A barrage of comment by both the political leadership of the region, and commentators in the press, suggests a certain concern about the Caribbean Community’s direction. A post-Jamaica election comment by the then new Prime Minister Bruce Golding raised questions about Jamaica’s ability to implement the provisions of the CSME insofar as they applied to certain kinds of collective decision-making cohesion felt to be required to manage the single economy. The occasion for the Prime Minister’s sentiments seemed to be discussions, on the morrow of his party’s election, between the Caricom Secretariat and himself on the possibility of implementing institutional arrangements foreshadowed in the Report of the Caricom Technical Working Group on Governance, Managing Mature Regionalism.
Golding’s sentiments raised concerns about Jamaica’s desire – to ensure the maintenance of its independent sovereignty – deemed to be the cause of the demise of the West Indies Federation. And indeed, with the Jamaica Labour Party’s unwillingness to subscribe to the Caribbean Court of Justice, and its consequent refusal to support legislation proposed by the then Prime Minister PJ Patterson, Mr Golding’s party had signalled that its old reservations remained, and would be maintained. Patterson’s attempt to square a circle by getting agreement at the Caricom heads level, in 2003, that whatever form economic integration took, Caricom would remain a “Community of Sovereign States,” obviously did not persuade the JLP.
During the first years of the decade of the 2000s leading up to agreement on the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas and on arrangements and a date for the establishment of the CSME, additional concerns to that of the sovereignty issue started to be raised again. Jamaica, under Golding’s immediate predecessor, Portia Simpson, raised grave concern at what it considered an unfair approach by the Government of Trinidad to the pricing of natural gas needed for the pursuit of an aluminium smelter industry in Jamaica. Other countries, including Barbados and some of the OECS states, raised the issue of an insufficiently collective approach to the maintenance of LIAT, pointing the finger again at Trinidad, in terms of what was perceived as its unwillingness to take a holistic view of air transportation arrangements in the region, and thus autonomously pursuing its privatization of BWIA. Trinidad, on the other hand seemed to feel that the complainers were unwilling to face the harsh decisions about LIAT that needed to be taken.
And so, more recently, the perennial issue of all economic integration movements, that of fair trade, has now raised its head again. The Jamaican Minister of Trade Karl Samuda, always a somewhat voluble politician, has stormed away at Trinidad on the issue of allegedly illegal impediments to the export of Jamaican patties. In addition, he has announced his ministry’s intention to finger countries (he referred also to Barbados) whom Jamaica deems to be treating the country’s exports unfairly. Simultaneously, a former PNP Minister of Industry, Mr Claude Clarke, writing in the Jamaica Gleaner in recent weeks, has fulminated against Caricom’s treatment of Jamaica, and what he deems the one-sided dominance of Trinidad and Tobago in regional trade.
Seasoned observers of regional integration movements, including the assumed ‘mother’ of modern integration movements, the European Union, will not be surprised at these kinds of fulminations, even on the issue of sovereignty and the so-called ‘supranational’ method of governance of these processes. The Conservative Party of the United Kingdom has threatened to seek to reject the Lisbon Treaty that has revised the EU’s constitutional approach to governance and decision-making, even if Ireland voted in favour in the near future. Many Europeans might have thought that Britain’s passage of a so-called enabling European Communities Act that sealed its entry into the institution, would have inhibited the Conservatives from writhing against an alleged diminution of Britain’s sovereignty. But this has not been the case, even as at the same time Prime Minister Brown has sought to dominate European economic decision-making in the present economic crisis.
In our region, the actions of the Government of Barbados have, for the supporters of persistent movement towards the CSME, added grist to the mill. Not only in Guyana, but in many of the smaller countries of the region, there is some feeling that they are not, at this time, substantial beneficiaries of the Revised Treaty. They rail against Barbados’ actions in respect of one of the few measures which the ordinary citizens of the region believe to be beneficial to them – the relatively, formally unhindered freedom of movement for those with defined skills. Opposition to the recent Barbados initiatives tend to focus on the abrupt manner in which they have been introduced, and the lack of any regional consultation on the matter on the part of Prime Minister Thompson’s relatively new government.
Others focus on the effects of national party politics on the Barbados decisions, noting that a change in immigration policy was a plank of the Democratic Labour Party’s electioneering platform, which, even in the face of the allegation of its increasingly xenophobic tinge, the government feels it needs to implement. Others observe that the current immigration imbroglio indicates the inability of Caricom as a collective system to implement measures that balance the gains and concessions necessary in any integration process, and in consequence, the Barbados government’s unwilllingess to deal with the issue of the contingent rights of immigrants contributing to the general welfare of the country.
Into this turbulent atmosphere has come the Manning Initiative for Eastern Caribbean-Trinidad & Tobago Economic Union by 2011, leading to political union by 2013. Though the Prime Minister exercised the option of receiving and releasing the Report of the Technical Task Force on the matter before a full assembly of Caricom Heads of Government rather than simply before those who had agreed to pursue the examination of the initiative, Prime Minister Golding’s response has been immediately negative, regarding it as designed to break up the Caribbean Community itself.
This initiative comes at an opportune time in one sense. That is, it comes at a time when all Caricom countries are constrained to seriously deal with the effects of the global economic crisis, not only on their individual economies, but on Caricom as a whole. It is often the case that beggar-my-neighbour policies come into existence in times of economic crisis, forcing a turning inwards. And the probability is that individual countries will seek to blame the global crisis for deficiencies in their own economies which have been long visible. It is no secret that efficient domestic economic management has not been a hallmark of quite a few of the Caricom economies, with many problems in the OECS itself, Jamaica and Guyana having been maturing over some time.
The crisis also has a difference which the Caricom has not experienced before, and that is the sense of a certain isolation in the face of global trends, as Europe has signalled its relative indifference to the end of preferential arrangements; and as some of the emerging economies, even including Brazil, have sought to pursue the search for fair trade as defined by WTO rules, between themselves and the United States in particular, with little deference to the effects of this on the smaller countries of the world.
In that context too, there is obviously a certain nervousness among Caricom countries as they feel pressure from a country like the Dominican Republic for a re-arrangement of the community to accommodate itself; and as they have seen the United States hurry to finalise free trade agreements with our Central American neighbours – establishing what is likely to be a template for us.
In this atmosphere, a certain calmness and deliberation is necessary on the part of our leaders. Our Nobel Laureate, Sir Arthur Lewis, commenting on the end of the Federation, observed how curious it was that highly sophisticated men like Adams, Manley and Williams could not desist from shouting at each other across the region. Our present leaders would do well to contemplate his discussion on this phenomenon, and on the necessity to avoid it at all costs, no matter how difficult our present situation.
