CARIBBEAN: Regional Bloc Struggles to Implement Agenda

•  basseterre, st kitts
• Thursday, June 30, 2011
• Inter Press Service

Officials hope that Thursday night's ceremonial opening, with Martelly and others, including Colombian President Juan Manuel Santos Calderón and the Secretary General of the Organisation of American States (OAS) José Miguel Insulza, in attendance, will hasten the ongoing restructuring intended to make the 15-member grouping more effective.

As one senior Caribbean diplomat pointed out recently, 'citizens [have] become increasingly frustrated by what they perceive as a lack of progress with the community's agenda'. The Jamaica Gleaner newspaper noted in an editorial earlier this month that breaking the logjam on governance requires the approval of CARICOM's two most important power brokers: Jamaica, on the political front, and Trinidad and Tobago, the Community's strongest economy.

In addition, the paper said CARICOM also 'suffers... from a deficit of legal arrangements'. This point is not lost on Grenada's Prime Minister Tillman Thomas, the outgoing CARICOM chair, who has argued that one of the reasons for the lack of implementation within CARICOM is the fact that there is no legal basis for member countries to do so.

In a paper presented to his regional colleagues and obtained by IPS, Thomas cited 'a loss of momentum with regard to the regional integration agenda.

'It is the view of some that the accumulation of scepticism and disillusionment resulting from the 'Implementation Deficit' can undermine the progress already made in building the Caribbean Community,' Thomas said, adding that CARICOM needs to undertake concrete actions that deliver tangible benefits to the regional population and demonstrate the value of regionalism in ways that touch on their daily lives.

'The problem is, and has always been, with implementation. CARICOM decisions do not have the force of law, and there is no real machinery to ensure implementation,' notes prominent University of the West Indies (UWI) academic, Professor Norman Girvan.

'And at the root of this is the reluctance of member states to share their insular sovereignty with the community of all regional states acting collectively,' adds Girvan, a former secretary general of the Association of Caribbean States (ACS).

Thomas wants the region to emulate the European Union as it deals with what Girvan describes as the 'deep-seated problems and implementation' within CARICOM.

According to Thomas, the EU is a good example of a succession of stages by which authority was devolved to provide the legal basis for collectively made decisions in certain key areas. He said the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS), which includes his country, is moving in this direction with its new Economic Union Treaty.

'This is a clear lesson of the experience of the European Union for CARICOM and offers a way of overcoming the impasse in CSME (CARICOM Single Market and Economy) implementation while preserving the longer run integrity of the integration process,' he said.

© Inter Press Service (2011) — All Rights ReservedOriginal source: Inter Press Service

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