By this time next week, the winning team from the ICC T20 World Cup would have already left for home, a multinational security mission dominated by Kenyan forces arrived in Haiti, and Caricom leaders readied for another summit in Grenada.
The meeting commemorates 50 years of political independence for Grenada which, 35 years ago, also witnessed the signing of the Grand Anse Declaration on deepening the integration movement.
These developments are highlighted here because they each bear unique messages related to Caricom’s survival project.
The first is that while cricket as played in some, not all, Caricom member states contains instructive elements that can help guide integration efforts, it is hardly a subject worthy of the kind of attention and resources it has been formally receiving.
We can start talking real business if/when we decide to send a Caricom team of athletes to the Summer Olympics or a single Caribbean contingent to the FIFA World Cup – two areas of sporting endeavour in which all member states have displayed levels of deep interest and high excellence.
Countries of the United Kingdom have been participating in the Olympics as a single team since 1908. This, of course, would be an impossibility when it comes to football.
I have dealt with this here before and also wondered what it must be like to sit around a Caricom table as a delegate from Belize, Bahamas, Haiti, or Suriname and listen to talk of the “good old days” of Worrell and Walcott and Weekes.
Now, don’t get me wrong, I will never say anything bad about Clive Lloyd who receives an Order of the Caribbean Community (OCC) in Grenada next week, but I just worry, on behalf of some members of the fraternity, about the priorities often on the table.
Then comes Haiti and continuing instability there. There has been some idiocy on public display by several commentators regarding Caricom’s role in the latest round of crises in this member country that needed to be confidently and forcefully attended to by the regional leadership.
To associate Caricom participation in the search for solutions to the problems of Haiti as an external, surrogate intervention on behalf of others is to fail to understand the nature of our collective relationship. It also betrays a special kind of condescension when it comes to our small countries and the integration movement that drives collective actions.
Whether or not you believe we should have ever performed the initial act of “widening” to embrace Haiti in 2002 is now an irrelevant concern. I believe, especially in the face of the current situation, Caricom’s role has been seminal.
For one, it served to blunt the notion of outright invasion by invitation – a compulsion heavily rooted in sentiments on the ground throughout Haiti.
Next, there are continuing 50th anniversary Caricom celebrations and Grenada’s own half century of independence. The Grand Anse Declaration of 1989 represented, at that time, the single most important development in the history of Caricom since its launch in 1973. The founding of the Caribbean Court of Justice in 2005 was the next.
None of this is expected to make sense to anyone fixated on a national destiny marked by denial of geographical and historical antecedents. There are, indeed, passengers on board the Caricom ship who’d rather not be there. Jamaica’s Bruce Golding Report noted structural flaws and, in the process, proposed a series of ultimatums regarding future participation in the Single Market.
Should the latter occur, this would take Jamaica to the status of The Bahamas which has habitually cherry-picked its obligations. Added to this, a majority of member states have chosen to forego the opportunities presented by the appellate jurisdiction of the CCJ, even as they are bound by its powers related to Caricom Treaty obligations.
The experiences of integration movements around the world do not significantly differ. Have a closer look at developments within the African Union, the European Union, the ASEAN grouping and others. We could certainly have done more but have actually not done that badly.
The Caricom Secretariat, though, would do well to modernise its operations. Its public communication functions are particularly weak and there are operational features in other areas that can benefit from the more appropriate employment of new approaches and technologies.
I am aware that study after study has been conducted into these areas of weakness, but it is time that the better recommendations are adopted.
The bureaucrats may well find that in pursuit of the key agenda items including food and nutrition security, the climate crisis, and foreign policy, upgraded internal processes would serve the regional project well. This is not only a matter of achieving focus but employing different lenses to deliver clear direction.
