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PUBLISHED| Dennis Minott | Of Course, I Still Believe in Federation
- A-QuEST (Minott)
- 6 hours ago
- 7 min read
Of course, I still believe in Federation.
I believe in it not merely because I am Caribbean, nor because West Indian cricket once taught us how magnificently separate territories could perform beneath one maroon banner. I believe because I have travelled, observed, and worked in societies where political architecture has been made to accommodate geography, cultural difference, and economic ambition. My own lived working exposure to the wisdoms of these Far East archipelagos was profoundly enriched through renewable energy development initiatives led by the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO)—where the field engagements supported by Bill Tanaka, Han Pak, and their team opened invaluable windows into how island and regional energy frameworks can function at scale.
I understand, firsthand, mighty Malaysia: peninsular and Bornean, Malay and Chinese, Indian and indigenous, Islamic yet constitutionally plural, combining thirteen states and three federal territories within a single federal constitutional order. I have also experienced, firsthand, the fascinating Philippines, a nation scattered across more than 7,000 islands, possessing profound regional, linguistic, and cultural differences, yet functioning within one republic, one national market, and one international personality.
Accuracy requires an important distinction. Malaysia is a true federation. The Philippines is a unitary presidential republic, albeit one divided into regions, provinces, and autonomous arrangements. It therefore does not prove that federalism alone produces development. It proves something equally damaging to Caribbean complacency: extensive water, island geography, local identity, and cultural diversity do not make effective national scale impossible. Malaysia shows how federation can hold diverse territories together; the Philippines shows how an archipelago can still think, plan, and bargain as a country.
CARICOM, by contrast, remains a collection of sovereign governments that repeatedly announce common purposes while retaining the practical machinery of fragmentation.
The comparison should make us uncomfortable.
According to the World Bank’s figures, Malaysia produced a gross domestic product of approximately US$472.2 billion, with GDP per person standing at US$13,125 after expanding by 5.2 per cent. The Philippines, with nearly 117 million people, produced about US$487.1 billion, grew by 4.4 per cent, and recorded GDP per person of approximately US$4,171.
Jamaica’s GDP was only about US$22.7 billion, with GDP per person of roughly US$8,003. Haiti, with nearly 12 million people, produced approximately US$32.1 billion, or only US$2,694 per person, while its economy contracted by 2.7 per cent and consumer-price inflation reached 28.6 per cent.
GDP per person must never be mistaken for household income, equality, happiness, or moral worth. It says little by itself about how wealth is distributed, whether hospitals function, whether young people can afford homes, or whether citizens feel secure. Yet it remains a useful measure of the productive resources potentially available per resident.
The figures disclose a Caribbean paradox.
Jamaica’s GDP per person exceeds that of the Philippines, yet the Philippines possesses an economic system more than twenty times Jamaica’s size. That scale permits larger domestic markets, deeper capital pools, specialised universities, extensive manufacturing supply chains, national research institutions, more powerful procurement, and a diplomatic presence Jamaica could scarcely reproduce independently.
Malaysia combines both scale and substantially higher output per person. Its federation does not eliminate political conflict, corruption, ethnic tension, uneven development, or centralising tendencies. No serious argument for federation should romanticise it. Nevertheless, Malaysia can pursue semiconductor manufacturing, advanced electronics, energy development, mass transit, ports, higher education, industrial policy, and international trade from a platform of nearly half a trillion US dollars.
Jamaica must finance the basic apparatus of sovereignty from an economy smaller than that of many metropolitan regions.
Haiti’s plight is more severe. It has a population larger than several successful countries, but not an effective regional structure capable of reinforcing public administration, security, infrastructure, energy provision, food systems, and disaster response. The World Bank’s recent strategy for Haiti explicitly acknowledges these recurrent crises, weakened institutions, and the urgent need to preserve basic state capacity while rebuilding roads, electricity, water, digital access, and human capital.
The Caribbean has treated Haiti too often as a neighbouring tragedy rather than as the supreme test of whether our claimed community possesses political meaning.
Were CARICOM a genuine federation, Haiti’s institutional collapse could not be treated as chiefly a Haitian–CARICOM Citizens’ matter. Federal courts, policing assistance, customs administration, disaster logistics, electoral support, engineering corps, public-health services, and infrastructure finance would be responsibilities of the union. Federation would not instantly cure Haiti’s historical wounds, foreign interventions, elite capture, or insecurity. It would, however, replace episodic “sometimish” sympathy with constitutional obligation.
That is the difference between a community of speeches and a political union.
Consider also the geographically analogous small island states beyond our region. Mauritius, Seychelles, Maldives, Fiji, and Cabo Verde face combinations of remoteness, limited land, climate exposure, import dependence, and narrow domestic markets. Yet several have achieved GDP-per-person levels comparable with or considerably above Jamaica’s. World Bank reporting places Maldives near US$14,615 per person and Cabo Verde near US$5,797; Malaysia stands at US$13,125, while Jamaica remains near US$8,003.
Mauritius has repeatedly demonstrated how a small island economy can move beyond dependence upon a single agricultural export(Sugarcane sugar) into tourism, financial and professional services, textiles, information technology, and higher-value activities. Seychelles and Maldives benefit from small populations and high-value tourism, so they are not simple models for Jamaica or Haiti. Nor should nominal GDP comparisons erase differences in living costs, inequality, demography, or natural endowment.
The correct lesson is not that every island can copy Mauritius or Maldives. It is that geography is a constraint, not an acquittal.
The World Bank continually identifies the recurring disadvantages of small states: limited institutional capacity, narrow economic bases, difficulty attracting investment, high operating costs, remoteness, and acute vulnerability to external and natural shocks.
Federation would not abolish those disadvantages, but it could reduce several of them by creating scale where nature supplied little.
A federal Caribbean market would contain roughly twenty million people, depending upon membership. It could negotiate trade agreements collectively, establish enforceable regional competition law, procure medicines and technology in bulk, coordinate food and energy security, and maintain specialised regulatory agencies of a quality too costly for every microstate to duplicate.
Why should each small country struggle separately to regulate artificial intelligence, financial technology, aviation, pharmaceuticals, telecommunications, cyber-security, and complex energy systems? Why must every territory maintain a thinly staffed imitation of the same state apparatus?
A Caribbean federation could establish federal institutions for maritime surveillance, civil aviation, disaster response, public-health emergencies, advanced technical standards, tertiary research, transportation planning, and major infrastructure. National governments would retain education, culture, local policing, land use, community development, and other functions best handled close to citizens.
That is not surrender. It is subsidiarity: governing each matter at the lowest level capable of handling it effectively.
Federation could also end our strange condition in which a Caribbean citizen may travel more conveniently to Miami, conduct business more easily through London, and purchase goods more predictably from China than from a neighbouring island. CARICOM describes itself as the oldest surviving integration movement in the developing world, yet its longevity sometimes conceals the shallowness of implementation.
There has been progress. In recent arrangements across the region, countries such as Barbados, Belize, Dominica, and Saint Vincent and the Grenadines moved towards fuller freedom for participating citizens to live and work across their borders without conventional work permits. That experiment deserves support. But it also exposes the central weakness: fundamental Caribbean rights continue to depend upon which governments are willing, which have delayed, and which remain afraid.
In a federation, regional citizenship would not be a favour announced at a summit. It would be a constitutional status enforceable in court.
Malaysia’s experience deserves attention here. Its federation joins territories separated by the South China Sea. Sabah and Sarawak possess distinctive histories, populations, and constitutional interests. Federalism has not removed disputes over autonomy, revenue, or political power. It has supplied a continuing constitutional arena within which those disputes can be conducted without requiring every disagreement to become an international quarrel.
That is the brilliance of federation when properly constrained: it domesticates difference.
The Caribbean possesses no shortage of common identity. Our people have already federated through cricket, music, migration, religion, universities, literature, carnival, food, pay-me. banga-mary, flying-fish, and family. The political class lags behind the civilisation.
A modern West Indian federation must, however, learn the bitter lessons of 1958–1962. It must not be an arrangement negotiated by premiers and presented to citizens as an accomplished fact. It requires a written constitution, public deliberation, national referendums, a directly elected federal legislature, and a binding bill of rights.
Its lower chamber should reflect population. Its upper chamber should protect smaller states. Federal taxation and revenue-sharing must be transparent. The Caribbean Court of Justice should become the final constitutional court of participating members. Powers not expressly granted to the federation should remain with national governments.
No single capital should own it. Federal institutions could be deliberately distributed: the court in Trinidad and Tobago, parliament in Barbados, the executive in Jamaica, a regional climate authority in Dominica, agriculture in Guyana/Suriname, maritime security in the Eastern Caribbean, cultural institutions and TVET plus light manufacturing in Haiti, and research facilities across the region.
Federation should begin with the willing, not be paralysed by the reluctant.
The comparison with Malaysia and the Philippines does not tell us that large political units are automatically wise or democratic. Both societies face serious political and social difficulties. Scale can magnify incompetence as readily as competence. A badly designed Caribbean federation could become remote, bureaucratic, and dominated by its largest members.
But fragmentation has dangers too, and we have normalised them: duplicated overheads, weak bargaining power, thin institutions, incomplete markets, high transport costs, and governments too small to regulate the corporations, and Anansis courting them.
Poor Jamaica has achieved admirable fiscal discipline, cultural influence, and pockets of excellence, yet remains trapped in low productivity and restricted scale. Poor Haiti bears burdens so immense that sovereignty without regional capacity has become almost an abstraction.
We must stop treating smallness as sacred.
I still believe in a Caribbean Federation because I have seen societies separated by seas govern at scale. I have seen that diversity need not mean disunion, that state and regional identities can survive inside a larger constitutional home, and that economic weight matters in a world organised around continental powers and multinational capital.
The West Indies Federation failed. That is historical fact.
Our prolonged fragmentation is failing too. That is the fact we are still unwilling to face.
Of course, I still believe in Federation—not as nostalgia for a broken experiment, but as the unfinished architecture of Caribbean survival, dignity, and power.
