In 1991 and 1992, when I was working with the West Indian Commission, a feature of many of the presentations made by scores of experts and academics and businessmen and educators was how often they cited other countries as influences we needed to recall or examples we should strive to emulate. The Commission was constantly hearing about a dominant American influence, the New Europe, the Japanese example, the dynamic image of the Asian tigers, the Singapore model. Now, of course, people enthuse over the world-shaking dynamism of China and India.
During the Commission hearings, I remember after a while wondering if all the experts were overdoing it a bit since I was quite sure very few of the presenters really found the ways of life in most of these countries preferable to our own. Did we, then, have nothing for others to emulate?
Well, I am glad to say that in its discussions the West Indian Commission concluded that, while such presentations certainly gave useful reference points for appraising our future, they also underestimated our own worth – that we in the West Indies possess our own singular potential and it was by no means impossible, if we worked hard to get it right, for us to propose for others a West Indian model for the 21st Century.
