Whither Europe?

May 11, 2012 Editorial

Wednesday May 9th was “Europe Day”. Guyana has had a long, if not exactly glorious, relationship with Europe. Founded as colonies of the Dutch, they were eventually ceded to the British in one of the interminable wars. The European imperial states used us as pawns. Apart from being trophies to demonstrate their “power”, we produced raw materials for the ‘home country”.
And that was how relations generally continued until an exhausted Britain began to, reluctantly in some instances, wrap up its empire after WWII. We signed an agreement to supply our sugar to Britain that needed to sweeten its ‘cuppa’. That was the extent of our importance.
As Europe as a whole tried to rebuild itself under the watchful eyes of the US, on May 9th 1950, the French Foreign Minister Robert Schuman initiated what became the Europe Union. We were not affected in the least: Britain reserved its reservations about the ‘continent’.
When Britain acceded to the Union in 1973 – under conditions, of course – our Commonwealth Sugar Agreement was transferred into the Lomé Treaty. Unlike its stance on its own interests, Britain assured us that our sugar interests would be protected – it was in writing, after all. Very soon after, in a fortuitous turn of events, world sugar prices skyrocketed and we had our day in the sun with the EU, as the Lomé Agreement gave its members sugar security. Their desserts were safe.
The world continued to turn; Lomé was transformed into “Cotonou” and we were assured the word of Europe was their bond – especially when it was in writing. Our policy makers were therefore shocked when in the new millennium, the Sugar protocol was unilaterally abrogated, in 2005, and a 36% reduction in our ‘guaranteed’ prices imposed. And this has become the defining image of the EU and Europe for the present generation of Guyanese.
A continent that conquered our native peoples, exterminated them for the greatest part, exploited and extracted our wealth as primary products so that we remained, in the words of the late great Walter Rodney, “underdeveloped and finally scrapped an agreement that had been defined by them as ‘sacrosanct’. We had been hegemonised to believe that they were ‘civilised’ and ‘cultured’, and had not only economic rationality as their criterion for our relationship, but also a sense of noblesse oblige”.
But the world does continue to turn and today, Europe is still roiling from the shocks of the financial crisis that emanated from the US back in 2008. They’re being overtaken by BRICS. Greece has defaulted on its sovereign debt and the monetary union unrolled with so much fanfare in 2001 is now up in the air. The smart money is betting that Spain and Italy might follow Greece’s suit. The continent is enmeshed in a nasty argument as to whether ‘austerity’ or “stimulus’ is the way to deal with their travails.
The ‘austerity package’, of course, was imposed on Guyana as well as much of the Third World back in the 1980s by the IMF, which is ‘traditionally’ headed as it is today by a European. Then, we were forced to drink the bitter IMF draught. Guyana became an international pariah when we defaulted on payments. Today, Greece has received untold billions and yet the incoming government has emphatically declared it will not go through with the austerity package ‘agreed to’ with the previous government.
The Germans will be the ones to ultimately foot the bills, so it will be interesting to see how matters turn out in the next few months as the new socialist French president, joins in calling for stimulus rather than austerity. The Germans have already signalled that they might compromise on their macro-economic rules by declaring that they will be willing to permit a higher level of inflation in their economy, so as to pull the weaker economies through stimulating its economy.
For us in Guyana, therefore, we might best reflect on Europe Day on the different rules of the game for the strong and for the weak.

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