Inward Visions: Caribbean Governance and Development

By Trafford Publishing

The publication Inward Visions: Caribbean Governance and Development offers a selection of papers that seek to pull together into a coherent framework the linkages of progress of our Caribbean society. In doing so, they allow for retrospective assessment and futuristic projections.

Th e Most Honourable Professor Sir Kenneth, former Governor-General of Jamaica, is a well known and respected Caribbean academic who utilised the skills of his profession to analyse the main factors leading to the success of the Caribbean Integration process. Professor Sir Kenneth joined his academic work to a passion for education and has held positions of Chairman of the Caribbean
Examination Council(CXC), Pro Vice Chancellor and Principal, UWI, Chancellor, University College of the Caribbean and Deputy Secretary-General, Caribbean Community. He is currently a Distinguished Research Fellow of the University of the West Indies.

Myrtle Veronica Chuck-A-Sang, M.A. has co-edited several publications with Professor Sir Kenneth Hall on a range of issues relating to Caribbean Regional integration and International Relations. She was the former Director of the UWICARICOM Institutional Relations Project, Caribbean Community Secretariat and is currently the Editor and Managing Director of the Integrationist, Editor of the Integration Quarterly and Company Secretary, Caribbean Fellowship Inc.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Trafford Publishing
• Release date: Jun 4, 2013
• ISBN: 9781466950290

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Contents

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1

Caribbean Civilization?

Dr. Kirk Meighoo

Chapter 2

Development And Regionalism Transformation Of The World System

Professor Kari Polanyi-Levitt

Chapter 3

The Caribbean Single Market And Economy (CSME): The International Environment And Options For CARICOM And The OECS Countries1

Professor Vaughan A. Lewis

Chapter 4

Foreign Policy Options For Caricom: An Analytical Review

Professor Stephen Vasciannie

Chapter 5

Brazil And The Caribbean In A Changing Regional Environment: Challenges And Prospects*

Dr. Mark Kirton

Chapter 6

Caribbean Diplomacy Towards New International Actors In The Caribbean Basin

Dr. Diana Thorburn

Chapter 7

Caribbean Economic Integration: What Is Happening Now; What Needs To Be Done

Dr Trevor Farrell

Chapter 8

Reflections Of A Diplomat

Ambassador J. O’neil Lewis

Chapter 9

Caribbean Reasonings

The Hon. Lloyd Best OCC

Chapter 10

The Caribbean Seascape

Carl Dundas

Chapter 11

Border Controversies And Their Implications For Stability And Security Of The Caribbean Community

Cedric L Joseph

Chapter 12

The Performance And Suitability Of The Standard System Of Political Democracy: A Comparative Analysis Of Guyana And Suriname

Dr. Jack Menke

Chapter 13

Ethnic Voting—A Myth?

Haslyn Parris

Contributors

PREFACE

Participating in periodic retrospection—is not necessarily retrogressive and therefore should not engender or cause undue apprehension. For often, reflection is the starting point of change, the genesis of innovation and the basis of new achievements. If, for any reason therefore, retrospection becomes depressing it should not be forgotten that oft-times it can be simultaneously transformational and exhilarating. The Papers offered in this issue of The Integrationist summon us to the sober activity of contemplating our common plantation beginnings in the Caribbean and lead us to the consideration of our integrated future. Their related thematic strains are held together by the central objective of our efforts and the requirements for building a Caribbean Community for all. For it is true that we have had a similar experience in the past, we may also experience mutuality of gains in the future.

Today the Fathers and Founders of Caribbean Integration would no doubt be proud of our achievement, as we enter the stage of a Caribbean Single Market and Economy. They may upbraid us for slowness and reproach us for previous indecisiveness. They would find it difficult however, not to commend us for staying true to the aspiration of an integrated Caribbean. The world of the 1940s and the place the Caribbean then envisaged for itself is returned to with an assessment as to how we have done. A dispassionate evaluation would identify our omissions, note our frequent stallings and veering off course. It will equally have to show however, that we have always returned to the pathway.

There is also some welcome evidence of what has often been advanced about our Caribbean Civilization. We have to our credit a degree of intellectual maturity, of commitment to scholarship, and of the pursuit of knowledge.

There is a recognition of the path we have travelled, so that we do not need others to tell us what we are since they are certainly not the custodians of our Caribbean experience. This realization must surely serve to embolden our self-confidence as a people.

The breeze that blew us to the CSME shore certainly has lessons for our future. It is to our collective credit that we are aware and responsive to change in our external environment. The more praiseworthy situation of course, is the extent to which we can anticipate that change even if we cannot initiate it. It is equally to our credit that we are able in that process to fashion and forge a response to our internal urgings as well.

In this edition, we are given timely reminder of the importance of jointly caring, preserving, and protecting the Caribbean Sea, our single most valuable common patrimony. Equally, we are reminded that it was our coordinated diplomatic initiative that won us the distinction of hosting the United Nations Conference on Small Island Developing States (SIDS) in Barbados in 1994. And though we cannot prevent natural disasters we must seek through our joint efforts to prevent those disasters that are produced by humans. These and our other past initiatives and achievements must be fortified and built upon.

An outward look at our historical external linkages having engaged our attention, we are then forced to embark on an inward vision of the heritage of our diversity and its implications for governance and development. In this regard, any tendency to yield to flawed simplistic perceptions that our rich diversity is solely problematic rather than beneficial must be resisted. Indeed, at this juncture, these subjects are worthy of the most profound investigation and ventilation. Furthermore, as we demonstrate our willingness to forge forward we must never be afraid to look back at our roots and beginnings. And to this end, this issue of The Integrationist!

The journal is indebted to its distinguished contributors who, by considering and discussing these issues, are playing a part in our advancement and in constructing our future.

INTRODUCTION

The selection of papers for this edition has managed to accomplish the feat of drawing the irrefutable linkages of the progress of Caribbean society across time into a coherent framework allowing retrospective assessment and futuristic projections. To attempt, as though in one mighty swath, to capture the myriad consequences of our 500 years of actions and interactions on plantations and latterly, in our modern independent societies, is a major undertaking and a task of enormous proportion.

This mission commences with Dr. Meighoo’s interesting riposte to a momentum gathering discussion on our Caribbean civilization and concludes with Professor Levitt’s ‘imagined future.’ We are taken on a journey between two extremities—the distant past and the beckoning future. What we are and have become through time and the plantation experience, and the new and distinct society that has emerged in the Caribbean through our cultural diversity is not in debate on our Caribbean civilization. Neither is there uncertainty about our place, performance and evident contributions to the world community. The heart of the debate is whether the Caribbean possesses all of the attributes of a civilization and thereby provides a centre—political, economic, philosophical, linguistic, cultural, juridical, and aesthetic, among others—for its people.

Admittedly, this engagement has not so far produced consensus nor has it arrived at a generally acceptable resolution. In the ferment that is likely to follow, we may, in the process, rediscover much of what has been forged in our unique historical circumstances and that much of this is taken for granted. The debate of our claim of a Caribbean civilization is in itself a sign of our maturity and confidence since, as Dr. Meighoo affirms, a civilization cannot be derived simply from indignant sentiments that if others have one then we must have one also.

There is however, little disagreement that the sugar cane plantations, once notorious for inhumane conduct, and replete with every possible atrocity, were more than wealth producing entities. They served as laboratories for the pioneering of the economic system of division of labour and, on these plantations, the establishment of production facilities on capitalist principles emerged. And if Professor Levitt is accurate, the Caribbean, through its regional integration movement, is playing a part in the evolution of the impending world system transformation. Our regional integration movement will feature in the imagined future which anticipates a significant retreat from the universal capitalism of globalization through the formation of large regions of economic integration with political institutions of governance appropriate to geographic and historical realities. In this resides the greatest tribute to the vision of the past and confirmation of the correctness of the undertaking of the Community.

Within the two extremities constructed by Dr. Meighoo and Professor Levitt, is located the 1940s vision of the Caribbean to establish itself as a light rising in the West. The Hon. Lloyd Best reminds us that the founding fathers of Caribbean integration had definitive thoughts of what we are and what we should become. It was with abounding self-confidence that we desired not to be a European outpost, or become a North American backyard or a non-descript constituent of Latin America. So the West Indian Federation was inaugurated with great anticipation and fervent hope. The fathers and founders of Caribbean integration envisaged a union of the English-speaking West Indies within the British Commonwealth. That the efforts at federation failed did not lead to an abandonment of the initial vision but rather to the discovery of other vehicles, such as CARIFTA in 1968, CARICOM in 1973, and a call for the CSME in 1989, capable of taking the region to the desired destination.

There has been progress along the continuum constructed for us by the writers, but today there is the fear that the region’s people are not exuding the confidence displayed in the past. We may have become susceptible to encroaching self-doubt, having in the past been responsible for bold initiatives—regionally and internationally. Best locates this condition in our education system. He thinks we are experiencing an education crisis that is pervasive and epistemic, and rooted in the failure of the formal and informal institutions to liberate the Caribbean imagination and provide sources of confidence and venture. He diagnoses that the issue is epistemic sovereignty and we must assume responsibility for our own philosophical conception of the world seen primarily, although not entirely, from the coordinates of our own historical, cultural, and institutional context. We must adjudicate our own truths properly, taking into account the experience of the other.

The rising edifice of the Caribbean Single Market and Economy bestriding the region and having the potentialities to bring us to the desired haven envisioned by the founding fathers of integration also appears along this timeline. Professor Vaughan Lewis tells us that while we have been on the road to integration for many years it is our interpretation of the external environment that goaded our leaders and galvanized us into establishing the CSME. His contention is that the decision of CARICOM Heads of Government to pursue the establishment of a single market and economy was influenced by perceptions and expectations largely driven by external factors and sources. Additionally, perhaps, the timing of the development to some extent owes its origin to fortuitous circumstances. These facilitated the progressive implementation of the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas thereby bringing the specific elements of the CSME into effect.

It is an acceptable principle that precipitating factors may be studiously identified in historic and momentous actions. Whatever wind blew the region towards the destination of the CSME succeeded because the sails were set correctly; for it is only an ill wind that blows no where and blows no good. This introspection is however necessary as it makes us conscious of our decision-making apparatus, its flaws and limitations and need for transformation. This statement, is in no way however, intended to dispute or trivialise the inherent difficulties is such a task. The Rt. Hon. Prime Minister Owen Arthur has called the CSME—constructing the 15 participating economies into a single market and a single economy—a most complex, most ambitious and most difficult undertaking in a region where ‘division is the heritage, contrast is the keynote, and competition is the dominant theme’, whereas economic integration requires cooperation.

There are vital Caribbean integration lessons in retrospection. Therefore the close up and personal recollections of Ambassador J. O’Neil Lewis occupy an important place. They provide background and give colour, supply context and include texture for deriving meaning from developments of the past. The matters of his reflections are not obsolete, although they are of historical and recurring relevance and present significance to the Community. The interesting disclosure that we may have been subsumed under the United States; the role of Caribbean diplomats in the birth of the ACP; the manner in which the first Lomé Convention emerged; and the failure of the Federation, awaken our pride and simultaneously impose a sense of soberness. What, however, is intriguing is how closely our past resembles the present even if history does not repeat itself. There is little need of great imagination to identify the parallels between the Lomé Convention and the Economic Partnership Agreements (EPAs) being negotiated. The future is not like the past in that there is little recognition and consideration of the historic fact of former relations and that therefore, something is owed to the former colonial territories.

The region may not negate its historic colonial relationship, escape its geography, dismiss its past geopolitical role and its size, or deny its place in the shadows of the US in a uni-polar world. However, we are advised to realistically reconsider our foreign policy orientation; that is, it must accept its past but redefine future relations with other nations.

Professor Stephen Vasciannie sees scope in the Caribbean situation for creative diplomacy, and support for alliances that will give the small Caribbean an extended voice in global affairs. He tells us that there are options and then warns against uncritically embracing all aspects of the neo-liberal projects presented by the developed world. Considering our reality, the Community is urged to protect its supremacy and to be reluctant to sanction attempts to reduce the significance of State sovereignty.

Dr. Mark Kirton supports that view point that we are not hapless prisoners of our past and suggests that with the political will and through strategic alliances, increased collaboration and structured programmes of cooperation with Brazil we may transcend past limitations. In considering the historical non-engagement between Latin America, and Brazil in particular, and CARICOM, he identifies expansive opportunities for cooperation in the changing regional and global environment.

He clearly believes that out of every evil cometh good and therefore sees the loss of special consideration for small states like those of CARICOM, the reduction and impending elimination of preferential trade arrangements together with the changing global and regional economic and political configuration, as merely providing windows of opportunity for the emergence of a new agenda between CARICOM and Brazil, one which would be capable of accommodating appropriate strategic alliances, increased collaboration and structured programmes of cooperation.

Meanwhile, Dr. Diana Thorburn positions the contemporary Caribbean basin within a changing diplomatic and political arena and on a wave of new international political dynamics in the region. While this presents opportunities for the region to extend its political and diplomatic relations beyond the US and Europe, the caution to be cognisant of its smallness and pragmatic in its approaches has been sounded.

It must be reassuring to the hesitant to discover that already some of the expectations of CSME are emerging in CARICOM. Dr. Trevor Farrell has searched and found ample evidence of growing intra-regional investment. He makes the point that Trinidad and Tobago and, to a lesser extent, Jamaica and Barbados, account for much of this development. He tells us too, that much of the intra-regional direct investment flows take place through some form of inter-corporate linkages, based on joint ventures, mergers, acquisitions and strategic alliances rather than through the setting up of new operations. Cross-border investments have involved mainly ‘market extension diversification’ rather than production integration but portfolio investment is becoming a new dynamic in regional economic integration.

Beyond corroboration he sees positive developments in the emergence of a regional capital market as well as the development of offshore financial centres in various countries in the region. It is true that at this juncture much of what is happening falls within the area of trade in services rather than trade in goods. Perhaps the visible hand may well intervene and encourage the region to ‘identify strategic industries’ in which it has the best chance to build a competitive advantage. He believes that while the CSME is important, if the region is to develop its full potential, public policy will need to be more specifically targeted in the future.

The Caribbean Sea preceded us. In fact, it was the means by which our forebearers were brought to the New World. Our relationship with the sea therefore goes back into the tortuous past—our Caribbean beginning. It is therefore understandable that we may even subconsciously be ambivalent about the sea although it is essentially part of our home. There is today growing recognition that the economic potential of the Caribbean Sea, and more so its centrality to the life of the Community, demands that it be ranked higher in national and Community affairs and be cared, preserved and protected. There is admission of benign neglect.

Carl Dundas and Cedric Joseph speak about the Caribbean Sea in related ways yet with distinct emphases. Dundas tells us that these delicate ecosystems of the Caribbean Sea face serious threats from a variety of human activities as well as from climate change and consequently, there is urgent need for the states and dependent territories of the region to embrace and implement conservation measures and foster international cooperation with a view to furthering research into the health of the ecosystems of the Caribbean. There is clear evidence that serious threats exist to the health and survival of coral reefs, mangrove forests and seagrass meadows. These threats emanate mainly from human activities as well as climate change.

Meanwhile, Joseph calls upon the Community to realize the potential difficulties and negative impact of border controversies and maritime delimitation issues on the Community. The situation is placed below crisis level but there have already been failed mediation between Suriname and Guyana and the employment of naval force of one Community Member against another. The situations are said to be indicative of some turmoil in regional affairs with the prospect for disruptions in the workings of the Community. Further, the prevailing situation has the potential to convey to the international community the region’s incapacity to settle disputes peacefully, which is a major requirement of international behaviour. He recommends collective effort in support of bilateral initiatives as a way of managing the extended maritime area.

We had always held the view that the cultural diversity of the region as represented in its peoples is a distinguishing feature of strength rather than a pathological and problematic issue. In fact, Professor Rex Nettleford says that it is the encounters in the Caribbean that has given rise to what he calls a distinguishable and distinct entity called ‘Caribbean.’ Nevertheless, the Caribbean itself has struggled for all of five centuries with mastering the management of the complexity of its diversity and so it today is possible to say we have learnt to live together rather than simply living side-by-side.

As though the matter is not settled Dr. Jack Menke and Haslyn Parris have revisited our diversity in relation to governance. Their perspectives diverge and so did their conclusions. Dr. Menke looks at the political systems while Parris looks at political relationships and voting preferences and ethnicity. Dr. Menke’s conclusion is that the standard system of political democracy as is evident in Guyana and Suriname produce persistent problems such as blocked development, political instability, ethnic polarization and blocked nation building. Further, empirical data and events in these societies contradict the theoretical concept of the plural society and the related standard political models—the majoritarian and the non-majoritarian models.

Parris consigns ‘assertions and allegations’ about ethnic voting in Guyana to the category of great malignant myths. He reasons that the existence of a correlation between ethnicity and voting preferences seems to bolster the erroneous view with its proponents failing to realise that correlation does not unwaveringly imply causation or offer a sufficient explanation. According to him, the theory of ethnic voting faces insurmountable difficulties. It must deal with the complications of a definition of ethnicity and explain how ethnicity and race may be utilized interchangeably. It must be able to define what voting along ethnic lines means and whether voter-perceived ethnicity relates to the Party Leader, the Party, or the Presidential candidate. Theorists of ethnic voting must then be able to explicate the determination of the aggregate societal mandate of the elections, and finally to determine whether ‘Apan Jhaat’ is the major decision-making criterion in elections where the secrecy of the ballot is preserved.

The issues taken up in this edition, move like a pendulum between our past and our future. They are formidable issues for our consideration and require the application of our creative powers. In many instances, these matters are already occupying the region’s attention. The fact that some degree of constitutional reform is being contemplated and / or undertaken is admission of difficulties and a determination to perfect the democratic system considering our peculiar realities. There are some issues that are new but with resolve and political will, are capable of being amicably resolved.

These observations merely set the tone for an appreciation of the thrust of the papers. The following synopses are intended to provide a compact entrée to the content of each contribution.

Caribbean Civilization

Dr. Kirk Meighoo remains unconvinced of the veracity of the usage of the expression ‘Caribbean Civilization’ and the arguments advanced for its existence. He admits that the Caribbean possesses many, if not all, of the attributes of a civilization but misses the essence, and the main features of a civilization. According to him, a civilization is often composed of many societies, nations, and peoples and has an identifiable cultural, and often geographic centre around which others revolve, feed off, rebel against or feed into. It provides for its people a primary point of reference and orientation and its people are sure of the standard that is set. However, the Caribbean does not fit this definition but remains a collection of satellites. Its states and peoples revolve around centres of authority outside of the Caribbean.

Admitting that a civilization is difficult to define and opting instead for an intuitive definition, he rejects the Marxist and radical critics’ view of civilization as a mask for economic relations of dominance, and he is not satisfied with the emphasis of Prime Ministers Errol Barrow and Ralph Gonsalves on the existence of a distinct identity to arrive at the conclusion that the Caribbean constitutes a civilization. Instead, he supports CLR James’s contention that the Caribbean is an outgrowth of Western civilization, stating that our intellectual world is overwhelmingly North American and British. And while many native ancestral and genuine West Indian strands are threaded into our cultural life, these survive at the informal level. He argues that consequently, our societies are half-made, since there is disconnection between the formal and the informal, between lived experiences and official institutions.

Returning to his definition of a civilization, Dr. Meighoo believes that we are unsure of our autonomy and independence in matters considered serious. He notes that this prevails in the areas of economic organization, justice, military matters, constitutional systems, and other institutional arrangements; and our native sense is marginalised in favour of the international. In concluding, he cites Lloyd Best as observing the persistence of West Indian ambivalence—an ambivalence that springs from the fact that there is this dual consciousness and an inability to bring about the integration of the two halves, and distilling what is the new Afro-Saxon heritage.

Development and Regionalism

According to Professor Kari Levitt, the new wave of globalization has shattered the prolonged period of relative economic stability and economic growth in Europe and North America enjoyed after the Second World War, and there has been instead massive social dislocations and exclusion on a global scale with polarising inequalities. She states that the global community has arrived at one of those critical moments in history when the world system experiences a transformation.

This imagined future anticipates a significant retreat from the universal capitalism of globalization. This may be realized through the formation of large regions of economic integration with political institutions of governance appropriate to geographic and historical realities. The embrace of regionalism as in the EU and the expected emergence of a powerful East Asian formation including China, Japan, Taiwan, and Korea may be manifested. Additionally, the change may come through a civilizational change to transform institutions governing economic life in order to resolve the contradictions to the requirements of the capitalist economy and the requirements of people to live in mutually supportive ways. Moreover, the discipline of Economics must return to basic questions of value and exchange value, and there will have to be the reconciliation of the criteria of technical efficiency with distributive justice and the democratic process.

Her view emerges from the recognition that by the close of the 1990s the neo-liberal policies had failed to produce economic growth with stability and instead had widened the disparities of income in Latin America; resulted in falling living standards in Sub-Saharan Africa; and has been an engine of inequality and instability. This has given rise to severe financial crises in Asia, Latin America, Turkey, Brazil, Argentina, and Russia.

At that time, the World Bank expressed that globalization offered a return to the ‘golden age of the 19th century’ which could bring prosperity to the developing world so long as countries adhered to the market principle. Consequently, GATT was converted to WTO and the North American Free Trade Agreement was signed intending to extend to the entire hemisphere. This emergence was assisted by the Bretton Woods institutions which in response to the maladies of the capitalist system, exhibited in creeping inflation, declining productivity and profits, and political radicalism in the South, utilized their financial leverage to remove restrictions to trade and capital in the developing world. There was also an intellectual attack on development economics as a sub-discipline devoted to the problems of developing countries. Instead, the World Bank declared that there was one and only one economics, and that economic science could explain the functioning of the economy anytime, any place, anywhere, regardless of institutions.

Tracing the emergence of the present world system, Professor Levitt observes that globalization manifests similarities with earlier penetrations of capitalism into the developing world. Noting three waves of capitalist expansion in the 500 years of the modern world system, she identifies mercantilism from 1500–1800; the creation of the world economy in the nineteenth century; and the present wave of globalization. In the first era, she stated that North-South relations of dominance and dependence was established; the second globalization created a world economy and the rise of industrial capitalism from England to Europe, to North America, and Japan. The surplus labour displaced by industrialization emigrated to empty lands. Peripheral countries were transformed into export economies, the traditional division of labour between centres exporting manufactures and a periphery exporting primary products was established.

The Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME):

The International Environment and Options for CARICOM and

the OECS Countries

Professor Vaughan Lewis contends that the concomitants of international trade and economic liberalization; the adoption of IMF/World Bank Washington Consensus principles and programmes of structural adjustment by some CARICOM states; the abandonment of the principle of tariff-protected import substitution as the basis of industrialization and economic growth, and embracing Open Regionalism, implying full integration into the world economy; and the recognition that the major powers of the world were bringing into force new principles of regulation of the conduct of international trade and production, to which all countries—developed and developing—would have to subscribe, facilitate the progressive implementation of the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas thereby bringing the specific elements of the CSME into effect.

He identifies fortuitous circumstances facilitating the creation of CSME as the timing of the original decision, and the revival of the Trinidad and Tobago economy in the second half of the 1990s. The decision was taken when the economies of many of the leading Caribbean states were in recession, or beginning to emerge from recession and acceptance of structural adjustment programmes compelled open, tariff-free national market systems, while the accrual of substantial surpluses of capital in the financial sector of Trinidad and Tobago occurred in a context of a deficit of capital in other economies. This, he claims has induced a movement towards what can be called commercial and financial integration—private sector based—that has itself placed pressure on governments to speedily implement arrangements for rights of establishment, liberalized movement of capital and easy movement and settlement of professional persons.

He concludes therefore, that in a sense, our governments were somewhat forced into moving from our protected common market system to the open market system, since it had become virtually a principle in donor circles that protected import-substitution as a mechanism for economic growth was not possible in the new environment.

He calls for the Community to test the EU assertion that the Regional Economic Partnership Agreement is intended to enhance the scope for Caribbean regional economic integration, noting that regional economic integration is a means to an end—the end of enhanced economic growth. Effective regional economic integration must permit, or increase, the possibilities for our competitive participation in the wider liberalised global economy. It would therefore serve both their interest and ours.

Consequently, the EPA negotiations must not be perceived and treated simply as a follow-up to the previous arrangements. We have to agree, and then assert to the European Union on the basis of a set of principles, schemes and programmes, that we wish our effort of construction of a Caribbean single market, and more importantly, a Caribbean single economy to be integrally a part of the new EPA aid arrangements. Accordingly, the Community needs a certain mental approach to the negotiations so that while it recognizes the need to ensure appropriate conditions for the sustenance of the current set of agricultural exports to Europe, it cannot be the centrepiece of negotiations for an EPA. The central objective of an EPA must be to help CARICOM to move its economies, and therefore the Caribbean economy, to a new level, as the structural adjustment funds helped the poorer countries of the European community to lift their economic levels.

Foreign Policy Options for CARICOM

In considering the foreign policy options of CARICOM, Professor Stephen Vasciannie begins at the historical forces that have functioned to shape the region’s foreign policy. He notes that the region’s foreign policy orientation has been shaped by its historical legacy, its geographic location, and its small size. This is apparent in historically determined arrangements, including preferences, which have kept CARICOM States locked into a durable relationship of dependency with Europe. He points out that small size has imposed considerable constraints in respect of market size, economies of scale and political power in the international arena, on individual CARICOM States.

Professor Vasciannie identifies the foundation of the region’s foreign policy noting the significance of economic considerations which have shaped it. Most CARICOM initiatives and viewpoints ultimately turn on economic factors, since in the field of foreign policy, and at the foundation of, most political issues in the Caribbean lies an economic foundation. Economic concerns play a significant role in determining possible options for CARICOM, and the limits that may be applicable to each approach contemplated. Likewise, macroeconomic concerns are of paramount importance in assessing the prospects of individual CARICOM Member States, and the strategies they may pursue to enhance standards of living in their respective territories. While economic self-interest may be a general feature of international relations and a key factor in policy formulation, in the case of CARICOM, this emphasis is even more well-placed, having regard to the economic difficulties encountered in the post-independence period by members of the regional grouping.

He notes that the fixed reality of CARICOM is not perceived in purely negative terms and observes that proximity to the world’s main military and economic power in a unipolar environment forms