The Week in Europe
By David Jessop

As you might imagine I travel regularly between Brussels, London and Paris.
I use the efficient high-speed rail network that links seamlessly city
centre to city centre. The value over flying is that these rail services
provide uninterrupted time to read the very many documents that come
formally and informally out of the European Commission (EC), European
governments and the myriad of organisations that influence the decision
making processes of the European Union.

By nature one tends to focus on the specific issues the documents address.
But unusually and perhaps not coincidentally the last few weeks have seen
the publication of a range of draft regulations, communications (policy
papers), speeches, letters and working documents which taken together
suggest a future European relationship with the Caribbean that is very
different from what has prevailed up to now.

The documents include the highly contentious draft regulation offering duty
and quota free access to the EU for all commodities from Least and Less
Developed Countries: the so called 'everything but arms' initiative.
Another, OCEAN 2000, proposes to change from March of next year the
relationship between the EU and its overseas territories in the Caribbean
and elsewhere. There is a communication from the EU Council of Ministers to
the European Parliament setting out future European political and economic
policy towards Latin America and the Caribbean. There are documents on
implementing the Cotonou Partnership arrangement and the processes by which
related aid programmes will be delivered.  There are also papers dealing
with how the next round of EU/ACP trade negotiations might go forward and
other documents dealing with the internal reorganisation of the European
Commission as it effects trade and development policy and aid policy.

Nothing in any single document should come as a surprise. They only spell
out in detail the problems, the timetables and the largely transitional
trade solutions Europe proposes to bring to its relationship with all
developing countries and by extension, the Caribbean.

However, when read together these various documents suggest, mostly in a
bureaucratic kind of way, is that there will be, during the next few years,
a number of defining moments after which the Europe/Caribbean relationship
and that of the ACP as a whole, will change for all time.

By way of example, they point to dates in 2001 by which time the region
will, in the EC's view, have had to determine the nations that comprise the
Caribbean: remember Europe's difficulties earlier this year with Cuba
becoming a signatory to the Cotonou Convention. They also suggest other
dates by when the region's relationship or otherwise with other members of
the ACP group in relation to future EU trade arrangements or with Latin
America will have to be determined finally.

Taken together they convey the sense that Europe regards the Caribbean as a
relatively homogeneous more developed part of the developing world. They
portray the EC as a body facilitating and encouraging a process that will
end the region's reliance on preferential commodity arrangements and as
helping to bring the Caribbean into conformity with World Trade Organisation
(WTO) rules. They also suggest that European aid will provide support to
enable Governments, the private sector and others in the region to be able
to integrate rapidly into the global economy and become competitive. They
suggest the death of older industries but say virtually nothing about how
newer industries will be fostered. They look towards a region, while not yet
a part of Latin America, as being on its way towards deeper economic ties
with Central American and Latin neighbours. This the documents suggest
Europe would regard as beneficial and as facilitating its broader political
interests on achieving over time an advanced relationship with Latin America
and the Caribbean as a whole.

A common theme not stated but that runs throughout every document is that
Europe has decided to set aside historic ties in favour of new criteria
largely set by its globalisation agenda and a politically driven view of the
new world order. Thus in all of the documents one sees references to
political dialogue based on European principles relating to good governance
and human rights; emphasis on trade relations based on WTO criteria; and
references to development being led by the levels of poverty in any specific
developing nation.

Moreover the documents implicitly suggest that there is, in European eyes,
no future utility for Europe in a single trade relationship with a grouping
that includes widely differing economies in former European colonies in
Africa, the Caribbean and the Pacific.

In essence what these papers contain are the fine detail of how Europe will
apply its post cold war philosophy to the ACP and by extension to the
Caribbean. As such their content reflects the real politick of a Europe
which by fits and starts may, in time, come to rival the US and put an end
the present unipolar structure of global power.

All of which is of little comfort to the Caribbean, which now finds itself
in an invidious situation. In most cases it is not poor. In all cases it is
democratic. As with parts of the Pacific and Indian Ocean it consists of
small vulnerable middle income developing economies which do not fit easily
into any of the WTO categories that enable special and differential
treatment. It has done much to open its economies and to develop newer
industries such as tourism and offshore financial services. It had hoped,
quite reasonably, to have a period during which it might transit out of
existing preferential arrangements for sugar and bananas. Yet somehow it now
finds itself penalised for having been relatively too successful.

Understandably in the Caribbean the focus has been on the economic
relationships and having to address first one crisis then another caused by
changing external factors such as the transatlantic banana dispute, the OECD
initiative on offshore tax regimes and more recently the EU's everything but
arms initiative. Europe's avalanche of paper on its changing relationships
suggests that the region also needs to define more publicly its priorities
in its relationships with Europe, the US, Africa and elsewhere and where it
sees its future place in the world.

David Jessop is the Executive Director of the Caribbean Council for Europe
and can be contacted at [log in to unmask]
November 25th, 2000



Dr. Amanda Sives
Postdoctoral Research Fellow
Commonwealth Policy Studies Unit
Institute of Commonwealth Studies
28 Russell Square
London, WC1B 5DS

Tel: +44 0207-862-8865
Fax: +44 0207-862-8820
Website: http://www.sas.ac.uk/commonwealthstudies/