David Jessop, Contributor
Early in 2007, Caribbean governments will have to take some difficult political decisions. Continuing failure to do so, or to fudge or delay could result at the worst in the viability of the CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME) being brought into question.
Bizarrely, what is driving this is an external force: a one-and-a-half-year-old trade negotiation between the Caribbean and Europe.
At face value, this is about achieving a new arrangement that will enable Europe and the CSME to more closely integrate their economies.
But dig beneath the surface and the problem is much more fundamental.
It's about the fault lines that dissect the region - nationalism; multiple sovereignties; variations in physical size; differing national, regional and international objectives; relative levels of development; and discordant national characteristics.
Unreconciled, they collide with the vision of a single Caribbean.
Despite constant warnings from some Brussels-based diplomats about the problems that would arise if key issues in the negotiations with Europe were not resolved politically, a crisis is now evolving in slow motion.
Startling
What is startling is that it is occurring at a number of different levels simultaneously.
Firstly, there is a growing disenchantment among some governments with the institutional arrangements for the negotiations that are being undertaken. This is resulting in accusations being made about the absence of timely briefings to ministers from the Caribbean Regional Negotiating Machinery and the suggestion that negotiators have interpreted their brief in a manner that exceeds their political mandate.
The tip of this iceberg is the issue of who owns the process of external negotiations and the absence of any effective oversight mechanism to address the growing tension between nationally elected ministers and supra-national officials. But the bulk beneath is the unresolved question about how the region can ever function effectively without a supra national decision making body.
Secondly, some ministers are asking how it can be that after a year and a half of negotiations no one has yet attempted to resolve the conundrum of how Cariforum (CARICOM plus the Dominican Republic) can be turned into a homogenous economic space. They suggest that Caribbean heads of government need to determine rapidly how a geographically proximate, but artificial grouping of more developed and less developed nations with differing trade arrangements is to evolve into a single entity.
This issue, which threatens any idea of a single region, might be best compared to two locomotives hurtling towards each other without anyone knowing how to stop them or have them change tracks.
Thirdly, at issue is the region's capacity to undertake complex actions within a limited time scale while retaining a consensus. In theory, the negotiations are to be completed by July 2007, resolving every outstanding matter of principal and detail in four technical negotiations and a meeting of principal negotiators and ministers in September.
Pegional decision-making
This issue speaks to the perpetual problem of regional decision-making, the setting of unrealistic goals and the too frequent failure to meet deadlines. It exposes the weakness of regional governance.
Fourthly, sugar and banana could well become a flashpoint in the negotiations. The desire by the Dominican Republic to be included in such arrangements in a new regionwide trade arrangement is considered unacceptable to CARICOM states producing these commodities.
Despite this, producers groups have yet to instruct governments and negotiators how quota and tariff issues relating to these commodities are to be handled in a regional arrangement with Europe.
This points to a long-term failing of the region as a whole to adopt a pro-active long-term strategy for industries that are large employers of labour and of economic significance in a number of less developed regional economies.
Negotiating
And fifthly, a fundamental problem is emerging with the whole process of negotiating within the overall framework of the African Caribbean and Pacific group. Some in the region believe that finishing the Caribbean negotiation before those for Africa or the Pacific may not be as attractive as it seems. There is a sense that tactically this may not offer the most advantage and that the Caribbean requires political oversight of the arrangements for other regions that may have negotiated incompatible or more beneficial arrangements.
Some argue that as before and at the eleventh hour the region will coalesce and resolve all these issues.
But whether the region has at this time a statesman or woman willing, strong and convincing enough to bridge the inter-regional technical and political chasms that exist remains an open question.
Also of concern must be the speed at which any of these issues can be resolved which is to say nothing about the practicalities of trying to deliver strategic or technical decisions during the two month 'blackout period' in 2007 of the Cricket World Cup.
None of which should not be taken as trying to excuse Europe of its failure to understand the damage it may do politically by pressing a regional trade agreement on a far from mature regional integration process.
As matters now stand, the lack of any mechanism able to generate regional homogeneity implies that the uniqueness of each Caribbean nation's problems will remain. If this is the case and a viable region is not created, the dream of the Caribbean as a single region will die and a moment will come when very different policies will have to be designed that accept this difficult fact.
If the region is to respond to the challenge posed by new bi-regional relationships, it must rapidly find practical answers to the issues that lie at the heart of the negotiations with Europe for an economic partnership agreement.
David Jessop is director of the Caribbean Council. Email: david.jessop@caribbean-council.org. NOTE: Week in Europe will next run on January 7, 2007.
