Political make-up of the Caribbean

 

For my first post I will discuss the political make-up of the West Indies. The main goal will be to give you the tools to understand the nations with concepts specific to their own reality without having to resort to the typical :"this is a Dutch island and that is a French island".The term West Indies will be used interchangeably with that of  Caribbean as it is common in the region to use both.

The denominations are not geographically bound and will mostly include countries in which the population overwehlmingly considers to be culturally part of the Caribbean. This conception can be tricky to grasp but is critical in any attempt to approach any matter that concerns the West Indies. 

If you have ever tried to gather information about a West Indian nation, you surely came accross references to the colonial power that used to rule the said nation. It is an easy but misleading way for one who wants to understand the geopolitical situation of those countries, as it does not give any substantial information on the type of gouvernement, the real ethno-linguistic groups who live together and how they do that.

 Degree of autonomy

The most important disctinction we can make is on how autonomous a nation is compared to it's neighbours and/or the sovereign state it is incorporated in. Having an idea of the degree of autonomy will ease your way through the different topics. For example, it will be useless to ask why a country is not in the CARICOM if you know that the country is part of groups C or D.

 You have probably noticed that I used the words country and nation in the introduction. These two words can, in a Caribbean setting, be used to describe a state as independant as the Republic of Cuba or an overseas territory as assimilated as the Martinique region (for exemple in sport events or inter-Caribbean summits ). The "title" of nation or country is thus not related to the status of statehood. Therefor even though it is usually seen as an objective way  we will not use the United nation's list of sovereign states to determine wether or not a Caribbean Island is a country as most of them do not make the list whilst being considered countries by all their neighbours.

When it comes to the level of indepencance a Caribbean nation enjoys, I see 4 disctinctive levels in which we can classify them.

A) The Republics
B)  The Independant states with "some" ties to another nation
C)  The Overseas territories of a sovereign state with great autonomy and not integrated in the        administrative subdivision of the sovereign state.
D)  The Overseas territories of a sovereign state with seemingly neither more nor less autonomy than other parts of the mainland and  fully integrated in the political subdivision of the sovereign state

Those 4 categories pretty much encompass every nation that is considered part of the West Indies. These are all countries, nations in the Caribbean sphere. Here are some examples to clarify my way of categorizing.

A  Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Surinam, Haïti. Notice here that Surinam and Guyana are both geographically located on the south american continent and are still strongly considered locally and abroad as being West Indian. Both countries are part of CARICOM which is the most important supranational Caribbean organization. This brings us back to the introduction and the fact that being caribbean as a nation, a person or even an organization or company in some cases is much more related to a subjective consideration of one's culture rather than on borders or internantional law.

B  Jamaica, Barbados, Commonwealth of Dominica, Grenada, Belize. These countries are fully independant and share the same head of state as the United Kindom and dozens of other countries. They are not "less independant" than the republics but the head of state not being a local puts them in another category in my view. Countries like Canada, Australia and New-Zealand have the exact same status and are not considered dependencies. Again we see a country that is not an island nation of the antilliean arc and is still fully caribbean, Belize located in Central America.

C Curaçao, Sint-Maarten, Aruba, Puerto Rico. These are the ones that usually confuse and make people want to class them as either fully independant or fully incorporated while the truth is so specific to each one of these islands.  The Dutch islands are all constituent countries of the kingdom of the Netherlands they have their own parliament, own governement with a prime minister and a governor ( who represents the king/queen of the Netherlands), their own currency and an extended autonomy so great that a citizen of these nations can live a full life from birth to death without ever having to be in contact with an administration of the kingdom. The affairs for which the countries have no say on a local level and for which the kingdom has full "power" are citizenship, defence and foreign affairs.

D Guadeloupe,Bonaire, Saba. These islands are all fully integrated in a sovereign state and have the status of a municipality or region of that state. In Guadeloupe you are on the soil of the république, on Sint-Eustatius you are in Nederland.

Voilà! it isn't perfect but at least we can start to divert from the narrative which systematically considers a Caribbean nation through it's colonial past. That colonial past is important but not essential.Wilhelmina, Victoria and Napoléon are long gone. For me on a personal level the essence of being Caribbean comes from one's image of self and in what respect other West Indians would consider one to be Caribbean or not. Our food, carnivals and most importantly our creole languages are in my opinion the best showcases for our warm and beautiful region. This blog will do just that. Put the Caribbean on stage ;-)

Feel free to comment and have a nice day.

Kasima.