Caribbean Governance Systems: The Historical Legacy

• Author: Roy Augier
• Pages: 213-228

Caribbean Governance Systems 213

I assume governance to mean all the ways in which the governors and governed

relate to one another; this assumption requires me to identify the principal

institutions, where the two groups now interact, and there inferentially, I shall

find governance, good or bad, and be able to assess the extent to which, in its

current state, governance is a historical legacy.

The word legacy is used here as metaphor. We are not discussing real estate.

But the metaphor is useful if it makes us ask what was bequeathed, and who

devised it. If it was not real estate that was devised, what was it? It was behaviour

and the assumptions which induce that behaviour. It was beliefs about the

proper functioning of political institutions. It was also the institutions themselves

where that behaviour was manifest. My answer is derived from the meaning I

have given to governance. If it is the relation between governors and governed

then our task is to search in the mindset of the rulers and of the ruled in times

past for evidence of the ways they worked institutions of government and

governance back then.

The topic requires us to relate behaviours in the present to behaviours in

the past. If the behaviours manifested in the present have their origins in and

are sustained by, assumptions from the past about the proper relationship

between governors and the governed, then it would be reasonable to say that

the behaviours have been bequeathed, call them a legacy and name the donor.

However, the claim that certain behaviours in the present are a legacy from

the past can be unfounded. Some behaviours might appear to have roots in the

past when they are responses to recent or contemporary circumstances.

In my search for legacies I have tried to distinguish present behaviours

which are better explained by examining immediate circumstances, from

present behaviours which are best understood by reference to the past.

Institutions and mindsets first have to be identified before anything useful

can be said about their connections with the past. This attempt to trace the

historical legacy of governance is only possible because of the abundance of

CarIbbean GovernanCe SyStemS:

the hIStorICal leGaCy

ROY AUGIER

CHAPTER TWELVE

214 GOVERNANCE SYSTEMS AND STRUCTURES

writing on contemporary Caribbean political institutions, on the way they

work and on the behaviours of governors and governed.

I wish, therefore, to acknowledge my debt to the scholars of politics, law,

public administration and history, prominently among them Selwyn Ryan,

Neville Duncan, Pat Emmanuel, Ralph Carnegie, Margaret Demerrun, Rex

Nettleford, Gladstone Mills, Edwin Jones, Carl Stone, Trevor Munroe, Louis

Lindsay, Anthony Payne and Paul Sutton.

I said at the beginning that legacy used as metaphor prompted me to identify

a donor and to consider the nature of the gift. However, if what we have been

given is to be found in institutions and mindsets, our search for a legacy will

also require us to use notions derived from history and psychology as we engage

in what might be a case of transmission of culture.

Some elements of the legacy, perhaps the most important, have been

represented in the material culture by words printed on paper and inscribed on

buildings prominently sited in capital cities. The words have been entitled Acts

of Parliament, Orders in Council, Constitutions, Laws, Law Reports; the buildings

named, House of Representatives, Supreme Court. What has been printed has

generally had the intended effect of regulating behaviour.

The pre-eminence of printed words of that sort and the prominent structures

from which they have emanated have tended to make us abridge discussions of

the historical legacy of governance to the Westminster. Westminster model, we

say then approve or disapprove the legacy. Of course, scholars writing with

precision, refer to the Westminster-Whitehall Export Model and discuss the

ways in which that exported constitution has since been adapted.

The Caribbean territories were not the only recipients of the constitution

exported, but whereas elsewhere it was soon wholly rejected or eviscerated,

here, Guyana and Grenada excepted, the changes have been modest enough to

merit the description adapted.

Why was the fate of the Westminster-Whitehall Export Model different in

the Caribbean? In part, it is because the process of adoption and adaptation of

government and governance by people with counterbalancing institutions,

together with assumptions about law as an instrument for licensing as well as

limiting the exercise of power, was co-terminous with the capture, migration,

occupation and settlement of the islands by the English and continues to our

own day.

In this section of the paper, I offer a brief historical review of the origins of

legislative institutions and the mindsets underlying the working of these

institutions to support my explanation.

For all of the 18th and most of the 19th centuries, the political institutions

of the English settlers were governor, council and assembly. The exceptions

after 1815 are well known. Given the englishness of the settlers and the

apparently exact mapping of governor, council and assembly on crown, lords