IF NOTHING ELSE, we in the Caribbean will forever continue to have to grapple with not only the internal dynamics taking place within our respective economies, but also to keep pace with changes occurring in the international economic and political environments.
These changes can and do have profound implications for us as small and decidedly vulnerable countries that depend a great deal on foreign relations, whether those relationships are trade-based or strictly diplomatically oriented.
Why? For the past three-and-a-half decades, from the ascension to power of Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in Britain, the world has experienced the domination of the economic ideology of neo-liberalism, and the effective abandonment of what conservatives such as previous British Prime Ministers Harold MacMillan, Alec Douglas Home and Edward Heath used to call “One Nation” Toryism; that is, a conservative party that embraced all classes in Britain.
This neo-liberalist economic doctrine would get many, often confusing and sometimes contradictory names: “monetary” or “Freidman” economics, so called after economist Milton Friedman and his Chicago School; “supply-side” economics; “Washington Consensus” economic policy; and in Britain, it was often simply called “Thatcherism”.
It was divisive: Thatcher passed laws restricting the rights of workers and their trade unions, and used force, sometimes brutal, to smash the strikes by Britain’s coal miners.
On the other side of the Atlantic, at the beginning of his presidency, Reagan fired all 14 000 air traffic controllers who were responsible for the American air space because those workers took strike action in defence of their rights. He subsequently used the armed forces for a while to handle passenger air traffic.
The message in both Britain and America under these new leaders was clear: trade unions and their members must know their place. Capitalists – those who provided the investments and therefore jobs; the guys who ran the economy, the large corporations and especially the financiers – were now firmly in the driver’s seat.
Even within that framework, however, financial capital stole the day over manufacturing (the “real” economy, as economists often referred to the direct production of goods and services, as distinct from the stock and bond and general securities markets, and the financial entities of all kinds).
“The City” in Britain and “Wall Street” in the US became the centres of British and American capitalism; not the industrial heartland of these countries.
The significance of this short dive into recent history should serve as a simple reminder of the domination of economic ideology in the global arena and how easy it could be for us in the Caribbean to fall victim of developments that have nothing to do with us or even our mode of thinking and reasoning.
The message for us as small and susceptible countries should therefore be clear: shy away from economic ideology that is packaged as good for us when in fact they were meant to serve the needs of those who advance and promote them at the point in time.
Email: bfrancis@uwi.edu.bb