A conversation with Sir Shridath Ramphal
During a recent visit to Guyana former Commonwealth Secretary General Sir Shridath Ramphal granted The Guyana Review an extensive interview covering a wide range of issues embracing aspects of Caribbean diplomacy, the role of the United Nations and evolving issues in the development of the international system. Sir Shridath also provided glimpses into his own distinguished career including the circumstances associated with his candidature for the Secretary Generalship of the United Nations.
Following is the full text of that interview.
GR : How satisfied are you with your career as a diplomat and international civil servant?
S.R: Very satisfied. In a sense it is inevitable that I should be because I have been very fortunate in having had a varied career and at very high levels. But I say that with a great deal of humility because I do not think that it was a career that I carved our for myself. I don’t think it was a career that responded to goals that I set for myself.
It was a career that evolved from one thing that I did to the next. To the extent the people were generous enough to believe that what I had done at any one time was worthy of going on to something else, then that was a stroke of good fortune.
The lesson of it, I suppose, is that you must do well whatever it is that you are doing and it will lead on to other things, undreamt of. That is not to say that it is not good advice to give young people – that they must have specific goals and work to meet them, it is just the case that I didn’t.
I pursued the areas that I found to be of interest and that were compatible with the interests of the country and the community which I wanted to serve and they naturally led me to higher and higher levels of service. In fact, they still are.
GR: Is the international diplomatic agenda as challenging today as it was fifty years ago?
S.R: Very much so. In some senses it is more troubling because the levels of danger and horror and terror that characterize the international scene today must, on any showing, be said to be worse and more terrifying than they were fifty years ago. Fifty years ago was challenging enough but as the years have unfolded new issues have come on the scene. The whole issue of the environment was not an issue fifty years ago. We had not foreseen the magnitude of the terrible things we were doing to the planet. We had not remotely contemplated that human survival could be endangered. We assumed, rather glibly, that life would go on forever as it had gone on over the millennia, unmindful of the fact that we were gradually using up the time because we were making too large a footprint on the planet. That whole area of activity, (diplomatic, non-diplomatic, civil society), is new. Generation after generation has had to adjust to that newness.
GR: What isn’t new is the ongoing struggle by developing countries to balance the scales, to level the global economic playing field.
S.R: Absolutely! That is not new at all. It took different forms and it came under different names. In our experience the worst elements of colonialism were at the heart of the divide between rich and poor and we believed that with independence, with freedom, there would come new opportunities to put aside the iniquities of the colonial system. It turned out that is was not as easy as that. They adjusted too and gave new forms to dominion. Colonialism was overcome but dominion in a deeper sense was not; So whether you look to the business community or you look to the regulatory apparatus that was put in place after the Second World War in terms of the whole Bretton Woods System, this did not, in fact, work for development. The rules were created to sustain the status quo and that status quo was inimical to the developing countries.
Today that fight is ongoing. That is the fight that we face in the World Trade Organization (WTO) because the WTO is an attempt to establish a legal regime – and a legal regime Is a good thing – for world trade. But the rules that the WTO seeks to establish or the rules which the developed countries seek to establish through the WTO, sustain the status quo, sustain poverty. Hence the trials of the developing countries; and, thank goodness, up until now, the successes of the developing countries – at Seattle, at Cancun, at Doha and, more recently, in Geneva – have foiled these efforts.
GR: Where do you fit the current hectic discourses regarding an Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA) with Europe into this matrix?
S.R: It is unfortunate that even at this moment, even as we were part of the Group of 77 in Geneva we are about to sign an EPA with Europe in which we give away to Europe all of those things which we were keeping not just from Europe but from the developed world as a whole. The trouble is that while the EPA is with Europe today it will be the basis for our relations with all of the developed world. We are behaving in a totally contradictory manner.
GR: You sound very disappointed,
S,R: Of course! At eighty and after fifty, sixty years of effort when you hope to see the aspirations and the institutional structures that they should lead to in the developing world virtually crumble, I am saddened by the loss of passion and commitment and vision on the part of the leadership of most of the developing world. We are not where we were in 1974 when we talked about a New International Economic Order.At least we knew what we wanted and what we were trying to get. What are we trying to get now?
GR: Haven’t develoing countries become worn down by the whole process?
S.R: We cannot afford to be worn down. At eighty I certainly do not feel worn down. Why should the developing world feel worn down after fifty years of struggle? It may take another fifty but we cannot throw in the towel except we are accepting all that throwing in the towel involves – which is back to dominion; back to a state that isn’t going to be called colonial because it isn’t colonial in the sense that we used to know it; but it is dominion and the leadership of the developing world could be contemplating adandoning that struggle. That would be too much to bear. I do not think that that is so. The stand by China, India and Brazil helped by the rest of the G77 in Geneva within recent weeks demonstrates that there is leadership out there which is mindful of what is at stake and which is going to persist in preventing it. Guyana and the Caribbean as a whole – used to be part of that, But we are not now; all because we think we perceive small gains in special deals. That a terrible level of acquiescence in defeat. Because we are in effect saying that for this small gain from Europe we are prepared to abandon the bigger fight. Either we understand that – which I think we must do because our political directorate is very bright and very able – and if that is the choice that is being consciously made then yes – to your question as to whether I feel frustrated and unhappy – yes, I do.
GR: Where do you locate the contemporary Caribbean in your Global Village?
S.R: That is the biggest area of frustration because for forty or fifty years I had no trouble with that question. We were a small area of the developing world but we were clear-headed. We had an awareness that our contribution did not lie in numbers but that that contribution lay in our capacity to think, to cerebrate, to develop and sustain a vision, to encourage our colleagues who had the greater clout to pursue a path that would lead to the amelioration of this terrible division, this gap between rich and poor, the elimination of so many elements of the relationship between rich and poor countries that lead to human poverty and destitutiom within our countries; and that poverty is real. Countries may talk about great increases in Gross Domestic Product but, in fact, we know that within every society in the Caribbean there are unacceptable pockets and levels of poverty. We have to have those eliminated and we have to do all we can, at the local level, of course, and all that is necessary at the international level so that those local efforts may be fulfilling.
GR: Has the Caribbean diplomatic effort become, in your opinion, afflicted by a slowing down of its energy levels?
S.R: Yes I think there has; but I don’t think that you can blame the diplomats. It’s a consequential slowing down of diplomatic effort deriving from a policy shift at the level of the political directorate of the entire region.
GR: Where has that shift taken us?
S,R: It has lost its passion and I think it has lost its direction. It has lost a clear-minded view of what needs to be done at the global level so that life can be better at the local level.
GR: What troubles you most about the condition of the Caribbean?
S. R: I think that we have to recognize that we are small and that to count for anything in the world we haven’t got to develop a sense that we matter because we can attract a great many tourists to come and admire our sea and our sand. We have to count by exercising some intellectual leadership that can contribute to sensible and fulfilling global policies.
GR; Are we still capable of providing that kind of global diplomatic input?
S.R: Of course we are! We are bright people in the Caribbean. We are a people who have demonstrated that we can give leadership; leadership within the developing world – that is perfectly clear – but leadership as well in the international community; and as we do that we inspire the younger generations of Westindians to recognize that they can do it too. So that over the years you develop a confidence in your capacity to make a difference.
I think that we are losing some of that confidence. I think that we are relapsing into a colonial frustration, a line of reasoning that says …that’s how the world is the rich are always going to be dominant and we are going to have to have to take what crumbs we can get and be content… . I think that we are settling all to readily for the world as it is.
GR: The Caribbean Community (CARICOM) is the institution that was set up enable the creation of a regional diplomatic effort in some areas of internarional relations. Has it worked?
S.R: CARICOM and CARIFTA which preceded it – with such an important Guyana contribution – was designed to restart the Caribbean project after the failure of the Federation. CARICOM is the centre of our vision of the future both for ourselves and in terms of our capacity, through the strengths that CARICOM will provide to exercise influence beyond the Caribbean Sea; and CARICOM has not been going well ever since 1992 when the Heads of Government choked on the central recommendation of the West India Commission which was the establishment of an executive authority at the centre to be responsible for the implementation of decisions taken by those Heads of Government; not taken by a federal government or some other authority.
They choked on it because it looked as if it might be a process through which people were losing power, some even said sovereignty. None of this was true but it was a feeling that pervaded the political directorate. Ever since then, trying one way or another to respond to the need that the Commission identified – and which the Heads of Government recognized, know – through a whole series of alternatives, make-do arrangements a Bureau of Heads, an allocation of subjects to Prime Ministers – all of that was really an effort to respond to the needs that the Commission had identified in order to avoid the solution that the Commission had recommended; and they all failed. The Bureau is not an effective arrangement for the integration of Caribbean economies or even of the cooperation of Caribbean countries. The allocation of subject portfolios to individual Prime Ministers is a total failure and ought to have been seen to be a failure because Prime Ministers are very busy with what they are doing and have to do in relation to their domestic agenda; so that CARICOM becomes something on the side and once its something on the side it has no capacity to sustain itself. So that CARICOM has gradually slipped from the centre, moved away from the centre of our lives. We talked – because it came out of those days of the nineties – about a Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME) and yet Caribbean people, I believe,
Westindians in the streets, have a sense that this thing isn’t working at all; it isn’t changing their lives in any way and through that they lose confidence in the political directorate.
GG Is there an argument here for reviewing the way in which CARICOM works?
S.R: Of course there is and Caribbean Heads are doing it all the time because they recognize it; but they are doing it, always, with these blinkers on. Yes, we’ve got to make fundamental changes but we’ve got to do it in a way that doesn’t change the status quo. It’s a built-in contradiction. We must not change the status quo of power but we must, somehow make radical changes to improve our condition. You cannot reform while standing still.
GR: When you compare the current situation with the decades of the seventies and eighties, for example, Guyana too has experienced a decline in the quality of its diplomatic service. What does it take to build at Foreign Service?
S.R: We need to do all that we did in those days. That is the simple answer. If we did it once then we have the blueprint. It is a question of following that blueprint. I think that the answer must lie in younger people not having the opportunities to fulfill the capacities that they have. You can have all the capacity in the world to be a brilliant diplomat but if you have no opportunity to demonstrate and develop those aptitudes then it wouldn’t come. I remember in the early days – because I had the great opportunity of creating Guyana’s first Foreign Service and it was a big responsibility but it was an exciting challenge. You don’t sit down and draw up a foreign policy on a sheet of paper. It has to evolve out of experience and that experience has to come out of structure, not out of ideology.
Looking around the world there were two countries which seemed to me to be countries by which we should be guided in the evolution of our Foreign Service and the development of our foreign policy. This was fifty years ago and those countries were Brazil, in terms of the institutional structure of their Foreign Service and India, in terms of the policy content of their foreign policy. We did that and the latter took us down the path of non-alignment and that was good for us because those were the dangerous times of the Cold War when we were being tugged hither and tither in that struggle – which really didn’t concern us – between superpowers who couldn’t care for us save that we are dragged away from being on the side of the other protagonist. Non Alignment was the chosen path and it was chosen and pursued by Guyana with vigor, with passion and with commitment and that led to a great many of the things that we did in those days.
As to structure the Brazilians really do point the way. They have a marvelous institutional arrangement by which they insulate their Foreign Service, first of all, from the rest of their bureaucracy and from politics. Brazil has gone through very turbulent times. including periods of military dictatorship, and yet, through all that time. their Foreign Service has remained a quality Foreign Service, above the fray, never being dragged down and into the political mire I think those were very good choices that we made, maybe very fortunate choices in terms of the models that we had. There is no question in my mind that we can still look to India and Brazil today, in particular areas, You don’t take India, lock stock and barrel. In the case if India. I am talking about Indian foreign policy and the role of non-alignment in standing up to the superpowers, having not so much an ideology but a vision of the directions, the paths that we have to fo down as a country to develop and to sustain our freedom, our independence.
GR: How to you perceive the role of the United Nations in contemporary international relations?
S.R: The United Nations has been buffeted, first of all, by the Cold War and then by the era that has superceded it, that is, the era of a uni polar world, a world dominated by the Untied States. The Cold War was bad enough but the uni-polar world is worse. Now we are beginning to see a shift in the tectonic plates of world politics. We can look now to a post-American world, I believe; to a world in which the United States will no longer be the sole superpower. It isn’t going to be a return to the Cold War but it is going to be a movement to a time when the United States is certainly not the sole economic powerhouse in the world. I’m thinking China. I’m thinking India, I’m thinking Brazil. Brazil has mobilized the Latin American continent under MERCUSOR. This is what the Europeans have done in Europe. So the world is going to look very different and small countries have to have a vision of their place in that post-American world. It should not be a place which is built on alienations. We don’t start looking at that time with an anti-American bias. Indeed, we must look at that time with the knowledge that we are part of a hemisphere in which the United States is going to be, forever, a very big player; but there are now going to be other players, other big players; and beyond the hemisphere, particularly in a time when hemispheres no longer matter. We are one world, one increasingly small world in which the fate of the Americas – north and south – are not going to depend on whether we have a free trade area with America but on what happens in the world economy. Geneva is going to be more important to us than Washington. We have to prepare for that world. We have to be actors in that world and we have to start at home. Everything, of course, starts at home in a national sense.
But for us in the Caribbean we have to start by getting our act together. We are less cohesive than we were twenty years ago. Twenty years ago when Guyana led the process by which four Caribbean countries broke the diplomatic embargo against Cuba – a global embargo – it was our collective action with very confrontationalist neighbors looking at us. That was a time of very considerable achievement for the Caribbean. Once we had raken that very courageous action the diplomatic embargo crumbled, the rest of Latin America just gave way; and that was the end. Yes, the United States maintained its economic embargo but Cuba’s isolation in the world was over. The Caribbean did that! The seeds of that were sown here in Georgetown. I f we could do it then, surely, fifty years later we can do even better.
GR: Is it not the case that here in the Caribbean the national will to survive may have superceded the regional will to succeed?
S.R: I think that what has happened is that we have been seduced a little by short-term gains within the Caribbean, largely through tourism There is no question that many islands have developed in a real sense on the basis of enhanced tourist economy. But a tourist economy is a very fragile thing. It has a downside in terms of your nationalism because what you are conveying to the world all the time – sometimes consciously, sometimes subliminally – is that we’re a little bit of paradise here on the Caribbean.
GR: Does this remove that image of seriousness as a country?
S.R: Its a difficult thing because there is validity in having to make an effort in that direction because tourism is, after all, the bread and butter of hundreds of thousands of Westindians and to that extent it is a laudable pursuit. What we have to do is to be on guard that we don’t begin to believe our own propaganda and therefore diminish our capacity to engage in struggle in those areas where we must. For political leaders it is a particularly difficult process to have to walk these two ropes together.
Some have done it very successfully. Some with less success. People too are part of that process. Our whole mentality, our way of thinking and in fact my own feeling is that that level of international policy doesn’t, win you respect and to that extent doesn’t affect your tourism. Which is the biggest tourism destination in the Caribbean today?” There is no question that it is Cuba. But Cuba hasn’t changed to become so. It pursues the same policies; it has retained its character and yet it has welcomed the world to come; and the world has come and the world goes away from Cuba respecting that country. Our Caribbean identity must be developed in the same way. Its not going to be the Cuban identity but it is going to be ours and we must not worry that developing that Caribbean identity will somehow keep the tourists away. The truth is that the tourists are not coming to the Caribbean because we are taking this position or that position in the WTO. Those are not the things that they come for when they think of beaches and sunshine. The Informed people in the world who come and find that we are struggling to improve ourselves and our place in the world – probably even by engaging their own countries – leave us respecting us, respecting us a little bit more. That is something that we always have to be careful about.
GR: How close is the Caribbean to a more cohesive foreign policy?
S.R. We are not very close at all. We talk a great deal about it but the closest that we get to coordinated action is deciding on appointments and places and candidatures in international institutions. Yes, we do come together to say who we are going to support for this job or that job in Geneva, Washington or in Latin American institutions. That is not foreign policy. That is acting together in a tiny little area of foreign affairs. The big issues of foreign policy don’t even get debated in the Caribbean. They get debated among academics. Our Institutes of International Relations have grown from strength to strength but I do not think that the work of those Institutes play a big part in policy-making. In Britain, for example, there are think tanks like Chatham House – The Royal Institute of International Relations in London. They have institutions that function as think tank. Outside of London there are institutions like Witon Park where people from all over the world assemble for serious policy discussions.
They are, in fact, funded by the British government because the British government recognizes that in making foreign policy it needs to draw on that intellectual input. It is not bound by it and it establishes enough distance from them to go in a different direction to the ones they have mapped out when it chooses. But it is then a conscious choice based on analysis and information, The same thing happens everywhere. It happens, for example, in the United States in places like the Institute of Foreign Relations and the Stanley Foundation. Everything is the subject of dispassionate analysis before policy is made. The policy makers are not bound to go in that direction but they are informed by those analyses in making policy. The same thing is true in countries like China and India. I do not think that we use the institutions that we have in that way. I do not think that what comes out of the Institute of International Relations in Trinidad or in Jamaica filters into the foreign policies that we pursue at national levels. They were intended to but we don’t take it seriously now. We are a little whimsical about foreign policy. That applies to the entire Caribbean.
GR: Is that a call for making institutions like the IIR more relevant or for creating new ones?
S.R: I think that we have the institutions. How you make
them relevant is by changing the attitude of decision-makers to them. If the attitude is – ‘This a good little Ivory Tower institution that is doing good things but that doesn’t need to trouble us in the Cabinet’ – then nothing will change. It isn’t a change in the institutions that is needed. It is a malaise that exists all over the Caribbean.
GR: Is there a price that we pay for this?
S.R: Of course you pay a price because you are pursuing foreign policy on an ad hoc and an ill-informed basis so that you are responding to short-term considerations. These are reflex responses and reactions and that does not allow you to build and sustain the kinds of alliances that are an essemntial element of a sound foreign policy. You can’t expect, for example, to play a part in the Non Aligned Movement if the principles of non alignment do not find expression in the day to day policies that you pursue. There is never going to be a body of prescribed decisions. What is needed is a basic resovoir of appreciation that non alignment – if that is what we are talking about – must inform what we are boing in our relations with others in the world. The same is true about the things that are so much to the fore today. Non Alignment was very relevant in the Cold War period. It is not as relevant now. It needs to be re-branded, in my view; but whatever the brand it is going to be ours and we need to be playing a part in the re-branding. But we are together with the G77 in New York, in Geneva and around the world in terms of a collective developing countries’ position in the big international negotiations. We have talked about what we did and didn’t do in Geneva in the last negotiations following the Doha Round. But that is something that is ongoing everywhere. We have to have a basic commitment to a body of principles that guide us. I think that most Prime Ministers have that sense of where the country ought to be going or where the region ought to be going. It is translating those individual perceptions into a collective sense of where the region is going that is lacking. That is what George Lamming was talking about a few weeks ago when he spoke at the Heads of Government meeting in Antigua.
GR: Do you fear that as a consequence of al this Caribbean diplomacy has been left behind?
S.R: I think that it isn’t where it was forty years ago and we harm it every time we do things that are inimical to our standing – as I think signing the EPA will. I am particularly concerned that we are going in this direction without the close consultation that we promised ourselves at the level of the ACP group. The ACP was created here in Georgetown and yet the Caribbean is pursuing a path with Europe almost unmindful of the hesitations, reluctances and reservations of Africa and the of the Pacific. The Pacific is showing more of a capacity to resist than the Caribbean. Something has happened when that is the case. That leaves you to wonder how is the Caribbean going to be sustained. We need each other for survival and if we forget that then we face the danger of becoming inconsequential.
GR: Are the differences within CARICOM on the signing of the EPA not reflective of the worst kind of division?
S.R: It is a manifestation of a lack of cohesiveness and, ultimately, a lack of vision in terms of our priorities. The, EPA in my view – but not just in my view, in the view of our most informed thinkers in the region – is anti-CARICOM, anti Caribbean integration, anti – CSME; and if it is then why are we not standing up and telling Europe ‘hold on, we want an economic relationship with you and we want to preserve the interests of our products. But there are limits and you canot expect us to commit ourselves to any action which endangers Caribbean integration.’ The EPA endangers Caribbean integration and that ought to be our starting point for any analysis.
GR: Can we talk a bit on what might have been – Sir Shridath Ramphal as Secretary General of the United Nations?
S.R: It didn’t happen. I will leave you with a little anecdotal evidence of why it didn’t happen. The superpowers, these were Cold WarrIors – and I’m glad to say both superpowers – were very uneasy about my candiadature. The Russian Ambassador at the time was a man called Federenko. Any candidate for the Secretary Generalship has to be sensible enough to speak to the Ambssadors of the Permanent Members of the Security Council. I had discussions with Federenko, He was a very attractive diplomat and he was a straight shooter. He said to me, Minister – I was Foreign Minister at the time – I must level with you. We like you. We like Guyana. We think that Guyana has been pursuing an enlightened foreign policy; but you worry us. You remind us too much of Dag Hammarskjold; and I said to him, Ambassador, thank you very much.
Thank you for telling me why you can’t support me because it is a reason that I can live with for not being Secretary General of the United Nations. That was the level of respect that I had for Hammarskjold. Washington worried too. I don’t think that they would have gone as far as the Russians in saying that that they thought that we were pursuing an enlightened foreign policy because they had conceived of Non-Alignment as being anti-western, which was not true. But their ‘bottom line’ was the same. “You worry us.”