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EQUALITY ACROSS THE PACIFIC

 A presentation by the Expansionist Party of the United States
295 Smith Street, Newark, New Jersey 07106, United States
Phone: (973) 416-6151
E-mail: XPUS@aol.com

The Pacific island territories of the United States (Guam, American Samoa, and the Northern Marianas) suffer institutional discrimination and perpetual neglect. They are colonies of the one country that should never have had colonies. And they have been colonies for decades. Indeed, Guam and American Samoa were both acquired in 1898, so have suffered colonialism and paternalism for a hundred years. The U.S. dishonors the Founding Fathers and the Constitution in maintaining permanent 'territories' and 'commonwealths' that are never to be permitted statehood. That disgrace must end. Only through statehood — not "Commonwealth" or any other neo-colonial arrangement — can the people of U.S. territories achieve true equality under law.

Guam. Though Guamanians are legally regarded as "citizens" of the United States, they have no voting representation on the floor of Congress, nor even one vote for President for the 150,000 people of Guam. That is politically and morally wrong.

American Samoa. More wrong still is the status of "American" Samoa (a contradiction in geographical terms, since America is a continent thousands of miles from Samoa; Samoa is part of Oceania, not America). Samoans are not even "citizens" but only "nationals" of the United States. That means they somehow "owe allegiance" to a nation unwilling to grant them citizenship! How, pray, does one owe allegiance to a nation that discriminates against him?

Treatment of the people of the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands (which the United States controlled for nearly 40 years, was even more unjust still. The people of the Trust were forbidden even U.S. "nationality", and it was made very plain that the U.S. would not welcome them all into the Union. The Trust suffered four decades of gross neglect in the name of noninterference with island cultures. Much of what little development as was promoted was instituted largely to silence critics in the United Nations, and even then without a clear or consistent purpose.

Northern Marianas. On November 3, 1986 the people of the Northern Marianas were finally made citizens of the United States, upon their ratification of a "Commonwealth" arrangement of limited political union with the United States. These "citizens" have no vote for President of the United States and, like Guam, only a nonvoting representative in Congress.

In both American Samoa and the Trust, U.S. administrators have been unable to harmonize two very different impulses: preservation and modernization. Under the first, the islands were to be living anthropological museums, 'protected' from the contaminating influence of the outside world. Never mind that the outside world will inevitably intrude upon all the islands of all the world, all efforts to exclude it notwithstanding. The U.S. was going to 'protect' the people from modern preventive medicine, education, media, etc., to let them enjoy their traditional way of life — or was it all an excuse for racist neglect? To prevent the people from being confused, the U.S. did not even allow the people informed choice but kept them in the dark about what modernity offers, as to permit them only the past.

Now and then, however, and especially as time began to run out on U.S. control of the Trust, the second impulse rose to primacy: modernize enough to allow the people to run their own affairs in a modern, interconnected world subject to the forces of international economics and politics.

The two contradictory strands are seen in political grand schemes. At one point the U.S. tried to promote a single Congress of Micronesia to unite the various island subgroups and tribes, but ultimately gave up on such a plan and reverted to a peculiar mix of Western and traditional governments in a multiply splintered patchwork that to the outsider — and perhaps to islanders as well — made no sense at all.

The results of the United States' confused and contradictory policies in the Pacific have, not surprisingly, been mixed, but largely negative. One has been the progressive depopulation of Samoa, as people who don't want to live in an anthropological museum devoid of individual and employment opportunity fled to Hawaii and the mainland. Today, three times as many Samoans live in the States as in American Samoa! Another result was an appalling distinction for Truk: one of the world's highest suicide rates for young males.

Now the U.S. has withdrawn from the Trust, breaking it up into several tiny entities that are abysmally un-self-sufficient and grossly overgoverned. A neo-colonial military tether is to keep them from doing too much harm to one another, though they can do as much harm as they wish internally. The United States can forbid the several descendant microstates from pursuing external policies that their governments may regard as being in their interest but which might compromise U.S. strategic interests. For instance, they may not invite a foreign power to create a military or, especially, naval base in their territory. Will these microstates prosper? Or might they not collapse into social and economic calamity? or settle into permanent economic depression?

Righting Decades of Wrong

"Citizens" and "nationals" not permitted full rights of citizenship by virtue of Territory or Commonwealth status suffer legal inequality. Such inequality is always wrong. The only way to achieve equality is for Territories or Commonwealths to become states, in themselves or as part of larger states.

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One obvious combination would be merger of Guam and the neighboring Northern Marianas. Together, however, they would still have too small a population to be persuasive to Congress. At about 200,000 residents, combined Guam and Northern Marianas would have a population only marginally smaller than Alaska's 225,000 at the time of statehood (1959). But the population of the Nation then was only 180 million — as against some 270 million today.  Consequently a larger population, not smaller, would be needed to impress Congress today than 40 years ago.

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The next most obvious combination, then, would be to add in American Samoa, another U.S. "territory" (colony) in the Pacific whose embarrassing status should also be resolved to statehood. That would add another 55,000 people, for a population of 255,000 for a new Micronesia state to be created from the three present colonies. That is, however, still not much compared to the average state, which has over 3 million people.  Big states have vastly larger populations (California, on the order of 32 million; Texas and New York over 18 million; Florida 14 million; Pennsylvania 12 million).  It would be morally wrong and politically undoable to give a tiny Pacific Island state ("Oceania"? "Micronesia"? "Pacifica"?) the same two votes in the U.S. Senate as California or New York. How, then, could a Pacific state based on the Mariana Islands (of which Guam is a geographical part) ever get enough population to warrant statehood on its own?

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If the fractious other remnants of the Trust Territory (Palau (also called "Belau"), the Federated States of Micronesia, and the Marshall Islands) could also be persuaded to join with Guam, the Northern Marianas, and American Samoa, that would add another 200,000 people, for a state population of over 450,000. Though that would be substantially greater than the population Alaska had even at 1980 and approaches the present population of our least-populous state, Wyoming (less than 500,000), this might still not be enough to persuade Congress to grant statehood, because:

1. Alaska and Wyoming are relatively huge in land area, whereas Micronesia is tiny (in land area, though the ocean area controlled by Micronesia is about as large as the conterminous U.S. — the "Lower 48"), so Congress may not see much room for growth of a Micronesian state's population as might in time bring it more in line with that of the average state, over 3 million;
2. fifty, the complement of present states, is a very round number, to whose sound we are accustomed; adding a state forces a change of usage and design of the flag, and upsets the number of representatives in Congress (the wonderfully round number 100 in the Senate, the 435 figure for the House that was established in 1912). Congress may resist making such big changes for so small a group. While frivolous reasons like these for denying legal equality may seem absurd, history is often determined by such trivia; and
3. Congress, if pressed over legal equality for so small a population, would much more likely prefer another way, which would not upset current arrangements and emotional attachments: that is, simply to merge all these 'specks of land' into our existing Pacific island state, Hawaii — the "Big Hawaii" proposal of the 1960s. The Senate would remain 100-strong; the House would continue to have 435 members. And nice, round 50 would remain the number of states.

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Best Solution. We believe that it would assuredly be in the best interest of all Pacific islanders to accept and actively pursue merger with Hawaii. Honolulu is already the metropolis of the Pacific, and a great many Pacific islanders flock to it for higher education, medical care, an island-style but modern good life, etc. Hawaii is small enough a state that the tiny populations of the various islands could make themselves felt in its state legislature. Traditionalists among Hawaii state legislators to be elected from the new counties would strengthen forces working for a renaissance of Hawaii's own indigenous culture, and cross-pollination from other traditional societies would produce an even more vibrant Pacific culture.

A single state government for all U.S. Pacific territories would provide a framework in which developmental, environmental, and other projects of common concern could be worked out among islanders on a region-wide basis first, then presented to the Federal Government with greater force, the force of unity. Whereas Washington could easily ignore a request from Guam or American Samoa alone, it would have a harder time refusing a proposal from Big Hawaii, affecting a huge sweep of the Pacific Ocean.

Merging with Hawaii would give islanders a chance to modernize life to the extent they want it modernized while retaining the best of island traditions in the low-pressure atmosphere of the relatively laid-back State of Hawaii. As a practical matter, this may be the only way out of the inequality our Pacific territories suffer, because "Commonwealth", "free association", or outright independence would subject these fragile entities to great-world pressures none might be able to cope with.

Dangers of a Weakened Tie to the United States

Buffeted by pressures from great powers — e.g., for fishing rights for Japanese trawlers, then landing rights for Taiwanese commercial vessels, then bases for the Japanese coast guard or French or Russian or Chinese Navy — a tiny island nation might seek to abrogate present security arrangements on the basis that it agreed to such arrangements only under duress; then embark upon an extremely dangerous course of trying to use one major power to extort special favors from another. It is hard for microstates to win such a game.

Great powers are very good at attaching strings to aid. Japan, France, and other nations eager to exploit Pacific biological and mineral resources might subject microstates to irresistible pressures. Micronesia could become an arena for great-power competition — and conflict. That could prove dangerous not only to the security and culture of the island nations themselves but also to world peace generally.

Lessons of the Past

Like Guam, three other island areas, the Philippines, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, were acquired from Spain after the Spanish-American War. Guam, the Philippines, and Puerto Rico were all taken as colonies; Cuba was refused, in part because Congress had entered the war with a high-minded declaration (the infamous 'self-denying Teller Amendment') that it was waging war not to steal Cuba but to give it its freedom; in part because Spain wanted the U.S. to assume Cuba's sizable public debt; in part because Cuba spoke Spanish, was almost wholly Catholic, and had a substantial black population, all three being regarded as seriously negative considerations by the Congress of the time.

By 1934 it was clear that giving Cuba its independence was a mistake, since it suffered gross misgovernment and descended into dictatorship. With that example clearly in view, President Roosevelt and Congress decided to give the Philippines its "freedom" too! Not surprisingly, the Philippines also descended into gross misgovernment and dictatorship.

As is the case with most countries (and individuals, for that matter), the U.S. doesn't learn much from history so makes the same mistakes over and over. "Commonwealth" is an alarming example.

The Philippines was made a "Commonwealth" in 1935, the first step on its path to "freedom" in 1946. The U.S. never considered the Philippines for statehood, for reasons of distance, race, and religion (in that the two major religions of the Philippines, Catholicism and Islam, are regarded with hostility by the Protestant ruling class of the United States, now as much as in 1898).  Americans did create extensive infrastructure, establish political institutions for self-governance, and teach English to a significant minority of the population. But the Japanese invasion, occupation, and destruction prior to evacuation of Japanese forces destroyed much of the hard-built infrastructure. Nonetheless, the original schedule for Philippine independence was kept, and in 1946 an ill-prepared Philippines became an independent nation. It should hardly astound that the Philippines could not hold on to its democracy but suffered grave economic setbacks and political shocks, not least from Communist guerrilla movements. After limping along for a couple of decades, the Philippines fell to the "presidency" of Ferdinand Marcos, which hardened into a 20-year dictatorship. It has taken the Philippines over 15 years to re-establish a stable democracy, but 30% of its people are poor even by Philippine standards, and some are desperately poor, living in lengths of concrete conduit or scrap-lumber shacks at the edge of vast public dumps. Plainly the people of the Philippines have not profited from "freedom". Or is it that "freedom" and "independence" aren't the same thing? (For more on the Philippines, see our presentation, "Private Action for Philippine-U.S. Union".)

When President Franklin Roosevelt embarked upon his plan to give the Philippines its "freedom", he had before him the example of Cuba, which had already fallen under one dictatorship (of Gerardo Machado y Morales) and was well on its way to a second, under Fulgencio Batista y Zaldívar. Roosevelt should have known better than to think the Philippines, which descended from the same centuries-long colonial empire, Spain's, could succeed as a democracy after only a few decades of tutelage from a neglectful U.S. At least he didn't have any idea that Cuba could flip-flop from a right-wing dictatorship to a Communist totalitarian state 25 years later. But when two presidents and Congress decided to give the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands its "freedom", and perhaps put Guam on the path to "freedom" too, they had the experience of both Marcos's Philippines and Castro's Cuba before them as powerful warnings of the risks such "freedom" entails. They nonetheless gave most of the Trust independence, and some people in Congress are thinking seriously even now of giving Guam independence.

Puerto Rico — Disaster, Progress, Stagnation

Puerto Rico was a miserable, neglected colony in the 1940s, with extremely high levels of unemployment on an extremely low personal income base. Under the leadership of a Puerto Rican reformer, Luis Muñoz Marín, the U.S. and Puerto Rico invented a new style of "Commonwealth" by which Puerto Rico would take control of most aspects of its government and finances and attempt to lift itself up "by its own bootstraps". Thus in 1952 began "Operation Bootstrap", in which an internally self-governing Puerto Rico lured investment from mainland companies by offering tax moratoriums, development loans, etc., in exchange for commitments to build factories, refineries, and such to employ locals. Puerto Rico was given the right to elect its own legislature and governor, and to control its own finances. U.S. customs duties, income taxes, etc., collected on the island went to Puerto Rico's treasury, not to Washington. With those resources and a new stress on education and self-help, Puerto Rico made major strides over the next two decades. Then something happened.

"Operation Bootstrap" ran out of steam. Tax moratorium periods ended, and when the tax incentives ran out, so did the mainland investors. Sometimes they closed down operations in one locality and moved to another that was willing to bribe them with a new tax-free decade. Other times, they just closed down island operations altogether and left thousands of people unemployed. Puerto Ricans were forced to face the unpleasant fact that the population and economic base of the island was just too small (at over 3 million people) and too remote from major markets to justify regional operations of size. And so Puerto Rico started to slide back into economic depression.

With that backslide came intensification of old problems, and the invasion of new ones. A host of poorly educated Puerto Ricans who had fled the island for New York City and other mainland areas found that their lack of education and English language skills made them virtually unemployable. They sank into the despair and violence of slum existence, then returned to Puerto Rico, disheartened, stripped of self-respect, dependent upon drugs, and inclined to the prostitution and crime into which they had fallen on the mainland. Puerto Rico's rates of alcoholism, drug addiction, and crime shot up and remain high to this day. Official unemployment figures have often hovered above 15%, unofficial unemployment at 25%, and youth unemployment and underemployment as high as 50% and even 60%. The "showcase" that Puerto Rico had seemed in the 1960s became an embarrassment. (For more information on Puerto Rico, see the homepage of the Puerto Rico statehood movement.)

With the dismal example of Puerto Rico before them, the people of Guam and the Northern Marianas have recently been offered Puerto Rico-style "Commonwealth"s of their own!

Commonwealth NO! Statehood YES!

Guamanians, Samoans and other Pacific islanders must reject all attempts to force them out of the Nation, to fight their way in, instead. They should become missionaries for statehood and secure the longest-range interests of both the U.S. and Pacific islanders by persuading the people not just of the former Trust Territory but also of the independent and semi-independent areas of Micronesia, Polynesia, and Melanesia to join the Union, not chase after the dangerous phantasm "independence" in a world so interdependent that not even the greatest economic and political powers are truly independent.

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The islands of the Pacific constitute a chain of steppingstones to the Philippines, Australia and New Zealand, all of them areas of great cultural affinity to the United States that might eventually be drawn into the Union as well. Statehood for the steppingstones would throw the mind's eye of the United States thousands of miles farther west and south than it now reaches (Hawaii), and set us upon a wiser and more far-sighted foreign policy in regard to the Pacific Rim.

Pacific islanders are heir to a long tradition of national expansion which saw the United States spread first across a continent, then across oceans to work toward a world more united than disunited, more inclined to look for mutual interests and common causes than for a fight.

The moment you put a border between two groups of people, however, that moment do you create the potential for serious disputes, even warfare at some future time. International rivalry for fisheries and the resources of the seabed bode ill for the microstates of the Pacific. Only a recognition that the people of the Pacific islands are as much a part of the modern world and its trends as are the people of Manhattan Island will prepare the Pacific for the new relationships that must develop if the "Pacific" is to live up to its name in perpetuity: a sea of peaceful cooperation and development, not a huge arena for playing out the rivalries of great commercial and military powers.

We encourage Guamanians, Samoans and other Pacific islanders to work for permanent union with the United States, by joining the Expansionist Party or by exerting themselves separately for the first-class citizenship that statehood alone endows. See the presentations "Private Action for British-U.S. Union", "Private Action for Philippine-U.S. Union", and "Private Action for Canadian-U.S. Union" for ideas on how an individual remote from centers of power can reach out and persuade powerful politicians and media to his cause. Then act to promote equality across the Pacific.

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