Autour d’un Pacifique postcolonial, pluriel et plurilingue: Enquête auprès des étudiants de l’enseignement supérieur à Port-Vila sur la construction de l’identité nationale au Vanuatu

Nation-building remains a key challenge across Melanesian societies, including Vanuatu. From the origins of the new nations of Melanesia following decolonisation in the 1970s and 1980s, it was clear that creating a unifying sense of national identity and political community from multiple languages and diverse traditional cultures would be difficult. Despite an apparent greater success than neighbouring Melanesian states, the legacies of dual Anglo-French colonialism presented additional challenges to the post-independence political elites of Vanuatu. This paper presents new survey and focus group data on attitudes to national identity among tertiary students in Vanuatu, based on research conducted at the University of the South Pacific and other tertiary institutions in Port-Vila in 2010. Among other things, the survey identifies many key areas of common attitudes toward nationalism and national identity, shared by both Anglophone and Francophone Ni-Vanuatu. These include most indicators of national pride, and attitudes to the importance of respecting tradition and kastom, of citizenship, and respecting political institutions and laws. However, despite the weakening ties between language of education and political affiliation over recent years, the findings also suggest there remain some key areas of strong association between language of education, attitudes to the nation, and national identity. These findings cast new light on the attitudes of likely future elites toward regional, ethnic, intergenerational and linguistic fault lines in Vanuatu, and the challenges of building a cohesive sense of political community and national identity