(This is one of a series of fortnightly columns from Guy-anese in the diaspora and others with an interest in issues related to Guyana and the Caribbean)
In March, an international two-day conference was held at the Mona Campus of the University of the West Indies. Hosted by the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies (SALISES), the conference theme “Reinventing the Political Economy Tradition of the Caribbean”, was an occasion to pay tribute to economist Norman Girvan, and to draw on the work of his generation of intellectual thinkers as a point of departure for rethinking the political economy of the Caribbean. This week’s column reproduces some of the text of the conference description.
The political economy tradition of the Caribbean was consolidated in the post-independence period when newly emergent states were searching to find their own route to development. The challenge then was for them to break with the colonial past and forge new policies that could enhance their economic autonomy, propelling them along a path of independent development.
For Caribbean intellectuals this meant seeking, first, to understand the structure and workings of the Caribbean economy and its connectedness with the colonial economy and, second, to break or radically transform this relationship in a way that would serve the developmental goals of the region. Thus, much of the work of Caribbean political economists, including Arthur Lewis and the New World Group, was engaged with understanding the workings of the Caribbean economy.
The international climate, with a tremendous influx of new states in Africa and Asia, and the consolidation of formerly independent states in Latin America, provided a rich ferment of ideas and hope for constructing a truly independent economic path for countries of the ‘South’. It was a fertile and permissive environment for the development of a home-grown Caribbean political economy. The New World Group’s intellectual explorations connected closely with the dependency school that emerged in Latin America, contributing to its richness. Critical thought also drew upon the activism of the South, particularly the Non Aligned Movement and Group of 77, in seeking to transform the character of their relationship with the North, to one that was more beneficial to their development.
This period, from the 1950s to the 1970s, was a productive one for intellectual output, which cemented the Caribbean’s place at the forefront of critical analytical thought. It witnessed the emergence of a number of intellectual luminaries whose contribution to critical thought is without question. This contribution includes Lloyd Best’s and Kari Levitt’s characterisation of the Caribbean colonial economic model as a ‘plantation economy’; Alister McIntyre’s identification of the region’s structural dependency, in both economic and intellectual terms; George Beckford’s attempt to understand the role of agriculture, both peasant and plantation, and the way in which their organisation served to maintain and exacerbate the cleavages between the two systems; and Norman Girvan’s analysis of the role of transnational corporations in the mining sector of developing countries in inhibiting their pursuit of industrial policy, as well as his advocacy of appropriate technological models for developing countries.
The Caribbean radical intellectual project, as with the other postcolonial projects of the time, collapsed in the wake of the debt crisis and the international financial institutions’ neo-liberal structural adjustment projects, to which many developing countries were subjected. This presaged the emergence of the World Trade Organisation (WTO), which represented the expansion of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) project, both in terms of coverage, to include most developing countries, as well as in extending the breadth of liberalisation beyond goods to include services, trade-related investment and intellectual property. For countries of the South, the WTO’s emergence represented a radical transformation of the global political economy away from possibilities of autonomous development paths, or even paths pursued by the North in their bid for development. This presents a severely curtailed path of ‘development’ for countries of the South based on their ‘integration’ into the so-called ‘global economy’ within the framework of neo-liberalism.
The neo-liberal agenda also proceeds apace with the globalisation project, which promotes the integration of the world in ways that reduce prospects for autonomous development strategies. The credibility of the development project has suffered severely at the same time that multilateral institutions are projecting a one-size-fits-all development model. This model is based on the same foundational principles, but with even less of the previous flexibilities. The imperative for Caribbean intellectuals who maintain the goal of genuine economic and political transformation is to develop alternative models of development that challenge this new orthodoxy, while accepting the more fundamental critiques of the development model, but recognising that the scope for presenting alternative paths is severely curtailed by the present international political and economic system.
Norman Girvan is especially recognised for the breadth and originality of his work and his association with SALISES as its first Director. He remains one of a small group of academics from that period who continue an intellectual engagement with the current international paradigm, seeking to find spaces for the articulation of the development challenges of countries of the South, particularly the Caribbean region and its small states.
SALISES itself represents a merger in 1999 between the UWI’s Consortium Graduate School of the Social Sciences (CGSSS) and the Institute of Social and Economic Research (ISER). ISER was home to many of the region’s critical thinkers, including Lloyd Best, Alister McIntyre, M.G. Smith, Adlith Brown and R.T. Smith. Some of these, like economists Kari Levitt, CY Thomas and Michael Witter of the New World Group, have had a close association with CGSSS.
For SALISES, 2008 is also an important milestone, as one of its founding institutes, ISER, is as old as the university, which celebrates its 60th anniversary this year. The 2008 conference therefore present an opportune moment to highlight the achievements of both founding institutes; to honour those who have directly shaped the emergence of the political economy tradition in the Caribbean; and to reflect on that legacy and the contemporary challenges of forging Caribbean futures in a different, what some would call inhospitable, global environment.
