Despite their best intentions, the Biden administration brought a simmering Pacific tension to a head in September 2022. What started as an oversight in compiling an invitation list became something akin to a test case for sovereignty in the Pacific in an era of environmental and geopolitical pressures colliding with colonial vestiges. In this second part of a series examining the potent tangle of history and regional pressures, the focus will fall on one pressure point that has ramifications for others.
In September 2022, the Biden administration arranged the first Washington-based U.S.-Pacific Islands Summit to bring U.S. and Pacific leaders together. It initially drew up a guest list comprised of only United Nations member states. This first guest list included Tonga, Fiji, Samoa, the Solomon Islands, Kiribati, Tuvalu, Papua New Guinea, Vanuatu, the Federated States of Micronesia, Palau, and the Republic of the Marshall Islands. The publication of the list elicited a swift regional reaction and a rapid game of catch-up for an administration earnestly trying to engage a region, that by its own admission, the U.S. had neglected for too long.
The summit was the pinnacle event among a suite of U.S. announcements and initiatives to counter China’s bold moves in 2022. Beijing’s moves included a security deal with the Solomon Islands signed in March and then an attempt in May to create a “common development” program between China and most Pacific Islands Forum (PIF) members. In the words of then-President of the Federated States of Micronesia David Panuelo, what China put on the table in May was “the single-most game-changing proposed agreement in the Pacific in any of our lifetimes.” All of these moves brought the United States back to region in 2022 at a speed and at levels not seen for eight decades.
In their haste, the Biden administration had overlooked including all the members of the PIF, the peak regional body. After protests, the guest list was hastily revised. France’s overseas territories, New Caledonia and French Polynesia, which were admitted as full PIF members in 2016, were duly extended invitations. Also extended belated invitations were Niue and the Cook Islands. The summit “family photo” included the French tricolor displayed along with the flags of its two Pacific territories, as well as the Cook Islands’ flag. Niue’s flag did not make it into this lineup until the second summit in 2023.
The status of the Cook Islands and Niue presented unique challenges. Unlike the French Territories (though New Caledonia’s status is now a matter of serious contention since the May 2024 riots that we will return to in part 3 of this series), or the United States’ three Pacific territories – Guam, the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas, and American Samoa – the Cook Islands and Niue have a different, ambiguous and evolving status that required some deft U.S. diplomacy to accommodate.
The Cook Islands and Niue were once New Zealand colonies that on gaining their independence in 1965 and 1974 respectively became “realm states” in free association with New Zealand. This free association relationship initially endowed New Zealand with considerable residual powers. New Zealand enjoyed foreign relations, defense, legislative and judicial appeal powers with regard to the two realm states. In exchange, Cook Islanders and Niueans were granted New Zealand citizenship. This provided the means for the circulation of populations between islands and diaspora communities in New Zealand, which vastly outnumber populations in the home islands. 17,500 Cook Islanders reside on the home islands versus 60,000 in New Zealand, and around 90 percent of Niue’s population lives in New Zealand, with about 1,600 on the home island.
The realm state model was an innovative answer to the particular circumstances of a decolonizing Pacific that allowed for small islands to stay connected to larger metropolitan economies – and their educational and health systems – while bolstering New Zealand’s geopolitical power in the South Pacific.
In 1962, New Zealand’s former U.N. Trust Territory of Western Samoa made a clean break from New Zealand. It was the first Pacific nation to gain its independence, though Samoa opted to remain part of the British Commonwealth without the British monarch as its head of state. For the Cook Islands, the free association model offered an alternative path that gave both New Zealand and the Cook Islands government and its population the ongoing benefits of close association.
The U.S. and three of its U.N. Trust Territories took the 1965 Cook Islands/New Zealand model as inspiration for the compacts of free association (COFAs) that came into effect in the 1980s when the Republic of the Marshall Islands, the Federated States of Micronesia, and the Republic of Palau gained independence from the United States. Unlike the Cook Islands template, these COFAs granted special U.S. work, residency, and social service access privileges to COFA citizens, which disentangled the citizenship complexity currently challenging the NZ-Cook Islands relationship. However, it should not be overlooked that the COFAs include a termination mechanism (see section 204 (d)(1)). It is quite conceivable that in the current red-hot geopolitical climate, this could be activated.
Long before the 2022 U.S.-Pacific Islands Summit, the Cook Islands began refining its national status, greatly diminishing New Zealand’s role in its affairs. Now New Zealand’s role is essentially to assist on request in both states. For over 20 years, the Cook Islands has declared itself “sovereign” and “independent,” though the U.S. had not recognized this. Niue, which marks 50 years this year since it transformed from a New Zealand colony, continues to describe itself as a “self-governing state” in free association with New Zealand.
Following the 2022 U.S.-Pacific Islands Summit, the U.S. declared it would “recognize Cook Islands and Niue following appropriate consultations,” which led to the establishment of diplomatic relations at the second summit, in September 2023. By contrast, China celebrated 25 years of diplomatic relations with the Cook Islands and 15 years of formal relations with Niue in December 2022.
The U.S. moves have propelled Cook Island ambitions to become a U.N. member, and therein lies a significant problem. What happens to islanders’ New Zealand citizenship if this assertion of sovereignty is achieved? Though keeping its concerns muted, New Zealand’s government maintains that New Zealand citizenship cannot coexist with U.N. membership for the Cook Islands. In 2023, the New Zealand government stated that there was “no issue” with describing Niue and the Cook Islands as “states,” but they are not “fully sovereign states or members of the United Nations” because “the people of Niue and the Cook Islands are New Zealand citizens.”
Not everyone in the Cook Islands is in favor of the current push for U.N. member status because it comes with the risk of losing New Zealand citizenship and all the complications that will entail for Cook Islanders. Such a momentous decision, which will disrupt the lives of the population greatly, should be put to a referendum, some leading politicians have argued. To decouple entirely from New Zealand seems to be a very unappealing prospect when all the practicalities are weighed.
Is there another way? The Cook Islands case is shaping up as a harbinger for future Pacific Island expressions of statehood given the predicted challenges of staying on home islands with rising sea levels. Many Pacific leaders are already putting plans in place to allow for migrations out of the islands, like the Falepili Union Treaty signed between Australia and Tuvalu in late 2023 that will allow every Tuvaluan migration rights into Australia. Such offers of hosting climate-displaced populations, a circumstance that will increasingly also impact the U.S. and New Zealand, should not entail second-class migrant status in the host country. Is it possible for nations like the Cook Islands to have dual nationality through retaining free association links and complete membership of the U.N. with all the attendant benefits of full sovereignty?
Cutting such a path might also create a way ahead for another Pacific pressure point: the Autonomous Region of Bougainville (ARB) and its ambitions to break free from Papua New Guinea. Is a free association relationship, one that creates an independent state of Bougainville as its citizens overwhelmingly voted for in the 2019 referendum, but that keeps close relations with Papua New Guinea, including citizenship rights, the way ahead? Currently, there is a frustrating impasse with the Papua New Guinea parliament despite the ARB government releasing a draft of its proposed independence constitution in May 2024 and the clock running down on the 2027 deadline Bougainville President Ishmael Toroama has set for independence to take effect.
In the third part of this series on the evolving Pacific map, we will look again at Bougainville, New Caledonia, and the return of colonial powers to the Pacific due to the heightened geopolitical tensions. We will also look at how all of these regional developments have impacted U.S. relations with its Pacific territories as the status quo is being called into question, and change is being pushed.