Piece on the modern Commonwealth

The Commonwealth comes to the Caribbean at the end of November 2009, when its Heads of Government meet in Port-of-Spain. The Heads bring thousands in their wake, and attract millions more further afield: around them converge Commonwealth Foreign Ministers, and the Commonwealth civil society, youth and business communities – to say nothing of nearly 1,000 regional and international journalists.

The Caribbean has been at the heart of the Commonwealth for nearly 50 of the 60 diamond years which the association is celebrating in 2009. Newly independent Jamaica as well as Trinidad and Tobago joined the Commonwealth in 1962, and most recently St Kitts and Nevis joined in 1983. The 12 Caribbean Commonwealth members make up over three-quarters of the membership of CARICOM, while accounting for nearly a quarter of the Commonwealth membership itself.

The challenges of the Caribbean are those of the Commonwealth. They are mirrored especially in the challenges of another set of islands on another side of the world: we have made much of the synergies between the 12 Caribbean Commonwealth members in the Atlantic Ocean, and the 11 island states spread across an even greater distance in the Pacific Ocean. Setting aside so many distinctive features of language and culture and history, the bond of Caribbean and Pacific Commonwealth states – and more in the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea – is that they are small island states.

Working with partners such as the World Bank, the Commonwealth can properly claim to have pioneered the science of small states, hitherto unexamined and seemingly untended. With half of its membership having populations of less than one million people, the Commonwealth has studied the unique vulnerabilities (political, economic, environmental, social) of small states, as well as their equally unique strengths and resilience, so often embodied in their people, and the level of education and opportunity which their governments can give them. The Caribbean is resourceful, as we see in the ways it is currently reorienting its economies. The Caribbean is in good democratic health, yet not complacent, as we see in its constant efforts to strengthen the institutions and systems of governance that make a democratic vote a thing worth having.

CHOGM 2009 will focus on the shared challenges of 53 countries across the globe – as each of them faces the task of building economies in difficult times, of staving off environmental ruin, and of strengthening the very systems of government by which they exist. It is a chance for a quarter of the world’s countries to show the rest of the world that our way is the communal and consensual way – the way of inclusiveness, in which every voice is heard, and every challenge shared.

40 or so non-Caribbean leaders will look especially closely at their Caribbean counterparts, for the lessons and the leadership which this region can share. Above all, our leaders must be trustees of the values of this organization, and the fact that it is here to serve its people, and particularly its young people. Half of the population of the Commonwealth is under 25 years old, and within the cohorts of the young there lurks a litany of worrying statistics – not least, the chilling fact that young people account for 25% of the world’s working-age population, but 45% of its unemployed.

We cherish the flower, not the blight, of youth. We resolutely proclaim that young people embody hope, not despair; and that they are a resource, not a drain. The effects of globalisation, positive and negative, flow through the young, and today’s challenges will be solved by today’s young people, the greatest contemporary agents of change and of transformation.

As we celebrate the quality of Caribbean leadership in this welcome volume, Oaths of Allegiance, I call on all our Commonwealth leaders – in the Caribbean and beyond – to show leadership at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Trinidad and Tobago in November 2009. ‘CHOGM’ can be the moment when leaders exercise shared political will, convening power and financial muscle, to put our young people at the centre of our plans for this association. I recall the slogan which we have used throughout 2009, and which can see climactic results in November: thecommonwealth@60 – ‘serving a new generation’.

ENDS