While Paris is basking in the spotlight of the 33rd Olympiad, in the Pacific France is being pummeled. In its restive overseas territory of New Caledonia, France’s colonial history is literally being torched with the burning of some of the oldest Catholic churches over the past few days. The funneling of more military personnel and equipment into New Caledonia marks France’s ongoing response to over two months of violence that has seen 10 people killed and over 2 billion euro in damages. One of the five Kanak independence leaders transported to France for trial, Christian Téin, has declared himself a political prisoner.
In this third part of our series delving into the contemporary clashes between geopolitical tensions and historical legacies in the Pacific, we return to New Caledonia and look at the resurfacing histories and the paths forward to potentially resolve, albeit imperfectly, these Pacific pressure points.
France’s response to the New Caledonian tensions is out of time in 2024. It would be more plausible if had occurred during Paris’s first Olympiad in 1924 when anti-colonial convulsions, including in New Caledonia, rocked imperial capitals like Paris. One hundred years ago, imperial responses to colonial rule were consistently harsh and militarized, with trained personnel and equipment fresh from World War I repurposed to quell colonial hotspots in Asia, Africa, and the Pacific.
In 2024, there is little appetite for France’s militarized response to the New Caledonia crisis. France’s tactics have not only been met with more defiant acts of resistance and destruction within its overseas territory, but in recent days, France has been diplomatically scorched throughout the Pacific region. In a statement issued by the Pacific Islands Forum (PIF), the region’s peak body expressed “grave concerns” and a willingness to send a mediation mission. The Melanesian Spearhead Group (MSG), a subregional grouping of New Caledonia and its neighbors – Vanuatu, the Solomon Islands, Fiji, and Papua New Guinea – also hammered France’s handling of a crisis of its own making.
Then in a keynote address by New Zealand Minister for Foreign Affairs Winston Peters to the Pacific Islands Leaders Meeting (PALM) in Tokyo on July 19, no punches were pulled. Peters followed the lines of argument from the PIF and MSG by citing the “democratic injuries” France caused when they held a third referendum on New Caledonia’s future in December 2021.
The Macron government forged ahead with the referendum at the height of a COVID-19 crisis against explicit appeals from the Kanak constituency to delay the vote until the health emergency had subsided. Peters said that the circumstances surrounding the third referendum “raise[d] questions about its legitimacy” whereas President Emmanuel Macron’s government has maintained it fulfilled, and finalized, the peace process brokered after New Caledonia’s last time of crisis in the mid-1980s.
In upbraiding France’s response to the current crisis, Peters urged France to find diplomatic solutions with the socially and politically divided factions within New Caledonia.
Peters’ speech has perhaps reignited old tensions between New Zealand and France. In the 1980s, when France was still using parts of its French Polynesian territory for atomic testing, despite howls of protests from across the region, New Zealand was a leading voice of condemnation. Relations reached a nadir with the sinking of a Greenpeace vessel, the Rainbow Warrior, in Auckland Harbor, after a bombing carried out by French agents in 1985. This act of state-sponsored terrorism coincided with the height of tensions in New Caledonia between Kanak independence and French forces.
As a result of the compounding regional antipathy, France paused its testing program and brokered a political path to resolve the New Caledonia crisis through the Matignon Accord of 1988. Then under the leadership of Jacques Chirac, France again disregarded Pacific voices and discarded any goodwill it had earned by abandoning its atomic testing program by recommencing it in 1995. A groundswell of protest shook the region and propelled independence movements in French Polynesia. France quickly backed away and embarked on a different path. In 1998, a second agreement, the Noumea Accord was signed in New Caledonia that set out the three referendums on French rule as the path of political resolution.
In the wake of these crises, France was able to revive its fortunes in the Pacific and retain Pacific territories it had controlled since 1842, in the case of French Polynesia, and 1853 for New Caledonia. Until the explosion of tensions in New Caledonia in May 2024, France’s place in the Pacific looked secure. This was a remarkable situation given the loss of almost all of its once vast African and Asian colonies in the age of decolonization after World War II and the height of Pacific regional rage against France in the 1980s and 1990s.
France has managed to blunt consistent independence aspirations in the Pacific by funneling resources and opportunities into its territories. Despite the economic disparities in New Caledonia between Indigenous Kanaks, who predominate at the lower economic end, and settler communities at the top, France’s territories have standards of living and opportunity that outstrip the rest of the region with the exceptions of New Zealand and Australia. The average annual income in New Caledonia is 10 times that of neighboring Vanuatu. French citizenship allows for educational and employment opportunities that many Pacific islanders, especially those from New Caledonia’s nearest neighbors in Melanesia, can only dream of. New Caledonia’s health infrastructure is again of a standard rivaling New Zealand and Australia, compared to the dire state of health services in much of the Pacific.
All these factors, along with heavy investment in Indigenous arts and culture, have served France well. Yet the breach of trust and “democratic injuries,” as New Zealand’s Peters put it, from late 2021 caused by the Macron government’s conduct surrounding the third referendum has set France’s position in the Pacific back decades.
That the third referendum, in December 2021, came mere months after the AUKUS agreement was announced in mid-September that year is a bit of timing worth noting closely. AUKUS ruptured France’s relationship with Australia and the United States. Despite efforts at repair, Australia’s relationship with France remains brittle. The AUKUS agreement, which draws Britain back into the Pacific at levels not seen for many decades, was a direct response to the escalation of regional tensions with China. These tensions spiked again only a few months after the third referendum when the security deal between China and the Solomon Islands came to light in March 2022 and triggered widespread change and upscaled levels of attention to the region not seen since World War II.
In this atmosphere of red-hot geopolitical tension, where France was seeking to strongly reassert its security presence in the Indo-Pacific as a global power, it seems the French government wanted to ensure that there would be no opportunity to lose New Caledonia to an independence movement that had been steadily gaining ground on the slim majority who had twice before voted to stay with France. Yet in taking the course of action they did, France now risks losing a lot more than it likely would have if the third referendum had been conducted to the satisfaction of all sides.
So, what is the way forward? Given all the circumstances, tensions, and competing ambitions within New Caledonia along with the intense geopolitical contest, the solution likely lies in a freely associated arrangement for an independent New Caledonia.
This decolonial quid pro quo arrangement has been deployed in the Pacific since the New Zealand and Cook Islands brokered the first free association agreement in 1965, when the latter became a self-governing “realm state” of New Zealand. As the previous article in this series explained, this freely associated relationship has evolved considerably over the past 59 years. Now the Cook Islands enjoys almost all the trappings of a sovereign state while its population retains the benefits of New Zealand citizenship and New Zealand development funds. New Zealand’s role initially involved defense, legislative, and judicial powers, but now its role is to stand ready to assist when invited as is also the case with New Zealand’s other realm state, Niue.
The United States and three of its U.N. Trust Territories took this free association model and adapted it to their specific circumstances, forging the Compacts of Free Association (COFAs) in the mid-1980s. These arrangements created three sovereign nations – the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Republic of Palau, and the Federated States of Micronesia – whose citizens gained access to the U.S. through a COFA special status that allows for legal residence, social services, and employment rights. In return, the U.S. gets an exclusive security domain in the extensive and strategic COFA EEZs. Living in the U.S. under these arrangements has been an evolving, incredibly challenging, and complicated experience for thousands of COFA migrants who have moved off their home islands into all corners of the U.S. over the past 40 years.
With these precedents in mind, what model of free association would work best for New Caledonia, or indeed for the Autonomous Region of Bougainville, which is also pushing for independence from Papua New Guinea? Neither side will get everything they are seeking, that is all but guaranteed. The “least worst option” for all concerned is the freely associated model pioneered by the Cook Islands and New Zealand.
The complex bonds between people with shared citizenship guarantee better futures for the next generations who have the options of coming and going from home islands for education and work. These bonds and explicit rights of citizenship will also work to the advantage of former colonial powers in the security arena. Raising military forces in any way equipped to deal with current or likely future circumstances is not plausible for most of the Pacific, let alone for potentially independent states of New Caledonia or Bougainville. Compromise is key, as Peters said in Tokyo, as is thinking about the lives of future generations if doors now open because of existing citizenship rights are closed in exchange for all the trappings of an independent state.
The first step to resolving the New Caledonia crisis is for France to return to the resolve it demonstrated in the mid-1990s and drastically alter its course, and fast. It is time for France to look at how other parts of the Pacific decolonized but remained connected. Despite their umbrage over Peters’ Tokyo speech, France needs to also look to New Zealand and the Cook Islands as a template for a way out of this crisis.