We are now adding to our page a weekly commentary on St. Lucian affairs, called “The Orange Banner”. This first commentary is on St. Lucia’s management of its foreign policy in its thirty five years of independence. THE ORANGE BANNER (Orange is a blend of red and yellow, uniting them in a vibrant new colour) Independence and St. Lucia’s Foreign Policy Lessons By Earl Stephen Huntley When the flag of Saint Lucia was raised for the first time as an independent nation on 22nd February 1979, what essentially changed for this small island state was that it was given full control of its external affairs and defence. Saint Lucia had in fact become totally responsible for its internal affairs in 1968, when it became an Associated State of Great Britain. Now, from the 22nd February 1979, the power to decide on how it would deal with its external relations was going to be in the hands of the Government in Castries and not with the Foreign Office mandarins in London. Thirty five years later how has St. Lucia fared? How has it coped with the challenges of making foreign policy? Has it successfully weathered the storms of international relations? Two events, more than any other, very early in St. Lucia’s independent life, taught St. Lucia that being responsible for the conduct of its own foreign policy was not going to be easy and that international relations is a jungle in which one cannot .always depend on friends for succour . The harsh reality of international politics was not long in coming. Four years after St. Lucia’s independence, the Grenada Revolution imploded and St. Lucia as a member of the newly created OECS was among the Caribbean countries which invited the USA to assist them in restoring peace and democracy to Grenada. They were severely condemned by the international community. At the United Nations, the General assembly voted by a massive 108 to 9 to reject the action by the USA and the Eastern Caribbean Countries. St. Lucia’s fledgling Foreign Ministry was totally unprepared for that kind of foreign policy foray and it had not briefed its tiny one man mission at the UN about the impending invasion, complying with the directive for strict confidentially from Prime Minister and Foreign Minister John Compton, one of the leaders of the invasion plan. St. Lucia’s Permanent Mission to the UN was therefore caught totally by surprise at the invasion and at the hurriedly summoned General Assembly debate and had to lie low as the avalanche of criticism descended on the Eastern Caribbean islands at the General Assembly. Prime Minister and Foreign Minister John Compton was disappointed with the apparent “inability” of the international community to understand the motives of the OECS. He was particularly aggrieved at the reluctance of the United Kingdom, the former Mother Country, to join the OECS in the Grenada action. St. Lucia’s Foreign Ministry learnt from the shock of the international condemnation of the Grenada intervention and quickly began to mature in its management of foreign policy initiatives. But if the disappointment with traditional allies and friends which the Grenada intervention had evoked was biting, worse was yet to come. By the mid 1990’s, the United States which had been so eager to assist St. Lucia and other OECS States in the Grenada experience because of its own Cold war interests, forgot its friendship and turned a dagger on Fair Helen and her Windward Island sisters. It was the USA which led the attack at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) on the preferential agreement under which St. Lucia sold its bananas to the United Kingdom arguing that it was contrary to the free trade rules of the WTO. The USA was protecting American companies like Chiquita which were exporting Central American bananas to Europe and coveted a bigger share of the market. By then bananas had become the green gold that powered St. Lucia’s economy and provided the base for the modernisation of the newly independent country. The attack on its vital economic artery elicited a vigorous response from St. Lucia Together with other Caricom countries, St. Lucian leaders and diplomats fought the USA at the WTO and at every possible international forum. Prime Minister John Compton with his colleague from Dominica, Mary Eugenia Charles and from St. Vincent and the Grenadines, James Mitchell journeyed over and over to European capitals to argue the case for the Windward Islands over the free trade philosophy of the WTO and the USA. In Brussels and at the WTO in Geneva, St. Lucia’s Ambassador, Edwin Laurent, was stalwart and steadfast. In early 1997, Prime Minister Vaughan Lewis, at a conference in Barbados, sought to make President Bill Clinton understand the injury he would be inflicting on St. Lucia, when he told him: “Bananas are to the Windward Islands what cars are to Detroit”. Clinton said then that he understood; but with his Department of Commerce Chief having ears only for Central America, the US was unrelenting in its WTO strike against preferential access to Europe for Caribbean bananas. Later that year, St. Lucia restructured in its Foreign Ministry making it Foreign Affairs and International Trade as trade issues had taken centre stage in St. Lucia’s external affairs. According to the Foreign Ministry, “Foreign Policy had become Foreign Trade and Foreign Trade had become Foreign Policy.” In 1999 Foreign Minister George Odlum, at the WTO Ministerial Conference in Seattle, lashed at the WTO and the USA. “I come from a country where the name WTO is a dirty word… I come from a region where the people are here in spirit with the anti-WTO demonstrators outside… Their attitude is forged by the experience of their betrayal by a country they had considered a friend, who, in the name of a so-called crusade for liberalized trade, sold them out for the profits of a multinational corporation.” But it was to no avail. The WTO finally ruled in favour of the US and its Latin American allies and the US penalised the European Union when it delayed implementation of the WTO decision. The EU finally complied; the banana market in the UK for St. Lucia and the Windward’s collapsed and St. Lucia’s economy was undermined. It was a bitter foreign policy blow for St. Lucia. It had lost the great banana war and with that loss, as well as the disappointment with the international community over the Grenada intervention, St. Lucia in less than twenty years of its independence, learnt the hard way the truism that, in international relations countries do not have friends, they only have interests.
Posted on: Sun, 09 Mar 2014 17:59:18 +0000