The Greater Caribbean This Week

Watson R. Denis, PhD

There are more than 250 international organisations (IO) in the world today. Emerging at the end of the 19th century, and evolving slowly in the early 20th century, IOs picked up cruising speed after the Second World War. The outcome of this war showed that the world should no longer be subjugated under the yoke of one super power, but that on the contrary, co-operation and negotiation between States were necessary for peace and the conduct of international affairs. This is how the United Nations and its specialized agencies as well as other international and regional organisations were born.

IOs fall within the realm of international governance. On the one hand, they allow a number of States to project their political vision or national projects onto a geographical stage much larger than their own. On the other, they allow other States to face national challenges by pooling their problems, either by harmonizing them so as to solve them together, or by dividing them conscientiously, again in order to arrive at a common solution. Finally, IOs allow States to project themselves as protagonists for the purpose of influencing, defining or governing issues previously unresolved by the international community.with Africans.

Today, IOs represent in themselves a veritable political system. They are present everywhere and intervene in every area, from A to Z - international security, economic and political relations, integration and co-operation, the environment and human rights. In this sense, they are at the same time a policy instrument of States, a chessboard a plural space where an organisation’s international policy is defined- and a political player using diplomacy in international relations to bring about the fundamental objectives and mandates set by the organisation. Whether it is the Association of South-East Asian Nations, the African Union, the Organization of American States, the European Union or the ACS, they almost all respond to this role and its characteristics.

Of this group, the ACS is the most recent. It was founded in July 1994, in the context of globalization, with the basic objective of intervening in the field of regional co-operation. The ACS is an entity set up as a link between different areas of the Greater Caribbean, that is, the Caribbean islands, the Central American area and three countries of Latin America whose coastlines are touched by the Caribbean Sea. Apart from this geographical or maritime factor, the ACS responds to a need to join geographical areas in the Caribbean which have so far developed little political or trade interaction among themselves. Hence the concept of the Greater Caribbean arose. In light of this, one of the founding objectives of the ACS is dialogue, co-ordination and co-operation among the 25 Members, Member States and Associate Members (involving also the countries or territories with political relations with powers outside the continent).