Dear Editor,
The consequences of Brexit on the Caribbean have not featured prominently in our public discourse. This has been the case across the region’s English-speaking quarters despite the economic and diaspora ties maintained with this former metropole. Negotiations between the United Kingdom (UK) and European Union (EU) are now at an end, while the international community warily watches on after two years of this exercise periodically threatening to destabilize the world economy. At present no guarantee exists that the British Parliament will approve the agreement, political grandstanding persists in the ruling Conservative Party, and disunity among domestic factions opposed to Brexit have all served to make national consensus on any course of action forward near impossible. The one recognizable certainty is that the United Kingdom will shortly cease to be a part of the European Union.
In the aftermath of Brexit many of the Caribbean’s scholars raised the urgent need to put in place mechanisms that would ensure trade and development assistance go uninterrupted post-Brexit. Indeed, there has been an attempt underway by CARICOM’s Secretariat and governments to ensure a smooth transition to dealing with Global Britain (the UK government’s post-Brexit foreign policy brand). The meeting held last week in Georgetown by the Council for Trade and Economic Development (COTED), which comprises CARICOM’s Ministers who hold the trade portfolios of their respective states, placed emphasis on a collective urgency to finalize an Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) with the United Kingdom. The Council acknowledged that it was meeting at a time when the Caribbean Community faces uncertainty in international trade, the undervaluing of the special circumstances of small states, and challenges associated with climate change. This work ensures preferential market access of our exports to the UK will continue as before, although the EPA remains unfinished. It is possible that final pronouncements on the matter will be made at the Special CARICOM Heads of Government Meeting on the CSME scheduled for the first week of December or later.
In a 2016 policy brief, economists of the Inter-American Development Bank argued that the economic impact of Brexit on tourism and commodity dependent states of the region will be negligible. Whether or not this is the case, Brexit stands to impact the relationship between the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) states and the EU. To be sure, the English-speaking Caribbean’s relationship with the EU was initially driven by the accession of the UK to that entity in 1973. While the current Caribbean EPA is in perpetuity, the Cotonou Partnership Agreement is the current treaty that governs ACP-EU economic ties and will soon be up for revision in 2020. As Walter Kennes of the European Centre for Development Policy Management notes, at present the ACP states enjoy comparably generous trade terms and European Development Fund financing, in large part due to British assistance in seeking these conditions post-accession. The EU has already indicated that the Agreement in its present form is not tenable and should be restructured to reflect each region’s circumstances as well the EU’s respective interests in each region.
Given the loss of the UK’s place at the table and a lack of significant economic or cultural relations between the ACP Caribbean bloc of states and any other individual EU member states, our region must redouble its efforts to build rapport with the remaining EU 27. The Caribbean requires every assurance and friend in the post-Brexit EU to ensure the continuation of favourable market access for our goods, development assistance, and climate change adaptation support. It is against a backdrop of post-9/11 American foreign policy moving ever further away from Latin America and the Caribbean, and the growing regional influence of China, that the EU’s terms of trade and its commitment to strong institutional governance are a counterweight in securing our own interests here at home.
In the context of our own Brexit preparation, it should be noted that the five states of the South African Customs Union recently reached consensus on similar arrangements during Prime Minister Theresa May’s visit to that region. Mindful of our place in the queue of Britain’s priorities at the moment, there has been little to no effort by the May government to shore up support for post-Brexit Global Britain from among the states of the Caribbean. In the post-Brexit age, the only high-profile visit to the Caribbean region by the UK government has been that of Boris Johnson amidst criticism of neglect by the Overseas Territories, largely due to the handling of disaster emergency response services these past hurricane seasons. One can infer from these circumstances and the Windrush Scandal precisely what regard the peoples of the Caribbean may be held in by the incumbent British administration.
Echoing Walter Kennes, post-Brexit Caribbean-EU relations should be viewed as an opportunity to build on common interests in lieu of colonial history.
Yours faithfully,
Brandon Cheong
