CARIBBEAN INTEGRATION

Go to the category Caribbean Integration on this website to access papers by Havelock Brewster, Norman Girvan, Vaughan Lewis, Jay Mandle and Sir Shridath Ramphal. Topics include Caricom, the Caricom Single Market and Economy - CSME, the West Indies Federation, the Association of Caribbean States - ACS, and the Rio Group.

To researchers, teachers and students: a great deal of material on Caribbean integration and the CSME is available both on-line and in regular publications.For starters, the Caricom website is a virtual gold mine of documentation. For instance you can read all the Communiqués issued at the end of Caricom summits going right back to 1973, giving you a detailed, blow-by-blow account of the evolution of the Community since its inception (you have to read between the lines of course, what’s unsaid is often as significant as what is said!).

You can download the full text of the Revised Treaty of Chaguaramas, the ‘Bible’ of the integration movement; and other key documents such as the Grand Anse and Rose Hall Declarations, and the recent (2007) reports of the Technical Working Group on Governance and the Single Development Vision - just to mention a few. Some other useful ‘non-official’ stuff is also there, for instance Havelock Brewster’s paper on the feasibility of the CSME without a political union; and the presentations made at the Caribbean Connect Symposium held in 2006 Unfortunately Time for Action: Report of the West Indian Commission, another major document, isn’t available online.

Two excellent analytical studies on Caricom economic integration are the Caricom Report No. 1 and the Caricom Report No. 2 prepared by researchers at the Inter-American Development Bank and published on-line by INTAL, the IDB’s Latin American and Caribbean Integration Institute in Buenos Aires. You can also follow www.iadbb.org to INTAL and search from there. The INTAL website also has the report of the regional CSME Seminar held at the UWI Institute of International Relations in November 2005 with the papers and presentation at (http://www.iadb.org/intal/foros/presentacion_40/intal.html). Another comprehensive and up-to-date analysis avialable online is Repositioning the Caribbean within Globalisation by the UK-based scholars Anthony Payne and Paul Sutton published by the Centre for International Governance Innovation in Waterloo, Canada.

Key on-line resources of economic data and analysis are the websites of the Caribbean Regional Negotiating Machinery; the Caribbean Development Bank; the Caribbean office of the UN’s Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean the East Caribbean Central Bank www.eccb.org. By the way, the ECLAC website above has an excellent data base on intra-Caribbean trade CARIBTRADE; together with powerful analytical tools. The SALISES 2004 annual conference was on the CSME and produced several useful papers. Also check out the website of the Association of Caribbean States for material on functional cooperation in the Greater Caribbean region. My own book, Cooperation in the Greater Caribbean, speaks to this subject.

In terms of hard-copy material, there is a lot of pick from, and several ‘must-reads’ or even ‘must-haves’. The monumental handbook CARICOM: Our Caribbean Community falls into the latter category. Published by the Caricom Secretariat (I follow the journalistic custom of writing ‘Caricom’ as a name rather than as acronym in block capitals, but don’t make this mistake with officials!) it is a comprehensive archival and descriptive reference book on the Community, its history, its organs and its programmes—everything you wanted to know about Caricom but didn’t know you should ask. It is distributed by the Secretariat directly (free copies are available to public institutions and libraries and who knows, to deserving researchers as well), and through Ian Randle Publishers. The Caricom Trade and Investment Report available on-line and last published by the Secretariat in 2006 (an earlier edition came out in 2000) is another ‘must-consult’ resource for economic researchers; its 500+ pages contain a huge amount of statistics, critical analysis and information on CSME initiatives. Equally essential reading, from the qualitative and political standpoint, are the books edited by Kenneth Hall and Dennis Benn as a result of the UWI-Caricom project and published by Ian Randle Publications including Integrate or Perish, Beyond Survival, Governance in the Age of Globalisation, Contending with Destiny and Production Integration. Several are the result of academic conferences and include contributions by virtually everyone who has ever written or spoken on the subject.

For historical perspective, make sure to read the work of the late William Demas on The Deepening and Widening of Caricom and The Economics of Development in Small Countries with Special Reference to the Caribbean, the Report of the West Indian Commission Time for Action, and of course the classic work of Havelock Brewster and Clive Thomas The Dynamics of West Indian Economic Integration. Both have continued to write extensively about integration; make sure to read Brewster’s incisive contributions including one which poses the question whether the CSME is realistic without a commitment to political unity (available on the Caricom website) and his critical analysis of the Rose Hall Declaration on Governance (published in the book on Regional Governance edited by Hall and Benn). For students who want to argue that regional political union is the ‘way to go’ (this has become quite fashionable), make sure to review the lessons of the failed West Indies Federation, amply documented, inter alia, by John Mordecai in The West Indies: the Federal Negotiations and by Arthur Lewis in The Agony of the Eight.

As you can see, there is no lack of material on the subject! But a great deal of research remains to be done to advance—and critically evaluate–the integration process. Look for example at the extensive programme for completion of the CSME by 2015 set out in the Single Development Vision Report: most of those actions will require technical and analytical studies of one sort or another. And the subject of the politics and sociology of integration remains a wide open field for research.

Norman Girvan

Last updated October 18, 2007