The Political Economy of Caribbean Development

M. Bishop

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137316103
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Trade & Tariffs
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Studies of the global political economy have rarely engaged with development in the Caribbean, the thought of its indigenous intellectuals, or the non-sovereign territories of the region. Matthew Bishop compares the development of the independent English-speaking islands of St Lucia and St Vincent and their non-sovereign French neighbours, Martinique and Guadeloupe. By explaining how distinctive patterns of British and French colonialism and decolonisation came to bear on them, he investigates how very different patterns of development have subsequently ensued, often with startling consequences in this era of globalization and crisis. By engaging with the empirical reality of the Caribbean, his study sheds light on a range of wider debates relating to development, indigenous thought, post-colonial sovereignty, small states, and the contemporary evolution of the global political economy.

1

Introduction

Père Labat, in a lyrical passage of his Nouveau Voyage aux Iles d’Amérique (1722) used the beauty of the Caribbean belle negresse to support his grave plea for the rhythm of history which, as he saw it, held all of the islands together in a common destiny. “I have travelled everywhere in your sea of the Caribbean,” he wrote, “… from Haiti to Barbados, to Martinique and Guadeloupe, and I know what I am speaking about … You are all together, in the same boat, sailing on the same uncertain sea … citizenship and race unimportant, feeble little labels compared to the message that my spirit brings to me: that of the position of and predicament which History has imposed upon you … It is no accident that the sea which separates your lands makes no difference to the rhythm of your body”. That splendid invocation, today no less than in Père Labat’s eighteenth century, remains the ultimate raison d’être of the West Indian scene.

Gordon K. Lewis, The Growth of the Modern West Indies, 1968

The Caribbean all too rarely features in studies of International Political Economy (IPE). Even when it does, the focus is usually upon the larger countries or the region as a whole is cast in a supporting role in a seemingly more exciting global saga, such as that pertaining to multilateral trade politics. The tiny island microstates in the eastern archipelago, especially, seldom enjoy the lead in their own story (although for two recent exceptions, see Vlcek 2008; Cooper 2011). Moreover, the non-independent Caribbean, which comprises a diverse range of British, Dutch, French, and even American, territories, is even more persistently ignored. These are significant oversights from a discipline with ‘global’ pretensions. This is especially so given that, until comparatively recently, this region was the beating heart of what we now call the Global Political Economy (GPE). ‘King Sugar’, and the wealth that it produced on the back of West Indian slave labour was the commodity that facilitated the growth and development of the industrial West, and these tiny islands held an importance that appears incomprehensible today (Williams 1970, 1980). In 1763, at the end of the Seven Years War, France was prepared to cede the whole of Canada (including Québec) and the American mainland east of the Mississippi River for just the island of Guadeloupe, and the riches that sugar and slaves could provide. And Guadeloupe was far from being the most productive sugar island. This dubious accolade was held by St Domingue (now Haiti) and then Jamaica. Sugar, a commodity which was as important to the 18^th Century economy as hydrocarbons are today, has also tended to be overlooked in much of the IPE canon (see Richardson 2009).

The core agenda of this book is an attempt to redress some of these imbalances by shedding light on the political economy of four of the smallest territories in the Eastern Caribbean. It does this in a comparative fashion: by examining two independent, Anglophone microstates, namely St Lucia and St Vincent and the Grenadines; and two formally-dependent, French Départements d’Outre-Mer (DOM), Martinique and Guadeloupe.¹ These territories are contiguous within the chain of islands that comprise the Eastern Caribbean. Yet history has left deep and abiding scars, so much so that, since the post-war era of decolonisation, their development has diverged dramatically. The Anglophone islands are today relatively poor yet independent states, operating on their own on the choppy seas of globalisation with limited resources; the Francophone islands, by contrast, enjoy a far higher material standard of living but have sacrificed their political independence in favour of ‘decolonisation by integration’.² Beyond this simple bifurcation – independent/poorer versus dependent/richer – a whole range of complex dependencies, trade-offs and tensions exist in both models, and, indeed, between the specific islands themselves. In short, very different patterns of British and French colonialism, together with their idiosyncratic approaches to decolonisation, have produced distinctive, diverse and even unique kinds of development in territories which sit just a few miles apart from each other. It is the exploration of these phenomena that provides our central empirical focus.

The significance of the study

Theoretically, the book seeks to contribute to a number of different, yet linked, debates. One of these, which essentially underpins all of the others, concerns how we understand the evolution of the contemporary GPE. This is reflected in two fresh developments. The first is the tendency on the part of some thinkers to suggest that (critical) IPE should seek to not only address ‘big’ phenomena, but should also explore the smaller, ‘everyday’ spaces where global processes of change are constituted, shaped and reconstituted (Hobson and Seabrooke 2007). The second is the rediscovery of small states specifically within the discipline; something which is a comparatively recent, and timely occurrence (see Cooper and Shaw 2009b; Lee and Smith 2010; Bishop 2012). The territories with which we are concerned here are not only small, but they are tiny, and two of them – Martinique and Guadeloupe – are not even states as such. Consequently, we can learn much about global processes of change by shining a light on these hitherto relatively neglected corners of the world.

If the above is fundamentally an ontological proposition, it also has an epistemological counterpart. Increasingly, thinkers are seeking to complement the staple fodder of IPE with greater contextual analysis in order to understand how disparate processes of global change are producing divergent outcomes in different places. As James Copestake (2010: 709) has recently argued, the global crisis ‘has brought some classical political economy themes back to centre stage’. However, these have not yet been systematically grounded. Consequently, he suggests, ‘the challenge remains to relate these themes to diverse contexts’. In this book, we seek to illustrate how the ways in which global processes of change play out are far from preordained. Specifically, not only have global shifts – notably patterns of history and, more recently, globalisation and then the global financial crisis – structured the parameters of change in the Eastern Caribbean, but these societies are each responding in distinctive ways. Therefore, it is not just the case that the character and quality of development is very different in the four territories, but also that the key agents within them are effecting interesting and often original strategies and responses to global change. Or, put another way, these agents are embedded within a given structural context, and that context is, to a significant extent, laid down by history. But equally, however limited the room for manoeuvre – and, in much of the Caribbean, it is very limited indeed – key actors are charting interesting courses of action in order to produce varying kinds of development. In contrast to analyses which often portray diminutive Caribbean states and societies as merciless victims of external forces beyond their control, this study places them at the centre of their own developmental narrative.

Another theoretical contribution relates to debates about development themselves. We forsake the rather teleological and often deterministic view of development as seen through the narrow lens of the formal post-1945 ‘development project’, and, moreover, as something which is of concern only to so-called ‘developing’ countries. Rather, the study draws on – and situates itself within – an emerging trend in critical IPE which seeks to universalise the problem of development as something which is of interest to all societies, however rich or poor they may be. This recognises development as something which occurs in tandem with – and often as a reaction to – the complex evolution of the GPE, and which is dynamic, contingent, and, as suggested above, driven by purposeful actors within a given structural context. By conceiving of development in this way, we aim to make a contribution – however small – to the ongoing project of rescuing the study of development from its ‘ghetto’ in formal ‘development studies’ and re-grounding it more squarely within political economy (see Payne 2004, 2005; Payne and Phillips 2010). Comparative studies of development, moreover, can tell us much about how similar processes of change can produce different outcomes. As Graham Harrison (2004: 155–156) has noted, this is the kind of research agenda which does – and should – distinguish studies of development today, because ‘development is ultimately a relational concept’, and, as such, ‘makes no sense unless it is operationalised comparatively’.

Finally, the book seeks to add to the literature on the Caribbean itself. One way in which it does this is, indeed, comparative; most of the extant work on West Indian political economy and development generally reflects the insularity of the wider region. That is to say, the divisions that were put in place by the former major European colonial powers – Britain, France, Spain and The Netherlands – are still reflected in debates which often fail to traverse these boundaries. A second issue is that, increasingly – and for reasons that we discuss in Chapter 3 – too much of the available literature today has a distinctly technical flavour, rather than a substantive academic one. We aim to offer a counterpoint to this, by offering the kind of theoretical depth to a Caribbean study which is all too often lacking in the contemporary era. A third contribution involves overcoming the general paucity of detailed, controlled analyses of development in the region. One of the most frustrating things from the point of the view of the researcher is the way in which much (again, technical) work actually conflates ‘Latin America and the Caribbean’ and, in fact, focuses almost exclusively on the former to the detriment of the latter.³ Even when it does focus on the Caribbean specifically, it nearly always ignores the smaller islands, and takes even less interest in the non-independent territories. Most critically, perhaps, this book seeks to show how, for many years, both the Anglophone and Francophone parts of the region enjoyed their own vibrant development debate. Students of IPE may not realise this today, but in the 1960s and 1970s, and particularly in the University of the West Indies (UWI), there existed an effervescent strain of an authentically West Indian political economy which, aside from a dwindling band of noble adherents, has now been all but lost. This is tragic. The indigenous insights of Caribbean intellectuals from this time still have much to say about a contemporary development predicament which, in many respects, is more troubling than at any time in the recent past (Girvan 2010a, 2010b). Moreover, IPE has much to learn from a cadre of thinkers who were ‘doing’ international political economy, with real reference to – and significance for – the region of the world in which they were located, for some time before the formalisation of the discipline in the West. The excavation of these theoretical roots can add great richness and depth to the critical IPE project more broadly.

Anchoring the comparative method: La carpe et le lapin

On commencing the research, an academic who had spent a lot of time working on the French Caribbean early in her career, gave the following warning: comparing the development of islands in the French and English-speaking Caribbean is like trying to weigh up the differences between la carpe et le lapin. This expression, which is the French equivalent of ‘fish and fowl’, but directly translated, actually means ‘carp and rabbit’, provides an unexpectedly shrewd insight into the rationale underpinning the study. The two pairs of islands are, indeed, very different, but not for the reasons that we might initially suspect. It is not the case that St Lucia and St Vincent are simply fish whilst Martinique and Guadeloupe are fowl. Rather, as with the metaphors ‘fish and fowl’ on the one hand, and ‘carpe et lapin’ on the other, they signify broadly the same thing, but when translated literally they emerge exhibiting a very particular British or French character. Or, put another way, the political economy of these islands is actually fundamentally the same in many ways, yet the peculiar characteristics that distinguish them from each other derive from their respective experiences of British and French colonialism. Today, although the islands share many essential similarities, the way these manifest themselves embodies a discernible British or French flavour.

These ideas together highlight what the study is all about. St Lucia, St Vincent, Martinique and Guadeloupe – and, by implication, most of the wider Caribbean – have all undergone a broadly analogous process of European colonialism and decolonisation. They share a range of intrinsic geographical and natural characteristics. And they are all societies constructed de novo out of the twin processes of European capitalist expansion and African slavery (Lewis 2004). However, when these processes are translated into either French or English, that which emerges is similar in so many fundamental ways, yet it is also profoundly different.

This provides the point of departure for our analysis. Practically-speaking, at first glance, the levels of development that obtain today in Martinique and Guadeloupe vis-à-vis those of St Lucia and St Vincent appear wildly divergent. But if we scratch beneath the surface a whole range of similarities, differences, contradictions and paradoxes emerge, providing the impetus for the chapters which follow. Throughout this book, we will compare and contrast the formal dependence of the French islands with the functional dependence of their Anglophone neighbours. Empirically, this will take the form, essentially, of an audit, which, by the time we reach the end, will have weighed up the implications of these differences, and also illustrated how similar – yet differently flavoured – historical processes can come to bear so differently upon such comparable, contiguous places.

The structure of the book

The analysis which follows this introduction takes place in three parts. Part I will set the scene, and outline the key historical processes which have come to bear on the structural context in which development today takes place, before moving on to an agency-based conception of what can actually be said to constitute that ‘development’. Part II will then apply the resultant framework to a comparative empirical analysis of the political economies of the four territories. Finally, Part III will draw together the key themes and advance our conclusions.

Part I: Enduring Structures, Understanding Agency

Chapter 2 sketches the historical context. By tracing, on the one hand, the history of St Lucia, St Vincent and the broader Anglophone Caribbean, and, on the other, that of Martinique, Guadeloupe, and, likewise, the wider Francophone Caribbean, the chapter illustrates how varying patterns of British and French colonialism and decolonisation have produced the contemporary structural context in which development takes place. Chapter 3 orients the analysis towards questions of agency. Specifically, it surveys the genesis of development thinking in the region, locating it in wider development debates. The discussion traces, to borrow a phrase from Colin Leys (1996), ‘the rise and fall of development theory’ in the post-WWII period, along with the ways in which this manifested itself very differently in the intellectual output of the French and English-speaking parts of the region. Chapter 4 seeks to chart a course out of the ‘impasse’ in development theorising in both the Caribbean and wider debates, and reconceptualises development in line with the notion to which we alluded above: that development should be considered an ongoing, universal dilemma facing all societies. By casting the problem in this way, ‘development’ will essentially emerge as a dependent variable, understood primarily as an agential concept, centred upon the strategies with which societies attempt to manage their political economies. These three chapters together will provide us with the theoretical tools with which to engage in the empirical audit in Part II of the book.

Part II: The Comparative Political Economy of Eastern Caribbean Development

Chapter 5 examines ‘political development’ in the four territories, comprising two principal strands. First, we compare and contrast the respective state apparatuses that exist in St Lucia, St Vincent, Martinique and Guadeloupe, and which, essentially, are conceived of as the primary drivers of the economic and social development to be discussed in Chapters 6 and 7. Secondly, we assess the different components of political development in practice, including the nature of the prevailing political settlement, and the extant quality of democracy and governance. Chapter 6 assesses the question of ‘economic development’ and it begins by stressing the historical legacies of the West Indian plantation for the contemporary structure and operation of Caribbean economies. It then traces how global patterns of change are reflected in the relative decline of agriculture and the concomitant, but not unproblematic, rise of the service economy. It also looks more explicitly at the evolving international context, with reference to the ways in which shifts in the composition and projection of EU power are coming to bear in an appreciably different fashion upon the two sets of islands. Chapter 7 rounds off the empirical analysis by looking at ‘social development’, which, again, has two elements. One comprises a snapshot of social provision in the islands, along with a brief discussion of the respective levels of ‘human development’ that have been achieved. The latter part of the chapter engages in a broader discussion of each society, and assesses some of the challenges that persist, and which derive in large measure from prevailing and enduring class, race, gender and cultural cleavages.

Part III: Conclusions

Chapter 8 brings together th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgements
• List of Acronyms
• Map
• 1 Introduction
• Part I Enduring Structures, Understanding Agency
• Part II The Comparative Political Economy of Eastern Caribbean Development
• Part III Conclusions
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index