This weekend’s Summit of the Americas marks a historic opportunity for the reshaping of hemispheric relations. The Summit comes at a time when the considerable popularity of the new United States President Barack Obama in Latin America and the Caribbean, affords the event an atmosphere of good faith and goodwill that has been absent from relations between the United States and many of her neighbours to the south for decades.
Not least among the indicators the relations between Washington and the Caribbean have been changing for the better with the advent of the Obama administration is the steady thaw in relations between the United States and Cuba. There is also the fact that President Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, whose relationship with the Bush administration had been gradually reduced to one of open hostility, will be in Port of Spain for the Summit.
The sense that relations between the United States and the rest of the hemisphere is heading in the right direction, therefore, will at least help to create an enabling environment at the Summit out of which some measure of real accomplishment could materialize.
The challenge, of course, lies in the expectations of the Summit in terms of outcome, given the fact that the hemispheric agenda is crowded with a bewildering array of issues some of which, like crime, climate change, drug trafficking and the state of the global economy and its knock-on effects on the economies of the region and the hemisphere are of compelling importance. In this context the fact the President Obama will be coming to Port of Spain with his own domestic economic concerns on his mind, plus a range of foreign policy issues, many of which are at least as important as his concerns about his administration’s relations with America’s immediate neighbours, is a matter that must surely be considered when we begin to assess the likely outcomes of the Summit.
An occasion such as this has to be preceded with a great deal of diplomatic legwork that works out the ‘nuts and bolts’ of the issues agreed at the forum leaving little more than a formal signing ceremony and the document that outlines the substance of what has been agreed. Beyond that the various working sessions provide opportunity for intra-hemispheric bilateral and multilateral agreements which can open new vistas of cooperation between and among participating states.
The anticipated meetings between Caribbean Heads and the Prime Minister of Canada, for example, could, in the context of the status of Caribbean/Canada relations prove just as beneficial for the region as the outcome of the Summit as a whole.
Then there are the discourses that will take place at the intra-regional and intra-hemispheric levels between and among private and public sector officials which, presumably, will address such issues as the current economic crisis and the possible collaborative efforts – particularly at the level of the regional private sector to respond to the challenges that are inherent in the crisis. Such exchanges may well explore possible areas of technical cooperation in the manufacturing, agricultural and information technology sectors, the global food crisis and the hemispheric response. They could also pinpoint how to attract investment into the region at a time when countries like our own cry out for an infusion of funding in sectors like agriculture and agro-processing.
Port of Spain offers all these possibilities though the point made by President Jagdeo about the logistical challenges posed by the sheer size and scale of the forum cannot be easily dismissed. If the truth be told there is also the likelihood that the Summit can end up being a ‘talk shop’ where many of the ‘understandings’ reached and ‘commitments’ given end up being no more than good faith agreements.
But there is another more positive potential outcome. Port of Spain could create the paradigms of a new era in hemispheric relations, shaped by a more amenable American leadership; one that is both more sensitive and more responsive to its role in the hemisphere and to the relevance of the Americas as a whole on the wider international stage. Beyond the possibilities of the strengthening of formal relations at the intra-hemispheric level, there are also the myriad knock-on possibilities in the realms of people-to-people relations including social, cultural, educational, technical, technological and investment cooperation.
If, therefore, there are concerns that Port of Spain may fall short of expectations then perhaps the thing to do is to see the Summit as perhaps the first defining moment in the comprehensive reshaping of relations among the states comprising the hemisphere. That way some good is bound to emerge from the event.
