Simultaneously with the European Union’s effort to reorganize its economic relationships with the African, Caribbean and Pacific states, the EU is involved in a major effort of seeking to effectively influence the reorganization of the contours of the global economy taking place in the Doha Development Round talks.
Unlike the immediate post-independence period of economic relations between Europe and its former colonies that resulted in the first Lome Convention, the Europeans have found themselves with less autonomy to define the goals and secure implementation of a new economic arrangement with the ACP. For in the last years of the 1960s and the first half of the 1970s, the United States was basically sympathetic to the European attempt to essentially keep the colonial economies wedded to their own, even while they sought to push a general reorganisation of the Western world’s economies towards freer trade.
But with the Uruguay Round negotiations that eventually brought the World Trade Organisation (WTO) into existence, United States officialdom had become clear in its mind that with the strength which the now flourishing European Community had achieved, there had to be less sympathy for relatively closed, tariff-bound economic arenas such as the EEC had become. The US now felt that Europe had to compete on a more open basis in the world economy – essentially the Western hemisphere economy plus Japan whose economic rebirth the Americans had substantially fostered.
This open international economy policy which the US pushed through the Uruguay Round was not simply a policy of international relations, but also a reflection of US domestic policy of structural adjustment and market-led economic arrangements which fully flowered under the Reagan administration and were complemented on the European side by the Thatcher economic revolution in Britain.
It is worth recording that with the negotiations initiated with the EC in the mid-’60s by British Prime Minister Harold Macmillan which eventually resulted in Britain’s adherence to the European Common Market, then Prime Minister Eric Williams even at that stage felt it necessary to warn the Caribbean that what they could expect from these negotiations was an essential ending of our preferential arrangements with Britain, and that the most we might obtain, given General De Gaulle’s hostility to the British request to join, was a stay of execution and then some compensation for the adjustment of our economies. At that time the Trinidad economy, in addition to its oil production, was characterized by an active exportation of not only sugar, but citrus and cocoa – all of which have virtually disappeared from the country’s production statistics today.
That Williams’s prediction did not immediately come true, was in part a result of an active diplomacy by the ACP countries in which an intellectually self-confident Caricom participation played a full role. This produced the first Lome Convention. In effect a stay execution was achieved, the United States being content to extend its tolerance of tariff-protected regional economic systems, to the US-ACP relationship.
It is that tolerance that has now come to an end. It was initially high-lighted by the American refusal to allow the sustenance of a protectionist relationship between the now established European Single Market and Economy and its former colonies. The US was now insisting as the Uruguay Round continued, that relations between its own economy and the European economy should be on the basis of increasingly free trade; and that that form of relationship should permit open access by the US to third countries with which the EU had substantial economic relations. This new US hard-nosed and persistent rejection of the maintenance of a preferential relationship between the EU and other states came to a boil with the establishment of the WTO, and the Americans’ rejection of Europe’s attempt to maintain the Banana Protocol with the ACP. To the dismay of the states of the Caribbean Community that rejection has been extended to sugar and rice, and added to by Europe’s concession of the Everything But Arms initiative, whereby the Least Developed Countries of the globe would receive the same concessions extended to the ACP states by the EU.
The American push has been influenced, of course, by the growing strength of the European economy which it had rescued from ruins after World War II. The EU itself has sought to penetrate the hemisphere with new economic relations with Mexico, and a persistent attempt to establish a free trade arrangement with the Mercosur group led by Brazil.
The EU, like the US, has recognized the increasingly integrated nature of the global economy including the emerging, once-called developing, powers – China, India, Brazil, for example. They have therefore recognised the need to relocate their own economies to cope with the challenges from the rising states and to get a full share of their markets.
That scenario suggests a stiffening competition between the EU and the US, in which there will be scant regard for lesser producers of the old colonial systems. And it is that scant regard – or disregard – which many in Caricom now feel, with varying perceptions of our ability to cope with this new world.
It is in no way surprising that there should be a certain disarray among Caricom states as we are let loose from the close forms of relationships which we have had with both Europe and the United States. Gone are the days of the mid-’60s when Jamaican Minister of Trade Robert Lightbourne could demand of the British “bankable assurances” in regard to the protection of our sugar. Today, Britain itself, which went through a virtual economic revolution in the 1980s and 1990s, accompanied by a changed institutional relationship with the rest of Europe, perceives that same Jamaica staggering through a prolonged period of economic decay, while insisting on the maintenance of a ‘sovereignty’ which the British (the Conservative Mrs Thatcher in particular) fought for, and then yielded, when that country agreed to join the European Single Market and Economy.
The global economy is a different one from the one in which, for a brief while, the United States was willing to encourage both Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago to make application to join NAFTA. Caricom states have fallen down the totem pole, in both economic and political terms in both European and American perceptions. Their emphasis is now put not on the Caricom economies, but on Caricom political systems deemed to be victims of the ravages of crime.
The collective and self-confident Caricom diplomacy displayed in the drive to seal a 1973 Lome Convention is not easily visible, and the regional political discourse seems to have lost its optimism – focusing on a certain fear of countries in our hemisphere felt to be more powerful or influential than ourselves – the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Brazil and so on. And this latter phenomenon in particular reflects another failure – our inability to sustain in a functional form the Association of Caribbean States, deliberately created to come to terms with the changing world of this hemisphere.
