Some thoughts on summitry
Editorial
Stabroek News
July 7, 2004
They met, in the words of the poet, at a dark time, the Caricom Heads of Government whose conference inGrenada will end today. They confronted a number of overarching issues which will continue long into the future - the status of Haiti within the community; the apparent decision of the European Union to reduce sugar prices which could lead to the destruction of the Caricom sugar industry, as has already happened with bananas; the urgent unpostponeable need to restructure the community; those among others.
On the question of Haiti, the summit has been under intense US pressure to accord to Prime Minister Latortue's interim administration in Haiti, full recognition. Caricom has been side-lined by the sheer military power of the US and France. Nevertheless, Caricom retains significant diplomatic influence. In this regard US pressure must be seen as part of a widersituation including Iraq. The administration which has now taken over in Iraq is similar in origin to that inHaiti, i.e., whatever might be the veneer of independence provided by certain mechanisms, it has been nominated under US direction. The US is anxious, especially in terms of enhancing President Bush's re- election prospects, that Prime Minister Allawi's government should be given full international recognition. Caricom is clearly right in adhering to a principled position. Although a grouping of small states, its refusal to recognise the nominated government in Port-au-Prince will pose a question mark over the nominated government in Baghdad.
By contrast the question of the threatened reduction in the price for ACP sugar, including Guyana's sugar, is a matter of the utmost complexity. Several powerful factors are coming together to exert pressure for the price reduction. These are the increasing militancy of the developing world in demanding as acondition for future trade negotiations the removal offarm subsidies in the developed countries, especially the EU, the USA and Japan; the anxiety of some powerful EU countries to abolish farm subsidies before its ten new member states become beneficiaries of the scheme as it already consumes more than half of the EU's total budget; the insistent demand of huge corporations in the EU for lower sugar prices which would enable them to earn outrageous profits; and the legal case brought to the WTO by Brazil, Australia and Thailand over sugar subsidies, and which in all likelihood will succeed.
Given such complexity this matter cannot be left to the Caribbean Regional Negotiating Machinery (RNM) but will require diplomacy at the level of the heads themselves.
Although some information has already been released, one must await the summit's final press conference and communique before attempting an assessment of how the summit dealt with these answers.
The limits of the summit as the ultimate instrument of integration are now fully documented and wellknown. It is that while it can make decisions it has little capacity forenforcing their implementation. Caricomcontinues to insist and projects itself as an association of sovereign states. The head of government often finds himself in his own state, condoning the non- implementation of the very decision in which he has participated. Hence the decision last year of the Montego Bay Summit as recorded in its Rosehall Declaration to establish an Executive Commission with responsibility for overseeing in some areas, implementation. Alas, the Rosehall Declaration with its several important commitments now seems like a false dawn which has quickly faded away.
The Caricom Summit itself has had a chequered history. Caricom as such began in 1973. But no sooner had it got going than its major institution, namely the Caricom Heads of Government Conference, succumbed to internal strife. As a result of a mixture of personal and political conflicts the summit conference was not held for seven years between 1975 and 1982. This was the period when the so-called doctrine of ideological pluralism was promulgated. A number of socialist regimes in Caricom maintained that their ideological stance should not affect adversely the commitments to regional integration. But it did. This seven-yearperiod during which Caricom heads of government did not meet in conference remains like a skeleton in the closet, largely un-researched and hardly ever mentioned.
However, it was recently mentioned by Prime Minister Owen Arthur of Barbados in his Caricom distinguished lecture. PM Arthur remarked "We are therefore left to imagine what kind of studies would have been made in the development of the regional economy had the leaders of the day, who constitute some of the titans of Caribbean politics, not left Caricom to languish in its infancy."
In the years which followed, the imposition of structural adjustment programmes by the IMF has ensured that there is no difference within Caricom in systems. The summit has met regularly and the mechanism for the co-ordination of foreign policies which had also been a non-starter has been established. Moreover, with the revision of the Treaty of Chaguaramas the integration institutions were overhauled, and given new names and wider functions.
Yet there seems to be a kind of enervation, a running down of energy, a loss of a sense of urgency and of direction, sometimes bordering on paralysis, despite the increasingly threatening environment in which it is essential that integration must survive if Caricom member states are to remain viable and reasonably secure against coercion. Everything is slow-paced and indecisive. Again, as in the case of the earlier institutional collapse, one perhaps should seek an explanation within the member states themselves.
One turns again to PM Owen Arthur's lecture for illumination. It is a document which should be widely circulated. He explains that: "Buffeted by economic crisis after economic crisis, some domestic economies are elatively less prosperous than they were thirty years ago.Others, faced with the loss of trade preferences teeter on the brink of collapse. Many are compelled to deal with basic, urgent issues relating to economic survival and solvency; attention therefore turns inward, and the immediate issues pertaining to regional restructuring take second place in such a context, especially if they bring with them new financial obligations that cash-strapped governments are in no position to assume. Ironically, and as a consequence, the very set of economies that more urgently need to be integrated than any other set in the world, often find themselves unable to devote the energy and resources to the task."
But surely, although the economy is recognisably a powerful determinent, it does not wholly explain the situation of defeat and decline which pervades the region; the sense that there were better days. In this respect PMArthur observes that "...few new icons of Caribbean excellence are emerging in any field. In cricket it is as if our days of greatness and glory are behind us. There have been no Barbadian novelists or poets of late on the same plane of achievement as Lamming, Clarke or Braithwaite; no Caribbean economists of the ilk of Lewis or Beckford, no new cultural artists of the vintage of Sparrow or Marley; in the regional public service no new legends of the status of Arthur, Browne, Ramphal, Demas, McIntyre, Oliver Jackman, Steve Entage. Our regional political leaders and politicians in general appear to be modest in scope and accomplishment as compared with the titans of the past..."
It is unlikely that they are many who will challenge Owen Arthur's general assessment. What went wrong? It is possible that an answer lies in the finding of the 'Wise Men' who reported on the future of Caricom at the beginning of the eighties. They maintained that the regional movement was founded on the shared sense of a common identity, not on perceptions of economic necessity. By contrast, the European Union is a grouping of states with separate identities but motivated by the recognition that economic advantage and security for war lay in integration.
In Caricom the common identity is being rapidly eroded, and there is apparently as yet nothing to take its place, no glue so to speak, no strong recognition of the need to pool sovereignties to ensure economic survival and security for division and coercion.
It may be that the demoralisation derives from this situation of penetrated (if not perforated) identity, a result in part from the non-stop bombardment of the foreign electronic media. It is true that this kind of situation obtains globally.
But it is a matter of degree of saturation and density. But it is not only the electronic media; there are the powerful attractions of the diaspora. But most decisive of all are the political conflicts in which the balance in Indo-Guyanese or Afro-Guyanese or Trinidadian is being tipped over away from the Guyanese or Trinidadian part of the equation. And this is happening not only in Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago, but elsewhere, as for example in Jamaica, whereconflict between parties puts the national identity under strain.
Maybe at this moment in history it is this confusion in identity which partly explains this slowing in energy, the lack of clarity and the uncertain pursuit of objectives at both national and regional levels. It may be that West Indians no longer know who they are, what they want or where they are going.