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October 2013
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So how can these two apparently competing tendencies be reconciled? In our study, we suggested 20 recommendations which would require vision, ambition and a complete restructuring of, not just CARICOM, but both the rationale and apparatuses for Caribbean regionalism more broadly. Very few of these ideas have gained traction, but we did nonetheless set out an expansive and optimistic vision for what regional integration might become. More recently, the CARICOM Secretariat itself commissioned a report by the Landell Mills development consultancy. This was markedly narrower, more technical and constrained in its scope. It focused specifically on the operation of the Secretariat itself, and suggested a slimming of the institution’s focus to simply deal with a number of priority areas in which policy could be implemented. Beyond this, CARICOM’s ambition and responsibility would be drastically curtailed. What we have, then, are essentially two competing visions of the future of integration. There is the view encapsulated in the IIR report which can be considered an optimistic, yet perhaps less realistic and excessively hopeful view, which sees both CARICOM and the wider integration process that it underpins in a considerably more expansive light. Then there is the second view, which is notably more austere, but perhaps more pragmatic regarding the likely capacity of CARICOM to effect meaningful transformation, and which effectively sees the institution shrinking to take on a necessarily more narrow, but arguably more focused, portfolio of responsibilities. It is very much within the contours of this second view that Secretary-General Ambassador Irwin LaRocque’s own vision for CARICOM—which was the subject of his Distinguished Lecture at the St Augustine campus of The UWI on October 3—can be understood. In many respects, LaRocque’s lecture was deeply impressive. He made a convincing case for the defence of the institution, highlighting a number of areas of successful policy development about which the public are often poorly informed. He quite rightly noted that CARICOM is the longest surviving integration movement in the developing world, and globally is second only to the European Union (EU). He also emphasised that the test of CARICOM’s success is not simply about what happens in the Secretariat, but should rather be ascertained by reflecting on the myriad institutions—of which there are more than 20—which orbit it. Moreover, the Secretary-General’s analysis of the problems afflicting the regional integration process was candid, lucid and sobering. He displayed a shrewd awareness of the changing regional, hemispheric and global context in which CARICOM is operating. A number of processes, such as the inability of Caribbean countries—which are relatively better off in GDP per capita terms than those in other developing regions—to access concessional financing, and the huge debt burdens that many are carrying, all militate against a commitment to the implementation of regional edicts which are often perceived as being expensive. LaRocque was also quite right, in my view, to stress that integration has to be about much more than trade, something which has dominated the process since the establishment of the CSME and the broader dominance of neoliberal ideas since the 1980s.
On the reading advanced by Ambassador LaRocque—which, given his role and the very difficult job that he has to do to balance a range of competing tendencies—the contours of the possible are necessarily perceived as being heavily constrained. This is further reflected in the solutions which he advanced during his lecture: focusing on the kinds of priority areas identified in the Landell Mills report, engaging in a three-year restructuring of the CARICOM Secretariat, undertaking consultations relating to economic recovery, strengthening governance, improving infrastructure and so on. Moreover, he ended by posing a number of salient questions:
The problem, as I see it, is that we know the answers to these questions. Many reports have been written by the region’s finest minds—from Sir Shridath Ramphal’s 1992 report of the West Indian Commission, Time for Action, to Professor Norman Girvan’s Single Development Vision of 2006, and Professor Vaughan Lewis’s 2007 report on creating new institutions of CARICOM governance—which offer wide-ranging prospectuses for infusing the integration process with energy and direction. However, the kinds of answers that all of them proposed do unfortunately exist well outside the constraints within which Ambassador LaRocque himself, and our regional technocrats, are operating. Moreover, they all involve deeply political, rather than simply technical solutions. And this brings us full circle: LaRocque’s proposed solutions are, within these perceived constraints, about the best that we can hope for. There is, for example, little doubt that the Secretariat itself requires a significant degree of institutional transformation. However the travails in which the CARICOM Secretariat finds itself are of a second order nature, and they only exist as a reflection of a series of much deeper problems. Consequently, the proposed technical solutions are largely palliatives, aimed at treating symptoms, not the first order problem of the core sickness itself. The central aspect of this is the enduring unwillingness of the regional political elite to cede power to regional institutions with the prerogative to enforce compliance and implement regional policy. This is something the EU—a regional grouping of countries with far less in common than those in the Caribbean—managed 20 years ago. Even the OECS, as Ambassador LaRocque himself noted, has managed it too (with the signing of the Revised Treaty of Basseterre in 2011). When viewed in this light, CARICOM’s performance unfortunately appears distinctly less impressive. Simply because it has survived for 40 years, does not mean that it will remain relevant for another 40. My sense is that, without a rediscovery of the political purpose of integration, and a conscious widening of the boundaries of the possible by those in power in the region, a period of decline could well become terminal. It barely needs saying that such an eventuality would be an absolute tragedy. Dr Matthew Bishop is a lecturer at the Institute of International Relations, The UWI, St Augustine. For the full text of the lecture by Ambassador Irwin LaRocque please click here. |
Where I am perhaps less in agreement was in his assertion that, too often, “we set ourselves over-ambitious targets which doom us to failure.” My disagreement with this notion stems from the fact that it reflects the fundamental—and perhaps unbridgeable—divide between the two positions encompassed within the IIR and Landell Mills reports respectively.