She applied the "Page 99 Test" to her new book, Unsettling Sovereignty: International Law, Nuclear Weapons, and US Extraterritorial Power in Postwar Oceania, with the following results:
Imagine that a foreign country has colonized your homeland and begun using parts of your lands and waters to stage nuclear detonations. Now imagine that an explosion went terribly awry, contaminating land, sea, and air and sickening hundreds of your people. Where would you go to seek help? This is the situation in which Marshall Islanders found themselves in 1954.Visit M. X. Mitchell's website.
Marshallese politicians turned to the United Nations Trusteeship Council, which was tasked with oversight of US colonialism in their homelands. Page 99 of my book transports readers to the United Nations headquarters in New York city, where Trusteeship Council representatives from India, Syria, Haiti, El Salvador, the Republic of China, the USSR, Australia, New Zealand, France, Belgium, the United Kingdom, and the United States considered how to respond to a Marshallese petition seeking to halt nuclear blasting in their archipelago.
The Marshallese petition was morally powerful, but legally weak. Although one of its authors, Dwight Heine, elegantly presented the petition’s requests to the Trusteeship Council, the Marshall Islands’ status as a US-governed, UN “strategic” trusteeship, limited Islanders’ possibilities for further action. Because the archipelago was part of a US dependency and not an independent member state of the UN, Islanders could neither raise resolutions there nor file lawsuits at its International Court of Justice. For the petition to have legal purchase, a UN member state would have to take up Islanders’ cause.
The Indian delegation, led by lawyer V. K. Krishna Menon, stepped up, presenting a carefully and narrowly drawn resolution to refer the question of the legality of nuclear blasting in a trust territory to the International Court of Justice. Amid Cold War tensions, the United States delegation had expected that Soviet representatives would seize on the Marshallese petition for political gain. They even thought a neutralist state like India might take some action. But they had not foreseen this legalistic tack. They feared that a narrow, legally-focused resolution could more easily gain support than a political broadside. Characterizing India’s move as “clever and subtly vicious,” they scrambled to muster lawyers and formulate a response.
The page ends on a cliff-hanger: What will the United States do? How will other states respond? And how will the outcome affect Marshall Islanders’ search for justice?
Page 99 encapsulates several core questions I explore throughout the book: Who had a voice in international politics after World War II? What were the affordances and constraints of various forms of sovereignty and dependency? How did peoples subjected to colonialism assert their sovereignty and make themselves heard? What kinds of power did legal claims and arguments generate and what were their limitations?
This page begins to unfold the peculiar legal conundrum faced by residents of the US-governed UN Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands: Sovereignty over their ancestral lands and waters had been so ambiguously divided between the US and UN, that it was unclear whether their grievances against US rule could be adjudicated in any forum. As page 99 shows, their rights in the United Nations were limited to petitioning in the Trusteeship Council. States like India could and did stand in, but they often did so for their own reasons. So while petitioning was a politically powerful tactic, it did not result in an international trial.
The rest of the book explores how Islanders and their allies marshaled legal claims and arguments about US nuclear blasting to political advantage, both in negotiations and in US and Trust Territory courts from the 1950s through the 1980s. It is a story of creative legal maneuvering, false starts, and, ultimately, some stunning reversals.
Not every argument or claim was successful—at least if measured through court wins and losses—but all of them mattered. To find out why, pick up the book, journey with me to beautiful archipelagoes in the north central Pacific Ocean, and follow Marshall Islanders to the United Nations and beyond as they challenged US power and forged their postcolonial sovereignty.
--Marshal Zeringue
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