Perhaps the most immediate issue in the minds of Caribbean policy-makers and commercial interests on the eve of last May’s general elections was the effect of an Air Passenger Duty (APD) or tax which the then Labour government proposed to introduce on persons leaving Britain for other destinations. The duty would go towards means of carbon remission associated with air transportation. What bothered the policy-makers was not only the imposition of the duty, for in these economic guava days, desperate governments are searching for every hitherto untouched source of revenue that they can find, and a British government in the country’s current period of recession would be no different in its desperation than any one of our Caricom governments.
What to our governments was hurtful was that in determining the duty, the British Government had decided that persons visiting Caribbean destinations would have to pay more than persons going to the United States, on the grounds that the Caribbean, sitting next to Florida, is further from the United Kingdom. Irony of ironies, distance from the United States had now become a new source of economic vulnerability for the Caricom states.
Taking recourse in the run-up to the general elections to protest to both the governing Labour Party, which refused to budge on its policy, and the opposition Conservatives, our governments thought for a moment that they had got some relief when the Conservatives announced that they would make an amendment to the government’s proposal. And in a sense, this seemed to come true when, within days of the formation of the coalition, it was announced that the duty would be changed from a per passenger one, to a per plane one – from APD to PPD. But this too, appears to have turned into an illusion, as it has transpired that while the implementation of the PPD would not allow the tax to be called discriminatory by our governments, it would simply put them on the same level playing field as the United States. As has occurred with the region’s bananas, our relationship with the rest of the world would be internationalized, and no longer preferentialised.
The group of Caribbean Tourism Ministers visiting the United Kingdom this week, will therefore have found the new government as resistant to entertaining their entreaties to remove the duty as the previous one. They will have found what Caricom ministers of trade found out in the last two decades as Britain has gradually drawn down the curtains of preferentialism of any kind on them, not recognizing vulnerability as a decisive impediment to development if, as is often preached, “the right policies” are introduced.
So an early lesson in the relative continuity of British foreign policy is being given to us, even as we in the Caribbean tend to pride ourselves on changing policies as governments change. And not only this. For we have, for some time, been receiving another lesson: that at the level of trade policy, Britain, and we must assume the European Union, adheres to the strictness of the WTO regime on non-discrimination. Her objective in fact, as indicated in an early speech by Foreign Secretary William Hague, is to ensure a shift of concern from the preservation of the old pre-liberalisation, pre-globalisation order, to the new order which recognized the significance of the so-called emerging economic powers – China, Brazil, India and others. This would assist the United Kingdom, in Hague’s words, “to deliver a distinctive British foreign policy abroad” while maintaining its “unbreakable alliance” with the United States, though “not in any slavish way.”
As the initial results of a recent study done by Chatham House, more well known as the Royal Institute of International Affairs, have indicated, the British recognize fully the emergence of a new global economic order in which the players have changed, and are changing. The study, ‘Playing to Our Strengths: Rethinking the UK’s Role in a Changing World,’ summarises the significant global changes which Britain must face as “structural shifts in the global economic and political centre of gravity from West to East, growing competition for natural resources, new risks emanating from the most fragile states and pressures to reform structures of global governance.” And it suggests that these changes “will all affect the UK’s long-term security and prosperity.”
From that perspective, the study suggests that one of the “core strategic objectives” of British foreign policy must be the “promotion of open markets,” no doubt a statement not only of affirmation of WTO objectives, but an allusion to the suggestions of protectionism emanating from the United States as it faces the new emerging powers, not least that of China. And the new Lib-Con government has put its objective early in its own life, in the form of Prime Minister Cameron’s early visit to India, itself in a process of progressive liberalization and opening to the industrialized world. There he seemed to make observations more favourable to that country than to its neighbour Pakistan. In similar vein, Mr Cameron gave early support to Turkey’s entry into the European Union, cognizant as he would be of the increasingly strategic role that that country is playing not only in terms of economic progress vis-à-vis the Western world, but its evolving geopolitical role in relation to the wider Asia-Middle East arena. And here, he distanced Britain’s position from that of France. Finally, it is evident that Britain intends to take full cognizance of the economic awakening of Latin America, and in particular the increasing global economic status of Brazil, and its efforts to induce the liberalisation of that continent by way of infrastructural physical integration which would induce the opening of national markets and spheres of investment.
So where does that leave us? First in full recognition that our ‘special relationship’ with the United Kingdom is well on its way to being over, as we are seen, we suspect in strategic terms, not even as a meaningful member of a Commonwealth that would give due attention to the “vulnerability of small states,” but rather as a component in the European Union’s economic relationship with the developing world and its emerging powers, particularly in our hemisphere. Brazil has itself shown, as the WTO decisions on sugar and cotton indicate, that its priority to is to rationalize its economic relationships with the North Atlantic powers and, complementarily, to build new relationships with other emerging powers like China, no matter what Western commentators allege about the Chinese search for more than favourable terms for needed mineral and agricultural commodities.
In the evolving pattern, is it too much to suggest the sorting out of a profitable place for Caricom states in the emerging geopolitics will lead us to focus on the possibilities emerging in new hemispheric relations, and the appropriate institutional forms that these might take? The evolution of UNASUR and the recently agreed Community of Latin American and Caribbean states, provide openings. Looking that way suggests that our post Lomé I concentration on the ACP connection is not strong enough to do the job for us, as the EPA negotiations have sown havoc among the regional groupings in Africa and the Pacific. But do we really have, or are we equipping ourselves, with the diplomatic strength for this?
And finally, the evolving pattern of relations suggests also that the security aspects of the political and economic survival of Caricom states will become less dependent on the United Kingdom. Foreign Secretary Hague, while continuing to support NATO, that is American, intervention in Afghanistan, has given signs that Britain would hope for a diminishing role for itself there in the near future. For Britain, the era of Tony Blair’s liberal interventionism would appear to be over, unless there are economic prospects to be relatively easily protected. And for us, as Secretary Hillary Clinton recently suggested, our security will, in the era of continuing narcotics transmission across our Basin, become a priority of the United States, as has that of Colombia – pace President Chávez and the countervailing diplomatic interest and strength of a democratic Brazil.
