The Caribbean Community in the age of Globalisation: The Impact and Effectiveness of Foreign Policy Coordination

• Author: Rudolph A. Collins
• Pages: 291-295

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THE CARIBBEAN COMMUNITY IN

THE AGE OF GLOBALISATION: THE IMPACT AND

EFFECTIVENESS OF FOREIGN POLICY COORDINATON

Rudolph A. Collins

The recently concluded debate over the

signing of the Economic Partnership Agreement

(EPA) between the CARIFORUM and the

European Union has brought into sharp focus

the issue of foreign policy coordination and its

effectiveness as an essential pillar of support

for the development of an economic and

socially viable Caribbean Community. The

debate therefore has provided a valid reason to

examine both the impact and the continuing

relevance of foreign policy coordination in

advancing the Community’s development. It

also opens the gates for an examination of the

many likely prescriptions for change that can

be realistically introduced by a Community

faced as it is with the ever-growing imperative

to f‌ind areas of accommodation within the

current era of globalisation.

An ever-present truism, and one which the

then Prime Minister Forbes Burnham ventilated

at the very f‌irst meeting of the Community’s

Foreign Affairs Ministers Meeting which was

held in Guyana in November 1973, is that

foreign policy, however def‌ined, is not a set

of prescriptions that exist in a vacuum but

is, in reality, an integrated element of what

constitutes or is def‌ined as national policy.

Any serious examination of the region’s success

or failure at foreign policy coordination has

to be structured, to a very signif‌icant degree,

against an equally serious examination of what

the Community’s leaders considered to be the

fundamentals of the Community development

policy. It may be recalled that a major

criticism of the EPA was that as a Community

foreign policy experiment it failed because it

was not suff‌iciently development oriented.

As far as many of the region’s academics were

concerned, this was its essential weakness.

Without a regional development context, its

detractors claimed, the EPA became little more

than a series of issue-oriented arrangements

based on an EU agenda which, despite some

f‌ine sounding language, was unlikely to work

to the benef‌it of the Community.

This essential nexus between foreign

policy and the Community’s development

process was fully recognised and appreciated

by the region’s leaders. In October 1972, at

the Seventh Meeting of the CARICOM Heads

of Government, they decided to establish a

Standing Committee of Ministers to deal with

matters of common interest in foreign policy

in view of, inter alia:

the very great importance of foreign poli-

cy for economic policy and general devel-

opment strategy in the small structurally

open economies in the Commonwealth

Caribbean countries, and the obvious

impact of foreign policy in the volume,

quality and source of aid, private invest-

ment, trade and technical assistance, as

well as on other commercial areas such as

the negotiation of Air Routes Rights and

Bilateral Air Agreements.

There is no doubt that whatever might be

the interpretation of the meaning of “foreign

policy coordination” it was f‌irmly etched in

the intent of the region’s leaders that such