The coming Anarchy in Oceania? A critique of the 'Africanisation' of the South Pacific thesis.

This article considers claims, in the wake of coups in Fiji and the Solomon Islands in 2000, that the Pacific region is experiencing 'African'-style difficulties. It argues that the Africanisation thesis is analytically weak, internally inconsistent and empirically flawed. Data covering GDP per capita, literacy, schooling and life expectancy are explored, as are indicators covering coups, insurgencies and military involvement in politics. Claimed similarities between the role played by "ethnicity' in driving conflict are considered, as are comparisons of the role played by the post-colonial state. In conclusion, the article looks at the underlying causes of conflict, and potential for future instability, in Melanesia

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   Sierra Leone is a microcosm of what is occurring, albeit in a 
   more tempered and gradual manner, throughout West Africa and 
   much of the underdeveloped world: the withering away of central 
   governments, the rise of tribal and regional domains, the 
   unchecked spread of disease, and the growing pervasiveness of 
   war. It is Thomas Malthus, the philosopher of demographic 
   doomsday, who is now the prophet of West Africa's future ... 
   And West Africa's future, eventually, will also be that of most 
   of the rest of the world. (1) 

COMFORTING ANALOGIES

When the Malaita Eagle Forces dislodged the Solomon Islands' elected government on 5 June 2000, the event was widely depicted as a 'copy-cat coup' inspired by George Speight's seizure of Fiji's parliament three weeks earlier. (2) The next day, Australian Prime Minister John Howard publicly warned that Papua New Guinea might be the next state to fall, (3) and Vanuatu soon joined the ranks of recognised threatened states. The Solomons coup was a 'direct progeny of the coup in Fiji', explained The Australian's foreign editor Greg Sheridan, warning that the South Pacific was sliding towards 'an abyss of African dimensions'. (4) 'The Fiji coup begat the Solomon Islands coup', he emphasised several days later. (5) The Bulletin's Michael Maher argued that the 'Speight coup played a key role in shaping the past weeks' events in the Solomons', echoing concerns in Canberra about a 'deep sense of primordial loyalties' inflaming tribal conflict throughout a new 'arc of instability' stretching around the north of Australia. (6) Notions of common causes and mutual interconnection served not only as a rousing call to antipodean action, but also as an explanation-by-analogy for the otherwise perplexing 18-month old conflict on Guadalcanal.

Only a week before Speight marched into Fiji's parliament, The Economist had featured 'The Hopeless Continent' on its front cover, describing Africa as a region whose peoples were 'especially susceptible' to 'brutality, despotism and corruption ... for reasons buried deep in their cultures'. (7) Just as the Solomon Islands conflict was to be accounted for by the coup in Fiji, so too the Australian press cast Fiji's George Speight in the role of an African coup leader cast adrift in the Pacific. Rediscovering Africa in the Oceania provided an easy alternative to explanation, even for the Royal Institute of International Affairs magazine The World Today. 'Teenage fighters roam the streets with guns ransacked from local armouries in a scene that could fit anywhere in the failing states of Somalia, Sierra Leone or Liberia' led an article written by International Institute of Strategic Studies expert David Shearer. 'With ethnic tension switching to ethnic violence, the Pacific, like Africa, needs to be seen for what it is, a region facing chronic instability.' (8)

In a similar vein, the Australian National University's Ben Reilly invoked 'frightening parallels' between George Speight's bid for ethnic Fijian paramountcy and Idi Amin's 'Fiji-like crusade against the community from the Indian subcontinent in Uganda', a comparison also drawn by the novelist Salman Rushdie writing in the New York Times. (9) This was no longer merely off-the-cuff sensationalist journalism, at least in terms of when and where it was being written. In the Australian Journal of International Affairs, Reilly expounded a full-blown theory of the 'Africanisation of the South Pacific'. The South Pacific Island states, he explained, were now 'on a par with sub-Saharan Africa' in terms of GDP per capita, education, employment, and health, and were experiencing four inter-related phenomena that have long been associated with violent conflict and the failure of democratic government in Africa: