ABSTRACT
The recent growth of export-driven Asian economies has inspired visions of a coming “Pacific Century.” Historian Paul Kennedy has predicted that East Asia will be a future core of world power (Kennedy, 1987: chapter 8). Others describe this prospect as “coming full circle,” since China was once before a locus of global economic activity (Jones et al. 1993). Yet this optimistic image of the Pacific basin as a booming, integrated economy has been questioned by some scholars.1 In fact, when viewed from the Island micro-states at its geographic center, the region shows far more incoherence, limitations and inequities than might be expected. Like survivors in the eye of a hurricane, the small, insular societies surrounded by today’s Pacific Rim “dynamism” have developed strategies that enable them to preserve some traditions while selecting what they want from the outside. In doing so, they offer alternative models for “peripheries” in an interdependent world.2
