With Prince Harry visiting Jamaica this week, Prime Minister Portia Simpson-Miller repeated her intention to hold a referendum on Jamaica becoming a republic and no longer having Queen Elizabeth II as head of state. Certainly, in this, the 50th year of Jamaica’s independence from the United Kingdom, the time has come at last for Jamaica to cut its constitutional ties to the British throne.
Indeed, in January, shortly after her swearing-in, Mrs Simpson-Miller had also stated her intent to replace the British Privy Council with the Caribbean Court of Justice (CCJ), as Jamaica’s highest court of appeal, to end, as she put it, “judicial surveillance from London.” It is difficult not to overstate the significance of such a move for Jamaica’s full independence and sovereignty, even as it remains a source of great curiosity that Trinidad and Tobago, where the CCJ is based and a republic since 1976, continues anachronistically, illogically and embarrassingly to hold onto the Privy Council as its final appellate court.
The Jamaican Prime Minister’s commitment to the CCJ is most welcome. For even as she participates in CARICOM’s 23rd Inter-Sessional Meeting in Paramaribo, Mrs Simpson-Miller is signalling that, in seeking to rid Jamaica of the last vestiges of colonialism, standing fully on one’s own feet is not to be equated with standing on one’s own, alone and apart from the rest of the region. This is simply not an option for CARICOM’s small states struggling to survive in a globalized world.
Sir Ronald Sanders argues in his 2005 book, Crumbled Small: The Commonwealth Caribbean in World Politics, “these states fall neatly into the category of states used to explain dependency theory.” That is, “[T]heir small populations, small domestic markets, limited range of natural resources (in a few cases, only beaches), limited access to capital markets, heavy dependence on aid, and narrow range of local skills correspond to those characteristics which lead dependency theorists to categorise them as being subject to external dominance, particularly by capitalist countries.” All this, of course, takes us back to the old question of whether there can be political independence without economic independence.
No matter what one might think of the politics of Errol Barrow of Barbados, Vere Bird Sr of Antigua and Barbuda, Forbes Burnham of Guyana and Eric Williams of Trinidad and Tobago, these leaders all recognised the need to come together, after the failure of the West Indies Federation, when, in 1968, they agreed on the establishment of the Caribbean Free Trade Association (CARIFTA). Then, in creating CARICOM in 1973, along with the likes of Michael Manley of Jamaica and surrounded by technocrats such as William Demas (Trinidad and Tobago) and Alister McIntyre (Grenada) and ministers like PJ Patterson (Jamaica) and Sonny Ramphal (Guyana), they showed that they understood the imperative of forging a stronger alliance to guarantee their economic survival, to make the whole greater than the sum of its parts and to acquire a bigger collective voice in the international arena.
Ironically, much of CARICOM’s subsequent success in the international system would, arguably, only serve to maintain and reinforce dependency. This is perhaps best exemplified by the formation of the African, Caribbean and Pacific (ACP) Group of States in 1975 and the negotiation of the Lomé Conventions and Cotonou Agreement, which allowed for a new framework of cooperation for development with the former colonial masters based on preferential access to European markets.
Unfortunately, the region’s leaders have consistently failed to act with sufficient urgency on the more visionary recommendations and, admittedly, tough political options for integration, ranging from those of Havelock Brewster and Clive Thomas in 1967 to the roadmap laid out by the West Indian Commission in 1992. The narrow interests of small states have time and time again frustrated the aspirations of those who understand the reality of survival in the wider world.
Thus, we are living today with the effects of the failure to follow through on the promise of social and economic transformation through integration, particularly with regard to the integration of production, the establishment of economies of scale and the free movement of people across the entire region. It is almost as if some are condemned by their smallness to think small.
The main legacy of colonialism in the post-independence Commonwealth Caribbean has been dependence in one form or another. But CARICOM has to find alternatives to the dependency syndrome, if its small states are to survive and prosper, with any sense of mastery of their own destiny. It will take a remarkable turnaround in the policies of individual member states and the attitudes of their political leaders to redress the failures of the integration project and the deepening of dependency, made manifest in the continuing quest for development assistance, aid for trade and other such handouts.
