Envisioning Kanak Independence: A Cosmopolitan Future?

Abstract

This article considers how the notion of independence might be reconciled with a cosmopolitan view of the world through an examination of how the Kanak nationalist movement in New Caledonia has envisaged the place of the non-Kanak majority in a future independent nation-state. Drawing on literature that criticises the over-bearing weight of Western universalism in cosmopolitan discourse, I show how Kanak independence calls for a moral re-centring of the political community that undermines French claims of a monopoly on universalism. In doing so, I explore how the Kanak independence movement engaged with the critique that it was intrinsically racist and exclusive and it’s wrestling with the question of how to affirm their identity as a people rather than as an ethnic group. I argue that Kanak views of independence reaffirm the possibility of locally constructed cosmopolitanisms.