Text of the Week: 'How Instability Creates Stability: The Survival of Democracy in Vanuatu'

Wouter Veenendal, Third World Quarterly, 2021

Discussed by Scott Hamilton

According to the precepts of mainstream political science, Vanuatu should be a violent, intolerant place in the 21st century. Instead it is ranked as one of the freest countries in the world by Chatham House. Vanuatu's political system is profoundly paradoxical.

The country has fifty-two MPs, yet they belong to over a dozen parties. Parties form and collapse regularly, MPs frequently change their colours, and one government follows another rapidly. But out of this chaos has come stability. Vanuatu has never had a non-constitutional transfer of power, let alone the sort of coups seen in neighbours like the Solomons and Fiji. Its elections do not bring the terrible violence seen in Papua New Guinea. Its courts remain independent. What is going on?

Wouter Veenendaal is one of the tribe of northern European scholars dedicated to the study of Vanuatu. His article 'How instability creates stability: the survival of democracy in Vanuatu', which was published in The Third World Quarterly in 2021, made me feel a lot less confused about ni-Vanuatu politics.

Veenendaal notes that Vanuatu's parliament typically sits for only about a month a year. MPs spend the rest of their time in their constituencies. In a nation of largely self-governing villages and a parallel village-based court system, they can embody the state. And each MP has part of the state budget to spend. Whether they are in government or opposition, MPs are given millions to use as they see fit in their electorates. The money typically goes on local development projects. MPs party hop and jostle for power because being in government means more money to spend locally. In most of Vanuatu—the capital island of Efate is a notable exception—chiefs do not gain power by birthright, but by their ability to mobilise communities. A chief can lose support if he is deemed excessively venal, if he is incompetent, or if he violates traditional kastom. Chiefs therefore have a lot invested in MPs. An MP who fails to deliver will not be renominated for election.

Veenendaal points to demography when he explains why Vanuatu's decentralised, volatile version of Westminster politics has brought stability rather than chaos. Between them Vanuatu's people speak 128 different indigenous languages, as well as the lingua franca Bislama, English, and French. The nation is divided into many small polities. None can hope to dominate government.

Although the Solomons has many different culture and language groups, its politics have been dominated and disfigured by a power struggle between the capital island of Guadalcanal and the most populous island, Malaita. This struggle has led to coups and war. In Vanuatu, Veenendaal points out, different groups have tended to be influential in government at different times. The frequent changes of government mean that MPs from every part of the country get to hold cabinet posts. No group needs to fear the domination of another.

Vanuatu's decentralised society and bizarre colonial history have also helped safeguard democracy. In many Third World nations a small group located outside traditional society—often the military, sometimes bureaucrats—has been able to seize control of the state and retain it. Between 1906 and 1980 Vanuatu was run as a Condominium by Britain and France. The two powers ran their own courts, postal systems, and schools, and competed to see who could fly their banner from the highest flagpole in Port Vila. Ni-Vanuatu were third-class citizens.

But the 'Pandaemonium', as it was nicknamed, had some accidental benefits. Britain poisoned colonies like Uganda and Fiji by giving them oversized and ethnically exclusive armies. In other places, like Sri Lanka, it allowed one ethnic group to dominate the colonial bureaucracy at the expense of another. There was never a chance of either scenario in the Condominium. Today Vanuatu has an indigenous elite in Port Vila, whose members hold coveted civil service jobs. But this administrative elite would find it hard to capture political power.

Even by the standards of the tropical Pacific, Vanuatu is an extraordinarily decentralised nation. The anarchist archaeologist James Flexner went to the island of Erromango to work, and found that he regularly needed to get consensus approval from meetings of villagers. Flexner called Erromango a 'non-state space'. Lawyer and anthropologist Siobhan McDonnell says that in rural Vanuatu 'the state and its institutional apparatus remain a peripheral concept'. Villages rule themselves, though 'there is rarely a unified community perspective'.

Any urban elite that seized the state would, then, win a pyrrhic victory. But there is one centralising authority in Vanuatu that has been greatly strengthened by the country's reinvention of Westminster democracy. Veenendaal notes how the courts have repeatedly been called in to settle disputes between Vanuatu's politicians. In 2023, for instance, the Supreme Court had to rule on whether a no-confidence motion against Prime Minister Kalsakau had succeeded.

The motion had come after Kalsakau upset the opposition by signing a security pact with Australia & raising the minimum wage. A sick MP missed the vote, leading to arguments about whether the motion had succeeded or not. The court ruled against Kalsakau, and he was gone. The weakness of Vanuatu's governments has empowered the judiciary. That may not be a bad thing. Vanuatu's courts have punished political corruption, sending the powerful to prison. In 2016 fourteen Vanuatu MPs were jailed for taking money in return for crossing the floor of parliament. Later that year eleven were found guilty of conspiring to pervert the course of justice.

Vanuatu's other contemporary experiments—in legal pluralism, in co-operative economics and alternative currency, and in decolonising research and knowledge collection—are intentional, the outcome of debate and planning. But its model of politics seems simply to have evolved. For the first fifteen years after independence, politics were dominated by parties that represented the English and French-speaking parts of the population. The country's first Prime Minister was Walter Lini, who led the Vanua'aku Party, which got its support mainly from English-speaking Protestants.

Lini did not campaign on a sectarian basis—he called for 'Melanesian socialism', and said he wanted inter-community harmony—but his support was limited in the Catholic, French-speaking parts of the country and in areas where indigenous religions like Jon Frum dominated. In the nineties the Francophone and 'pagan' Union of Moderate Parties formed a government. But the two large political blocs soon began to disintegrate, as differences based on the colonial era became less important. In the twenty-first politics became steadily more fissiparous—and yet democracy survived.

Vanuatu has long been and remains one of the most egalitarian places in the world. Nevertheless, some ni-Vanuatu are more equal than others. Feminist activist Yasmin Bjornom points out that Vanuatu is a 'deeply patriarchal' society. Women have far less power than men. Female chiefs are a rarity.

In 2023 one of Vanuatu's most influential chiefs, Paul Robert Ravun, led a large march through Port Vila against French colonialism in Kanaky/New Caledonia. But in the same week that he marched for Kanak freedom Ravun spoke out against gay rights, saying they were incompatible with kastom. In 2024 Vanuatu's teachers staged on an extended strike, demanding better pay, and eventually won their battle. But a number of them were sacked. Vanuatu is a fascinating place and its history and culture contain many clues about human potential, but it is not some South Seas paradise.

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