A country’s foreign policy is the lens through which it sees and treats with the rest of the world. In its details, foreign policy serves as a navigational tool that plots the paths through countries’ relations with the rest of the world at both the bilateral and multi-lateral levels.
Foreign policy precepts derive from what a government perceives to be a country’s national interest. They seek to embrace the broadest range of countries’ priorities, not least, those that are deemed to be critical to survival, growth and peaceful coexistence within the wider community of states.
What foreign policy does, essentially, is to provide a ‘manual’ for countries’ interaction with the rest of the world. How individual countries or groups of countries with shared interests seek to be perceived and treated by the rest of the international community and the benefits that they seek from that interaction are the primary considerations that determine the ‘shape’ of a country’s foreign policy. Put differently foreign policy is, a priori, about national interest. It must be crafted in a manner that focuses unerringly on the benefits to be derived from countries’ interaction with other state and non-state actors with which it must engage.
A country’s foreign policy cannot be framed without account being taken of just where that country is positioned in the constellation of states and in the absence of a clear sense of which are its friends and which, its adversaries. In that sense, a country’s foreign policy becomes a critical tool in the protection and consolidation of the national interest.
The framing of a country’s foreign policy must also take account of its relationships with allies, which relationships inform a sense of partnership, of acting together on issues. There are, understandably, expectations of mutual gain from such partnerships.
Here it should be stated that the vagaries of relations between and among states in what has become, increasingly, a fluid global environment, can give cause for adjustments in foreign policy posture to take account of those shifting circumstances. Those shifts may be designed to accomplish a particular set of relatively short-term objectives. Otherwise, they may be influenced by more profound changes in countries’ longer-term goals.
Guyana’s post-independence embracing of the concept of a New International Economic Order (NIEO), a set of ideas posited by poor countries to seek to end what is described in some of the literature on the issue as “economic colonialism and dependency” derived from the realization that some countries, having attained political independence, had been dispatched to the domain of the so-called ‘have nots’ and that that condition could not be changed unless the system itself that dictated that status quo was also transformed. This foreign policy posture derived from the realization that while political independence had brought with it, momentarily, an immediate sensation nationalistic fervour that became attended by grandiose illusions and exalted expectations, the reality of what it meant to be independent was an altogether different matter.
In essence, the ‘call’ by some countries for a New International Economic Order amounted, in the final analysis, to little more than ‘hot air,’ altogether divorced from the real world axiom of the ‘haves’ and the ‘have nots.’ For Guyana and other so-called Third World countries that were waiting to ‘grow up,’ there inevitably came the disturbing realization that in terms of taking their places in the constellation of states, political independence, in the first instance, really didn’t mean much beyond the acquisition of a flag, a National Anthem and the onerous responsibility of having to, in a broader sense, fend for itself. For Guyana and for the rest of the Caribbean the ‘rush’ of exaggerated patriotism/nationalism that was part of the euphoria that attended political independence proved insufficient to compensate for the belated wide-eyed helplessness that came with the realization that independence really meant, for the most part, simply being on one’s own.
A newly independent country can only properly fashion a foreign policy if it seeks, first, to understand the world for what it really is. A foreign policy cannot properly be fashioned outside the framework of just where a country is positioned within the constellation of states. It is a matter of shaping a (foreign) ‘policy’ that gives expression not just to a country’s long-term goals but to the particular postures and positions that provide what is perceived to be the best means of arriving there. This process includes, a priori choices of friends and embracing of principles that support the shaping of policies.
Countries must also seek to embrace foreign policy positions that are mindful of their overall circumstances and realistic about their vulnerabilities, This is, to say the least, an exacting task that must take account of myriad considerations, not least, those that have to do with how the world in which a newly independent country must live will respond to its pursuit of what it perceives to be its national interest.
In the particular instance of Guyana, political independence was swiftly followed by the discomfiting realization that the condition of becoming independent had automatically dispatched us to the realm of the have-nots, in the company of a broader grouping of states fervently seeking escape from a ‘global economic order’ that had relegated them to the bottom of the proverbial pile. Guyana, in 1966 joined that queue. As political independence arrived at the doorstep of other countries in the region, the idea of the fashioning of a regimen of alliances through which the Caribbean could at least put heads together to address its common concerns collectively, took shape, eventually, in the form of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM). What could derive, in terms of real forward movement, from a group of countries that had shared a common condition of colonization is an issue which the collective christened CARICOM has, arguably, never really benefitted from diligent and pragmatic contemplation.
During the 1970’s, particularly, expressions of concern by newly independent countries over their lack of preparedness to be part of an international community that had made no room for them became the essence of a clarion call at the levels of the United Nations General Assembly and the Non-Aligned Movement, for “change.” Unsurprisingly, those interventions brought no meaningful transformation…never mind the fact that for much of the 1970’s and 1980’s international organization became preoccupied, principally, with the call for an ill-defined NIEO. This, inevitably, metamorphosed into a protracted and mostly acrimonious ‘discourse’ which ‘the rich’ won, hands down.’
The outcomes of the protracted tumult on non-alignment, a concept that derived from the reluctance by poor countries to become embroiled in the ongoing east/west ideological confrontation were identical. Non-alignment appeared to have bloomed fleetingly through the rousing renditions of a handful of ‘militant’ Third World champions, only to become overwhelmed by the polarized positions of the architects of the Cold War.
In the particular instance of the Caribbean, the creation of CARICOM derived, in large measure, from a collective desire to seek to fashion a common foreign policy outlook out of member states’ shared historical past though what can be described as a collective pursuit of some of its vital interests through a ‘foreign policy’ that derives from a commonality of interests has been stymied by differing intra- regional ideological dispositions and in a more general sense by the disproportionate balance of power between CARICOM and the ‘First World.’ This had largely been the case, as well, in the relationship with post-independence Africa and the colonial powers that had ruled them.
If countries’ foreign policy remains the instrument that gives expression to their external ambitions the question that still remains to be answered has to do with the extent of the effectiveness of the foreign policy aspirations of developing and underdeveloped countries in an international environment where the rich/poor divide is, arguably, no less embedded than it was more than four decades ago and what is now, unmistakably, the increasing iciness of the Cold War.
Here in the Caribbean, not least Guyana, the post-independence ardour that had helped to fashion foreign policies crafted against the backdrop of a call for a more equitable international economic order has been, for the most part, cast aside, replaced by a reality that as a region, and indeed as countries within that region, we have been, for the most part, left to ‘hack it’ it on our own.
