The Districts That Voted Themselves Out
On 12 July 1978 the districts of the American-administered Trust Territory voted on a single constitution for a single Micronesian nation, and two of them — the Marshall Islands and Palau — voted it down. The four that voted yes are 2,700 kilometres apart, share no common first language, and have spent the years since engineering a federation designed to survive its own arithmetic.
The referendum held on 12 July 1978 asked one question of every district in the Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands: accept this constitution, or do not. It had taken eleven years to produce. A Future Political Status Commission had been sitting since 1967, a constitutional convention had worked through the second half of 1975 at Saipan, and the document on the ballot would have made a single federated country out of a chain of islands running most of the width of the western Pacific. Four districts voted yes. The Marshall Islands and Palau voted no, and that was that.
What survived the vote is the Federated States of Micronesia: Yap, Chuuk, Pohnpei and Kosrae, about 702 square kilometres of land scattered across nearly three million square kilometres of ocean, with roughly a hundred thousand people speaking at least eight languages between them, two of which are Polynesian rather than Micronesian. Yap and Kosrae are 2,700 kilometres apart. The country is not held together by geography, language or trade, none of which cooperate. It is held together by a constitution written specifically to stop it going the way of the vote that created it.
Six districts and one draft
The Trust Territory was the last of the United Nations trusteeships and the only one designated strategic, which put it under the Security Council rather than the General Assembly and gave the United States, as administering authority, a veto over its own supervision. Washington ran it from 1947 through a district structure inherited largely from the Japanese mandate before it: six districts — Yap, Truk, Ponape, the Marshalls, Palau and the Marianas — with Kosrae separated from Ponape as a seventh in 1977. In 1965 the Congress of Micronesia convened, the first body ever to represent the whole territory, and it did what such bodies do: it began asking what came next. The answer it drafted was a federation of everyone. It was already incomplete when it went to the ballot — the Northern Marianas had voted in June 1975, by a margin approaching four to one, to negotiate separately with the United States and become a Commonwealth, and they took no part in the 1978 referendum at all.
The arithmetic of who pays for whom
The two districts that walked out had the same reason and it was not sentiment. A federation redistributes, and both of them expected to be net contributors. The Marshall Islands held Kwajalein, where the United States had built a missile range whose lease payments were the largest single sum of money in the territory and which the Marshallese landowners had no intention of sharing with Chuuk. Palau, at the western end, had the smallest population of the large districts, the strongest sense of separate identity, and a calculation that it could negotiate a better compact alone than as one voice among six. Both were right about the terms. Both then spent years discovering what sovereignty costs a country of that size: the Marshalls adopted its own constitution on 1 May 1979 and Palau on 1 January 1981, and Palau then failed to ratify a compact with the United States through repeated referendums across a decade, because its own constitution contained a nuclear-free clause that the American terms could not accommodate.
A federation is an argument about redistribution wearing the clothes of an argument about identity. In 1978 two districts read it correctly, said no, and left the four poorest to work out how to live with each other.
The machinery built to hold four together
The FSM Constitution came into force on 10 May 1979 and its central device is the national Congress, which has fourteen members and two kinds of them. Ten are apportioned by population and sit for two years: five from Chuuk, three from Pohnpei, one each from Yap and Kosrae. The other four are at-large senators, one per state regardless of size, sitting for four years — and it is from those four, and only those four, that Congress elects the president and vice-president, who must come from different states. A senator elected president vacates the seat and a special election fills it. The effect is that Kosrae, with about six and a half thousand people at the 2010 census, has the same claim on the presidency as Chuuk, which had a little under forty-nine thousand. The rest of the bargain runs the other way and reverses what visitors expect: the national government holds foreign affairs, defence, immigration and the exclusive economic zone, while the states keep land — customarily owned rather than titled in all four, which is why the entrance fee at Nan Madol is paid to a traditional chief and why a reef has an owner. The four could have the sea between them because none of them could hold it alone, and none of them gave up an inch of ground. The capital was moved out of Kolonia town to a purpose-built complex at Palikir in 1989, which was itself a gesture about the national government being nobody's guest.
Chuuk's objection
Chuuk has never stopped noticing the trade. It is the largest state by population, holds six of the fourteen congressional seats, and is the poorest and worst-served part of the country: the hospital on Weno is thin, the road system barely functions, and the state government has repeatedly struggled to pay its own staff. A Chuuk Political Status Commission was established by state law in 2012 to study independence, and its case was not romantic. It was that a separate Chuuk could negotiate its own compact with the United States, on its own population, and would not be dividing the proceeds with three smaller states. A referendum was scheduled to run alongside the national election in March 2015. It was postponed. It has been rescheduled and postponed at every date set since, which tells you both that the argument is serious and that nobody in Chuuk has been confident of winning it.
Free association, and the date on it
The Compact of Free Association entered into force on 3 November 1986. The United States took responsibility for defence and the right to deny military access to any other power; the FSM received budget support and the right for its citizens to live and work in the United States without a visa, which is why there are Micronesian communities in Guam, Hawaii and Oregon large enough to change the arithmetic at home. The economic provisions were written with expiry dates, and when the first tranche ran out in 2023 the FSM negotiated a renewal worth in the order of three billion dollars over twenty years, signed that year and funded by the US Congress the following spring. The alternative was not a different partner. The country recognised Beijing in 1989 and has been courted by it hard since, but the passport privilege and the emigration valve it opens are American and have no substitute.
Forty-eight years on, the case for the federation is easier to state than it was in 1978. Four states with a hundred thousand people between them are a country with a seat at the United Nations, an exclusive economic zone the size of a continent, and enough tuna licence revenue to bargain over; four separate states of between six and fifty thousand people would be four clients. The case against it is equally easy to state, and Chuuk states it every few years. What is worth noticing is that this is a live domestic argument with a commission, a draft ballot and a postponement calendar — not a curiosity about a small place. The two districts that voted no in 1978 did the same sum and reached a different answer, and both of them are still, on paper, doing rather better out of it.