Refocusing the diaspora

David Jessop, Contributor

In the middle of next month, Jamaica will hold its annual diaspora conference. The event ought to be a moment of solidarity as the country prepares for its 50th anniversary of Independence, its likely success at the Olympics, and a positive world image.

However, the signs are that this event may prove fractious, party political, and may be boycotted by some.

Similar situations exist with other community groups from across the Caribbean that sometimes give the impression that they are more interested in complaining about what is happening at home, settling old scores and engaging in domestic squabbles rather than providing their country of birth or ancestry with political and economic support where they live and vote.

How to make the best use of the vast and largely dormant army of family (and friends) that the Caribbean has beyond the region in the United Kingdom, the United States, and Canada is a matter that ought to trouble all Caribbean governments.

Caribbean people living overseas now cross four generations. The precise numbers are hard to come by as much depends on the extent to which, through marriage and relationships, their progeny have or want an affinity with, or knowledge of the region.

Reliable figures

Despite this, relatively reliable figures for the United Kingdom suggest that there are some 0.85 million people self-declared in the 2001 census as being of Caribbean ethnicity - numbers that are significant in terms of the overall British population size of 59 million.

Moreover, as in the United States and Canada, where there are large numbers from Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba as well, the first and second generations in particular tend to concentrate in a relatively small number of districts, cities, and constituencies where they have political clout.

Unfortunately, however, much of the focus of the older part of the diaspora is on looking back and participating in meetings that have relevance to the nation in which they are living, divorced from the questions that now matter to the Caribbean.

Recent conversations on this subject suggest that the time has come to move on and for Caribbean governments, together with the larger companies in the private sector that care, to determine a strategy that looks forward.

That is to say, in developing an approach that owes less to views that revolve around social issues and discrimination and more to asking, from a national perspective, what the newer element in the community can do where they live to move political, economic, and social issues to the advantage of the nations of their origin or ancestry.

Such an approach requires a sea change in understanding how and where the power in the Caribbean diaspora really lies, and how this might relate to branding, new forms of economic partnership, and real political influence.

To understand this fully requires awareness that the Caribbean community, more than it wishes to think, is itself divided by periods of arrival, class, self-confidence, economic aspiration, academic achievement, sense of Caribbean identity, influence, and access in their nation of residence.

Put another way, the overseas Caribbean community is now so socially diverse that different values and levels of influence ought to be assigned to different groups and their relative power utilised in ways that relate better to their capabilities.

Uniquely in the case of the APD campaign in Britain, it has proved possible to organise the whole community around a pocketbook issue. But this approach, which is based on the hugely emotive sense of unfairness and discrimination, may not apply to any future political or economic need that the Caribbean may wish to prosecute.

For this reason, a far more interesting development may be one that is being led by individuals in Jamaica who have recognised that in addition to the many in the community, there are other voices that now need to be cultivated.

Who these individuals are

Although it is hard to define simply who these individuals are, they are the men and women of a third generation who are citizens of the country in which they live, have gone through higher education, have significant academic qualifications, are working in highly paid jobs in the mainstream of society, are often close to the highest levels of government or the private sector, and have a very different relationship and attitude to the Caribbean to those who came before.

They are individuals who are international in outlook, understand how politics and business works, are well connected in mainstream society, and have influence.

What they require is peer-to-peer relationships, to be embraced by the region's political and intellectual elite, to be able to meet with ministers and prime ministers on the basis of equals, and to be engaged in dialogue to see how their networks might benefit the nations of their family background.

To put it bluntly: This is a very different community to that which the Caribbean is trying for the most part to engage. It is an elite that the region ought to be more proud of, which provides not only role models in the nations in which they now live, but have much to offer the countries from which their grandparents came.

Developing a relationship with this group requires a form of high- level networking that few ministers and Caribbean diplomats have yet understood. While the cultivation of elite national communities is commonplace among countries in the Asian subcontinent and many other parts of the world, the Caribbean still seems too fixated on the view of its community that the former colonial powers and their media have foisted on it.

The reality is that there are significant numbers of successful individuals with a Caribbean heritage who want a relationship with the region and to be asked to help support the region's interests.

What is needed is a Caribbean programme that makes use of modern networking vehicles that create such linkages, and relevant fora for discussion.

At one end of the spectrum it involves linking today's UWI undergraduates to their diaspora counterparts in universities in the US, the UK, and Canada, and at the other, the establishment of vehicles that create in the US, Canada, and the UK, dialogue and, linkages on issues that matter to the region.

Above all, it requires abandoning past models of a single unified Caribbean community and recognition that there are new ways and new groups that can really change thinking if involved and well directed.

David Jessop is director of the Caribbean Council.david.jessop@caribbean-council.org