Vexed Bermoothes

The PLP’s marketing of independence avoids the plain facts that minuscule countries have a hard time going it alone.  Local enthusiasts wishfully say that Caricom solidarity or some new island federation might overcome that size disadvantage.

The local media has not covered the radical moves that some island states in the Caribbean are currently proposing to overcome “the problems of small.”  This perhaps reflects Bermudians’ low and declining interest in independence, and how little we have in common economically with most Caribbean countries.

Here’s what’s up:

• Caricom is under scrutiny for becoming increasingly irrelevant as “a ramshackle political-administrative apparatus” that allows “several of its member states to jealously guard their vaunted and pristine sovereignty” whenever regional cooperation or unification is pushed.  Well, duh.  In short, Caricom achieves little.
• In frustration, new alignments are occurring on the fly. In one failed move, Grenada proposed to make itself a effective colony of Trinidad & Tobago.
• Another move championed by T&T’s Prime Minister Patrick Manning would see a group of island states commit themselves to economic union by 2011 and complete political union by 2013.  Despite the rushed timetable, the prime ministers of Grenada, St Lucia, and St Vincent & the Grenadines have already joined in signing a Memorandum of Understanding to that end.

The move is a partial resurrection of the 1958 West Indian Federation, which was established by the British Caribbean Federation Act with the aim of executing a political union among Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Jamaica (which included the Cayman Islands and the Turks & Caicos Islands as dependencies), Montserrat, Saint Christopher-Nevis-Anguilla (present day Saint Kitts and Nevis and Anguilla), Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and T&T.  Bermuda and others opted not to join because they believed that their future lay with association with North America.

The Federation fell apart in 1962 when Jamaica and later T&T withdrew. Their reasons for withdrawing from the Federation included the strain of geographic diversity, discontent that their representation in the Federal Parliament was disproportionate to their population size and economic weight, and the belief that the smaller islands were draining their wealth.

These reasons remain a major obstacle explaining why several countries, including Jamaica, Belize and Surinam, are explicitly rejecting the current new union.  It is also attracting criticism in other circles.  Political journalist Ricky Singh commented “Needless to say, none of the quartet that commendably favours regional political unity is known to have a national mandate to pursue political union in any form – confederation, federation, unitary state or else,” he said.

My advice to Bermuda and the PLP (for whom these developments must be surely tempting):  stay out of it.  Many members of our community treasure our cultural and family links to the Caribbean.  But there’s little benefit to us economically to get involved in a Caribbean federation.