Nauru, the outsourced state

TokyoNauru, a tiny island nation in the central Pacific measuring just 21 square kilometers, has become an extreme yet revealing case study of how far the contemporary redefinition of sovereignty can go. Once, this atoll represented the epitome of Polynesian paradise: a circle of white sand and palm trees where life unfolded with almost biblical self-sufficiency. Today, however, that Eden is a memory buried beneath layers of extractive history, financial corruption, and, ultimately, a disturbing redefinition of what it means to be a sovereign state in the 21st century. Nauru is no longer known for what it produces—it no longer produces anything—but for its role as a dumping ground for the crises that major powers prefer to ignore.

The origin of this drift lies in the intensive exploitation of phosphate throughout the 20th century. For decades, Nauru lived off an extraordinarily profitable natural resource, exploited first by colonial powers and, after independence, by the Nauruan state itself. From the 1970s onward, phosphate revenues temporarily placed the country among those with the highest per capita income in the world. But this prosperity was based on the accelerated depletion of a finite asset, without any strategy for economic diversification or environmental preservation. But phosphate was not infinite. When reserves began to run out in the late 1990s, the state's business model collapsed, leaving no alternative infrastructure. The environmental cost was the final blow: 80% of the interior of the block, known as the TopsideIt was transformed into a lunar landscape, a labyrinth of barren coral pinnacles where nothing grows. With no land to cultivate, no possibility of tourism, and sovereign wealth funds squandered on disastrous investments abroad, Nauru lost the material capacity to reinvent itself. It was then that the state, in an almost desperate act of survival, realized that its only remaining commodity was its own formal sovereignty.

It is in this context that formal sovereignty began to become the last available resource. In the early 2000s, Nauru agreed to host detention centers for migrants and asylum seekers as part of the so-called "Pacific Solution" promoted by Australia, after flirting with money laundering and the sale of diplomatic passports. Canberra sought to remove the management of irregular migration flows from its territory—and its judicial system. In exchange for direct financial aid, Nauru assumed a role it had neither defined nor could politically control. Canberra needed a place far from its courts and public opinion to imprison asylum seekers arriving by sea. Nauru, facing dire circumstances, agreed to become an open-air prison in exchange for direct financial aid. In this exchange, the island doesn't export goods or services; it imports a foreign political problem and monetizes it. Australia outsources the management of the most contentious points on its border, fragmenting its legal and moral responsibility, while Nauru bears the social and reputational cost of a policy decided thousands of kilometers away. This agreement didn't lead to the creation of a productive sector or the transfer of knowledge. It consolidated a model of dependency. In some budget years, up to 60% of Nauru's state revenue has been directly or indirectly linked to these agreements. Nauru doesn't export competitive goods or services; it performs a political function outsourced by another state. It maintains its flag, government, and vote in the United Nations, but its economic viability depends on the will of an external client.

A laboratory

But it would be a mistake to see Nauru as an exotic anomaly in a remote corner of the Pacific. In reality, Nauru is the laboratory where a model is being tested that Europe is already beginning to normalize with alarming speed. Europe is moving, unevenly but steadily, toward similar schemes of border externalization. The Italian government's agreement with Albania to install migrant detention centers outside the EU is a recent and significant example. The principle is the same: to displace the conflict outside one's own political sphere in order to reduce the electoral, media, and legal costs of migration policy.

The same logic is repeated in the European Union's agreements with countries in North Africa and the Middle East. The border ceases to be a fixed line and becomes a network of subcontracted points where migration containment is delegated in exchange for economic resources or political support. When managing rejection becomes an economic activity, the central question is no longer how to govern human mobility, but who is willing to bear the cost in exchange for compensation.

The risk is not only humanitarian but also political and institutional: Outsourcing basic functions erodes the very notion of state responsibility and fragments international law. Nauru shows the extent to which this model can become structural and generate dependencies that are difficult to reverse. Once a state's viability depends on implementing decisions made abroad, sovereignty becomes progressively nominal.

The political appeal of outsourcing—lower internal costs, less visible conflict—is clear. The case of Nauru serves as a warning: Outsourcing border management may alleviate tensions in the short term, but in the long term it also means outsourcing an essential part of democratic responsibility. And once this threshold is crossed, regaining it is much more difficult than it seems.