ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the various meanings of, and the debates concerning the concept of sovereignty. It provides a perspective on how development, aid and the concepts of ownership and sovereignty mutually interact in the context of the Pacific. The chapter then explores Oceanic sovereignty; the ways in which non-self-governing islands express self-determination while maintaining constitutional bonds with their former colonial metropoles. In many ways, Tonga represents an example of the survival of an early form of Westphalian royal sovereignty: national sovereignty was built upon the authority of a powerful monarch. The French revolution of 1789 changed the concept of royal sovereignty drastically. The French revolutionaries not only decapitated King Louis XVI, but also at a conceptual level they removed the head of state as the sovereign power. The case of Fiji shows clearly that sovereignty is malleable and contested, and that gaining independence by no means guarantees that competing claims are necessarily resolved.
