BY
LLOYD BEST
“… the CARICOM and other models of Caribbean integration currently being offered are neither credible nor realizable in the contemporary world of widening economic spaces and globalization. They also do not do justice to our aspirations for unity.” – Havelock Brewster
“… the increasing isolation of the West Indies is giving rise to a more urgent need to project its collective identity and widen the security arena. Traditional assumptions made… about external relations need to be questioned, looking to the next century and the new world order that is now taking shape: for example, that we are of geo-strategic, if not economic, value to the US; that historical antecedents assure us of a privileged place in the EC; that the UK could be an influential ally in the EC of the future; that our place in the ACP grouping is secure; that the Commonwealth, the G77, the NAM have real meaning in a world dominated by power and race; that we can continue to ignore Japan, Germany and China; that Latin America and other Caribbean states are our natural allies
rather than potential antagonists; that we are too creolized to find any common ground with Africa and India, the lands of origin of the great majority of our population. The dangers of isolation and insecurity and thus the task ahead will call for a more affirmative approach to regional foreign policy coordination.”
– Havelock Brewster
Perhaps the main reason the West Indies Federation never gathered momentum is that its protagonists perpetuated the regional tradition of practising government – official measures adopted on high – with little or no reference to politics – community initiative
exercised from below. Such is the argument – ultimately.
That there is a distinction to be drawn between government and politics is alien to West Indian idiom even thirty five years later. When we say politics, more often than not what we mean is government. Particularly (but not only) the educated elites see little virtue in private organisation for public purpose, except where conquest of the State is immediately and directly involved. For reasons firmly rooted in Caribbean history, office is taken to be virtually synonymous with power. The politics tends therefore to be centred excessively on elections. Everything – including the promotion of popular participation - seems to be hitched to the campaign machine and to the Governments or would-be Governments for which that machine has come, under the conditions of democracy and independence, to serve as vehicle.
A related phenomenon is that both government and politics are predicated on notions of an essentially impotent public, incapable of advancing on its own without the intervention of messianic leaders, correspondingly omnipotent for being fit to govern, bringing deliverance to the weak and the lame, the dispossesed and the disadvantaged. In the fifty years since elections under Adult Suffrage created the opportunity to replace the Crown Colony governors by home-grown chief executives, the phenomenon of Doctor
Politics has been copiously experienced throughout the West Indies.
The associated tradition of government from above – without politics from below - can perhaps be most fruitfully studied in the context of the regional movement. In the twenty-five years since the Caribbean Community was founded by the Treaty of Chaguaramas, nowhere has the issue of non-implementation of high level decision assumed larger proportions. What has become patent is that even repeated commitment given by Heads of Government is so much waste paper when no political machinery exists for joining the outcomes of expert negotiation to the practical concerns of the general public.
To my knowledge, the point has not been researched, but on how many occasions have CARICOM concerns been voiced in public? Or in the Parliaments? Or at the level of the parties in any CARICOM country? Policy – making in the West Indies has scarcely anywhere acquired any political drivers. Policy – making on regional questions is therefore merely the limiting case where there is now no illusion. It is this tradition which dates from the days of the West Indies Federation.
The purpose of this brief paper is to recall and to emphasize this absence, this refusal, of politics as the predominant failing and proximate cause of the breakup in 1962 of the young West Indies nation. The aim, however, is not to indict. It is to suggest that that outcome very possibly could not be escaped and to suggest reasons. Given the origins and the experience of West Indian society and the selection of “island of origin” as the chief among many bases of ethnic solidarity – race, colour, class, language, religion; given the dynamics of self-determination before Independence, particularly the terms on which the leadership was selected for its fitness to rule; and given the relationship which quickly settled between trades unions and political parties, almost immediately after the social revolution of the 1930’s on which Arthur Lewis reported; the contradictions were simply too much to contain.
It is the failure to take stock of this shattering experience – and of its grounding inculture and history – which may have permitted CARIFTA and CARICOM to carry on in much the same way as the Federation, devoting massive energies to the formulation of expert programmes with no popular backing – and with much the same results. Perhaps, precisely on account of the failure of the politics; political integration has since been taboo. The West Indian Commission came back to it knowingly, but of course only indirectly. Both its proposal for the Caribbean Community to promote the Association of Caribbean States and its advocacy of a single currency, compel a consideration of some innovative new form of closer political association.
In the Eighth Adlith Brown Memorial Lecture, Havelock Brewster recognises this.
Brewster himself has made proposal for a new West Indian Commonwealth, employing an “evolving, indigenous concept” of nationhood and statehood, suitably elastic. It cannot but exercise a claim on our attention. He is not enchanted by the small size argument which sees CARICOM in terms of critical mass for good government and as attractive investment and market space. For him, the best, the unique, most lasting rationale for drawing closer is cultural identity and kinship – especially in these days when there seems to be a strong, worldwide tendency toward racial and cultural identity.
Of course, there is no wild dismissal of the pragmatic pursuit of economic opportunities. On the economic side, Brewster advocates a few exciting “institutional alternatives”, involving the development of a more organized effortto stimulate collaborative measures among the actors themselves.” He has in mind, national associations of manufacturing, commercial banking, tourism and other services enterprises getting together to work out collaborative programmes. Experts would also have their place as responsible national officials undertake regular, in-depth, consultations and research on macroeconomic and exchange rate policy and national and regional policy assessment and outlook analysis.
Itwas precisely such cross fertilization at the level of real interests which what was lacking in the era of the West Indies Federation and which allowed the contest to conquer and control the State – in Jamaica first and then everywhere else – to be blown out of proportion and to torpedo the structure before it acquired the wisdom to adapt to the diverse needs of the constituent island civilizations. Above all else, the appropriate fertilization was lacking at the level of the trades unions, the political parties and the community groups and people’s associations. Does this not imply a sifting of the experience in preparation for a fresh start to which everything points so many decades
later?
II
“The favourite, but not invariable scapegoat, was the United Kingdom. Jamaicans also blamed Trinidad and the federal government. Trinidadians blamed Sir Grantley, Jamaica and the Colonial Office. The small islands blamed all three, but especially the largest two territories. The federal government blamed Britain, Jamaica, and Trinidad. Before the Federation’s collapse, its opponents criticized the United Kingdom for encouraging union in the first place. When Jamaica and Trinidad opted for withdrawal, its supporters attacked Britain for allowing them to secede”.
– Elizabeth Wallace
Some say concept. A centralizer’s project with which Port of Spain scared Kingston and those used only to sleeping in Sligoville. Hence, the emasculated Federation with which Manley countered at the Lancaster House Conference in June 1961, enabling Bustamante to lampoon the Federation as a useless luxury and embittering Eric Williams in the bargain.
Others say campaign. Manley never explained anything until the last three months. And then it was practically he alone – so much anti-Federal sentiment was there among his colleagues in the PNP. Besides, he did not throw his weight fully behind it; he separated the unpopular issue from all the others and called a referendum, rather than a general election. If he lost, he said, he would accept it, giving the impression it would be no great
defeat. Still others say the dramatis personae: austere intellectual bringing chilly logic and high ideals, pitted against humourous demagogue happy to exploiting anxiety, insularity, cupidity… The Secretary of State, Maudling, saw an awkward situation involving the principles as much as the personalities. Both Dr Williams and Prime Minister Adams, daggers drawn, perceived imperial intrigue from their different angles of vision, while Premier Errol Barrow could only conclude that the federation had been “unfederateable.”
Arthur Lewis did not think the politicians too predisposed to give and take; he was not so sure the stumbling block lay in the problems. CLR James was sure; they were devoid of programme and consideration for the people. They met among themselves to arrange what their government would get and what they would lose. In the end, the historian concludes, the economic interest of the large triumphed over the ideal West Indian unity. The Federation had sprung “primarily from anti-colonial sentiment rather than from any positive desire for unity. Its failure resulted from a variety of causes: inadequate finances, uneven economic and political development in the constituent units, the clashing personalities of the chief architects, and above all from a lack of any positive fellow feeling among its scattered peoples”.
These are the orthodox interpretations. And yet, there are also the orthodox qualifications: West Indians were in charge; they could have made the Constitution work or they could have amended it without parting company, had “an early and intelligent attempt” been made to develop an informed opinion. From this point of view, the most notable feature of the time was that, both before and after the Referendum of September 1961, the almost automatic response of the actors was to appeal to London – repeatedly Mr. Manley, Sir Grantley, some leaders of the Little Eight. In Port of Spain, Dr Williams, for his part, declined to allow the legislature to debate what stand Trinidad and Tobago would take. Instead he promised that, after the impending general election, he would hold a series of meetings to educate the public on the issues involved. Curious as was this promise, it was never fulfilled.
The issue here is the unstated but still almost explicit premise of participation by the public, only when invited. The sum of it is that the collapse of the Federation was clearly a political failure but one involving the led as much as the leaders. Both somehow, managed to eschew every form of private and community initiative that in this matter could have made a difference to public purpose. Two region-wide parties existed. With only one highly staged exception, neither in the crisis exhibited any cross-border movement.
Ultimately, it cannot even be said that the case of the West Indies was not decided on its merits. Or that insularity triumphed. Or, as James put it, that the leaders “disgraced the West Indian people.” We might form a judgment from the newspapers or from the calypsonian , or even from the intra-party silence and the absolute stasis among the rank and file; but we are in no position to say how far the public supported or refused to support the actions whether of Government or Opposition. What we are forced to reckon with is the almost total absence of politics in the West Indies when it is not a matter of campaigning for a candidate, or of providing the cannon fodder for government’s efforts and endeavours.
III
The main task which the Dominica conference [1932] set itself was the elaboration of a West Indian constitution, on the two major foundations of federation and full elective control. All went well until the question of the franchise was raised, the representative of Trinidad leading demand for adult suffrage. On this there was no agreement, and eventually the conference adopted a compromise solution permitting each colony to settle its own franchise qualifications. It was clear that many of the leaders of West Indian politics were unsympathetic to the aspirations of the working classes.
The real significance of the revolution of 1935-1938, is that such narrow political thought has faded into insignificance. The major issues discussed today no longer revive round the aspirations of the middle; classes, but are set by working class demands. Federation and elective control are still in the forefront, but they are now desired in the interest of the masses, and side by side with them are new issues….
….Focusing all this new spirit is the British Guiana and West Indian Labour Congress, newly established as a clearing house for labour opinion. Its inaugural meeting was held in British Guiana in June 1938 … but on the announcement of a Royal commission a second meeting was summoned for November 1938 in Trinidad, and delegates invited from labour organizations in every colony.
It is a far cry from the Dominica conference of 1932, to the Trinidad congress of 1938 ……federation and full elective control figured prominently in the resolutions, but even more attention was devoted to the demands for adult suffrage, dismemberment plantations and creation of a cooperative peasantry, nationalization of the sugar factories and public utilities, provision of old age pensions, health and unemployment insurance, and reformed industrial legislation. This was essentially a Labour Congress. It is mainly on the development of this united labour movement that future progress in the West Indies depends.
One other important political issue is that of Federation. The demand for it is based on two sets of reasons, firstly, West Indian national aspirations, which are a powerful force in its favour; and secondly economy. The latter argument has been accepted by most official reports since 1897, and has long been obvious to people themselves….
What has stood in the way of federation is not the sea; that is no obstacle in these days of aeroplanes and wireless telephone. The real stumbling block has been the opposition of small local potentates, fearful that their voices, all powerful in a small island,
will be unheard in a large federation.
-Arthur Lewis, April 1939
Do we not have to wonder how the failure to make a diagnosis about the outcome of the Federal initiative of the post World War I period, one which emphasizes the role of politics – as culture – over and above that even of principles and personalities – as demons, must have served to influence what we have able to accomplish in the three and half decades since 1962, the threshold year of political Independence? Not the least on account of the role played by the educated elites (middle classes?) in the transition, then
and now, both as actors and as validators of action, certain questions are mandatory. To what extent has the existence of the UWImade any instrumental difference?
Any such enquiry would clearly be required to go beyond the role played by Mona in 1961 as “the eleventh State of the realm” and by the then Vice-Chancellor, as expert adviser to the Prime Minister in Port of Spain, as much in his personal, as in his professional and official capacities. As early as April 1939, in his Fabien Pamphlet, ‘Labour In The West Indies’, Arthur Lewis can now be seen to have laid crucial planks for the subsequent Federal idea with its emphasis on radical self-determination to be expressed in vigorous government in the interest of the many, after constitution reform, and through a thrust towards “the development of local industries”, all to be attempted with British help, not only financial.
The Vice Chancellor’s earlier perception of the issues in 1939 warns us how complex is the influence of role and of class and station on our perception of the necessary and the possible. In what sense was Lewis’ 1939 view a representative one? How did it evolve over 25 years? In what sense was it representative in 1961? Ultimately, how might it have influenced the regime of university education established at Mona and on the other campuses – including the postures of sundry dissenting elites, some trading in victimhood? There is copious statement and action still to be examined in the face of an ex-post tendency to re-write history, as if all the instruments on campus made or did not make a beautiful chorus.
What can we make of the work – pedagogy, epistemology, organization – in history, the humanities, the social sciences and everything else – in relation to the requirements of the politics we had, or did not have, at the crucial moment in the early 1960s? Why is the region not producing anything even resembling a regional political involved in private endeavour for public purpose and oblivious of elections? Or, is this the party here assembled today?
Here again, the focus cannot usefully be recrimination or indictment. It can only be estimate and judgment of the impact of the priorities and the attitudes we adopted then, on the subsequent insularisation and sterilisation of the political thrust from below – and with that, the stunting of the initiative towards regional integration at the level mostly of repeated declaration by wise men and experts, but scarcely ever translating into effective implementation.
Is there any place in the West Indies, even now, where these are priority issues? Or is the focus not still on the failure not of the politics from below but of the politicians which is to say the government leaders from above and on high? Which, if it is, would merely confirm the cultural origins of the impasse – both then and now. These questions are posed here only in passing.
Ultimately, they are the most compelling of the questions, for the simple reason that in so many dimensions the CARICOM Community, as we have put it together, is manifestly unviable in the world of today.
IV
For the rest, I wish simply to suggest that the above can be welded together by invoking the dynamics of history and culture. The stunting of the politics is explained by the two long standing West Indian traditions of resistance which fused in the period following the social revolution of the 1930s, graphically described and welcomed by Arthur Lewis. The upheaval came from below. Inevitably the legitimation, described by Norman Manley himself as “fitness to rule,” was supplied from above. Given the balance of forces after Emancipation, as indeed before it, both ingredients were indispensable to our advance.
Not even in Jamaica or Barbados did either culture bring an experience of sustained and responsible participation, of professional, permanent and private organisation for public purpose. In the politics, how could any but the Crown Colony model of governor domination prevail – now with elections providing a periodic legitimation from inside and below? The Doctor Politics was therefore subscribed to as much from below, as from above. The Unions willingly supplied the rank and file to the parties. Jamaica perhaps, is merely the best of the examples. The workers exchanged their support for the validity of the representation permitting the freedom of the top-down culture to the government leaders. And there were compensations in economic policies which shared the fruits of booming staple export earnings between the new aristocracy of organized labour and the old aristocracy of merchants and traders.
For its part, the sociology furnished the whole scheme with solid undergirdings. The pattern of forced migration and of ineluctable interculturation – creolisation, douglarisation and permanent betweenity – necessarily placed a premium on automatic solidarity. The greater the challenge of identity and of space for selfhood, the more insistent the affirmation of the ethnic. That way, both Africa and Europe had been created here in Caribbean America setting the stage for a tribalism – an automaticity of solidarity – as the cardinal principal of association, mobilisation and even organisation too, if that ever took place.
The individual did not adhere; he or she belonged as much by self ascription as by other ascription. The exclusiveness of military, proprietary, and of crown colony government and the business organisation of the colony of exploition merely underpinned this culture. The ethnic basis of cleavage and of solidarity could be race, class, colour, religion, language or place of origin. Achievement, performance and individual character were so immaterial to the rankings issued by the culture as a whole, it could only be a case of any port in a storm.
The assertion of the island civilization as the transcendent value should therefore have been expected particularly at moments of crisis. Had it been anticipated, other solidarities could very possibly have been urged precisely because local potentates had emerged as stumbling blocks. In the event, there was no vehicle available and in 1961 there scarcely could be. The Unions had been pledged to the parties. If Jamaica had not demurred, sooner or later Trinidad or another island might have. Guyana had already distanced herself, on whatever pretext. In that sense. Errol Barrow was probably right: perhaps the Federation had not been ‘federateable’ at that moment. The conditions were not assembled.
In view of what Brewster has concluded about CARICOM, the question is whether we have not come full circle. Are the conditions not now assembled – above all, in Jamaica? It may well be that an altogether fresh and more imaginative initiative is needed now with a view to establishing a West Indian Commonwealth – perhaps, in some ways, even a CARIFORUM Commonwealth. There is a powerful case for the Caribbean to choose to heighten its own strategic value. We can do that now by promoting the Lewis Engine of Growth Strategy as an alternative to the American globalization.
Correspondingly we could go slow on this futile venture into Latin America and look more spiritedly towards the Indian Ocean for our most intimate linkages. With the vision and the courage such a hand could be played. To think it through would be the first bold stroke in the cause of a new awakening. Much would depend on the elements we have already put in place at, and from, the UWI these last 50 years.