We integrate or we perish’:
Eric Williams, Forbes Burnham and the regional integration movement
By Cecilia McAlmont
Stabroek News
June 26, 2003
About a week from today, on the 40th anniversary of the first Heads of Government Conference and the 30th anniversary of the signing of the Treaty of Chaguaramas which brought CARICOM into being, the Heads now 15 in number as against 4 that were present at that first meeting, will meet in Jamaica to chart the way forward for the Caribbean Community including the CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME). Probably the most important Agenda items on their working document would be firstly, the fine-tuning of mechanisms to make CSME operational with the possible accession of Trinidad & Tobago, Barbados and Jamaica in 2004 and other member states in 2005 and beyond, secondly, the establishment of the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) which will be a critical component in the operation of the CSME. The achievement of these goals will help to partly bring to fruition the vision of the creator of the Heads of Government Conference, Dr. Eric Eustace Williams. It also seems an appropriate time to re-examine the role played in the integration movement by two Caribbean leaders - Eric Williams, the leader of Trinidad and Tobago which was the capital where the first significant attempt at integration was made and Forbes Burnham, leader of Guyana when it became the headquarters of the CARICOM Secretariat.
Eric Williams and later Forbes Burnham participated in the last three processes which form a continuum on the road to regional integration. The first of these was the West Indies Federation. Eric Williams played an important role in that debacle. Indeed Williams’ political career as a leader of a party in government coincided with the birth of the Federation in 1958. Forbes Burnham entered the regional integration scene in 1964 shortly after he became Premier of Guyana as a result of a coalition. These two men had overall contrasting personalities. Eric Williams was an introvert, reclusive, almost secretive but an original thinker. Forbes Burnham was a natural extrovert, full of bonhomie, a doer and a superb orator. But they had several things in common. Their characters were fashioned in the same clay of a British elitist education which they received, a decade apart, but during the same period of political and intellectual ferment that was transforming Great Britain in the years between the two World Wars. Eric Williams was a historian, academic and teacher. Forbes Burnham, though a lawyer by training, had a keen sense of history and, like Williams, was cognisant of the legacy of colonialism on the personality of the Caribbean man.
Consequently, they both resented the psychological thralldom of that colonial legacy on our psyche and saw regional integration as a means of breaking it. Yet they themselves gloried in what they had achieved under colonialism’s tutelage. It was a contradiction which played itself out in the nature of the mechanisms they supported to achieve regional integration. They also accepted with little modification, the paradigms, theories and models of integration that were designed by and for the exploiters as a means of achieving integration among the exploited. They roundly condemned the regional characteristics of fragmentation, insularity, individualism and parochialism which hampered progress towards regional integration. However, they ignored the fact that, as Caribbean men themselves, they too were nurtured in and therefore products of that same environment. Their denial of that personal legacy was the basis of one of the main weaknesses in the attempts to forge regional integration.
What Williams and Burnham had in common too, was that broader concept of what constituted the Caribbean region. They were both pragmatists and the role they played in the regional integration process was determined by the different political realities of their individual circumstances. Both men have been highly praised for their vision in conceptualizing and supporting the regional integration process. However, examination of recent and not so recent assessments of the instruments created to achieve regional integration revealed that, despite their avowed commitment, what Williams and Burnham played a major role in creating was a set of handicapped children. The last surviving sibling, the Caribbean Community and Common Market which by Treaty revision in 2002 became the Caribbean Community including the CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME) was in fact abandoned as a toddler and virtually left to fend for itself for seven years.
The West Indies Federation can be regarded as the first of the three challenged infants birthed in the pursuit of regional integration during the 20th century. Its first and most significant handicap was that its main framers were not the local politicians but the expatriate representatives of the mother country who had a very narrow view of Federation. According to Gordon K. Lewis, “they saw the West Indian leaders as primarily, Her Majesty’s Ministers overseas not as a vanguard of a West Indian regional nationalism.” It explained the reason why they invested the office of Governor General, not that of Prime Minister, with most of the panoply of federal power. It was against the latter that Eric Williams protested most vigorously. The second handicap was that it was a political Federation which tried to encompass several different levels of economic integration. Hence the framers were faced at one go with the problems inherent in ensuring freedom of movement and free movement of goods, a Customs Union and federal taxation. Most of these matters were simply left, in typical West Indian style, to be dealt with later. Williams described the birth of the Federation thus “The infant nation was presented to the world in swaddling clothes made in the United States of America out of the made-in-Britain shroud of colonialism.”
One of Eric William’s main reasons for supporting what he knew to be a handicapped instrument was precisely because he saw Federation as the means whereby the shackles of colonialism which seemed to pervade the very core of our being, could be broken. Additionally, Williams realized that the islands had a long history of insularity which was rooted in the development of their economy and trade patterns. He envisaged that integration through Federation would help to counteract the legacy of fragmentation, insularity and parochialism. He realized too that the ultimate goal of independence could only be achieved, at that point in time, through the acceptance of Federation. Over a period of two years while the debate over the nature and scope of the Federation was being discussed, he tried to introduce those modifications which he felt would make the Federation a more fitting instrument for the achievement of integration. However, his attempts soon brought to the fore the differing perceptions of Federation and with it the insularity, jealousies and rivalries he hoped Federation would cure.
The federal infant was being suffocated by the very ideas it was birthed to help eradicate. In the end, it was that insularity and the selfish pursuit of individual national interests which led, first Jamaica and later Trinidad and Tobago to withdraw from the Federation thus leading to its demise. The point is well stated by Gittens when he wrote that “it (Federation) failed not just because the leaders of the separate units were too nationalistic or insular, but more intrinsically because their insularism was so strong, as to totally emasculate the institution and powers of the federal government so as to render it incapable of surviving.” It then therefore, was the neglect of the infant while its parents squabbled over its development as much as its “USA made swaddling clothes” and “British made colonialist shroud” that smothered it. Like many abused and undernourished children of the developing world today, as in the past, Federation died almost a year before its fifth birthday.
The role of Eric Williams in the debacle of Federation was therefore an ambivalent one. He supported Federation because he saw it as the means of achieving integration but at the same time recognized its shortcomings as the mechanism for achieving integration. He aired his dissatisfaction about the defects and when he was in a position to do so, he tried to modify them. However, his own action in withdrawing Trinidad and Tobago from the Federation, underscored the fact that he had been fashioned in the same clay and driven by the same jealousies of which he had accused others.
In the next article the focus will be on the beginning of the Conference of Heads of Government, the arrival of Forbes Burnham on the regional integration scene and the coming of CARIFTA
In the previous article, the focus was on the personality and background of the two Caribbean leaders Eric Williams and Forbes Burnham and the role of Williams in particular in the Federation debacle. The focus of this article is on the Conference of Heads of Government, the arrival of Burnham on the integration scene and CARIFTA, the second handicapped sibling of the integration movement.
The Conference of Heads of Government was one of the most important creations in the pursuit of regional integration. Its creation underlined the role of Eric Williams as the visionary of the integration movement. While still basking in the euphoria of leading his country into independence on the heels of the breakup of the Federation, Williams, conscious of the truism that the best way to proceed after a disaster was to get right back into the fray, was ready with a new proposal to move the integration process forward. Herein lay both its strength and its weakness. Williams clearly did not spend enough time examining the lessons to be learnt from the failure of the Federation. He also did not spend enough time reflecting on, or for that matter, giving the other Caribbean leaders time to reflect on their collective and individual roles in that failure and what they could do to prevent a recurrence. Therefore, they came to the table with all the baggage of the past.
Williams invited his colleagues to attend what turned out to be the first heads of Government Conference, to discuss the creation of a Caribbean Community. The grouping was to consist of the 10 units of the late Federation, the three Guianas and all the islands of the Caribbean Sea - both independent and non-independent. This was to be extended as soon as possible to include the non-British Caribbean countries. But it was not to be extended to all of them. The Republic of Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic were not to be included. Over the years Williams continued to change his definition of the wider Caribbean. It was the difference in perception of Federation which had led to the confrontation between Williams and the Jamaican leaders. Similarly, in the early years, perception of the scope and purpose of the Heads of Government Conference again led to confrontation. Williams stated that the first two conferences had gone well but felt the third was an anti-climax and “did nothing to restore the Conference to such status as it undoubtedly had in the first instance.” While it was Williams’ idea to use the medium of the Heads of Government Conference to resuscitate the integration process, it was also his actions that stymied the process.
Forbes Burnham hosted the Third Conference. He succeeded Cheddi Jagan as the Premier of British Guiana after the 1964 elections. Jagan had attended the first two Conferences and his opposition to British Guiana joining the Federation was known. In 1956, Williams had argued passionately that the solution to the Caribbean’s problem of overpopulation and migration was to include British Honduras and British Guiana in the Federation. He stated that the inclusion of British Guiana was essential to the economic development of the British Caribbean without which Federation would be “no more than a Federation of legislators as it once was of lunatics.” Burnham, as a member of British Guiana’s Legislature in 1958, had argued with equal passion, but to no avail, for support for his resolution that the colony should join the Federation. He argued, among other things, that British Guiana would not only derive tremendous economic and other advantages from that association, but more specifically, it could be the means whereby the country could gain independence.
When Burnham hosted the Third Conference, Williams was aware that the Conference would be in the hands of someone who was close to the leaders who had attended the last two Conferences and with whom he, Williams had had bitter confrontations. He could now retreat strategically knowing that the person to whom he had yielded and allowed to share the space, also shared his vision of a wider Caribbean involvement in the integration process. Burnham’s statement at the opening of the Conference confirmed that view. He stated: “I shall merely content myself with inviting you to consider another stage of regional cooperation at economic and other levels ... We are on the Northern Territory of the South American continent and perhaps I am permitted to give you another dream that I have had for years and that is to get an even bigger community embracing all of these countries.
During the ten years before the creation of CARICOM, the Conference of Heads of Government continued to provide the main stimuli for the regional integration process. Many areas of functional cooperation, the main success story of the integration movement had their genesis during this period. It was during the meeting of the Seventh Heads of Government Conference that what should have been the first step of the vision of Williams and Burnham to include the non-British Caribbean in the integration process was taken. At that meeting, Guyana, Barbados, Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica agreed to establish diplomatic relations with the Republic of Cuba. Williams’ support of this decision was a volte face but as it turned out, only a temporary one. In fact Williams continued to be ambivalent in his attitude to Cuba. However, among the most significant developments during this period was the coming to fruition of one of Williams’ dreams - the establishment of a free trade area - CARIFTA in 1968 and five years later its widening into CARICOM.
CARIFTA was designed to be an interim arrangement. Although Williams was not one of the signatories to the Dickenson Bay agreement, CARIFTA’S economic rather than political focus was in keeping with the vision which had inspired his convening the first Heads of Government Conference. One writer stated that CARIFTA would be the means of achieving true economic integration in the Caribbean because it was an indigenous creation. This proved to be incorrect. Its only indigenous characteristic was the men who proposed it. But it was the same men, with the same mindset who had been involved in the debacle of Federation. According to Pollard, CARIFTA was fashioned with little modification along the lines of the European Free Trade Association (EFTA). Because the units of EFTA were basically at the same level of economic development, they were in a position to reap equitably the benefits which were associated with membership of a free trade area. On the other hand, while the member countries of CARIFTA were all underdeveloped compared to members of EFTA, four of the larger member states were more developed than the other potential members. This immediately raised one of the perennial questions of economic integration as to how the costs and benefits of economic integration would be shared. Herein lay the main handicap of this second attempt at integration. There were different perceptions between the MDC’S and LDC’S as to what constituted the benefits of integration, and how quickly the benefits from CARIFTA would start accruing. Consequently, the discussions of CARIFTA. Council meetings were just as acrimonious as the discussions on Federation had been. The contradiction was again evident. Despite their declarations to break the shackles of colonialism and achieve economic independence, the now black and brown leaders of the region were again using the mechanism of the white exploiters to achieve their goals.
Both Williams and Burnham constantly reiterated the fact that although the economic benefits of CARIFTA were important, they supported its creation because of the other equally important benefits to be derived from the association. A significant one was the strength and stature the region would achieve from speaking with one voice at international forums. However, others saw the motives of Williams and especially Burnham in mainly political terms. One writer conjectured that Burnham needed regional support for a government system opposed by Britain and the United States. Another opined that the Guyana government was anxious to improve its political position and legitimise its American-backed seizure of independence. In the case of Williams, one writer stated that in the wake of the 1970 February revolution in Trinidad and Tobago, Williams probably for the first time began to feel some political insecurity. Additionally, there was a new sense of economic insecurity as foreign reserves diminished and the economy seemed to be in a state of decline. The framers of CARIFTA had sought advice and had been informed before its establishment that, even as a temporary measure, CARIFTA would be woefully deficient as an instrument for forging economic integration. They were presented with what seemed to be a more viable alternative which was deliberately ignored. Consequently, CARICOM its reincarnated sibling inherited both its strengths and its weaknesses.
The focus of the next article will be the creation of CARICOM and the contribution of Williams and Burnham to 1985.
The 24th regular session of Caricom heads had not yet commenced when the first of these articles looking at Eric Williams’ and Forbes Burnham’s involvement in the regional integration process was written. When the conference concluded a few days ago the main items on the agenda had been tackled and important decisions taken albeit `in principle’ which may well have elicited mixed reactions from the two stalwarts of the integration movement under discussion. In the last article, the focus was on the origins and role of the Conference of Heads of Government and Carifta. In this article, the focus is on the creation and assessments of Caricom and especially the impact of those hiatus years when the heads did not meet until the death of Williams and Burnham. It will conclude with some brief postscript 1985 comments.
Caricom replaced Carifta as the mechanism that would `deepen’ the integration process. Assessments of Caricom done within seven years of its creation and those done more than two decades later reveal the nature of the instrument, which the two leaders played such an important role in creating. Duke Pollard examined the institutional and legal aspects of the community the very year of its creation. He concluded that Caricom was institutionally weak but if the teething problems were solved then its prospects for survival were evenly balanced. Twenty years later his criticism was much harsher. Among other things, he agreed with the West Indian Commission that “decision making was the `Achilles heel’ of the integration movement” other authors also assessed Caricom from different perspectives. They examined the less than honourable motives of the leaders, Caricom’s strengths and weaknesses and the dissatisfaction of the LDC’s. Many of the criticisms and counter proposals were in keeping with the theories and models of development current in the 50s, 60s and 70s. However, all of them turned out to be either inapplicable or inadequate for the needs of the structurally traumatised economies of the Caribbean. Their prediction of Caricom’s early demise proved to be premature. Caricom has survived even if it has not always prospered.
In the West Indian Commission Report, it was admitted that the gradualist and halting nature of the approach to regional integration resulted from the “trauma of federation’s failure”. However, they highlighted several technical successes, which were cumulative but “desperately slow and halting”. It is, however, in evaluating the many areas where Caricom has fallen short that the mixed legacy of Williams, Burnham and the other leaders is revealed. Firstly, the general disenchantment of the people of the Caribbean with the integration movement is discussed. Despite all the promises from Chaguaramas (1958) to Chaguaramas (1973) via Georgetown, the people of the region, for the most part, still live with unemployment, poverty, deteriorating health services and inadequate educational systems. They are still hassled at each others’ airports while foreign tourists enter unmolested.
They are not permitted to move from one member state to the other seeking jobs. The critics of the integration movement refer to the disconnection of the Caribbean people from the process. Ironically too, so did the leaders. But they were the problem. They demanded integration in the name of the people but it was seldom for the people. When Eric Williams spoke to the people of Trinidad and Tobago at the `University of Woodford Square’, they were there as students to be educated not citizens to be consulted. In the heyday of Cooperative Socialism in Guyana, Forbes Burnham made no pretense of consulting the Guyanese people. Additionally, the treaty showed ambivalence on issues that clearly touched on issues of vital importance to the peoples of the region. It therefore begged the question as to who were to be the primary beneficiaries of integration - the politicians or the people.
In his July 3, 1973 speech, on the occasion of the signing of the Treaty of Chaguaramas, Williams identified many of the dilemmas of developing countries. Yet he, Burnham and the other leaders, based on neo- classical development, models geared to the needs of developed countries in order to integrate the fragmented economies of the region. The unequal nature of the development between the MDC’s and LDC’s indicated that some member countries would experience the negative rather than the positive effects of integration. The special regime put in place for the LDC’s did not adequately cater for their needs. The constraints on freedom of movement inherent in Article 38, the conscious choice of leaving the implementation of decisions necessary to advance the progress of regional integration to individual member states which made it possible for national interests to override regional ones, all pointed to the fact that despite their utterances, the leaders were not yet prepared to make the compromises necessary in pursuit of their stated goals. Despite what Williams said in that speech, the Caribbean leaders had not learned that well. The neo classical model which they had cogged made certain basic assumptions about the economies of the participating units in a Customs Union. The assumptions were inapplicable to the resource poor, underdeveloped economies of the small Caribbean countries. Another handicapped child had been birthed.
Caricom’s progenitors were very conscious of its handicaps but clearly expressed their intention to carefully monitor its growth and development. But the parents reneged on their promise and abandoned the infant while it was barely a toddler. It would be naïve to contend that the failure of the heads to meet for over seven years was alone responsible for the lack of satisfactory progress towards integration. However, it certainly aggravated exogenous factors like the oil crises and the onset of the debt crisis. It also left the way clear for endogenous problems to fester and spread unhampered. For example, the unworkable nature of the unanimity rule for critical decision making in both organs and institutions would have soon become obvious if the heads had met more often in the 1970s.
Additionally, many members used the absence of sanctions for non-compliance with decisions to renege on their obligations, among others to pay their dues. Had the heads met regularly, that and other problems faced by the LDC’s would certainly have surfaced. It would have forced the heads to take corrective action twenty years earlier than they did, if they were serious about their desire for meaningful integration. Most certainly, Guyana’s abuse of the Caricom Multilateral Clearing Facility would have been contained if not stopped and the reality of ideological pluralism recognised and maybe less acrimoniously accommodated. The potential for gridlock entrenched in the veto power of individual members and the so important secretariat - rendered all but impotent in a bid to ensure impartiality - would also have soon become evident and hopefully dealt with.
The feeling was, though some writers disagree, that the failure of the heads to meet should be laid squarely at the door of Eric Williams. Some reasons given were his concern over the rise of political objectives in Guyana and Jamaica, disillusionment over the future of Caricom in the light of Venezuela’s political and economic incursions into what Williams may well have regarded as his turf especially given the generosity he had shown with his petro-dollars to members of Caricom. He was also fed up with the incompetence of some of the Caricom leaders and became bitterly disappointed when Jamaica backed out of the smelter deal.
In the case of Forbes Burnham both his supporters and detractors ascribed political motives to his commitment to the cause of regional integration. A former minister stated that the Caribbean was central to Burnham’s thinking and to his foreign policy, However, foreign policy and domestic policy were two related aspects of national policy. Foreign policy was about serving the national interests. In a recent work one author dubbed Burnham’s initiative in respect to the regional integration process as `merely posturings to divert attention from growing unpopularity at home.” However, an examination would reveal that his actions, in light of his restricted options, were no more or less self-centred than those of other Caribbean leaders, including Williams.
Burnham made several attempts to get the heads to meet. However, it as clear that whatever leverage and influence Burnham had possessed after the signing of the Treaty of Chaguaramas, had disappeared under the disapproval of the new group leaders of Caricom many of whom were fiercely opposed to his ideological orientation. Especially after the assassination of Walter Rodney, Burnham no longer commanded the respect or had the influence and moral authority to persuade anyone to attend a Heads of Government Conference. By the time the heads met in Ocho Rios in 1982, the year after Williams’ death, Burnham’s influence in Caricom had reached its nadir. Despite a brief resurgence due to the Grenada problem, the situation remained the same when he died in 1985.
Perhaps it is not without significance that the initiatives to transform Caricom have taken place after the death of these two leaders beginning with the signing of the Grand Anse declaration and eventually the findings of the West Indian Commission under the title of a Time For Action. It has formed the basis for many of the changes and new instruments introduced over the last several years. More than any other change, however, the creation of the Association of Caribbean States reflects that wider vision of the Caribbean which both leaders but particularly Eric Williams had envisioned.
