Marking time in Port of Spain
Editorial
Stabroek News
March 5, 2003
Nearly three weeks ago, a Caricom Summit Conference was held in Port of Spain. It met on 14-15 February. It was preceded on 13, February, and in terms of news impact overshadowed, by a Consultation on Options for Governance to Deepen the Integration Process.
The so-called consultation had started out as an initiative of Prime Minister Manning to hold a conference on Political Unity in Trinidad in January. The Manning initiative sent shockwaves through the region. Prime Minister Patterson of Jamaica was quick to dissociate himself from it. The espousal of anything which smacks of Federation is apparently still viewed in Jamaica as bordering on political suicide. On the other hand Manning’s call was generally welcomed by the OECS leadership with, in addition, strong support coming from Roman Catholic Bishops of that grouping. Symptomatic of the eventual outcome was the way in which the Caricom Secretariat, no doubt alarmed by Patterson’s stand, quickly emasculated the Manning proposal by translating it into a concern with regional governance - which could be made to mean anything you wanted it to mean. The columnist Rickey Singh immediately remarked that the reformulation into a concern with governance provided the occasion for West Indian “ole talk”.
As it turned out the discussion on political unity in the context of the summit itself mainly focused on implementing the defining elements of the Caricom Single Market and Economy (CSME) by 2005. Implementing the CSME has been a commitment made and remade at every summit for as long as one can remember. This time there was at least the realisation that there was a non-negotiable deadline as the Free Trade of the Americas (FTAA) was due to enter into force by 2005.
The search for political unity, effectively submerged under the so-called Options for Governance, was eventually entrusted to an expert group which, to quote the language of the communiqué, would “carry the process forward by undertaking an examination of the proposals submitted and to make recommendations on how best to perfect regional integration”. The Group will be chaired by Dr. Ralph Gonsalves, Prime Minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines whose affirmation of the urgent need for political unity of some kind is well known. Other “experts” already named to the Group are the Prime Ministers of Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago.
Nothing more clearly reveals the anxiety not to appear too committed than the fact that what is clearly a Prime Ministerial sub-committee of the summit is being disguised as a Group of Experts! The summit appears to have confused itself by references to Federation and Confederation. As has already been noted editorially there exists in the European Union a “model” which while attracting important political gains does not significantly diminish sovereignty - witness the separate and independent positions taken by Member States of the European Union (EU) on the issue of the possible war on Iraq.
Although the two concerns, one with the rapid implementation of the CSME and the other a possible advance towards political unity, are complementary, the “visions” pushing them forward are quite different. The CSME derives from the initial inward-looking strategy out of which the Caribbean Free Trade Area (CARIFTA) was conceived leading on to the Common Market and now CSME as the dominant component /sector within the community. It was believed at the time of the foundation that an industralisation strategy based on import substitution behind tariff walls could provide the impetus for rapid social and economic development. There has certainly been some growth and development. However intra-regional trade remains a very small part of Caricom’s total trade which is intractably directed to traditional foreign markets. Now that the acknowledged strategy has been changed into export-led growth with its significant dependence on external capital and technology, it is increasingly difficult to maintain the CSME against unwarranted penetration by extra-regional imports as for example in the recent case of the US rice milling investment in Jamaica.
Far more threatening to any meaningful existence of the CSME are the pressures of global processes of liberalisation as they will be embodied in the FTAA and the forthcoming Regional Economic Partnership Agreement with the EU which will insist on elements of reciprocity. It is for consideration whether the concessions made by the USA at the FTAA Ministerial Meeting in November are sufficient to keep the CSME viable. More penetrative still are the Trade Rules of the WTO which pay little respect to juridical sovereignty. The summit communiqué recognised the need for the maintenance of consistency across Caricom’s various negotiations with the FTAA, the European Union and in the several fora of the WTO. It may be wise for Caricom to hold a Special Summit to review the three sets of negotiations not only in terms of maintaining consistency but in terms of their impact on the viability of the CSME.
While the CSME is for the time being the final outcome of the inward-looking strategy which inspired the foundation of the regional movement, the concern with political unity and the need for institutionalising it, as reflected in particular in the utterances of PM Manning and PM Gonsalves, is by contrast outward-looking and is responding to external circumstances which threaten the viable survival of Caricom States.
The threats include not only the pressures of liberalisation as noted above but a range of other shaping factors including international perception of the Caribbean region as no longer of geo-strategic significance but in mainly negative terms as transit ports for narcotics, as including countries with high rates of infection in the Aids pandemic and as a major source of immigrants.
In addition, there is the dismantling of global arrangements which developing states, including Caricom States, had sought to put in place so as to secure from the international system the security and resources with which to give meaning to the judicial sovereignty which they had achieved. Thus the developing states had secured commitments within the United Nations that funds equal to a very small percentage of GDP would be made available annually by developed countries. At present, economic assistance has fallen sharply with assistance to Africa, where there are nearly all of the least developed countries, cut by half. With similar intent, norms to ensure against intervention and interference in the affairs of a sovereign state were enshrined in a UN Declaration. Now, there is the doctrine of humanitarian intervention often admittedly, necessary in circumstances of civil war and widespread abuse of human rights but with the doctrine being susceptible to being invoked to support intervention for the removal of lawful regimes. Capping it all is the bypassing of the UN in the name of a so called right to preemptive strikes.
In this context some regional leaders have begun to perceive that the assertion of separate sovereignties may signify little. Dr. Vaughan Lewis, distinguished academic, one time Director General of the OECS secretariat, former Prime Minister of St. Lucia, now Professor of International Relations at UWI, St Augustine recently summed up the Caricom predicament succinctly as follows:
“Friends, the world we live in today requires more, not less cooperation among ourselves. As we gradually lose the protection that we have had for centuries for our exports to Europe; as, with our relatively high per capita incomes we are refused consideration of the vulnerability that comes from our small size; and as we fight a rearguard action for so called special and differential treatment against countries which insist that we must all exist on a so-called “level playing field,” we in this region have to review the whole basis of the regional arrangements that we have today. We need to decide to discard what is no longer useful. We need to rid ourselves of false concepts of a sovereignty which we cannot use as a meaningful instrument of growth and development” (Address to Annual Convention of St. Vincent’s New Democratic Party, November 2002).
Given the intrinsic disabilities of their small island states, the OECS leaders appear to be particularly aware of the looming crisis which will eventually overtake all states in the region. Short of some kind of political union, Dr. Ralph Gonsalves sees the region as headed for reabsorption with the former metropolitan countries, probably ending in colonial status. Vaughan Lewis had earlier drawn attention to former Prime Minister of Dominica the late Rosie Douglas’s call to join the European Union. This was a “cri de coeur” from a man whose anti colonial, even revolutionary credentials were not in doubt. Douglas had doubtless foreseen the situation which now threatens Dominica with the condition of a failed state.
In this context one must recall Elliott Abrams’s bitter injunction in the context of the Shiprider agreement negotiations with Caricom States. Now rehabilitated and a senior figure in the Bush administration Abrams wrote in 1996, “In an increasingly troubled region, reliance on a foreign power for security and prosperity may be the most sensible form of nationalism. And the only available foreign power is the United States”. (“National Interest” Spring 1996).
Given the “shambolic” discussions at the recently concluded Port of Spain Inter-Sessional summit are there any grounds for hoping for a serious discussion of the imperative for political unity? Composed as it is, it is unlikely that the so-called Group of Experts will advance the matter despite the well known views of its chairman, when they report at the next summit in July.
On the other, as recorded in the communiqué, there is PM Manning’s challenge. He stated in his opening address. “I now formally put on the table Trinidad and Tobago’s intention to enter into discussion with any Caribbean country willing to pursue with us the objective of Caribbean Political Integration”. Is that not the way forward, two or three or more like-minded states acting together?
After all, this was how Caricom began some three decades ago with the three Bs, Burnham, of Guyana, Barrow of Barbados and Baird of Antigua and Barbuda signing the Carifta Agreement at Dickenson Bay. Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago and the other states joined later.
