Caribbean Sovereignty, Development and Democracy in an Age of Globalization

Linden Lewis, Linden Lewis

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136274329
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Globalisation
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Many of the nations of the Caribbeanthat have become independent states have maintained as a central, organizing, nationalist principle the importance in the beliefs of the ideals of sovereignty, democracy, and development. Yet in recent years, political instability, the relative size of these nations, and the increasing economic vulnerabilities of the region have generated much popular and policy discussions over the attainability of these goals. The geo-political significance of the region, its growing importance as a major transshipment gateway for illegal drugs coming from Latin America to the United States, issues of national security, vulnerability to corruption, and increases in the level of violence and social disorder have all raised serious questions not only about the notions of sovereignty, democracy, and development but also about the long-term viability of these nations.

This volume is intended to make a strategic intervention into the discourse on these important topics, but the importance of its contribution resides in its challenge to conventional wisdom on these matters, and the multidisciplinary approach it employs. Recognized experts in the field identify these concerns in the context of globalization, economic crises, and their impact on the Caribbean.

Part I

Neoliberalism and the Paradox of Sovereignty in the Caribbean

1 Class, Power, Sovereignty

Haiti before and after the Earthquake

Alex Dupuy

In this chapter I argue that one needs to distinguish between sovereignty and democracy, and ask whether it is possible to achieve either or both in peripheral capitalist societies like Haiti. If by sovereignty is meant the right of a government to rule over and decide the internal affairs of its territory or nation-state, and if democracy means the right of a sovereign people to decide freely on the agenda of their government, then I will argue that the logic of capitalism undermines both for two reasons. First, insofar as capitalism is not confined within nation-states but is a world economy, it requires that the stronger or dominant states compel weaker and poorer states to conform to the rules and processes of production and circulation of capital on a world scale. And second, capitalism cannot allow the right of the people to determine the agenda of their government to interfere with the right of private property in the means of production and hence with the processes of accumulation by both domestic and foreign capital. Achieving sovereignty, then, would require extending and deepening democratic control over the domestic agenda and therefore undermining the dominance and rule of capital.

On March 2010 Prime Minister Jean-Max Bellerive appeared in front of the Haitian Senate to present his government’s postearthquake recovery plan known as the Action Plan for the Reconstruction and National Development of Haiti. That plan had been drafted by the Haitian government and representatives from the major donor countries, especially the United States, Canada, and France, and the international financial institutions (IFIs), principally the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Inter-American Development Bank. The Action Plan called for the creation of an Interim Haiti Recovery Commission (IHRC) charged with deciding on and implementing the programs and projects for the reconstruction of Haiti.

The IHRC comprised 26 voting members drawn equally from the foreign community and Haiti, and cochaired by former U.S. president Bill Clinton and Prime Minister Bellerive. The idea of the IHRC had been formulated by the U.S. State Department, and it called for transferring the Haitian government’s decision-making powers to that body. As its “Concept Note” stipulated, the IHRC would have the power to “solicit and draw up projects that fit within the priorities of the Development Plan and decide on the eligibility of external submissions . . . to award land title of dispute-free Government land, set and approve priorities and projects for development, receive and disburse funding for projects, and grant licenses and concessions for the operation of vital economic assets such as ports, airports, hospitals and power stations.”¹ These functions would supposedly be transferred back to the Haitian government once the IHRC’s mandate expired in October 2011, 18 months after the Haitian Parliament ratified it in April 2010. In the meantime, it is clear that the IHRC placed the Haiti government under the tutelage of a decision-making body conceived and imposed on Haiti by foreign powers. This was so because despite the appearance of equality between the foreign and Haitian members of the IHRC, the former controlled all the financing and made all the key decisions. Haitian members of the IHRC complained publicly that they were shut out of the decisions of the Commission, and organizations representing wide cross-sections of Haitian society protested their exclusion and decried the Haitian government’s surrender of its sovereignty to the international community.²

When questioned by members of the Haitian Senate that Haiti had in fact surrendered its sovereignty to the IHRC, Bellerive responded candidly that “I hope you sense the dependency in this document. If you don’t sense it, you should tear it up. I am optimistic that . . . [soon] we will be autonomous in our decisions. But right now I have to assume, as prime minister, that we are not.” ³ This rare admission by a high-ranking public official expresses succinctly the dilemma that Haiti faced in rebuilding its shattered economy in the wake of the massive destruction caused by the January 12, 2010, earthquake. Recent estimates put the number of dead between 200,000 and 300,000, including more than 16,000 civil servants, more than 300,000 injured, and more than 1.5 million people, about half of whom were still living in makeshift shelters in hundreds of camps (as of August 2010). The value of the damage was estimated at between $7 and $14 billion, and the economic damage alone represented more than 120 percent of annual GDP. To make matters worse, a cholera epidemic, introduced by a contingent of U.N. Nepalese troops assigned to the U.N. Mission in Haiti, swept Haiti in October 2010 and has so far claimed more than 4,500 deaths.⁴

Haitians became increasingly impatient with the United Nations, the international community, and the Haitian government for the lack of progress in rebuilding the economy and the lives shattered by the earthquake. Since the cholera outbreak, calls for the departure of the United Nations Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH) became more widespread, as that institution, which has been in Haiti since the ouster of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide for the second time in 2004, is now seen as an occupying force. To understand the widespread popular frustration and discontent that occasionally spilled over into violence, then, it is necessary to separate the helpful and laudable humanitarian response that Haitians welcomed immediately after the earthquake from the short- and long-term objectives of the international community in the postearthquake reconstruction of Haiti.

The members of the Haitian senate who questioned PM Bellerive did not challenge him when he said that Haiti would become sovereign again in its decision making once the mission of the IHRC ended. The obvious question would be what did the PM mean by sovereignty, and how could a country like Haiti that is so heavily dependent on the international community for financial assistance, foreign investments in key sectors of its economy, and the continued presence of a U.N. peacekeeping force be sovereign in its decision making? For if by sovereignty we mean the right and the ability of a people or their government to determine their agenda, then both this right and this ability are undermined when the state is subordinated to the dictates of foreign governments and international financial institutions, and/ or the interests of powerful private foreign and domestic actors who are not accountable to the people or their government.

Let me elaborate. To me, sovereignty is a relational concept that refers first and foremost to the ability of a people to determine the public agenda either directly through its active participation in the management of public affairs, or, as has become the norm under liberal capitalist democracies, by electing representatives to public office to legislate and manage the public agenda. Even in the case of liberal democracy, however, it is possible for the people to safeguard their sovereignty by retaining and exercising their right to hold their representatives accountable, either by immediate recall or voting them out of office.

However, as Marx argued, the formal separation between the state and civil society under capitalism makes it possible for citizens to exercise their right of private ownership of property and concentrate the means of production and the wealth and resources they generated in fewer hands.⁵ That fact granted the bourgeoisie or capitalist class the power to greatly influence government policy because the viability and wealth of the state itself depends on the accumulation of capital, that is, the profitability and viability of private enterprise.⁶ This is especially so in a liberal democracy where the legitimacy of and electoral support for elected representatives and governments depends on the performance of the economy in general and of the private sector in particular. Thus, governments are constrained to pursue policies that are favorable to the development and success of private enterprise and corporate power at the same time that they must suppress or deter the popular demands for policies that minimize the adverse effects of the market on the welfare of the people and maximize social and political equality. In other words, liberal democracy must disempower the people if it is to serve the interests of private or corporate capital. There is an inverse ratio, then, between the power of private or corporate capital and the power of the people, or between capitalism and democracy.⁷

Put differently, the more the dominant capitalist class is able to wield its economic power to determine the agenda and shape public policy, the more the sovereignty of the people to form a government of, for, and by the people is undermined. And for the people to be able to determine the agenda, they must not only have the guarantees of basic political liberties (e.g., freedom of speech, of assembly, personal security and equal protection under the law; freedom from arbitrary arrest, inhumane, or degrading treatment), and the necessary material (e.g., income security, adequate housing, food, clothing, health care, and transportation) and social (access to education, information, communication) resources to prevent them from falling into conditions of nautonomy. Under such conditions, David Held argues, “a common structure of political action is not possible, and democracy becomes a privileged domain operating in favor of those with significant resources. In such circumstances, people can be formally free and equal, but they will not enjoy rights which shape and facilitate a common structure of political action and safeguard their capacities.”⁸

If we now consider that we are dealing with a world capitalist economy rather than a single nation-state, then the question of sovereignty becomes even more complicated. The capitalist world economy is characterized by a hierarchical division of labor among a small number of highly developed economies with powerful states and capitalist classes at one end, and a much larger number of highly underdeveloped economies with weak states and capitalist classes at the other end, buffered by an expanding but still small number of semideveloped economies with relatively or regionally strong states and capitalist classes in between. From this it follows that just as in a capitalist economy in general there is an inverse ratio between the power of private or corporate capital and that of the people as I indicated above, so too, is there an inverse ratio between the power of a highly developed state and its capitalist class and that of an underdeveloped and weak state and its capitalist class. This is so because the rulers of the developed economies don’t act to facilitate the accumulation of capital within their own nation-states only, but globally as much as possible to promote the interests of their state vis-à-vis other states. By contrast, the ability of weaker states to withstand external pressure and determine their own domestic policies depends largely on their internal characteristics, the balance of power among the state, the dominant and subordinate classes, and the relative strength of their dominant classes and the state vis-à-vis the state or states that exercise(s) greatest influence on them.⁹

For my purposes here, the early 1970s represented an important turning point in the relations between developed and underdeveloped capitalist economies, for it was then that the United States and Great Britain undertook a process of restructuring the relations between capital and labor in the world economy as a whole. Basically, this restructuring was the result of the emergence, around 1973, of what David Harvey called a regime of “flexible accumulation” that displaced the previous “Fordist” (factory) mode of labor organization. Essentially this new regime of accumulation consisted of a general offensive by the state on behalf of capital against labor through state policies that led to growing inequalities and deteriorating working and living conditions for labor in the developed as well as in the underdeveloped economies. Everywhere, though to varying degrees and at different times, states have been under increasing pressure to reduce public expenditures, especially social but not corporate welfare reallocations, do away with policies of full employment, deregulate their economies, and privatize public enterprises. “Flexible accumulation” also involved the greater mobility of capital, of migrant labor, the transformation of work, occupations, management, labor processes, the organization of production, the emergence of new markets, technological and commercial innovations, new and faster means of communication, new financial services, and important shifts in the structuring of uneven development between economic sectors, countries, and geographic regions.¹⁰

In the underdeveloped countries, the restructuring aimed at dismantling the achievements of the statist and populist nationalisms of the 1950s to the 1970s through the policies of “structural adjustment.” Adopted by the developed countries in the 1980s, starting with the Reagan and Thatcher administrations in the United States and Great Britain, respectively, and enforced by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund in the underdeveloped and poorer countries since, the new offensive of the developed countries, packaged under the label the Washington Consensus,¹¹ exploited the huge debts accumulated by the less developed countries to “reform,” or more accurately, restructure their economies, open them more to the free market system and facilitate the further takeover of their assets by foreign capital. Concretely this meant that, especially since the collapse of the Soviet bloc, the end of the Cold War and of the East-West rivalry in the late 1980s, underdeveloped countries would be even more reliant on investments from and access to the markets of developed capitalist countries, less able to withstand their demand for reforms that are more “market-friendly” and facilitate the processes of capital accumulation, and thus less responsive to popular demands for greater distribution of wealth, income, and resources.

It is in this context that we can return to and understand better the question of sovereignty raised by PM Bellerive and the relative incapacity of the Haitian state to exercise it vis-à-vis the major powers like the United States, Canada, and France, and the international financial institutions that exert great influence over its domestic policies. Again, the early 1970s are the starting point to explain the dilemmas that Haiti faces today and will continue to face for the foreseeable future.

The restructuring of the capital-labor relations and the new process of cap...