The more I travel around the Caribbean the more I despair of any sort of serious Caribbean unity. Yes, I am one of those who, in my youth, got infected with the vision of a West Indies Federation, and have sought in my own little way to try to bring us together; but clearly I am in the vast minority in the region: among average West Indians and among our policymakers.

I guess these thoughts come to me as I now travel around Europe, itself involved in a serious experiment in regional integration. At the outset Europe's challenge was greater than ours: dozens of different languages, while we have much fewer; centuries of bloody wars and imperial rivalry, while we have only a few decades of petty competition in low level manufacturing. And the political texture of Europe is so variegated, with capitalist parties, socialist parties, communist parties and green parties operating in monarchies, republics and various federal systems, compared with our relatively homogeneous young democracies. Faced with the economic colossus of the USA to the west and the unpredictable Russians to the east, the many countries of western Europe took a decision geared to engineer their very survival into the future against great odds. We don't seem as bothered, when we have so much more at stake.

The many nations of Europe sat down and agreed on a set of standards to which they would hold themselves: standards of justice and human rights, standards of fiscal and economic behaviour, standards of political and electoral conduct, standards for the participation of civil society in public decision making, and a suite of environmental standards.

Bogus elections

Then they watch each other like hawks to make sure everyone complies, for they know that their very survival depends on adherence by all members. The EU would not put up with bogus elections among its members, or systematic police brutality and police killings, or endemic pollution.

CARICOM - and CARIFTA before it - is about protection of turf. States stood by during years of various crooked Caribbean regimes and did nothing to maintain any standards. Maybe the extreme case was the persistent corruption in Guyana under Burnham, when CARICOM maintained its headquarters there and did nothing to improve conditions. Each member state had its own turf to defend, and CARICOM states did not interfere with the corruption in which their friends were involved.

The European project has various components to which members can choose not to sign on; e.g. there is the currency union (the Euro) which Britain has not joined, and the Schengen Treaty (requiring no passport controls) which Britain has not joined. I guess each of our Caribbean countries is more like Britain than we would like to admit. We are reluctant to forge ourselves into a cohesive unit with organs of governance that have real teeth, because we each want to be 'sovereign states'. We are unwilling to follow a consistent, unified political and economic policy vis-á-vis the rest of the world because we each have our private patrons. Some countries have switched from a 'two-China' to a 'one-China' policy and then back again. Some countries have entered a special relationship with Japan supporting their efforts to kill whales, in return for economic aid.

Infamous agreements

In the 1990s several countries broke ranks with their regional counterparts by negotiating separately with the US on the infamous 'Shiprider' agreements; and in 2002 they did it again with the equally infamous agreements to grant immunity for US personnel from prosecution under the International Criminal Court.

Rather than behave as a regional bloc, CARICOM states behave with opportunistic unilateralism; we coordinate our foreign policies when we believe it suits us, and break ranks when it suits us.

CARICOM makes sense because none of the member states is big enough to achieve economies of scale by itself. In the 1989 Grand Anse Declaration, members agreed to establish joint diplomatic representation in foreign capitals. Although even the largest CARICOM country lacks the financial and human resource capacity to maintain an effective presence in the major capitals, each still prefers to 'do its own thing', and this treaty has not been honoured. We still do not trust each other.

Impatient with the pace of regional integration, several countries formed the OECS to promote sub-regional integration. Dominica has recently joined the Bolivarian initiative (ALBA) with Venezuela, Nicaragua, Bolivia, and Cuba. And now we hear of a new initiative led by Trinidad to form a new regional union. It seems that even the pretence of CARICOM is breaking up.