If you have a hammer...

By Bukka Rennie
July 09, 2003

It was Gwynne Dyer, the syndicated columnist, who said that "...if you only have a hammer, all you shall ever see are nails..."

In the final analysis the civilisations of each epoch will be judged in the course of time not by their power, military might and capacity to dominate others, but by the nature of the system of relationships and social infrastructure they devise for the mutual development of all who inhabit this planet called Earth.

So today, despite all their well-documented negatives, Rome is known for giving us jurisprudence, Greece, the concept of democracy, and ancient Egypt, scientific investigation, scholarship and monotheism or "one-worldism", while modern mercantilism and capitalism emanated out of Britain and Western Europe. For what will America be known other than its brutish nature, its superficial Hollywood and pop culture?

Of course, those who, at any moment, become obsessed with their sense of power and/or become addicted to the ideology of establishing "empire" at any cost, never see the human face, the global human condition as the final and foremost measure of historic significance and importance.

It in this context that we have to view the latest salvo from President Bush and his Pentagon ghouls. The US is attempting to force some 50 countries, including Caricom member States, to accept bilateral agreements that would exempt US nationals and other people working for the US Government from the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Those who do not acquiesce to this demand will no longer be considered for military aid from the US.

This is certainly not unusual. This approach is very symptomatic of US foreign policy. It is never a question of seeing the rest of the world as equal partners in the quest to procure peace and international development, it is always a case of "do as America wishes or face the big stick..."

The history is rife with examples. How many of us recall that the US envoy to the Western Hemisphere, one Otto Reich, openly threatened Caricom States during a visit to Barbados because of our reluctance to support the war against Iraq? He was reported to have snarled then: "...I would urge Caricom to study very carefully not only what it says, but also the consequences of what it says..."

It was as if he were talking to his little children and using fear to divide and rule them. It seems to be the desired intention of US foreign policy to keep the Caribbean disunited. It was the same strategy applied when the issue of Haiti and moreso Cuba joining Caricom was placed on the agenda.

They refused to accept Caricom's position that the trade blockade against Cuba was anachronistic and counter-productive and needed to be removed in context of modern considerations and developments, ie the end of the East-West Cold War politics given the fall of both the Iron and Bamboo Curtains and the opening up of Russia and China to the dictates of the modern international capitalist system.

Caricom was simply saying if you the US can see the necessity to open up trade routes into China, why can't we go into Cuba? We have to be mindful that US foreign policy is always in the interest of American capitalist accumulation, and that that is always its underlying logic and raison d'etre. Why must we act in their interest rather than ours?

The Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) is due to come on stream in 2005 and the only way we can get equity within that trading bloc is if we negotiate with a united Caribbean perspective. Divided, we will be vulnerable like Mickey Mouse before Goliath. It is in their interest to divide us now!

In the meantime the rules and regulations of the WTO (World Trade Organisation) are being revised. Our trading patterns with the US, Britain, Canada and the EU countries will be on the line. Will we allow them alone to dictate the future of modern trading relations?

We have to remember how the US used the WTO regulations to virtually destroy the Caribbean banana industry in the interest of wealthy American families and their connections like the Chiquita Brands out of Latin America.

T&T has to take the lead and show leadership to the rest of the Caribbean. We cannot shirk that responsibility.

It is an established fact, according to a statement from the US embassy in 1998, that T&T is the second largest US investment area in the Western Hemisphere after only Canada. In 1998 total US investment in T&T stood at some US$1.4 billion. At the moment that figure has to be closer to US$3 billion.

Our leading position as a result in the gas and petrochemical industrial world ought to be used as leverage in cementing a Caribbean perspective and in guiding Caricom negotiations with the G7 countries. It is clear from all reports that the technical officers of the Caricom Secretariat have already worked out the parameters of future negotiations as a unified trading bloc. What is lagging is the political will and wisdom of our leadership.

We in T&T cannot allow ourselves to be bullied out of our responsibility to Caribbean civilisation as happened during the course of the last regime when the Shiprider Agreement was placed on the agenda.

We have to be careful of swallowing wholesale the projections of American political-economists like Robert B Reich of Harvard University's John Kennedy School of Government who in his book The Work of Nations is attempting to sell us the view that national economies are no longer relevant. One wonders if he is a relative of the Otto Reich mentioned above. Such people are ideologues who work to justify morally American foreign policy.

We must ask them to answer first these questions: is the nation State of the USA with its Congress, Appeal Court, Pentagon and Executive Presidency, etc no longer relevant? Is it not important anymore for Americans to defend their national economy? The answers are self-evident. So we must know the course history behooves us to take.

In like manner we must be wary of the cultural imperialists in this new tendency or stage of globalisation. Everyone and everything must be reduced to the common denominator and "sickening sameness" (my words) of American commercialisation. Elsewhere I have argued that nothing else is to be tolerated.

Suffice it to say that recently even World Bank officials have found themselves at loggerheads with the US Treasury, the single largest contributor to the bank, over the question of which cultural projects around the world should be funded.

The World Bank was therefore forced to let its media relations chief, Caroline Anstey, point out that "...in a recent global opinion poll 20 countries identified threats to their national culture as their top concern about globalisation... cultural heritage and its relationship to development matter to an awful lot of people... this may not be an issue for Americans whose culture tends to dominate, but it is an issue for many other people..."

"Tend to dominate" is in my view the understatement of the decade. It is euphemism at its best, euphemism that glosses over the chauvinistic jingoism that surrounds the "stars and stripes". In other words, what it seeks to hide is that if you only have a hammer, you will always pound nails...