Most of our region’s people must be wondering what the new decade will bring, as most countries are struggling with the effects of the global recession or with the lack of productivity of some of the economic activities which have carried us through in the past. The virtual trauma in Jamaica over the economic measures taken by the Golding government, as a prelude to being granted assistance by the IMF, serves to remind Jamaicans that a little over thirty years ago, well before the last decade, struggling to arrive at a structural adjustment package acceptable to the IMF, they were in exactly the same predicament as today.
This means that successive governments of the largest member of the Caricom system have had to direct much of their attention inwards, with a weak economy hardly in a position to give confidence to the regional integration movement. In which connection it is noteworthy that the issue of the appropriate concessions of sovereignty to regional instruments which, after all, are our own creations, remains as an impediment to progressive movement towards a viable single market and economy. And this is in spite of what was thought early in the last decade to be acceptance by all, in the Rose Hall Declaration, of the long laboured-over phrase, that the Caribbean Community was a “community of sovereign states.”
Running parallel over the decades has been the difficulty in achieving full regional acceptance of the Caricom Court of Justice, even after its flamboyant inauguration in Trinidad which had fought hard to have the court established there. It must surely look odd to outside observers that the headquarters of the court is in a country which does not accept one part of its jurisdiction, and that another major member state of the region continues to adopt a similar stance. Mercifully, a possible diminution of the embarrassment which the court itself must feel has, in the course of just the past year, been given a prod in the right direction by the indication from the highest legal quarters in the United Kingdom that, as they modernize their own judicial system, they could do without having to deal with our cases. For this in turn seems to have prodded the revival of cross-party discussion in Jamaica on the abolition of appeals to the British Privy Council towards, hopefully in the not too distant future, some consensus on the means of entry into the CCJ.
As we noted in a recent editorial the last month of the old decade saw what is apparently the development of a formula between the EU, the US and the Latin Americans, towards a final resolution of the EU-ACP banana trade issue. The resolution, as most in the Caribbean would have expected, is really not in our favour, a conclusion which by now we must have been well prepared for. The implementation of the WTO treaty brought the whole issue of agricultural commodities’ trade into prominence, and some resolution of that issue in turn has come to be seen as one of the main prerequisites to a satisfactory conclusion to the Doha Development Round.
In turn as the decade progressed, one thing must have been becoming obvious to our Caricom leaders and diplomats. This was that the ACP mechanism making for diplomatic cohesion among the grouping, and helping us to sustain allies as we fought our battles for beneficial terms of trade and aid in the context of the post-imperial EU Single Market and Economy/WTO system, was weakening. Many African states, like some Latin American ones, developed a strong interest in forcing agricultural trade reform on the developed states, the consequences of which brought our immediate interests into conflict with theirs.
In this regard we would seem now, as we enter the new decade, to be in the situation which the Israeli political scientist David Vital once described (in examining the security predicament of his own country) of being “small states alone,” and thus a ‘small region alone’ – though our main predicament lies in the sphere of economics. The era of protection is over. The concession of ‘special and differential treatment’ for us as small island, or small disadvantaged, developing states will hardly be granted in a way that can make a substantial difference to our economic growth. And we will achieve what we can refer to as economic development concessions from the developed states largely in return for concessions of one kind or another to them. In a sense, the Central Americans, in hastening to move towards a US-DR-CAFTA agreement understood all that. It is also noteworthy that the Dominican Republic, now being drawn institutionally closer and closer to us, quickly came to the same conclusions on the basis of their own regional objectives. The EU can be now perceived as the DR’s strong allies in the reforming of post-EPA Cariforum.
In the meantime we struggle, in the new century, to continue to define our approach to a Caricom free trade agreement with both the United States and Canada, perhaps with too little attention to what would appear to be a disposition of both those countries to see us as now positioned substantially within the hemisphere, and not to be treated any differently from other small states in that sphere. In the future then, it is likely that trade and aid arrangements made by them with us will parallel their efforts in other parts of this geographical-geopolitical zone, and in a sense, the sooner we get these particular trade agreement matters done, the better.
What this means in turn, is that our trade, and perhaps wider economic negotiation diplomacy – diplomatic strategy and methods – have become anachronistic. And while we may continue to protest at the most newly arrived arrangement on bananas, our interests in this new decade clearly lie in defining with dispatch new diplomatic strategies and approaches. Similarly, it would seem, our approach to our hitherto main international diplomatic protection systems, the Commonwealth and what remains of the ACP, will have to change. We shall have to concentrate our efforts on diplomatic approaches to certain specific large, and certain specific small, countries within those systems. And we shall have to decide also, whether single-state diplomatic instruments (foreign policy systems), or collective – perhaps Caricom and even immediately beyond Caricom in the Caribbean – will serve us better, both in terms of our ability to finance them and supply the needed human resources.
These are substantial tasks for Caricom and its Secretariat to which our heads of government should now forcefully turn their attention. There are indications that the changes in our region’s environment are being taken notice of, either in terms of action or in terms of policy. Thus it can hardly be doubted that the recognition by Guyana of the particular significance of its own geo-economic environment has initiated a new, and largely successful, diplomacy in the realm of global environmental concerns, and that the achievement of the Guyana-Norway agreement has demonstrated a new path in Caricom diplomacy. On the other hand, the Windward Islands banana traders will hardly not have noticed the quiet, virtual exit of Jamaica from the trade in bananas with Britain, the consequence of which is likely to be the practical loss of an ally in any further negotiations with the EU.
Which takes us to the place of the region in respect of its future relations with Europe, and the manner in which we are likely to have to cope with the implementation of the Economic Partnership agreement. One thing is already visible. This is that, surely, the governance arrangements projected as part of the Revised Treaty for a more cohesive and efficient decision-making and decision-implementation system, have taken so long to see the light of day, that even a conclusion of discussions on them in the near future might prove irrelevant to current Caribbean geopolitics and geoeconomics.
By this we mean, to take one example, that ten years ago, had there been an already established working governance system for the CSME, satisfactory to a majority of the members of Cariforum, it might have been possible now, with the signing of the EPA, to have drawn the DR into that system. But that can hardly be the case any longer. The assertive diplomacy of the DR, before and since the signing of the EPA, gives every indication of that country’s desire for a new institutional arrangement. And we are inclined to think that what can only be described as a recent shot across Caricom’s bow by the EU representative in Jamaica, in respect of the institution’s alleged inefficiency in implementing the EPA agreement, would suggest that the EU is in the DR’s corner.
And what, as we look down the road, Caribbean (as in beyond Caricom) strategy are we preparing to develop, as the EU’s interest in some form of EPA with Cuba, begins to take practical shape?
We are back, then to the old ‘won’t go away’ issue of governance. Will we face it in this new decade?
