ABSTRACT
Nationalism in the Pacific is a challenging topic, not least because some would argue that there is nothing to discuss. Jeffrey Clark argues in his contribution to this book that national consciousness is virtually non-existent in the part of the Highlands from which his material is drawn, if not in other areas. Papua New Guinea is hardly an unimportant case, but it is also an extreme one; neither Vanuatu nor the Solomon Islands have consistently experienced the crises of state power and threats of separatism that have faced PNG for some years. Other Pacific islands nations, such as Samoa and Tonga, are relatively coherent politically, and Tonga could even be said to meet traditional, Eurocentric criteria for nationhood, in the sense that political, ethnic, and linguistic boundaries coincide (if the fact that many Tongans have migrated to New Zealand, Australia and the United States is overlooked). This coherence, however, might largely be attributed to prior ethnic distinctiveness and an insular situation, rather than the effective transposition of the modernist model of nation-building to a western Polynesian environment.
