Let's Be More Positive
Editorial
Guyana Chronicle
July 15, 2003
LIKE our sister media organizations scrutinizing and disseminating news and information on Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Integration, we cannot but try to put the post-summit meeting of four Caribbean leaders on a sub-regional union in perspective.
Some organizations such as Barbados’ Daily Nation see the four-nation union proposal as “a positive step, a way of advancing on a number of fronts without violating existing agreements under the Treaty of Chaguaramas.”
Others don’t. In the Nation’s view, “the new accord in principle, among Trinidad & Tobago, Grenada, St Vincent and The Grenadines and Barbados, has unfortunately attracted a few negative responses.
It is as though bad memories of the now defunct federation are stifling people’s will to learn from those events and forge ahead rather than stagnate.”
Antigua & Barbuda’s High Commissioner in Britain, Sir Ron Saunders, hails the combination of regional initiatives - including formation of the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) - as unmatched except by the European Union.
And former Barbados Prime Minister Sir Lloyd Sandiford doesn’t share sentiments against the proposal since, as he recalls, it’s nothing new.
“A concept paper on a political union among three of the More Developed Countries of the region (Barbados, Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago) was prepared in 1993,” he said in an interview in Bridgetown, the Barbadian capital.
We agree with the Nation that the region’s print and electronic media have a role to play in helping both CARICOM and the newer sub-grouping to make progress. “Equally, however, the media can only perform this constructive duty if the relevant authorities share vital information in a timely manner.”
It would be unreasonable for us to prejudge the purpose of the four-leader proposal or to anticipate the outcome without getting a deeper sense of the thought-patterns of those leaders at a time when attention centered on the 15-nation CARICOM coming up with ways to ensure that the movement reached its objectives and the deadlines it had long set making the bloc a potent force in the international arena.
The Nation believes opines that while “there is no shortage of assurance that the majority of ordinary Caribbean people are keen for unity,” there is also “the reality that some politicians baulk at the thought of surrendering any of their power and would never go as far as European countries have gone to create a strong union.”
So we have precedents of large unions having emerged from smaller ones, as we do of small unions, like the West Indian Federation more than 40 years ago, falling apart.
As debate on the sub-union proposal rages on, a point to ponder is whether, for today’s Caribbean, it’s better for us to move toward integration in what we refer to sometimes as “parts and participles,” or as a whole where more people with more resources and a common goal should look at and work harder, together, in pursuit of that bigger picture.