Abstract
The Pacific Island states include some of the world’s most and least heterogeneous polities. Only in Fiji and New Caledonia have the communally based political parties emerged that form the essential building blocks of what Arend Lijphart calls ‘consociational democracy.’ Most other Pacific Island states are either too heterogeneous to support such parties or so homogeneous that political parties either do not emerge at all or acquire hegemony in dominant party systems or are scarcely differentiated programmatically. This chapter argues that ‘power-sharing’ entails a potentially preferable alternative to majoritarian democracy primarily in contexts where cohesive and pillarized groups are represented by powerful actors on the national stage. Two implications for investigations of power-sharing in the Global South follow. The first is the importance of context: one needs to carefully analyze the character of cleavages (or their absence) to establish where power-sharing agreements might be appropriate or workable. Second, at least in those appropriate contexts, power-sharing rules are likely to need to be codified in law.
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Notes
- 1.
The speakers of Austronesian languages are also widely found in island southeast Asia and occasionally in mainland Asia and as far afield as Madagascar.
- 2.
It is likely to have been the case that Papuan-speaking peoples once also inhabited islands further east, including areas in modern Vanuatu (the New Hebrides) and New Caledonia.
- 3.
- 4.
Later turned into a book: Lijphart (1966).
- 5.
Horowitz correctly notes that “Fiji adopted the device of a multi-ethnic alliance directly from Malaysia” but incorrectly describes Fiji’s Alliance as “basically similar” to its Malaysian namesake (Horowitz, 1985: 579, 410n). The Fijian Alliance never had the same level of support in the Indian community as its Malaysian counterpart obtained in the Chinese community. For a more careful comparison between Fiji and Malaysia, see Milne 1981.
- 6.
‘General voters’ were those who were neither on the Fijian nor on the Indian voter rolls, i.e., Europeans, part-Europeans, Chinese and (from 1990) other Pacific islanders.
- 7.
John McGarry misinterprets me as arguing that “the failure of Fiji’s post-1997 power-sharing experiment may be partly attributed to an absence of external involvement” (McGarry, 2017: 271). On the contrary, this was one of its greatest strengths. In Bosnia, by contrast, the externally appointed Office of the High Representative intervened continuously after 1997 in ways that diminished the likelihood of effective power-sharing.
- 8.
The court controversies regarding Fiji’s power-sharing provisions are reviewed at greater length in Fraenkel (2017).
- 9.
In Bougainville’s case, the outcome was not binding on the PNG government.
- 10.
‘Tant que les consultations n’auront pas abouti à la nouvelle organisation politique proposée, l’organisation politique mise en place par l’accord de 1998 restera en vigueur, à son dernier stade d’évolution, sans possibilité de retour en arrière, cette “irréversibilité” étant constitutionnellement garantie’ (Accord de Nouméa, 1998), [English translation: “If the consultations [or referendums] have not resulted in the proposed new political organization, the political organization established by the 1998 agreement will remain in force, at its last stage of development, without the possibility of going back, this ‘irreversibility’ being constitutionally guaranteed”].
- 11.
‘Le résultat de cette consultation s’appliquera globalement pour l’ensemble de la Nouvelle- Calédonie. Une partie de la Nouvelle-Calédonie ne pourra accéder seule à la pleine souveraineté ou conserver seule des liens différents avec la France, au motif que les résultats de la consultation électorale y auraient été différents du résultat global’, (Accord de Nouméa, 1998), [English translation: “The result of the poll will apply comprehensively to New Caledonia as a whole. It will not be possible for one part of New Caledonia alone to achieve full sovereignty, or alone to retain different links with France, on the grounds that its results in the poll differed from the overall result”].
- 12.
As Fiji’s Supreme Court found in 2002, “there remains an element of discordance between the mandatory language of s. 99 and the terminology of s. 6(g) which states ‘if it is necessary or desirable to form a coalition government from among competing parties.’” The latter had been the original intent of the Reeves Commission, but it was inconsistent with the multi-party cabinet rule (Supreme Court of Fiji, 2002: S. 126).
- 13.
The 1988 census was the last to report ethnicity. It identified 66.5% of the population as Polynesian, and the remainder as either European (11.9%), Asian (4.7%) or mixed (16.4%) (Brami Celentano, 2002).
- 14.
Even in those European cases that had both formal rules and behavioral power-sharing, as in Belgium, it has been the propensity to seek consensual solutions at critical junctures rather than the formal legal rules that has most contributed to the survival of consociational democracy (Deschouwer, 2006: 895, 905-6). The price of failure to reach agreement was just too high.
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Fraenkel, J. (2024). The Pacific Islands: The Centrality of Context for Power-Sharing in the Global South. In: Aboultaif, E.W., Keil, S., McCulloch, A. (eds) Power-Sharing in the Global South. Federalism and Internal Conflicts. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-45721-0_15
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