As the second decade of the new century rolls in, it would appear that even the major powers of the world, including the United States of America cannot, with confidence, set a path of movement in international politics and economics which they feel will proceed relatively smoothly. Though it is probably the case that that country remains the only superpower, able to physically extend its reach to almost any part of the globe, its leadership finds itself facing consequences of the economic globalization and liberalisation which it welcomed and recommended to the rest of the world somewhat over two decades ago, that it hardly anticipated. In particular, an American President now finds himself not confidently coping in a clear ideological standoff with an apparently powerful Soviet Union of that time, but instead with a China which has exploited globalization to many of its limits. It has drawn United States investment into its country, and virtually held the US hostage in terms of the extent to which an extensive financial and economic interdependence now binds the two countries.
The United States, too, also did not anticipate the extent to which the economic globalization process would spill over into the sphere of politics and global political strategy. For clearly, it has opened the door for China to contemplate a virtually autonomous diplomatic role not only in many spheres of Asia and the Pacific, but an economic investment role in many parts of Africa and Latin America once deemed privileged investment spheres of the Americans and Europeans. That economic reach, particularly as it has concerned Chinese interest in many third world agricultural and mineral commodities, has in turn hastened the economic strength of countries many of which are today called emerging powers. These, in turn, have now forced their entry into the select grouping of states that has now become the G20, responsible for the economic direction of the globe. And these emerging powers now also seek to insist that the political direction of the globe, as reflected in the composition of the United Nations Security Council, should be widened to include themselves.
This changing global constitution is also inducing the United States itself and a European Union even more cognizant of the limitations being placed on its own world role and autonomous diplomacy, to begin to reorganize relationships with the rising powers to ensure a sustaining of their influence. Thus, no sooner did President Obama, following his predecessor’s recognition of the de facto nuclear weapons capability of India, announce in New Dehli last November his country’s support for a seat for that country on the Security Council, than British Foreign Secretary William Hague did the same in that same month on a visit to Brazil in respect of that country.
The United States, in recognizing the transformation of the pattern and rate of India’s economic growth, has quickly recognized also a certain mutuality of interest in a joint approach by the two countries in matching China’s extension of presences and influence in Asia, and therefore a certain interdependence of the two countries in policy and strategy in that area. And the British, as part of a Europe wishing to revive its old economic interest in an economically liberalising Latin America, seek also to play a new diplomatic hand that can favour that interest.
Counterpose then, this emerging repatterning of global relations with the map that countries like Guyana and Jamaica perceived, in the mid-1970s and after. Then, they sought to advance the cause of UNCTAD as the vanguard coalition of Third World countries in shaping a New International Economic Order (NIEO). And they sought, as well, to reposition themselves, interposing the Caricom states collectively in a wider diplomatic sphere in a wider institutionalized collective African, Pacific and Caribbean countries.
What has happened since? A conclusion must be that with the dissolution of NIEO diplomacy in the face of recession in many Third World, particularly Latin American, states, and Europe’s slimming down of the Lomé Convention in reaction to American determination to push the liberalisation process through the WTO, the ACP countries lost that particular diplomatic focus. Many African states have found a new, virtually no-strings-attached investor-cum diplomatic partner in China.
India’s state-led protectionist economic policy and diplomacy has given way to clearing a path through the WTO system and openness to American investment. And Brazil is determined to force a diminution of United States agricultural protectionism and exclusiveness over industrial patents, at our, they tell us, temporary expense. But we in Caricom have virtually stood still. We seem to be in a phase of wondering whether the EPA which we have signed with the EU can have long-term validity, as extensive questioning of that approach goes on among the countries of the African, particularly southern African, continent.
In fact, this second decade of the new millennium, positions us face-to face with an essentially unsympathetic world and largely unsympathetic major world actors. To this we are unaccustomed, and seem to continue to adopt an ad hoc diplomacy as events hit us. Contrast this with the earlier period, to which we have referred, of collective self-confidence that induced diplomatic innovation when we eventually came to accept, in the first half of the 1970s, that the days of British protectionism in agriculture were over.
Over the last decade, we have lingered along with a facsimile of that machinery, not recognizing that globalization and liberalization have produced new patterning among states, including the states which were our ACP and UNCTAD-NIEO allies. That patterning obviously requires a reconstruction of, not only our international negotiation machinery (RNM-OTN), but serious collective consideration by our heads of government, of the extent to which our diplomatic and negotiation strategies require to be rethought in the present era – an era in which the Third World has disappeared, along with the strength and interest of our imperial, and immediate post-imperial godfathers. A task for a new, far-sighted and persuasive Caricom Secretary-General?
