A perusal of the Trinidad & Tobago press during the last month or so indicates a mounting, and somewhat surprising, crescendo of mostly negative comment, on the decision of the Government of Trinidad & Tobago to host the forthcoming Summit of the Americas. Oddly enough, at the time of the decision, this was not much evident. But now, across a wide spectrum of journalists, commentators, some trades unions and academics, the decision is being questioned on a number of grounds.
Some argue that a small country like Trinidad should be devoting its resources to other exertions having to do with sustaining the standard of living, dealing with infrastructural deficiencies, and with priorities of general economic policy rather than to the summit. Expression of this sentiment has grown in strength as the economy, like most others at present, has taken a downturn in the face of the global recession, and doubts as to whether the current level of public expenditure can be sustained in the immediate future. In large measure this reflects earlier doubts about the economic strategy elaborated by Prime Minister Manning as, in the last few years, substantial financial resources have come into the Trinidad economy, memories being prodded once again about the use, by Dr Eric Williams, of the resources from the oil boom of 1973 and after. For in spite of its huge wealth relative to the other countries of Caricom, the notion of Trinidad as a small, fragile country, open to sudden damage from changes in the external environment, still haunts policymakers and the population.
Other criticisms of the government’s summit initiative are more overtly political, attributing it to Prime Minister Manning’s objective of enhancing his own political image and that of his government and party, and putting his country “on the world map.” There is, of course, little doubt that the holding of both the summit, and the Commonwealth heads meeting later this year, are closely connected to the so-called 20-20 Vision programme of Trinidad & Tobago’s future, elaborated after widespread consultation in the earlier part of the 2000s, and intended to develop the country as a substantial entrepôt involved in production and trade directed at both North and South America.
In a sense the whole debate going on in the country has a somewhat parochial air about it. Little recognition has been given to the fact that other Caribbean countries have hosted major conferences, a partial objective of which would have been to enhance their prestige, visibility and attractiveness. We can easily recall the holding in the 1970s of the Non-Aligned Foreign Ministers Conference here in Guyana and the Commonwealth Summit in Jamaica, these being, in effect, springboards to a wider diplomacy then undertaken in larger spheres relating to elaborating the requirements of small developing countries, to the notion of a New International Economic Order, and indeed to drawing attention to the peculiarities of Guyana’s geopolitical situation. In Jamaica’s case too, substantial efforts were made at giving itself a visible diplomatic location in the negotiations on the Law of the Sea Conference, a spin-off of which was the choice of the country as the site for the International Seabed Authority.
Similarly, in the early 1990s Barbados hosted the United Nations Conference on the Sustainability of Small Island Developing States. Then immediately prior to, and for some time after the conference, Prime Minister Erskine Sandiford was pilloried for building a special conference centre, now, indeed, recently named after him. Further, some might even have thought that then Prime Minister ANR Robinson’s persistence in promoting the notion of an International Criminal Court as something of a will-o-the wisp, until of course it came to fruition. And beyond the Caribbean itself, it can easily be recalled that Singapore and Malta, though very small island-states, positioned themselves to play a substantial part in the evolution of the Law of the Sea negotiations, with a certain prominence being achieved as a result of the substantial intellectual contributions made by their diplomats in this specialist field. Today, of course, we speak of the “Singapore Issues” in the ongoing WTO negotiations.
So it could be argued, that much of the criticism directed at the Trinidad Prime Minister, whether in terms of his own ego, or in terms of the cost of the summit venture to his country, is not unheard of, and is perhaps without much merit. And that his initiative is in no way precedent-setting, even in respect of the Caribbean itself.
What, we suspect, is new in Trinidad’s case is, as we have hinted above, the change in the economic climate in Trinidad and a certain nervousness as to whether an economic strategy elaborated on the basis of a continuing increase in the country’s foreign reserves, can hold in the forseeable future. This naturally is giving grist to his domestic opponents, particularly in a context of Mr Manning’s electoral victory of two years ago when the opposition to his People’s National Party had expected to do much better.
But it would not be far fetched to suggest a criticism which has not been much focused upon in Trinidad itself. For the question arises as to whether the Trinidad Prime Minister, as Chairperson of the summit, has been vigorous enough in marshalling the diplomatic and planning capabilities of Caribbean Community states towards developing a more visible set of priorities of the community for the summit, given that it is being held in our region. We would have thought that, not only because we have continuing concerns about the effects of the changing international financial and economic environment on our own economic futures, but in the context of the evolution of new kinds of relationships within the hemisphere itself in the last decade, that Caribbean Community states, as the smallest of the small in the hemisphere, would have devoted some time to strategizing more specifically on our future location in the hemisphere, and the extent to which this will require more focused cooperation from the larger states, including the United States and Canada – or the NAFTA countries as a whole, Brazil and Venezuela; and relating these also to the future nexus in the hemisphere between ourselves and the next smallest grouping, our Central American neighbours, in the Caribbean Basin.
Some might say that some of these matters are being dealt with in other fora – our trade relationships with the US and Canada particularly, in forthcoming negotiations. But would it not have been worthwhile if the Caricom Secretariat had been given the charge of developing a coherent picture of our various strategies in the hemisphere, their connection to the continuing WTO negotiations which so much involve the US and Brazil for example, and the extent to which we wish our notion of special consideration for small states to be further pursued and considered by the large hemispheric countries? Do we not need to expose these considerations to the hemisphere as a collective?
We believe that as hosts to the summit, the Government of Trinidad and Tobago might have taken a more active pursuit of these more self-centred Caribbean concerns. Then, the Declaration of the Summit would not only concern the pressing global issues of the day as they relate to the hemisphere. But they would also indicate, in a more practical way than just reiterating the notion of the special needs of small states, or the notion of the security requirements of small states, some strategy or strategies, timebound, for furthering the prospects for our economic growth and development; and providing a new mandate for the relationship of these to the development institutions like the Inter-American Development Bank and our own Caribbean Development Bank.
