Perceptions of the CSME by Stakeholders

• Author: UWI-CARICOM Project
• Pages: 84-103

84 CSME: Challenges, Benefits, Prospects

The literature on integration identifies four stages of progress: free trade;

customs union; economic and monetary union; and political integration. In

1968, CARIFTA was evidence that the region was at the first stage of this

continuum; but more than a free trade area had been achieved as CARIFTA

included areas of functional cooperation that were even more successful than

mere free trade. Under the 1973 Treaty of Chaguaramas, which established

the Caribbean Community and Common Market, the Region presented itself

to GATT as a customs union. However, it was recognized that adaptations

would have to be applied to the model of that second stage for it to suit

regional needs. The Common Market, however, never provided for common

collection and sharing of customs revenue or for fully free movement of

capital, skills, and labour.1 In a similar manner, the CSME in the consensus

of 1989, would take the Region beyond the second stage but would not envisage

political union. As Brewster has pointed out, there is no provision in the

Revised Treaty for a compulsory single foreign trade and economic policy.2

The Treaty of 1973 represented a careful balance of both political and economic

interests with primacy being given to protecting national policy space. The

Revised Treaty seeks a new balance between unified policies and respect for

the Community as an association of sovereign States.

Before engaging in an analysis of the perception of different stakeholders

it is useful to recall the nature of a market integration process. Professor

Clive Thomas, 3 in the Sixth W.G. Demas Memorial Lecture has pointed out

that, “markets are institutions which principally respond to purchasing power

and command over resources, not necessarily the broad needs of people,

except by coincidence.…. left alone they often serve to widen gaps in income,

PERCEPTIONS OF THE CSME BY

STAKEHOLDERS

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Perceptions of the CSME by Stakeholders

consumption, wealth, capability, and access”. As they stress the private, the

individual and the personal, ‘all markets are potentially destabilizing,

conflictual and even contradictory in their outcomes.’ Since the CSME is at

heart a market-driven process of integration it runs the risks normally

associated with such processes. There will undoubtedly be winners and losers

both in the short term and in the longer term. For these reasons compensatory/

corrective mechanisms must form a ‘necessary and prominent’ feature of all

discussions on the future of the CSME.

How do stakeholders see this stage in the evolution of the region? How

do they answer the question, what’s in it for me?

The following sections provide insights into the thinking about answers

to these questions that have emerged from various categories of stakeholders.

Academics on the dimension of the Necessity of Political

Union

At the level of the intellectual elite there has been much suspicion that

the CSME could be effective without a significant level of transfer of

sovereignty. Professor Kari Levitt, the Hon. Lloyd Best and Prof. Clive Thomas

espouse this view, even advocating political union.4 The experience of the

European Union is pertinent. Europe’s experience over 30 years is understood

to have demonstrated the ineffectiveness of inter-governmental cooperation

to achieve harmonized legalization. Every state in Europe could decide in its

own sovereign discretion when and how to implement a decision. The other

aspect of this is the perception that only political union can respond to the

need to be seen as a sovereign region with capability for authentic decisions

taking into account its culture, resources, and needs. In this sense, Professors

Levitt and Thomas argue the economic justification for integration, for

instance, as being of lesser value than the cultural/political. For them, current

developments fall way below their expectations and ideals.

Thinkers such as Prof. Havelock Brewster take a different position. In

2002, he pointed to the issue of transfer of sovereignty as being at the root of

implementation failure.5 He raised the question of the necessity of political

union frontally when he entitled a presentation Can the CSME Become a

Reality Without Political Union? At the end of the presentation his concept

of political union remained obscure, although there is a suggestion of the

need for transfer of sovereignty. In July 2003, when he discussed The Rose

Hall Declaration on Regional Governance, he criticized the Declaration’s

“reaffirmation” that the community was an association of sovereign states,