In concluding our editorial on regional integration last week, we suggested that there was a tendency to suggest that our own experience is sui generis, and not to be compared with other experiences in today’s world. Those who are inclined to this view tend to argue that others have a tendency to analyse Caricom integration in terms of the experience of Western Europe, but that on at least two counts such an orientation is inadmissible. First, we are told, the countries of Western Europe are industrially developed countries, and have had more to trade with each other, and were so when their experience started. And secondly, that these were basically countries on a single land mass where communication could be easier, while we are largely countries separated by water, each of which has developed its own customs, ways of politics and identities, which each country needs to consolidate.
To the defenders of these views it matters little that the experiment of Caricom integration and the free trade areas and customs unions with which we commenced were really directed at the pursuit of industrial rather than agricultural trade, and that the early academic and technical economist supporters of economic integration, whether Arthur Lewis, William Demas or the UWI Faculty of Social Sciences economists of the late 1960s and after, were all inclined to this view. Which is not to say that they looked askance at agriculture, but that they were certainly aware that the old plantation agriculture, pursued on metropolitan rather than indigenous West Indian terms could, by that fact, not be the basis of any meaningful integration.
The opposition is based on the fact that separate political identities and the sense of nationalism deriving from this still hold strong sway, and increasingly so. That our current political leadership seems incapable of overcoming impediments to persistent and institutionalized collective decision-making and timely implementation, gives grist to their mills. But the purveyors of this view tend to slide over the well-known history of mutual antagonisms of various Western European states to each other, and the wars to which this consistently led, up to the end of the first half of the twentieth century. And in that connection they do not draw the lesson that the Europeans came to a first conclusion in the mid-1950s, that only a persistent integration would tend to inhibit the tendency to pursue industrialization in part as a basis for making war; and a second conclusion that integration, rather than protectionist beggar-my-neighbour policies, was a superior road to economic well-being.
The supporters of the view concerning the overwhelming strength of nationalism do not draw another lesson from contemporary European history. This is that there could not be meaningful economic integration unless there was agreement among the participating states to a union of some of their decision-making instruments, not on an ad hoc, but on a persistent basis; and that this was to be done by merging national processes of decision-making in the relevant spheres of collective economic decision-making. This indeed was another way of saying that economic integration and political integration go together, and that the only issue is the nature of the political integration.
From hard lessons, the Western European states interested in economic integration came to another conclusion. This was that political integration was not necessarily to be identified solely with federation, or the unitary state, as the North Americans had earlier decided in peace, and then through civil war. Instead, there were other ways of innovating towards collective decision-making that merged particular aspects of their sovereignties by choice, towards new forms of cross-country governance. In the modern world, sovereignty was to be shared by choice.
What was noticeable about the course of discussion along these lines was that the main opposition to it indeed came from an island state, the United Kingdom. And this was in spite of the fact that it was a British head of government, the Conservative wartime and post-war Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, who gave the first real clarion call for what he called a United States of Europe. But the British hesitated when the Western Europeans decided to pursue the new course. They persuaded some small European states to pursue a free trade area, EFTA, rather than a customs union and common market, the European Economic Community (EEC), that would require new integrated political institutions. The UK’s argument was that integrated political institutions would affect her sovereignty.
But, as is often remarked in politics, reality is the great teacher, and the success of the EEC acted like a magnet to British economic interests. So it was another British Conservative Prime Minister, Harold Macmilllan who, putting the island-state’s vaunted sovereignty behind him, sued for peace in peacetime and applied for membership in 1961. The debate on the potential effect of such membership on British sovereignty was fierce, with the British Labour Party inclined to oppose. But the deal was eventually signed; Britain entered under a third Conservative Prime Minister, Edward Heath. Britain also abandoned her EFTA partners, and a successor Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, found, on attaining office, that it was politically impossible to “renegotiate” Britain’s membership as he had promised on the campaign trail.
Britain’s application, in 1961, to join Europe coincided with the demise of the West Indian Federation on Jamaica’s insistence on the untouchability of her coming sovereignty. That theme of untouchability has been a constant in Jamaica’s subsequent relations with the rest of the Caribbean. (Oddly enough, it was a Jamaica Labour Party member of Parliament who moved the first motion for Jamaica’s entry into a West Indian Federation), with the People’s National Party, when in government, having to tread cautiously on the issue. Prime Minister PJ Patterson’s attempt, by way of accepting a regional consensus on the description of the Caribbean Community as a “community of sovereign states” seemed to be a solution towards permitting agreement on institutions for collective governance on the management of the community, but that has not been the case. Jamaica Labour Party Prime Minister Golding’s recent ruminations on the point, equating membership of a Caricom Single Economy with the subordination of Jamaica’s sovereignty forcefully reminded us of this.
The fact of the matter is, however, that in the case of Britain, even Mrs Thatcher, yet another Conservative Prime Minister constantly expressing hostility to the EEC, found herself obliged to accept the movement towards a European Single Market and Economy in 1985 in order to ensure that certain gains which Britain had secured could be sustained. With that she also accepted the description of that integration system as a European Union, meaning not only an economic union, but what was now referred to as a political union.
A great concern of the British, and particularly Mrs Thatcher, was fear of what was alleged to be the power of the European Commission with what was described as its “power of initiative” to autonomously bring proposals for the management of the EU before its Council of Ministers (a prerogative normally held to be the province of a country’s cabinet). And the power of the commission to be the sole negotiator in international trade relations on behalf of the community – a power delegated by the European Council (the heads of government), enhanced its status as a virtual co-equal of the member-states.
The fact of the matter is, however, that what appeared to be the special and privileged power of the commission at that time, reflected the organizational, intellectual and political capabilities of Mr Jacques Delors in a period when the European governments themselves recognised the urgent importance of implementing the single economy in the face of widening global competition. Today it is widely acknowledged that there is a more even balance between the European Commission, the European Council and the European Parliament in the union’s decision-making.
To many observers, the Union is changing its shape in the present global economic circumstances, and in doing so also has to accommodate a much larger number of member-states than the six of 1950s or the larger number, including some EFTA states, after Britain’s accession.
As we in Caricom conduct the debate on the nature of decision-making and governance, we seem, in defence of state sovereignty, to hold to the old picture of the European Commission. And we seem to treat our community as a static animal, even in the face of substantial changes in our own global environment, within the wider Caribbean Basin environment itself, and within the hemispheric environment. Changes in the latter mean, for one thing a much greater interest than in the past, on the part of countries on Caricom’s borders – Venezuela, Brazil, Mexico and Central America. In that context, our governments seem to think that institutions and adjustment do not matter.
The Europeans are now struggling, and clearly persevering in their struggle, to come to terms with what they deem to be the necessity for a new treaty to facilitate decision-making for the new circumstances. Will the effects of the present crisis induce a similar orientation within Caricom? Or will it be a case of single state subordination to the International Monetary Fund, without a whimper about the sovereignty of our states? We shall look next at the issue of institutions and their relevance to Caricom’s integration.
