US Constitution: A model for others
Published: Mon, 2011-10-03 01:42 trinidad guardian
Michael Delblond
In my own humble—and hopefully informed—view, genuine public discussion on constitutional matters ought not to be confused with or obscured by “cut and paste” exercises on the part of legal draughtsmen or the combing and probing of the Constitution’s fine print and grey areas for loopholes and ambiguities for the sole purpose of scoring sterile academic debating points simply in order to procure preferred outcome.
Today, more than ever, with the “wind of change” sweeping across the international landscape and autocratic regimes being swept aside, it’s probably advisable that a subsequent political vacuum and its possible attendant anarchy be eschewed in favour of attention being focused on the bedrock of liberal assumptions on which future constitutions are presumably based, with due respect for individual rights and legitimate freedoms. There is, in my respectful view, a lot of daylight between “political shadowboxing and snide innuendoes” and genuine inquiry into fundamental constitutional tenets, as distinct from an exercise in semantics and/or argumental and/or political expediency, in complete ignorance of the social, historical and political realities.
It’s perhaps fortunate that reference can be made to the US Constitution and particularly the amendments which constitute their Bill or Rights. A distinctive feature of the American Constitution is what is known as “the principle of separation of powers.” Interestingly, the framers didn’t intend that the executive, legislative and judicial arms of government should function in water-tight compartments but their overriding concern was “the dispersion of power” and ensuring that “checks and balances” would guarantee against the accumulation of power and lack of accountability which they deemed a sure recipe for tyranny.
Noted political scientist Prof James Q Wilson explained: “The framers (of the American Constitution) did not create three autonomous branches of government, but rather three separate institutions sharing power. For example, the President negotiates treaties with foreign governments, the Senate must approve them, and the Supreme Court has the right to declare presidential acts unconstitutional.” According to James Magregor Burns, the rationale for having the legislative and executive “at arm’s length,” so to speak, “was designed to prevent the mischief of factions and the tyranny of passionate majorities or ambitious politicians.”
Professor of History Jack N Rakove claimed that, like most other federalists, James Madison “thought that the legislatures were dominated by demagogues who sought office for reasons of ‘ambition’ and ‘personal interest’ rather than ‘public good.’ Such men as Patrick Henry (give me liberty or give me death), his great rival from Virginia, could always dupe more honest but unenlightened representatives, by veiling selfish views under the professions of public good.” As one of the major architects of the Constitution saw it, “The constant aim is to divide and arrange the several offices in such a manner so that each may be a check on the other.”
There is another view, as expressed by James L Sandquist: “A government structure drafted to frustrate would-be despots must, inevitably, also frustrate democratic leaders chosen by the people.” James Burns noted that the framers wanted a government “strong enough to protect individual liberties, but not too strong as to threaten those liberties.” When faced with the particular dilemma during the America Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln reflected thus, “Government must be strong enough to ensure its own existence, but not so strong to imperil the liberty of its citizens.” The American Constitution is not only regarded as a model for other written constitutions—even of the parliamentary or pseudo-parliamentary paradigm—but much can be learnt from a knowledge of how the framers approached their tasks and their chief concerns.
I do not refer to the “pseudo-parliamentary system” in any spirit of levity. Suppose—and we’re only supposing—that a Prime Minister is effectively much more than “first among equals,” and his/her Cabinet and parliamentarians, generally, are virtually under his/her thumb, then it would be difficult to discern the much touted “checks and balances” that are supposed to be an integral ingredient of a bona fide “parliamentary democracy” system. As far as I know, India is the world’s largest parliamentary democracy. Interestingly, the first Chief Justice of the Federal Court of India, referring to noted lawyer M Ramaswamy’s work (Fundamental Rights), opined that a “valuable part of that work was showing that fundamental rights conferred upon American citizens by the Constitution of the United States are real, effective, constantly enforced and readily enforceable.”
THOUGHTS
• According to James Magregor Burns, the rationale for having the legislative and executive “at arm’s length,” so to speak, “was designed to prevent the mischief of factions and the tyranny of passionate majorities or ambitious politicians.”
• The American Constitution is not only regarded as a model for other written constitutions—even of the parliamentary or pseudo-parliamentary paradigm—but much can be learnt from a knowledge of how the framers approached their tasks and their chief concerns.
Monday, October 3, 2011
'Rodney Riots'
Remembering the 'Rodney Riots'
published: Sunday | October 12, 2008 jamaica gleaner
Carolyn Cooper, Contributor
Most students at the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies are too young to have witnessed the events of October 16, 1968, when protests erupted in Kingston as a result of the banning of Walter Rodney by the then government of Jamaica. Many students don't even know the name of this distinguished Pan-Africanist.
These days, the only question the average student would ask if a lecturer were banned is, "So who is going to take over the class?" And you really have to understand. With the high cost of tuition, books, housing, food, transportation, and so on, most students are focused on getting in and out of university as fast as possible. Their goal is a 'big' job. They don't have any time to count cow. They just want to drink milk.
My generation of students also counted the cost of university education. But we counted cow as well. The late 1960s was a period of self-discovery in which the cry 'Black Power' animated conversations about racial identity and national consciousness. The promise of 'independence' and 'out of many, one people' masked the visible signs of neo-colo-nialism. So we had to take stock.
THE GOLDEN CALF
Students of the University of the West Indies break through a police cordon along Mona Road, St Andrew, in 1968. The cops, armed with tear gas canisters and riot batons, are in hot pursuit.
When I entered UWI in October 1968 I was accompanied to my hall of residence, Mary Seacole, by my immediate family, as well as the pastor of my church, the North Street Seventh-day Adventist. The university was seen as a hotbed of radicalism and so it was decided that I needed divine intervention to protect me. Or, at least, my pastor's prayers.
I had always been the kind of child who asked disquieting questions. Why can't we wear jewellery when the children of Israel had enough gold to make a calf? And why is it OK to wear a brooch and not earrings? You can well imagine the quizzical expression on my face when a well-intentioned pastor told me that you wear a brooch on your clothes and earrings on your body, so that was the important difference. The identical decorative function simply didn't matter.
It was clear that university education was going to give my restless imagination even more scope for development. So in exactly the same way that other believers would have taken their child to an obeahman or woman for protection from bad-mind and grudgeful people, my pastor was brought along to offer prayers to save me from dangerous intellectual inquiry.
IMPRISONED ON CAMPUS
Nevertheless, before the end of the month, I was out on the streets taking part in the infamous demonstrations. The meeting of the Guild of Students that was called to discuss the appropriate response to the banning of Walter Rodney took place in Mary Seacole's dining room. There was no question about not attending. I was living at the very centre of the excitement. I certainly didn't understand all the issues. But the eloquence of the older students was persuasive. I made up my mind to participate in the demonstration.
We had been advised to take damp towels to protect ourselves from tear gas. As it turned out, I was quite lucky and was able to jump into a passing car when we were tear-gassed in Liguanea. When the march divided - some students going downtown and others down Hope Road - I took what I anticipated would be the less dangerous route. I headed for Half-Way Tree.
But when I realised that I could actually be arrested, the demonstration lost its appeal. I don't know what I would have told my poor mother. I quickly calculated that discretion was, indeed, the better part of valour and retreated to the campus. Imprisoned there for two weeks as police and soldiers cordoned the university, we had the luxury of time to reflect on the meaning of the protests and our role as university students in transforming political systems of inequality.
GROUNDINGS
This week, the University of the West Indies will host 'Groundings: The Walter Rodney Conference', to mark the 40th anniversary of the student protests. The conference, one of the many activities to commemorate the University's 60th year, will open on October 16 with the 10th Annual Walter Rodney lecture. Professor Patricia Rodney will speak on the topic, 'Remembering Walter Rodney: My Personal, Political and Professional Journey'.
The conference continues on Friday and Saturday with panels on 'Rodney, Revolution and Popular Music'; 'Rastafari and Political Activism in Jamaica'; 'Oral Histories of the Rodney Protests'; 'Rodney, Race, Class and Gender'; 'Student and Youth Activism Past and Present'; 'Rethinking Development' and 'Walter Rodney's Academic and Political Legacy'.
Some of the featured speakers include Donna Hope, whose paper is titled 'Pon di Gullyside: From Rodney to Mavado'. Horace Campbell will examine Rodney's contribution to the Dar es Salaam School of Philosophy. Rupert Lewis will assess the implications of the demonstrations for UWI and the idea of regionalism.
Karen Jefferson, head of Archives and Special Collections at the Atlanta University Center's Robert W. Woodruff Library, will focus on the Walter Rodney papers which are housed there. Asha Rodney will speak about the role of the Walter Rodney Foundation in sustaining her father's legacy.
CONFERENCE HIGHLIGHT
One of the highlights of the conference will be Edward Seaga's reflections on Walter Rodney as an activist. Frederick Hickling's multi-media presentation on 'Rastafari as an African Disapora National Liberation Movement' promises to be another high point. There will be film screenings and poetry readings and the conference will close with a dance at the UWI Student Union, 'Eras: Reunion at the Union'.
Like Walter Rodney's influential book, The Groundings With My Brothers, the 40th anniversary conference will provide a unique opportunity for conversation with both sisters and brothers about how we can help create humane societies in the 21st century.
In the spirit of Rodney's inclusive politics, the 'Groundings' conference is open to the public and there is no registration fee. For further information, email conferencewalter rodney@yahoo.com or telephone the Institute of Caribbean Studies at 977-1951 or 512-3228.
Letters to the Editor
published: Sunday | October 12, 2008 jamaica gleaner
Carolyn Cooper, Contributor
Most students at the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies are too young to have witnessed the events of October 16, 1968, when protests erupted in Kingston as a result of the banning of Walter Rodney by the then government of Jamaica. Many students don't even know the name of this distinguished Pan-Africanist.
These days, the only question the average student would ask if a lecturer were banned is, "So who is going to take over the class?" And you really have to understand. With the high cost of tuition, books, housing, food, transportation, and so on, most students are focused on getting in and out of university as fast as possible. Their goal is a 'big' job. They don't have any time to count cow. They just want to drink milk.
My generation of students also counted the cost of university education. But we counted cow as well. The late 1960s was a period of self-discovery in which the cry 'Black Power' animated conversations about racial identity and national consciousness. The promise of 'independence' and 'out of many, one people' masked the visible signs of neo-colo-nialism. So we had to take stock.
THE GOLDEN CALF
Students of the University of the West Indies break through a police cordon along Mona Road, St Andrew, in 1968. The cops, armed with tear gas canisters and riot batons, are in hot pursuit.
When I entered UWI in October 1968 I was accompanied to my hall of residence, Mary Seacole, by my immediate family, as well as the pastor of my church, the North Street Seventh-day Adventist. The university was seen as a hotbed of radicalism and so it was decided that I needed divine intervention to protect me. Or, at least, my pastor's prayers.
I had always been the kind of child who asked disquieting questions. Why can't we wear jewellery when the children of Israel had enough gold to make a calf? And why is it OK to wear a brooch and not earrings? You can well imagine the quizzical expression on my face when a well-intentioned pastor told me that you wear a brooch on your clothes and earrings on your body, so that was the important difference. The identical decorative function simply didn't matter.
It was clear that university education was going to give my restless imagination even more scope for development. So in exactly the same way that other believers would have taken their child to an obeahman or woman for protection from bad-mind and grudgeful people, my pastor was brought along to offer prayers to save me from dangerous intellectual inquiry.
IMPRISONED ON CAMPUS
Nevertheless, before the end of the month, I was out on the streets taking part in the infamous demonstrations. The meeting of the Guild of Students that was called to discuss the appropriate response to the banning of Walter Rodney took place in Mary Seacole's dining room. There was no question about not attending. I was living at the very centre of the excitement. I certainly didn't understand all the issues. But the eloquence of the older students was persuasive. I made up my mind to participate in the demonstration.
We had been advised to take damp towels to protect ourselves from tear gas. As it turned out, I was quite lucky and was able to jump into a passing car when we were tear-gassed in Liguanea. When the march divided - some students going downtown and others down Hope Road - I took what I anticipated would be the less dangerous route. I headed for Half-Way Tree.
But when I realised that I could actually be arrested, the demonstration lost its appeal. I don't know what I would have told my poor mother. I quickly calculated that discretion was, indeed, the better part of valour and retreated to the campus. Imprisoned there for two weeks as police and soldiers cordoned the university, we had the luxury of time to reflect on the meaning of the protests and our role as university students in transforming political systems of inequality.
GROUNDINGS
This week, the University of the West Indies will host 'Groundings: The Walter Rodney Conference', to mark the 40th anniversary of the student protests. The conference, one of the many activities to commemorate the University's 60th year, will open on October 16 with the 10th Annual Walter Rodney lecture. Professor Patricia Rodney will speak on the topic, 'Remembering Walter Rodney: My Personal, Political and Professional Journey'.
The conference continues on Friday and Saturday with panels on 'Rodney, Revolution and Popular Music'; 'Rastafari and Political Activism in Jamaica'; 'Oral Histories of the Rodney Protests'; 'Rodney, Race, Class and Gender'; 'Student and Youth Activism Past and Present'; 'Rethinking Development' and 'Walter Rodney's Academic and Political Legacy'.
Some of the featured speakers include Donna Hope, whose paper is titled 'Pon di Gullyside: From Rodney to Mavado'. Horace Campbell will examine Rodney's contribution to the Dar es Salaam School of Philosophy. Rupert Lewis will assess the implications of the demonstrations for UWI and the idea of regionalism.
Karen Jefferson, head of Archives and Special Collections at the Atlanta University Center's Robert W. Woodruff Library, will focus on the Walter Rodney papers which are housed there. Asha Rodney will speak about the role of the Walter Rodney Foundation in sustaining her father's legacy.
CONFERENCE HIGHLIGHT
One of the highlights of the conference will be Edward Seaga's reflections on Walter Rodney as an activist. Frederick Hickling's multi-media presentation on 'Rastafari as an African Disapora National Liberation Movement' promises to be another high point. There will be film screenings and poetry readings and the conference will close with a dance at the UWI Student Union, 'Eras: Reunion at the Union'.
Like Walter Rodney's influential book, The Groundings With My Brothers, the 40th anniversary conference will provide a unique opportunity for conversation with both sisters and brothers about how we can help create humane societies in the 21st century.
In the spirit of Rodney's inclusive politics, the 'Groundings' conference is open to the public and there is no registration fee. For further information, email conferencewalter rodney@yahoo.com or telephone the Institute of Caribbean Studies at 977-1951 or 512-3228.
Letters to the Editor
ccj
Is the CCJ a Trojan Horse?
Published: Sunday | December 26, 2010 jamaica gleaner
Priya LeversAshford W. Meikle, Contributor
In a recent address to the Cornwall Bar Association, Justice Patrick Robinson blamed a colonial mentality for the failure of Jamaicans to abolish appeals to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council and embrace the Caribbean Court of Justice as the country's final court of appeal.
In advancing his arguments, he quoted Marcus Garvey, saying it was better to misgovern yourself rather than be governed by another.
The eminent jurist's views echo similar sentiments that were expressed just over a year ago by the president of the Court of Appeal, Justice Seymour Panton, who described people favouring a retention of the Privy Council as being "the very wealthy, murderers and the ones with colonial mentality".
As well intentioned as they are, the views of both judges are misplaced. There has been a tendency to intellectualise the Privy Council-CCJ debate, one that betrays the intelligentsia's belief that it knows what is best for the Jamaican people. Ironically, it may be argued that this paternalism is itself one of the vestiges of colonialism - backra massa knew what was best for his innocent and naive slaves.
Recent polls suggest that a majority of Jamaicans support the Privy Council as the country's final court of appeal, and with good reason. Twice, since Independence, the Jamaican government - in a calculated and cynical strategy - has launched a direct attack on the Constitution and the civil liberties of Jamaicans.
Serious breach
The 1977 case, Hinds v R, challenged legislation passed by parliament which established the Gun Court. Effectively, the act transferred the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court over criminal firearm offences to a tribunal of resident magistrates who did not enjoy the security of tenure of Supreme Court judges, as guaranteed in the Constitution. The legislation was a serious breach of the principle of separation of powers (as implied by the Constitution) between the judiciary and the executive.
In 2004, in a brazen and Machiavellian move, the Jamaican government attempted to abrogate the constitutional rights of Jamaicans when it rushed legislation through parliament to establish the CCJ as the country's final court of appeal. This was challenged in IJCHR v Syringa Marshall-Burnett, in which it was argued that if appeals to the Privy Council were abolished, the Constitution mandated a referendum to entrench the CCJ so that its judges would enjoy the security of tenure afforded to our Supreme Court and Court of Appeal judges in the constitution.
Ironically, in both cases, it was a 'foreign' court - far removed from the corruption and graft of our politics - that stood as the bulwark for the constitutional rights of Jamaicans against government misbehaviour. Indeed, if an argument is to be made for getting rid of the vestiges of colonialism, it is that we should dismantle the Westminster system of government. It is Britain's lasting legacy to her former colonial empire, and it is one which has engendered executive dictatorship (with too much power concentrated into the hands of the prime minister) and, in the case of Jamaica, the fight for scarce benefits and political spoils.
Nationalism has always been the cri de guerre of the proponents of the CCJ. However, it is an argument which stands on feet of clay. On that issue, Marcus Garvey is wrong. Misgovernment is unacceptable and against the rule of law. Robert Mugabe is Zimbabwe's modern-day Ozymandias. It is intellectually dishonest to argue that the Privy Council is comprised of 'foreign' judges when the CCJ itself is chartered to invite other Commonwealth judges to sit in the court. The argument also ignores the fact that four Caribbean chief justices, including Jamaica's own Justice Zacca, have been appointed to the Privy Council.
Given our turbulent and violent political culture, it is a testimony to the integrity of our judiciary that it has, for the most part, remained unscathed and protected from poli-tical interference and corruption. Yet, as the IJCHR case has shown, there is a real risk that the judiciary is susceptible to the emotional appeal of nationalism. There is also the belief that our local courts, at times, take a narrow approach in its interpretation of legislation concerning constitutional rights (the Hinds case), human-rights issues (Pratt and Morgan) and the liability of the state when its servants abuse their power (the Clinton Bernard case). In each case, the profoundly unsatisfactory judgment of our local court was overturned by the Privy Council, ensuring justice for poor and disenfranchised Jamaicans.
It may be argued that the articles of the 2001 Agreement Establishing the Caribbean Court of Justice are so rigid in their provisions that political interference in the court and the manipulation of judges by Caribbean politicians will be virtually possible. Of course, it is not without a sense of irony to note that the agreement itself was written by politicians. In any event, almost all the judges will be drawn from a pool of regional jurists who, ultimately, are appointed to their local judiciary by their respective heads of government. As an example, in Jamaica, members of the judiciary are appointed by the Judicial Service Commission. Yet, four of the six members of the commission hold their positions ultimately on the recommendation of the prime minister. Services commissions are protected in the Constitution but, as the Stephen Vasciannie imbroglio demonstrated, the prime minister can force the resignation of members of a service commission at his pleasure.
Eminent jurists
There is no doubt that the region is not short of eminent jurists who are equal to their peers worldwide. However, the actions of some Caribbean judges invariably bring into question their objectivity and political agenda. In Cayman, recently, the Privy Council ruled that Justice Priya Levers should be removed from the bench as a result of her history of misconduct in making derogatory statements about Jamaican women who appeared in her court.
Earlier this year, Trinidadian High Court Judge, Justice Herbert Philip Volney (a strident critic of the former Patrick Manning government while the judge was on the bench), resigned to run on the winning ticket of Prime Minister Persad-Bissessar. In Jamaica, we have our own example, with former RM judge, Marlene Malahoo-Forte, who was appointed to the Senate.
Whether or not the CCJ will consider itself bound by previous Privy Council decisions remains to be seen. The position of the High Court of Australia is that Australia, having left the Privy Council, is not bound by previous, established rulings. In the context of the Caribbean, this is frightening. It is for this reason why the sceptics of the CCJ regard it as a Trojan horse designed by Caribbean politicians to launch an assault on our civil liberties and human rights.
It was, in fact, dissatisfaction with the Pratt and Morgan ruling and a desire to expedite hanging which provided the catalyst for the previous People's National Party government (and a number of other Caribbean governments) to hastily pass legislation to establish the CCJ as our final appellate court. But, until the Jamaican Government looks into the mirror and, like Caliban, recoils at its revolting image, many Jamaicans will feel quite justified in continuing to believe that the scale of justice is more likely to be balanced 5,000 miles away, in London, among a venerable group of 'foreign' men.
Ashford Meikle is a law student and a member of Jamaicans for Justice. Feedbackmay be sentto columns@gleanerjm.com
Published: Sunday | December 26, 2010 jamaica gleaner
Priya LeversAshford W. Meikle, Contributor
In a recent address to the Cornwall Bar Association, Justice Patrick Robinson blamed a colonial mentality for the failure of Jamaicans to abolish appeals to the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council and embrace the Caribbean Court of Justice as the country's final court of appeal.
In advancing his arguments, he quoted Marcus Garvey, saying it was better to misgovern yourself rather than be governed by another.
The eminent jurist's views echo similar sentiments that were expressed just over a year ago by the president of the Court of Appeal, Justice Seymour Panton, who described people favouring a retention of the Privy Council as being "the very wealthy, murderers and the ones with colonial mentality".
As well intentioned as they are, the views of both judges are misplaced. There has been a tendency to intellectualise the Privy Council-CCJ debate, one that betrays the intelligentsia's belief that it knows what is best for the Jamaican people. Ironically, it may be argued that this paternalism is itself one of the vestiges of colonialism - backra massa knew what was best for his innocent and naive slaves.
Recent polls suggest that a majority of Jamaicans support the Privy Council as the country's final court of appeal, and with good reason. Twice, since Independence, the Jamaican government - in a calculated and cynical strategy - has launched a direct attack on the Constitution and the civil liberties of Jamaicans.
Serious breach
The 1977 case, Hinds v R, challenged legislation passed by parliament which established the Gun Court. Effectively, the act transferred the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court over criminal firearm offences to a tribunal of resident magistrates who did not enjoy the security of tenure of Supreme Court judges, as guaranteed in the Constitution. The legislation was a serious breach of the principle of separation of powers (as implied by the Constitution) between the judiciary and the executive.
In 2004, in a brazen and Machiavellian move, the Jamaican government attempted to abrogate the constitutional rights of Jamaicans when it rushed legislation through parliament to establish the CCJ as the country's final court of appeal. This was challenged in IJCHR v Syringa Marshall-Burnett, in which it was argued that if appeals to the Privy Council were abolished, the Constitution mandated a referendum to entrench the CCJ so that its judges would enjoy the security of tenure afforded to our Supreme Court and Court of Appeal judges in the constitution.
Ironically, in both cases, it was a 'foreign' court - far removed from the corruption and graft of our politics - that stood as the bulwark for the constitutional rights of Jamaicans against government misbehaviour. Indeed, if an argument is to be made for getting rid of the vestiges of colonialism, it is that we should dismantle the Westminster system of government. It is Britain's lasting legacy to her former colonial empire, and it is one which has engendered executive dictatorship (with too much power concentrated into the hands of the prime minister) and, in the case of Jamaica, the fight for scarce benefits and political spoils.
Nationalism has always been the cri de guerre of the proponents of the CCJ. However, it is an argument which stands on feet of clay. On that issue, Marcus Garvey is wrong. Misgovernment is unacceptable and against the rule of law. Robert Mugabe is Zimbabwe's modern-day Ozymandias. It is intellectually dishonest to argue that the Privy Council is comprised of 'foreign' judges when the CCJ itself is chartered to invite other Commonwealth judges to sit in the court. The argument also ignores the fact that four Caribbean chief justices, including Jamaica's own Justice Zacca, have been appointed to the Privy Council.
Given our turbulent and violent political culture, it is a testimony to the integrity of our judiciary that it has, for the most part, remained unscathed and protected from poli-tical interference and corruption. Yet, as the IJCHR case has shown, there is a real risk that the judiciary is susceptible to the emotional appeal of nationalism. There is also the belief that our local courts, at times, take a narrow approach in its interpretation of legislation concerning constitutional rights (the Hinds case), human-rights issues (Pratt and Morgan) and the liability of the state when its servants abuse their power (the Clinton Bernard case). In each case, the profoundly unsatisfactory judgment of our local court was overturned by the Privy Council, ensuring justice for poor and disenfranchised Jamaicans.
It may be argued that the articles of the 2001 Agreement Establishing the Caribbean Court of Justice are so rigid in their provisions that political interference in the court and the manipulation of judges by Caribbean politicians will be virtually possible. Of course, it is not without a sense of irony to note that the agreement itself was written by politicians. In any event, almost all the judges will be drawn from a pool of regional jurists who, ultimately, are appointed to their local judiciary by their respective heads of government. As an example, in Jamaica, members of the judiciary are appointed by the Judicial Service Commission. Yet, four of the six members of the commission hold their positions ultimately on the recommendation of the prime minister. Services commissions are protected in the Constitution but, as the Stephen Vasciannie imbroglio demonstrated, the prime minister can force the resignation of members of a service commission at his pleasure.
Eminent jurists
There is no doubt that the region is not short of eminent jurists who are equal to their peers worldwide. However, the actions of some Caribbean judges invariably bring into question their objectivity and political agenda. In Cayman, recently, the Privy Council ruled that Justice Priya Levers should be removed from the bench as a result of her history of misconduct in making derogatory statements about Jamaican women who appeared in her court.
Earlier this year, Trinidadian High Court Judge, Justice Herbert Philip Volney (a strident critic of the former Patrick Manning government while the judge was on the bench), resigned to run on the winning ticket of Prime Minister Persad-Bissessar. In Jamaica, we have our own example, with former RM judge, Marlene Malahoo-Forte, who was appointed to the Senate.
Whether or not the CCJ will consider itself bound by previous Privy Council decisions remains to be seen. The position of the High Court of Australia is that Australia, having left the Privy Council, is not bound by previous, established rulings. In the context of the Caribbean, this is frightening. It is for this reason why the sceptics of the CCJ regard it as a Trojan horse designed by Caribbean politicians to launch an assault on our civil liberties and human rights.
It was, in fact, dissatisfaction with the Pratt and Morgan ruling and a desire to expedite hanging which provided the catalyst for the previous People's National Party government (and a number of other Caribbean governments) to hastily pass legislation to establish the CCJ as our final appellate court. But, until the Jamaican Government looks into the mirror and, like Caliban, recoils at its revolting image, many Jamaicans will feel quite justified in continuing to believe that the scale of justice is more likely to be balanced 5,000 miles away, in London, among a venerable group of 'foreign' men.
Ashford Meikle is a law student and a member of Jamaicans for Justice. Feedbackmay be sentto columns@gleanerjm.com
What is carnival?
It is an annual celebration of life found in many countries of the world. And in fact, by learning more about carnival we can learn more about ourselves and a lot about accepting and understanding other cultures.
Where did the word “carnival” come from?
Hundred and hundreds of years ago, the followers of the Catholic religion in Italy started the tradition of holding a wild costume festival right before the first day of Lent. Because Catholics are not supposed to eat meat during Lent, they called their festival, carnevale — which means “to put away the meat.” As time passed, carnivals in Italy became quite famous; and in fact the practice spread to France, Spain, and all the Catholic countries in Europe. Then as the French, Spanish, and Portuguese began to take control of the Americas and other parts of the world, they brought with them their tradition of celebrating carnival.
The dynamic economic and political history of the Caribbean are indeed the ingredients of festival arts as we find them today throughout the African and Caribbean Diaspora. Once Columbus had steered his boat through Caribbean waters, it was only a few hundred years before the slave trade was well established. By the early 19th century, some six million slaves had been brought to the Caribbean. Between 1836 and 1917, indentured workers from Europe, west and central Africa, southern China, and India were brought to the Caribbean as laborers.
African influences on carnival traditions
Important to Caribbean festival arts are the ancient African traditions of parading and moving in circles through villages in costumes and masks. Circling villages was believed to bring good fortune, to heal problems, and chill out angry relatives who had died and passed into the next world. Carnival traditions also borrow from the African tradition of putting together natural objects (bones, grasses, beads, shells, fabric) to create a piece of sculpture, a mask, or costume — with each object or combination of objects representing a certain idea or spiritual force.
Feathers were frequently used by Africans in their motherland on masks and headdresses as a symbol of our ability as humans to rise above problems, pains, heartbreaks, illness — to travel to another world to be reborn and to grow spiritually. Today, we see feathers used in many, many forms in creating carnival costumes.
African dance and music traditions transformed the early carnival celebrations in the Americas, as African drum rhythms, large puppets, stick fighters, and stilt dancers began to make their appearances in the carnival festivities.
In many parts of the world, where Catholic Europeans set up colonies and entered into the slave trade, carnival took root. Brazil, once a Portuguese colony, is famous for its carnival, as is Mardi Gras in Louisiana (where African-Americans mixed with French settlers and Native Americans). Carnival celebrations are now found throughout the Caribbean in Barbados, Jamaica, Grenada, Dominica, Haiti, Cuba, St. Thomas, St. Marten; in Central and South America in Belize, Panama, Brazil; and in large cities in Canada and the U.S. where Caribbean people have settled, including Brooklyn, Miami, and Toronto. Even San Francisco has a carnival!
Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago
Trinidad's carnival is a beautiful example of how carnival can unite the world. For in this small nation, the beliefs and traditions of many cultures have come together; and for a brief five days each year, the whole country forgets their differences to celebrate life!
Like many other nations under colonial rule, the history of Native Americans and African people in Trinidad is a brutal, sad story. Spain and England at different times both claimed Trinidad as their colonies. Under British rule, the French settled in Trinidad, bringing with them their slaves, customs, and culture. By 1797, 14,000 French settlers came to live in Trinidad, consisting of about 2,000 whites and 12,000 slaves. Most of the native peoples (often called the Amerindians) who were the first people to live in Trinidad, died from forced labor and illness.
Carnival was introduced to Trinidad around 1785, as the French settlers began to arrive. The tradition caught on quickly, and fancy balls were held where the wealthy planters put on masks, wigs, and beautiful dresses and danced long into the night. The use of masks had special meaning for the slaves, because for many African peoples, masking is widely used in their rituals for the dead. Obviously banned from the masked balls of the French, the slaves would hold their own little carnivals in their backyards — using their own rituals and folklore, but also imitating their masters’ behavior at the masked balls.
For African people, carnival became a way to express their power as individuals, as well as their rich cultural traditions. After 1838 (when slavery was abolished), the freed Africans began to host their own carnival celebrations in the streets that grew more and more elaborate, and soon became more popular than the balls.
Today, carnival in Trinidad is like a mirror that reflects the faces the many immigrants who have come to this island nation from Europe, Africa, India, and China. African, Asian, and American Indian influences have been particularly strong.
Carnival is such an important aspect of life in Trinidad that many schools believe that sponsoring a carnival band is a way to teach young people about their roots and culture. In Trinidad’s Kiddies Carnival, hundreds of schools and community organizations participate! In this way, communities work together to develop stronger friendships and greater respect for the many cultures that make up Trinidad.
Creating a carnival production
In order to put a carnival band together, it takes many weeks of welding; sewing; gluing; applying feathers, sequins, foil papers, glitter and lots of creativity, energy, and patience. The first step is to come up with a theme or overall concept for the band and to develop costume illustrations for each section of dancers. Costumes are then sewn, decorated, and fitted to each individual dancer. All this creative activity takes place in what are referred to in the Caribbean as “mas camps,” where teamwork and organization are crucial to creating an award-winning production.
The larger costumes are usually more difficult to design and build. Huge frames are created by bending wire into shapes, then covering with paper mâché, foam, and other materials. Physics play an important role, as the costume must be able to move and dance across stages and streets, and not fall apart! Many different forms of decorations and materials (natural and man-made) are used to transform the costume into a dream of the mind’s eye. The Praying Mantis pictured here was created by Ronald Blaize (from Marabella, Trinidad), who also created All Ah We’s Sun Fire King in 1992. Created primarily from wire, netting, foam, and paint, these awesome costumes mesmerize and dazzle spectators.
One of the most incredible artists working today in Trinidad is Peter Minshall. He is acclaimed internationally as the foremost artist working in the field of “dancing mobiles,” a form of performance art that combines the three-dimensional quality of large-scale sculpture with the dramatic and choreographic expressiveness of a live human performer. As Minshall has noted, “The dancing mobile is one of many forms to grow out of the masquerade tradition of Trinidad Carnival.”
The Birth of the Steelband
One of the exciting aspects of Caribbean carnival is the appearance in the early 20th century of the steel pan, which are instruments made from used oil drums that have been cut off on one end and then shaped, pounded, and tuned. Every carnival season, steelbands, composed of one to two hundred pan players, practice for months on end. Ready with their tunes, these steelbands take to the stadiums and the streets, to create some of the most beautiful music in the world.
The history of the steelband in Trinidad and Tobago is directly tied to the banning of all types of drumming in Trinidad in the 1880’s. Though this ban was not readily accepted and rioting resulted, ultimately Africans applied and readapted their tradition of the drum to create new forms and mediums of music, including the tamboo bamboo, a rhythmic ensemble made up of bamboo joints beaten together and pounded on the ground. Biscuit tins and dustbins were manipulated and crafted into instruments, becoming the first “pans.” To explore the roots of pan and understand that this phenomenal music came about through years of struggle and sacrifice, visit Steelbands of Trinidad and Tobago.
Uniting the World
Carnival arts offers all of us a dynamic tool for self-expression and exploration, a tool to seek out our roots, a tool to develop new forms of looking at the world and its cultures, and finally, a tool to unite the world, to discover what we all have in common, and to celebrate what makes us different. The power and creativity that underlies these art forms can transform lives. Join hands with All Ah We, and together we will dance the song of life!
Recommended Reading
Caribbean Festival Arts, written by John W. Nunley and Judith Bettleheim (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988).
It is an annual celebration of life found in many countries of the world. And in fact, by learning more about carnival we can learn more about ourselves and a lot about accepting and understanding other cultures.
Where did the word “carnival” come from?
Hundred and hundreds of years ago, the followers of the Catholic religion in Italy started the tradition of holding a wild costume festival right before the first day of Lent. Because Catholics are not supposed to eat meat during Lent, they called their festival, carnevale — which means “to put away the meat.” As time passed, carnivals in Italy became quite famous; and in fact the practice spread to France, Spain, and all the Catholic countries in Europe. Then as the French, Spanish, and Portuguese began to take control of the Americas and other parts of the world, they brought with them their tradition of celebrating carnival.
The dynamic economic and political history of the Caribbean are indeed the ingredients of festival arts as we find them today throughout the African and Caribbean Diaspora. Once Columbus had steered his boat through Caribbean waters, it was only a few hundred years before the slave trade was well established. By the early 19th century, some six million slaves had been brought to the Caribbean. Between 1836 and 1917, indentured workers from Europe, west and central Africa, southern China, and India were brought to the Caribbean as laborers.
African influences on carnival traditions
Important to Caribbean festival arts are the ancient African traditions of parading and moving in circles through villages in costumes and masks. Circling villages was believed to bring good fortune, to heal problems, and chill out angry relatives who had died and passed into the next world. Carnival traditions also borrow from the African tradition of putting together natural objects (bones, grasses, beads, shells, fabric) to create a piece of sculpture, a mask, or costume — with each object or combination of objects representing a certain idea or spiritual force.
Feathers were frequently used by Africans in their motherland on masks and headdresses as a symbol of our ability as humans to rise above problems, pains, heartbreaks, illness — to travel to another world to be reborn and to grow spiritually. Today, we see feathers used in many, many forms in creating carnival costumes.
African dance and music traditions transformed the early carnival celebrations in the Americas, as African drum rhythms, large puppets, stick fighters, and stilt dancers began to make their appearances in the carnival festivities.
In many parts of the world, where Catholic Europeans set up colonies and entered into the slave trade, carnival took root. Brazil, once a Portuguese colony, is famous for its carnival, as is Mardi Gras in Louisiana (where African-Americans mixed with French settlers and Native Americans). Carnival celebrations are now found throughout the Caribbean in Barbados, Jamaica, Grenada, Dominica, Haiti, Cuba, St. Thomas, St. Marten; in Central and South America in Belize, Panama, Brazil; and in large cities in Canada and the U.S. where Caribbean people have settled, including Brooklyn, Miami, and Toronto. Even San Francisco has a carnival!
Carnival in Trinidad and Tobago
Trinidad's carnival is a beautiful example of how carnival can unite the world. For in this small nation, the beliefs and traditions of many cultures have come together; and for a brief five days each year, the whole country forgets their differences to celebrate life!
Like many other nations under colonial rule, the history of Native Americans and African people in Trinidad is a brutal, sad story. Spain and England at different times both claimed Trinidad as their colonies. Under British rule, the French settled in Trinidad, bringing with them their slaves, customs, and culture. By 1797, 14,000 French settlers came to live in Trinidad, consisting of about 2,000 whites and 12,000 slaves. Most of the native peoples (often called the Amerindians) who were the first people to live in Trinidad, died from forced labor and illness.
Carnival was introduced to Trinidad around 1785, as the French settlers began to arrive. The tradition caught on quickly, and fancy balls were held where the wealthy planters put on masks, wigs, and beautiful dresses and danced long into the night. The use of masks had special meaning for the slaves, because for many African peoples, masking is widely used in their rituals for the dead. Obviously banned from the masked balls of the French, the slaves would hold their own little carnivals in their backyards — using their own rituals and folklore, but also imitating their masters’ behavior at the masked balls.
For African people, carnival became a way to express their power as individuals, as well as their rich cultural traditions. After 1838 (when slavery was abolished), the freed Africans began to host their own carnival celebrations in the streets that grew more and more elaborate, and soon became more popular than the balls.
Today, carnival in Trinidad is like a mirror that reflects the faces the many immigrants who have come to this island nation from Europe, Africa, India, and China. African, Asian, and American Indian influences have been particularly strong.
Carnival is such an important aspect of life in Trinidad that many schools believe that sponsoring a carnival band is a way to teach young people about their roots and culture. In Trinidad’s Kiddies Carnival, hundreds of schools and community organizations participate! In this way, communities work together to develop stronger friendships and greater respect for the many cultures that make up Trinidad.
Creating a carnival production
In order to put a carnival band together, it takes many weeks of welding; sewing; gluing; applying feathers, sequins, foil papers, glitter and lots of creativity, energy, and patience. The first step is to come up with a theme or overall concept for the band and to develop costume illustrations for each section of dancers. Costumes are then sewn, decorated, and fitted to each individual dancer. All this creative activity takes place in what are referred to in the Caribbean as “mas camps,” where teamwork and organization are crucial to creating an award-winning production.
The larger costumes are usually more difficult to design and build. Huge frames are created by bending wire into shapes, then covering with paper mâché, foam, and other materials. Physics play an important role, as the costume must be able to move and dance across stages and streets, and not fall apart! Many different forms of decorations and materials (natural and man-made) are used to transform the costume into a dream of the mind’s eye. The Praying Mantis pictured here was created by Ronald Blaize (from Marabella, Trinidad), who also created All Ah We’s Sun Fire King in 1992. Created primarily from wire, netting, foam, and paint, these awesome costumes mesmerize and dazzle spectators.
One of the most incredible artists working today in Trinidad is Peter Minshall. He is acclaimed internationally as the foremost artist working in the field of “dancing mobiles,” a form of performance art that combines the three-dimensional quality of large-scale sculpture with the dramatic and choreographic expressiveness of a live human performer. As Minshall has noted, “The dancing mobile is one of many forms to grow out of the masquerade tradition of Trinidad Carnival.”
The Birth of the Steelband
One of the exciting aspects of Caribbean carnival is the appearance in the early 20th century of the steel pan, which are instruments made from used oil drums that have been cut off on one end and then shaped, pounded, and tuned. Every carnival season, steelbands, composed of one to two hundred pan players, practice for months on end. Ready with their tunes, these steelbands take to the stadiums and the streets, to create some of the most beautiful music in the world.
The history of the steelband in Trinidad and Tobago is directly tied to the banning of all types of drumming in Trinidad in the 1880’s. Though this ban was not readily accepted and rioting resulted, ultimately Africans applied and readapted their tradition of the drum to create new forms and mediums of music, including the tamboo bamboo, a rhythmic ensemble made up of bamboo joints beaten together and pounded on the ground. Biscuit tins and dustbins were manipulated and crafted into instruments, becoming the first “pans.” To explore the roots of pan and understand that this phenomenal music came about through years of struggle and sacrifice, visit Steelbands of Trinidad and Tobago.
Uniting the World
Carnival arts offers all of us a dynamic tool for self-expression and exploration, a tool to seek out our roots, a tool to develop new forms of looking at the world and its cultures, and finally, a tool to unite the world, to discover what we all have in common, and to celebrate what makes us different. The power and creativity that underlies these art forms can transform lives. Join hands with All Ah We, and together we will dance the song of life!
Recommended Reading
Caribbean Festival Arts, written by John W. Nunley and Judith Bettleheim (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1988).
Friday, September 16, 2011
Wednesday, September 14, 2011
culture and imperialism
© Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East, 23:1&2 (2003)
Reflections on Edward Said: A Caribbean Perspective
MELANIE NEWTON
In Culture and Imperialism–the work which, of all of
Edward Said’s writings, resonated most with me, and, I
think, with many scholars of and from the Caribbean–
Said did for the British novel what Trinidadian scholar
and prime minister Eric Williams in Capitalism and Slavery
did a generation before for slave emancipation. Said
took what were previously dismissed as merely peripheral,
passing references to the empire “out there,” comments
carelessly “thrown away” and forgotten, and
showed how central they in fact were to the stories being
told. Said represented more than just the empire
“writing back.” His was a voice writing through and beyond
the master narratives of empire, refusing the binary
oppositions between empire and metropole,
“them” and “us,” “familiar” and “unfamiliar” which
have been so important to colonial expansion and which
still informs so much of our academic inquiry.
Beneath the carefully considered prose, the humorous
language and the kindness of Said’s writings—a kindness
frequently not replicated and usually unacknowledged
in the writings of his detractors—is a sense of
urgency, which also animates the writings of so many
writers and artists from the Caribbean, who are or were
public intellectuals like Said. In common with Said,
many of these intellectuals have found that the history
of the Caribbean does not permit them the illusion that
the beauty of art can ever be disconnected from its
wider historical context. Through their works these intellectuals
have both helped and forced their audiences
to face the fact that artistic forms, like the novel, are
inextricably bound up with colonialism, and will always
recall histories and legacies of exploitation, persistent
inequalities and enslavement. It is no accident that the
novel—perhaps the most imperially imbricated of all
forms of artistic expression—became one of the principal
sites for the articulation of a language of decolonization
in the twentieth century Caribbean.
Said’s writings are peppered with references to Caribbean
thinkers and public intellectuals who were writing
in exile of various kinds. His writings on Aimé Césaire,
Frantz Fanon, C.L.R. James and Walter Rodney reflect
the empathy of a fellow traveler who shared a consciousness
of himself as in but not of this messy array of
institutions which make up the “West.” Like Fanon,
James, or Rodney, Said did more than simply provide a
voice for the dispossessed–already a noble thing–or
serve as the intellectual face of anti-colonial nationalism.
He was able to occupy a difficult space of ambivalence,
a position “out of place”, which could not be satisfied
with easy recourses to identitarian politics. This gift of
living creatively with the ambivalence of the perpetual
insider/outsider speaks powerfully to the experience of
many Caribbean intellectuals who have come to terms,
in the words of the Barbadian novelist George Lamming,
with the “pleasures of exile.” It is a rare ability,
but one which is essential to any vision of a just and
genuinely postcolonial world.
Said brought to his analysis a determination to recognise
the imperialist assumptions, the “throw-away” references
to empire which so shaped the world view of,
for example, Jane Austen and William Thackeray, while
still retaining the ability to admire their beauty. Even as
Said laid bare the imperialist assumptions that informed
the English literary canon, taking it apart and rebuilding
it with empire and slavery at its heart, he also laid claim
to the British novel as his. Like C.L.R. James, who
probably knew every word of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair by
heart, Said could confront and accept his own uncomfortable
sense of simultaneous familiarity and unbelonging
in this imperial vision, and still claim such texts,
in all their ambivalence, as part of himself. I was
touched by his ability to see, for example, the genius of
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and yet also critique
the fact that Conrad could afford-–despite his trenchant
critique of European imperialism in Africa-–to paint a
picture of Africa which closed off the possibility of
alternative visions either of Africans or of the encounter
between Africans and Europeans.
This ability to see beauty in all its tarnished forms, to
understand that we should not run from that beauty
even as we expose and condemn the assumptions on
which it was based, was perhaps one of Said’s most important
legacies. He understood that beauty is not to be
found in the absence or suppression of historical pain
but in the act of creation, recognition, naming and refusing
to “throw away”. Perhaps what moves me most
about Said’s writings, his life and his passing was this
generosity of spirit, this capacity to marvel, whether
through literature, music, or academic scholarship, at the
beauty of the mess that we have made of the world.
Reflections on Edward Said: A Caribbean Perspective
MELANIE NEWTON
In Culture and Imperialism–the work which, of all of
Edward Said’s writings, resonated most with me, and, I
think, with many scholars of and from the Caribbean–
Said did for the British novel what Trinidadian scholar
and prime minister Eric Williams in Capitalism and Slavery
did a generation before for slave emancipation. Said
took what were previously dismissed as merely peripheral,
passing references to the empire “out there,” comments
carelessly “thrown away” and forgotten, and
showed how central they in fact were to the stories being
told. Said represented more than just the empire
“writing back.” His was a voice writing through and beyond
the master narratives of empire, refusing the binary
oppositions between empire and metropole,
“them” and “us,” “familiar” and “unfamiliar” which
have been so important to colonial expansion and which
still informs so much of our academic inquiry.
Beneath the carefully considered prose, the humorous
language and the kindness of Said’s writings—a kindness
frequently not replicated and usually unacknowledged
in the writings of his detractors—is a sense of
urgency, which also animates the writings of so many
writers and artists from the Caribbean, who are or were
public intellectuals like Said. In common with Said,
many of these intellectuals have found that the history
of the Caribbean does not permit them the illusion that
the beauty of art can ever be disconnected from its
wider historical context. Through their works these intellectuals
have both helped and forced their audiences
to face the fact that artistic forms, like the novel, are
inextricably bound up with colonialism, and will always
recall histories and legacies of exploitation, persistent
inequalities and enslavement. It is no accident that the
novel—perhaps the most imperially imbricated of all
forms of artistic expression—became one of the principal
sites for the articulation of a language of decolonization
in the twentieth century Caribbean.
Said’s writings are peppered with references to Caribbean
thinkers and public intellectuals who were writing
in exile of various kinds. His writings on Aimé Césaire,
Frantz Fanon, C.L.R. James and Walter Rodney reflect
the empathy of a fellow traveler who shared a consciousness
of himself as in but not of this messy array of
institutions which make up the “West.” Like Fanon,
James, or Rodney, Said did more than simply provide a
voice for the dispossessed–already a noble thing–or
serve as the intellectual face of anti-colonial nationalism.
He was able to occupy a difficult space of ambivalence,
a position “out of place”, which could not be satisfied
with easy recourses to identitarian politics. This gift of
living creatively with the ambivalence of the perpetual
insider/outsider speaks powerfully to the experience of
many Caribbean intellectuals who have come to terms,
in the words of the Barbadian novelist George Lamming,
with the “pleasures of exile.” It is a rare ability,
but one which is essential to any vision of a just and
genuinely postcolonial world.
Said brought to his analysis a determination to recognise
the imperialist assumptions, the “throw-away” references
to empire which so shaped the world view of,
for example, Jane Austen and William Thackeray, while
still retaining the ability to admire their beauty. Even as
Said laid bare the imperialist assumptions that informed
the English literary canon, taking it apart and rebuilding
it with empire and slavery at its heart, he also laid claim
to the British novel as his. Like C.L.R. James, who
probably knew every word of Thackeray’s Vanity Fair by
heart, Said could confront and accept his own uncomfortable
sense of simultaneous familiarity and unbelonging
in this imperial vision, and still claim such texts,
in all their ambivalence, as part of himself. I was
touched by his ability to see, for example, the genius of
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and yet also critique
the fact that Conrad could afford-–despite his trenchant
critique of European imperialism in Africa-–to paint a
picture of Africa which closed off the possibility of
alternative visions either of Africans or of the encounter
between Africans and Europeans.
This ability to see beauty in all its tarnished forms, to
understand that we should not run from that beauty
even as we expose and condemn the assumptions on
which it was based, was perhaps one of Said’s most important
legacies. He understood that beauty is not to be
found in the absence or suppression of historical pain
but in the act of creation, recognition, naming and refusing
to “throw away”. Perhaps what moves me most
about Said’s writings, his life and his passing was this
generosity of spirit, this capacity to marvel, whether
through literature, music, or academic scholarship, at the
beauty of the mess that we have made of the world.
writing caribbean intellectual history
small axe 26 • June 2008 • p 168–178 • ISSN 0799-0537
Writing Caribbean Intellectual History
Anthony Bogues
Abstract: Arguing that An Intellectual History of the Caribbean is an important text in the emerging
field of Caribbean intellectual history, this essay suggests that missing from this important
text is the working through of an intellectual history that grapples with black religious practices
as modes of thought. It also argues that if Caribbean thought gets knotted up in the trope of
Caliban, it will not decolonize itself and begin to wrestle with what Kamau Brathwaite has called
the “inner plantation.”
The writing of Caribbean intellectual history is a tricky matter. There are not only conventional
linguistic divides that balkanize Caribbean thought but also the more critical matter of
what constitutes Caribbean ideas and thought, and thus a Caribbean intellectual tradition.
Is this tradition constituted primarily of political ideas, literature, economic thought, or the
historical knowledge of the region? In this mix, where do Afro-Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean
religious practices fit? Do these religious practices not invoke, as Joan Dayan argues, a “project
of thought,” with the “intensity of interpretation” that is allowed by such practices?1 And if
they do, then what does this mean for an intellectual history of the region and for the category
of thought itself?
There is also the matter of popular culture as one of the ways in which subaltern classes
both represent and produce, in Antonio Gramsci’s phrase, “ways of seeing things and acting.”2
And finally, there is a thematic problem. In what ways can we characterize Caribbean intellectual
history? In other words, what are the critical preoccupations of this history, not an
intellectual laundry list of writers, thinkers, and practices, but rather preoccupations that
allow us to reflect upon our historical experiences—historical experiences that at first blush
1. Joan Dayan, Haiti, History and the Gods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), xvii.
2. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. and ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith
(New York: International Publishers, 1987), 333.
SX26 • June 2008 • Anthony Bogues 169
oftentimes seem impossible to represent and in which official memory circulates as mnemonic
spectacle. These are knotty issues that, although present at the “inauguration” of Caribbean
intellectual history, assume today a vital centrality.
In thinking about these issues while reading Silvio Torres-Saillant’s An Intellectual History
of the Caribbean, one recalls Elsa Goveia’s 1956 observation: in writing Caribbean history,
we should “seek [to go] beyond the narrative of events, [to get] a wider understanding of the
thoughts, habits and institutions of a whole society.”3 Writing before the formal political independence
of the British Caribbean colonies, Goveia urged us on to a possible way in which
we should consider history not just as the narrative of events to be recounted but instead as
perhaps the most important frame for a postcolonial society understanding itself on its own
terms. Almost twenty years later, Kamau Brathwaite in what has become a seminal essay in
Caribbean thought, “Caribbean Man in Space and Time,” attempted to provide an answer to
Goveia’s observation when he constructed two typologies for studying the Caribbean. One
typology, the “outer plantation,” congealed itself into a disciplinary field calling itself Caribbean
Studies. Arguing that historical study was the major preoccupation of this field in the
early twentieth century, Brathwaite suggests that historical work cleared the way for “the concept
of the plantation in Caribbean scholarship.”4 The concept of the plantation Brathwaite
suggests draws on the 1927 writings of Gurrea y Sanchez. The plantation has been a central
leitmotif in Caribbean thought, becoming a conceptual marker for the work of Lloyd Best and
what eventually became known as the New World Group.5 Although appearing at a critical
moment in Caribbean intellectual history, the theoretical framework of the plantation did
not have full explanatory power. The reason for this, Brathwaite argued, was that plantation
theory, although it claimed to be a theory of totality, did not “contain all that was planted.”6
For Goveia’s call to be properly answered, Brathwaite suggested that Caribbean writers and
theorists needed to turn their gaze to the “inner plantation.” In this inner plantation, he
says, “we are concerned with cores and kernels: resistant local forms: roots, stumps, survival
rhythms; growing points.”7 Brathwaite’s call was not a narrow linguistic one.
What does it mean to examine the inner plantation? I would suggest that this requires first
and foremost the recognition that one of the key defining historical moments of Caribbean
3. Elsa Goveia, Historiography of the British West Indies (1956; reprint, Washington D.C.: Howard University Press,
1980), 177.
4. Edward Kamau Brathwaite, “Caribbean Man in Space and Time,” Savacou, nos. 11–12 (1975): 3.
5. For a set of essays reviewing the intellectual history and work of the New World Group, see Norman Girvan, ed.,
The Thought of the New World (Kingston: Ian Randle Press, 2008).
6. Brathwaite, “Caribbean Man,” 4.
7. Ibid., 6.
Writing Caribbean Intellectual History
Anthony Bogues
Abstract: Arguing that An Intellectual History of the Caribbean is an important text in the emerging
field of Caribbean intellectual history, this essay suggests that missing from this important
text is the working through of an intellectual history that grapples with black religious practices
as modes of thought. It also argues that if Caribbean thought gets knotted up in the trope of
Caliban, it will not decolonize itself and begin to wrestle with what Kamau Brathwaite has called
the “inner plantation.”
The writing of Caribbean intellectual history is a tricky matter. There are not only conventional
linguistic divides that balkanize Caribbean thought but also the more critical matter of
what constitutes Caribbean ideas and thought, and thus a Caribbean intellectual tradition.
Is this tradition constituted primarily of political ideas, literature, economic thought, or the
historical knowledge of the region? In this mix, where do Afro-Caribbean and Indo-Caribbean
religious practices fit? Do these religious practices not invoke, as Joan Dayan argues, a “project
of thought,” with the “intensity of interpretation” that is allowed by such practices?1 And if
they do, then what does this mean for an intellectual history of the region and for the category
of thought itself?
There is also the matter of popular culture as one of the ways in which subaltern classes
both represent and produce, in Antonio Gramsci’s phrase, “ways of seeing things and acting.”2
And finally, there is a thematic problem. In what ways can we characterize Caribbean intellectual
history? In other words, what are the critical preoccupations of this history, not an
intellectual laundry list of writers, thinkers, and practices, but rather preoccupations that
allow us to reflect upon our historical experiences—historical experiences that at first blush
1. Joan Dayan, Haiti, History and the Gods (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), xvii.
2. Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, trans. and ed. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smith
(New York: International Publishers, 1987), 333.
SX26 • June 2008 • Anthony Bogues 169
oftentimes seem impossible to represent and in which official memory circulates as mnemonic
spectacle. These are knotty issues that, although present at the “inauguration” of Caribbean
intellectual history, assume today a vital centrality.
In thinking about these issues while reading Silvio Torres-Saillant’s An Intellectual History
of the Caribbean, one recalls Elsa Goveia’s 1956 observation: in writing Caribbean history,
we should “seek [to go] beyond the narrative of events, [to get] a wider understanding of the
thoughts, habits and institutions of a whole society.”3 Writing before the formal political independence
of the British Caribbean colonies, Goveia urged us on to a possible way in which
we should consider history not just as the narrative of events to be recounted but instead as
perhaps the most important frame for a postcolonial society understanding itself on its own
terms. Almost twenty years later, Kamau Brathwaite in what has become a seminal essay in
Caribbean thought, “Caribbean Man in Space and Time,” attempted to provide an answer to
Goveia’s observation when he constructed two typologies for studying the Caribbean. One
typology, the “outer plantation,” congealed itself into a disciplinary field calling itself Caribbean
Studies. Arguing that historical study was the major preoccupation of this field in the
early twentieth century, Brathwaite suggests that historical work cleared the way for “the concept
of the plantation in Caribbean scholarship.”4 The concept of the plantation Brathwaite
suggests draws on the 1927 writings of Gurrea y Sanchez. The plantation has been a central
leitmotif in Caribbean thought, becoming a conceptual marker for the work of Lloyd Best and
what eventually became known as the New World Group.5 Although appearing at a critical
moment in Caribbean intellectual history, the theoretical framework of the plantation did
not have full explanatory power. The reason for this, Brathwaite argued, was that plantation
theory, although it claimed to be a theory of totality, did not “contain all that was planted.”6
For Goveia’s call to be properly answered, Brathwaite suggested that Caribbean writers and
theorists needed to turn their gaze to the “inner plantation.” In this inner plantation, he
says, “we are concerned with cores and kernels: resistant local forms: roots, stumps, survival
rhythms; growing points.”7 Brathwaite’s call was not a narrow linguistic one.
What does it mean to examine the inner plantation? I would suggest that this requires first
and foremost the recognition that one of the key defining historical moments of Caribbean
3. Elsa Goveia, Historiography of the British West Indies (1956; reprint, Washington D.C.: Howard University Press,
1980), 177.
4. Edward Kamau Brathwaite, “Caribbean Man in Space and Time,” Savacou, nos. 11–12 (1975): 3.
5. For a set of essays reviewing the intellectual history and work of the New World Group, see Norman Girvan, ed.,
The Thought of the New World (Kingston: Ian Randle Press, 2008).
6. Brathwaite, “Caribbean Man,” 4.
7. Ibid., 6.
Tuesday, September 13, 2011
essay writing(course work)
here is an essay site:http://http://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/100773.html
ECONOMIC INTEGRATION AND CARIBBEAN
ECONOMIC INTEGRATION AND CARIBBEAN IDENTITY... 53
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ECONOMIC INTEGRATION AND CARIBBEAN
IDENTITY: CONVERGENCES AND DIVERGENCES*
Emilio Pantojas García
ABSTRACT
The literature on economic integration in the Caribbean and Latin
America primarily focuses on economic, institutional and geopolitical
issues. Regional economic exchanges (trade, investment), transportation,
economic structures, political institutions, as well as geographical
and demographic factors are high on the list of variables pondered
when studying regional integration. Cultural and ideological issues
are seldom considered central to the viability of regional integration.
Three key factors that constitute the context upon which contradictory
tendencies act simultaneously to foster and hinder Caribbean regional
integration are discussed: geopolitical, economic and cultural-historical
factors. These factors configure “dialectics of cooperation and competition”
and account for both, the basis and fulcrum of regional integration
and the basis and fulcrum of regional competition and, often,
mistrust. A discussion of each of these factors suggests that how they
are managed is crucial to the formation of a regional identity and the
articulation of a political project of regional integration.
Keywords: economic cooperation, economic integration, identity,
regional integration, trade agreements
RESUMEN
La literatura sobre integración económica del Caribe y América Latina
tiene como eje primordial asuntos económicos, institucionales y geopolíticos.
Temas de intercambio regional (inversión y comercio), transportación,
estructuras económicas, instituciones políticas, así como factores
geográficos y demográficos, son las variables principales en el estudio de
la integración regional. Rara vez se consideran como factores centrales
para la viabilidad de la integración asuntos culturales e ideológicos.
Se discuten tres factores claves que constituyen el contexto en el cual
tendencias contradictorias actúan simultáneamente para promover y
obstaculizar la integración del Caribe: factores geopolíticos, económicos
e histórico-culturales. Estos factores configuran la “dialéctica de cooperación
y competencia” y constituyen simultáneamente la base y el fulcro
de la integración, así como de la competencia y, a veces, la desconfianza
regional. La discusión de estos tres factores sugiere que la manera en que
se manejen éstos será crucial para la formación de una identidad regional
y la articulación de un proyecto político de integración.
54 EMILIO PANTOJAS GARCÍA
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Palabras clave: cooperación económica, integración económica, identidad,
integración regional, acuerdos comerciales
RÉSUMÉ
Les études réalisées sur l’intégration de la Caraïbe et de l’Amérique
Latine portent leur attention sur les questions économiques, institutionnelles
et géopolitiques. Des sujets d’échange régional (investissement
et commerce), de transport, de structures économiques, d’institutions
politiques, ainsi que des facteurs géographiques et démographiques,
se sont là les variables principales de ces études. Les aspects culturels
et idéologiques qui soutiennent la viabilité de l’intégration de la région
son rarement considérés comme des éléments principales. Les débats
sont portés sur trois facteurs essentiels : géopolitiques, économiques
et historico-culturelles qui forment « la dialectique de coopération et
de compétence ». Ils constituent le contexte dans lequel des tendances
contradictoires fonctionnent de façon simultanée, dont l’objectif
est de promouvoir et faire obstacle à l’intégration de la Caraïbe. Ils
représentent la base et le point d’appui de l’intégration, ainsi que la
compétence et, parfois, une manque de confiance dans la région. Ainsi,
les débats de ces trois facteurs suggèrent que la manière de gérer sera
cruciale pour la formation d’une identité régionale et la structure d’un
projet politique d’intégration.
Mots-clés: coopération économique, intégration économique, intégration
régionale, identité, accords commerciales
Received : 30 May 2007 Revision received : 2 April 2008 Accepted : 4 April
2008
The Caribbean is an emotional federation.
Derek Walcott
The literature on economic integration in the Caribbean
and Latin America traditionally and primarily focuses on
economic, institutional and geopolitical issues. Regional
economic exchanges (trade, investment), transportation, economic structures,
political institutions, as well as geographical and demographic factors
are high on the list of issues / variables pondered and discussed when
speaking about regional integration. Cultural and ideological issues are
seldom considered central to the viability of regional integration. The
notion that forging a shared Caribbean identity is, or may be, a necessary
precondition to articulate a political project of regional integration
is rarely, and only recently, included in the agenda of regional bodies
dealing with economic integration. It appears as if geography, the location
on the rim of the Caribbean Sea or on the “Caribbean Basin,” and
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the shared historical traits of “plantation economies,” are assumed to
constitute the basis of a shared identity.
This technocratic view of economic integration centers on geographic
proximity, and assumes that economic exchanges and shared history
naturally beget a “regional” identity. The geopolitics of WWII created a
framework of international relations that divided the world into spheres
of influence. The Eastern or Socialist bloc, the North Atlantic alliance
between Europe and the United States are but two examples of this
emerging view of the World. This geopolitical cum technocratic view
of regions, in turn influenced post war reconstruction economics and
became institutionalized with the creation of the Regional Science Association
in 1954 (Isard et al. 1998). The new imaginary of the “regional
sciences” focused on geography and economic, demographic, political
and institutional linkages and interactions in defining the makeup of
a region. Historical, cultural and ideological affinities were assumed
in construing Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia as regions. The
regional science imaginary in turn constructed smaller, geographically
and historically similar spaces, into subregions, such as Central America,
the Andean region and the Caribbean.
The technocratic constructs called regions and subregions became
new analytical units for reconstruction and development economics.
Inspired by the success in coordinating the production, delivery and
use of weapons on a massive scale during WW II, development and
reconstruction economics advocated the creation of regional economic
communities as a means of taking advantages of economies of scales and
complementarities to further economic reconstruction and development.
In 1957, following this new paradigm, the European Economic Community
was created. And in 1960, the European Free Trade Association
followed.1
In Latin America, regional integration began with the Central
American Common Market (CACM) and the Latin American Free
Trade Association both founded in 1960 and the Andean Pact in 1969. In
the Caribbean, the Caribbean Economic Community (CARICOM) was
created in 1973, following the ill fated Caribbean Free Trade Association,
created in 1968 (Samuel 1993:159).2 Only recently and mostly due
to the pressures of the World Trade Organization and the Free Trade
Area of the Americas initiative, regional economic and trade agreements
in the Western Hemisphere have become operational economic units.
This is the case of the CARICOM single market and economy as well
as MERCOSUR, and the CACM.
This essay examines three key factors that foster and hinder Caribbean
regional integration: geopolitical, economic and cultural-historical
factors. These factors constitute the context upon which contradictory
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tendencies act simultaneously tending to convergence and divergence.
They configure “dialectics of cooperation and competition” and account
for both, the basis and fulcrum of regional integration and the basis and
fulcrum of regional competition and, often, mistrust. This essay simply
presents a general overview of the elements and factors that confront
regional integration initiatives.
On Caribbean Identity(ies)
Much has been said and written about Caribbean identity and identities
in the past two decades, with the emergence of cultural studies as a
major academic field. The notion that the Caribbean shares a common
cultural bond anchored in the plantation and slavery experience is a
subject of much debate. The claims to a shared identity are founded on
perceived cultural and anthropological affinities such as food, music and
social institutions (family, kinship). In reality the concepts of Caribbean
and “caribeñidad” (Caribbeanness) are problematic, as Antonio Benítez
Rojo points out. As a region, the Caribbean assumes multiple identities
embodied in the diversity of nouns used to refer to the region and to
name its modern citizens: Antilles, West Indies, Caribbean, Antilleans,
West Indians and Caribbean (caribeños).3 The name Antilles is derived
from the mythical Antilia, the island of the seven cities linked to the myth
or legend of Atlantis. The name West Indies comes from Columbus’
belief that he had discovered the outer realm of India. And the name
Caribbean is said to originate with the Caribs, the indigenous population
that most fiercely resisted European colonization.
Most certainly, the Caribbean archipelago and the continental lands
that constitute the rim of the Caribbean Sea share a history marked
by the political, economic, social and cultural dynamics of plantation
economies. In this region, indigenous populations, the African Diaspora
created by slavery, and European settlers provided the human basis
upon which plantation economies built unique but analogous social,
political and economic institutions and cultures. Antonio Benítez Rojo
argues that Caribbean musical identity is a rhizome, a rootlike stem that
spreads horizontally in various directions and unexpectedly producing
a rhythmic complex that becomes genuinely Caribbean (Benítez Rojo
1997:11,23). He sees this complex set of “analogous differences” (diferencias
análogas). That is, a set of similar rhythms with differences that
stem from local differences. The same can be said for Caribbean identity
and culture in general. Within distinct and conscious national and or
subregional identities, there is a shared experience that can be said to
be the basis of a Caribbean identity.
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But there is not an identifiable single homogeneous Caribbean
identity. Rather, there are shared regional customs, practices and beliefs
characterized by “analogous differences”. All over the Caribbean local
music is identified with the beat of Afroantillean drums and beats,
Christian religions incorporate animistic and polytheistic traits from
the African Diaspora and indigenous populations, food is prepared
from similar ingredients, but all are articulated in different ways across
countries and across language-defined regions. Thus, although the Pepperpot
Soup of Jamaica is similar to the Puerto Rican and Dominican
sancocho, there are differences from island to island. In religion, likewise,
Cuban santería is different from Haitian voodoo. In both cases the
historical, sociological and anthropological processes of their creation
may be similar but they constitute distinct expressions of analogous (not
identical) lived experiences.
If at the level of culture and aesthetics analogous differences
produce a clearly identifiable regional complex, at the political and
economic levels heterogeneity prevails over synthesis. The shared historical
and cultural traits that produce a Caribbean ethos or distinctive
cultural milieu do not extrapolate to the regional polity and economy.
In this sense, the Caribbean does not constitute an integrated political
and economic complex.
Politically the Caribbean is made up of independent countries, non
independent territories (which may be regions or colonies/territories of
their metropolis), and regions or provinces of independent countries
(Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica). Some countries are republics
(Santo Domingo), other are Westminster style democracies, while
other and single party socialist states (Cuba).
Economically, the Caribbean includes oil producing countries (Trinidad
and Tobago, Venezuela); industrialized economies (Jamaica, Puerto
Rico, Dominican Republic); international service centers focused around
tourism and offshore banking (The Bahamas, Cayman Islands).
And although there is a cultural affinity, as explained, there are
important cultural distances due to language differences stemming from
diverse colonial histories, English, Dutch, French and Spanish. Beyond
these differences in official languages there are intraregional differences
stemming from the local languages, pidgins, Creole and Papiamento.
Clearly, the cultural affinities at the popular level have advanced in
the beginning of the twenty first century, stimulated by increased interisland
migration, regional tourism, and the revolution in telecommunications
centered on the Internet. However, at the political and economic
levels, the Caribbean continues divided by economic competition and
political rivalries. It seems that as Gordon K. Lewis suggested, “Regional
identity […] was frequently not so much an indigenous phenomenon on
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native grounds as it was the effort of the outsider groups […] to impose
an abstract ideal upon an intractable insularity… (Lewis 1968:350).
Hence, in the economic and political sense, the Caribbean does not
constitute, at this point in history, an integrated complex. We cannot
speak of a Caribbean economy or economic identity.
Historical Background
The first proposals for political and economic integration in the
Caribbean date to the second half of the nineteenth century. In the
British Caribbean the first mention of a West Indian Federation is found
in 1860. In the Hispanic Caribbean, leaders of the Puerto Rican independence
movement were calling for an Antillean Federation between
Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic in 1867 (Lewis 1968:343;
Rama 1980:18-19). The proposed Antillean Federation will include later
Haiti and Jamaica, calling for the federation of the Greater Antilles. In
1882 a proposal presented to the British Prime Minister William Ewart
Gladstone, would include the British West Indies, in an effort to deter
the annexationist ambitions of the United States in the Caribbean (Rama
1980:4, 68-74).
It is precisely in the British Caribbean that the first concrete steps
toward regional integration will take place. The creation of the Anglo-
American Commission on the Caribbean in 1942 was aimed at coordinating
American and British policies in the region during World War
II. In 1946, the Commission was renamed the Caribbean Commission
to include France and the Netherlands with the view of establishing a
common regional policy. Although it did not achieve this immediate
purpose, the Commission did much to advance a regional perspective
in dealing with politico-economic issues and it served to train a cadre of
Caribbean professionals that would eventually become political leaders
and government officials in the independent and non independent countries
and territories of the region (Taussig 1946, Williams 1955).
According to Gordon K. Lewis (1968:351), the 1958 project for a
West Indian Federation traces its origins to the Caribbean Commission.
However, it was precisely the perception of the project as an instrument
of metropolitan control, what led to its demise. But according to Arthur
Lewis, writing at the time of the final collapse of the Federation around
1965, the elements that conspired against it were not merely external. In
a short book published by the Barbados Advocate entitled, The Agony
of the Eight, the later knighted and Nobel Laureate, Sir Arthur Lewis
describes in detail the feverish negotiations and profound political differences
and mistrust that led to the collapse of the West Indian Federation.
The sharp differences between Norman Manley of Jamaica and Eric
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Williams of Trinidad were as much to blame, as distrust of Metropolitan
interests or interventions. On September 1961, the people of Jamaica
voted to leave the federation, reflecting the effects of political bickering
and mistrust among West Indian leaders (A. Lewis n.d.:9). Shortly
after that, in 1962, both Jamaica and Trinidad became independent and
the Federation collapsed. Later attempts to revive a federation with the
remaining British territories would also fail and Barbados will become
independent in 1966.
Nonetheless, economic integration in the Caribbean advanced the
most among the English-speaking countries. Attempts at economic integration
in the British Caribbean began in 1968, after the failure of political
integration through federation. Efforts of economic coordination
among former British colonies and territories resulted in the creation
of the Caribbean Free Trade Association (CARIFTA). Nearly 40 years
hence, CARIFTA’s successor, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM),
is on its way to becoming a single market and economy (Girvan 2007).
CARICOM is integrated by 14 independent countries and one British
overseas territory. Another 5 associate members are also British overseas
territories. Only two of the twenty CARICOM members are not former
British colonies, Haiti and Surinam.
This significant advance of economic integration in the English-speaking
Caribbean may be attributed to various factors. First, in spite of fragmentation
and insularism, there was a tradition of regional associations
such as trade unions and chambers of commerce. Second, the attempts
at regional coordination by the various colonial powers articulated in
the creation of the Anglo-American Commission first, and later in the
Caribbean Commission, reinforced the drive for regional coordination
within the British West Indies. Region-wide professional organizations
and other region-wide institutions such as the University College of the
West Indies emerged during the 1940s (Lewis 1968:346-349). A third factor
that fostered advances in economic integration was the provision in the
1957 Treaty of Rome that allowed the concerting of economic agreements
between the European Common Market and the former colonies and nonindependent
territories of its members. The view that regional integration
was the optimal way for economic reconstruction and development that
prevailed in post WWII Europe permeated the economic relations with
the Caribbean and other colonial regions (Africa, the Pacific). In fact, the
creation of CARICOM in 1973 coincides with the year when the United
Kingdom entered the European Economic Community (EEC), as well as
with the formation of a negotiating bloc (Africa, Caribbean, Pacific, ACP)
among former European colonies that signed the Lomé Convention in
1975 (The Courier 1985:32).4
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In the Hispanic Caribbean, the Antillean Federation was a project
of the pro independence leadership of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the
Dominican Republic. The aggressive U.S. policy that culminated with
the invasion of Cuba and Puerto Rico in 1898 and the “occupations” of
Haiti in 1915 and the Dominican Republic in 1916 derailed any project
of Antillean Federation.
In the last two decades of the twentieth century the drive for integration
took a new turn. The 1978 “oil shock,” the fall in the prices of
traditional exports (sugar, bananas) and the subsequent growth in the
international debt placed the Caribbean at the Cold War’s politico-economic
crossroads. The establishment of socialist regimes in Grenada
and Nicaragua, coupled with the civil war in El Salvador, thrust the
Caribbean and Central America in the midst of competing projects of
regional cooperation and integration. The competing views on regional
cooperation and integration were represented by the U.S. Caribbean
Basin Initiative (CBI) and the Central American-based Regional Alternative
for Central America and the Caribbean (RACAC) advanced by
the Coordinadora Regional de Investigaciones Económicas y Sociales
(CRIES) (ISS 1983; Irvin and Gorostiaga 1985).
The CBI enacted a system of bilateral economic preferences between
the United States and Caribbean and Central American countries. While
the RACAC, proposed a regional treaty based on policies consistent with
a new international economic order (NIEO) that promoted balanced
international trade and traditional regional integration measures such as
a custom union and common market (Dietz and Pantojas-García 1994).
By 1989 the Grenadian revolutionary government had been deposed and
the Sandinista government would loose the elections, and the Central
American peace process was underway, preventing other revolutionary
regimes from taking power. By this time also, the Cold War was coming
to an end with the collapse of the Berlin wall. The 1980s were declared
the “lost decade” for development throughout Latin America and the
Caribbean.
The 1990s heralded the triumph of trade fundamentalism, neoliberalism,
as the dominant economic paradigm. The free trade paradigm
became structured globally with the creation in 1995 of the World Trade
Organization (WTO) which would promote and enforce trade liberalization
policies on a global scale. In the Western Hemisphere the signing of
the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the celebration
of the first Summit of the Americas with the intention of creating a
Free Trade Area of the Americas in 1994, redefined regional integration
and cooperation views. The axis of regional integration shifted from
coordination of production, duties and trade, to liberalization of trade
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and investment. Free market competition replaced regional planning
and coordination as the new means of integration.
The Neoliberal paradigm proposes dramatic changes in the institutional,
juridical, political and economic frameworks of nations aimed
at facilitating international trade and investment. Regional “free trade
agreements” (FTAs) are promoted as supranational frameworks that
regulate transnational economic activities. These FTAs are regulated
by transnational bodies, such as the WTO, or a regional secretariat.
The decisions of these multinational bodies may overrule decisions of
national governments. This process of national deregulation and transnational
re-regulation promotes the creation of new regional / supranational
economic spaces that allow corporations to operate freely. The mobility
of labor, however, continues to be legally restricted (Cf. Grinspun and
Kreklewich 1994; Pantojas García and Dietz 1996).
After the first Summit of the Americas in 1994 and the announcement
of a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) initiative, there
was a rush throughout Latin America and the Caribbean to liberalize
bilateral and regional trade. This resulted in the creation of MERCOSUR,
and the acceleration of the integration processes in CARICOM
and the CACM, as well as the signing of a regional free trade and
economic cooperation agreement between the Dominican Republic
and the CACM know as the DR-CAFTA (Cf. West Indian Commission
1994; Villasuzo and Trejos Solórzano 2000). In this context, Caribbean
integration, whether through CARICOM or the DR-CAFTA, appears
to be a defensive maneuver aimed at positioning the small economies
of the Western Hemisphere to avoid some of the perceived negative
consequences of FTAs.5
While at the economic level there were advances, at the political
level attempts at Caribbean integration and cooperation have not
advanced swiftly. The creation of the Association of Caribbean States
(ACS) in 1994 was to be the basis for region-wide politico-economic
cooperation. However, in 2000 one its directors, economist Miguel Ceara
Hatton spoke openly of the persistent fragmentation of the ACS into
four camps: the Central American bloc, the CARICOM bloc, the Group
of Three (Colombia, Venezuela and Mexico), and the Non Aligned
Group, integrated by Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Panama
(Ceara Hatton 2000:20)
In spite of the initial enthusiasm for laying the groundwork for
regional cooperation, the ACS has only modest achievements in specific
areas such as regional transport, sustainable tourism, natural disasters
and trade. The framework agreements and proposals in each of these
areas have been superseded by intra bloc agreements such as the CARICOM
single economy and the DR-CAFTA.
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What are the factors that contribute to what can be termed the
“dialectic” of Caribbean integration? What explains the fact that, as
Derek Walcott remarks on the quote at the beginning of this essay,
emotionally and culturally people born in the Caribbean express a unifying
bond, while at the level of realpolitik there are what seem to be
insurmountable chasms. The rest of this essay analyzes the geopolitical,
economic, cultural and historical variables that explain these dynamics
of convergence and divergence that historically have hampered regional
integration at various levels. We shall attempt also to identify and present
those “points of convergence” within the practices of Caribbean identity
that could serve as the basis to build a project of regional integration.
This is, however, a first and incomplete attempt in what needs to be a
multidisciplinary and multinational effort.
Points of Divergence
GEOPOLITICS
Among the geopolitical variables or factors that divide the Caribbean
one is the difference between island and continental economies.
Many of the continental countries that border the rim of the Caribbean
Basin define their identities not as Caribbean but as Andean (Venezuela
and Colombia), Central American (Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras,
El Salvador, Nicaragua) or North American (Mexico). For these countries
the Caribbean is but a region, often marginalized.
A corollary of the Caribbean identity of these continental countries
is often enmeshed in territorial disputes such as Venezuela’s claims
over the Essequibo region of Guyana and Aves Island, off Trinidad, and
Guatemala’s and Hondura’s claims on Belize (Milefski 2004:82).
The disputes cited above are between Latin American countries and
CARICOM, English speaking, countries. There is also a stark contrast
between the militaristic traditions of Latin America and the role of
“security forces” in the CARICOM countries, some of which only have a
police force that may act as a sort of “national guard” in certain circumstances.
Major police and military undertakings in Caribbean countries,
such as the invasion of Grenada in 1983, or major operations on regional
drug trafficking, are funded by the European Union, the United States
or the British Commonwealth (Cf. Griffith 2004).
The geopolitical view of the Caribbean Basin as a strategic bastion
to promote the interest of former and current colonial powers is another
obstacle for regional integration. An example of this is the so called
“banana wars.” North American fruit companies, such as United Fruit,
used Caribbean Basin governments such as Guatemala, Honduras and
Mexico, to complaint to the WTO’s Dispute Settlement Body about the
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European Union’s subsidies to Bananas from the Eastern Caribbean
distributed principally by the British Geest Corporation. Banana growers
from Latin American were pitted against Windward Islands growers
by what was essentially a battle of transnational corporations for the
European banana market. This contributed for the increasing mistrusts
between CARICOM governments and Latin American Caribbean governments
(Cf. Vázquez Vera 2002; WTO 2001).
In regional organizations, such as the ACS, the non independent
territories of the Caribbean that acquire affiliate or observer status, are
often perceived as doing the bid of their metropolis; be it France in the
case of Martinique or Guadeloupe or the United States in the case of
Puerto Rico.
The end of the Cold War transformed geopolitics in the twenty-first
century. The Caribbean is not the fulcrum of East-West confrontation, as
had been since the Cuban Revolution. The Bush Administration considers
the Caribbean the “third border” of the United States and perceives
it as a gateway for illegal drugs, undocumented migrants, and potentially
terrorists. Rather than an arena for high politics, the Caribbean is seen
now as a law enforcement problem (Pantojas-García 2006).
Caribbean countries are not seen as economic and political partners
but as troubled neighbors that need assistance and policing. In this
regard, much controversy has been created by U.S. initiatives to counter
drug smuggling in the regions such as the Plan Colombia, which invest
billions of dollars in Colombia’s war against the drug cartels and against
the leftist guerrillas known as FARC. Other controversy grounded in
the new geopolitics of the region is the Shiprider agreements pursued
by the United States government since 1996, giving the U.S. Coastguard
the right to enter Caribbean territorial waters and intervene with non
U.S. vessels thought to carry drugs (Blumenthal 2001; CHA 2007). The
post Cold War official discourse “criminalizes” Caribbean migrants and
brands countries that refuse to cooperate in the U.S. security initiatives
in the region. In turn, this creates mistrust within the region and sharpens
the xenophobic biases against migrant groups, for example Dominicans
and Haitians in the Eastern Caribbean.
ECONOMICS
One of the most important and difficult problems that confronts
any regional cooperation and integration project is the similarity of the
Caribbean Basin economies. Tourism, agriculture and assembly manufacturing
for export (maquiladoras) are axes of the region’s economies.
These axes have been greatly negatively affected by trade liberalization.
For example, the apparel industry of the insular Caribbean was nega64
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tively impacted by NAFTA. In the first two years of NAFTA, 1994-96,
apparel exports from Mexico to the United States grew by 123 percent.
Conversely, apparel exports from the insular Caribbean faltered, with
the Dominican Republic and Jamaica growing by 12 and 11 percent
respectively. This in contrast to the previous two years, when Mexican
exports had grown 70 percent while Jamaica grew 54 percent and the
Dominican Republic 29 percent.
The banana wars to which we referred previously are another
example of the economic rivalries among Caribbean Basin economies
small and large and the negative impact of trade liberalization. In the
emerging economic order known as “globalization” the main economic
actors are not countries but firms; especially large transnational corporations.
Countries with similar natural endowments and labor pools
compete to attract investment from transnational corporations. Bilateralism
rather than regional cooperation or integration becomes ever
more important.
Another factor that conspires against economic integration is the
asymmetry of the economies of the Caribbean Basin. Small island economies,
with high rates of industrial concentration depend on a few specialized
activities. Trade liberalization increases the vulnerability of these
sectors to international fluctuations and competition. Export manufacturing
in the Caribbean has suffered greatly with the opening of China for
trade and investment, especially assembly manufacturing in free trade
zones. Sustainable development for small economies requires not only free
trade but a flow of investment and technical assistance both at the level of
production and at the level of managing in an open environment.6
Regional asymmetries and competition beget a deep mistrust
between, for example, the Latin American and West Indian ruling elites,
as this quote from an article of Sir Ronald Sanders (2005) in the Jamaica
Observer eloquently shows:
Further, governments were not confident that the Dominican Republic
would hold to CARICOM positions on regional and international
issues. While the Dominican Republic was courting CARICOM, it was
also flirting with the Central American group of countries.
What deeply troubled CARICOM governments then was the Dominican
Republic’s siding with Central American countries to distance
themselves from CARICOM’s relationship with Cuba because they
thought that trade benefits from the United States, under the Caribbean
Basin Initiative, would be threatened.
Thus, the Dominican Republic signs a free trade agreement with
CARICOM that did not reflect the desire for integration but rather was
coerced by external pressures form the United States and the European
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Union, deepening mistrust within the region (Sanders 2005). Likewise,
the special financial terms for oil imports provided by Venezuela to
CARICOM members through Petro Caribe raised protests and complaints
from Trinidad, an oil producing competitor of Venezuela (Culmer
2005).
CULTURAL AND HISTORICAL FACTORS
If it is true that the main economic actors of the new “global” order
are large transnational corporations, those who articulate the economic,
corporate, political, geopolitical, social and cultural interests are social
actors: chambers of commerce, political parties, professional associations,
etc. Whether they are called classes, elites, cliques, groups or social
forces, these social actors operate in a context. This context, in turn, is
defined in historical, cultural, linguistic and ethnic terms.
Caribbean identities often diverge in unexpected ways. Panamanians,
for example, do not consider themselves, Central American,
Dominicans refer to Haitians as “blacks” (negros), while the lighter-skin
black Dominicans are referred to as Indians, and Puerto Ricans refer to
migrants or visitors from the Eastern Caribbean as “those people from
the islands” (los de las islas). There is also a history of mistrust among
“West Indians” and “East Indians” (people of Indian descent) within the
English speaking Caribbean, especially in Trinidad and Guyana. These
ethnic and xenophobic prejudices, which should not be confused with
national pride, hamper also the development of a Caribbean project of
economic integration.
Differences in the size of the population, economic development
and language add to the divergences. English, Spanish, French, Dutch,
Papiamento and Creole constitute important barriers to effective communication.
But there are deeper differences. There is, for example, a
militaristic tradition in the Latin American Caribbean (Cuba, Dominican
Republic, Venezuela) that is absent in the rest of the Caribbean. This
difference is heightened especially in territorial disputes, where Latin
American republics are perceived as threatening and menacing to the
territorial integrity of smaller non-Hispanic countries.
Thus far we have pointed out the most salient divergences that conspire
against the formation of a Caribbean identity that could promote a
political project of integration for the Greater Caribbean (the Caribbean,
Central America and the continental rim of the Caribbean). This does not
mean that developing a project of Caribbean integration grounded on
shared identity traits would be impossible. It means that such a project will
not grow spontaneously and that there are important obstacles that need to
be surmounted in order to move towards cooperation and integration.
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Convergences
GEOPOLITICS
If it is true that geopolitical factors pose important obstacles to
Caribbean integration, it is also true that there is increasing awareness
of the need to move towards regional cooperation. The inclusion of
Haiti and the Dominican Republic with CARICOM through CARIFORUM
in the European Union’s negotiating group for an Economic
Partnership Agreement (EPA), albeit conflictive, is an indication that
geopolitics dictates a need for regional cooperation. The signing of free
trade agreements between the Dominican Republic and CARICOM, as
well as with the CACM in the DR-CAFTA, are further indication of the
recognized need to overcome insularism through regional cooperation
and, eventually, integration. There are also a number of treaties signed
between the CACM and Panama, Chile and Mexico and negotiations
for an FTA between CARICOM and Central America and Panama that
evidence the drive towards regional cooperation.7
As in the past, geopolitics defines metropolitan interests and exercise
pressure on regional politics and economics. But the pressure for
regional cooperation and integration is not simply exogenous. Geographical
proximity, a history of commercial and demographic exchanges
(regional migrations), and the perceived threat of being marginalized
from metropolitan trading blocs (NAFTA and the EU), have provided
an incentive for endogenous regional initiatives. The Caribbean political
and business elites are keenly aware that they need to join in the
Neoliberal bandwagon or risk being marginalized. Of the 35 countries in
the Western Hemisphere, 21 are small economies located in the Caribbean
Basin.8 And the ruling groups in all of these countries have come
to the conclusion that they need to enter into trading blocs to adapt to
the trend of trade liberalization. Even socialist and insularist Cuba has
move to create an alternative economic bloc, the ALBA (Alternativa
Bolivariana para las Américas).
It could be argued that the geopolitics of smallness and the strife to
position themselves as something other than metropolitan backyards,
compelled Caribbean political and economic leaders to look to regional
cooperation mechanisms. In this sense the creation of the ACS in 1994,
was to provide an arena for building common ground, beyond immediate
economic concerns. The ACS, however, has not fulfilled its promise
and has limited its endeavors to specific areas such as transportation,
sustainable tourism and natural disasters (ACS 1994, 1999).9
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ECONOMICS
Within this contradictory spectrum, the threat of marginalization
from trade blocs and initiatives has fostered a drive towards intra
regional alliances. The larger economies of the region are promoting
regional initiatives for economic cooperation. CARICOM, the CACM,
and the DR-CAFTA have already been mentioned. Aside from those,
there two new and complementary initiatives: Petro Caribe and the
ALBA. Petro Caribe, offers to finance Caribbean oil imports at concessionary
rates of one to two percent for 20 years. Complementing this
specific initiative, Venezuela is to promote the ALBA, as an alternative
to the Free Trade Area of the Americas, headed by the United States.
The ALBA is a controversial economic cooperation initiative based on
the principle of balanced or equitable trade and allows for barter agreements
and subsidies to promote economic development. The ALBA
has attracted few members or affiliates (Nicaragua, Dominica, Antigua,
Cuba, Bolivia, Haiti and Venezuela), as it is ideologically identified with
a political project dubbed twenty first century socialism.
Regional cooperation is also taking place at the level of the private
sector. Regional transnational corporate groups are emerging and
thriving throughout the region linked to business such as tourism and
transportation. The TACA group in Central America and the Superclubs
in the Caribbean are examples of this tendency.10
Trade liberalization and economic exchanges in the Caribbean are
not limited to transnational corporations or regional government-promoted
initiatives. There are transborder economic and social exchanges
through out the region. Small merchants and enterprises move a regionwide
network of trade in crafts and other goods. This trade is driven by
individuals, often women that travel buying and selling throughout the
region. This popular trade links are not knew they date back to the smuggling
traditions of Corsairs and Privateers. Today, however, traveling
traders known as higglers or madame Sara’s tour the Caribbean with bags
full of commodities that could be considered technically as “contraband.”
From personal care goods and apparel to laptop computers and ipods,
there is a renewed vigor to informal inter island trade in the Caribbean
(Cf. Morales Carrión 1971; Quiñones 1997).
CULTURAL AND HISTORICAL FACTORS
It can be argued that the basis for the cultural industry that has
flourished in the Caribbean is the afro-Antillean tradition. From salsa
to reggae to the newfangled “reggaeton,” music has been traditionally
an integrationist force. Afro-Antillean tradition is, as it was said in the
beginning, the rhizome that spreads horizontally in various directions
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unexpectedly producing a Caribbean rhythmic complex. This common
substratum of Caribbean popular culture provides the fulcrum of any
project of Caribbean unity. The African Diaspora in the Caribbean
provides the basis of a cultural industry that is thriving with the growth
of tourism.
The zouk of the French Caribbean and the Calypso of “The Mighty
Sparrow” from the English-speaking Caribbean may be hardly known in
the Hispanic Caribbean but all of these rhythms find themselves labeled
as Caribbean or Tropical music in the tourist capitals of the region:
Nassau, Philipsburg, San Juan, or Charlotte Amalie, to mention only a
few. The growth of tourism and regional migration has spread Caribbean
cultures. Caribbean rhythms have traveled and continue to travel
throughout the region following migration. Puerto Rican “bomba” is the
Creole’s Caribbean belle dance and reggaeton is the “syncretic” product
of Marleys reggae, rap and hip hop. Salsa, reggae, zouk and merengue
meet and redefine themselves in this migratory path.
The mistrust of Hispanic, English-speaking, French and Dutch elites
contrasts with the meeting of peoples and cultures through the migration
experiences of the working classes. In Puerto Rico, for example, in the
1980s and 90s, before the emergence of reggaeton, Dominican merengue
became the popular music of choice. Such was the influence of migrants
from the neighboring country in popular culture.
In historical and cultural terms, a Caribbean identity can be conceived
as a set of overlapping circles. The segment of the surface of each
circle that overlaps (music, cuisine, religious beliefs, etc.) constitutes
the building bloc of a Caribbean identity. It is argued, further, that this
“cultural core” is provided by the Afro-Antillean Diaspora traditions.
The shared, yet diverse, experience(s) of slavery and plantation are the
basis of the cultural bond captured in Walcott’s affirmation, the driving
force behind the “emotional federation.”
Conclusion
The push towards trade liberalization and economic openness has
had and adverse impact on the small economies of the Caribbean. The
threat of economic marginalization and decline, has rekindled the drive
for regional integration. CARICOM and the CACM resurged as necessary
institutions for economic development. The philosophical and
institutional basis of the new integrationist doctrine, however, shifted
from regional economic coordination and cooperation to regional liberalization
of trade and investment and competition. The market, rather
than governments drive the emerging process of regional integration.
Integration is seen as the opening of a regional space for the competition
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of private regional and transnational corporations, rather than cooperation
and planning of common economic strategies.
The question that emerges is whether regional trade liberalization
constitutes economic integration. Especially given the fact that the unrestricted
mobility of goods, services, capital and technology is not matched
by the mobility of peoples. Migration continues to be restricted by legal
and political constraints. A further question arises as to whether Neoliberal
models of economic integration, i.e. regional FTAs that configure
trading blocs, promote integration or simply create supranational conditions
for corporations take advantage of regional social disadvantages
such as low wages, lax environmental rules, etc.
Clearly, neoliberalism questions traditional views of economic
integration. Is regional integration desirable or sentimental utopia? Is
it relevant in a globalized world where economic deregulation is the new
dominant paradigm?
The proliferation of regional FTAs such as MERCOSUR, NAFTA,
CARICOM, CACM, DR-CAFTA, etc, indicate that there are new
modes of economic integration. The traditional geopolitical views about
regional integration are obsolete. A paradigm shift is called for.
The analysis of the integration experience in the Caribbean suggests
that the basis for achieving a durable and structurally deep regional
integration go beyond traditional technocratic designs such as customs
unions and free trade agreements. Regional economic agreements are
important building blocs but regional integration may require the development
of complex institutional and normative frameworks. That is, in a
context of geopolitical, economic, historical and cultural heterogeneity,
such as the Caribbean, regional integration may require the construction
of a political project of integration that includes the construction
of a shared regional identity.11 Put another way, regional economic
integration necessitates the construction of a shared political and cultural
identity, as well as coherent institutional, normative and economic
framework. Until these common regional frameworks are developed and
aligned, integration will not materialize in the Greater Caribbean beyond
the traditional cultural and linguistic regions.
Notes
* This article is a revised version of a paper presented to the Second
International Seminary of the Cátedra de Estudios del Caribe, University
of Havana, Cuba, January, 5-8, 2006. A version in Spanish
appeared in Temas, 52, septiembre-diciembre de 2007, pp. 4-17.
70 EMILIO PANTOJAS GARCÍA
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1 The first regional economic community in post WW II Europe was
the European Coal and Steel Community created by the Treaty of
Paris in 1951, as a common market for coal and steel and integrated
by France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.
This was followed by the Treaty of Rome, signed by France,
West Germany, Italy Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg
on March 1957, establishing the European Economic Community.
These two are the precursors of the contemporary European Union.
In 1960, the European Free Trade Association was created as a trade
bloc as an alternative to the European Economic Community. For
a comprehensive account of economic blocs and agreements in the
post WWII world see Aponte García and Álvarez Swihart (2002).
2 The dates of the creation of the pacts are drawn from the websites
of the respective associations except for the Latin American Free
Trade Association which became the Association for Latin American
Integration (ALADI) in 1980. Cf. Asociación Latinoamericana
de Libre Comercio,; Secretariat for Central American
Economic Integration,; Andean Community, http://www.comunidadandina.
org/ingles/quienes/brief.htm; CARICOM,.
3 It is interesting to note that there is no gentilic noun for Caribbean
in the Francophone or Anglophone Caribbean. As a rule, people
from the English speaking Caribbean describe themselves first with
the gentilic of their country of origin, Kittisian, St. Lucian, Trinidadian,
etc., then as West Indian, but never or rarely as Antillean. In
the Hispanic Caribbean, caribeño is used as the gentilic for Caribe
(Caribbean). People from the Hispanic Caribbean describe themselves
first national by national origin—Cuban, Dominican—then
as Latin American, and then Antillean or Caribbean (caribeños).
4 The Caribbean group that is part of ACP is known as CARIFORUM
and includes CARICOM members plus the Dominican Republic.
5 The Neoliberal project of trade liberalization anchors its view of
economic growth on the Ricardian principle of “comparative advantages”.
That is, international free trade—economic openness—is
mutually beneficial to all countries those involved in international
trade, as long as they produce and trade those goods for which they
have a comparative advantage. These comparative advantages, originally
thought to be provided by natural endowments (climate, soil,
dexterity of people) today are also complemented by social factors
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that affect cost such as low salaries, absence of trades unions, tax
and duties exemptions and tolerance to lax corporate responsibility
towards the environment and labor. In this sense, comparative
advantages may amount to “social disadvantages” for the less developed
countries.
6 At the 2001 CARICOM summit in Nassau, Bahamas, Mexican
President Vicente Fox underscore the asymmetries by offering to
double Mexico’s technical aid to the Caribbean. In doing this, not
only did he accentuate the technical differences between Mexico
and the small economies of the Caribbean but also situated Mexico
in the position of the economic “North” of the hemisphere.
7 See the list of Central American FTAs on the website of the Secretaría
de Integración Económica Centroamericana (SIECA)(02/29/08). See
also the CARICOM Secretariat website on negotiations for an FTA
with Central America,, and negotiations with the EU on an EPA (02/29/08).
8 Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Costa Rica,
Dominica, El Salvador, Grenada, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti,
Honduras, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Panama, Dominican Republic, St.
Kitts-Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Surinam and
Cuba.
9 The new Secretary General of ACS Luis Fernando Andrade Falla
emphasized this focus on his inauguration. See the ACS website,
(03/25/08).
10 The Taca Groupis based
in El Salvador, and Super Clubs in Jamaica.
11 The notion of “political project” is a construct defined as a set of
political, social and economic principles, interests, preferences,
values, and goals articulated by sociopolitical coalitions (social
actors) that aspire and compete for shares of political power in a
society. In this case it refers to regional or transnational groups
(sociopolitical coalitions) competing for shares of regional power.
72 EMILIO PANTOJAS GARCÍA
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ECONOMIC INTEGRATION AND CARIBBEAN
IDENTITY: CONVERGENCES AND DIVERGENCES*
Emilio Pantojas García
ABSTRACT
The literature on economic integration in the Caribbean and Latin
America primarily focuses on economic, institutional and geopolitical
issues. Regional economic exchanges (trade, investment), transportation,
economic structures, political institutions, as well as geographical
and demographic factors are high on the list of variables pondered
when studying regional integration. Cultural and ideological issues
are seldom considered central to the viability of regional integration.
Three key factors that constitute the context upon which contradictory
tendencies act simultaneously to foster and hinder Caribbean regional
integration are discussed: geopolitical, economic and cultural-historical
factors. These factors configure “dialectics of cooperation and competition”
and account for both, the basis and fulcrum of regional integration
and the basis and fulcrum of regional competition and, often,
mistrust. A discussion of each of these factors suggests that how they
are managed is crucial to the formation of a regional identity and the
articulation of a political project of regional integration.
Keywords: economic cooperation, economic integration, identity,
regional integration, trade agreements
RESUMEN
La literatura sobre integración económica del Caribe y América Latina
tiene como eje primordial asuntos económicos, institucionales y geopolíticos.
Temas de intercambio regional (inversión y comercio), transportación,
estructuras económicas, instituciones políticas, así como factores
geográficos y demográficos, son las variables principales en el estudio de
la integración regional. Rara vez se consideran como factores centrales
para la viabilidad de la integración asuntos culturales e ideológicos.
Se discuten tres factores claves que constituyen el contexto en el cual
tendencias contradictorias actúan simultáneamente para promover y
obstaculizar la integración del Caribe: factores geopolíticos, económicos
e histórico-culturales. Estos factores configuran la “dialéctica de cooperación
y competencia” y constituyen simultáneamente la base y el fulcro
de la integración, así como de la competencia y, a veces, la desconfianza
regional. La discusión de estos tres factores sugiere que la manera en que
se manejen éstos será crucial para la formación de una identidad regional
y la articulación de un proyecto político de integración.
54 EMILIO PANTOJAS GARCÍA
Caribbean Studies Vol. 36, No. 1 (January - June 2008), 53-74
Palabras clave: cooperación económica, integración económica, identidad,
integración regional, acuerdos comerciales
RÉSUMÉ
Les études réalisées sur l’intégration de la Caraïbe et de l’Amérique
Latine portent leur attention sur les questions économiques, institutionnelles
et géopolitiques. Des sujets d’échange régional (investissement
et commerce), de transport, de structures économiques, d’institutions
politiques, ainsi que des facteurs géographiques et démographiques,
se sont là les variables principales de ces études. Les aspects culturels
et idéologiques qui soutiennent la viabilité de l’intégration de la région
son rarement considérés comme des éléments principales. Les débats
sont portés sur trois facteurs essentiels : géopolitiques, économiques
et historico-culturelles qui forment « la dialectique de coopération et
de compétence ». Ils constituent le contexte dans lequel des tendances
contradictoires fonctionnent de façon simultanée, dont l’objectif
est de promouvoir et faire obstacle à l’intégration de la Caraïbe. Ils
représentent la base et le point d’appui de l’intégration, ainsi que la
compétence et, parfois, une manque de confiance dans la région. Ainsi,
les débats de ces trois facteurs suggèrent que la manière de gérer sera
cruciale pour la formation d’une identité régionale et la structure d’un
projet politique d’intégration.
Mots-clés: coopération économique, intégration économique, intégration
régionale, identité, accords commerciales
Received : 30 May 2007 Revision received : 2 April 2008 Accepted : 4 April
2008
The Caribbean is an emotional federation.
Derek Walcott
The literature on economic integration in the Caribbean
and Latin America traditionally and primarily focuses on
economic, institutional and geopolitical issues. Regional
economic exchanges (trade, investment), transportation, economic structures,
political institutions, as well as geographical and demographic factors
are high on the list of issues / variables pondered and discussed when
speaking about regional integration. Cultural and ideological issues are
seldom considered central to the viability of regional integration. The
notion that forging a shared Caribbean identity is, or may be, a necessary
precondition to articulate a political project of regional integration
is rarely, and only recently, included in the agenda of regional bodies
dealing with economic integration. It appears as if geography, the location
on the rim of the Caribbean Sea or on the “Caribbean Basin,” and
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the shared historical traits of “plantation economies,” are assumed to
constitute the basis of a shared identity.
This technocratic view of economic integration centers on geographic
proximity, and assumes that economic exchanges and shared history
naturally beget a “regional” identity. The geopolitics of WWII created a
framework of international relations that divided the world into spheres
of influence. The Eastern or Socialist bloc, the North Atlantic alliance
between Europe and the United States are but two examples of this
emerging view of the World. This geopolitical cum technocratic view
of regions, in turn influenced post war reconstruction economics and
became institutionalized with the creation of the Regional Science Association
in 1954 (Isard et al. 1998). The new imaginary of the “regional
sciences” focused on geography and economic, demographic, political
and institutional linkages and interactions in defining the makeup of
a region. Historical, cultural and ideological affinities were assumed
in construing Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia as regions. The
regional science imaginary in turn constructed smaller, geographically
and historically similar spaces, into subregions, such as Central America,
the Andean region and the Caribbean.
The technocratic constructs called regions and subregions became
new analytical units for reconstruction and development economics.
Inspired by the success in coordinating the production, delivery and
use of weapons on a massive scale during WW II, development and
reconstruction economics advocated the creation of regional economic
communities as a means of taking advantages of economies of scales and
complementarities to further economic reconstruction and development.
In 1957, following this new paradigm, the European Economic Community
was created. And in 1960, the European Free Trade Association
followed.1
In Latin America, regional integration began with the Central
American Common Market (CACM) and the Latin American Free
Trade Association both founded in 1960 and the Andean Pact in 1969. In
the Caribbean, the Caribbean Economic Community (CARICOM) was
created in 1973, following the ill fated Caribbean Free Trade Association,
created in 1968 (Samuel 1993:159).2 Only recently and mostly due
to the pressures of the World Trade Organization and the Free Trade
Area of the Americas initiative, regional economic and trade agreements
in the Western Hemisphere have become operational economic units.
This is the case of the CARICOM single market and economy as well
as MERCOSUR, and the CACM.
This essay examines three key factors that foster and hinder Caribbean
regional integration: geopolitical, economic and cultural-historical
factors. These factors constitute the context upon which contradictory
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tendencies act simultaneously tending to convergence and divergence.
They configure “dialectics of cooperation and competition” and account
for both, the basis and fulcrum of regional integration and the basis and
fulcrum of regional competition and, often, mistrust. This essay simply
presents a general overview of the elements and factors that confront
regional integration initiatives.
On Caribbean Identity(ies)
Much has been said and written about Caribbean identity and identities
in the past two decades, with the emergence of cultural studies as a
major academic field. The notion that the Caribbean shares a common
cultural bond anchored in the plantation and slavery experience is a
subject of much debate. The claims to a shared identity are founded on
perceived cultural and anthropological affinities such as food, music and
social institutions (family, kinship). In reality the concepts of Caribbean
and “caribeñidad” (Caribbeanness) are problematic, as Antonio Benítez
Rojo points out. As a region, the Caribbean assumes multiple identities
embodied in the diversity of nouns used to refer to the region and to
name its modern citizens: Antilles, West Indies, Caribbean, Antilleans,
West Indians and Caribbean (caribeños).3 The name Antilles is derived
from the mythical Antilia, the island of the seven cities linked to the myth
or legend of Atlantis. The name West Indies comes from Columbus’
belief that he had discovered the outer realm of India. And the name
Caribbean is said to originate with the Caribs, the indigenous population
that most fiercely resisted European colonization.
Most certainly, the Caribbean archipelago and the continental lands
that constitute the rim of the Caribbean Sea share a history marked
by the political, economic, social and cultural dynamics of plantation
economies. In this region, indigenous populations, the African Diaspora
created by slavery, and European settlers provided the human basis
upon which plantation economies built unique but analogous social,
political and economic institutions and cultures. Antonio Benítez Rojo
argues that Caribbean musical identity is a rhizome, a rootlike stem that
spreads horizontally in various directions and unexpectedly producing
a rhythmic complex that becomes genuinely Caribbean (Benítez Rojo
1997:11,23). He sees this complex set of “analogous differences” (diferencias
análogas). That is, a set of similar rhythms with differences that
stem from local differences. The same can be said for Caribbean identity
and culture in general. Within distinct and conscious national and or
subregional identities, there is a shared experience that can be said to
be the basis of a Caribbean identity.
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But there is not an identifiable single homogeneous Caribbean
identity. Rather, there are shared regional customs, practices and beliefs
characterized by “analogous differences”. All over the Caribbean local
music is identified with the beat of Afroantillean drums and beats,
Christian religions incorporate animistic and polytheistic traits from
the African Diaspora and indigenous populations, food is prepared
from similar ingredients, but all are articulated in different ways across
countries and across language-defined regions. Thus, although the Pepperpot
Soup of Jamaica is similar to the Puerto Rican and Dominican
sancocho, there are differences from island to island. In religion, likewise,
Cuban santería is different from Haitian voodoo. In both cases the
historical, sociological and anthropological processes of their creation
may be similar but they constitute distinct expressions of analogous (not
identical) lived experiences.
If at the level of culture and aesthetics analogous differences
produce a clearly identifiable regional complex, at the political and
economic levels heterogeneity prevails over synthesis. The shared historical
and cultural traits that produce a Caribbean ethos or distinctive
cultural milieu do not extrapolate to the regional polity and economy.
In this sense, the Caribbean does not constitute an integrated political
and economic complex.
Politically the Caribbean is made up of independent countries, non
independent territories (which may be regions or colonies/territories of
their metropolis), and regions or provinces of independent countries
(Venezuela, Colombia, Panama, Costa Rica). Some countries are republics
(Santo Domingo), other are Westminster style democracies, while
other and single party socialist states (Cuba).
Economically, the Caribbean includes oil producing countries (Trinidad
and Tobago, Venezuela); industrialized economies (Jamaica, Puerto
Rico, Dominican Republic); international service centers focused around
tourism and offshore banking (The Bahamas, Cayman Islands).
And although there is a cultural affinity, as explained, there are
important cultural distances due to language differences stemming from
diverse colonial histories, English, Dutch, French and Spanish. Beyond
these differences in official languages there are intraregional differences
stemming from the local languages, pidgins, Creole and Papiamento.
Clearly, the cultural affinities at the popular level have advanced in
the beginning of the twenty first century, stimulated by increased interisland
migration, regional tourism, and the revolution in telecommunications
centered on the Internet. However, at the political and economic
levels, the Caribbean continues divided by economic competition and
political rivalries. It seems that as Gordon K. Lewis suggested, “Regional
identity […] was frequently not so much an indigenous phenomenon on
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native grounds as it was the effort of the outsider groups […] to impose
an abstract ideal upon an intractable insularity… (Lewis 1968:350).
Hence, in the economic and political sense, the Caribbean does not
constitute, at this point in history, an integrated complex. We cannot
speak of a Caribbean economy or economic identity.
Historical Background
The first proposals for political and economic integration in the
Caribbean date to the second half of the nineteenth century. In the
British Caribbean the first mention of a West Indian Federation is found
in 1860. In the Hispanic Caribbean, leaders of the Puerto Rican independence
movement were calling for an Antillean Federation between
Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic in 1867 (Lewis 1968:343;
Rama 1980:18-19). The proposed Antillean Federation will include later
Haiti and Jamaica, calling for the federation of the Greater Antilles. In
1882 a proposal presented to the British Prime Minister William Ewart
Gladstone, would include the British West Indies, in an effort to deter
the annexationist ambitions of the United States in the Caribbean (Rama
1980:4, 68-74).
It is precisely in the British Caribbean that the first concrete steps
toward regional integration will take place. The creation of the Anglo-
American Commission on the Caribbean in 1942 was aimed at coordinating
American and British policies in the region during World War
II. In 1946, the Commission was renamed the Caribbean Commission
to include France and the Netherlands with the view of establishing a
common regional policy. Although it did not achieve this immediate
purpose, the Commission did much to advance a regional perspective
in dealing with politico-economic issues and it served to train a cadre of
Caribbean professionals that would eventually become political leaders
and government officials in the independent and non independent countries
and territories of the region (Taussig 1946, Williams 1955).
According to Gordon K. Lewis (1968:351), the 1958 project for a
West Indian Federation traces its origins to the Caribbean Commission.
However, it was precisely the perception of the project as an instrument
of metropolitan control, what led to its demise. But according to Arthur
Lewis, writing at the time of the final collapse of the Federation around
1965, the elements that conspired against it were not merely external. In
a short book published by the Barbados Advocate entitled, The Agony
of the Eight, the later knighted and Nobel Laureate, Sir Arthur Lewis
describes in detail the feverish negotiations and profound political differences
and mistrust that led to the collapse of the West Indian Federation.
The sharp differences between Norman Manley of Jamaica and Eric
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Williams of Trinidad were as much to blame, as distrust of Metropolitan
interests or interventions. On September 1961, the people of Jamaica
voted to leave the federation, reflecting the effects of political bickering
and mistrust among West Indian leaders (A. Lewis n.d.:9). Shortly
after that, in 1962, both Jamaica and Trinidad became independent and
the Federation collapsed. Later attempts to revive a federation with the
remaining British territories would also fail and Barbados will become
independent in 1966.
Nonetheless, economic integration in the Caribbean advanced the
most among the English-speaking countries. Attempts at economic integration
in the British Caribbean began in 1968, after the failure of political
integration through federation. Efforts of economic coordination
among former British colonies and territories resulted in the creation
of the Caribbean Free Trade Association (CARIFTA). Nearly 40 years
hence, CARIFTA’s successor, the Caribbean Community (CARICOM),
is on its way to becoming a single market and economy (Girvan 2007).
CARICOM is integrated by 14 independent countries and one British
overseas territory. Another 5 associate members are also British overseas
territories. Only two of the twenty CARICOM members are not former
British colonies, Haiti and Surinam.
This significant advance of economic integration in the English-speaking
Caribbean may be attributed to various factors. First, in spite of fragmentation
and insularism, there was a tradition of regional associations
such as trade unions and chambers of commerce. Second, the attempts
at regional coordination by the various colonial powers articulated in
the creation of the Anglo-American Commission first, and later in the
Caribbean Commission, reinforced the drive for regional coordination
within the British West Indies. Region-wide professional organizations
and other region-wide institutions such as the University College of the
West Indies emerged during the 1940s (Lewis 1968:346-349). A third factor
that fostered advances in economic integration was the provision in the
1957 Treaty of Rome that allowed the concerting of economic agreements
between the European Common Market and the former colonies and nonindependent
territories of its members. The view that regional integration
was the optimal way for economic reconstruction and development that
prevailed in post WWII Europe permeated the economic relations with
the Caribbean and other colonial regions (Africa, the Pacific). In fact, the
creation of CARICOM in 1973 coincides with the year when the United
Kingdom entered the European Economic Community (EEC), as well as
with the formation of a negotiating bloc (Africa, Caribbean, Pacific, ACP)
among former European colonies that signed the Lomé Convention in
1975 (The Courier 1985:32).4
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In the Hispanic Caribbean, the Antillean Federation was a project
of the pro independence leadership of Puerto Rico, Cuba, and the
Dominican Republic. The aggressive U.S. policy that culminated with
the invasion of Cuba and Puerto Rico in 1898 and the “occupations” of
Haiti in 1915 and the Dominican Republic in 1916 derailed any project
of Antillean Federation.
In the last two decades of the twentieth century the drive for integration
took a new turn. The 1978 “oil shock,” the fall in the prices of
traditional exports (sugar, bananas) and the subsequent growth in the
international debt placed the Caribbean at the Cold War’s politico-economic
crossroads. The establishment of socialist regimes in Grenada
and Nicaragua, coupled with the civil war in El Salvador, thrust the
Caribbean and Central America in the midst of competing projects of
regional cooperation and integration. The competing views on regional
cooperation and integration were represented by the U.S. Caribbean
Basin Initiative (CBI) and the Central American-based Regional Alternative
for Central America and the Caribbean (RACAC) advanced by
the Coordinadora Regional de Investigaciones Económicas y Sociales
(CRIES) (ISS 1983; Irvin and Gorostiaga 1985).
The CBI enacted a system of bilateral economic preferences between
the United States and Caribbean and Central American countries. While
the RACAC, proposed a regional treaty based on policies consistent with
a new international economic order (NIEO) that promoted balanced
international trade and traditional regional integration measures such as
a custom union and common market (Dietz and Pantojas-García 1994).
By 1989 the Grenadian revolutionary government had been deposed and
the Sandinista government would loose the elections, and the Central
American peace process was underway, preventing other revolutionary
regimes from taking power. By this time also, the Cold War was coming
to an end with the collapse of the Berlin wall. The 1980s were declared
the “lost decade” for development throughout Latin America and the
Caribbean.
The 1990s heralded the triumph of trade fundamentalism, neoliberalism,
as the dominant economic paradigm. The free trade paradigm
became structured globally with the creation in 1995 of the World Trade
Organization (WTO) which would promote and enforce trade liberalization
policies on a global scale. In the Western Hemisphere the signing of
the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the celebration
of the first Summit of the Americas with the intention of creating a
Free Trade Area of the Americas in 1994, redefined regional integration
and cooperation views. The axis of regional integration shifted from
coordination of production, duties and trade, to liberalization of trade
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and investment. Free market competition replaced regional planning
and coordination as the new means of integration.
The Neoliberal paradigm proposes dramatic changes in the institutional,
juridical, political and economic frameworks of nations aimed
at facilitating international trade and investment. Regional “free trade
agreements” (FTAs) are promoted as supranational frameworks that
regulate transnational economic activities. These FTAs are regulated
by transnational bodies, such as the WTO, or a regional secretariat.
The decisions of these multinational bodies may overrule decisions of
national governments. This process of national deregulation and transnational
re-regulation promotes the creation of new regional / supranational
economic spaces that allow corporations to operate freely. The mobility
of labor, however, continues to be legally restricted (Cf. Grinspun and
Kreklewich 1994; Pantojas García and Dietz 1996).
After the first Summit of the Americas in 1994 and the announcement
of a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) initiative, there
was a rush throughout Latin America and the Caribbean to liberalize
bilateral and regional trade. This resulted in the creation of MERCOSUR,
and the acceleration of the integration processes in CARICOM
and the CACM, as well as the signing of a regional free trade and
economic cooperation agreement between the Dominican Republic
and the CACM know as the DR-CAFTA (Cf. West Indian Commission
1994; Villasuzo and Trejos Solórzano 2000). In this context, Caribbean
integration, whether through CARICOM or the DR-CAFTA, appears
to be a defensive maneuver aimed at positioning the small economies
of the Western Hemisphere to avoid some of the perceived negative
consequences of FTAs.5
While at the economic level there were advances, at the political
level attempts at Caribbean integration and cooperation have not
advanced swiftly. The creation of the Association of Caribbean States
(ACS) in 1994 was to be the basis for region-wide politico-economic
cooperation. However, in 2000 one its directors, economist Miguel Ceara
Hatton spoke openly of the persistent fragmentation of the ACS into
four camps: the Central American bloc, the CARICOM bloc, the Group
of Three (Colombia, Venezuela and Mexico), and the Non Aligned
Group, integrated by Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Panama
(Ceara Hatton 2000:20)
In spite of the initial enthusiasm for laying the groundwork for
regional cooperation, the ACS has only modest achievements in specific
areas such as regional transport, sustainable tourism, natural disasters
and trade. The framework agreements and proposals in each of these
areas have been superseded by intra bloc agreements such as the CARICOM
single economy and the DR-CAFTA.
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What are the factors that contribute to what can be termed the
“dialectic” of Caribbean integration? What explains the fact that, as
Derek Walcott remarks on the quote at the beginning of this essay,
emotionally and culturally people born in the Caribbean express a unifying
bond, while at the level of realpolitik there are what seem to be
insurmountable chasms. The rest of this essay analyzes the geopolitical,
economic, cultural and historical variables that explain these dynamics
of convergence and divergence that historically have hampered regional
integration at various levels. We shall attempt also to identify and present
those “points of convergence” within the practices of Caribbean identity
that could serve as the basis to build a project of regional integration.
This is, however, a first and incomplete attempt in what needs to be a
multidisciplinary and multinational effort.
Points of Divergence
GEOPOLITICS
Among the geopolitical variables or factors that divide the Caribbean
one is the difference between island and continental economies.
Many of the continental countries that border the rim of the Caribbean
Basin define their identities not as Caribbean but as Andean (Venezuela
and Colombia), Central American (Costa Rica, Guatemala, Honduras,
El Salvador, Nicaragua) or North American (Mexico). For these countries
the Caribbean is but a region, often marginalized.
A corollary of the Caribbean identity of these continental countries
is often enmeshed in territorial disputes such as Venezuela’s claims
over the Essequibo region of Guyana and Aves Island, off Trinidad, and
Guatemala’s and Hondura’s claims on Belize (Milefski 2004:82).
The disputes cited above are between Latin American countries and
CARICOM, English speaking, countries. There is also a stark contrast
between the militaristic traditions of Latin America and the role of
“security forces” in the CARICOM countries, some of which only have a
police force that may act as a sort of “national guard” in certain circumstances.
Major police and military undertakings in Caribbean countries,
such as the invasion of Grenada in 1983, or major operations on regional
drug trafficking, are funded by the European Union, the United States
or the British Commonwealth (Cf. Griffith 2004).
The geopolitical view of the Caribbean Basin as a strategic bastion
to promote the interest of former and current colonial powers is another
obstacle for regional integration. An example of this is the so called
“banana wars.” North American fruit companies, such as United Fruit,
used Caribbean Basin governments such as Guatemala, Honduras and
Mexico, to complaint to the WTO’s Dispute Settlement Body about the
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European Union’s subsidies to Bananas from the Eastern Caribbean
distributed principally by the British Geest Corporation. Banana growers
from Latin American were pitted against Windward Islands growers
by what was essentially a battle of transnational corporations for the
European banana market. This contributed for the increasing mistrusts
between CARICOM governments and Latin American Caribbean governments
(Cf. Vázquez Vera 2002; WTO 2001).
In regional organizations, such as the ACS, the non independent
territories of the Caribbean that acquire affiliate or observer status, are
often perceived as doing the bid of their metropolis; be it France in the
case of Martinique or Guadeloupe or the United States in the case of
Puerto Rico.
The end of the Cold War transformed geopolitics in the twenty-first
century. The Caribbean is not the fulcrum of East-West confrontation, as
had been since the Cuban Revolution. The Bush Administration considers
the Caribbean the “third border” of the United States and perceives
it as a gateway for illegal drugs, undocumented migrants, and potentially
terrorists. Rather than an arena for high politics, the Caribbean is seen
now as a law enforcement problem (Pantojas-García 2006).
Caribbean countries are not seen as economic and political partners
but as troubled neighbors that need assistance and policing. In this
regard, much controversy has been created by U.S. initiatives to counter
drug smuggling in the regions such as the Plan Colombia, which invest
billions of dollars in Colombia’s war against the drug cartels and against
the leftist guerrillas known as FARC. Other controversy grounded in
the new geopolitics of the region is the Shiprider agreements pursued
by the United States government since 1996, giving the U.S. Coastguard
the right to enter Caribbean territorial waters and intervene with non
U.S. vessels thought to carry drugs (Blumenthal 2001; CHA 2007). The
post Cold War official discourse “criminalizes” Caribbean migrants and
brands countries that refuse to cooperate in the U.S. security initiatives
in the region. In turn, this creates mistrust within the region and sharpens
the xenophobic biases against migrant groups, for example Dominicans
and Haitians in the Eastern Caribbean.
ECONOMICS
One of the most important and difficult problems that confronts
any regional cooperation and integration project is the similarity of the
Caribbean Basin economies. Tourism, agriculture and assembly manufacturing
for export (maquiladoras) are axes of the region’s economies.
These axes have been greatly negatively affected by trade liberalization.
For example, the apparel industry of the insular Caribbean was nega64
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tively impacted by NAFTA. In the first two years of NAFTA, 1994-96,
apparel exports from Mexico to the United States grew by 123 percent.
Conversely, apparel exports from the insular Caribbean faltered, with
the Dominican Republic and Jamaica growing by 12 and 11 percent
respectively. This in contrast to the previous two years, when Mexican
exports had grown 70 percent while Jamaica grew 54 percent and the
Dominican Republic 29 percent.
The banana wars to which we referred previously are another
example of the economic rivalries among Caribbean Basin economies
small and large and the negative impact of trade liberalization. In the
emerging economic order known as “globalization” the main economic
actors are not countries but firms; especially large transnational corporations.
Countries with similar natural endowments and labor pools
compete to attract investment from transnational corporations. Bilateralism
rather than regional cooperation or integration becomes ever
more important.
Another factor that conspires against economic integration is the
asymmetry of the economies of the Caribbean Basin. Small island economies,
with high rates of industrial concentration depend on a few specialized
activities. Trade liberalization increases the vulnerability of these
sectors to international fluctuations and competition. Export manufacturing
in the Caribbean has suffered greatly with the opening of China for
trade and investment, especially assembly manufacturing in free trade
zones. Sustainable development for small economies requires not only free
trade but a flow of investment and technical assistance both at the level of
production and at the level of managing in an open environment.6
Regional asymmetries and competition beget a deep mistrust
between, for example, the Latin American and West Indian ruling elites,
as this quote from an article of Sir Ronald Sanders (2005) in the Jamaica
Observer eloquently shows:
Further, governments were not confident that the Dominican Republic
would hold to CARICOM positions on regional and international
issues. While the Dominican Republic was courting CARICOM, it was
also flirting with the Central American group of countries.
What deeply troubled CARICOM governments then was the Dominican
Republic’s siding with Central American countries to distance
themselves from CARICOM’s relationship with Cuba because they
thought that trade benefits from the United States, under the Caribbean
Basin Initiative, would be threatened.
Thus, the Dominican Republic signs a free trade agreement with
CARICOM that did not reflect the desire for integration but rather was
coerced by external pressures form the United States and the European
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Union, deepening mistrust within the region (Sanders 2005). Likewise,
the special financial terms for oil imports provided by Venezuela to
CARICOM members through Petro Caribe raised protests and complaints
from Trinidad, an oil producing competitor of Venezuela (Culmer
2005).
CULTURAL AND HISTORICAL FACTORS
If it is true that the main economic actors of the new “global” order
are large transnational corporations, those who articulate the economic,
corporate, political, geopolitical, social and cultural interests are social
actors: chambers of commerce, political parties, professional associations,
etc. Whether they are called classes, elites, cliques, groups or social
forces, these social actors operate in a context. This context, in turn, is
defined in historical, cultural, linguistic and ethnic terms.
Caribbean identities often diverge in unexpected ways. Panamanians,
for example, do not consider themselves, Central American,
Dominicans refer to Haitians as “blacks” (negros), while the lighter-skin
black Dominicans are referred to as Indians, and Puerto Ricans refer to
migrants or visitors from the Eastern Caribbean as “those people from
the islands” (los de las islas). There is also a history of mistrust among
“West Indians” and “East Indians” (people of Indian descent) within the
English speaking Caribbean, especially in Trinidad and Guyana. These
ethnic and xenophobic prejudices, which should not be confused with
national pride, hamper also the development of a Caribbean project of
economic integration.
Differences in the size of the population, economic development
and language add to the divergences. English, Spanish, French, Dutch,
Papiamento and Creole constitute important barriers to effective communication.
But there are deeper differences. There is, for example, a
militaristic tradition in the Latin American Caribbean (Cuba, Dominican
Republic, Venezuela) that is absent in the rest of the Caribbean. This
difference is heightened especially in territorial disputes, where Latin
American republics are perceived as threatening and menacing to the
territorial integrity of smaller non-Hispanic countries.
Thus far we have pointed out the most salient divergences that conspire
against the formation of a Caribbean identity that could promote a
political project of integration for the Greater Caribbean (the Caribbean,
Central America and the continental rim of the Caribbean). This does not
mean that developing a project of Caribbean integration grounded on
shared identity traits would be impossible. It means that such a project will
not grow spontaneously and that there are important obstacles that need to
be surmounted in order to move towards cooperation and integration.
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Convergences
GEOPOLITICS
If it is true that geopolitical factors pose important obstacles to
Caribbean integration, it is also true that there is increasing awareness
of the need to move towards regional cooperation. The inclusion of
Haiti and the Dominican Republic with CARICOM through CARIFORUM
in the European Union’s negotiating group for an Economic
Partnership Agreement (EPA), albeit conflictive, is an indication that
geopolitics dictates a need for regional cooperation. The signing of free
trade agreements between the Dominican Republic and CARICOM, as
well as with the CACM in the DR-CAFTA, are further indication of the
recognized need to overcome insularism through regional cooperation
and, eventually, integration. There are also a number of treaties signed
between the CACM and Panama, Chile and Mexico and negotiations
for an FTA between CARICOM and Central America and Panama that
evidence the drive towards regional cooperation.7
As in the past, geopolitics defines metropolitan interests and exercise
pressure on regional politics and economics. But the pressure for
regional cooperation and integration is not simply exogenous. Geographical
proximity, a history of commercial and demographic exchanges
(regional migrations), and the perceived threat of being marginalized
from metropolitan trading blocs (NAFTA and the EU), have provided
an incentive for endogenous regional initiatives. The Caribbean political
and business elites are keenly aware that they need to join in the
Neoliberal bandwagon or risk being marginalized. Of the 35 countries in
the Western Hemisphere, 21 are small economies located in the Caribbean
Basin.8 And the ruling groups in all of these countries have come
to the conclusion that they need to enter into trading blocs to adapt to
the trend of trade liberalization. Even socialist and insularist Cuba has
move to create an alternative economic bloc, the ALBA (Alternativa
Bolivariana para las Américas).
It could be argued that the geopolitics of smallness and the strife to
position themselves as something other than metropolitan backyards,
compelled Caribbean political and economic leaders to look to regional
cooperation mechanisms. In this sense the creation of the ACS in 1994,
was to provide an arena for building common ground, beyond immediate
economic concerns. The ACS, however, has not fulfilled its promise
and has limited its endeavors to specific areas such as transportation,
sustainable tourism and natural disasters (ACS 1994, 1999).9
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ECONOMICS
Within this contradictory spectrum, the threat of marginalization
from trade blocs and initiatives has fostered a drive towards intra
regional alliances. The larger economies of the region are promoting
regional initiatives for economic cooperation. CARICOM, the CACM,
and the DR-CAFTA have already been mentioned. Aside from those,
there two new and complementary initiatives: Petro Caribe and the
ALBA. Petro Caribe, offers to finance Caribbean oil imports at concessionary
rates of one to two percent for 20 years. Complementing this
specific initiative, Venezuela is to promote the ALBA, as an alternative
to the Free Trade Area of the Americas, headed by the United States.
The ALBA is a controversial economic cooperation initiative based on
the principle of balanced or equitable trade and allows for barter agreements
and subsidies to promote economic development. The ALBA
has attracted few members or affiliates (Nicaragua, Dominica, Antigua,
Cuba, Bolivia, Haiti and Venezuela), as it is ideologically identified with
a political project dubbed twenty first century socialism.
Regional cooperation is also taking place at the level of the private
sector. Regional transnational corporate groups are emerging and
thriving throughout the region linked to business such as tourism and
transportation. The TACA group in Central America and the Superclubs
in the Caribbean are examples of this tendency.10
Trade liberalization and economic exchanges in the Caribbean are
not limited to transnational corporations or regional government-promoted
initiatives. There are transborder economic and social exchanges
through out the region. Small merchants and enterprises move a regionwide
network of trade in crafts and other goods. This trade is driven by
individuals, often women that travel buying and selling throughout the
region. This popular trade links are not knew they date back to the smuggling
traditions of Corsairs and Privateers. Today, however, traveling
traders known as higglers or madame Sara’s tour the Caribbean with bags
full of commodities that could be considered technically as “contraband.”
From personal care goods and apparel to laptop computers and ipods,
there is a renewed vigor to informal inter island trade in the Caribbean
(Cf. Morales Carrión 1971; Quiñones 1997).
CULTURAL AND HISTORICAL FACTORS
It can be argued that the basis for the cultural industry that has
flourished in the Caribbean is the afro-Antillean tradition. From salsa
to reggae to the newfangled “reggaeton,” music has been traditionally
an integrationist force. Afro-Antillean tradition is, as it was said in the
beginning, the rhizome that spreads horizontally in various directions
68 EMILIO PANTOJAS GARCÍA
Caribbean Studies Vol. 36, No. 1 (January - June 2008), 53-74
unexpectedly producing a Caribbean rhythmic complex. This common
substratum of Caribbean popular culture provides the fulcrum of any
project of Caribbean unity. The African Diaspora in the Caribbean
provides the basis of a cultural industry that is thriving with the growth
of tourism.
The zouk of the French Caribbean and the Calypso of “The Mighty
Sparrow” from the English-speaking Caribbean may be hardly known in
the Hispanic Caribbean but all of these rhythms find themselves labeled
as Caribbean or Tropical music in the tourist capitals of the region:
Nassau, Philipsburg, San Juan, or Charlotte Amalie, to mention only a
few. The growth of tourism and regional migration has spread Caribbean
cultures. Caribbean rhythms have traveled and continue to travel
throughout the region following migration. Puerto Rican “bomba” is the
Creole’s Caribbean belle dance and reggaeton is the “syncretic” product
of Marleys reggae, rap and hip hop. Salsa, reggae, zouk and merengue
meet and redefine themselves in this migratory path.
The mistrust of Hispanic, English-speaking, French and Dutch elites
contrasts with the meeting of peoples and cultures through the migration
experiences of the working classes. In Puerto Rico, for example, in the
1980s and 90s, before the emergence of reggaeton, Dominican merengue
became the popular music of choice. Such was the influence of migrants
from the neighboring country in popular culture.
In historical and cultural terms, a Caribbean identity can be conceived
as a set of overlapping circles. The segment of the surface of each
circle that overlaps (music, cuisine, religious beliefs, etc.) constitutes
the building bloc of a Caribbean identity. It is argued, further, that this
“cultural core” is provided by the Afro-Antillean Diaspora traditions.
The shared, yet diverse, experience(s) of slavery and plantation are the
basis of the cultural bond captured in Walcott’s affirmation, the driving
force behind the “emotional federation.”
Conclusion
The push towards trade liberalization and economic openness has
had and adverse impact on the small economies of the Caribbean. The
threat of economic marginalization and decline, has rekindled the drive
for regional integration. CARICOM and the CACM resurged as necessary
institutions for economic development. The philosophical and
institutional basis of the new integrationist doctrine, however, shifted
from regional economic coordination and cooperation to regional liberalization
of trade and investment and competition. The market, rather
than governments drive the emerging process of regional integration.
Integration is seen as the opening of a regional space for the competition
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of private regional and transnational corporations, rather than cooperation
and planning of common economic strategies.
The question that emerges is whether regional trade liberalization
constitutes economic integration. Especially given the fact that the unrestricted
mobility of goods, services, capital and technology is not matched
by the mobility of peoples. Migration continues to be restricted by legal
and political constraints. A further question arises as to whether Neoliberal
models of economic integration, i.e. regional FTAs that configure
trading blocs, promote integration or simply create supranational conditions
for corporations take advantage of regional social disadvantages
such as low wages, lax environmental rules, etc.
Clearly, neoliberalism questions traditional views of economic
integration. Is regional integration desirable or sentimental utopia? Is
it relevant in a globalized world where economic deregulation is the new
dominant paradigm?
The proliferation of regional FTAs such as MERCOSUR, NAFTA,
CARICOM, CACM, DR-CAFTA, etc, indicate that there are new
modes of economic integration. The traditional geopolitical views about
regional integration are obsolete. A paradigm shift is called for.
The analysis of the integration experience in the Caribbean suggests
that the basis for achieving a durable and structurally deep regional
integration go beyond traditional technocratic designs such as customs
unions and free trade agreements. Regional economic agreements are
important building blocs but regional integration may require the development
of complex institutional and normative frameworks. That is, in a
context of geopolitical, economic, historical and cultural heterogeneity,
such as the Caribbean, regional integration may require the construction
of a political project of integration that includes the construction
of a shared regional identity.11 Put another way, regional economic
integration necessitates the construction of a shared political and cultural
identity, as well as coherent institutional, normative and economic
framework. Until these common regional frameworks are developed and
aligned, integration will not materialize in the Greater Caribbean beyond
the traditional cultural and linguistic regions.
Notes
* This article is a revised version of a paper presented to the Second
International Seminary of the Cátedra de Estudios del Caribe, University
of Havana, Cuba, January, 5-8, 2006. A version in Spanish
appeared in Temas, 52, septiembre-diciembre de 2007, pp. 4-17.
70 EMILIO PANTOJAS GARCÍA
Caribbean Studies Vol. 36, No. 1 (January - June 2008), 53-74
1 The first regional economic community in post WW II Europe was
the European Coal and Steel Community created by the Treaty of
Paris in 1951, as a common market for coal and steel and integrated
by France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands.
This was followed by the Treaty of Rome, signed by France,
West Germany, Italy Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg
on March 1957, establishing the European Economic Community.
These two are the precursors of the contemporary European Union.
In 1960, the European Free Trade Association was created as a trade
bloc as an alternative to the European Economic Community. For
a comprehensive account of economic blocs and agreements in the
post WWII world see Aponte García and Álvarez Swihart (2002).
2 The dates of the creation of the pacts are drawn from the websites
of the respective associations except for the Latin American Free
Trade Association which became the Association for Latin American
Integration (ALADI) in 1980. Cf. Asociación Latinoamericana
de Libre Comercio,
Economic Integration,
org/ingles/quienes/brief.htm; CARICOM,
3 It is interesting to note that there is no gentilic noun for Caribbean
in the Francophone or Anglophone Caribbean. As a rule, people
from the English speaking Caribbean describe themselves first with
the gentilic of their country of origin, Kittisian, St. Lucian, Trinidadian,
etc., then as West Indian, but never or rarely as Antillean. In
the Hispanic Caribbean, caribeño is used as the gentilic for Caribe
(Caribbean). People from the Hispanic Caribbean describe themselves
first national by national origin—Cuban, Dominican—then
as Latin American, and then Antillean or Caribbean (caribeños).
4 The Caribbean group that is part of ACP is known as CARIFORUM
and includes CARICOM members plus the Dominican Republic.
5 The Neoliberal project of trade liberalization anchors its view of
economic growth on the Ricardian principle of “comparative advantages”.
That is, international free trade—economic openness—is
mutually beneficial to all countries those involved in international
trade, as long as they produce and trade those goods for which they
have a comparative advantage. These comparative advantages, originally
thought to be provided by natural endowments (climate, soil,
dexterity of people) today are also complemented by social factors
ECONOMIC INTEGRATION AND CARIBBEAN IDENTITY... 71
Vol. 36, No. 1 (January - June 2008), 53-74 Caribbean Studies
that affect cost such as low salaries, absence of trades unions, tax
and duties exemptions and tolerance to lax corporate responsibility
towards the environment and labor. In this sense, comparative
advantages may amount to “social disadvantages” for the less developed
countries.
6 At the 2001 CARICOM summit in Nassau, Bahamas, Mexican
President Vicente Fox underscore the asymmetries by offering to
double Mexico’s technical aid to the Caribbean. In doing this, not
only did he accentuate the technical differences between Mexico
and the small economies of the Caribbean but also situated Mexico
in the position of the economic “North” of the hemisphere.
7 See the list of Central American FTAs on the website of the Secretaría
de Integración Económica Centroamericana (SIECA)
also the CARICOM Secretariat website on negotiations for an FTA
with Central America,
8 Antigua and Barbuda, Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Costa Rica,
Dominica, El Salvador, Grenada, Guatemala, Guyana, Haiti,
Honduras, Jamaica, Nicaragua, Panama, Dominican Republic, St.
Kitts-Nevis, St. Lucia, St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Surinam and
Cuba.
9 The new Secretary General of ACS Luis Fernando Andrade Falla
emphasized this focus on his inauguration. See the ACS website,
10 The Taca Group
in El Salvador, and Super Clubs in Jamaica
11 The notion of “political project” is a construct defined as a set of
political, social and economic principles, interests, preferences,
values, and goals articulated by sociopolitical coalitions (social
actors) that aspire and compete for shares of political power in a
society. In this case it refers to regional or transnational groups
(sociopolitical coalitions) competing for shares of regional power.
72 EMILIO PANTOJAS GARCÍA
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