David JessopTHE FIRST-EVER official visit to the United Kingdom by a president from the Dominican Republic has just ended.
Not only was it unprecedented, but it also involved, over a five-day period, an intense schedule of meetings rarely experienced by any Caribbean head of government.
During his visit the Dominican President, Dr Leonel Fernandez, was accompanied by his Foreign Minister, Carlos Morales, plus other ministers, officials and private sector leaders. He held meetings with a wide range of political figures including the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, the Deputy Prime Minister, John Prescott, the Foreign Secretary, Jack Straw, and the minister with responsibility for relations with the Caribbean, Lord David Triesman. He met also with the shadow Foreign Secretary, William Hague from the Opposition Conservative Party.
ALL-PARTY
PARLIAMENTARY GROUP
In addition, during his visit an all-party parliamentary group for the Dominican Republic was formally established in the British Parliament involving some 22 members from all three main political parties, including a number of former senior ministers.
The Dominican president had an audience with the Queen.
Aside from the political and official programme, President Fernandez addressed an investment seminar in the City of London attended by around 200 companies; spoke at a separate tourism event attended by some one hundred investors; and delivered to sell out audiences an academic address on Latin America, and another on the Dominican Republic's energy sector. The president met with senior figures in the British media and the London Financial Times published a six-page supplement on the Dominican Republic.
What should we make of all of this when leaders from the Anglophone Caribbean rarely have or seem able to create the equivalent opportunities?
It would be easy to say that once the visit over it will rapidly be forgotten, that the meetings were formal or insubstantial or even to expect that there will be little in the way of follow up. But this would be to entirely miss the point and to ignore the plans that the Dominican Republic is putting in place to extend its relationships in the UK.
Official visits are about chemistry and perception.
The meeting that President Fernandez had with Tony Blair is a case in point. While the two leaders had little that was politically pressing to discuss, senior political figures suggest that there was real value in two leaders exchange on a politically challenging hemispheric issue. Nothing was decided, but the value of this encounter and the visit as a whole was a recognition that there are many synergies between the way in which London and the Dominican Republic's leaders see the world, the economy and social issues.
In other words not only was the intellectual and personal chemistry right, but the two leaders philosophy and world-view are very similar.
A similar meeting of minds occurred with investors.
During his visit and in his presentations to the City of London and elsewhere, the Dominican President continually stressed that his emphasis was on achieving a profound transformation of the Dominican Republic's economy. His nation, he said, was one that was in transition.
ECONOMIC CHANGE
Originally, 70 per cent of the population lived in rural areas and 30 per cent in the cities. Now the reverse was true. The nation had changed. It had gone from being an economy dominated by agriculture, through manufacturing for export to one that now aspires to a services-led economy. His focus was on the future and a positive economic message rather than on the past.
He said that his objective after returning to office in 2004 had been to restore confidence and macroeconomic stability. The Dominican Republic, he said, had out-performed the IMF programme that had been put in place, it had restructured its debts and had experienced a 9.3 per cent GDP growth in 2005 the highest in Latin America and the Caribbean compared with the 2.5 per cent that the IMF had targeted.
His focus and one of his reasons for visiting the United Kingdom was, he said, to drive forward a new economy in his nation, whether it be through the global branding of the Dominican Republic, the development of expertise in bio-sciences, taking export agriculture to higher-value organic production or the diversification and scaling up of the Republic's tourism product.
Everything in the Dominican Republic is, of course, not rosy. It has stiff challenges ahead in opening a market still dominated by a small number of powerful economic interests and it faces a difficult task in trying to integrate its economy with that of the rest of the region. But what was striking in London was that the president not only had a positive story to tell, but was also able to convey a sense of quiet optimism that what he was saying was achievable. He was, in other words, able to create confidence.
President Fernandez's visit also had an interesting and unintended by-product. It created a more holistic view of the Caribbean. It suggested a single region that requires being seen as both Hispanic and Anglophone. As such, it played to the theme of the gradual reordering of Britain's global priorities. It also highlighted how much the message of looking forward and the acceptance of the global economic consensus may bring benefits in London and, by extension, in other European and North American capitals.
UNSPOKEN SUB-TEXT
But if this is true, there was also a further worrying and unspoken sub-text for the English-speaking Caribbean. The visit re-emphasised the need for the 5.5 million people living in the Anglophone Caribbean to make the Caribbean Single Market and Economy work if nations of nine million such as the Dominican Republic with critical economic mass are not over time to assume the identity of 'the Caribbean' in a Europe of twenty-five or more member states.
The United Kingdom's ties with the Anglophone Caribbean remain different and will continue to be so. However, there is a weariness at the highest levels of the British Government, that parts of the English-speaking Caribbean are not doing enough to change, modernise and face the future at just the moment when new technologies, the service sector and education and economic reform can enable nations to overcome their smallness.
This view may seem harsh, but it is perhaps the strongest message, albeit subliminal and unintended, for the Caribbean from the first ever visit by a Dominican Republic President to Britain.
David Jessop is the
director of the Caribbean
Council and can be contacted
at david.jessop@caribbean-council.org. Previous columns can be found at www.caribbean-council.org.
