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| Prime Minister Dr Ralph Gonsalves (pictured above) said, the countries of the OECS - Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Montserrat, St Kitts and Nevis, Anguilla and the British Virgin Islands - have forged ahead with strengthening their ties, the latest effort being a proposed OECS Economic Union. (Photo: iisd.ca) | |
KINGSTOWN, St Vincent, June 18, 2008 - One of the Caribbean Community's (CARICOM) heads of government has given that regional body a tongue lashing for its ineffectiveness and failure to move forward with the integration process, and has urged the Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS), of which he is also part, to ensure it does not go down the same road.
St Vincent and the Grenadines Prime Minister Dr Ralph Gonsalves, addressing an OECS consultation on moving towards establishing an economic union of the sub-regional grouping, had some harsh words for the 15-member CARICOM which he suggested had little chance of meaningfully furthering its integration in the near future.
Mr Gonsalves said he was highly doubtful of the member countries coming together to achieve either a common monetary policy or common currency, as aimed by the Single Economy aspect of the CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME).
"You have a ramshackle, political administrative apparatus in CARICOM. It doesn't even suit properly the functional arrangements in health, in education and the like, and in foreign policy, much less to use the same arrangements - institutional, administrative, political arrangements; governance arrangements - for a Single Market and a Single Economy," he said.
The St Vincent leader pointed to political and social factors in particular CARICOM states contributing to the body's inability to move beyond being just a group of sovereign states.
"The politics of a limited regional engagement in Jamaica, shackled by the ghosts from the federal referendum; the politics of ethnicity in Trinidad and Tobago and Guyana; a mistaken sense of uniqueness, specialness and separation among the large sections of the Barbadian populace; the peculiar distinctiveness of Haiti and Suriname; and the cultivated aloofness from the regional enterprise by the Bahamas, are destined in the foreseeable future to keep CARICOM as a community of sovereign states in which several of its member states jealously guard a vaunted and pristine sovereignty," he said.
On the other hand, Mr Gonsalves said, the countries of the OECS - Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St Lucia, St Vincent and the Grenadines, Montserrat, St Kitts and Nevis, Anguilla and the British Virgin Islands - have forged ahead with strengthening their ties, the latest effort being a proposed OECS Economic Union.
But he has warned that the OECS could go down the same road as CARICOM if it does not guard against some of the factors which can derail the integration process.
"Island chauvinism, a potential overreach by regional bureaucrats and the petty politics of village states are the debilitating interlopers which threaten to undermine the efficacy of the proposed economic union enterprise and its necessary and consequentially altered political superstructure," he said.
But even as he criticised the CARICOM body, the St Vincent leader called on OECS states to continue working on the "very special political, economic and social relationships" which they have with three of the Community's member countries - Barbados, Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago.
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