The Week in Europe
  By David Jessop
   
  The problem with living through history is that it is far from comfortable. 
   
  For the last two decades the world has been changing rapidly and many of the old certainties are no longer there. Economic globalisation, changed political priorities and new international alignments suggest that we now live in an environment in which we cannot be sure that what we plan today will have the outcome we expect.
   
  So much so that the certainties that have sustained the self-image and confidence of the Anglophone Caribbean since the 1960s seem now ever less present. 
   
  For nearly half a century Caribbean politicians and officials have described the English speaking part of the region as being democratic, respecting of the rule of law, secure, stable, agriculturally based and uncompromising on sovereignty. They have also had an inalienable belief that the dream of a single integrated region is achievable. 
   
  Yet reality, in a number of respects, suggests otherwise; that the dream began to fade in the 1990s; and that the concept of a single, secure and sovereign Caribbean, is eroding and being altered by events.
   
  Today it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the Caribbean is the process of transiting to some other place. Somewhere in which a number of associated autonomous parts with very different objectives and economies will co-exist uneasily in a Caribbean Single Market and Economy (CSME) under constant external pressure to achieve greater regional integration and to cede sovereignty. 
   
  If this is so, it will be an uncomfortable and perpetually changing region, requiring levels of public sector management previously unknown.
   
  The trends are there for all to see. 
   
  In the Anglophone Caribbean, Trinidad seems intent on encouraging closer economic integration with the United States while expanding its regional vision to embrace other relationships with Latin neighbours. Others, including Jamaica and Barbados also accept market opening but want to re-balance their North American, European global and inter-regional relationships. In contrast much of the Eastern Caribbean wants out of all economic arrangements, regional or otherwise that involve significant open markets and free movement of labour. Guyana appears set on a path from which recovery may be difficult, that may lead it into closer relationships with powerful neighbours, while Belize, still committed to a Caribbean identity, is by virtue of its location growing closer to its Central American neighbours.  
   
  More generally many Anglophone nations are pointing in different philosophical directions. Some governments want arrangements that provide some form of permanent special and differential treatment; others retain a belief in the central role of the state while having limited capacity to manage the implementation of national let alone regional policy; while a few are still are not prepared to recognise the central role that the private sector and the services sector has to come to play in a single market. 
   
  For its part, the Hispanic Caribbean seems headed in an altogether different direction. The Dominican Republic will choose very soon how it will position itself so that its political and economic independence can be sustained. And Cuba, while still wishing to be a part of the region, has entered into a substantive and sustaining economic alliance with Venezuela and Bolivia to say nothing of its relationship with China. 
   
  In short, just months after the CSME was launched, national self-interest, significantly different levels of economic development, the pressures of having to finance current account deficits and variable strategic concerns would appear to be pushing the region apart.
   
  This might matter less if there was the time to face external change and establish a new equilibrium. But the inexorable process of international trade negotiations, dates by which existing arrangements end or cease to be compatible with the rules of the World Trade Organisation and a range of global economic and political uncertainties, are forcing the pace.
   
  To try to respond, concepts such as variable geometry and asymmetrical trading relationships have been developed. But with limited capacity, an approach in Europe and elsewhere not to agree to such concessions, these at best can only be short-term transitional arrangements.
   
  More alarmingly perhaps where Caribbean image and reality publicly collide is on matters relating to security. 
   
  The tide of violent crime against residents and visitors is rising in almost every nation in the region at rates that ought to open eyes everywhere. It threatens not just the quality of Caribbean life but also the ability of the region to encourage the external investment necessary to create service industry driven economies in which the legitimate private sector, agriculture, society and the state can prosper. 
   
  In this respect and furthest from the region perception of itself, is a troubling new development. Perhaps for the first time ever in Anglophone Caribbean history, in Guyana, an internationally wanted criminal with narcotics and arms trafficking connections has made political statements that seek to involve him in the mainstream of public life along with those who given the chance, would violently usurp authority from the state: This is a genie once out of the bottle that cannot easily be contained as previous experience in Central America and parts of Africa has shown.
   
  This development and growing levels of crime across the region are the clearest signal of the dangers of failed Caribbean democracies and what happens when two party systems become polarised. It speaks to the need for constant democratic renewal as well as about the dangers of economic underdevelopment and a trend towards the love of government over governance. 
   
  These are uncomfortable messages that collide with the way the region sees itself and give me no pleasure to write about. What they point to is not a fundamental problem with the culture or aspirations of the Caribbean. Rather it indicates the need for institutions, governments and business to rise to the new challenge of constant change, as global history alters direction, and we all become more closely integrated and loose elements of control over our own destiny.
   
  A few days ago I was listening to a programme on the BBC World Service in which Mark Tully, the veteran broadcaster, was discussing certainty, knowing and change. The programme tried to address the need for us to walk into the unknown. It suggested that it was this made us creative and courageous. It made me wonder if this was not the space that Caribbean politicians and intellectuals now urgently need to occupy.
   
  David Jessop is the Director of the Caribbean Council and can be contacted at [log in to unmask]
  Previous columns can be found at www.caribbean-council.org
  June2nd, 2006
   
   
   
   

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