In North America and Europe, think tanks, study groups and corporate retreats regularly try to look over the horizon. They are assessing how best to react to trends or developments. Thus, in a hemispheric, regional, country specific or industry context, events take place throughout the year that seek to look at diverse aspects of the Caribbean from almost any imaginable perspective.
What is striking, however, is that very few of these events are either organised by bodies in the Caribbean or held in the region itself. Rather such events, which often involve high level or influential participants from the Caribbean and elsewhere, tend to start from the perspective of the outside looking in.
Over the last few months I have been discussing why this should be with some of the region’s more influential figures in the public and private sector and why so little that is new is coming from all but a very few individuals in the region.
As with everything relating to the Caribbean there was no single or simple answer.
In general terms, there was a consensus that there was an absence of vision. Those I spoke to, argued that key establishments and institutions in the region had become moribund or lethargic and that public finance was in short supply. More broadly and perhaps more significantly they attributed the absence of creative and strong leadership across the region to the limited capacity – in small countries in particular – to address the myriad global political, economic and commercial issues that elected leaders faced on a daily basis. In part this was compounded by the ease of travel and communications and the expectation of constant availability that meant within pyramidical structures that almost every decision was referred upwards.
At a broader level it was also suggested that aspirations were changing. The desire for education that had vocation as its purpose, the relatively new-found attractiveness of the private sector, global opportunities that encouraged the best and brightest to migrate and declining interest in public service in the broadest sense, were all held out as distracting.
More deeply, some felt that the Caribbean was in a state of moral ambiguity making it harder for leadership to thrive. This, allied to the absence of any fundamental crisis, or external threat, had diminished the peoples’ fears and thus the drive and focus from which leadership and new thinking emerge.
So if this was the case, I asked, then where would the future vision in the region come from?
Some mentioned individuals in politics, academia, business and government who stood out, but there was a consensus that the ‘promise’ of the ‘golden age’ of vision and leadership that had occurred before and after independence, had evaporated. So much so that one of my interlocutors spoke about his fear that the 1960s and ’70s may have been an anomaly and that the present paucity of new Caribbean thinking may really be the norm.
Others, most notably leaders of some of the region’s largest enterprises, had a different view. They saw government and much of its political leadership as lacking the dynamism and outward looking service-oriented approach that they expected from their own employees. They worried about education and the future of the swathes of small businesses that make up the majority of most Caribbean economies. Interestingly and perhaps alarmingly they made clear that they were leading their companies out of the region to participate in investments in Europe, North and South America and further afield to countries such as India. They saw their markets, future opportunity and new sources of equity as coming largely from beyond the region. While they had no intention of abandoning their Caribbean base, their long-term interest was not in the economic potential of the region but in the much wider opportunities and profit presented by economic globalisation.
Despite this they like those in the public sector and at higher levels of academia all acknowledged that the region had to find new ways to react to change and the social and economic problems that still afflict the region.
In these conversations I asked also what the principal challenges were that required the region to adapt.
The answers were remarkably similar and warrant far more space than is available here.
In no particular order they included the need to create in short order a viable executive mechanism for Cariforum and the regional development fund if the Caribbean Single Market economy were to work. They encompassed concerns about how best the region might achieve food security and energy security. They focused on education, health care and deprivation and alternative paths to overcoming the social problems that contrast sharply with the region’s relatively advanced status.
Other concerns were observed: the seemingly inexorable rise in crime and violence. The so far little considered implications of large Caribbean-owned transnational companies whose economic velocity is faster than that of most governments; the move to first world status by islands such as Barbados or the British Virgin Islands; the very different foreign policies and perceptions of the nations in the region that trend towards integration and division at the same time; the reorientation of public thinking in economies that have become wholly based on tourism and financial services; how best to relate to the growing economic strength of Cuba and the Dominican Republic; and the need to rebalance foreign and trade and investment policy so as to take account of the changing weight of Venezuela, China, India and Brazil in the region, hemisphere and the world.
More prosaically there was sense that few understood what the implications were of managing economies based on tourism, financial services and the new agriculture that was either industrially oriented or organised to supply the consumption needs of the domestic and visitor market.
It was a list that went on.
In a region that so closely defends its sovereignty, the right to its views and chosen trajectory, these conversations left me astonished as to why there is not, at least once a year, a Caribbean located and led event that tries to address in a Caribbean context some or all of these issues.
Previous columns can be found at www.caribbean-council.org
