The communiqué issued after the meeting last week between our heads of state and government and the American Secretary of State was entitled ‘Commitment of Bridgetown: Partnership for Prosperity and Security.’ This was no doubt intended to remind the people of the community of the meeting held in 1997 between the heads and President Bill Clinton (the present Secretary of State accompanying her husband to Bridgetown on that occasion) that produced the Bridgetown Accord of May 1997; of the expectations that it engendered; and of a certain optimism about future Caribbean-US relations at the time on the part of Caribbean leaders.
The Secretary of State Clinton’s statement to her Caribbean counterparts that “we are back and committed” was also no doubt meant to indicate some sense of American regret at what she will have been advised was an increasing disappointment on our part, of the state of US-Caricom relations since then – the interregnum having been the George W Bush years. And we are left to suppose that our own leaders were probably too polite to remind their guest of the material and psychological damage done to us by the Bush government’s continuation of the Clinton negative stance on the EU-ACP preferential banana regime.
Yet it is a matter of record that as early as May 1999 Prime Minister Denzil Douglas, addressing the second meeting of the Ministerial Council for Foreign and Community Relations was moved, in reference to the WTO decision on the Banana Protocol, and implicitly but more particularly, to the role of the United States, to observe that “we have witnessed a disproportionate exercise of power involving the Banana Protocol” and to urge “that the US and the Caribbean trade and political officials meet without further delay to refine their ideas as to how this WTO-consistent preference can be achieved with the effect of averting an economic and social crisis in the region,” taking into account the fact that “the economies of small states pose unique problems and are especially vulnerable to changes in the global economy.”
That request for joint consideration of the effects of the WTO decision on the protocol was in fact a conclusion of deliberations held between heads of government and President Clinton in the margins of the Summit of the Americas meeting in 1994 which, in short measure, petered out as the US and interested Latin American countries relentlessly pursued the EU to come to terms. And last week (June 12), two days before the meeting in Bridgetown, the United States Trade Representative Ron Kirk announced that, following an agreement signed on May 31 between the EU and the relevant LA countries, the United States had signed an agreement intended to bring the long-running banana dispute to a conclusion.
Much water had indeed flowed under the bridge in the intervening years, including our own disappointments as President Clinton’s promise to pursue the George W H Bush-initiated Free Trade Area of the Americas itself petered out, and the President and his successor pursued a serious of sub-regional and country agreements in Central and South America. While there is in last week’s communiqué, much reference to the current soundbite issues of crime and security, HIV/Aids and climate change, we can see no explicit reference to progress on the transformation of the CBI/CBTPA agreements into a Caricom-US free trade area, even as the Central American states have with persistence arrived at the CAFTA replacing their CBI arrangement, with obvious implications for the negotiating space that is left to us. Instead there is the holding statement welcoming “the recent extension of the Caribbean Basin Trade Partnership Act.”
Yet, in those intervening years between Bridgetown 1997 and Bridgetown 2010, the diplomatic positioning of Caricom has changed if only for one reason, as indicated in the composition of the players, by which we mean the presence of Dominican Republic at last week’s meeting – perhaps a half-way house in Caricom-US relations, towards a status for the DR similar to our Cariforum relations with the EU? Some observers have already noted that the fact of the DR’s membership of the DR-CAFTA agreement will induce the United States to perceive the possibilities for a Caricom-US FTA in terms similar to those which the DR has already negotiated for itself. It would appear that both the Central American and US negotiators in concluding their agreement did not put the kind of emphasis that we have placed, and continue to place, on the notion of what we refer to as special and differential treatment for vulnerable economies. Instead, the Central Americans were left to fight for acceptance of the negotiated terms through domestic referenda with all their domestic divisive implications – something that is anathema to us. The case of Costa Rica, the country most similar to us in Central America in terms of its organization as a constitutional democracy, involving the severe political battle that its government went through, is instructive.
It is unlikely, therefore, that we can expect any particular empathy from the US as we pursue an FTA, although the communiqué makes a case in terms of “recognizing that continuation of preferential access to the US market for Caribbean products will help to stimulate growth and job creation in the Caribbean countries.” The Obama campaign was supported by an essentially protectionist trade union movement. And the presence of the Dominican Republic at last week’s discussions should be taken as an indication that the US recognizes the shifting sands of Caribbean regionalism, in which a status of exclusivity and special character as defining Caricom is inevitably giving way, as the Europeans are insisting on wider conceptions of a Caribbean with no sub-regions treated with special privilege as against others. The United States too, in accordance with its recently enunciated National Security Strategy, has recognized that the notion of consultation with, rather than pressure on, “emerging powers” as they seek to affect and effect changes in regional and continental balances is now a fact of life. And we can see President Obama easily accepting this as equivalent to our Caricom’s evolving determination to establish new types of relations with the emerging powers around us. In that sense, our initiative towards membership of a Community of Latin American and Caribbean States they might well, at times see somewhat cynically, as relieving them of complete commitment to coping with the adjustment problems of our small, vulnerable countries.
Perhaps the dominating factor affecting our current relations is the United States’ concern with the state of our countries’ capabilities for coping with the problems of the Caribbean Sea, in so far as they relate to Caribbean countries’ positioning on the movement of narcotics and other aspects of transnational crime. That, to some American officials, may be the strongest link they see between ourselves and the Latin American states. The issues of security features strongly in the communiqué, the Americans no doubt being pleased with the evolution of the work of the Caricom Ministerial Council on National Security and Law Enforcement, whose second dialogue was held with the US late last month. Yet no doubt, the elephant in the room must have been the present extradition problem in Jamaica-US relations and the extent to which a Jamaica Labour Party government there, for years welcomed and treated as the strongest Caricom ally of United States positions, has found itself in open opposition to the US. Signs of resistance to conformity with the requirements for responding US extradition requests have existed elsewhere. But the seriousness of the present case, with its virtual confirmation about presumptions relating to state capture by criminal elements will have given the Americans pause for thought.
Early this week too, it was reported that the Security Attaché at the Jamaican Embassy in Washington indicated that 6,000 Jamaicans were presently in custody in the United States in connection with deportation proceedings. That bit of news should remind the US that the present Jamaican problem is hardly one-sided, but is reflective of a wider Caribbean Basin issue.