Towards a New Democracy in the Caribbean: Local Empowerment and the New Global Order

• Author: Percy C. Hintzen
• Pages: 173-198

Towards a New Democracy in the

Caribbean: Local Empowerment and

the New Global Order

Percy C. Hintzen

Introduction

Governance, whether democratic or not, is exercised as an entangled

set of institutional and bureaucratic practices aimed at ordering and

directing people and their relationships to other people and to things.

It must be judged by its ‘far-reaching effects’ on the governed – what

I choose to call its ‘instrument effects’.1 It is in these effects that the

intent of sovereign power is both revealed and realized. And intent is

closely aligned with the constitutive interests of its effective participants.

The West Indies is inscribed in global entanglements effectuated

in ‘interlinked transnational formations’ through which the local, the

national, and the global coalesce.2 The role of postcolonial West Indian

governance has been confined almost exclusively to establishing and

guaranteeing contractual legal authority to legitimate the extractive

work of transnational firms, to fashioning institutional practice

consistent with the needs of the market in the formal economy, to

the establishment and running of legal order (from which many are

exempted), to the organization of political parties, to the co-optation

and control of public interest groups, and to the disciplining of public

discussion and opinion. All of these respond to demands placed upon

national governing authorities by powerful international interests.

This chapter addresses the manner in which these inter-linkages, both

historically and currently, explain the region’s practices of governance,

irrespective of form. Our focus on the ‘Westminster’ model, universally

adopted by all of the former colonies of Britain in the Caribbean region,

makes analytical sense because it allows for the disentanglement of

form and practice through a focus on democracy. However closely it

does or does not adhere to its British provenance, there is considerable

convergence in the practices of governance throughout the region.

Democracy, according to the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya

Sen, must be understood as an ‘institutional arrangement’ organized

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for ‘the exercise of people’s freedoms through the liberty to participate in

social choice and in the making of public decisions.’ Ideally, the result

of its practice must be the achievement and expansion of ‘economic

opportunities, political liberties, social powers, and the enabling conditions

of good health, basic education, and the encouragement and cultivation of

initiatives’.3 It is effectuated through the expansion of human capabilities.

I employ this as the benchmark of political freedom.

Representative democracy in the West Indies does not meet this

benchmark. The networks of neocolonial and imperialist relations through

which representative democracy in the West Indies is practised, have

constrained attempts at the expansion of human capabilities necessary

for the guarantee of rights and freedoms. In protecting powerful global

interests and meeting their demands, and in ensuring conditions for their

own survival, regimes may be forced to constrict, coerce, and control political

expression and dissent. In this context, attempts to incorporate subaltern

interests in governing practice can result in political crises, because such

incorporation can threaten regime survival by rendering it vulnerable to

punitive retaliation by global actors and their local supporters. There is,

therefore, a disjuncture between representative practice and the ability of

national apparatuses of governance to expand substantive freedoms. As a

result, when demands for freedom impose themselves upon governance,

there is no hesitation in their curtailment.

This chapter focuses on the manner in which the interests of global actors,

including nationals acting on the global stage, affect governing practices.

I do this through examination of consequences, positive or negative, of

these imposed interests on the stated goals of governance, particularly as

these relate to the interests of local communities and constituencies. In

the final analysis, the compatibility between governing practices and the

conditions for genuine development are explored. Such an examination is

not inconsistent with the declared assertions of West Indian postcolonial

governments, whose demands for democratic transformation were closely

linked to goals of ‘development’. Postcolonial governance implied the

expansion of freedom to the colonized subjects, not as an end in itself, but

as the principal means by which to achieve development: the singular and

universal goal of West Indian governance. Indeed, ‘development’ has been

the goal for all forms of postcolonial governance, legitimizing all forms of

governing practice.4

This point brings into question the constitution of the state and its

relationship to national governance. Michel-Rolph Trouillot has pointed