THE 31st regular annual Heads of Government Conference of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) concluded in Montego Bay, Jamaica, on Wednesday with a low offering of optimism for the immediate future progress of the now 37-year-old regional economic integration movementHaving initially raised hope midway of the four-day event for a new approach to ensure realistic management appropriate for today’s challenges from the global economic and political crisis, the leaders were to back off by closing time.Not surprisingly, they adjourned for another “special meeting”, scheduled for September this year when they will consider likely alternative governance models for better management.In its normally lively “discussion forum”, the BBC Caribbean Service has been encouraging responses to the provocative question: Does CARICOM have a future?Even before the final communique was released, comments flowing from an end-of-summit Press conference on Wednesday clearly signalled that the elusive governance issue had once again emerged as a barrier the leaders are yet to scale.
Diminishing credibility
It is a failure that could only deepen concerns over the leaders’ credibility to make a reality of the Community’s flagship project – either in the remaining years of this decade or the next – of a single economic space in a region that constitutes a microcosm of the world’s peoples, cultures and varying levels of social and economic development.Often viewed, among Latin American, African, and Asian blocs of countries, as a cohesive and productive experiment in regiional economic intregration, CARICOM has clearly done reasonably well in wide-ranging areas of functional cooperation and foreign policy coordination.When, however, it comes down to implementation of decisions on major issues involving critical segments of its treaty-based arrangements for inauguration of a single, market and economy, there lies the rub. Their failures are rooted in lack of collective political will to overcome parochialism and a narrow sense of nationalism in favour of a shared vision of one people, one market, one Caribbean – to which they all claim commitment. The consequence is a spreading sense of alienation and defeatism, if not the “despair” alluded to in the BBC Caribbean discussion forum on CARICOM’s future.The announcement by Prime Minister Golding in his capacity as CARICOM’s new chairman, that a committee of prime ministers has been identified to come forward with proposals for the forthcoming “special meeting of Heads” in September to address alternative forms of governance, cannot seriously be considered as anything of significance.The Community has gone that way before with “Prime Ministerial Working Groups” and high-level Committees of regional technocrats. The upcoming meeting seems destined to do what Trinidadians like to describe as “spinning top in mud”.Amid the expanding word games on CARICOM’s future governance, more heads of government, are now complaining against “talk” and urging “action”.They may be simply reprimanding themselves, but in the current circumstances, the self-rebuke is welcome.
