CARICOM Beyond Thirty: Charting New Directions, Chairman's Perspectives

• Author: Most Hon. P. J. Patterson
• Pages: 466-524

466 CSME: Genesis and Prognosis

Foreword - Destiny Beckons

I feel a sense of historic duty to offer this paper “CARlCOM Beyond

Thirty: Charting New Directions,” as a contribution to the deliberations of

the 24th Regular Meeting of the Conference of Heads of the Caribbean

Community. It is a document which reflects my own thoughts based on personal

involvement in the CARlCOM process over the past three decades and which

I hope will stimulate discussion among wider audiences.

I wish to acknowledge the work of a number of persons, devoted to the

regional cause, who have contributed immensely to this product.

It is not an official paper from the Government of Jamaica, nor is it

intended to cover the ground demarcated by the 14th Inter-Sessional and

entrusted to an Expert Group of Heads to “make recommendations on how

best to perfect regional integration.” As a member of that group I subscribe

fully to its report.

These perspectives seek to keep at the centre of our attention, a number

of initiatives on which we have already agreed, as well as to explore new

possibilities, which will impact directly on ensuring that CARlCOM can

make a material difference in the lives of our Caribbean peoples.

We have arrived at a point in the history of CARlCOM, when it is of

utmost importance to encourage active debate and discussion about the nature

and direction of Caribbean regional integration.

In the thirty years since CARlCOM was founded, we have come a long

way. In the field of intra-CARICOM trade, we have come from the beguiling

simplicity of the Basic Materials List through the construction of a Common

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30 The Most Hon. P.J. Patterson

Former Prime Minister of Jamaica

CARICOM BEYOND THIRTY:

CHARTING NEW DIRECTIONS,

CHAIRMAN’S PERSPECTIVES

467

CARICOM Beyond Thirty

External Tariff (CET), and now to the current task of forging a CARICOM

Single Market and Economy (CSME).

We have built a strong regional institutional infrastructure in education,

development finance, health, and other fields, that have served the people

well.

In its epic journey, CARICOM has found the resilience to withstand

severe external and domestic political and economic shocks. It has survived

to be one of the longest functioning integration groupings today.

But now the future beckons CARlCOM to look beyond thirty years.

It must do so at a moment when daunting challenges, unknown at its

inception, confront us from the global and regional environment. These

challenges constitute new tests of the resilience of CARICOM, and at the

same time, must spur the Community to a greater fulfilment of its mission.

That mission, basically, is to be an association of states, exercising sovereignty

individually and collectively for the betterment of the people for whom the

Community was brought into being.

The challenges that confront Caribbean people must stir us now to make

CARlCOM a truly living Community of the people; a Community that is not

only an enlarged common space for the unleashing of entrepreneurial energies,

but also, as Norman Manley once said, “a Community that provides a wider

field for individual ambition.”

We must press on now with the mission of building a people’s Community

that not only supports the people’s yearning for good governance and embraces

them with the promise and the reality of enhanced security, but also provides

a nurturing home from which to engage with the wider world.

In the last three decades, our regional institutions have not simply

endured; they have reflected their maturity. But our institutions “must be

retrofitted to become more efficient and reliable vehicles at this stage of our

journey, if we are to realize our goals and fulfil the aspirations of our founding

leaders and the Caribbean people as a whole.”

This must begin with our human resources, which must be made central

to the process that is ahead of us.

Nowhere else on the planet is there a region where encounters between

people of different cultures have been as challenged to make sense of human

existence in modern times as in the Caribbean The encounters among Africans,

Europeans, and Asians, and they, in turn, with the indigenous Native

Americans (Caribs, Arawaks and Tainos) have resulted in a dynamic interplay

to produce a new and unique people shaping what many of us describe as a

Caribbean civilization.

468 CSME: Genesis and Prognosis

It is to that civilization that a reformed CARlCOM must pay far more

attention, if that sense of self and society embedded in a strong regional

consciousness, is to be fostered. For it is such regionalism, rooted in psychic

and intellectual commitment, that will sustain the institutions that are vital,

but by themselves will mean nothing without the passionate commitment by

those who must lead, manage, operate and constantly evaluate them.

We are at a moment when destiny beckons. Let us seize the moment.

Chairman

24th Conference of Heads of Government Caribbean Community

July 1, 2003

Executive Summary

CARICOM in a Transformed Global and Domestic Environment

The thirtieth year of CARICOM provides an occasion not only for

celebrating past achievements, but also for charting new directions and

increasing the tempo of regional integration. But quite apart from the fact of

this landmark anniversary, the imperative for intensifying integration stems

from other vital considerations. Prominent among these is the radical

transformation of the global and regional domestic environments from what

they were at the inception of the Community. Globally, the movement from

bipolar super-power confrontation and competition to looming unipolar super-

power dictation threatens to undermine multilater-alism and international

law, creating dangers for the world as a whole, but especially for small

developing states, such as ours.

Added to this, the emerging world economic order, driven by globalisation

and liberalization, is bringing about the dismantling of the special trading

arrangements and protective regimes of old, on which many small economies

depended. Perniciously, while small countries are being constrained under

this new dispensation to open their markets, protectionism persists in powerful

countries in respect of key products of export interest to small developing

economies.

At the same time, locally within the region, a whole new generation has

come of age since the birth of the Community and has added its voice to

increasingly strong demands from the people for improved governance, and

for the enhancement of their social and economic welfare.