Sir Shridath Ramphal, the noted ‘Caribbean man’ who headed the path-finding West Indian Commission and served the University of the West Indies as Chancellor for fourteen years, has warned against the endangering of our Caribbean Community by a “crippling separatism”. Further, that the leaders of the 15-member regional economic integration movement, now in its 38th year, resist the “old entrancement of local control” and avoid falling victim to rhetoric that expediently urges “a slow down” or “pause” when the harsh realities of our Caribbean environment and the global challenges demand focused “matured regionalism”.
And, in making an open plea for shared regional “vision and leadership”, the former three-term Secretary General of the 54-member Commonwealth and ex-Attorney General and Foreign Minister of Guyana, said: “We need not fall short  in vision or in leadership, but mindful, always, of the infinite unity of our people’s needs…”
Sir Shridath was at the time delivering the inaugural ‘G. Arthur Brown Lecture Series’ that memorializes a most distinguished son of Jamaica and the Caribbean, the first Jamaican to head the Central Bank of Jamaica and former Deputy Administrator of the United Nations Development Programme.
The central theme for the public lecture, organized to coincide with last month’s 50th anniversary of the Bank of Jamaica, was ‘Vision and Leadership: The Infinite Unity of Caribbean Needs.’
Ramphal’s stimulating regional overview and assessment of these “needs”, encompassed the vision that led to the establishment of the 15-member high-level West Indian Commission that produced the seminal 1992 ‘Time for Action’ Report, and extended to last month’s 32nd CARICOM Summit in St. Kitts.
At that annual event talk by leaders of a “slow down” in the regional economic integration process was to follow the earlier notion of need for “a pause” as earlier verbalised at the leaders’ “special retreat” in Guyana.  

Timely UWI Study
What was rather ironical for Ramphal – an iconic West Indian messenger – is that the rhetoric of “slow down” and “pause”, sharply contrasted with the needs of the Community as identified in a significant study recently conducted by the St. Augustine-based Institute of International Relations of the University of the West Indies.
Entitled ‘Caribbean Regional Integration’, and involving some of the most eminent scholars, it is viewed by Ramphal as “the most authoritative contemporary commentary on the issue of Caribbean integration and very specially, of the challenges facing it….”
In its executive summary, the study makes quite clear: “There was a real sense that the optimistic era of Caribbean integration may well have passed just at the time when it is most desperately needed. The difficulties facing the region are no longer simply about competing in a globalizing  economy.
“Rather” it noted, they are ‘existential threats’ which bring into question the fundamental  visibility of Caribbean society itself—climate change, transnational crime,  the decline of regional industries, food security, governance challenges, international diplomacy and so on, which can only be effectively addressed by co-ordinated REGIONAL (my emphasis) responses…”
In the thinking of the scholars who contributed to the Institute’s study, these problems “are becoming increasingly acute in the immediate present, and failure to act immediately, effectively and coherently at the regional level could quite conceivably herald the effective  decline of Caribbean society as a ‘perfect storm’ of problems gathers on the horizon….”.
The study warned that “it cannot be stressed just how critical the present juncture is”, adding that “this may well be the last chance to save the formal integration process in the Caribbean as we know it, to set the region on a new development path, and another opportunity might not present itself in the future…”

Valid fears
Evidently, further inspired by the thinking of the eminent regional scholars who participated in the Institute’s study on the state of “Caribbean Regional Integration”, Sir Shridath was to make the telling observation that the outcome of last month’s CARICOM summit in St.Kitts “seems to have confirmed the validity of the fears of West Indians at all levels…
“In the environment of public skepticism in which the summit was convened”, he noted, “there were many verbal assertions of dedication to the goals of Caribbean integration. Those assertions are welcome; they mean, at least, that it would be politically perilous to assert otherwise to the vast majority of Caribbean people. But, of course, it is what Caribbean leaders did at St. Kitts that matters most….”         
And in his judgement, Ramphal argues that the CARICOM leaders decision in St. Kitts to “slow down” the integration pace “a bit and look at a more realistic calibration of where we need to go in the integration movement…” (according to the summit’s host and current chairman, Prime Minister Denzil Douglas), was, “effectively, reaffirmation of the conclusions of the special retreat in Guyana.”  
In  his delivery of the inaugural ‘G Arthur Brown memorial lecture’, Ramphal, clearly distressed over the future of CARICOM,  was to wonder aloud:  “Slow down…given that we are already at dead slow, how far is that from ‘stop’?
“There is a serious economic, not just political issue here”, he warned as he pointed out that the study done by the UWI  Institute of International Relations offers the “exact opposite” assessment to the conclusions  that emerged from the St. Kitts Summit.
If it has not already made arrangements to do so, the Central Bank of Jamaica should consider circulating, as a public service, copies of the full text of Sir Shridath’s inaugural ‘G Arthur Brown’ lecture to, for a start, all Heads of Government of CARICOM, regional private sector leaders and representatives of major regional non-government organisations.