Prospects for an Effective CSME

• Author: UWI-CARICOM Project
• Pages: 140-170

140 CSME: Challenges, Benefits, Prospects

Among the most trenchant and pessimistic positions on the CSME has

been that adopted by the Hon. Lloyd Best in the following statement:

“For many years various spokesmen for CARICOM have been

offering the CSME in its various guises as the solution to the region’s

economic viability and an essential precondition to the success of

integration. It seemed to us that in 2005 we had arrived at a critical

moment. We had either to launch the programme of implementation

or concede that the measures we have taken over the years were

frightfully flawed .We were aware that the great majority of

professionals in the Region had been adopting an almost universally

sceptical stance. Few could say where the policies of the last five

decades had been leading.” 1

The Hon. Best goes on to say that CARICOM seemed not to have escaped

reliance on ideas borrowed from various sources, notably from the European

Union, and “comprising largely of a set of ad hoc, utopian programmes

which neither singly nor together achieved insight, cogency, internal

consistency or just point.” Lloyd Best expresses the view that plans,

programmes, and measures had failed because they had not been located in

the specific historical context of the Caribbean. The Integration Studies, the

Food Plan, the schemes for Industrial Programming, the Enterprise Regime,

the proposals for trade integration and many related measures had failed to

get off the ground for this reason. There was a lack of a galvanising vision

and many initiatives lacked creative spark. The Region had not even come

PROSPECTS FOR AN EFFECTIVE

CSME

88

88

8

141

Prospects for an Effective CSME

close to articulating such a vision. Nor had it produced a “cadre unequivocally

committed to the region and capable of breeding integration ideas or of

establishing any set of effective integration activities.” The Region therefore

needed a fresh start and an entirely new approach to regional integration.

Regionally, there is need to elaborate a new set of policies, strategies, plans,

programmes and ventures. 2

Lloyd Best seems pessimistic of the prospects of integration by way of

establishing the CSME. He proposes an entirely new approach to integration.

Instead of a focus on intra-regional trade (market integration) and ‘utopian’

schemes of the industrial programming type, he envisages a major effort to

channel the flows of liquidity deriving from the offshore gas reserves of

Trinidad and Tobago into Transformative projects at the national and regional

level (inshore transformation in the sister islands brought about by the

deployment of idle funds). In a win-win situation, Trinidad and Tobago will

be laying the basis for its own viability while promoting transformation of

the islands (using its age of abundance). 3

For him, this alternative approach to integration is better designed to

fulfil the original sense of being a “nation”, and is realistic if based on

decisive government expenditure and effective management of the fiscal surplus

by Trinidad and Tobago. The failure of the Lewis/Demas strategy4 of

industrialization to produce internally propelled growth through foreign

capital dictates a new approach. In short, Best does not see the CSME

producing the capability of self-propelled growth required to fulfil the original

dream of creating a sense of West Indian nationhood. Lloyd Best’s vision of

integration may prove to be just as utopian as the model and strategies he

criticizes if the national, political calculus does not find it feasible.

Prof. Clive Thomas expresses his own disenchantment with the current

CARICOM process, by noting that CARICOM has abandoned what, at the

beginning, was a radical project. That project has, however, been derailed

with “CARICOM transformed into a complicit mechanism with which to

facilitate the integration of the region into the global economy-not challenge

it.” 5 He identifies the following five distinct goals associated with the original

conceptualisation of the integration project:

- to create an instrument to challenge the global division of labour,

further decolonise the region, and resist forms of neo-imperial control

that might arise. It was to be an active rather than a neutral

instrument of development on a playing field regarded as uneven;

- to promote a distinctive model/strategy for self-development by