Governance in the Non-Independent Caribbean: Challenges and Opportunities in the Twenty-First Century (review)

Studies on the economic and political future of the Caribbean point in multiple directions, but most of them involve a well known repertoire of policy recommendations. These typically include improved economic ties with the United States and Europe (basically market access through trade and increased foreign direct investment); completion of the single market and economy project (CSME); and swift inter-state policy coordination to tackle problems like violence, crime, and natural disasters. More nuanced and specialized readings also address the need to reform political institutions (regional and national), improvements in citizen representation, state capabilities, and corruption. In almost all these instances, the “Caribbean” consists of member states of CARICOM or, at best, members of the CARIFORUM, both instances in which deliberations of these pressing matters usually take place.

Governance in the Non-Independent Caribbean reminds us of the pending agenda, and pressing importance, of the various territories in the region without national sovereignty. The book brings together a variety of analytical tools and perspectives—from political science, economics, history, and anthropology—to describe contemporary developments in these territories, while highlighting the various ways in which they have attempted to adapt to a changing political and economic landscape. While invariably subject to complicated relationships with metropolises and with their neighbors, the non-independent Caribbean territories in the book do not appear as passive recipients of policy prescriptions from outside sources, but rather as conflicted and divided entities struggling with complex issues. Their dilemmas are compounded by the quirks of their relationships with outside powers, and the need to adapt these old relationships to new concerns.

The book revisits the traditional question of political status of the non-independent territories of the Caribbean and examines some political developments in the last decade, such as the implosion of the Netherlands Antilles. From this platform, the volume tackles two broad challenges for these territories: the meaning of economic development in a globalized economy, and the multifaceted role of migration in defining political attitudes and agendas both in the territories and the metropolises. This “globalized” approach to the question of the non-independent Caribbean is rounded up with an introduction by noted Caribbeanist scholar Paul Sutton that synthesizes the political and intellectual debate on decolonization and self-governance during the past several decades, and a final section that looks at a metropolitan reaction as well as the travails of other non-independent entities such as Gibraltar and the Falklands.

The question of governance contained in the title figures prominently in the volume, and it is perhaps its biggest contribution to the debate. For a long time the political project in the independent and the non-independent Caribbean—in fact, the center of the Caribbean’s relationship to the broader international system—consisted of finding a solution to the puzzle of self determination and sovereignty. Yet self determination in the Caribbean is not so much a matter of sovereignty anymore (was it ever just that?) as it is a question of governance, specifically the quality of democratic governance, that is posited throughout this book.

Many public figures and intellectuals in the Caribbean remain fixated on Westphalian political principles that seem to fly in the face of the democratic desires of populations in the non-independent Caribbean who repeatedly validate their political status, not to mention the realities of economic circumstances in the region, including the independent Caribbean. Some of the most pressing problems in the region—crime, environmental management—do not recognize sovereign limits. The largest economy of the Caribbean, larger in fact than Cuba’s and that all of CARICOM’s, whose foreign trade volume is larger than the entire region, is a non-independent territory—Puerto Rico. It would seem that to maximize the potential of a single market and economy in the Caribbean (meaning CARICOM) some type of substantive relationship with this economy is necessary. And...