Editorial | Patterson’s prescriptions

P.J. Patterson’s seminal intervention on the state of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) accords with this newspaper’s vision for the institution and the regional integration project.

The former Jamaican prime minister proposes deeper integration and “binding mechanisms to implement and enforce the solemn decisions of (CARICOM’s) Heads (of Government) and Ministerial organs”. The issue now, in the face of the community’s current crisis, is how to get Caribbean leaders to focus their intellectual energies on the fundamental questions posed by Mr Patterson in the Norman Manley lecture even as some seek to insulate their countries from geopolitical turmoil with bilateral deals at the expense of the regional partnership.

The situation calls for an urgent reset, allowing CARICOM to return intra-regional relations to at least to the pre-crisis status quo. This may mean, in the first instance, allowing the Trinidad and Tobago prime minister, Kamla Persad-Bissessar, an off-ramp in her public feuding with CARICOM over the reappointment of Karla Barnett as the community’s secretary general. Ms Persad-Bissesar’s other complaints against the community – their lack of structured coherence, notwithstanding – would become part of a broader discussion of CARICOM’s operating structures and strategic mission in the context of the road map sketched by Mr Patterson.

Should the situation with Ms Persad-Bissessar remain unresolved, CARICOM’s chairman, Terrance Drew, might consider appointing a ‘good offices’ team of respected regional political/diplomatic and business officials to quietly engage the Trinidad and Tobago prime minister about the potential political and economic cost to CARICOM – including of her own country – of a prolonged stand-off with the community.

COME AT A DIFFICULT TIME

Mr Patterson’s April 1 lecture, and the proposals therein, come at a difficult time for CARICOM and other small and weak countries. Donald Trump, the American president, has not only torn up the global rule book and dismantled the existing international order but in this hemisphere, he has reasserted the Monroe Doctrine of US hegemony.

Mr Trump attacked Venezuela and renditioned its president, Nicolás Maduro. He has intensified America’s long-standing economic embargo of Cuba with the imposition of an oil blockade of the country. Washington has also been pressing Caribbean countries to end, or dramatically scale back, their vital economic relationships with China.

While other CARICOM have been reticent, or hedged on America’s action in the region, Mr Trump’s policies have received full-throated support from Ms Persad-Bissessar, who branded CARICOM an “unreliable partner” and accused some of its members of “bad- mouthing” the United States in favour of dictators.

These tensions layered atop Port-of-Spain’s claim that it was sidelined in Dr Barnett’s reappointment and the old consensus that the community has failed to deliver on the expectations of its citizens, is causing CARICOM’s deepest – some fear existential – crisis in over 40 years.

But like this newspaper, Mr Patterson, one of the architects of the community, does not believe that either the moment, or the region’s future, calls for, or lies in, fragmentation.

Mr Patterson’s answer for the times and the community is deeper integration and institutional reform. He, however, makes it clear that his call is not for political union – or backdoor federation – as Jamaican critics of regional integration efforts often construe it.

P. J. Patterson’s thesis, therefore, is not the idea of integration that is at fault. The failure has been the inappropriateness of CARICOM’s infrastructure to work at its optimum.

“We do best when together we exercise the tremendous power and intellectual mastery of the entire Community to confront the common obstacles and challenges which we face in the post-colonial world,” Mr Patterson said, recalling the region’s leadership in matters such as trade negotiations with Europe in what was the African, Caribbean and Pacific Countries (ACP) (now the Organisation of African, Caribbean and Pacific States). Or as in the 1990s when the region collectively pushed back against the US’s attempt to impose a maritime drug interdiction agreement on the Caribbean states. Rather than surrender their sovereignty, CARICOM, led by Jamaica, fashioned an alternative pact to which the Americans agreed.

INTELLECTUAL LEADERSHIP

CARICOM, Mr Patterson believes, can again muster the intellectual leadership, working with the countries of this hemisphere, especially Mexico and Brazil, Africa, the Group of 77, including China, as well as the Commonwealth, in fashioning a response “to the seeds of narcissistic hegemonism which endanger the rest of us”.

“The Global South can no longer be content to react to agendas set by others,” said the former prime minister. “We must set our own priorities. Our unity amplifies our moral authority. It is about reshaping an archaic global order to make it inclusive, fair, and sustainable for all our people.”

Mr Patterson’s call to arms isn’t intended merely as an intellectual exercise. It is aimed at a deepened economic cooperation that gives full expression to the contingent rights of citizens of the community and for CARICOM to operate as a “fully functional single market”.

“We need a seismic shift to be more cohesive – not more divided and supine,” Mr Patterson said.

Some of Mr Patterson critics will ask why his prescriptions weren’t promoted or implemented during his nearly dozen years as Jamaica’s prime minister and his several more as a senior government minister. P.J. Patterson couldn’t have singularly transformed CARICOM, and few people have been as committed to, or worked as hard for, Caribbean integration.

In any event, the current crisis doesn’t allow for harping on the past except for understanding the shortcomings that limited CARICOM’s success. Mr Patterson brought analytical clarity to the issue. It is for the current leaders to have the courage to embrace his critical offerings.