Before Caricom, there was the Caribbean Free Trade Area (Carifta); before Carifta there was the West Indies Federation; before the Federation, there was the University College of the West Indies (UCWI), the precursor to the University of the West Indies (UWI); and before them all there was West Indies cricket. All have played a critical role in forming the collective consciousness of the West Indian people and developing a sense of unity, no matter how tenuous at times. And all have had to face enormous challenges, many of which persist today and some of which are completely new.

If there is any one institution that can lay claim to being the principal progenitor of a sense of West Indian nationhood, it is arguably West Indies cricket. Forged on the playing fields of Bourda, the Queen’s Park Oval, Kensington Oval and Sabina Park, when we were still under the colonial yoke, cricket was a unifying force, one of the most visible and powerful means of affirming our right to equality – and eventually, our superiority. The rich history and proud record of achievement of West Indies cricket make the ongoing crisis of mismanagement and the generational shift in attitudes, which now bedevil the regional game, all the more lamentable.

The pioneering UCWI, established in 1948, became UWI in 1962, but it had already begun to mould a sense of West Indian identity and culture – “our Caribbean civilization,” as Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves of St Vincent and the Grenadines has dubbed it. But this too is being weakened, with the evolution of Mona, Cave Hill and St Augustine into national rather than regional campuses, funded as they are, in the main, by their respective host governments and accordingly subject to a certain degree of political direction. In addition, the creation of national universities in Guyana, Belize, Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago, and the sprouting of ‘offshore’ universities in the smaller islands of the Eastern Caribbean, while serving to open greater opportunities for tertiary education have also contributed to a dilution of the sense of regional belonging nurtured in the UWI system. UWI’s efforts, however, in reaching out to the University of Guyana and the Anton de Kom University in Suriname, are encouraging in so far as they reinforce the idea of a pan-Caribbean education and inter-institutional cooperation.

We all know or have heard of the political insularity and insecurities that hastened the collapse of the short-lived Federation (1958-1962), of which Guyana was never a part. Even though the ghosts of the Federation have not yet been laid to rest, tremendous progress has been made, from Carifta to Caricom, in pursuing the dream of regional unity, through as the West Indian Commission (WIC) put it in its 1992 report, Time for Action, “the joint exercise of sovereignty.”

Thus, against the backdrop of an “awareness of belonging to a West Indian home of many mansions” – a rhetorical flourish attributable to its Chairman, Sir Shridath Ramphal – the WIC spoke of strengthening existing structures of unity and establishing new ones to deepen Caricom integration.

Certain recommendations were adopted with relative speed and a fair degree of success, in particular as they related to the Conference of Heads of Government, the establishment of a Community Council of Ministers to relieve the heads of the burden of the minutiae of decision-making, and the restructuring of the organs of the community, including the Secretariat. Others were also acted upon: the Assembly of Caribbean Community Parliamentarians (ACCP), the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ) and the Charter of Civil Society were all created. But the Community Council continues to refer almost all decisions to heads, the ACCP is moribund, only Guyana and Barbados recognise the CCJ as their final Court of Appeal, and the Charter is either unheard of by most or ignored for being toothless.

Worst of all, heads failed to agree on the key recommendation to establish a commission to oversee the deepening of the integration process and to “fill the implementation gap.” The WIC, wisely recognizing that the issue of sovereignty was a contentious one, based its recommendation on the concept of “a Community of sovereign states,” stressing that far from advocating a surrender of sovereignty, it was in fact reiterating the principle of a pooling of sovereignty, as already embodied in the Treaty of Chaguaramas.

As the WIC argued, “It is the sharing of the exercise of sovereignty, not a transfer of it, that is involved in the integration process.” This then would redound to the collective benefit of the members of the community, constrained as they are by smallness and other limitations that ultimately lead to powerlessness in the international environment, for, in the words of the WIC again, “Integration is a strengthening process, not one which weakens or diminishes its participating states.”

The heads in 1992 did not so much drop the ball as refuse to stretch their hands out to accept it. It was an act of political pusillanimity that has come back to haunt Caricom time and time again over the past 17 years of sporadic progress and mounting frustration at the pace of integration. Let us hope that next week they can put national grievances aside and subsume their individual egos in the interest of coming together again for the regional good. We know what came before Caricom. Our leaders must now secure the future. It is not yet too late.