AS PRIME Minister Bruce Golding remarked Monday night, there is no one in Jamaica, and we dare say anywhere else in this region, who would have deserved more than P.J. Patterson the honour that was bestowed on him by the Caribbean Community (CARICOM).

Indeed, as Mr Patterson prepared to retire as Jamaica's prime minister in 2006, there was anxiety among his regional peers whether someone would emerge who possessed the negotiating skills, capacity for consensus building and who enjoyed the respect of his fellow leaders as Mr Patterson did.

Such concern was understandable. CARICOM can be a fractious bunch of competing interests. And as one leader noted at the time, Mr Patterson often provided the community with an experienced and steadying hand. Moreover, beyond his intellectual appreciation of the logic of conglomeration, Mr Patterson is, by instinct, a regionalist. It was true, as Mr Golding said, that when Mr Patterson was awarded the Order of CARICOM, "it was made with unanimity".

Jamaica's place in caricom

But more important than Mr Golding's heaping encomiums on one of his predecessors was the PM's further acknowledgement and deeper embrace of the imperatives of CARICOM and Jamaica's place within it. Which, in some respects, may be healthier and more responsible than the by-the-gut support of regionalism.

As a former sceptic, Mr Golding brings to his regionalism a hard-nosed, cost-benefit calculation and, apparently, has determined that, on balance, Jamaica has substantially more to gain by being in rather than out. Moreover, Mr Golding's less-than-emotional engagement of CARICOM affords him the luxury of frankness in declaring the quality and effectiveness of its outcomes.

It is in that context we note the prime minister's observation that in today's world, where economics largely defines international relations, nations are reconfiguring themselves into regional blocs in order to create the mass with which to survive and assert authority. Moreover, small states are being forced by larger powers into such groups before engaging them.

Indeed, as Mr Golding said, it is these kinds of multilateral arrangements "within which bilateral interests are pursued".

"In this new paradigm, smallness of size is a distinct disadvantage," he said.

More aggression needed

In other words, what used to be an article of faith of Mr Golding's Jamaica Labour Party, that Jamaica ought to eschew regionalism and integration, misconstrues the logic of today's environment.

But Mr Golding posed an important and relevant question for CARICOM: how is this regionalism to be manifested, and by what mechanism is the community to be made to work and bring value to its members?

We agree with the prime minister that CARICOM, as a community of sovereign states, has been hamstrung by its tendency towards minimalism. He seems to suggest, but did not expressly say so, that CARICOM needs to be more aggressive in its governance arrangements to get more done, faster.

If that, indeed, is Mr Golding's position, it presumes ceding some sovereign authority to the central organs of the community, which we do not believe to be in conflict with proposals for deeper union among some CARICOM members in the Eastern Caribbean. Should our assumption about Mr Golding's posture be true, we suggest that he uses Jamaica's natural position as political leadership of CARICOM to steer the community to the desired new directions.

There is emerging consensus in Kingston.

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