By David Jessop
Is the Caribbean, as one of the region’s elder statesmen recently noted to me, about to enter the darkest period in its history since the collapse of the West Indies Federation? Does it have the will, the institutions and the single-minded focus on implementation required to deliver the decisions crucial to being able to resist the forces of economic globalisation?
These questions have been troubling me constantly over the last four weeks I travelled first to Washington, then via London to Barbados and Antigua and finally on to Geneva, Brussels and London.
During this period I have had the opportunity to discuss these issues with a wide range of figures from the Caribbean as well as the region’s external friends and critics. My conversations have been wide ranging. They have focused on whether freer trade through the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) with Europe, movement forward in the Doha Round at the WTO, or new arrangements with Canada, will really encourage regional economic growth. I have asked questions about what Caribbean citizens want socially and the extent to which there is a common Caribbean cultural identity; and I have enquired where the process of regional integration is leading. At the same time I have discussed in North America and Europe how the region is viewed and have listened through countless meetings of all kinds to the region at work.
What I have heard has left me profoundly pessimistic about the future of the Caribbean as an entity; disturbed by the near universal external disinterest in the detail of the region’s problems; struck by the pervasiveness of crime and violence; and worried about the real possibility of a rapid collapse of the social provision in many nations as governments’ revenues diminish. I have also been left with a sense that the Caribbean has allowed itself to become engaged in trade processes without really asking whether for the most part it has the will or capacity to deliver what has been agreed.
How has this happened to a region that showed such promise?
At the centre of these and other doubts seems to be the inability of the region to actively move on and reform its regional institutions, and endow them with executive authority and sense of urgency and purpose. Without this, without a coherent and strong single regional economy the likelihood of being able to withstand the sovereignty-diminishing force of liberalising markets seems an improbable objective.
While it is not unreasonable to argue, as some involved in politics and trade negotiations do, that the shock tactic of signing free trade agreements should create change, this seems only to have validity if the region already has in place bodies and governments able to respond effectively on a pan-Caribbean basis, and a significant number of truly regional companies beyond those well known that are willing to consider competing globally.
Instead at an all-Caribbean level there seems to be a near total absence of cohesion, the resurgence of nationalism, institutions and systems unable to implement decisions in real time, and delay the only way to achieve consensus.
In my conversations a number of individuals in the region and those with long memories from without, suggested that this slide away from reality began in 1992 when the recommendations of the West Indian Commission were rejected and with it the opportunity to change the region’s decision-making structures to prepare for the way the world was changing.
Above all the sense was that failure to act at that time on the re-invention of Caricom as a supra-national body with executive responsibility able to propose and deliver agreed decisions on regional economic integration had left the Caribbean in an impossible position as the pace of globalisation and tariff liberalisation accelerated, and the relocation of global political power began to change traditional partners’ world view. This was the real reason why, some outside the Caribbean suggested, the debate on the Economic Partnership Agreement with Europe has become so caustic. Because the regional single market and economy was far from viable, the final EPA text and its implications had brought the economic reality of global competition and dreams about regional integration face to face. Put another way, implementing what was negotiated in good faith was in no one’s competence because the regional dream had not been translated into the hard reality of a single executive authority able to deliver on the basis of political consensus.
As a consequence the regionalists, historicos and nationalists had looked at what was negotiated with Europe, had become belatedly aware that if the region could not withstand the force of economic opening or take advantage of the new opportunities on offer, it would end up ceding economic sovereignty; and by extension the dream of a fully functioning and Caribbean controlled region could be lost for ever.
Not surprisingly this process of negotiating well but then turning on what had been agreed has resulted in pushing nations well disposed towards the region to the limits of their patience. As one European minister, a good friend of the Caribbean, asked me exasperatedly about growing criticism of the EPA, “then what do they want. What alternative are they [the region] suggesting?”
And here is the problem: there are no longer easy-to-deliver answers at a regional level. Faced with increasing food prices, higher energy costs, falling tax revenues, increasing difficulties with funding health care and education, and a dysfunctional regional integration process, governments are turning to national solutions. They are focusing more on domestic issues, indulging a creeping protectionism and attempting to identify new external sources of finance.
In this nations like Venezuela, China and Brazil and oddly tourists, are rapidly emerging as countries or groups to be cultivated, not for ideological reasons but in order to balance budgets and find less threatening ways to encourage growth than freer trade.
While traditional trade and development partners might complain that this approach lacks coherence and there is need for a more co-ordinated regional thinking, the reality is that increasingly short-term national economic imperatives are driving relationships.
What I have seen and heard over the last month is a region on the verge of disintegration, some of its more able leaders in private clearly exasperated, and nations like Jamaica and Trinidad developing policies that are ever less regional in intent.
If, as seems likely, the global economic outlook darkens and trade liberalisation is seen by the developed world as the way to spur growth, it is very difficult to see how any semblance of Caribbean regional economic coherence will be sustainable.
Previous columns can be found at www.caribbean-council.org
