Book review : Overseas territories in world affairs : linking up subnational, national and international politics

Abstract

I have a lot of sympathy for Dr Fred Constant; in a way – and I hope he does not mind me saying so – he could be my French double. He is five weeks younger than me. He is a career academic and political scientist who also served for a while in the diplomatic corps of his country. He is adamant on bridging the (still troubling) linguistic divide between French and English language scholarship, particularly on small states and territories. And he adopts a global, rather than a narrowly regional or national, focus. True to form, his 2024 book is a translation of an earlier, French language monograph on the contribution of subnational, mainly small, island jurisdictions to the understanding of contemporary politics and international relations. Now, this may sound like an oxymoron: how much could small, sometimes very small, non-sovereign island units impact on world affairs? The answer is: a lot, actually: a growing paradiplomatic clout places them amid regional tensions and great power competition, where they must permanently stave off being used as stooges and fronts for other powers, be these metropolitan patron states or ‘the new kid on the block’ (read: China). The United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea has gifted them with immense tracts of ocean and their marine and submarine resources, but they may lack the internal capacity to manage these. Their unique evolutionary paths mean that they can offer spellbinding ecological beauty and natural diversity –the basis of a burgeoning tourism industry – which is concurrently fragile and vulnerable to environmental threats and human-exacerbated invasions, despoliations and extinctions. Their far-flung locations assume the symbolic status of projecting state power – coveted as forward bastions of military might – as well as safe, detached, ‘out of sight’ fragments where certain experiments can unfold, including the testing of nuclear weapons.