July 12, 2011

ALL AH WE IS ONE - Time for boldness


BY TENNYSON JOSEPH | TUE, JULY 12, 2011 - 12:00 AM

RECENT NEWS on the regional integration movement has not been encouraging. The talk among the people who have been entrusted with the health of the living body is now of corpses and obituaries.

The Prime Minister of St Kitts, Denzil Douglas, ironically advocates a “slowing down” of the movement towards a single economy and tries to pass that off as a new advance, superior to the enthusiastic support for deeper integration once espoused by the founding fathers.

A clearer example of generational retreat and of “one step forward, two steps backward” cannot be found.

Leaders, who can hardly be stirred from their slumber to give a positive report on the achievement of long-overdue tasks, discover a new-found energy that fuels only cross-talk and mauvaise langue and are at their best only when verbally beating the integration project into the dust.

What is worse, all of this is coming at a time when the failure of stand-alone, single-island development is now beyond question, exposed as it is by the comatose nature of the Caribbean state in the face of the Great Recession. Indeed, if the scent of death can be picked up, it is not of the integration project, but of the false claim that any Caribbean territory can survive on its own.

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