonia in the Pacific Ocean--plays this role much more prototypically. The roughly two million people living in these territories enjoy the benefits of inclusion in a larger France (and a larger European Union), receiving extensive subsidies from the metropole to maintain near-First World standards of living and generally enjoying considerably higher standards of living than their independent counterparts. New Caledonia is of roughly the same size, population-wise, as Samoa and Tonga, after all; but whereas New Caledonia, much to the Kanak's deficit, has been a net receiver of immigrants, Samoa and Tonga rank among the largest per capita senders of migrants in the world. Sékou Touré's claim that the Guinéen people preferred "poverty in liberty to riches in slavery" doesn't seem likely to tempt the residents of the DOM-TOM.









UPDATE (2:48 PM, 13 May) : Jonathan goes into more detail.