Self rule in the Cook Islands : the government and politics of a new micro-state

Abstract

The Cook Group comprises fifteen small islands lying between Samoa and Tahiti in the South Pacific. They have a total land area of only ninety-three square miles and are scattered over 850,000 square miles of ocean. Eleven of them provide the home for some 20,000 Polynesians, just over half of whom live on the island of Rarotonga in the south. In 1965, after sixty-four years of New Zealand rule and as the culmination of gradual constitutional development since the Second World War, the Cook Islands became selfgoverning in free association with New Zealand. At a time when the world had witnessed dozens of colonies advance to sovereign independence, the advent of self-rule in the Cook Islands might normally have gone unnoticed. Instead, it drew considerable international attention. There were two closely related reasons for this: the status of association with New Zealand and the grant of self-government to a territory so small in terms of population and resources that there seemed little prospect of its ever achieving economic viability. The form of association worked out for the Cook Islands was not the first example of an alternative to independence for formerly dependent territories. With the approval of the United Nations others had been introduced, and had worked with varying success, in the Caribbean:: Guadaloupe and Martinique had become departments of France; the Dutch Antilles had been incorporated into the Unitary Kingdom of the Netherlands; and Puerto Rico had entered a form of association with the United States in which the term 'Commonwealth' had been translated from the Spanish Estado libre Asociado.