From time to time there are suggestions that Caricom is not making progress or has lost its raison d’etre. And over the years there have indeed been suggestions that one or other of the Caricom states can develop a reasonable level of economic growth without a dependence on the process; or that the process no longer has the capability of meaningfully helping to sustain the kinds of economic progress that such a country had anticipated, and that the costs of participation are exceeding the anticipated or potential benefits.
Other critics have sometimes asserted that the integration process that we are involved in is no longer appropriate, having been bypassed by the new world economy of globalised integration that we are now experiencing. Consequently, they say, we need to find another form of integration – integration into the world economy, and this can be done as long as we select the right policies of openness to the international economy, and of restructuring, some say liberalizing, of our domestic economies to suit. Someone like former Prime Minister Edward Seaga of Jamaica has fairly consistently outlined views of this nature over many years, and they have tended to have a significant influence on the extent of the integration which the population would, in its majority, support.
Yet others say to Caricom Heads of Government, the fault dear Brutuses lies in yourselves, because you wish to maintain your sovereignty over all relevant policy instruments, and refuse to engage in the types of meaningful “pooling” of sovereignties that economic integration systems, of the kind that we have engaged in, require. Many of the keen advocates of Caricom over the years, have become disillusioned that our Heads even refused to accept the formula that “the Caribbean Community is a community of sovereign states” proposed by the West Indian Commission years ago. And this, regardless of the fact that the European Union (more or less Caricom’s model) describes itself as no more than a “community (now union) of sovereign states”.
It is obvious today that the persistent lack of what has been deemed to be the required development of the integration process, as the experts have defined it, or as the Heads of Government have approved it in numerous resolutions, has been taking a toll on the beliefs and confidence of even fervent supporters of Caricom, particularly Caricom as an economic integration, as distinct from a functional cooperation, system. It is therefore not perhaps surprising at this stage that the latest denunciation of the movement has come not from the mouths of unknowledgeable babes and sucklings, but from a distinguished Barbadian diplomat. For it is former Ambassador Peter Laurie long experienced in the ways of Caricom, and a former Ambassador of his country to the United States who has, as some would say, “broken ranks” in calling our integration system, and particularly the CSME “irrelevant” in today’s circumstances, and no longer a “win-win situation” for its participating members; the situation, in his view, now so bad that the only “question is whether anyone will have the decency to bury the corpse”.
Strong language indeed for someone so versed in the ways and discreetness of diplomacy. And a provocative statement indeed coming out of Barbados which has recently seemed to provoke some countries of the Region with its official view on immigration policy. But Mr Laurie’s view cannot be taken as an off-the-cuff remark of a retired diplomat disillusioned by long years of what he probably now feels is wasted travail in the integration vineyard. For he makes a more interesting statement that suggests the basis of his current conclusions: namely, that “in a globalised economy we’re all better off fending for ourselves. Caricom has become a drag on the progress of its member-states”. This comment might sound strange to other Caricom citizens, coming as it does from a Barbados which is a substantial beneficiary of regional trade, investment and tourism in Caricom. Perhaps if this statement had come from Trinidad, with its main sources of revenue coming from way beyond the Caribbean it could be understood, though even Trinidad business today understands that it benefits substantially from its financial, services and manufacturing investments in Caricom as a whole. And perhaps before the recent economic crash, and the OECD’s rampage against offshore jurisdictions such a statement might even have come from some of the small, still-colonial jurisdictions, in the Eastern and Northern Caribbean which in the past have come to define that kind of international integration as preferable to either independence or regional integration.
Mr Laurie’s view is one that has evolved over time among many small countries now finding themselves having to exist in what he rightly calls the “globalised economy”, and without the old preference system, trends which he perceives as having “simply overtaken Caricom”. The experiences of some of the Southeast Asian states in the 1980’s and 1990’s has also tended to convince some professional economists, and some observers, that that their lack of a formal customs union/common market arrangement in the early years of their economic progress, was really no hindrance to persistent economic growth. Sometimes too, we hear others positing the potential benefits of the “continental destinies” of hemispheric integration, the assumption being that those waters can be individually navigated. Yet, in much the same fortnight, we have heard the President of the Caribbean Association of Industry and Commerce (in remarks reported in a recent issue of this newspaper), making a strong plea for pursuing the Single Market and Economy. It would really be interesting to hear a debate between himself and Mr Laurie.
Little notice has been taken of the fact that given, indeed, the fragility of our small islands, it is perhaps the presence of the sub-regional Eastern Caribbean Currency Authority, and its swift movement to coalesce the states of the OECS, and in some measure Barbados, that has allowed those islands to limit the potential immediate damage of the CLICO and Stanford affairs, as well as to allow the OECS states to rapidly organize a concerted policy in their negotiations with Barbados. This institutional posture, we can surely say, was equally beneficial to Trinidad. Those islands well understand, also, the benefits which inter-island travel have provided to Barbados, one of the owners of LIAT with a strong sense of how urgent a resolution of the air transport issue is to the Eastern Caribbean intra-regional and international travel.
We suspect that such concerns, and interests in the Region as a whole, are partly behind the recent proposal by Prime Minister Patrick Manning – tied indeed to some concern about the slow pace of the CSME, and an increasingly strong concern about regional security – for some form of tighter regional economic integration in the east and southern Caribbean; though it is thought by some to be more provocative and amusing to attribute this initiative to delusions of power and grandeur on the Prime Minister’s part. But Mr Manning too, will surely have remembered the initiative taken by both Trinidad and Tobago and Jamaica in the mid-1990’s, to make formal application to join NAFTA (leaving the rest of us behind?). These initiatives reached the doors of Congress but then withered on the vine as President Clinton decided that to have to negotiate the entry of numerous small Caribbean states through the Congress would not be worth either his time or political credits.
We doubt that this situation has changed, as we go entreating for “special and differential treatment”, within or outside the FTA that is likely to follow the end of the CBI/CBTPA. And it is in cognisance of all these considerations that we say that Ambassador Laurie’s statements will have some use if they provoke some deep, relatively quiet discussion among our Heads of States and Governments in the near future. We would hazard the guess that we do not, at this time, really need any more Convocations on the CSME, but a quiet re-setting of priorities, and then a degree of inter-governmental bargaining about how each of us gets what we need. The time has probably come to relocate the extent of mutuality interests among us, as a collective and as single entities, in what are likely to be these next years of relative lack of sympathy for us in the years of the global economic recession that will characterize the international arena.
In his last speech to his Caricom colleagues, in Guyana, the Barbados Prime Minister Errol Barrow, reminded them that “Caricom is not only about taking in each other’s washing”. A word to the wise, even when disillusioned.
