Globalisation

Publication: Sunday Sun
Paper Section And Page: 8A
Paper Date: Sun, Jan 21, 2001
Category: Current Affairs
Byline:  Professor Hilary Beckles

THE OECD Sherbourne meeting said much of what there is to understand about the word globalisation and its contested political reality. But there is much more that must be made explicit.

One of the inescapable features of all realities is the necessity to invent new words and to redesign language in order to establish new meanings and knowledge.

Globalisation as a concept, furthermore, has become an important part of popular as well as technical discourse.

On the surface, it seems a perfectly simple word that invites no major contest over its meaning. Closer investigation reveals, however, that it occupies centre stage in the desire to understand and manage recent seminal developments.

In the Caribbean, the word takes on special significance. Historians especially are very keen to establish that the process began in the aftermath of the Columbus mission to our islands in 1492. Columbus, we know, may not have been the first traveller to cross the Atlantic, but he certainly was the first to return alive and to tell the tale.

In so doing the Admiral linked the economies and societies of the old and new worlds forever, initiated the largest human migration in known history, and inaugurated the reality of shrinking intercontinental dimensions to village proportions. Since then, the spaces known as the Americas, Europe, Asia, Africa, and the islands in between, have been physically domesticated and networked by multiple forms of communications technologies.

The first global village, then, was the entire Caribbean world that emerged as the crossroads where African and Europe, and later Asia met the Americas under the umbrella of the plantation which in itself was an early example of a global economic institution.

The sugar planter, of course, was seen back then as the prototype of the global entrepreneur, and his mastery of the world market established the Caribbean as the place with a viable, even if morally tarnished, development model.

He had no role models to emulate. Before him there were the pirates and the buccaneers, global in their own right, but very illegal in their offshore sector. They were a criminal element without doubt, but should be credited nonetheless with laying the infrastructure of the globalised modern Caribbean economy. The sugar planter, then, was a pioneer. He took on the world. For 200 years, and won. During this time he had no peer as a global leader.

Think of it. He imported his labour from Europe, and later Africa and Asia after he had used up local supplies or was denied access to it on his slavery terms. The importation of over five million workers from Africa into the Caribbean was no easy task. It required massive global organisation and mobilisation, in addition to a fair measure of universal wickedness.

He imported his food and building supplies from North America after he had destroyed, or rendered unsustainable, what was locally available. He produced a crop which was totally exported, mostly to Europe where his economic fortunes were linked through a mesh of finance houses and commission agents.

When he wanted a wife, or an education, which were not one and the same thing, he looked first to England and considered the local darlings of a lesser quality. He was, therefore, not only financially and economically globalised, but socially as well.

Everywhere in the networked world during the 18th century, Caribbean sugar was available. Where there was none, it was desired and plans put in place to secure access. The Caribbean was at the centre of the new commodity globalisation, and most of the world understood this process as the natural order of things. Indeed, the entire Caribbean was considered designed and driven by these international forces.

But slaveowners were not the only ones to put in place a globalised reality, fashioned in their own image. The enslaved Africans of Haiti became the first workers anywhere in the modern world to obtain political power and establish an independent, sovereign nation with a constitution that spoke to the liberation of all Africans.

In the process Haitians established the Caribbean as the first place to create a political system based on the democratic principles of universal citizenship, freedom for all, and equality of all before the law. The rest of the world followed two centuries later in respecting the importance of such principles of governance.

No one, then, inside or outside of the OECD, has a deeper knowledge and experience with respect to transforming realities of globalisation. We were there at the beginning, gave it life and shape, and continue to carry it within our veins.

Furthermore, the Caribbean should be seen as the natural place, not only for the holding of major hearings on the subject, but as a scientific lesson on how best to avoid making its horrid, unjust, and unacceptable mistakes.

Both slavery and colonialism were first expressions. The firm line taken at Sherbourne and the apology were in good order. The next step is to hold the line steady as we go.