Addressing the opening session of the second meeting between the Caricom Secretary-General and the Heads of Regional Institutions at the Caricom Secretariat, a week ago on Wednesday, Secretary-General Edwin Carrington, stressed that “integration is not for the faint of heart.”
Mr Carrington should know. This August will mark his sixteenth year in the job, making him easily Caricom’s longest serving secretary-general. While prime ministers in the region have stumbled in their ambition to serve three and even four consecutive terms of office, Mr Carrington, the ultimate regional technocrat, is now currently in his fourth five-year term. It is a remarkable achievement and no one doubts his unstinting commitment and dedication to the cause of Caribbean integration and development.
The Secretary-General’s utterances last week made it clear that he is well aware of the growing mood across the region of dissatisfaction and disillusion, if not despair, regarding the pace of integration and the solidity of the Caricom project. And Mr Carrington’s antennae would certainly have picked up the mutterings, in Jamaica especially, that the only place Caricom is going fast is nowhere, with all the implications that these might have for reliving the failure of the West Indies Federation.
Thus, the Secretary-General acknowledged at Turkeyen last week: “…in addition to certain foreign commentators, some prominent regional voices and members of the media corps seem to be losing heart and are on the verge of, if not already, predicting collapse of the integration process. Some of this is due to the Economic Partnership Agreement with the European Union (EU), to which we are about to subscribe. Some is also due to the fact that we have not adopted suitable governance structures…”
Prime among these voices would most probably have been Dr Havelock Brewster, a committed integrationist, who has stated that if the Caricom-EU Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) is signed next month, then heads should “wind up” the Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME), since the EPA would make it “redundant.”
Dr Brewster may well have a point, especially as there is speculation that the CSME will not effectively come into being until 2015, exactly 20 years later than originally proposed. By then it may already be too late for the community, both in terms of its ability to hold its own with other sub-regions in the hemisphere and its ability to survive in a liberalized global trading system. For some, further delay may represent a more realistic timetable, but for many it is a painful example of the lack of ambition and the confusion of priorities that afflict Caricom.
Yet, the Secretary-General also has a point when he says in respect of the general criticisms: “While acknowledging the benefits of pointing to the dangers ahead, one must distinguish between that and the harm which widespread negative speculation can cause in the public mind, especially when suggestions for better alternatives are not forthcoming.” And in accepting that “divergence of opinion” is “a sign of a healthy democratic environment,” he warns against “that divergence becoming a cacophony and thereby leading to a diversion from achieving our common goals.”
The Secretary-General quite rightly emphasizes Caricom’s not insignificant achievements in its 35 years of existence and hails the ongoing work of several community institutions, whose cooperation and collaboration underpin the regional integration process. However, in likening the stresses and strains of the process to those of a family, the Secretary-General tacitly admits to a certain level of inherent dysfunctionality.
We are confident therefore that Mr Carrington is not deaf to the concerns, shared by this newspaper, about the health of the community, particularly with regard to the perceived lack of coherence and cohesion, the tendency to seek refuge in obfuscation and delay, and the inability or unwillingness of heads to adopt adequate governance mechanisms.
Indeed, notwithstanding his spirited defence of the integration process and the fact that it is, of necessity, an incremental process, the Secretary-General himself admitted last week that that he is dissatisfied with “the pace of progress towards the achievement of certain of our key objectives.” In this respect, he repeated his warning delivered to a meeting of Caricom heads, in Nassau, earlier this year: “Time is not on our side if we are to achieve the goal of a Single Market and Economy in the timeframe that, you our Heads of Government have set. And time is not on our side if we are to achieve the ‘Community for All’ as you our Heads have so hopefully scripted in your Declaration of Needham Point that you adopted last July in Barbados. All of this requires our experienced Leaders, our new Leaders and all of us to put our shoulders to the wheel and redouble our efforts and to take our integration arrangements to a higher level. And time is not on our side.”
Mr Carrington would also have to admit, even if only in private, that the process is a frustrating one. The current state of play, with new leaders and divergent views coming from within the regional leadership, much less those of interested and involved commentators and critics, points to a scenario in which one fears that all the hard work of the past 35 years and all the promises of the 1989 Grand Anse Declaration and the 1992 Report of the West Indian Commission, whose title, Time for Action seems more and more ironic with each passing year, are in danger of being undone by the twin terrors of insularity and inaction.
Put quite bluntly, our leaders’ rhetoric is not convincing when set against their reluctance to take hard and fast decisions to implement mandates aimed at moving towards deeper integration and greater unity and resilience in the face of daunting external forces, in most part generated by the phenomenon of globalization.
Edwin Carrington has never been and is clearly not faint of heart. Caricom integration remains a work in progress. But the region’s leaders will have to do more to bring the region’s people together. Integration may not be for the faint of heart, but it is also, by the same token, for the bold of vision and the strong of mind.
