From as far back as the foreign policy of the Caribbean goes we, as a region, have subscribed to a one-world-to-share principle, underpinned as it is by the brother’s keeper axiom. It is, in essence, a concept that symbolizes a commitment to the realization of a world in which nations are, each and collectively, bound by principles and practices that bind us to being our brother’s keeper.
Weak though it continues to be in its application, it remains regarded as much more than a pipe dream, the aspiration being kept alive in at least the principle of what the United Nations stands for. Here, one must concede, of course, that the ‘say so’ of the UN in matters pertaining to global peace and security still remains the exclusive domain of the big powers comprising the Security Council.
Our one world to share ‘axiom,’ has to do, primarily, with a presumed understanding that while all nations are decidedly not equal in might and resources, we share a collective responsibility to ensure some measure of fairness and conscience that speaks to our collective survival as a single human community. Indeed, if we extend the discourse into the realm of foreign policy practice, the analysts have repeatedly stated (and there is much merit in the point of view) that a world in which there is what one might call a ‘hungry half’ is an inherently unstable world.
For all the high-minded ‘one world’ chatter, however, it is a matter of the proof of the pudding reposing in the eating. It has to be said that there have been times, and increasingly frequently, when, where the one-world-to-share ‘principle’ is put to the test, it doesn’t hold firm. Rather, it is, all too often, the might-is-right practice that prevails.
Nothing that we know of, has for several generations, imperiled the world like the scourge of the current Coronavirus pandemic. It is in the indiscriminate nature of its power and in what it demands of us as a single global community that its real test lies. It goes beyond the application of medicine, testing our ‘one world’ notion in a manner that it has rarely if ever been tested before; and evidence would appear to be emerging that the much-vaunted one-world-to-share notion is buckling under the strain.
What both the sitting Chairperson of CARICOM, Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Dr. Keith Rowley and Director General of the World Health Organization (WHO) Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus have suggested at different times, recently, is that insofar as the one-world-to-share principle is concerned, we may well have fallen (hopefully, just stumbled) at a critical hurdle. For no sooner, it seems, that a vaccination that may offer some hope for standing up to the pandemic materializes, our ‘one world’ principle, it appears, has refashioned itself into the old axioms like rich and poor, north and south, First World and Third World and all of those various aphorisms that had, over time, become embedded in the lexicon of international relations.
What we have witnessed and both Drs. Rowley and Ghebreysus say so, unambiguously, is, seemingly, a cynical U turn by rich countries at a time when, arguably, more than ever in recent history, our much vaunted one-world-to-share principle which we claim to be the driving force behind the very existence of the United Nations, may have deserted us.
It now becomes a matter of whether we leave that one-world principle lying where it appears to have been discarded or whether a circumstance has not arisen in which the international community needs to return to the drawing board. Should not poor regions like the Caribbean and poor nations like Guyana, now ‘confront’ our First World ‘partners’ with this anomaly and require of them a revisiting of the principles that bind us as a human community? Do the circumstances not now demand some urgent gathering of nations to try to realize the re-setting of what, unquestionably, is the critical foundation on which the United Nations is built? Or should the ‘have nots’ simply continue to be lucky to have survived thus far and to live on that wing and a prayer that may or may not get us much beyond where we are right now? It is a question that provides food for thought within and beyond the walls of Takuba Lodge.
