In September 2017, at the 48th meeting of the Pacific Islands Forum, the political leaders of the Pacific agreed a new regional approach. They announced the way forward as the “Blue Pacific – Our Sea of Islands, Our Livelihoods, Our Oceania”. It was a remarkable moment of solidarity and ambition, charting a vision towards 2050.
Powering the vision was – as most Pacific Studies undergraduates would have noticed – a seminal essay by the Tongan scholar Epeli Hau‘ofa, Our Sea of Islands, from 1993. Stock reading for Pacific Studies students, the essay is remarkable in its prescience (most readers find it compelling, decades after its publication) and now it had been elevated to the headlines of regional geopolitics.
It’s a revealing example of how the study of the Pacific and the practice of Pacific politics often intersect.
In the wake of Hau‘ofa, Pacific politicians waxed lyrical about the “Sea of Islands”. “The Ocean is our cultural identity”, one politician riffed. “It is a cornerstone of our social cohesion. It is also the foundation of our economy and it is our road to prosperity.”
In opening the meeting, the host leader from Sāmoa spoke of the “Samoan Blue Pacific Identity”; that the ocean was the “fundamental essence of the region”; and that “the sheer fact of our geography, such as trends associated with shifts in the centres of global power […] places the Pacific at the centre of contemporary global geopolitics”. Of all the tools available to advocate for the Pacific and consolidate the region, the one chosen was story.
The “Blue Pacific” had already figured earlier that year, in June, at the United Nations Ocean Conference in New York. There, the efforts to implement UN Sustainable Development Goal 14, “Life Below Water”, had given rise to concrete solutions, a point that was particularly important to Pacific nations, which consider themselves the co-authors of that goal.
Rapidly, the Blue Pacific – a story about a place – had become a new place. Regional organisations connected through the Blue Pacific, and it became a cornerstone of diplomatic and national language. There were speeches, of course, and journalism, academic articles, music, debates and conferences.
At the 25th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, or COP25, in 2019, the South Pacific Regional Environment Programme called its pavilion “The Moana Blue Pacific Pavilion”. A sure sign of the story’s reach was that the “Blue Pacific” was appearing in the prosaic communications of the US State Department, which noted that “The Big Blue Pacific Continent Is a Force”. Which meant that it was.