Pan-Caribbean Integration

Beyond CARICOM

Patsy Lewis, Terri-Ann Gilbert-Roberts, Jessica Byron, Patsy Lewis, Terri-Ann Gilbert-Roberts, Jessica Byron

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138056718
• eBook ISBN: 9781351676250
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

A critical part of the history of regionalism in Latin America and the Caribbean is to be found in the widening of the economic and functional relationships among the English-speaking Caribbean to embrace other countries in the Greater Caribbean.

Bringing together a range of international experts to explain the broad thrusts of CARICOM's widening project and the opportunities and challenges it presents, the book pays particular attention to CARICOM's relations with the French Caribbean territories. Providing a review of the pan-Caribbean landscape this volume notes the impact of these new relationships on internal CARICOM affairs; inter-regional/South-South cooperation; and political and legislative changes in European metropoles of the non-independent territories. It also contemplates recent developments in the region and globally, such as political instability in Brazil and Venezuela, Britain's decision to leave the European Union and the policies of the Donald Trump administration.

This edited collection will be an important resource for students and researchers in Latin American and Caribbean politics, economics, development, history and heritage.

Part I

The foundations of pan-Caribbean regionalism

1 Pan-Caribbeanism and the CARICOM Widening Project

Patsy Lewis, Terri-Ann Gilbert-Roberts and Jessica Byron

Introduction

The Caribbean Community (CARICOM¹), which emerged in 1973, was the continuation of a project to secure the independence of the former and extant colonies of Britain in the Caribbean, whose first iteration was the West Indies Federation (WIF) (1958–1962). Thus, its primary concern was with integrating the economies of its members, pursuing functional cooperation across a wide range of areas and, in a more limited way, coordinating foreign policy. Its ambit widened in the early 1990s with the recommendation by the West Indian Commission (WIC), set up to review its goals towards the close of the twentieth century, that not only should the Community focus on deepening the process among its current members, but it should also seek to widen its membership.

CARICOM’s role in the advancement of a pan-Caribbean identity has rarely been documented in the literature. However, a critical part of the history of regionalism in Latin America and the Caribbean is to be found in the widening of the economic and functional relationships among the English-speaking Caribbean to embrace other countries in the Greater Caribbean, across linguistic and cultural lines. In particular, overtures from CARICOM and the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS²) to Cuba in the 1970s, Haiti in the 1990s and the non-sovereign territories in 2000s, tell an important part of the story of a changing landscape of regionalism in the Americas.

This volume brings together a wide spread of chapters that capture the broad thrusts of CARICOM’s Widening Project and the opportunities and challenges it presents, with a particular focus on CARICOM’s relations with the French Caribbean territories, Haiti and Cuba. It is a review of the pan-Caribbean landscape that notes the impact of these new relationships on internal CARICOM affairs; inter-regional/South–South cooperation; and political and legislative changes in European metropoles of the non-independent territories. It also contemplates more recent developments in the region and globally, such as political instability in Brazil and Venezuela, Britain’s decision to leave the European Union (EU) and the policies of the Donald Trump administration. Before providing an outline of the arguments made in each of the remaining 15 chapters, it is useful at this point to offer a brief historical review of the emergence of pan-Caribbean regionalism.

The CARICOM Widening Project

The impetus for widening CARICOM’s engagement with the region can be located in the broader context that gave rise to the political union initiative among some states of the OECS in the late 1980s, and the Grand Anse Declaration, in 1989, which committed these countries to the creation of a Single Market and Economy (CSME). This was the need to reassess the regional integration project against the backdrop of a changed international environment and the perceived damaging outcomes for the region. These included the collapse of the Soviet Bloc and the end of the geopolitical basis on which their engagements with the US and Europe had been pursued; the embrace by the EU of a single economic market and the likely restructuring of the trade protocols of the Lome Convention; the negotiation of the World Trade Organisation (WTO) which threatened to further erode some of their protections in the EU market; and the negotiation of the Canada-US Free Trade Agreement and, later, the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA), which they feared would undermine their protected access to the US market under the Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI) (Lewis 2002, pp. 8–9). The WIC’s recommendation to reach out to the wider region was an effort to reduce the isolation that CARICOM feared would result from these developments.

The primary vehicle for widening CARICOM’s engagement with the region was the proposed Association of Caribbean States (ACS), which provided for various forms of membership for all 32 states and territories washed by the Caribbean Sea, including the non-sovereign territories of the UK, France, the Netherlands and the US as well as the non-CARICOM independent countries – Haiti, Suriname, the Dominican Republic (DR) and Cuba. The widening agenda had already been set, with requests from Haiti, Suriname, the DR and Venezuela for full membership in CARICOM. The rationale for the ACS was to provide a distinct forum for CARICOM’s engagement with the wider Caribbean (WIC 1992, p. 60), while leaving its inner core intact. In other words, CARICOM feared that broadening its membership to include other countries in the region comprising different language groups and much larger populations, threatened the organisation’s cohesiveness. Thus, the ACS would be the vehicle for managing trade and functional cooperation between CARICOM and its larger Caribbean counterparts (WIC 1992, pp. 59–63). The ACS’s ambition as a mechanism for expanding regional trade was stymied, however, by the prospect of the hemispheric Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), negotiated between 1998 and 2004, and did not recover after the latter’s collapse. Its focus shifted to and has remained on issues related to the Caribbean Sea – a unifying motif for its members – sustainable tourism, disasters and transportation.

CARICOM accepted Suriname’s bid for membership in 1995 and Haiti shortly thereafter³ but did not extend membership to the DR. Despite being accepted for membership in 1997, with accession in 2002, Haiti’s full integration within CARICOM has been problematic. Trade with CARICOM did not begin until 2004. In March 2004, CARICOM protested the extra-constitutional removal of President Aristide and his government’s replacement by the Gérard Latortue administration, by suspending its membership, reinstating it in July 2006 after elections brought the government of President René Préval to power. Despite CARICOM’s more active involvement with Haiti in the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake, Haiti is still not integrated into the CSME, especially in respect of the movement of skilled people. Some CARICOM countries maintain visa restrictions against Haitian nationals. Haiti’s integration, therefore, remains a work in progress.

In preference to the full accession of the DR to CARICOM, the Community opted, instead, for a Free Trade Area (FTA) in goods (1998), with provision for future services liberalisation. Nevertheless, the formation of the Caribbean Forum of African, Caribbean and Pacific Group of States⁴ (CARIFORUM) in 1992 comprising CARICOM states, Haiti (before its accession to CARICOM) and the DR, driven by the impetus from the EU to streamline its operations in the region, brought the DR closer to the group. CARIFORUM was eventually located within the CARICOM Secretariat. The negotiation of the CARIFORUM–EU Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA), which saw the Regional Negotiating Machinery negotiating on behalf of the DR, appears to have undermined CARICOM’s tendency to keep the DR at arm’s length, with the DR relaunching its bid for membership in 2009. This was stalled, however, when CARICOM suspended consideration of the DR’s membership in protest over the Constitutional Court’s ruling in 2013 to withdraw citizenship from Dominicans of Haitian descent. Thus, the DR’s troubled relationship with Haiti continues to present challenges to its embrace by CARICOM, whatever the economic arguments in its favour and, even here, there is concern that its membership may have negative effects on smaller CARICOM economies.

The WIC Report advocated an explicit engagement with Cuba, aimed at ending its isolation, bringing it within the Caribbean fold and agitating for an end to the US embargo (WIC 1992, p. 49). An outcome of this was a partial scope trade agreement in 2000. Cuba’s relationship with CARICOM has run longer and deeper with cooperation in education and health care delivery, including the provision of nurses and doctors, and the construction of health infrastructure. More recently, it has collaborated with Venezuela to deliver the Operation Miracle eye programme that provides screening and treatment for eye disease in individual CARICOM states and in Cuba, where necessary.

CARICOM also established a number of trade agreements with other countries in Latin America between 1992 and 2004. These included partial scope agreements with Venezuela (1992) and Colombia (1994), and an FTA with Costa Rica (2004). Venezuela’s offer of a one-way preferential FTA with CARICOM was part of a bid for a more direct engagement with CARICOM. More recently, promoted by the Hugo Chavez government and continued by President Nicolas Maduro, CARICOM–Venezuela engagement included the PetroCaribe Agreement, which provided cheap financing for Venezuelan oil for participants⁵ and Venezuela’s involvement, with Cuba, in Operation Milagros. The FTA was eclipsed by the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of our Americas (ALBA), initiated by the Chavez government and supported by Cuba, with six CARICOM states – Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St Lucia, St Kitts/Nevis and St Vincent and the Grenadines – engaging as full members⁶ and another three – Haiti, Guyana and Suriname – as observers (i.e. observers). This relationship is not unproblematic, however, with long-standing claims by Venezuela to a sizeable portion of the territory of Guyana, a CARICOM member, and related tensions have been resurrected by the Maduro government. Moreover, as Chapter 16 in this volume details, recent political and economic turmoil in Venezuela places the future of ALBA and the PetroCaribe arrangements in doubt.

Brazil has played an important role in drawing the region more closely into broader subregional integration processes. Both Guyana and Suriname are members of Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), in which Brazil plays a major role. Their engagement in Initiative for the Integration of the Regional Infrastructure of South America (IIRSA) has provided the basis for their stronger physical integration into the continent, with the construction of bridge and road infrastructure, as has already been occurring between Brazil and Guyana. On the popular level and unsanctioned by the regional project, is the informal movement of people, which has led to the establishment of Brazilian communities in border towns in Guyana and a sizeable Guatemalan population in Belize. Brazil was also an important contributor to the collapse of the FTAA project and the move towards the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), in which CARICOM countries are engaged. Brazil, under the Lula regime, expressed interest in broadening its engagement with CARICOM, participating in summits with regional leaders although, as Montoute and Abdenur detail in Chapter 15, this has slowed down subsequently.

Between 1991 and 2003, the non-independent British territories,⁷ with the exception of Montserrat, which was already a full member of CARICOM, became associate members and engaged in some of CARICOM’s functional arrangements, most notably, education. The subregional OECS, which brings together CARICOM’s smallest members, all considered Lesser Developed Countries (LDCs), with the British Virgin Islands (BVI) and Anguilla as associate members, was the platform for engaging with the French Caribbean, notably Martinique and Guadeloupe. Martinique became the OECS’s latest associate member in April 2016,⁸ with Guadeloupe accession negotiations underway. CARICOM’s Widening Project has also received a boost with expressions of interest in associate membership from a number of non-independent entities in the French and Dutch Caribbean. These are Martinique, Guadeloupe, French Guiana from the French Caribbean and Curacao and St Maarten from the Dutch.

Structure of the volume

This volume brings together a wide spread of chapters that capture the broad thrusts of CARICOM’s Widening Project that embraces the wider Latin America region and some of the non-independent territories of the Caribbean, and the opportunities and challenges it presents. It also addresses their evolving South–South relations with Brazil, China and India. It is divided into five sections. The first includes the introduction and broad historical overviews by Norman Girvan and Percy Hintzen, laying the basis for a fuller understanding of the progress in pan-Caribbean regionalism outlined across the volume. The second brings together four chapters that explore attempts by the French Caribbean territories as well as other sub-state entities to be more closely integrated with regional organisations, the legal and political implications of this, and the opportunities the engagement presents for both sets of actors. The third section groups two chapters that touch on Haiti’s engagement with CARICOM and a third that explores the implications of the DR’s constitutional ruling to restrict the right of Dominicans of Haitian parents to Dominican citizenship. The fourth section focuses on CARICOM’s relationship with the broader Hispanic Caribbean. It assesses their engagement in more recent initiatives that transcend trade and the changing terrain of Cuba’s provision of fraternal assistance. The final section comprises three chapters that look at CARICOM’s relationship beyond the region and explores new developments that hold challenges for its engagement in the newer integration projects and with South–South cooperation initiatives, more generally, as well as with its diaspora; and new uncertainties introduced by the British decision to leave the EU and the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the US.

A feature of this collection is that it embraces academics and civil society representatives from across the region: Brazil, Cuba, English-speaking Caribbean and its diaspora, Haiti, the DR and Martinique and Guadeloupe; representing universities and academic institutions such as: the University of the West Indies, the Université Antilles, University of Havana, Université d’Etat d’Haïti and the Université Quisqueya, Haiti, University of Toronto, Florida International University, the Igarapé Institute, in Rio de Janeiro, Oxfam and El Consejo Latinoamericano de Ciencias Sociales (CLACSO) – reflecting on challenges and possibilities of pan-Caribbean regionalism and possibilities for alternative South–South forms of cooperation.

Part I: The foundations of pan-Caribbean regionalism

In addition to the introduction, the volume opens with Norman Girvan’s chapter, ‘Constructing the Greater Caribbean’ which presents a broad historical sweep of a pan-Caribbean project that charts the imagining of a pan-Caribbean identity variously through literature and activism, drawing its inspiration from perspectives on race, class, resistance and economy. Girvan references a wide range of authors and activists who contributed to the attempt to construct a pan-Caribbean identity, and in so doing suggests the cross-pollination of ideas that contribute to an understanding of the region that transcends language and draws on its common history and Haiti’s special role in the construction of a pan-Caribbean identity of resistance. Girvan places his own emphasis on culture as an avenue to Greater Caribbean integration to counter the centrifugal tendencies of post-independence nationalism.

Percy Hintzen’s chapter, ‘Diaspora, affective ties and the New Global Order: Caribbean implications’ which follows, provides the backdrop for understanding the growing influence of Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS) in the region – a theme Montoute and Abdenur explore in detail in Chapter 15 – which he locates in the decline of European influence and the loss of US hegemony that has opened up spaces for these emerging actors. He also explores the unanticipated role of initiatives such as the US’s CBI and the EU’s Caribbean Forum (CARIFORUM) – meant to further their interests in the region – in fostering pan-Caribbean integration, breaking down language and other barriers fostered by colonialism; and the increasing array of regional initiatives that bring the two groups out of their mutual isolation. He also privileges race in the construction of the region. Hintzen places particular emphasis on the role of the region’s diaspora in ‘challenging the logic of the state’ with the potential to break down barriers to regionalism and contribute to a broader pan-Caribbean project. Moreover, he argues that historical migratory patterns in the region provide a connection between the Caribbean and these new emerging powers, in particular China and India.

Part II: Confronting boundaries of formal sovereignty

Jessica Byron and Patsy Lewis’s, ‘Responses to the sovereignty/vulnerability development dilemmas: small territories and regional organisations in the Caribbean’, presents a detailed insight into the working of three regional groups, CARICOM, its sub-grouping the OECS and the ACS, in particular, the avenues they provide for the deeper integration of the autonomous and semi-autonomous territories of the French, British and Dutch Caribbean. They explore the impetus behind these territories’ attempts at increased integration within the region in which they are located and the interests the groupings might have in accommodating their membership. They suggest that greater integration within regional groupings provides these territories with avenues for functional integration, especially around the Caribbean Sea, natural disasters, education, among others, which are less feasible for the European states with which they are constitutionally aligned to provide; but it also gives them access to a political platform, inc...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright page
• Table of Contents
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of abbreviations
• PART I The foundations of pan-Caribbean regionalism
• PART II Confronting boundaries of formal sovereignty
• PART III Haiti and the Dominican Republic: challenges to integration
• PART IV Assessing initiatives in pan-Caribbean regionalism
• PART V Global and regional trends: implications for pan-Caribbean integration
• Bibliography
• Index