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US hegemony and the reconfiguration of the Caribbean*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  26 October 2009

Anthony Payne
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Extract

Like every other part of the world, the Caribbean is having to come to terms with the deep-seated changes in the nature of the world order manifest at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. These changes have set in train a process which is beginning to constitute a reconfiguration of what is meant by and included within the concept of the Caribbean. Conventionally, the Caribbean has been defined by a blend of its geography and history. From a simple geographical viewpoint, it consists of all the islands in the Caribbean Sea, making up a huge archipelago which runs some 2,500 miles from the southern tip of Florida in the north to the coast of Venezuela in the south, facing Central America to the west and the Atlantic Ocean to the east. From a more complex historical viewpoint which emphasizes the common, searing impact of slave-based European imperialism, it also includes Belize on the Central American isthmus and the three ‘Guianas’ on the South American coast: Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana. Conceived in this way, the region has widely been said to possess an intellectual coherence that makes it possible to analyse its modern politics and economics within a single framework.

Type
Research Article
Information
Review of International Studies , Volume 20 , Issue 2 , April 1994 , pp. 149 - 168
Copyright
Copyright © British International Studies Association 1994

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References

1 For further elaboration of this definition, see Payne, Anthony, The International Crisis in the Caribbean (London, 1984), pp. 1–10Google Scholar. 149

2 Williams, Dr Eric, the distinguished historian and former prime minister of Trinidad and Tobago for many years, put the point in typically pithy fashion in condemning as early as 1975 a plan to call a conference on the Caribbean Basin, ‘whatever that may be’. Trinidad Guardian, 16 May 1975Google Scholar.

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24 The literature which seeks to describe and explain post-war US hegemony is manifestly too large to cite. Moreover, the objective here is not to bring forward new evidence but rather to retell familiarevents by reference to a particular view of what hegemony means.

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40 Statement of Frederic H. Brooks, President, Caribbean/Latin American Action and Chairman, Riddell Inc. to the Subcommittee on Trade, Committee on Ways and Means, US House of Representatives, Washington DC, February 1991.

41 Statement of Brooks.

42 For an account of the work of the CBTAG, see the CBTAG Status Reports, January and September 1992, Department of State, Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.

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