But progress has on the whole been disappointing to non-existent. While there have been some successes, such as a pan-Caricom schools examinations board and a Caribbean Court of Justice, which has recently begun to gain traction, wider efforts have foundered due to a lack of political will. “There’s instinctive protectionism in the Caribbean,” says one western diplomat based in the region.
In some respects this is understandable. The Caricom countries gained independence only relatively recently after cutting ties with the UK in the decades after the second world war, and relinquishing even some sovereignty is still politically difficult.
Moreover, the kind of populist concerns that have stalked the EU’s development are mirrored in the Caribbean. Bigger countries, like Jamaica, or richer ones, such as Trinidad and Tobago, fret that they would be forced to shoulder too much of the costs of integration, or that they could be outvoted by tiny neighbours. Smaller states worry they would be swamped by cheaper labour and goods from more populous countries, or simply not have a significant say in contentious matters.
However, the benefits could be significant. For the micro states of the eastern Caribbean the cost of the trappings necessary for nationhood are particularly onerous: even a modest network of overseas embassies is a burden.
The entire Eastern Caribbean currency union – which comprises Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St Kitts and Nevis, St Lucia, and St Vincent and the Grenadines – has a population of 600,000. It would make sense to merge and rationalise some functions.
A true common market for goods, capital and labour could help foster bigger companies and reduce the severe economic efficiencies that bedevil the region, especially in areas such as transport and logistics. “It costs more for me to send a crate to Trinidad than to Liverpool [in the UK],” one Jamaican businessman points out.
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There are plenty of areas where co-operation could be fruitfully deepened even if countries insisted on maintaining full political independence, Ms Mottley says.
“We’re either going to have to decide that we are going to make the political jump, or if you want to maintain the community of sovereign states, then you have to deepen at a far greater pace the functional co-operation, such that you can remove the duplication of expenditure on a whole range of things.”
There are limits to how much closer integration will achieve. It would help many countries trim their government wage bill, but the problems run much deeper than a few expensive overseas embassies.
The economies of the Caribbean countries are also perhaps too similar to benefit greatly from a single market. The dominant industry is tourism, which depends more on overseas economic conditions than the cost of shipping goods between islands.
Nonetheless, in time the chastening experience of international bailouts and austerity could perhaps play the same role in gluing the Caribbean states more closely together as the memory of two devastating wars did in Europe.
The reporting from the Caribbean was supported by a grant from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting, a non-profit organisation that supports independent international journalism.
Source the FT