Ramcharan’s foreign policy study: more
historical fantasy than scholarly writing
Robin Ramcharan, The National Security of Guyana: A Study in Foreign Policy. Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 2007. 376 pages. ISBN-13 978-0 7734-5338-8.
There has been surprisingly little scholarly writing on Guyana’s foreign policy. Only a few books − Jacqueline Braveboy-Wagner’s The Carib-bean in World Affairs: The Foreign Policies of the English-Speaking States (1989); Garavini di Turno’s Politica Exterior de Guyana (1988); Georges Fauriol’s Foreign Policy Behaviour of Caribbean States: Guyana, Haiti and Jamaica (1984); Tyrone Ferguson’s To Survive Sensibly or Court Heroic Death: Management of Guyana’s Political Economy, 1965-1985 (1999); and Rashleigh Jackson’s Guyana’s Diplomacy. Reflections of a Former Foreign Minister (2003) − have been of significance over the past twenty-five years.
None of these works has ever tried to capture the country’s complete diplomatic history. Nor has any dealt comprehensively with the wide range of topics that fall under the purview of foreign policy. There are, of course, several official texts of ministers’ speeches, monographs and government pamphlets on specific issues but only a handful of articles, chapters in collections and monographs attempt a diagnostic analysis of foreign policy.
Dr Robin Ramcharan’s The National Security of Guyana: A Study in Foreign Policy published last year is an ambitious addition to this meagre body of literature. His publishers, the Edwin Mellen Press, describe the author as “a specialist of international relations and security issues.” He is currently a lecturer in the Department of Social Science at the University of Toronto at Scarborough.
In this book, Ramcharan defines his aim at being “to distil and outline the country’s foreign policy priorities from the time of independence up to the present and, particularly, to determine how that foreign policy has enhanced the country’s national security.” He casts his net wide, examining among other things, territorial claims; conflict-prevention; the AIDS, crime and drug crises; economic development and trade; the search for security through diplomacy, and the quest for human security. In so doing, he succeeds in merging a chronological approach with a thematic treatment of the subject.
This book attempts to analyze the way in which the country’s foreign policy has protected its national security while also proposing a broad definition of national security to suit a small-state. He argues that, since its independence, the country’s foreign policy has been coterminous with national security. He examines both internal insecurity and external challenges, which resulted in human insecurity and sees the process of national security as indistinguishable from that of nation-building.
Ramcharan contends convincingly that pre-independence problems left Guyana with no option but to rely on, and respect, the rules of international law. The country sought support for its cause through multilateral international organisations, especially the Caribbean Community, Commonwealth and United Nations. In this policy, Guyana’s principled positions on a number of geopolitical issues won it international acclaim and it achieved what Ramcharan calls a “stellar performance,” albeit mainly in the pre-1992 period.
Ambitious in scale, scope and size any book with these aims would have buckled under the sheer weight of the huge volume of relationships over a relatively long period of more than four decades. But Ramcharan seems unfamiliar with many of these transactions. He might well have bitten off more than he could chew.
A good example is the conduct of relations with neighbouring states. Apart from territorial issues, heads of state have exchanged visits; scores of agreements that deal with agriculture, culture, consular matters, defence, the environment, fishing, health, petroleum and other things have been entered into; hundreds of students have enjoyed scholarships; both Brazil and Venezuela established cultural centres in Georgetown, and there has been moderate economic cooperation and other forms of interaction through membership of the ACS; OAS; Caricom and the Treaty of Amazonian Cooperation (TAC). The strategy for the physical integration of South America (IIRSA) and Guyana’s involvement in the Rio Group are other aspects of cooperation. Alas, these issues have been given short shrift or ignored in this book.
Even in Caricom, Ramcharan has hardly explored the efforts made towards the coordination of foreign policy – much of which benefited Guyana’s national security – and the extensive cooperation, and more recent joint training exercises, among regional defence and police forces. This has been evident in events such as hurricane relief and the array of arrangements that culminated in the security plan for the cricket world cup. All of these have had major implications for national security.
In discussing foreign policy, Ramcharan paid scant attention to the nature and structure of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs itself. Perhaps, because of his own negative characterisation of Forbes Burnham as a “racist opportunist,” Ramcharan seemed reluctant to acknowledge the amount of positive work that the man might have done. Shridath Ramphal is erroneously described as the “first foreign minister” when, in fact, he was Attorney General and Minister of State for External Affairs. It was only in 1972 that he was appointed Minister of Foreign Affairs, six years after independence! Forbes Burnham was legally and practically both Minister of Foreign Affairs and Minister of Defence.
Burnham’s contribution must include his initiatives in formulating foreign policy about territorial security; relations with neighbouring states; regional cooperation; non-alignment, and the opening of new avenues for trade with the DPRK, GDR, PRC, USSR, and the SFRY to all of which he paid visits. Relations with these states resulted in the acquisition of Russian-manufactured aircraft for the Guyana Airways Corporation and the Guyana Defence Force, and the opening of embassies and trade missions of many socialist states in Georgetown, for example.
The admirable achievement of a particularly gifted corps of diplomats and officials, also, seems not to have been fully appreciated. In comparison, Ramcharan might have taken the trouble to comment on the consequences for foreign policy of the haemorraghing of talented foreign service staff and the strange present practice of retaining some diplomats in the same posts for up to 15 years. There is much to be learnt about this state of affairs by studying the 2003 Report of the United Nations Advisory Mission to Guyana on the Restructuring and Reorganisation of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which made a scathing assessment of the management of the ministry in recent years.
In discussing national security, Ramcharan refers to the recent rise of executive lawlessness – the milk scam; stone scam; wildlife scam; pensions scam; remigrants’ duty-free scam; dolphin export scam – but does not make the connection between these high-level crimes and other forms of criminality at lower levels of society. Gun crimes, execution-style murders and other forms of criminal violence, which threaten human security all increased at the same time as the escalation of narco-trafficking. Does he link the rise of internal governmental malfeasance with the failure of foreign policy?
Important questions about the stalled National Development Strategy and Poverty Reduction Strategy remain unanswered as Ramcharan concludes that “Guyana’s economic security and poverty-reduction efforts appeared to be functioning on survival packages from international financial institutions and donor handouts to various sectors of its economy and public sector.”
The best thing about this book is that it has attempted, under a single cover, to touch on a wide range of topics, which even career diplomats themselves have so far been disinclined to write about in a holistic manner. In this regard, the book has pointed to the direction for much more research into the field of foreign policy and national security. Although well conceived, though, this is not a well-written book and its egregious errors are inexcusable.
Stylistically, Ramcharan’s overindulgence in the minutiae of the less-than-relevant cold war intrigues of the UK and USA, his tedious, rambling, multi-page précis of the speeches of Shridath Ramphal and Odeen Ishmael, and the repetition of wordy fact-sheets on the Commonwealth and OAS, when analysis and interpretation were needed, were grating and frustrating. This cut-and-paste technique resulted in a collage of subjects, some of which were dealt with in oppressive detail and others touched upon too lightly or ignored completely.
Ramcharan does not try to hide his bias. His jejune, three-page biographical paean to Dr Cheddi Jagan – whom he calls the father of the nation without explaining what the term actually means – and trite references to his failed New Global Human Order initiative, offered only maudlin subjectivity in place of scholarly objectivity. A more sobering assessment of Cheddi Jagan’s foreign policy notions on
matters ranging from relations with Brazil to regional integration would have been useful in understanding his administration’s attitudes after 1992. Cheddi Jagan’s polemical The Caribbean Revolution (1979) helps to explain that mindset.
More inexplicable, however, is how a credible publishing house with international and intellectual pretensions could release a book with so many monstrous mistakes. In an academic publication, these are not simply wrong, but dangerously misleading to readers without knowledge of the country. How could such historical fantasy – references to Portuguese invasions; Javanese labourers being brought in to work on the sugar estates; 340,962 Indian indentured immigrants coming to the country; a Chinese population of 44,400; maroons living in the New River triangle; the US DEA being “in the process of strengthening its office in Guyana; and the US invasion of Grenada in October 1982” – have passed the editors? Sadly, there are many more. Not least of all, the fact that the author curiously contrived to spell his own father’s name three different ways is disturbing.
In the final analysis, Ramcharan makes it clear that Guyana’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs has “not risen” to the challenge of translating the best thinking on international human rights standards to help to knit the nation and advance nation-building on the basis of international human rights norms.” He is critical of the extent to which foreign policy has contributed to nation-building, describing its record as “far from good.”
Were its flaws to be corrected, Robin Ramcharan’s The National Security of Guyana: A Study in Foreign Policy could be a convincing story of how a small state was able to secure its political independence, territorial integrity and national security in an unfavourable international environment.
