By Ian McDonald
We should all be pleased. Our intrepid leaders have scaled another summit, hailed the achievements of the community, committed themselves fervently to the regional integration movement and issued the wide-ranging Dickensen Bay Declaration.
I quote word for word, without comment, a column entitled ‘A Summons To Action’ which I wrote and published seventeen years ago, in 1991.
“The 1991 summit meeting of West Indian leaders has produced a rush of renewed hope that concrete steps will be taken to strengthen the regional integration movement.
It is true that hope remains mixed with caution. Public expectations are seriously diluted by the cynicism which has grown over the years as decisions made at similar meetings have run into the sands of bureaucratic inertia in the aftermath.
“This time, however, a sense of greater urgency, purpose, and determination has emerged. No doubt this has a good deal to do with the initiatives which are being taken on all sides by other, greater, players in the international game. Such initiatives threaten to marginalize and overwhelm miniature states like ours unless we stop prevaricating and mobilize ourselves urgently as one nation. Sam Johnson’s aphorism that the prospect of being hanged in the morning concentrates one’s mind wonderfully applies to countries as well as people.
“However, credit for the new sense of purpose seems also to be due to the independent West Indian Commission, whose interim report has provided a clear focus for immediate action. Moreover, the continued existence of the commission will not allow decisions once made to be quietly forgotten while the work the commission still has to do should give a further, strong impetus both to deepening regional integration in Caricom and to closer co-operation with countries in the wider Caribbean.
“The recommendations for immediate action made by the commission in their interim report are clear-cut:
1. Permit West Indians to travel in their region with the freedom and ease due to them as citizens of a nation common to them all.
2. Allow UWI (and other) graduates and media people to work and live freely anywhere in the region as a first step to permitting the free movement of all skilled people within the region.
3. Take the first concrete steps – which the commission defines – towards establishing an independent Caribbean Monetary Authority and a common Caribbean currency.
4. Launch a Caribbean Investment Fund of US$50 – 75 million to invest in the region’s stock markets. The commission sets out a specific proposal for this.
5. Complete as a matter of urgency – and setting aside all delaying argument – the Caricom Single Market with its three principal instruments: the Common External Tariff, the Harmonised Scheme of Fiscal Incentives, and the Rules of Origin.
6. Mobilise Caricom as one – single policy, single negotiating posture, a single voice – for international negotiations vital to our common interests but in which we risk being picked off one by one.
“These recommendations have all been adopted. More than that, individual heads of government have undertaken to take responsibility for ensuring their urgent implementation. Thus accountability can be focused very specifically which is a definite change for the better.
“Something else is needed – an executive authority to implement efficiently summit decisions which otherwise tend to languish uncooked on back-burners. Mind you, how to achieve such supreme authority in “a community of sovereign states” is a conundrum for our best political scientists.
“West Indian summits have commonly been occasions for rhetoric, impressive prepared speeches, mutual backslapping, avowals of good intentions, the renewal of fraternal ties, and agreed communiqués issued all too often as grandiose Declarations. This has led to widespread disillusion.
“I like to quote the passage from the Third Act of Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part II when the noble Glendower boasts, like any West Indian summiteer, how much he can achieve:
‘I can call spirits from the vasty deep’
– only to have his friend Hotspur, like any skeptical West Indian man in the street, reply:
‘Why, so can I, and so can any man:
But will they come when you do call for them?’
“But this time, surely, there is greater reason to believe that it will not simply be fine words followed by thin fare. This time, surely, the spirit of action will not merely be summoned but will actually put in an appearance in the flesh.”
Seventeen years have passed, Glendower, seventeen years and counting.
