“Whosoever desires constant success must change his conduct with the times”: so wrote Niccolo Machiavelli in his discourses in 1513. This message from the past is one that the Caribbean would do well to heed if it is to chart a course through the rapidly changing currents of global influence and power.
Two different developments in the last two weeks demonstrate how far relationships are changing and the need to adapt. The first of these relates to the region’s long-standing engagement with Europe.
Since 2006 Europe has been negotiating bi-regional association agreements with Central American and Andean nations. These wide-ranging agreements contain detailed provisions for free trade that will provide Peru, Colombia and the nations of Central America after a short transition the same levels of access to Europe that the Caribbean has enjoyed for many years. Renewed negotiations with Mercosur, although difficult, are also expected soon.
While there are real concerns about what this may mean for Caribbean products like rum and sugar that have hard-fought-for arrangements with Europe, or for newer opportunities in the services sector, more significant is the longer term change of attitude in Europe towards the Caribbean and the ACP.
On February 17 an exchange took place in Brussels between officials from the European Commission and ambassadors from the ACP. At this and in other meetings ambassadors noted a distinct change in tone and attitude. EC negotiators, they observed, had ceased to have any historic perspective or interest in the Caribbean relationship and spoke about existing arrangements with the region on a basis that at the very least suggested a disinterest in the complex history of the Europe/Caribbean relationship.
ACP ambassadors cite as an example the brusque acknowledgement by EC officials that Europe will accelerate liberalisation for Latin nations beyond what was agreed recently in Geneva in the context of the resolution of the banana dispute.
How this came about will likely be the subject of future debate. However, it seems that while the EC and Latin American nations were negotiating a deal on tropical and preference products in the Doha Round that the ACP might accept, the EC was also agreeing a less than public side deal. This was to accelerate access in the context of its bi-regional negotiations with Central America and other Latin American nations for products of economic significance to the Caribbean and to others in the ACP.
The objective was to sweeten the deal in Geneva and to ensure that Europe had something tangible to deliver when Spain as President of the European Union hosts an EU-Latin American and Caribbean summit in Madrid in May, although quite how this will play at a preceding mini-summit with the Caribbean remains to be seen.
The EC’s line appears to mark the beginning of a new phase in relations between a Europe of twenty-seven nations and the region in which the unique interests and concerns of the Caribbean are being progressively set aside in the short to medium term in favour of an improved relationship with Latin America.
The second development has been the emergence of a grouping for Latin America and the Caribbean which unlike the Organisation of American States (OAS) does not include the United States and Canada.
At a summit in Cancun attended by most Caribbean heads of government, the Rio Group (all of Latin America plus Belize, Haiti, Guyana, Jamaica and Suriname) agreed to accept as members Antigua, the Bahamas, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, St Lucia, St Kitts, St Vincent and Trinidad and to establish a new broader body provisionally renamed the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States.
Much still has to be decided about the new grouping and its role, but it is expected that the working group that includes Mexico, Brazil, Chile, Jamaica, the Dominican Republic and Venezuela will present recommendations to the next summit in 2011 in Venezuela for final agreement in 2012 in Chile.
The new organisation is unlikely to be like the many institutions that already exist across the hemisphere such as Mercosur, the Association of Caribbean States, Caricom or Alba. Rather the suggestion is that it will be a co-ordinatory body without a permanent secretariat where the host government for the next meeting acts between summits to prepare joint positions for Latin America and the Caribbean on significant issues on which they might take a joint position.
Although views differ as to the extent the body should be about integration and development, a more probable longer term role is that envisaged by Brazil’s President, Lula Da Silva, who suggested that the new association could play a role in developing a unified approach to key global and hemispheric decisions including the composition of the UN Security Council, unchanged since World War II, or on climate change where the hemisphere south of Rio Grande has distinct objectives.
As the new grouping has already shown, it will also take a stand on issues of importance in Latin America and the Caribbean. At the first meeting it endorsed resolutions on a diverse range of subjects including the US embargo on Cuba, Haiti, climate change, migration and the Falkland Islands.
How you regard the significance of this seems to depend on where you are sitting. If it is somewhere in North America the inclination is to see this as a new power play led variously by Mexico, Brazil or Venezuela that aims to enhance their hemispheric position, and if it is in Latin American capitals it is about developing an alternative pole in the Americas. For the Caribbean the value appears to be about defining a broader geo-political place for itself in the world; the first step towards which was, to the interest of London, voting with Latin America on observing “Argentina’s legitimate rights” in respect of the Falkland Islands.
The point of all of this is that old relationships are dying and as new ones emerge the region needs to adapt and find new ways and institutions if it is to have its voice heard.
Previous columns can be found at www.caribbean-council.org
