The differing voting dispositions among member countries of CARICOM in the matter of whether or not Russia should be suspended from the United Nations Human Rights Council, having regard to its current invasion of Ukraine, is a reflection of the fact that however much we in the Caribbean talk about the desirability of coordinating our respective foreign policies, that imperative will remain, at least for the foreseeable future, subsumed beneath the reality of perceived national interest.
This raises the question as to whether the voting pattern on the Ukraine issue among the countries of one of the world’s least globally influential regional organizations, is really worth the bother, the reality being that realpolitik will always trump excursions into altruism and wishful thinking.
It is the central issue of the Russia/Ukraine hostilities and what, manifestly, continues to be, in various ways, its global impact and more particularly, the lessons that it teaches us about relations among states, that is important. Contextually, the first lesson that it conveys is that while the consequences of the conflict are global in their effect, the key actors are, principally, the handful of power brokers on the international stage who serve as ‘referees’ to the conflict. We in the Caribbean must simply tap our feet to the music of a soiree that we can only observe from a distance. The vote on whether or not Russia remains on the UN Human Rights Council is a kind of we’ll-call-you-when-we-need-you caveat that requires no more than monosyllabic responses (yes/no/abstain) positions that are arrived at by countries long before the preceding protracted discourses even begin.
Among the great misfortunes of armed conflicts as a feature of relations among states is the drawing into those conflicts of uninvolved states required to take sides that entail the spending of important foreign policy ‘currency.’ Most of them, all too frequently, are lesser actors’ on the international stage whose own vulnerabilities render them ill-equipped to engage in knee-jerk side-taking. That, all too frequently, is the junction at which, for member countries of CARICOM, the foreign policy ‘rubber hits the road,’ where foreign policy decision-making can sometimes become reduced to an embarrassing ‘woolliness,’ lacking conviction that has to do with the merits of the issue. Those remain subsumed beneath the ‘first base’ of what we loosely describe as ‘the national interest.’
It is this that likely accounts for Guyana’s abstention on the recent UN resolution on the Russia.
While the Russia/Ukraine hostilities can hardly be said to be a matter of mere peripheral concern to us in the Caribbean, the evidence of likely economic consequences being unmistakable, weak and vulnerable as we are, any debate within the region as to whether or not our position on the conflict should be a collective one, becomes an exercise in futility. What the individual positions of CARICOM member countries on the UN vote in the matter of suspending Russia from the Human Rights Council reflect, is that there will always be a dichotomy between what is commonly termed a unified ‘principled position,’ on the one hand and, on the other, the reality of self- interest that compels member states of CARICOM to frequently go different ways. Here, one feels, is the simple truth that in the global sphere of things, there is still no place for regions like the Caribbean at the ‘top table.’ Indeed, but for the prerogative of abstention from a vote which is provided for in the rules of the UN, we in the Caribbean (and in other regions like our own) would frequently find ourselves ensnared in endless foreign policy dilemmas whenever we become part of decision-making processes that has to do with issues like whether or not Russia is removed from the UN Human Rights Council.
The United Nations, through its own particular role in shaping the rules that govern relations among states, also seeks, at one point or another, to require nations to take sides. That is what the current UN resolution on the removal of Russia from the UN Human Rights Council does. Inherent in the abstention prerogative is an acknowledgement of what, all too frequently, are the immense challenges associated with having to make clinical choices. Our vulnerabilities in an inter-dependent international system in which our weaknesses by far outweigh our strengths will, more frequently than we might want, compel discomfiting choices.
