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June 2015 |
Emerging space in the global setting of our times: Will we miss this opportunity?By Winston Dookeran
I want to start to deal with an issue that is at the heart of the challenge of leadership in the Caribbean region. That issue was put together in a few words by the former Prime Minister of Jamaica, P.J. Patterson when he said, “It is high time that the perception of politics as an obstacle to the advancement of the Caribbean be removed. To become the catalyst for meaningful change, politics must be visionary but, yet, pursued through positive activism and principled purpose. As we completed the first decade of the twenty-first millennium, this is indeed the moment to espouse bold concepts which extend the frontiers of our knowledge, that also reflect a full appreciation of what is essential to fashion new political models, engender change and deepen the democratic process.” These words were somewhat echoed by his predecessor Norman Manley when he said, “old ways in politics are no longer equal to the new needs.” I thought from what I heard here this morning that these would come during the course of this session and tomorrow’s. We will focus on how we unlock the politics of our region in order to create the potential for that future of the Caribbean’s civilization. To do so we recognize that what we have achieved over the last 50 years has indeed been an enormous achievement. But the time has come for a new process to begin, and it is in that context therefore that we recognize, all of us in the region, as we move out into a different phase of our development, what is really promoting that. Globalisation has been with us for some time and in the case of the Caribbean for all time. It is not something new. Our experience in the Caribbean region has shown how we can adopt, mitigate and reduce the uncertainties that the external world imposes upon small developing countries, here in the Caribbean and elsewhere. Kishore Mahbubani, a noted diplomat and scholar said in an introduction to his book, “The Great Convergence,” “deep in our guts we all know that our world has changed significantly. Indeed the world has experienced greater change in the past 30 years than it did in the previous 300. What we are struggling to find is one big idea that explains what we feel.” That I believe is the concept of what he coined the great convergence. Our challenge therefore, to insert our region into the new world, is that we must find a new architecture, and that is why we need to look deep into what are the pillars of the current architecture, and how they must be altered and redesigned. “Why Nations Fail” was the title of another provocative book recently, and it concluded “it is man-made political and economic institutions that underline economic success or the lack of it.” That was a historical piece looking at the origins of power, prosperity and poverty in the world setting. This is why I have always been wedded to the idea that the greatest challenge we face is to weld together the synthesis between political logic and economic logic. They are not separate and apart. Much of our teachings and our syllabus have been predicated on that. Political and economic logic must now go hand in hand, that is what must lead us to make some major departures that have gotten us no favours, and it was mentioned here earlier. The economic shocks are not a temporary phenomenon for the Caribbean region. Indeed, we have always been negotiating how we respond in our entire economic history to economic shocks, but yet the international financial institutions of today have predicated their windows of support on the basis that economic shocks are a temporary phenomenon and can be dealt with by cash flow injections. It has not worked and therefore the time has come for us to redefine those windows of support on the basis of the new premises and the new realisation about our economic challenges. The issue of searching for economic space is one of the bases upon which we can ensure that we have the wherewithal in order to capture the opportunities that the world offers. The time has come for the region, and I sense in the submissions here this morning, an acceptance of the fact that we must move on. The Caribbean region’s economic space must be captured by new models of intervention, not in any way denying the benefits of a narrow integration process but capturing the possibilities that a new convergence of the Caribbean region, beyond borders can take place. It is that, that will allow us in the English-speaking CARICOM region and of course the new entrance to Haiti to move from a gross domestic product something like $70 billion to operating in a wider Caribbean Sea with a gross domestic product of $350 billion. The platform for expansion of business activity will have a new growth path and in that sense, institutions that allow us to integrate beyond borders must be put into place to encourage the movement of capital; the movement of technology; the movement of people; and indeed the movement of goods and services. Our institutional framework now limits the orbit of our operations, and that we believe must also be addressed. The third area within this framework of a new convergence process can be easily described as a currency of institutional redundancies in the region. All of us engaged in different institutions, sometimes we recycle each other’s work. All of us engaged in development sometimes take the credit for somebody else’s institution. We have reached a stage of institutional inertia, particularly with respect to development institutions in the region. Whether they are in a world of finance; or whether they are in other areas of economic activity. There is need now to accept the fact that institutional redundancies is one of our great challenges. It is not only a challenge here in the Caribbean, but it is also a challenge in the world at large within which we operate and within which diplomacy takes place. Many of the institutions of yesterday during another era of cold war continued to exist when in truth we now have a different alignment of global and political forces. These are all deep issues that must be addressed. So today, I take this opportunity to raise these issues as we embark on what I hope will be a new exercise to reduce the gap between the expectations of the citizens of the Caribbean, the civilization in which we belong and indeed the entire Caribbean region and its expectations from the global arena. We can together, work out not solutions that can be implemented tomorrow, but thinking that would lead to such institutions for the next generation. Thank you. Winston Dookeran is the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Trinidad and Tobago. He was speaking on the second day of the Forum on the Future of the Caribbean, May 5-7, 2015, Hyatt Regency Hotel. Port of Spain, Trinidad. |
We have had a wonderful setting for what I hope will be a most intriguing day and a rather disruptive day.