From Crisis to CARICOM

• Author: Anthony J. Payne
• Profession: Professor of Politics, University of Sheffield, UK. He is the author of several books on Caribbean politics and international relations
• Pages: 118-143

118 | The Political History of CARICOM

In the event, the ultimate crisis of disintegration was avoided. The

necessary reinvigoration of the integration movement came just in time,

and from the most unlikely source. In February 1972 Shearer’s JLP

government in Jamaica was heavily defeated at the polls and was replaced

by a People’s National Party (PNP) government, led by Michael Manley.

Although the reasons for the JLP’s loss of office had little to do with

regional integration and the issue itself played no part in the election

campaign, the change of government in Jamaica did significantly alter

the environment in which the movement had to survive.

Historically the PNP had a very different record from the JLP on

the question of Caribbean integration. It was the party which had

supported the Federation and which campaigned to stay in during the

notorious Jamaican referendum of September 1961. Michael Manley

himself was the son of Norman Manley, a lifelong supporter of the

federal concept in the West Indies. Although the PNP formally opposed

entry into CARIFTA when the issue came to a vote in the Jamaican

House of Representatives in 1968, it did so on the grounds that free

trade was a weak form of economic integration — ‘neither fish nor fowl

or red herring’, as its spokesman put it at the time.1 It has been suggested

too that the phenomenon of ‘opposition politics’ was instrumental in

dictating PNP tactics on this occasion,2 and on the whole the party did

remain true to the regional ideals of its founder. The problem was that

the PNP tended to be afraid of espousing regional integration too

enthusiastically because its own loss of power in 1962 in the elections

CHAPTER five

From Crisis to CARICOM

From Crisis to CARICOM | 119

immediately following the referendum had been almost universally

attributed to its support for the Federation.

Michael Manley understood the dichotomous position into which

the PNP seemed to have been driven and was determined to lead his

party away from it. In an article entitled ‘Overcoming Insularity in

Jamaica’, which appeared in the American journal Foreign Affairs at the

end of 1970, he expressed his own commitment to CARIFTA in

particular and regional economic integration in general. He wrote:

although many counsel caution — and indeed, this may be the

price of ultimate success — one wishes that a greater sense of

urgency attached to the whole exercise ... Clearly, regional

economic development provides a more ample prospect in a

situation where peaceful progress cannot be more than a marginal

possibility. Yet, although the aisle is clearly marked, we seem to

come to the altar of history like a reluctant bride with faltering

step and lowered gaze.3

What was needed, he suggested, and what indeed he appeared to possess,

was ‘a tough-minded recognition that national survival, like business

survival, is a matter of margins and that regionalism can provide the

framework in which internal markets are increased, external bargaining

power enhanced and international recognition maximised’.4 For the benefit

of those who were still dubious, he outlined four specific advantages

which, in his view, Jamaica stood to gain from regional integration: firstly,

the potential fulfilment of what he saw as an urgent need for all the

countries of the region to ‘develop techniques for handling trade and

other relations with the outside world on the basis of a common policy5’;

secondly, the increased negotiating strength which could be achieved by

handling major foreign capital interests, like the bauxite companies, on a

common basis; thirdly, the provision of a base from which to enter the

mainstream of Third World politics; and fourthly, the intangible benefits

offered by the psychological boost which regional integration would give

to the security and dignity of the West Indies. In Manley’s estimation the

choice lay between ‘a low road of self-imposed, insular impotence and a

high road of adventure into Caribbean regionalism leading on to the