A united Caribbean may be a utopia, and smaller alliances may be more realistic. Last year, Caricom, the association of English-speaking Caribbean states, announced it would not grant membership to the Dominican Republic following the Dominican authorities’ announcement that they would require foreigners to have legal status.
Europe’s Caribbean expert, David Jessop now warns that the time may have come for a new regional integration model. He comments that regrouping is already taking place “by default.” He mentions that the Dominican Republic is rapidly linking its economy to that of Puerto Rico as well as to selected Latin neighbors, including its Central American partners in SICA. Belize is also developing its relationship with its SICA partners. Cuba is seeking to open new investment and trade relationships with the United States, Russia, the European Union, China, Brazil and other nations that offer complementarity and balance. Likewise, Guyana’s new government seems set to develop its economic links with neighbors in Brazil, Suriname, French Guiana and Venezuela; and for a number of years now Trinidad has adopted an approach that seeks overlapping trade relationships with the US and the countries of Latin America.
“It is as if the regional economies are caught between two worlds; one that is dead or dying, the other that is struggling to be born,” Jessop quotes Owen Arthur, the former Prime Minister of Barbados. He warns that achieving perfect Caribbean integration may no longer be necessary after all.
“It is also far from clear whether anyone in power is prepared to think the unthinkable: that perfecting Caribbean integration may no longer be a relevant approach, and what may be required are new alliances and configurations buttressed by better leadership, new thinking, new infrastructure, new hemispheric relationships, improved education, and generational change,” writes Jessop.
In his recent commentary, in The View from Europe, he comments:
“This is not to set aside the importance of the Caribbean as an identity, but to try to be realistic. It is also to wonder whether there might be greater value in nations seeking new groupings with those Caribbean and Central American nations that offer greater complementarity.”
He points out:
“What may now be required is a debate that is both practical and visionary. If full regional integration is not achievable, a more realistic approach may be to see the future as a process of slow steady integration at a sub-regional level between compatible economies such as those in the OECS; a deeper relationship with the French DOM; involve economic integration between the larger countries of the northern Caribbean and Cayman irrespective of language or politics; and see Panama and eventually Havana as regional hubs of greater long-term importance than Miami, given Cuba’s emerging relationship with the US.”