By Havelock Brewster
It must have taken much courage for the University to confer this honour on me, who, as a young lecturer was threatened with firing for what is now known as politically incorrect behavior, and who over the years has not figured on Caribbean governments’ lists of persona grata.
When I arrived on this campus just over forty years ago as a young economics lecturer, the big challenge the community and governments offered the University was to make itself useful and relevant to the pressing needs of our Caribbean community. Our Chancellor echoes the feeling of that time in his introduction to the UWI’s Pelican’s “60 under 60” when he says : “The stature of our legacy will be determined by our ability to become the first port of call for regional leadership seeking advice and technical expertise for policy development, strategic planning and program implementation…….”. In the economics and social studies faculty, as in other faculties, we took up the challenge, and came up with a number of conclusions and recommendations. They included the need to: orient public policy to the eradication of persistent poverty, and the roots of the plantation system; to lessen dependence on primary commodities, like sugar and bananas, exported under preferential terms; to get greater returns and added-value out of our raw materials and services, like bauxite, petroleum, timber, fishery products, and tourism; to diversify the production structure; to rationalize our air and maritime transport; to combine our natural resources and aggregate demand through integrated policies for production and trade; to promote local ownership of Caribbean assets.
You would think this is all pretty respectable stuff. But all this was greeted forty years ago, not as the “first port of call for regional leadership”, but with unprecedented hostility. The authors were hounded as communists, Marxist revolutionaries, conspirators with Fidel Castro, at best lunatics. The would-be reformers had passports seized, some expelled from the country, fired, threatened, and one assassinated.
Fast forward forty years to the contemporary issue of fundamentally re-shaping our relations with the old colonial powers of Western Europe, now codified, they say, for all time, in a so-called Economic Partnership Agreement with the European Union. This Agreement has been severely criticized in the Caribbean, in Europe, and internationally, for the unfair and exploitative terms it has imposed on us.
Whatever the political viewpoints of the CARICOM parties to the Agreement, and their individual understanding of its provisions, this much must be clear to most observers:
· the Agreement focuses on market access, marginalizing support for development that was promised and expected to be the centre-piece of our new relationship with Europe;
· reciprocity, in the form of the full and free access to our markets for goods, services, and investment is fundamentally unjust, and dishonest, among partners who are so vastly unequal;
· we have given Europe valuable concessions in trade, services and investment, in exchange for uncertain or non-existent prospects of exporting to their markets;
· our discretion to promote development according to our own objectives and priorities has been significantly qualified;
· we have permitted our own plans for deepening integration in the CARICOM Single Market and Economy to be pre-empted by and subordinated to the requirements of Europe.
As in the earlier event, forty years ago, the advocates of change have been greeted, not “as the first port of call for regional leadership’, but with harassment, at the port of entry and in other ways, including a barrage of public vituperation of the most personal and offensive kind.
We have had the spectacle of a Prime Minister, a graduate of this University, vilifying as mendicants those who hold other views, including a fellow Head of State; newspaper editors descending to the depths of personal abuse of dissenting individuals, impugning their loyalty, integrity and qualifications, including of professors who served this and other universities and international institutions; mocking one of the most eminent Caribbean Statesmen, a long-serving Commonwealth Secretary General, a Chancellor of this University for many years, the recipient of Honorary Doctorates from twenty-five Universities all over the world, as seeking the “glare of public visibility for personal, pernicious and morally-elastic purposes”. And we have also seen the shameful dissemination of false information, and the withholding of information, by responsible officials of the European Commission.
There is much that is common to these two events, separated though they may be by forty years. But what I want to point to is ideological dogmatism and fear of change. In the earlier event, the comfort zone of colonialism was being disturbed.
In the present episode, the chastening realization that the free market, such as the Agreement represents, is no more efficient, no more growth-producing, no better managed, and no less corrupt than State management; that a reasonable accommodation is needed between private enterprise and public responsibility; and that we are hitching our wagon to the collapsing stars of the economic universe.
Over the years this University has fostered a milieu of intellectual curiosity, dissent, and creative thinking and practice. Out of that environment has come no less than eight Prime Ministers and numerous Cabinet Ministers, Secretaries-General of the Caribbean Community, and Chief Executives of Agencies and Corporations. And so some of my generation have been asking how have we come to the present state of dogmatism and fear of change— now being presented as globalization/modernization and pragmatism. I do not have all the answers. But I believe we were probably too naïve: to have placed so much faith in principle and rationalism.
These days all over the so-called democratic world, greed and power seem to trump service and consensus. These failings must surely be partly due to the political system we have inherited, and continue to work, as if divinely ordained. It is the system where the winner of fifty-one percent of the votes cast, frequently a minority of the electorate itself, “takes all”. In our region this often leaves substantial portions of the population with literally no voice at all. The rules of this system may be the only practically workable ones in large countries. In micro-states like ours, numbered in the tens of thousands of people, just a few square miles of area, a participatory democracy should be a feasible and realistic system of governance.
I believe it could better inculcate habits of popular consultation and civil behavior in respect of dissent; service to community and humility, in place of the contempt and pomposity that so quickly set in following general elections. It could encourage the practice of syncretism and accommodation, promote a stronger commitment to transparency and honesty, and help to raise the premium on service and consensus-building.
It is a great task for a young generation — to craft the means for so doing, and to stimulate the will and courage to change. Why not seize the advantages of small size in governance, even as we strive for the benefits of larger scale in economic operation? My generation, I believe, managed to make a significant advance in creating a Caribbean Economic Community. Why not set our sights now on creating a functioning, participatory Caribbean Democracy?
This is an edited version of the address given to the UWI (Mona) Graduating Class on his receipt of the Degree of Doctor of Laws , Honoris Causa, of the University of the West Indies, November 7, 2008
