Tiffany Grant

Id#: 0903631

Community Law

Assignment 1

Date: January 31 2012

Compare and contrast the legislative framework for the Caribbean

Community (CARICOM) and the European Union (EU).

Explain the relationship between the different structures of CARICOM, the

EU, OECS.

Twenty years ago on June 18, 1981, the Treaty of Basseterre gave birth to the Organisation of
Eastern Caribbean States (OECS). It's founding fathers fashioned a remarkable admixture of
functional cooperation between its Member-States and an embryonic confederal structure which
possesses the seeds for a further deepening or strengthening in the visionary quest for a
confederal political union, at a minimum.

This entity comprising six independent states (Antigua and Barbuda, Dominica, Grenada, St.
Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines), and three British Colonies,
Anguilla, British Virgin Islands and Montserrat, has experienced over the past twenty years
many changes or shifts in its institutional arrangements but has remained basically steadfast to its
original purpose and mandate. That has been a not inconsiderable achievement amidst the tumult
in the political economy of the sub-Region and the fundamental rearrangements in the
architecture of the international economy and polity.

To be sure, the weaknesses and limitations of the OECS are glaringly obvious, including the
repeated failure of many member-states - including Saint Vincent and the Grenadines - to pay on
time or at all their subventions, but all this ought not to blind us to the fact that this sub-Regional
grouping is pregnant with enormous strengths and possibilities.

The times in which the OECS was born are very different to those of today. It is often forgotten
that the late Maurice Bishop, head of the People's Revolutionary Government of Grenada, was a
signatory to the Treaty of Basseterre. The fledgling organization struggled with the push and pull
of "ideological pluralism" in a context of intense cold war rivalries in a geographical space in
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close proximity to the most powerful nation the world has ever seen, which nation was itself one
of the two ideologically-based super-powers which rivaled each other for world hegemony.

The phenomena of trade liberalization, globalisation and the revolution in information

technology had yet to come upon us. In those apparently idyllic days of yore, trade protectionism
for bananas and sugar subsidized the sub-Region's production and masked its inefficiencies and
lack of competitiveness. Concessionary aid was still flowing. Oh, "bliss was it in that dawn to be
alive but to be young was very heaven"

From those seemingly heavenly days, the OECS and its member-countries survived the gospel of
the Washington consensus focused upon the mantra of "structural adjustment" which sought to
balance the books but, in the process, unbalanced the countries of the sub-Region. The end of the
Cold War and the rise of North Atlantic triumphalism have fortuitously occasioned an
abandonment of the consensus imposed by the Washingtonians and its replacement by a new
consensus centered on "poverty alleviation" and "sustainable development".

The cynics say, not without some merit, that this new consensus is but a new paternalism
designed to rinse the consciences of imperium. Still, it is the only show on the road and, in the
difficult extant circumstances, we must learn the art and practice of embracing it to our
advantage whilst transcending it in our embark upon a new people-centred trajectory in politics
and economics. Hopefully, at the end of it all, the OECS or a successor confederal state
apparatus, at a minimum, will be around to tell the tale. But it is up to us as a Caribbean people
to convert that fractured story into a meaningful history in the interest of our own humanization.

If the truth be told, the earlier years of the OECS and its member-states were neither idyllic nor
heavenly. Our countries were poorer then than now; we were less educated than now; we were
technologically less advanced than now; we were less politically sophisticated than now; and we
were less democratic then than now.

Still, the statistical growth in the sub-Region's Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is not manifested
in the slums of Kingstown, Castries or Roseau nor in the newly-minted poverty-stricken rural
areas in the aftermath of the banana implosion. Thus, for example, the poverty level of 37 per
cent of the population in Saint Vincent and the Grenadines is wholly unacceptable. But I am sure
that the situation would have been even worse if the OECS had not existed.

Even where material progress has been visible in these blessed islands we appear to have lost our
souls, our moral compass, our anchor and our rudder; we have let slip our enduring vision of the
further ennoblement of our Caribbean civilization. This we must correct, together now!

The OECS, with a population of just over 550,000 at home but with probably thrice that figure
overseas and an average per capital GDP of some US$3,000.00 per annum, was formed as a
logical extension of the old West Indies Associated States (WISA) arrangement when
constitutional independence arrived for its member-states or was on their door steps. Its birth, too
came in the aftermath of the failure of the "Little Eight" federal venture in 1965 and the signing
of the Treaty of Chaguaramas in 1973 which established CARICOM with its categories of
MDCs (More-developed countries) and LDCs (Less-developed countries). The founding fathers
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of the OECS rightly saw wisdom in consolidating an inner concentric circle of the Region
integration movement but with points of relevance and contact to the wider CARICOM.