Nissology

When Islands control themselves, there is innovation and the elaboration of island high culture in monuments and, probably, other works of art and literature. When, however, Islands fall to continental control, the peripheralised Islanders become conservative, mimic their masters and become exchange-oriented, with island resources in people, materials and ideas flowing to continental cores of power and influence. An island controlling itself is a powerful engine for creativity; an island controlled by continentals is a place to abandon. The "most island" in the world is Rapanui and, there, the population created a most remarkable and monumental culture, with astounding feats of engineering science, as well as the development of a script, perhaps, even, writing. In the Pacific north of the equator and in a position of not so extreme isolation, the legendary Saudeleur dynasty created megalithic Nan Madol. As might Patton conclude with both Pacific and Mediterranean evidence, islands are places of creativity as long as they remain autonomous; islanders are innovators as long as they are free to pursue their natural tendencies, as evidenced in ancient constructions around the planet which often characterizes the early dates of human habitation of island places.

Patton (1996: 6, 24, 33), often disagreeing with his predecessors, emphasizes that analyses of Islanders and Island living mistakenly is restricted only terrestrial resources, ignoring the obvious (to him and me) surrounding resources of the sea (see also Côté 1996). Islanders owe their special position, even livelihoods, to the sea resources they know well. Patton (1996:81-2) writes in greater detail:

Islands, however, are by definition maritime environments, and one might therefore expect that the resources of the sea would be at least as important to island communities a the resources of the land. Indeed, this is true of many island communities in the Mediterranean even today. The exploitation of coastal resources may offset the effect of reduced biodiversity and resource limitation when MacArthur and Wilson (1967) see as a fundamental characteristic of island ecosystems. Most of the islands are small [Reference to figures omitted], giving all communities potentially direct access to the sea, and on the larger islands, such as Sardinia and Corsica, the earliest settlements are often in coastal areas. Contrary to MacArthur and Wilson (1967)'s model, the resources available to such communities may in fact be considerably more abundant and more diverse than those available to contemporary communities in land-locked continental areas.

In fact, it could be proposed that continentals settling an island only become islanders when they see the sea and not the land as their home. In David Steadman (pers. com.)'s study of the ancient settlement of Rapanui, for example, he observed that when the Polynesians first settled the place, they exploited the land resources, feeding mainly on the abundant bird life present on the island two thousand years ago. Gradually, as that bird life diminished substantially, the Rapanui turned to the sea and its rich resources. Fish bones replaced bird bones in the archaeological record in the first few generations as the people saw themselves in the sea and not just on the land.

As well, Islanders mostly are navigators, who venture far beyond their small terrestrial confines. They advise continental cousins how to take to the sea and how to benefit from it. And, in times past, Islanders have used their skills of the sea to control continental and other Islander access to trade routes and the general use of the sea. Bahrain island has a long history of this in the Gulf. Closer to hand, the full development of this seems to have been the Minoan thalassocracy of Crete, "an elite whose wealth and status depended almost entirely on control of the seaways on the eastern and central Mediterranean" (Patton 1996: 14). Thalassocracy of ancient times may be a feature of the not too distant future, I argue in my conclusions. But, let's get specific about Islands and look at a part of the world where many of the most famous ones are found.

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The Pacific : a 'sea of islands' and nissological examples

A central theme of this paper is that in order to understand Islands better, to comprehend their true nature and how they are perceived by Islanders themselves, one must take a Nissological point of view: the study of islands on their own terms; that one must take islands as they are and not impose continental notions on them. To illustrate my argument, I turn to examples from the Pacific Ocean, the most "islanded" part of the planet. The Pacific Ocean, largest and deepest of the world's four oceans, covers more than a third of the earth's surface, containing more than half of its free (ie unfrozen) water. The usual cartographic division is the North Pacific and the South Pacific, the line of demarcation being the Equator. In 1520, Ferdin and Magellan gave the name "Pacific" to the body of water as he first observed it as he was impressed by its calm or quiet character, one of the greater historical misconceptions in the European conquest and diaspora over the earth!

The Pacific Ocean is bounded on the east by the North and South American continents; on the north by the Bering Strait; on the west by Asia, the Malay Archipelago, and Australia; and on the south by Antarctica. In the southeast geographers divide the Pacific from the Atlantic Ocean by the Drake Passage along 68=9A west longitude; in the southwest, its separation from the Indian Ocean is not officially designated, but conventionally Papua New Guinea is in the Pacific Ocean and neighboring Indonesia is not. Apart from the marginal seas along that irregular western rim, the Pacific has an area of about 165 million sq km (about 64 million sq mi), substantially larger than the entire land surface of the globe. Its maximum length is about 15,500 km (about 9,600 mi) from the Bering Strait to Antarctica, and its greatest width is about 17,700 km (about 11,000 mi) from Panama to the Malay Peninsula. Its average depth is 4,282 m (14,049 feet). The greatest known depth in any of the world's oceans is 11,033 m (36,198 feet) in the Mariana Trench off Guam.

The Pacific Ocean is truly a "Sea of Islands", containing more than 30,000 islands; their total land area, however, amounts to only one-quarter of one percent of the ocean's surface area. The largest islands, in the western region, form volcanic island arcs that rise from the broad continental shelf along the eastern edge of the Eurasian Plate. They include Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, New Guinea, and New Zealand. The oceanic islands, collectively called Oceania, are the tops of mountains built up from the ocean basin by extruding molten rock. The mountains that remain submerged are called seamounts. In many areas, particularly the South Pacific, the land features above the sea surface are accretions of shell material. Along the eastern edge of the Pacific, the continental shelf is narrow and steep, with few island areas. The major groups are the Galápagos at the equator, which rise from the Nazca Plate, and the Aleutians in the north, which are part of the North American continental shelf.

Table 3 * South Pacific Populations, Densities & Areas

Country, State, or Territory	Population in 1995	Land Area (km2)	EEZ (000s km2)	Population Density (land)
.American Samoa	54 800.	200.	390.	234.
.Cook Islands	19 100.	237.	1 830.	79.
.Rapanui †	2 500.	166.		15.
.Fed. States of .Micronesia	105 700.	701.	2 978.	149.
.Fiji	774 800.	18 272.	1 290.	39.
.French Polynesia	218 000.	3 521.	5 030.	54.
.Guam	149 300.	541.	218.	246.
.Kiribati	78 400.	811.	3 550.	89.
.Marshall Islands	54 700.	181.	2 131.	240.
.Nauru	10 500.	21.	320.	472.
.New Caledonia	182 200.	19 103.	1 740.	9.
.Niue	2 000.	259.	390.	9.
.Northern Mariana .Islands	56 700.	471.	1 823.	92.
.Palau (Belau)	16 500.	488.	629.	31.
.Papua New .Guinea (1990)	4 042 400.	462 243.	3 120.	8.
.Pitcairn	54.	5.	800.	11.
.Solomon Islands	367 800.	28 530.	1 340.	10.
.Tokelau	1 500.	10.	290.	158.
.Tonga	98 200.	747.	700.	127.
.Tuvalu	9 500.	26.	900.	348.
.Vanuatu	164 100.	12 190.	680.	12.
.Wallis & Futuna	14 400.	255.	300.	54.
.Western Samoa	163 400.	2 935.	120.	55.
.South Pacific	6 586 554.	551 913.	30 569.	12.
.South Pacific .excluding Papua .New Guinea	2 544 154.	89 670.	27 443.	28.

Sources:
These details compiled from the Pacific Islands Population Update November 1995. The population densities are based upon figures for the last census.
The population estimates are for mid-1995.
† Rapanui (Easter Island) figures are based upon genealogical fieldwork of Grant McCall, carried out in 1985-1986 and projected at an approximate growth of 50 persons per year.

The full 23 states and territories of the Pacific demonstrate a wide spectrum of political status, from Rapanui, which is an integral part of the Chilean state, to independent states. Along the way, there are special statutes for the French territories which provide them with a kind of home rule, to the situation of the Cook Islands and Niue, whose citizens carry New Zealand passports, but who have elected assemblies for internal and, occasionally, foreign affairs.

Micronesia, except for Kiribati and Nauru, is within the sphere of influence of the United States of America and persons there have open access to their metropolitan power, though their political status exhibits considerable variation, from the total dependency of Guam (a possession) to the status of "Autonomous Self-Governing" countries, such as the Republic of the Marshall Islands.

Epeli Hau'ofa (1993a, 1993b) argues that continental dwellers see the Pacific typically as "islands in the sea". That is, dots lost in a blue mass, separated, isolated, alone. Ward (1991:19) writes: "The key features of island countries are small scale, isolation and boundedness". Kakazu (1994:4-8) brings together a good list of the conventional difficulties said to face "small island economics" or SIEs; one might take it also as a list of their alleged shortcomings, or, even, faults. It is worthwhile examining Kakazu's summary to better understand the extent of negative perception of islands, by implication also of Islanders.

Firstly, SIEs have a limit of a "capacity of transformation" as, owing to small size, they are less diversified. Secondly, as they have a small domestic market, they must be export oriented and, if successful, then become dependent upon foreign trade for their collective livelihoods. But, the list goes on, and back to small size, SIEs have a narrow, if not to say specialised, export base, both in terms of the products or services involved and the destinations, the latter typically being former controlling metropoles. If this export orientation does not take on Singaporean (Kakazu 1994: 173-188) proportions, SIEs are doomed to have chronic deficits in trade balances, which tend to be offset by Official Development Assistance (ODA), again often from the former metropole. A fifth difficulty is the problem of "discontinuities of scale in production, investment, consumption, transportation, education and administrative services". These internal imbalances exacerbate the SIEs overall. Returning to small size and, by implication, distance from larger markets and producers, transportation costs become a significant factor in SIEs development. The per unit cost is high, because the units shipped are few, and, especially with larger shipping vessels (whether by sea or air) the frequency of shipment may be low. Summarised as "transportation cost", these additions serve to increase the cost of items imported and place a premium on solid production exported. Of course, and Kakazu would be the first to recognise this (especially 1992: 55-64), SIEs dependent upon the export of services would suffer only for imported goods, not exported services where, increasingly these are delivered for little cost electronically. Seventh, SIEs typically have limited land for habitation. As development, even that fuelled by ODA and remittances, populations grow and outstrip available resources, leading to the need for a migration safety valve. Lastly, for Kakazu, there is a heavy dependence on government activity to generate income.

Lino Briguglio (1995: 1623) has conceptualised some of these elements, particularly the relationship between GDP and exports as a "vulnerability adjusted development index (VADI)", which he applies to 114 countries, including small island states. The VADI, represented in some comparative tables, is a useful summary of the main economic issues in the development of small island states which the author, coming as he does from Malta, finds not entirely a hopeless situation (Briguglio 1995: 1622). On the whole, though, it is a rare economist who finds advantage in small countries or, even, small island states. Demas (1965: 91, quoted in Kakazu 1994: 8) is one of the few, who innumerated advantages such as: "the importance of being unimportant in external commercial policy, more unified national markets, greater flexibility, and perhaps greater potential for social cohesion".

Whilst not writing about Small Island States, but simply the small states of Europe, Armstrong and Read (1995: 1230) observe the general economists belief that: "micro-states are greatly handicapped by lack of size in their pursuit of economic viability with few, if any, compensating advantages". However, these authors, both economists discover data that turns the usual argument on its head, observing that small size and a small domestic market are positive aspects, promoting Europe's small states into specialist areas such as financial services and tourism (Armstrong and Read 1995: 1230, 1231). In fact, they find that amongst the European small states and autonomous regions, economic performance is superior to the surrounding, larger entity! After a careful examination of the truth of this claim, they falter at the point of explanation, but suggest, contra the points summarised by Kakazu and Briguglio above, that smallness may have its comparative advantages, echoing Demas (above) although they apologize that such positive features are difficult for economists to handle:

Some of the likely explanations are also of an intangible nature and extremely difficult to quantify. This would include the special cohesion of many micro-states (and autonomous regions) together with their inherent flexibility, openness to change and international competition. (Armstrong and Read 1995: 1239).

The dependency of small island states may be more of a function of the economists dependency on quantification than anything inherent in such places themselves. Whilst economists rarely publish articles (or books, for that matter) doubting their algebraic models, often in conference presentations they are more candid about the fit between theory based upon numbers - regular integers, regularly spaced - than the behaviour of real human beings which, whose actions as social agents can at best be understood only as "fuzzy logic". With larger economies, the shortcomings of the economistic elegance can be obscured through sheer volume of data; with small economies, these probabilities are exposed to rather more glaring list than they are able to cope with; the cracks in the model show in high relief! Perhaps economists so decry Small Island Economies because they expose fundamental weaknesses in the models of "the dismal science"?

Anthropology, contra economics, has made much of its research and based much of its understanding on island populations. Hau'ofa, as a Tongan and as an anthropologist, argues that Islanders see themselves as living in a "sea of islands", of places connected by waterways, rich in resources, if not terrestrial, then certainly marine. Far from feeling small, they see themselves really as quite large. Hau'ofa's vision is not a map of dots, but one of islands with their EEZs shown. If one contrasts a map of the Pacific, for example, of the "dots on the sea" approach with one showing the EEZs, the contradiction is immediate. The Pacific Ocean, particularly in the south, is densely populated with huge island countries occupying a vast surface area. Take a typical "dots" example from Fairbairn, Morrison, Baker and Groves (1991: xii), which is placed on the page opposite the first page of the Introduction, which commences:

At the dawn of what some see as the Pacific Century, the many small islands of the Pacific, scattered widely over the world's largest ocean, are going through a crucial phase of their history (Fairbairn et al 1991: 1) Those economists go on to take the usual line about smallness and difficulty. By contrast, politics research Steve Hoadley (1992: 45) shows a map with the enormous EEZs outlined, where the countries involved are anything but dots.

So, even at the level of graphical representation, continental map makers conspire to diminish what islands are. And, of course, that EEZ, is allocated at only 200 nautical miles. Islanders, such as those in the Pacific, see their "sea of islands" much larger indeed! Even economist Kakazu (1994: 8) recognises: "The huge expanse of ocean surrounding these island masses may also provide rich marine resources and natural energy that can be tapped for future economic development".

Apart from this (geo-)graphical mis-representation, economists conventionally portray Pacific Island economies as dependent and fragile. The typical description of Pacific island, especially Polynesian, countries is as helpless victims, doomed forever to curry favor with the powerful for handouts in aid (e.g. Ward 1991). Economists like Bertram and Watters (1985) propose the concept of MIRAB for understanding Pacific Island, dependent economies.

MIRAB economies in the Pacific have developed over the last 30 to 40 years, from colonial export economies in the Post World War II period. MIRAB economies consist of four major components: MIgration, Remittances, Aid and Bureaucracy. To explain:

Migration is the removal of significant part of the workforce (Doumenge 1991: 229). For about 56,000 Cook Islanders in the world, only about 16,000 live in their homeland; for the 10,000 Niueans in the world, only about 2,000 actual live on Niue. This pattern is the most exaggerated for Niue (Appleyard and Stahl 1995:27). Migration itself, as these same authors show, is a feature of Polynesia, but not of the larger islands of Melanesia. The second component of MIRAB is Remittances and it is bound up intimately with migration. These are payments in cash or kind sent by migrating relatives to their kin back home. These remittances are used to finance local development, for local constructions and for educational and other expenses of family. With Samoans and Tongans being so widespread in the USA, Australia and New Zealand, this has led some researchers to call this kind of activity "the transnational corporation of kin". Lilomaiava-Niko (1993:74) writes:

Population mobility as a household strategy that is distributing its resources members of the family intra-island and extra-island is not draining a family's resources. Rather, this is a strategic response by households to varying economic resources, opportunities and constraints. The third component of Pacific Island economies in the MIRAB model is ODA, or "Official Development Assistance", more commonly Aid, and the consequent erection of a system which has to be supplied from abroad. The government sector is often said to be the largest in these circumstances and it is typically the largest employer of labour. Ignored in this, of course, is that much of the aid provided by donors is used to purchase products and services from that same donor. Thus the money really doesn't travel, but provides an indirect subsidy to the donor's economy.

In order to administer the complexities of aid, a final component is added: a Bureaucracy is erected to fulfil the requirements of accountability & the provision "counterparts" for training.

Typical of a MIRAB view of Pacific Island economies are these two tables from Appleyard and Stahl (1995: 33, 45). Now, economists readily admit that remittances are important and there is considerable research on the topic (e.g. Ahlberg 1991; Brown and Connell 1995), the picture of dependence is stressed at the expense of understanding Islander strategies. Let's deconstruct these two tables to see better what is happening.

Table 4 * Remittances and Other Income for Tonga, Western Samoa & Kiribati

Country	GDP (millions A$)	Aid (millions A$)	Exports (millions A$)	Remittances (millions A$)	Remittances as % of GDP
.Kiribati	46.9.	30.9.	3.7.	3.4.	7.2%.
.Tonga	73.7.	37.7.	15.2.	43.9.	59.6%.
.Western .Samoa	137.8.	25.7.	11.9.	48.4.	35.1%.

Typically, economists would point to the exports from these and other Pacific Island countries and argue that they constituted the "private sector". They, then, would look at income from aid and conclude that the public that is, government, sector dominates the private commercial one. However, by recasting the Appleyard and Stahl table as I have done, it is clear that remittances far outweigh other income factors for Tonga and Western Samoa. And, since all remittances are earned by private individuals and sent privately to private individuals, remittances can only be seen as the "private sector". They are income earned by the people themselves for their own use and having nothing to do with the public sector or government. Lilomaiava-Niko (1993:73) argues that the purpose of remittances for Samoans, at any rate, is affective, emotional as well as instrumental economic. Lilomaiava-Niko (1993:80), quoting Hanlon, declares: "Kinship is to the rest to what money is to the west". Va'a (1993) emphases the point by analysing migration and mobility as part of Fa'a-Samoa, the Samoan way of life.

The prevalence of remittances for Western Samoa and Tonga is in contrast to Kiribati, which I will take as a Pacific island country with low levels of remittances and migration. Kiribati, through the very local strategy of their founding President, Iremia Tabai, eschewed globalisation and modernity. He refused to get his people embroiled in more than a minimum way in a world labour economy, deciding on a more self-sufficient path. Some few I-Kiribati work on Nauru in the nearly depleted phosphate mining activity, with a few others employed on contract with merchant navies, notably on German registered ships. Cash is not a major factor in Kiribati, with subsistence affluence characterising economic life in those islands. Even tourism, so characteristic of the Pacific, is confined to limited "war tourism" from Japan, and sport fishing at Kirimati Atoll. The Kiribati solution has been to maintain a subsistence economy, supplemented by limited cash income and income from fishing agreements has been growing steadily (Hoadley 1992:111-4).

I return below to the question of tourism and its control for Islander development below. Both solutions, the export of one's population, or the suppression of demand for foreign goods, and hence the need for cash, are islander solutions to living in a globalised economy, the former followed by Western Samoa, with the latter being Kiribati's way in the world.

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Towards a Nissological Perspective on Islands

To cope with understanding the reality of island economies and their future in a world without borders, I propose that the concept of "Nissology" be employed as both a rhetorical and a political device. Nissology, the study of islands on their own terms, is a short-hand way of reminding continental dwellers that Islander reality is not Continental reality; that the Island world view is not the Continental ambience.

So, to sum up a Nissological point of view of studying and understanding islands on their own terms, for island populations, particularly those constituted as states, there are at least six characteristics that that I propose they share.

Firstly, the question of land borders for islands is usually clearer than it is for continental based countries, the shore being a natural and accepted delimiter, especially in modern cases of sovereignty.

Secondly, sea resources, in the EEZ (Exclusive Economic Zone), are crucial to island states, usually consisting of more surface area than the land resources. As far as I am aware, the most extreme example of this is the Republic of Kiribati, mentioned above, a country of 33 low-lying coral atolls, stretching along both sides of the equator. The land area for its 67,000 people is but 811 km2, but the EEZ is a massive 5 million km2, which represents 6,000 times the size of its land area. As I mentioned before, Australia, already a large island continent, becomes the second largest country on the planet due to its EEZ.

Thirdly, strategically, islands have a tendency to be claimed by continental states. Continental dwellers see islands as an advance guard of protection, or an outpost of influence.
Next, the perception of scarcity of land is mirrored in the scarcity of terrestrial (not marine!) resources, as distance from the continent increases. The more distant from a continent is an inhabited island, the more likely its terrestrial resources are to be limited, naturally leading to the extensive exploitation of the surrounding sea.

Fifth, is that in small places, perhaps more so in small island places, social relations are highly personal as Benedict (1967: 31-2) discussed in one of the first explorations of smallness in the sociological literature. More accurately, they are more intense in small populations.

Finally, migration is a major preoccupation of island states, either as emigration or immigration. This is not to say that only Islanders migrate, for continental populations have moved about, sometimes extensively, for millennia, across the seas as well as the land. Islands, particularly small ones, especially are prone to periodic migration, not as an option, but as a systemic imperative built into the nature of their ecological and social system; the consequences of their land boundedness. Due to limited land area, periodic emigration is a feature of most islands. The population expands, but the land does not. When the environment has become degraded, the population grown or both, a part of the population must relocate either to a continent or another island. This may be done by custom, or by warfare, but leave some people must, for the rest to survive. It is the very "sustainability" of the island that creates the predisposition, indeed, the need for migration (Ward 1991: 20). One might just as well look at large island states, such as Britain, to see this tendency. British populations (Scottish, English, Cornish, Irish and Welsh) have contributed surviving millions of emigrants around the former colonial world. Some =46rench writers suggest that it was the over-population of island Britain that was the major impulse for that nation's colonial and, especially, settlement impulse (see eg. Yacono 1993: 47).

So, some members of an island population must always leave. For a similar reason, land resource scarcity, immigration will be a major concern and Islanders will seek to control it strictly. Islanders fear being swamped by migrating continentals, either as the result of indenture schemes, such as Fiji, or the arrival of people from elsewhere for various purposes, such as the Northern Marianas, Guam and Saipan respectively.

This inevitability of migration means that there is something transitional about islands; they are places that are emergent. The much feared "brain drain," whereby the underdeveloped world loses its élite to the developed one, is not a consideration for small island states. The "brain drain" is an escape or overflow vent. Accompanying contemporary displacement and migration, mostly for labour, most island populations have older traditions that they came from some place else. In so far as migration, as a form of time-space distanciation, has led from the centrist character of modernity to the fragmentation of the post-modern, Islands might be said to be the original post-modern society.

That same place elsewhere might be mythological (as Hawaiki in the Pacific) or historical as in the Caribbean, and for Mauritius. The homeland is usually storied as superior to the island; it was larger and more bountiful, but people were banished or forced to flee for natural events or social ones, such as wars. It is a kind of mixture of migration story and the Biblical story of the Adamic fall from grace combined, for most island people, although the Original Sin rarely is specified.

This last characteristic, that of migration as an historical and contemporary fact, is a contributing factor, I think, to the ease with which Islanders do emigrate. Some people must always go and that is a clearly understandable practical reason for departure. And, of course, there is the option to return, ever held by the first generation of sojourners who may become settlers.

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Conclusions of a Specific Sort

The next millennium is often Eurocentrically proclaimed as "the Pacific Millennium". For the first thousand years, European civilisation focused on the Mediterranean Sea, drawing on antiquity and the great Jewish, Christian and Moslem empires that sprang from those roots. Gradually, the next thousand years shifted interest and activity from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic as wave after wave of European emigration spurted across those waters and over the rest of the planet in a vast diaspora of language and culture.

In only a few years, the next millennium is to be a Pacific one. But, more than that, it will be a global one. Our world, through the actions of government and capital, is coming together. Even as leaders of nation states compete for power and prestige, the juggernaut of capitalism diminishes borders, weakens governments and, eventually, will abolish the state as we know it today.

The two great ideologies of our century, communism and capitalism, both have as their goals "the withering away of the state". What communism failed to accomplish with Karl Marx, capitalism will achieve with free trade. Nation states try to control capitalism, to channel it, to confine it, through treaties which only legitimate governments can make. But, capitalism perseveres through global corporations and international contracts. It is unstoppable.

Nothing so much is characteristic of the modern nation state and the doctrine of sovereignty, "which endows state governments with absolute jurisdiction over a specified piece of real estate and exclusive authority over the individuals who reside upon it" (Heiberg 1995: 3). Modern concepts of sovereignty can be precisely dated in Europe to the Treaties of Westphalia of 1648, when politician, soldier and theorist combined in ideological unity on the question of one place, one ruler; one people, one government and, eventually many politicians seem to imagine, one leader! There developed over time a notion of paramountcy of the ruler (or government today) internally and an equivalence of rulers and governments externally. So, the Prime Minister of Niue with its 2,000 resident people is as much a ruler as the head of the Peoples Republic of China with its two thousand millions. As Brown (1996: 15) phrases it:

For a political entity to be considered sovereign it is necessary for it, first, to possess a government - capable of exercising effective control over a territory, allowing no domestic equals and certainly no superiors, and second, for that government to exist in a world of similar entities, each acknowledging no international suzerain, no external legitimate authority.

Now, since Bodin and Hobbes found their ideas adopted by ambitious rulers and, eventually, politicians, much has evolved in terms of international treaties and global fora where absolute 17th century sovereignty is conditional on multi-national cooperation. Sovereignty in that unambiguous sense has become modified, particularly after the Second World War when a series of North American led institutions were devised that permitted one or more states to oversight behaviour within others. A striking example of this is the conduct of "human rights" campaigns where the government of one sovereign state seeks to protect the citizens of another state.

Political sovereignty is an issue that preoccupies the political scientist and the politician, who share a common stake in the continuance of the state. But, there are increasing cries today about issues of cultural sovereignty. The 1997 meeting at the University of Malta seeks to discuss issues of cultural sovereignty, which is a matter of concern not only to small countries, but larger ones as well, be they island or continental.

There is a tendency in our contemporary world for a kind of global, commercial culture to spread from its (usually) North American nest to the rest of the planet through a variety of media channels. Whilst the principal of one ruler, one land, with us since the 17th century, is beginning to erode through large cooperative blocks such as the European Community, the tendency for the globalisation of culture in our post-modern times has been even greater.

What I take from this brief discussion of sovereignty is that small island states answer to two main features of contemporary non-island life: identity and speed. Regarding identity, as Castells quotes Hage and Powers (1992), is a society of flows, the societies of cities, where people are in constant need not simply to present themselves in everyday life, but, owing to the constancy of change, reconstitute themselves to cope with the exigencies of their lives, especially as "Knowledge Workers", a term favoured by Drucker (1994). Whilst it may be that as managers, such people have the power of control, they do not have the power of determination. Their control is contingent upon the control that others exercise in the informational arena. This constantly shifting grounds for identity in so many spheres of life, likely exacerbated by the more urban the locale of the worker, produces at once the excitement of an emergent identity in abiding development, but also the insecurity of an unanchored identity, or even series of identities in flux, as Bauman (1995) phrased it, a Life in fragments.

Shifting and altering identities has been a feature of human life for millennia and this feature alone is not what is of concern. Rather, it is the extreme pace of these required shifts which Paul Virilio (e.g. 1986, 1996) has characterised as "dromological": change and alteration are taking place at great speed. So, I argue, it is not only the shifts in identity, but the speed at which these changes are required. This speed is the transformation of space into time and the transformation of actual labour into virtual (i.e. human devised) time.

Combining the struggle for identity and hegemony of time, the high modern (Giddens 1990) self requires a place to drain this excess anxiety or, in Freudian (Freud 1955 [1914]) terms, one might almost say this narcissism of protean identity in virtual time.

In what might sound like a tourism brochure, I propose that small islands, long favoured as places for the continental dweller's holiday locale, are so because they offer a fixed identity, that of the tourist, and a sinkhole of dromos (speed). Arriving on a small island, where there is a compact community of specialist caretakers, the hospitality service industry, the continental visitor is transformed into a singular identity, the tourist, with a standard welcome, a standard room and standard facilities. This desire to switch changing for fixed identity, I propose, accounts for the international character of global mass tourism: it is a collusion between the weary multiple identity traveller and the service sector needing to offer a familiar product. Islands typically adopt the warm climate, palm tree and beach image, evening running to cross referencing their distant cousins. On Cyprus, there is a Waikiki Bar, at Waikiki there is a Capri bar and, although I have no evidence, Capri may well have its Pacific Island cross references. This cluster of conceptual cross connections serve as brick and mortar (or plastic!) hyperlinks by which a tourist can imagine travel within travel; to be in one spot that is no particular spot at all. Papeete probably is least likely to be found on the island of Tahiti; Mallorca probably left some time ago to find fortune elsewhere. Maybe it is the tourist zone, often separate from and liminal to the Islanders usual place of residence, that was the kind of place that Augé(1992) meant when he wrote about public non-lieu (non-places): those places constructed for commerce like the ubiquitous and standardised shopping mall. Waikiki is physically separated from Honolulu by tawdry light industrial suburbs, whilst Fiji has as a national policy the separation of tourist precincts from the places where local people live. On Cyprus, some villages even construct a tourist precinct distant from their habitual homes, the tourist town being only that, and there are several other examples that could be mentioned. The status of the tourist area is outside normal experience, where there are only "visitors" and "locals", these latter, at some destinations, being imported cheap labour! In the tourist submerged CNMI, there simply are not enough "locals" to go around to cater for identity and slowness seeking Japanese tourists: other Micronesians and even Filipinos are imported to become authentic "locals" (Kakazu 1995: 76, 80); Cyprus follows a similar pattern, but sourcing its locals from the Middle East and Bangladesh, amongst other places.

Substitute locals scarcely make a difference, though, to the tourist and the presence of human facsimiles are not a feature of local visitor information for obvious reasons: too many complications, and that is not what the modern mass tourist requires. It is escape from complications and dromos that has created mass tourism which in order to provide the suitable product has become simplified and standardised through numerous training schemes and institutes.

Of abiding interest in the situation of touristic development is the notion of cultural values of the small island host. Can a tourist destination be swamped by eager visitors; can a localised language and culture survive the grasping globalism of mass tourism? Many island have faced this already, and effectively quarantine their tourists in a non-place, the tourist precinct. (See above), in this way they conserve their "bonheur national brut" (Gross National Happiness), as so elegantly phrased by Poirine (1995: 276).

Tourism in the Caribbean is characterised by establishing the tourist precinct on enormous floating hotels - sumptuous cruise ships - that the tourist departs only to spend. There can be no safer form of tourism than one where the tourists themselves are confined to quarters, being let out only to perform the required economic function and, then, whisked away before they can cause any mischief!

Thus quarantined, the locals have their lives and the tourists have theirs, the twain meeting only in the market place of a simplified and constructed world. The touristic experience is only authentic when it is artificial for what the tourist seeks is liminality - escape - not the real life for which the traveller has paid so much to flee from. The tourist does not seek the Islanders real world either, by a construction of it, one that caters for relaxation, not contemplation.

The maintenance of small islands sometimes is costly, but it may be an international form of "rente". Bernard Poirine (1995) imaginatively has explored this concept for small island economies, especially French Polynesia. After going through the usual litany of reasons why small island economies cannot succeed (Poirine 1995: 11-34), he goes on to propose various ways how, in fact, they can survive in not simply a "society of well-being", or "consumption", but even prosper as a world resource in what he calls "development rent (le développement rentier)" (274), although he limits this kind of income to "natural (ie mineral)", military (bases) or "Administrative" (aid, remittances etc.), ignoring tourism and its benefits to not only one metropole, but several in a global and connected world. Tourism, I propose, is development involving "rent" in a strategy of "développement 'extraverti'" (Poirine 1995: 276).

Similarly, without even visiting, but in the course of dealing with island states and territories, there is an anti-dromological effect. Island states and territories develop quarantined zones of development, sometimes physical sites for urging special industry, sometimes only offices for development, which serve as non-lieu, which serve as liminal locales where Islander and outsider meet, but without one touching the other. Typically, in island countries, such "Free Trade Zones" are distant from where the local population normally goes and, in the case with CNMI, amongst others, the bulk of the workers there even are not locals. The space is separate, like the tourist development. In such spaces, all manner of bizarre, global and extra-island behaviour can take place, but the surrounding population remains untouched.

A tourism or a business development zone for an island state could be seen as cordon sanitaire, to permit entry, but at once to contain; where what takes place is a dialectical relation between outsider and local, but affecting neither whilst still deriving mutual benefit, rather like the meeting place that was the beach when voyager met inhabitant, both guarded, both keen to see what benefit could develop from the encounter.

The role of the small island, whether state or territory, then is to offer this refuge from identity crisis, perhaps, as the travel posters of the future might say, to participate in "sensual rituals of solidarity" in a search through sensuality and intimacy to come to grips with the "underbelly of modernity" (Shilling and Mellor 1996: 11, 13) Islands become a kind of dromological sinkhole where the constant identity shifts required by modern life can be slowed, even temporarily halted. In this sense, not only small islands may be concerned for their nissological integrity, but all 170 or so countries around today may share in this encroachment and need for solution.

But, it is an encroachment of a particular kind, for it is not an invasion by hostile forces, it is rather a consumer led adoption by citizens who believe that they are getting what they want. That is, the threats to cultural sovereignty are not really external: they only exist at our present post Cold War time because of the easy movement of ideas across the planet and people's willingness to adopt what appeals to them in a kind of "moral cosmopolitanism" (Brown 1996:22). Contemporary cultural sovereignty is being eroded in spite of still prevailing notions of political sovereignty.

Does this mean that in all this big business, big economics, even "big" culture environment that people on their little islands are to be swallowed completely in the coming decades?

I don't think so. In a contemporary geopolitics of culture, whether large continental or small island, there are alternatives to what Ely (1996: 52) characterises as the choice between particularistic Jihad and globalised McWorld; a legitimacy of difference (Moore 1996) without a crusade of localism.

It is true that there is increasing globalism like at no other time in history. This distinctive quality of this globalism is what Virilio calls its "simultaneity" (Oliveira 1996), whereby all local events become global, they can be understood, though communications, to be said to take place at the same universal time. A stock market crash in 1987 can (and did!) result in a suicide in Sydney; CNN during the Gulf War brought simultaneity to millions. The daily and nearly planetary communion of the news broadcast brings humans together in a single reality like never before. This is leading to what Castells (1996: 33-34) calls "a society of flows", which he characterises as follows:

Thus, the materiality of networks and flows creates a new social structure at all levels of society. It is this social structure that actually constitutes the new informational society, a society that could be more properly named as the society of flows, since flows are made up not only of information but of all materials of human activity (capital, labour, commodities, images, travellers, changing roles in personal interaction, etc.).

In this globalism, there are some emerging realities that are beneficial for small islands and that carry nissological importance. For if the next millennium can be given a label at all, it will be the millennium of the two thirds of the planet that is not land, but sea. Portugal's Expo '98 is the last world's fair of the 20th century and that organisation recognises a planetary aquatic future: it will celebrate the anniversary of the voyage around Africa to India of the Portuguese explorer Vasco da Gama as well as commemorate the International Year of the Oceans declared for 1998 by the United Nations General Assembly. The theme is to be "our blue planet", and intends to feature the world's largest oceanarium (Matloff 1996: 6).

And who are the experts on the waters of the world?

Islanders!

Who are the owners and caretakers of the waters of the planet?

Islanders!

Continental dwellers have polluted their lands and converted their nature into a commodity to be ravished and sold. Now, as they look at their exhausted lands, they want the happy waters of Islanders. The places where most extinctions have taken place has been on islands and it is a recasting of island biogeography that is one of the main tasks of our coming years (see e.g. Quammen 1996).

But, this time, Islanders must be at the bargaining table, not as mere pawns excluded from power. Islanders will no longer stand for being mere continental decoration on the continental cores of power. A first shot in that battle is the "Port-Louis Call in Favour of Island Countries" of 4 August 1989 (UNESCO 1991). The Law of the Sea is the Law for the Islanders! The world often finds inspiration in the stories of the ancient (island!) Greek world. Perhaps Islanders should take a lesson from the legendary King Minos and his dynasty of Thalassocrats, people who derived their power from controlling the seaways of their ancient world. Perhaps that is the meaning of the puzzling "archaic smile" that we can see on so many splendid monuments of prehistory. That "archaic smile", I suggest, is a nissological one! A smile of the successful management of the sea!

Let me propose that the next millennium is to be the island millennium, when the custodians of the planet and its resources shall be islanders. In this way, a nissological approach is a kind of Kantian "pragmatic and moral anthropology" (Kant 1974 [1800]: xvi) which may be summarised as follows:

Kant's choice, then, was one between pragmatic anthropology and moral anthropology, i.e. between a study of men with a view to formulating rules about how they can use one another for their purposes, and a study of men directed to rules about the way they can use their natural powers and dispositions to make the practice of morality easier and more effective. I ask: will Islanders as Thalassocrats contribute to formulating such rules for our next millennium, particularly when it comes to the Law of the Sea, their own domain?

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Conclusions of a More General Nature

If a man be gracious and courteous to strangers, it shows he is a citizen of the world, and that his heart is no island cut off from other lands, but a continent that joins to them.
Frances Bacon. Essays [1625] "Of Goodness and Goodness of Nature".

In conclusion, am I nominating Nissology as a valid field of study with a set of theoretical premises, key texts and identified subject matter? Whilst I would not oppose such an unlikely development, that is not my primary purpose in proposing "Nissology" as a perspective, a point of view, a way of looking at things. The starting point for Nissology is as a sub-altern discourse. That is, Nissology is a rhetorical way of framing an argument, even a political argument to produce "a systematic understanding of given historical orders by determining the social and political subject positions of the contending discourses" (Sahlins 1996: 424). Nissology is a mode of argument and of analysing islands in ways beneficial to and comfortable for Islanders.

As I discussed above, islands have not been properly understood and by highlighting the concept "Nissology" I hope that people, especially Islanders, might be provoked into thinking about such a perspective. I hope that researchers might try to bring into their analysis more positive aspects of island life, as they are experienced by Islanders themselves. That is why I offer as the definition of Nissology: "The study of islands on their own terms". The "their" in that sentence refers not to the land itself, but to the inhabitants of those places.

For example, Edvard Hviding (1994:12) writing about islands in the Solomons, but with experience of the rather different ones in the Arctic Circle proposes:

Contrary to beliefs often held about island peoples as living a life of static isolation, I will argue that a majority of the world's islanders share a variety of sophisticated cultural mechanisms for handling the outside world, which is never farther away than just across the horizon, and which may contain a never-ending variety of new peoples and things. For peoples experienced in the art of inter-cultural encounters, a new encounter may be just that: another one to be interpreted in the light of a long series of previous events" [reference omitted].

One of the reasons for proposing Nissology as a sub-altern discourse is that the tendency has been to define islands entirely in contrastive terms, mainly by what they are not: they lack resources, they are small, they are distant from continents and so on, as discussed above. Hviding's characterisation, that of openness to outside influence and inter-cultural encounters, takes islands for what they are, rather than what they are not. That is what I hope Nissology as a discourse might achieve, especially as it might be found useful as a reference point for islanders themselves. Far from being the isolate, it is the Islanders of the world who are the most open to contact and who are the most associative of peoples. Hviding (1994:14) concludes his work:
Like all cultural systems, those located on islands are not simply reactive parties open to influence, but active agents of change. If there is a specific "island effect" in cultural phenomena, it is one that promotes the awareness of and capacity of such agency, recognising the continuous exposure to new influences from overseas.

So, the new characteristics of islanders might be people who are open to the outside world, flexible in their approach to life and keen to share their wisdom with others. One can export services as well as products and manage knowledge as well as finances. Smallness becomes a virtue and the cohesion that can foster becomes a relief to harassed continental dwellers seeking escape from globalised speed and the simultaneity of managing shifting identities. Rather than living Life in fragments (Bauman 1996), people can experience life as a whole.

It may well be that in the globalised, speed devoured high modern world that it is Islanders who can be the most adapted socially to rapid change and who will hold they keys to the economic wealth of seabed resources of the future. Will Islanders in such a future world of the island dominating the continent be more benevolent to their subjects that continentals have been to Islanders over the centuries?

Let's Nissologically hope so.

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Bibliography

Ahlburg, Dennis A. 1991. Remittances and their impact: A study of Tonga and Western Samoa. Pacific Policy Paper Nr. 7. Canberra, National Centre for Development Studies, The Australian National University.

Ahlburg, Dennis A. and Michael Levin. 1990. The Northeast passage: A study of Pacific Island migration to American Samoa and the USA. Pacific Research Monograph Nr 23. Canberra, National Centre for Development Studies, The Australian National University.

Appleyard, R. T. & Charles W. Stahl. 1995. South Pacific Migration: New Zealand experience and implicat