The prospects of new pathways to progress

THERE IS no doubt that the world system is currently undergoing a sea of change. This affects the institutional foundations of multilateralism and the embrace of the politics of global development, which underpinned the relative stability of the international order over the past 70 years.

Both these principles offered hope of improvement in the standards of living for the majority, and ensured an acceptable quality of governance in developing countries. These precepts are now being fundamentally challenged.

Unilateralist inclinations have come to represent the central theme of great power politics replacing the main tendencies which surrounded, up until recently, the heart of the Washington Consensus. The spread of liberal democratic precepts within Latin America and the Caribbean now seem to be subject to reversal.

Events in Bolivia, Venezuela, the range of antiimmigrant policies in North America (and Europe), the tightening of the United States (US) embargo against Cuba, the return of Haitian immigrants, the externally driven efforts to split CARICOM – all this, taken together, reflects a new phase in the political, social and economic situation in this region.

It is evident also that the growing conflicts, particularly between the US and China, reflected in the trade war, are spilling over into the politics of the region. In Jamaica and elsewhere, small countries are being directly caught up and affected by their great power conflicts.

Whatever other issues that might arise from this, it clearly represents a retreat from broad multilateralism, which represented the dominant feature of the world system for 70 years. It is also a retreat from the developmentalist impulses supportive of the needs of developing countries and which have been an underpinning, at least officially, of the international order in the postWorld War II years.

GROWING EQUALITY

From another vantage point, it is increasingly clear that 30 years of intensified globalisation has resulted in growing inequality between nations and within countries. Social and economic inequalities within countries in the Caribbean have definitively worsened.

The debt crisis in the Caribbean and the spread of International Monetary Fund programmes have created a fiscal environment which has severely limited the policy options available to governments. It also contributed to undercutting popular confidence in the institutions of governance and in democracy itself.

Against this background, the meeting of progressive parties of the Americas, held last week in Montego Bay, is of fundamental importance.

Participants explored the scope for new policy initiatives within countries to protect and extend the social and economic gains of the people for better education, opportunities, healthcare, and social justice.

The parties also moved to fashion an effective platform for mutual political support, including inter-party support in the face of the aggressive interventions taking place from conservative power centres on the right.

Of major importance was the effort to develop a broader global perspective that can embrace a wider array of progressive forces not only in Latin America, but also in Asia, as well as among our traditional partners in Europe and North America, around a coherent view of the world system that will incorporate new issues and vectors of struggle such as global warming, sustainable development alongside our traditional focus on economic growth, workers rights and social justice.

Recent developments and popular upheavals across the region, in Chile, Ecuador and other places, and recent electoral victories in Barbados, Dominica, etc, signal to the progressive movement the possibilities of a new wave of activism, and the prospects of new pathways to progress.