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187 Conclusion The exploration of the independence experience of St. Lucia reveals that much of the politics revolved around tensions between the local demand for sustaining the economic and political objectives that had given rise to nationalism, on the one hand, and the imperative of adjustment to the largely external demands for adjustment of neoliberal capitalist hegemony, on the other. Central to the earliest impulse for national self-determination had been the issue of economic development and viability and the questions of internal political democracy beyond the historical experience of colonialism. These aspirations were largely seen in the politics of working-class nationalism in the 1950s and in the later expression of a reformist independence project in the 1960s. However, the prenationalist historical experience, coupled with the limitations of economic size, led to the articulation of a view of tentative anticolonialism and limited sovereignty as the dominant expression of nationalist aspirations in St. Lucia. This was reflected in the anxieties involved in transcending the constitutional status of Associated Statehood. It was also reflected in John Compton’s internal economic policy, which was hostile to the interventionist state and which was geared toward facilitating the activities of external capital as a basis for economic development. It was also seen in Compton’s narrow understanding of foreign policy, which essentially was reduced to retaining the friendship of the former colonial power and the dominant Western capitalist powers. This narrowly defined understanding of postcolonial existentialism was rendered unworkable by the emergence of a global neoliberal order, which demanded further adjustments of the postcolonial state and a further narrowing of postcolonial possibilities. In this work, the origins of the emergence of the neoliberal order have been located in a period commensurate with the collapse of the Bretton Woods order in the mid-1970s. This fundamentally challenged the global structures, ideologies, and political-economic relations that had shaped the assumptions of the independence project and produced sharp tensions between the juridical and real powers of the state, and between internal economic and political objectives and external economic relations. An ideological perspective that was hostile to a radical framework of national sovereignty was therefore Conclusion 188 dominant. This reality, to a large extent, explains the political economy of St. Lucia in the 1970s and 1980s. The nationalist politics in St. Lucia in this period, in contrast to those of Jamaica, Guyana, and Grenada, was marked by the absence of a project of radical internal reform, and even of the mild anticolonial reformism evident in states such as Barbados and Trinidad and Tobago. This pattern was consolidated by the retreat of the St. Lucian Left in the period following the U.S. invasion of Grenada in 1983. The defeat of the Left defined the independence project in St. Lucia in the 1980s, and the politics of the period was one in which the ideology of global neoliberalism became further entrenched. In practical terms, this was reflected in the reality of U.S. political, economic, military, and ideological hegemony in the region. In this context, Compton’s notion of independent statehood enjoyed hegemonic status. This was also facilitated by St. Lucia’s economic success due to a favorable international economic environment within which the banana economy was able to flourish. However, by the late 1980s the first challenges to Compton’s deliberately carved notion of limited sovereignty began to manifest themselves, due largely to the political shifts in the global environment associated with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the Cold War. The developments surrounding this reality were largely viewed within the Caribbean region as resulting in a process of marginalization. Within this context, the economic assumptions upon which the legitimacy of the “narrow” independence framework was based were rendered unsustainable. The response among the Organization of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) countries to these developments was to pursue a project of political unification, and an attempt was made to broaden the concept of St. Lucian sovereignty to include a subregional focus. In short, a stronger basis for the viability of St. Lucian sovereign statehood was being sought as a response to the process of marginalization . In the main, however, the narrow framework of sovereignty continued to shape both the external and internal relations of St. Lucia in this period. This partly accounts for the failure of the United Workers’ Party (UWP) government to seek the necessary legislative instruments that would have made OECS political union a reality. The process of “deepening globalization” of the...

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