Regional Integration Institutional Arrangements: Underlying Assumptions and Contemporary Appropriateness

• Author: Vaughan Lewis
• Pages: 509-526

Regional Integration Institution Arrangements 509

The Governments of the member-states of the Caribbean Community have

been engaged, at least since taking the decisions embodied in the Grand

Anse Declaration of 1989, in a prolonged process of reform of the orientation of

the Community and Common Market, and of the instruments required to match

that revised orientation.

The new orientation derives from recognition of three processes as they

affect the functioning of CARICOM:

(i) the multilateralisation of decision-making required of CARICOM in its

external economic relations in the post-Cold War post-WTO environment;

(ii) the necessity, in the era of “open regionalism” to focus on, and to arrange

the common market space less as an arena of intra-regional trade fostered

by state initiative, instruments and investments, and more as an economic

platform emphasising free movement of factors and facilitating full rights

of establishment for regional and foreign investment and related

economic activities; and

(iii) that in response to external processes, the boundaries of the common

market are increasingly fluid and changeable as the Community feels

constrained to increase its “economic size” and diplomatic weight in the

wider hemispheric and international economic systems affecting it.

MM

MM

Mulul

ulul

ultiltil

tiltil

tilaa

aa

ateralisteralis

teralisteralis

teralism and Dm and D

m and Dm and D

m and Decisiecisi

ecisiecisi

ecisioo

oo

on-Mn-M

n-Mn-M

n-Makinakin

akinakin

akingg

gg

g

In respect of the first of these, the necessity to respond to the transformation

of the European Union into a Single Economic Market; the recognition, since at

least 1992, that agreements made with the EU in respect of future Caribbean-EU

trade regimes are no longer discrete and final, but are subject to the wider

jurisdiction of the WTO regime, and the recognition therefore, that the WTO

RegIOnAl InTegRATIOn InSTITuTIOnAl

ARRAngeMenTS: undeRlyIng

ASSuMpTIOnS And COnTeMpORARy

AppROpRIATeneSS

VAUGHAN LEWIS

CHAPTER TWENTY - SEVEN

510 REGIONAL GOVERNANCE

regime itself is now integral to the economic decision-making of Common

Market regime, has shifted the focus of CARICOM concern from the management

of the domestic (that is intra-regional market) regime to face-to-face relations

with the WTO multilateral regime as the determining instrument of the

legitimacy of subordinate trade regimes. This has been the case for example, in

the prolonged whether negotiation of for new EU-ACP banana regime, or in

elaborating a response to the complaints of the OECD relating to off-shore

financial services.

In effect, the eras of first, British intermediation and diplomatic protection

(prevalent up to about 1990 in the banana regime case), or European Union

(Commission) intermediation (as in the negotiation of an acceptable banana

export regime in the contemporary post-GATT and WTO period), are over. The

Caribbean Community now had to establish direct and continuing presences at

the “centres” of the multilateral regimes, so as to be able to permit adequate

surveillance and response to their changing parameters. This applies even in

the case of the use of intermediary multilateral institutions like the

Commonwealth Secretariat, as in the case with the countries’ difficulties with

the OECD. The implications of all this for the arrangement of the necessary

technical resources and the modes of their support, immediately come into

consideration.

Further, it is an open question as to whether the case for particular treatment,

within the framework of emerging multilateral regimes, in recognition of

“special and differential characteristics” of small-island states, can be sustained

over the long-run. The neat “developing-developed” categorisation is fast

disappearing, and CARICOM states find themselves in an era of extremely diverse

“states as economic types”, following the transformation of the global system

into a complex of states with differing economic endowments and social assets,

all allegedly travelling along the path of “transition to capitalism”.

This observation does not negate the need for continuing diplomatic efforts

in regard to “special and differential characteristics”. But it recognises the need

for CARICOM governmental understanding that, as in the past, the dominant

entities determining the evolution of multilateral regimes will also determine

the concessions that they make on the basis of their estimation of the

“strategic”characteristics of third countries relative their own economic

orientations and the negative processes that they perceive as emanating from

particular states or regions. The United States treatment of Mexico pending, and

after, its entry into NAFTA is illustrative of this. In other words the focus on the

military or ideological aspects of security having changed, new connotations of

“strategic”in economic relationships, now come into play.

What follows from this is that the Caribbean Community as currently

politically and economically defined (bounded) - the smallest trading bloc with

a population of less than six million and a combined GDP of US$20bn - is not,