David Jessop | Reimagining the Caribbean

Today, a younger generation of Caribbean women and men have begun to challenge many of the assumptions that exist in and beyond the region. They are in government, business, academia, the social sector, and the media. They are becoming more assertive, independent of the outside world, and are seeking change in the region’s largely inherited post-independence establishment structures.

Unfortunately, the political process and the creaking machinery of most governments are unable to move at the speed and global connectivity of the open world that they inhabit.

Worse, there are intra-regional disputes, and as the region’s history with the Trump Administration has shown, it has become easy to exploit the endemic weaknesses and economic problems from which most Caribbean nations suffer. These things delay delivery and divide the region along ideological lines.

As this column has previously suggested, by virtue of its location, smallness, and need for development, the Caribbean will continue to struggle to be the mistress of its own destiny unless it can achieve unity of purpose, new thinking, a clear vision, and real-time execution.

My objective now, after working with and writing about the Caribbean in multiple incarnations since the 1970s, is to take a long view, ask questions about future alignments, and suggest the issues and themes that may determine the trajectory of the region in the rest of the 21st century.

In the coming months, the first commentary will reflect on the changing location of economic power and influence in the region; the very real possibility this may, in future, change the way Caribbean states and businesses respond to one another; and the likelihood that this will cause nations on the periphery, and beyond, to reprioritise their relationships.

The second will consider what might be described as the ‘big fish-small fish’ problem. This involves countries that say that they desire economic integration but are torn between the imposed parameters of existing institutions and the logic of determining optimum regional economic relationships as well as size-related opportunity.

The third will look at the alarming question of the Caribbean’s growing social deficit. Brought on by years of indebtedness and political mismanagement, a failing education system is continuing to foster inequality. It is not allowing young people to obtain the skills relevant to the connectivity, services, and global opportunity that will in future enable even the smallest nations to succeed.

The fourth column will look at the fact that it is impossible to consider the future without addressing the extent to which the enemy within – that is, those involved in criminality, organised crime, and corruption – if unchallenged, will influence the future and may skew the region’s prospects, its democracy, and the benefits of accelerated economic growth.

Fifth, this column will consider the pressing need to establish a shared basis on which to maintain and control the Caribbean’s natural environment. There must be established, a new viable balance between tourism, agriculture, and extractive industries in the region’s land and sea spaces.

Finally, there is the importance of leadership and retaining a vibrant, facts-based media that is better trained, less parochial, and more outward looking. The media must be able to provide information and commentary in a region that remains a bastion of free speech in a world veering towards populism, authoritarianism, and control.

Too many years have passed with little progress made in the way the region addresses change.

By now, the Caribbean ought to have become a modern integrated unity that is strong, speaks with a single voice, and pandemic apart, is making economic progress. It should be supported by an executive authority to which decision-making has been ceded in well-defined areas.

However, long after independence and the establishment of multiple overlapping institutions, it is still far from achieving any of this. It may be worth asking whether the idea of the Caribbean as a single entity is real or just an illusion.

At best, it is the positive expression of a vibrant, cultural, self-possessed, and sovereign identity. However, looked at objectively, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the expression is not much more than a dream. For the most part, ‘Caribbean’ appears to be a geographic description imposed by the outside world; a colonial construct used for administrative ease that has outlived its usefulness.

As such, cultural identity apart, the notion of ‘the Caribbean’ may have become a trap, one that most outside of the region, and some within, fall into when it comes to problem solving.

While the designation is convenient for those who need to package the region for policy or other purposes, a better way of understanding ‘the Caribbean’ may be to find a different framework for analysis. This new framework is one that recognises that the region is multidimensional, overlapping, awkward, a model with many moving parts and peoples, stretched, fragmented and divided by more than one million square miles of ocean.

Asking whether ‘the Caribbean’ really exists may seem a surreal even absurd question. However, the desire for unity that the term signifies may go some way towards explaining why the region now finds itself struggling to deliver the singularity the name promises. While it struggles, too, to realise its potential, the desire for unity may also explain why the region devotes so much time to trying to achieve, let alone deliver, common positions.

Geographically, the Caribbean is normally considered to be all that lies between Suriname and French Guiana in the south, Belize in the west, Barbados and the islands of the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States in the east, and Jamaica, Cuba, and the Bahamas in the North.

However, a more functional future solutions-based approach may be to accept that there is a common cultural identity defined by a shared colonial history of exploitation and suffering. This crosses the language divide but is increasingly separated by national identities and ever-widening alternative futures.

Put another way, within the all-embracing concept of ‘the Caribbean’, there may be better institutional ways to create a more effective future that ignores history, geography, smallness, and separation and is based on connectivity and all that the Fourth Industrial Revolution is now enabling.

Reimagined, and probably asymmetrical and multispeed, solutions that are wholly of the Caribbean’s own making will become of increasing importance as the chill in relations between the West and China seeks to draw the region into their webs.

- David Jessop can be contacted atdavid.jessop@caribbean-council.org. Previous columns can be found at https://www.caribbean-council.org/research-analysis/