Tonga

From Western Sahara we go to the other side of the world, to the Pacific, where a scholar is concerned about Tongan sovereignty and specifically the sovereignty of women. Since “sovereignty” is a concept that is applied to nations and not to individuals, I’m not sure what she means when she says that “we aren’t perhaps as sovereign as we like to claim we are because there are plenty of restrictions on women’s agency and power and rights that allow for that type of sovereignty.”

I was most interested to read her comments about Tongan sovereignty, which, of course, she linked to Westphalia, and, therefore, Europe. “So it stems from Europe,” she explains; “It’s not a sovereignty that is born and bred from Tonga.” Apparently, there is something deficient in the concept if it was not developed locally. I struggle to understand the meaning of this, because “sovereignty” is an abstract concept that applies, in theory, to any state. I don’t know how you could change it to create a “Tongan” version of sovereignty without either (a) fundamentally altering the concept itself, or (b) trivially altering the concept to make it seem more Tongan, without changing the basic nature of sovereignty.

The idea of fighting for sovereignty and against colonialism is all the ironic since it comes from a colonial empire that conquered vast swathes of the Pacific and imposed its own form of cultural imperialism.