Introduction

• Author: Kenneth Hall and Myrtle Chuck-A-Sang
• Pages: 9-33

ix

Introduction

The selection of papers for this edition has managed to accomplish the

feat of drawing the irrefutable linkages of the progress of Caribbean society

across time into a coherent framework allowing retrospective assessment

and futuristic projections. To attempt, as though in one mighty swath, to

capture the myriad consequences of our 500 years of actions and interactions

on plantations and latterly, in our modern independent societies, is a major

undertaking and a task of enormous proportion.

This mission commences with Dr. Meighoo’s interesting riposte to a

momentum gathering discussion on our Caribbean civilization and concludes

with Professor Levitt’s ‘imagined future.’ We are taken on a journey between

two extremities – the distant past and the beckoning future. What we are and

have become through time and the plantation experience, and the new and

distinct society that has emerged in the Caribbean through our cultural diversity

is not in debate on our Caribbean civilization. Neither is there uncertainty

about our place, performance and evident contributions to the world

community. The heart of the debate is whether the Caribbean possesses all of

the attributes of a civilization and thereby provides a centre — political,

economic, philosophical, linguistic, cultural, juridical, and aesthetic, among

others —for its people.

Admittedly, this engagement has not so far produced consensus nor has

it arrived at a generally acceptable resolution. In the ferment that is likely to

follow, we may, in the process, rediscover much of what has been forged in

our unique historical circumstances and that much of this is taken for granted.

The debate of our claim of a Caribbean civilization is in itself a sign of our

INTRODUCTION

xCARICOM Options: Towards Full Integration Into the World Economy

maturity and confidence since, as Dr. Meighoo affirms, a civilization cannot

be derived simply from indignant sentiments that if others have one then we

must have one also.

There is however, little disagreement that the sugar cane plantations,

once notorious for inhumane conduct, and replete with every possible atrocity,

were more than wealth producing entities. They served as laboratories for

the pioneering of the economic system of division of labour and, on these

plantations, the establishment of production facilities on capitalist principles

emerged. And if Professor Levitt is accurate, the Caribbean, through its

regional integration movement, is playing a part in the evolution of the

impending world system transformation. Our regional integration movement

will feature in the imagined future which anticipates a significant retreat

from the universal capitalism of globalization through the formation of large

regions of economic integration with political institutions of governance

appropriate to geographic and historical realities. In this resides the greatest

tribute to the vision of the past and confirmation of the correctness of the

undertaking of the Community.

Within the two extremities constructed by Dr. Meighoo and Professor

Levitt, is located the 1940s vision of the Caribbean to establish itself as a

light rising in the West. The Hon. Lloyd Best reminds us that the founding

fathers of Caribbean integration had definitive thoughts of what we are and

what we should become. It was with abounding self-confidence that we desired

not to be a European outpost, or become a North American backyard or a

non-descript constituent of Latin America. So the West Indian Federation

was inaugurated with great anticipation and fervent hope. The fathers and

founders of Caribbean integration envisaged a union of the English-speaking

West Indies within the British Commonwealth. That the efforts at federation

failed did not lead to an abandonment of the initial vision but rather to the

discovery of other vehicles, such as CARIFTA in 1968, CARICOM in 1973,

and a call for the CSME in 1989, capable of taking the region to the desired

destination.

There has been progress along the continuum constructed for us by the

writers, but today there is the fear that the region’s people are not exuding

the confidence displayed in the past. We may have become susceptible to

encroaching self-doubt, having in the past been responsible for bold initiatives

– regionally and internationally. Best locates this condition in our education

system. He thinks we are experiencing an education crisis that is pervasive

and epistemic, and rooted in the failure of the formal and informal institutions