In times of crisis a good place to start the search for answers is in history – looking for how similar, or relevant, situations were handled in the past.
Having only recently clawed its way back to a path of potential stability and for delivering on its promises, there is little doubt that Caribbean Community (CARICOM) is again facing a deep, and conceivably existential, crisis. It has been brought here by Kamla Persad-Bissessar, the Kafkaesque prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago, who has firmly aligned Trinidad and Tobago with the Trump administration’s muscular policy in Caribbean, to the point of berating CARICOM for its solidarity with member states squeezed by America’s actions.
Perhaps the last time that CARICOM has faced this level of institutional stress, and questions about its capacity to survive, is the period leading up to, and in the aftermath of, America’s 1983 invasion of Grenada, following the implosion of Maurice Bishop’s People’s Revolutionary Government (PRG) and the killing of Mr Bishop.
The issues now confronting the Caribbean are, in the context of the Trump’s administration’s approach to global relations, qualitatively more complex, and therefore more difficult to manoeuvre and resolve, than four decades ago. Today, there is no predictably ‘world order’ or settled institutional arrangements within which small, vulnerable countries like those in the Caribbean can readily find some cover.
SEEK OUT PARALLELS
Nonetheless, even as they search for other answers, Caribbean policymakers (especially those who see value in preserving the regional integration movement) should seek out the parallels between the Grenada crisis and the current times, and the lessons to be learned therefrom.
The proximate cause of CARICOM’s predicament is US President Donald Trump’s clear intent to remove Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro, under the guise that Mr Maduro – whose legitimacy the American’s dispute – runs a narco-state.
Earlier, when Mr Trump ordered the US military to attack alleged drug traffickers in the southern Caribbean Sea, Mr Persad-Bissessar urged the Americans to “kill them all violently”.
When it was clear that the intent of the build-up of American naval forces in the area was to pressure Mr Maduro out of power, and fears of the likelihood of war grew, the Trinidad and Tobago prime minister rejected the concept of other CARICOM leaders of the Caribbean as a zone of peace. She also allowed the Americans to establish radar monitoring systems in her country.
Last week, when CARICOM’s Bureau (the incumbent chairman, Jamaica’s Andrew Holness; the previous chairman, Barbados’ Mia Mottley; and the incoming chair, St Kitts and Nevis’, Terrance Drew) issued a benign statement urging the United States to engage “with the governments of Antigua and Barbuda and Dominica” to clarify visa restrictions it placed on both countries, as well as to address Washington’s concerns over the countries’ citizenship by investment (CIB) schemes, Ms Persad-Bissessar formally made it clear that the Bureau did not speak for Trinidad and Tobago. She declared CARICOM not to be a “reliable partner at this time”.
ACCUSED REGIONAL LEADERS
Ms Persad-Bissessar went further, saying in a statement that fissures in CARICOM could lead to its implosion, and accused regional leaders of “meddling in the domestic politics of regional states”.
At a separate function she said Antigua and Barbuda and Dominica had “badmouthed” the United States, causing the visa restrictions.
Trinidadians, Ms Persad-Bissessar suggested, wouldn’t want the same to happen to them. .
“So behave yourself,” she said. “Understand where our help comes from. Understand who can protect and defend Trinidad and Tobago.”
The geo-political space available to a group of small countries next door to the United States, is, at this time, obviously narrow, a reality of which the region has to be cognisant. That, however, doesn’t mean the region, and its states, are completely without agency and must meekly surrender all claims to sovereignty, as Ms Persad-Bissessar seems to imply.
CARICOM has to engage in meaningful dialogue with the United States to carve out agreements on matters of common interest. Or, it has to try.
In negotiations concessions are sometimes necessary. But the process ought not start with abject capitulation and surrender. At the same time CARICOM should seek to widen its global partnerships, providing the region greater space to operate between the United States and its geopolitical competitors.
The bottomline is that the current dispensation demands thoughtful policy formulation and skilled diplomacy, which has a better chance at success by the region operating through CARICOM as single force rather than tiny individual entities. Ms Persad-Bissessar apparently does not believe that this to be the logical route, preferring to unconditionally hitch Trinidad and Tobago’s wagon to the United States.
Four decades ago, post the Grenada invasion, when CARICOM’s survival was at stake, the leaders talked frankly at their 1984 summit in Nassau, Bahamas. They concluded that the sum of the community was greater than the total of its individual parts.
This newspaper believes that the same applies today.
