Naoero is a state whose interior was mined away

Naoero is a raised coral island in the Micronesian Pacific, and the republic carries the same name as the rock it stands on. On many maps the island is called Nauru. The interior was mined for phosphate. What the state still governs is above all the rim where people live, and the right to say what happens there.

12,025 people live on 21 square kilometres. There are no land neighbours and no hinterland a river could invent. What is inhabited is the coastal strip. Behind it stand the limestone pinnacles left when the phosphate-bearing soil was taken out. Yaren, the capital in the country data, is a district on that strip. Parliament and government sit there because the island has built no other seat.

The interior was the mine

Phosphate lies on raised coral islands where bird droppings have hardened into rock over a long time. On Naoero that rock was the interior of the island, not a district at the edge of a large country. Mining began under colonial administration and continued after independence. It pushed the ground where anything could grow back onto the coastal ring. A mine in a large state leaves the rest of the country in place. A mine that is the country leaves little country once the digging is done.

People live on the ring by the water. Schools, houses, the airstrip and the narrow strip of usable ground share that edge. The mined plateau is not a second city one could settle later, as if only the forest had been cleared. It is a field of pinnacles where the soil is missing. The state and the pit are the same island. The environmental question here is therefore not a department beside the economy. It is the question of how much of the republic is still ground.

Yaren has to be the capital

A capital is usually a city that grew larger than the others. Yaren is a district. The country data list it as the capital because parliament sits there and the government has its offices there. There is no second centre that could contest the claim. The island is too small for a rivalry of cities. The seat is where the coastal strip can carry a building. The office did not grow out of a market. It was placed on the rim because the middle of the island is no longer an address.

Nauruan and English are the languages of the state. Nauruan is the language of the island, English the language of the laws, the treaties and the traffic with the outside world. Two languages on so small a territory are not a wealth of provinces. They are the double voice of a republic that has to speak to neighbours with whom it shares no land border. Isolation here is not a mood. It is the political resource that remains when phosphate no longer fills the treasury.

When the rock is gone, a very small state still has one asset: the right to say what happens on its shore.

— TerraTally · Countries desk

What could still be rented

For years Naoero let Australian procedures for examining claims to protection take place on the island. People who sought protection in Australia were brought to this coastal ring so that the procedure would not run on Australian soil. That is the political use of remoteness. A state without a usable interior can still make its jurisdiction available. Whether one reads that as revenue or as dependence does not change the geography: the decision was not taken in a second city inland. There is none.

There is no currency of its own. Payment is in Australian dollars, issued by the Reserve Bank of Australia. The island's treasury thus hangs on another state's central bank. The dollar makes visible a dependence that phosphate mining hid for a time. Naoero is not poor in names. It is poor in ground that has not yet been mined away. Yaren administers what of that ground is left on the rim.

Naoero is what remains when a country and its mine are the same island. Yaren holds the office on the coastal ring. The Australian dollar holds the treasury. Jurisdiction holds the rest, because inland there is no second Naoero left.