States of mind: Micronesia and the Pacific: John Goodman reflects on the experience of the four states of Micronesia in dealing with the problems of modernity.

• Author: Goodman, John

Micronesia comprises four states spread across an area of the North Pacific the size of the continental United States. The islands, which have been the object of significant competition among the great powers over several hundred years, gained their independence relatively recently m a process vigorously supported by New Zealand, The islands remain relatively under-developed and their inhabitants have tended to resist change that may affect their values or life style. In a harsh environment, the need endures for subsistence and for subsistence culture. Individualism runs counter to the root norms that have made subsistence such an outstanding success story in these islands.

The Pacific is a place of big numbers--a third of the Earth's surface, largest economic zones, deepest submarine trenches, biggest environmental marine parks.... Everything is enormous except the land, much like the map of Lewis Carroll's Bellman, which the snark-hunting crew was very much pleased to see showed only the sea and no land.

The four states of Micronesia stretch across an area the size of the continental United States in the North Pacific but are in fact microstates--atolls and atoll formations of various types. The Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) are high forest-covered mountain atolls, the Marshalls more than a thousand sunken volcano craters where only the coral reefs rise above water, much like Kiribati, nineteen such atolls close to the Equator. Populations are also relatively small (although they are far from the smallest in the Pacific, as their leaders gently remind us from time to time: FSM and Kiribati are over the hundred thousand mark, as are the Marshalls if their US diaspora is included.)

For all this, there has been significant competition for them over two or more hundred years: Spain, Germany Britain, Japan and most recently the United States--all have vigorously sought control or political influence there. With the rise of China, a new chapter in this saga may be in preparation.

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

New Zealand has played a role too. When Micronesians gained their independence, part of the final wave of United Nations-sponsored decolonisation, New Zealand vigorously supported their efforts against the then colonial powers. And ever since, New Zealand has been in active caucus with these islands: during law of the sea negotiations; with the Marshall Islands at times on anti-nuclear policies; with Palau on marine environmental preservation and with all, today, on climate change.

Yet, after centuries of contact with the West, the islands may seem only lightly developed, if at all. Foreign aid as proportion of national budgets remains stubbornly high. How has this happened? What are the reasons? How does it all seem on the ground? Big questions: I can only try to provide impressions based on experience.

Windy departure

I left from Wellington on a windy day--thus begin the memoirs of all diplomats--and crossed to Brisbane to join the Air Nauru flight to Tarawa. The Pacific sky is immense--towering clouds like whole South Americas spiral over inky-blue seas, white-laced waves running sheer across to San Francisco. The mid-ocean atoll bursts onto this scene, as an old priest once said, like a star, an unreal image of iridescent blue, light green, emerald and adamantine ringed by bands of brilliant white sand and green palms with a final strip of grey rock and foaming surf scrumming and steaming into the air. Charles Darwin, son of another cleric, reminds us things have lasted thus for millennia, the atoll crest ten feet above the surf, the ocean floor a mere 20,000 feet below.

'Not sustainable,' says an aid expert sitting beside me--I no longer recall which institution he was from. He got two weeks or two months on the main-island. He has views on everything: the inadequacy of government statistics, twenty years out of date, he says; questionnaires, they do not receive them; overseas travel, senior people travel away all the time; reports and training, we do a lot but there is no change; there is no investment in infrastructure ... government is too big anyway, too little private sector, 80 per cent unemployment yet there are dance fests every night. The expert shrugs. He resumes reading an economic weekly--a special issue showing how globalisation has flattened the world to a single, free-market culture.

Globalisation has been washing over the atoll countries a long time--two to four thousand years if you count from when the migratory outriggers left East Asia, two hundred if you mean the Europeans. Whalers and traders visited in the early 19th century. Late in...