Mr. President
Mr. Prime Minister
Members of Cabinet
Members of the Diplomatic Corps
Distinguished Ladies and Gentlemen:
It was intended that on this day, May 5th, 2000, the Parliament of Barbados would have begun one of the great debates in its history – a Review of the Report of a Commission to Amend the Constitution of Barbados, in which is contained the recommendation to transform Barbados into a Republic. The debate has been postponed because Parliament did not think it fair nor feasible to cause a subject of such considerable importance to have to compete for attention with a Test match involving the West Indies Cricket team.
The sponsors of this Conference therefore perhaps either know something that we in Barbados have not yet grasped about the state of West Indies cricket; or have a supreme confidence in the power of the media. Experience urges me to accept that it is the latter. I should also add that in the event there were any lingering doubts as to whether the media in the Caribbean is a more potent force than Parliament, this little episode today should suffice to lay all such doubts to rest.
In treating to the theme on which I have been invited to speak, I would have wished today to be able to follow Dickens and to assert that “it is the best of times, even it is the worse of times”
On balance, the distressing circumstances in which the Caribbean Community now finds itself, and the very fearsome prospects which lie ahead do not create any grounds for the optimism that these are the best of times.
It comes closer in fact to being just about the worst of times as we begin a new century. For much of the Caribbean Community is confronted with quite considerable uncertainity, and a tendency towards disorder in just about every sphere of political, social and economic life.
In the political sphere, our region which has traditionally stood out as a beacon of democracy and political stability has of late become the location for political developments which not only run counter to that tradition, but are not for contemplation by the fainthearted.
Haiti, the newest member of the Caribbean Community is experiencing the gravest difficulty in establishing its rendezvous with democracy. Political unrest also stalks the land in St. Vincent, in Suriname, in Jamaica, always in different forms and with different incidence but also always of sufficient severity to absorb enough energy to put the development of those countries on pause.
I am, of course, in Guyana, which led Singapore and the rest of the Caribbean in every index of development as recently as the start of the 1960’s. It can do so again in the 21st century provided that it is prepared to put its political difficulties behind it; finding that political solution not in any Herdmanston Accord or in the role of any Caricom appointed mediator, but in the formation of a social contract, subscribed to by every class and creed in Guyana, to work to make Guyana succeed.
In addition ,I offer no hostility, just an overwhelming sense of sadness about the fact that elsewhere in the Caribbean, a state of such utter despair has been reached regarding the prospects for national development that some are now proposing variants of recolonisation, such as applying to join the European Union, as viable options in the Caribbean at the start of the 21st century.
In our international relations, the Caribbean has possibly been the only region of the world not to reap a dividend from the end of the Cold War. Indeed, the spectre of international marginalisation stalks the region.
Any geopolitical significance that the Caribbean had hitherto possessed, arising from its designation as a place where the clash of ideologies could have posed a threat to the security of the Western World, has receded with the fall of the Berlin Wall.
In addition, for our sins, we have on the one hand been too successful as lower middle or middle income developing countries, or not sufficiently important systemic threats to the stability of the world’s economic, financial and trading systems to warrant any special coddling by the international community.
Indeed, the rest of the world no longer sees the Caribbean as a special or unique case, deserving of special treatment and assistance. Our search for empathy or goodwill as we seek stays of execution in carrying out actions arising from our international commitments which can have painful consequences for the survival of Caribbean societies, are now perceived as yet other rearguard actions, not dissimilar from other such actions on our part over the last three hundred years.
The powerful states with whom we have maintained strategic and friendly relations have either therefore relegated the Caribbean region to a status of benign neglect, or have sought to forge with us a unidimensional relationship which draws its bearing entirely from our unsolicited and uncomfortable position as one of the world’s premier transit point in the traffic of illegal drugs.
At the start of a new century, and at the start of a new millennium, the Caribbean Community of states faces a situation of being small states, standing virtually alone, with only a few firm or reliable alliances in an increasingly unsympathetic and hostile international environment.
To illustrate, I recently attended a meeting of the Development Committee of the World Bank/IMF, which, as Prime Minister of Barbados, I addressed as a member of the Canadian delegation, by special leave and permission of the Minister of Finance of Canada, to argue a case for the adoption of a World Bank/Commonwealth Secretariat Task Force’s Report on a Development Agenda on Small States.
It is a sobering thought that without the indulgence of the Government of Canada, I would not have been able to speak on behalf of my country before principal decision makers in the international community about the special conditions of vulnerability and volatility of small states, nor to call for the adoption of a Development Agenda that enables such states to face, with confidence, the prospects of successfully integrating into a challenging new global economy.
I leave this conference to go to a meeting of the Caribbean Development Bank, where there is likely to be discussion on the possibility of certain European countries withdrawing from being shareholders in the Bank.
In June, the OECD is threatening to publish a list of non-cooperative tax havens, on which may appear various Caribbean societies, which will be alleged to have encouraged the development within their frontiers of international financial centres by their use of so called harmful tax competition practices.
It is not the best of times. In the social sphere, the Caribbean ranks high on the list of those countries which face the threat of being overwhelmed by the HIV/AIDS epidemic. New forms of crime and violence, linked closely to an insidious new drug culture which threatens to undermine the integrity of the institutions of our civil society, and linked to the behaviour of Caribbean nationals deported from the USA, have and are taking root, and are representing themselves as the most modern forms of social disintegration in a fragile region.
Our region, rich in its cultural and ethnic diversity, faces also the spectre of cultural absorption; of being just another victim of a monolithic process of globalisation which promotes homogeneity rather than diversity and which, unchecked, would create a world in which Mickey Mouse, McDonalds and Michael Jordan are the only cultural icons with which we can or will identify.
For a region whose major contribution to the development of the human condition in the 20th century has been the products of its creative imagination, expressed in terms of the work and worth of its poets, novelists, its music and calypsonians, its cricketers, and the Free Spirit of Caribbean people expressed wherever they have happened to be located in the Diaspora, the monolithic levelling social and cultural impulses of globalisation are a threat which can diminish the Caribbean and take it backward.
In what sense is McDonalds superior to a fish fry at Oistins, or Jerk Pork in Jamaica, or Labba and Creek Water in Guyana? Why should we yield on the preservation of our cultural icons, that traditional way of life inherent in small states which is so relaxing and rewarding and which makes living in a small state such an unforgettable experience, to become just another cultural and social statistic in a world made safe for the domination of powerful but socially and culturally insensitive transnational conglomerates?
In the economic sphere, the Caribbean is caught between two worlds. The old world of trade preferences, concessional flows of financial resources to the region, domestic protectionism, inward looking, state dominated, over regulated economic activity is vanishing or is already gone.
The new Caribbean economy has now to become a free spirit.
We will now have to make our place in a world of declining special preferences, greater reciprocity, equal treatment for national and foreign investment and enterprise, and the end of managed trade. It will constitute a major challenge for the Caribbean Community as a group.
It is in this context that I come to the main issue that I wish to deal with today. It has to do with the main purposes of the new economic integration that must serve as the basis for the engendering of a new sprit and sense of Caribbean Community and identity in the forseeable future.
Since 1947, more than 100 regional trade arrangements have come into operation. Others are also in force that have not been identified to the GATT/WTO . In our Caribbean, there has been a historic hostility to intra regional transactions, while similar transactions originating in the rest of the world have been put on a pedestal and treated as premium.
For instance, foreign direct investment has been treated as a major accomplishment where it has occurred. By contrast, direct investment by the nationals of any Caribbean nation in any other Caribbean state is somewhat perceived as a threat. In fact, it can fairly be asserted that the modalities for incorporation of the Caribbean economy into the global economy have historically been stronger than the media for creating a single, unified Caribbean economy designated to meeting the basic and advanced needs of the Caribbean people.
The Caribbean however is the region of the world which can least afford not to integrate. Indeed, if it was fully to integrate its economic system, it would nonetheless go into the 21st century as the world’s smallest, most volatile and most vulnerable economic system. Not to integrate its various economies will serve to dangeriously marginalise the various economies of the Caribbean Community in today’s world. This is especially so because no other region in the world is engaged in international trade negotiations of the scope and on the scale as the Caribbean.
The Caribbean has to negotiate a new relationship with Europe to come into effect in 2008. It has at the same time to secure its place in the Free Trade Area of the Americas to come into being in 2005. At the same time, and despite the debacle at Seattle, it has to participate in multilateral trade negotiations under the auspices of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in which there is a built in agenda for agriculture and services that simply cannot be ignored by Caribbean states.
The Caribbean Community therefore has to undertake a process of harmonised liberalisation which is greater and more all encompassing than that undertaken by any sub-set of states in the entire history of mankind.
In a word that is the challenge facing the states of the Caribbean Community, singly and in combination. The Caricom Community therefore needs to adopt a strategy of internal repositioning to achieve sustainable growth and continued improvements in the social standards and welfare of its citizens, at the same time as it undertakes global repositioning to bring on board a new relationship with the Americas, through the new FTAA, a new relationship with Europe through a successor relationship to LOME IV; and a new relationship with the global economic community through the new dispensation that will be created globally in the trade policies of the WTO.
It is against this backdrop that I address you today concerning the salient aspects to create a new Caribbean Single Market and Economy.
In 1973, the architects of the existing mechanisms of economic integration in the Caribbean under the Treaty of Chaguaramas set out to create a special but limited union of Caribbean economic integration. They saw Caribbean development as an inward looking, import-substitution phenomenon; they refused to believe that the Caricom Community could survive and prosper based on the unrestricted movement of capital and factors of production. They saw integration in only a limited sense as a limited common market, providing for the free movement of goods, but with no provision for the unrestricted movement of labour, capital and services.
The Treaty of Chaguaramus of 1973 was conceived and devised to implement this vision of regional economic integration. Better experience and the contemporary realities of Caribbean international economic relations have taught us the need for substantial modification . A limited common market such as that conceived in 1973, bears no relationship to the requirements of Caribbean development in the 21st Century.
Of especial significance is the fact that a process of Caricom economic integration, based on the precepts of the 1973 model would leave the Caribbean dangerously short of what is required to meet the prerequisites to compete successfully in the new global economy, to say nothing about meeting the requirements of regional development per se.
In 1973, the architects of the Caribbean Community could not envision a Caribbean in which capital, labour and services could move freely and in which Caribbean citizens enjoy the right to establish enterprise in any Caribbean location of their choice.
We must contemplate such today.
As such, as far back as 1989, in the Grand Anse Declaration, the leaders of the Caribbean Community committed themselves to creating a Single Caribbean Market and Economy.
The new process of economic integration arising from that decision contemplates that we not only liberate the movement of goods within the Caribbean region, but the movement of capital, services and human resources. It also requires that we harmonise our policies for the development of capital markets, our social security systems, our monetary and fiscal policies, our incentives to industry, our trade relations with the rest of the world, the main practices in the development of our business, our policies for the development of our human, institutional and technological resources.
The contemporary initiative to create a single market and economy expressed in the nine protocols to create a legal framework to amend the Treaty of Chaguaramas and other related initiatives are designed to create this new Caribbean economic environment.
However, the creation of such a Single Market and Economy in the Caribbean Community should be seen only as a necessary but not a sufficient condition for Caribbean development. Some have argued that the creation of a Caribbean Single Market and Economy is an initiative whose relevance and benefit have largely been overtaken and vitiated by international events which have unfolded. It was intended to have been created in 1993. It is now almost ten years late chronologically. Certainly it would have had a more profound impact if it had been created 20 years ago.
In today’s world, one of the highest purposes that can be accomplished by the formation of the Single Market and Economy is the creation of the common regional economic space in which enterprises, of all types can make judgements to rationally allocate resources available in the Caribbean.
We must however all appreciate that our relevant economic space is no longer the domestic economy of any individual Caribbean economy. For this matter, it is not the regional economy. It is, in fact the global economy.
The creation of a Single Caribbean Market and Economy gives us barely an outside chance, 10 years after the fact, of creating a new and reconfigured Caribbean economy that has a greater probability of succeeding in the new global economy than that of any domestic Caribbean economy functioning on its own.
The absence of a Single Caribbean Market and Economy in which goods, services, capital and enterprises can move freely, and in which our fiscal, monetary, exchange rate, and trade policies are harmonised would mean that we will fail individually and collectively in meeting the challenges ensuing from participating in the new global economy.
In the final analysis it is essential that before we embrace full liberalisation with the rest of the world, we must first practice full liberalisation in the Caribbean. This is what gives the Caribbean Single Market and Economy its special and unique purpose at this juncture in Caribbean Development. It is not the fifth wheel of the car of Caribbean development as some will have it. It is the key wheel that will ensure that the motor of Caribbean development will function effectively.
Against this background, I will touch quickly on a few matters related to the accomplishment of the Single Caribbean Market and Economy.
Whatever might be the appellate jurisdiction we accord to the proposed Caribbean Court of Justice, we need a Caribbean Court of Justice as a court of original jurisdiction to deal with disputes arising from the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas.
Without a Caribbean Court of Justice to interpret Community Law and to settle disputes arising from the new Treaty of Chaguaramas, a Caribbean Single Market and Economy and the entire Caribbean integration process will experience only the most profound difficulty in succeeding . I must especially stress that the initiative and the desire to create a Caribbean Court of Justice predates Pratt and Morgan. It is essential that the debate within the Region about the purposes of the Court be set within its appropriate historic and conceptual context , and that the vital function to be executed by the Court in underpinning our regional economic development be understood by all.
Secondly, the Caribbean can only meaningfully operate in the new global society if we put human resource development in the forefront of our efforts to create a new Caribbean society.
A new urgency and energy is therefore required of our regional Universities and all other institutions associated with the development of our human capacities.
I must therefore especially stress that among the measures to create a Single Caribbean Market and Economy is the effort to facilitate the free movement of our people within its own region.
In 1987 in his last and most graphic speech to the Caribbean Society, our National Hero, the Rt. Excellent Errol Barrow, observed that the people of the Caribbean had already made the free movement of people a Caribbean reality despite the opposition of their Governments.
The creation of a Single Caribbean Economy cannot succeed unless the people of the Caribbean can move freely in their region to develop the Caribbean society, each in accordance with his or her own ability.
My Government is determined to honour our obligations to enable Caribbean citizens to work and settle in Barbados. We have seen and have benefitted from the fact that since 1997 almost 500 Caribbean citizens have moved to Barbados under the new arrangement and have helped to propel the development of the Barbadian society. As it has been with Barbados, so let it be with the rest of the Caribbean.
Finally, it seems clear that there is need to put again in the forefront of Caribbean issues, the creation of new forms of governance in the Caribbean. The very logic that says that we must create a single Caribbean Market and Economy, in essence a Single Caribbean Economy, is the same logic that says we must eventually create a single Caribbean political space.
As a Minister of Finance, I know how difficult it is to hold my own economy to a successful course. As the Prime Minister responsible for the creation of a Single Caribbean Market and Economy, I must say to you that the Single Market and Economy in the Caribbean cannot truly become a reality unless we create the political power structures to make it a reality. It will not be easy or automatic. It will probably take place long after I have left active politics.
In today’s age, it will perhaps be perceived as a diminution of the national sovereignty that many Caribbean societies have struggled to achieve. But to create the new Caribbean society that can succeed in the new global society, we simply must gave greater attention to the political dimensions of Caribbean integration, and deliberately set out to design a new Caribbean governance relevant to the purposes of the 21st Century Caribbean Commonity.
I leave you today with the words of a Caribbean patriot. C.L.R. James. He spoke in 1977 about the “Birth of a Nation” and he delivered himself of the following:
“Nobody knows what the Caribbean population is capable of. Nobody has ever attempted to find out. For one thing is certain. Any new and genuine economic development of the Caribbean has to begin first of all with the involvement of the mass of the population”.
It is in the knowledge that involvement of the people of the Caribbean will require the full support of the media that I have been pleased to participate in this conference.
I therefore wish this conference well and look to it to realise all that the people of the Caribbean are capable of.
