This Week in Europe, 20 October 2000
Executive Director of the Caribbean Council for Europe
In Europe, the United States and Canada, most usually in foundation-owned country houses, groups from politics, business, the academic world regularly join specialists from government and elsewhere. Their objective is to discuss in private matters of national, regional or international significance.
The topics can be alarming - how can states cope with biological warfare – but more usually they relate to issues relatively mundane or arcane. The purpose is always to facilitate dialogue and to bring together in a personal capacity those who have a role to play, directly or indirectly in formulating or influencing policy on the subject matter concerned.
Every so many years, such an event has as its subject the Caribbean. Sometimes, as in the depths of the cold war, such conferences not only addressed the issues but seemed to make policy on matters as material as let us say, how to respond to guerrilla insurgency in Central America. But more usually and particularly in recent years, such conferences have largely come to have the purpose of doing little more than causing those invited to depart with a broader view on the challenges that lie ahead for them, or their country or region.
One such meeting took place recently in the depths of the English countryside. This conference sought to address the question of what might the future hold for the Caribbean. Although at the outset one of the participants questioned whether much had changed in the intervening years since the last such conference, it quite rapidly became apparent that on this issue there was something close to consensus. The region was on the edge of fundamental change. There was a very real feeling that the Caribbean’s historic trajectory was now different. But it was unlikely to cope with changing relationships with Europe and the Americas if the same voices continued to propose the same solutions.
Usually in such elite gatherings the true voice of Caribbean nationalism is hidden by politeness. But this time, participants from the region were vocal, even strident. For them externally-led solutions no longer offered any way forward. While they may not have had to hand the new Caribbean agenda about which they spoke eloquently, they seemed to have a determination to devise regional solutions to regional problems from a regional perspective. This was a new generation talking, renaissance Caribbean man and woman, graduates of the University of the West Indies seeking solutions that owed little to history whether it be out of Europe or North America.
Their responses recognised emotionally if not practically that Europe was pulling the plug. This was demonstrated by the EU’s decision to end prematurely the special trade relationship that has prevailed since the independence for much of the anglophone Caribbean. As a result there was a sombre response but no sense of shock when a senior European told a working group bluntly: "we have had this relationship for twenty five years-now its over".
From the meeting it was clear that Europe and states such as Britain and France, as well as the Dutch and the Nordic nations, would continue to work with the region but their perceptions had changed. Not in any negative way but in the sense that like parents, Europe has concluded that it was past the time when offspring should find a real job, a role for themselves in the world. Europe would still provide support and most importantly a degree of protection if matters went really wrong but the old world was no longer interested in the day-to-day lives of its grown-up children.
But if Europe seemed in touch but distant, the United States appeared to many Caribbean participants as increasingly irrelevant to the solutions the region had to find. Official and quasi-official US participants stuck stubbornly to views driven by the past. Their opinions seemed to have matured little and were driven more by concerns about security than development. So much so that one acedemic participant observed that while the US seemed less and less relevant to regional solutions, it saw itself as needing to be more and more present in the Caribbean.
The distance between the US and the Caribbean was at its most apparent over Cuba, with US officials in private incredulous that that to a man and woman, the Caribbean – and most European participants – were not prepared to accept the US view. When an ex-US Ambassador sought to remind Caribbean participants about democracy, it fell to one of the youngest participants to remind him that democracy also meant respect for self-determination.
Thus the conference also exhibited one of its own themes: That is that different generations had different perceptions of what the Caribbean was and the type of structures and relationships it required for the future.
Did anything of substance occur? The answer, as with all these events, is probably not. However, the conference provided some pointers to the future.
Europe was interested but not very interested in the Caribbean. The special trade relationship was nearing an end and all that might be reasonably expected of Europe was financial support to achieve some sort of transition to the new economy. Europe would increasingly see the Caribbean as a sub-set of Latin America and would hope that the region saw deeper integration into the Americas as its future. The region was not so sure about this but was encouraged by some senior Caribbean figures to feel that Latin America offered a better future than either Europe or North America. Regional integration was not much of an issue. It would move at different paces and in different ways depending on the actors involved. But it would be fostered by the real sense of regional identity that was emerging. As a result it was now genuinely possible for the Anglophone Caribbean to embrace the Hispanic Caribbean in general and Cuba in particular. With suitable interlocutors it was also possible to relate more closely to the French Caribbean. But despite this new thinking there was something close to silence about the new economy of services. This suggested that many from the region had yet to develop a clear vision of what would make region’s future economy work. As one might expect, there were important exceptions to this and most especially from energy rich Trinidad. But even then, there was a sense of uncertainty as to whether the Republic really wanted to play any role outside its shores. There was real feeling that many Governments, their bureaucracies and existing regional structures now stood in the way of the region adapting rapidly to the new economy and the place in the world that the region now has to find for itself. And, as always, there was deep and serious concern that rising levels of criminality, mostly narcotics driven, would subvert whole nations and economies and no one seemed able to offer solutions.
But above all there was a new confidence that the moment had come or was near at hand when the region itself, rather than external players, would set the agenda for change. That moment it seems is not quite now. But if those present were a reliable cross section of tomorrow’s Caribbean then, it was clear, in the next ten years a new culture will emerge.