EDITORIAL - Cede sovereignty to CARICOM's centre

Irwin LaRocque, the still relatively new secretary general of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM), arrived at a right conclusion. We are sceptical, however, about his analysis.

Ambassador LaRocque, in the process, reinforced one of this newspaper's assumptions of why the regional integration group will continue to meander, and the basis of our advocacy, at the time of the retirement of Edwin Carrington, for a change in the personality that led the secretariat.

We felt that in the absence of a governance structure ceding some sovereign authority to a centre, the secretary general should be someone who had held executive power, like the job of a prime minister or president, and could speak to current leaders on almost equal terms.

The context of this observation is last week's speech by Ambassador LaRocque to manufacturers in Guyana in which he sympathised with the frustration of Caribbean citizens at the slow evolution of CARICOM, and offered tepid excuses for the failure.

Said he: "We set ourselves overambitious and unrealistic targets; targets which, by their very nature, doom us to apparent failure when they are not met."

The targets are not met, CARICOM secretary general appeared to suggest, largely because the region does not sufficiently think through and determine whether it has resources with which to achieve its goals. The specific resources to which Ambassador LaRocque referred remain unclear.

governance foundation

The fact is that while the formal documents for the transition of CARICOM to a single market and economy by 2015 were signed six years ago, the process did not start in 2006. Indeed, the Grand Anse Declaration of 1989 set that course. Three years after Grand Anse, the Ramphal Report articulated the outlines of a governance foundation upon which the new CARICOM would have to be built.

The essential failure to advance has been because of the unwillingness of the constituent parts of the Community to shift executive decision-making/enforcement authority away from themselves. The bottom line is that CARICOM remains a community of sovereign nations, rather than transitioning to a sovereign community of nations, or something akin thereto.

That primarily is a political issue, the resolution of which is in the hands, primarily, of the Community's two most critical members - Jamaica, the political leader, and Trinidad and Tobago, the strongest economy.

Half a century after Jamaica voted to secede from the West Indies Federation, Kingston still harbours the political reaction to a notion of shared sovereignty. Underlying ethnic drivers and concerns that it might be overwhelmed by economic migration contribute to Port-of-Spain's lukewarm engagement of this process.

Indeed, Dr Ralph Gonsalves, the prime minister of St Vincent and the Grenadines, has spoken, and written, refreshingly frankly about the deficit of leadership in this Community that underpins the minimalism in regional integration. Ambassador LaRocque prefers, it seems, to tiptoe around the issue.

The matter of governance is to be debated by the leaders next week. The problems of Greece and others in the Eurozone might cause some to declare CARICOM fortunate that its ideal of a single currency has not evolved. But the crisis of the euro does not diminish the European Union, or as the Canadians recently reminded Jamaica, a deeper CARICOM union.

See Byron Blake's 'CARICOM: A failure of effective leadership' on page F11

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