Two eminent Guyanese economists, Dr Havelock Brewster and Prof Clive Thomas, are perhaps most famous in integrationist circles for their seminal 1967 work, The Dynamics of West Indian Economic Integration, the centrepiece of a series on regional economic integration put out by the University of the West Indies. Some believe that they have never written anything else as important since then. But this should not be considered an unkind comment so much as an acknowledgment of just how visionary their thesis was in 1967 and how relevant to the regional integration project it remains today, more than four decades later.
In 1967, at the time of the Caribbean Free Trade Association (Carifta) – then comprising its four founder members, Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago and aiming to promote a trade-based approach to balanced economic development by liberalizing and increasing trade and rationalizing to a certain extent agricultural production among its members – Drs Brewster and Thomas argued that a free trade area and a customs union should not be the sole vehicle for or objective of regional integration, in that such an approach did not on its own provide the basis for maximizing the gains from integration. Rather, they posited, “integration in the West Indies should not be limited to those conditions which govern the exchange of goods, but should also include in its perspective the integrated production of goods.”
In this context, the two economists proceeded to put forward a blueprint for integrated production (with particular regard to large-scale industries) and development premised on collective needs and opportunities and a rational use of limited and differentiated resources among the countries of the West Indies, to expand the productive base and to open up new vistas for not only economic but also social transformation. It was heady stuff, revolutionary even, in the creative ferment of post-Independence thinking that was seeking to overcome the constraints of colonial political and economic dependence.
Unfortunately, as Prof Anthony Payne, a British political scientist and expert on the Caribbean, explains in The Politics of the Caribbean Community, 1961-79, “the UWI studies were simply not taken seriously” by regional officials who gathered in Georgetown in August 1967 to chart the way forward for economic integration. Integration of production was accepted “only in token form as an item of secondary importance” to the overriding objective of trade liberalization in the region.
Perhaps the academic nature of the work may have proven, at the time, to be impenetrable to all but the brightest of officials and politicians in the region. Or, perhaps Drs Brewster and Thomas were guilty of being politically naïve in not addressing the huge adjustments that integration of production would demand across the Caribbean. Whatever the reason, they were undoubtedly ahead of their time in that the political and economic climate was just not ready for a vision that went beyond the prevailing economic orthodoxy and the narrow interests of small, newly independent nation-states.
It was not the first time in the history of the West Indies that the ball was dropped nor would it be the last.
In his recent Sir Archibald Nedd Memorial Lecture, entitled ‘Is the West Indies West Indian?’ in Grenada on January 28, which has already aroused some comment, Sir Shridath Ramphal makes a passionate and eloquent argument for maintaining the focus on Caricom and the regional integration project, premised on the imperative of unity for survival and progress.
However, he is also compelled to chronicle the painful process of attrition and “unfulfilled pledges and promises and unimplemented decisions” from Carifta to Caricom as it is today, through the doldrums of the 1980s to the 1989 Declaration of Grande Anse, through the West Indian Commission and Time for Action in 1992, to the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas and the false dawn of the stuttering Caricom Single Market and Economy, only to lament the remarkable lack of real progress, “But there was no action – no political action, no political will to act.” Notwithstanding some of the achievements since Grand Anse, the regional glass is increasingly looking half empty at best as in almost a generation, the regional project appears to be grinding to a halt.
In calling for the West Indies to be always West Indian as a call to unity to sustain and advance Caribbean integration, Sir Shridath perhaps forgets that procrastination is, regrettably, a classic West Indian trait and one of the common threads running through the West Indian tapestry at least since the time of Federation.
