Trinidad and Tobago's Prime Minister Patrick Manning

By Peter Richards

PORT OF SPAIN, Trinidad, CMC -At least three Caribbean Community (CARICOM) countries are seeking to establish a political union and will soon undertake a study on that possibility, Prime Minister Ralph Gonsalves announced Saturday.

Gonsalves, who is ending a two-day official visit to Trinidad and Tobago, said that the union of the southern Caribbean would involve Grenada and the twin-island oil rich republic.

Gonsalves said that former St. Lucia prime minister Dr. Vaughan Lewis, who also served as the Director General of the sub-regional Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) and Trinidadian diplomat Dr. Cuthbert Joseph would be approached to undertake the feasibility study on the proposed union of the three islands.

Trinidad and Tobago Prime Minister Patrick Manning told reporters that his country "is prepared to enter into a political union arrangement with any country or countries in the Caribbean that are prepared to go along with us"

adding that " that has been our position from time immemorial (and) nothing has changed".

He said that that even though there had been many attempts at integration without much success "one advantage we have today is the advantage of our experience of the past".

"We are moving into a world today where you are moving from one way access to markets to reciprocity in trade and there are countries in the Caribbean that are very, very wary of that approach, fearing that they may not be able to survive in a world like that.

"There are some countries in the Caribbean that welcome it, who feel it can be done quite easily," he said noting that his oil-rich republic was among those states.

"What it will do for us, (is that) it will expose us to competition, it will spawn new companies...so that for us we welcome political integration in the Caribbean and we make ourselves available for discussions on this matter and we will be part of any discussions that will advance that course.

"As it now stands the promising movement that is emerging in the Caribbean is a movement in the southern Caribbean involving Trinidad and Tobago, Grenada, St. Vincent and the Grenadines and hopefully St. Lucia and it will be to that cause of integration in respect of which these four countries are discussing that we will discuss our efforts," he said.

Gonsalves said that while no specific date or terms of reference had been developed for the study, both himself and Prime Minister Patrick Manning had agreed on the need for a closer collaboration and unity among themselves.

"Cleary it is much better to have it formalised so that it doesn't depend on Patrick Manning being prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago or Ralph Gonsalves being the prime minister in St. Vincent and the Grenadines.

"At the end of the day.and we can't have relations just on the basis of individual friendships, they have to be structured in some formal institutional arrangements," Gonsalves said.

"If you want to have a deeper form of integration involving political instruments it is not beyond the ingenuity of Caribbean people to fashion an arrangement which is appropriate to all the circumstances and the deepest form of arrangement the political market can bear.

"All of us know we cannot continue the way in which we have been going, but yet we don't want to think outside the boundaries of our individual sea and landscape. It is as though we believe we are immune to all the social laws of history," Gonsalves said.

"For my part, the words political union are not bad words; now it may well be I may be whistling in the dark, but what is a whistle in the dark today maybe in the light tomorrow or next week," he added.

CMC/pr/vd/2008