The conference was due to be held on 7-10 July and several eminent scholars and interested parties had been invited to participate. Arguments for and against attendance have been adequately expressed in the columns of this newspaper by commentators ranging from Prof. Bishnodat Persaud to Mr. Robert Persaud.

What seemed to have been at stake was not the subject matter, timing, venue or even the invitees. Indeed, there was a precedent for the Wilton Park Conference in the University of Miami’s North-South Centre Seminar on Guyana in November 1991 when, in the dying days of the PNC Administration, it was clear that the country was in crisis and that concerned parties needed to meet at some neutral venue to discuss how change would come.

At that time, ministers of the Government of Guyana - Winston Murray and Jailall Kissoon - met with representatives of the Opposition PPP’s Dr Roger Luncheon, WPA’s Dr Rupert Roopnaraine, DLM’s Paul Tennassee and interested persons such as Yesu Persaud, Asad Ishoof, Christopher Nascimento, and Patterson Thompson. The theme of that seminar, “Guyana at the Crossroads” is reminiscent of Wilton Park’s, “Guyana: Identifying a Way Forward”.

The question, therefore, is not whether a foreign government or organisation should sponsor a seminar or conference to examine the internal conditions of another state. This happened before and happens all the time. Wilton Park, however, was made a test case for defining Guyana’s sovereignty.

Most of the states of this world became independent only within the past four decades. All of them inherited the 19th century concept that statehood was founded on three principal rules - sovereignty, territorial integrity and the legal equality of states.

The principle of sovereignty, indeed, is the basis of all interaction between states and relations between Guyana and Britain, no matter how cordial, are based on the mutual recognition of this rule. The Government of Guyana feels, correctly, that it must be free to govern as it wishes in its own territory and this right must be respected by other states.

Based on its sovereignty, the Guyana Government feels that, without its consent, other states or organisations should not influence domestic political processes by coercing or cajoling its inhabitants to make or apply their own rules on Guyanese territory, except through established diplomatic channels. And, regardless of differences in wealth, power and population, all states are legally equal and should avoid interfering in each other’s domestic affairs.

It was on these rocks of international relations that the Wilton Park Conference was shipwrecked. But these notions of statehood are fast becoming irrelevant and obsolete, especially for poor, weak, small states such as Guyana. In recent years, it has become all too easy for international financial institutions to determine (if not dictate) conditionalities which have dire consequences on the national economy. Equally, in a crisis, security officials of foreign states enter Guyana, albeit with Government permission, to enquire into maritime narco-trafficking, the kidnapping of its citizens, back-tracking, or to conduct search and rescue or other relief operations, when the Government demonstrates its incapacity to fulfil these essential sovereign functions.

International relations have changed much since the 1960s and it would be useful to compare the penetrability of the state by so innocuous a matter as a semi-academic conference with other forms of intrusive international co-operation.

Nowadays, insistence on the formalities of State sovereignty may seem to be diplomatically correct in the short term but, eventually, may turn out to be harmful to the people who most need help.