The Week in Europe
By David Jessop

Some weeks ago I noted in this column that the new Administration in
Washington may attempt to redefine the post cold war US consensus on
international relations.

At that time I suggested that President Bush and his advisers might seek to
develop a new type of geo-strategic approach based in part on cold war
models. That is to say a foreign policy that proclaims the supremacy of
United States, is unashamedly self interested, seeks to embrace first the
Americas, a region defined as its own neighbourhood, and then uses this
enlarged economic strength to provide a base from which to achieve global
political and economic advantage. In other words, a policy, according to US
diplomats, that will re-classify all the people of the Americas as
'Americans'.

I argued that if this happened, the Caribbean needed to define rapidly the
matrix of trade and political strategies it intended pursuing, otherwise it
might be marginalised in the Americas as well as in its relationship with
Europe.

Recent developments suggest such changes in US policy are happening at a
pace that may lead to the Anglophone Caribbean in particular loosing control
of important elements of its own destiny.

The evidence for some of this is as yet partly circumstantial but taken
together suggests a US approach that will radically reorder international
relations and leave the Caribbean as an uneasy sub-region of Latin America.

In the area of trade policy the US has now determined that its first
priority is to secure a Free Trade Area of the Americas agreement by 2003.
Originally the objective had been 2005 but this had been languishing in the
latter years of the Clinton Administration. But in the last two months the
US has been engaged in active diplomacy in Latin America aimed at achieving
agreement that, at the Quebec Americas summit this April, President Bush
should announce agreement on a target date of 2003.

How the new US administration has achieved this is educative. Originally the
US had little support for a 2003 date among key Latin American states but a
number of recent initiatives have changed this. By making a commitment to
the 5 Andean Pact nations on the speedy passage through Congress of an
Andean Pact Preference Act that will grant similar access for clothes,
textiles, rum and other exports as prevail for Caribbean Basin nations,
previous Andean doubts about an accelerated FTAA process have been set
aside. More significantly still, it appears that a deal with Brazil, a
nation that had previously voiced serious concern about accelerating the
FTAA timetable, is also in the making. Here it is suggested that US has
achieved agreement on starting discussions in 2002 that will lead by 2003 to
comprehensive reductions in both nations tariffs by 2003.

The effect is that the Caribbean, opposed to any speeding up of the FTAA
process, is isolated and has lost the support of those Latin nations on
which it was relying to restrain the US. So much so that it appears
increasingly likely that the region may have to fall back on arguing in the
margins of the FTAA process, with few friends to assist, a case for special
treatment based on the Caribbean's smallness and vulnerability.

In parallel to this it appears the US now seems to be seeing the start of a
new round of tariff reductions at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) in
November as significantly less important. The US Trade Representative,
Robert Zoellick has said that the US will 'work' for a new trade round but
has not given any clear indication as to US thinking on the timing of the
process. As a result it is far from clear how much effort will be put into
achieving agreement on the scope of any such round when the WTO ministerial
takes place in Qatar this November. So much so that in Europe and elsewhere
there is, in private, real pessimism that the WTO Secretary General's
objective of international agreement on 95 per cent of a new WTO agenda by
the end of July can be achieved.

In parallel to these strategic decisions, the new US administration has
revealed other significant differences in its approach. In doing so it would
seem it is abandoning rapidly elements of its post cold war consensus with
Europe.

Most startling of all has been a little reported but dramatic shift in US
foreign and military policy. This redefines the nature of the threats facing
the US by turning Westwards and seeing China and not Russia as the danger to
world peace. Almost as startling has been the announcement in Washington
that the US is unilaterally abandoning the international agreement reached
in Kyoto, Japan on global warming and the need to reduce greenhouse gas
emissions. The effect of both decisions will be to marginalise Europe and to
cause the European Union to either cohere into a much stronger independent
minded counter balance to the US or remain in disarray over its response.

Where all this leaves the Caribbean might be described as sinking slowly in
the periphery. If an FTAA is to come into being by 2003 the region will have
hardly begun the economic restructuring that it knows is required if its
still heavy reliance on preference based industries is to change. Although
such change was in part envisaged by the ACP/EU Cotonou Convention over a
period up to 2008, a 2003 date for an FTAA demands almost instant structural
change in Caribbean economies.

Rapid progress to an FTAA will also blur what the region should negotiate
for with Europe after 2002. As a part of the FTAA it will have difficulty in
arguing against the region based economic partnership arrangements that
Europe is promoting to the ACP. Moreover, long term Caribbean economic
integration into the Americas if agreed for 2003 is also likely to bring
into question the validity of the ACP grouping. Already split by the EU's
decision to deal differently with the ACP's Less Developed members the
region may find after 2003 that solidarity without common cause has little
long-term value.

The region's future, whether it likes it or not, appears to be increasingly
bound up with the Americas. Despite this much of its economic interests
still rest on a strong relationship with Europe. The US sees the Caribbean
as a difficult part of the Americas, but in the Americas all the same. But
so far it is not prepared to offer the Caribbean different treatment based
on size or vulnerability. In contrast the EU, with its genuinely greater
liberalism, is prepared to recognise the need to treat differently
developing nations and provide resources for some form of gradual economic
transition. The dramatic shift in US policy, presents,  to say the least,
the region with a paradox.

David Jessop is the Executive Director of the Caribbean Council for Europe
and can be contacted at [log in to unmask]
March 28th, 2001

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/