Alison Gordon, Modern Afro-Atlantic Politics (Univ. of Kingston Press, 2013)
… The formation of the Afro-Atlantic Common Market [1] was both effect and cause. If there hadn’t already been a cultural elite at home in all the Atlantic-rim countries, if Afro-Atlantism weren’t already an established idea, the Common Market would never have come to be. But at the same time, the treaty union created by the Market allowed the elite to grow and enabled Afro-Atlantism to become a mass movement.
There had always been considerable freedom of movement between the Caribbean islands, the Coaster enclaves of West Africa and the United States, and for two generations, it had been common for the middle and upper classes to go abroad for work and study. The Common Market formalized the zone of free movement and expanded it to include the Spanish and Creole-speaking states. People had moved between those as well – it was common for Haitians to do seasonal labor in the Dominican Republic or Cuba, and many Jamaicans had settled on Hispaniola during the troubles of the Imperial era [2] – but establishing an
official presence there had been harder. Now, suddenly, it wasn’t, and the effects were quick in coming: between 1953 and 1960, the French and English-speaking communities in Havana doubled, and “Cuba Towns” grew up in Kingston and even Freetown.
Institutions followed the flow of people. In 1959, a Liberia-led consortium of Common Market countries founded the Afro-Atlantic University, with flagship campuses in Monrovia, Havana and Port of Spain. Before the 1960s were out, there were branches of the university in most Caribbean islands and coastal West African states, as well as three in the United States (Charleston, Atlanta and Houston) and others in Brazil and Mexico. Air travel and a union-run ferry network made education and jobs throughout the Common Market accessible to a majority of its people, and multilingual broadcast media existed across most of its member states by 1970. A 1966 revision to the Common Market treaty provided, as in India and the Central African Accord nations, that nationals of member countries would be treated as citizens throughout the union, allowing the cultural elite to become a political elite.
The solidarity built during the 1950s and 60s, both at the elite and the popular level, enabled the Common Market to survive the 1970s. The global recession that began in 1971 hit commodity prices hard and agricultural commodities hardest, which was devastating to a region still heavily geared toward sugar production. The Trinidad-Guiana federation had oil, and Jamaica, Cuba and Liberia had strong mining sectors and light industry, but even they had many small sugar cane growers, and on the smaller islands, sugar production and government jobs funded by sugar revenue were virtually the entire economy. Unemployment soared, many small growers were forced into debt to keep their land, and standards of living in some parts of the Common Market fell by a third, leading to mass demonstrations and calls for radical solutions.
Two opposing camps emerged: those, mainly in the larger and more diversified member states, who wanted to abandon the Common Market project and institute protectionist measures, and those who wanted to
strengthen the association by reviving the sugar cartel of the 1910s-20s. [3] Jamaica and Trinidad-Guiana threatened to withdraw from the union over this issue, but these threats proved empty due to the popular support that had built up over the last two decades, and the pro-cartel faction narrowly won out at the Common Market conference of 1974. The logistics of the cartel proved easier than in the 1910s, as none of the Afro-Atlantic countries were governed any longer by colonial authorities, and by early 1975, sugar price supports were back in place.
The revived cartel still faced major challenges. Not all the cane sugar producers were part of it, and it had to compete with beet sugar from the United States and Europe, so its control over the price of sugar was limited. The Common Market also faced a lawsuit in the Court of Arbitration arguing that the cartel was monopolistic, unfair to sugar consumers, and contrary to principles of free trade between nations. The legal challenge was turned back in 1978, when a majority of the Court ruled that there were no principles of customary international law that compelled free trade or prohibited nations from combining to support commodity prices (although several judges suggested that cartels might be illegal if they involved key energy resources such as uranium or oil). The purely economic challenge proved the more difficult one; in the face of beet sugar competition, the cartel struggled to raise the price of cane sugar enough to permit recovery.
In the end, the cartel was only partly successful in shoring up the Afro-Atlantic economies. The rest of the job was accomplished through negotiations with the more developed sugar producers, which agreed to voluntary price support measures in return for relaxation of cartel restrictions. But even this, in the view of many, represented a victory for the cartel: if the Common Market hadn’t spoken with one voice, then it would have had far less leverage in negotiating with outside countries, and indeed, a divided Afro-Atlantic region might never have been able to persuade the rest of the world to notice its economic difficulties. As prosperity returned in the late 1970s, there were no more thoughts of breaking up the Common Market – a sentiment which only redoubled during the 1980s as tourism grew into an economic mainstay and the smaller member states saw economic unity as their protection against becoming dependent on foreign-owned tourist facilities.
There would be one more test of the Common Market’s solidarity, though, and it would be a severe one: the emergence of regulatory-capture scandals in the 1990s much like those that had swept the Zollverein and other established treaty agencies two decades earlier. The bodies that administered the sugar cartel, which theoretically represented the member states, had come to represent the sugar industry, and more than that, they had effectively been taken over by large-scale agribusiness. By the end of the 1980s, the Sugar Board’s policies were increasingly inimical to the yeoman growers and co-ops that had multiplied in the wake of the land reform of the 1940s and 50s, and the board was able to influence, and in some cases even override, government action that favored small-scale agriculture.
The scandal broke in 1992, after revelations concerning elections that had been fought on the issue of debt relief for small growers. The previous year, in both Dominica and Barbados, the governing coalitions narrowly turned back challenges from parties that supported restructuring of the debt overhang from the 1970s. In January 1992, leaked documents revealed that the Sugar Board had played a large part in the outcomes of these elections, and had financed dirty tricks and outright fraud in favor of the governing parties. Legal challenges were filed, but they dragged on, with the local courts reluctant to challenge an agency that controlled a large portion of the economy outright and that was allied with banana growers’ groups that controlled much of the rest.
In Dominica, where there was a tradition of yeoman radicalism going back to the nineteenth century, people took matters into their own hands, with massive street protests in June 1993 occupying the capital and forcing the government to resign in favor of a union of co-operatives. Elsewhere, the growing scandal became a subject of elections, court petitions and conferences for the rest of the 1990s. As in the Zollverein, a consensus developed in favor of popular participation in international institutions; in 1999, an amendment to the Common Market treaty succeeded in replacing the crony-ridden boards with the “sugar parliament,” “banana parliament” and “tourist parliament,” each directly elected and with guaranteed representation for small business and labor unions.
The performance of the economic parliaments has been mixed. They are far more transparent than what came before and regulatory capture on the scale of the 1980s hasn’t recurred, but they have been marked by rivalry between member-state delegations and disputes between the representatives and their expert staff, and have been criticized for giving insufficient representation to environmental concerns. The aftermath of the 1990s scandals has also stymied attempts to move the Common Market closer to a political union on the Indian or Nusantaran model. Proposals for a common currency, tentatively the “Afro-Atlantic pound,” have foundered over disagreements between the richer, more industrialized members and the poorer, agriculture and tourism-dependent ones as to how a monetary union would be implemented; varying conceptions of popular government and human rights have thus far thwarted the establishment of union-wide parliaments or courts outside the economic sphere; and lingering cultural differences have muted calls for political unity, especially after the accession of the Dutch islands and Surinam in 2004. The solidarity created by Afro-Atlantic institutions and shared history continues unabated, but for the majority of people in the Caribbean and coastal West Africa, it still has limits…
Mauricio Salazar Blyden, Afro-Atlantism and the World (Monrovia: Massaquoi, 2012)
… In 2012, it’s still possible to start a fight by arguing that Afro-Atlantic culture does or doesn’t exist. Like the question of whether the West African Coasters are one people or several, the Afro-Atlantic question is tied up in ideology and nationalism. The same patterns that some see as proof of a common culture are viewed by others as mere details, and one’s view on this issue is often a good predictor of one’s political alignment.
Most people, if pressed, will admit that the Afro-Atlantic states are at least a cultural region, shaped by forced migration, slavery and European colonialism. There is also broad agreement that the region has certain cultural polestars. Liberia, the birthplace of Afro-Atlantic ideology, is clearly one; Monrovia is a flagship of the regional university and a center of education and media. On the other side of the Atlantic, Havana, Kingston, Santo Domingo and Port-au-Prince are centers of art, music and fashion, all with audiences that extend well beyond their home countries and even beyond the Common Market, and Port of Spain, as the bridge to India, is also a place where musical and artistic styles are born. Any educated person in the Afro-Atlantic world – and these days, that means almost everyone – will be familiar with the speech patterns and cultural products of these cities, and will likely have lived in more than one of them at one time or another…
… More controversial is the degree to which the demotic speeches of the Caribbean and West Africa have fused into a common language. There had always been strong similarities between the Krio language of Sierra Leone, the creoles of Liberia and Fernando Po, the Gullah speech of lowland South Carolina and Georgia, and the patois of Jamaica and Belize. Even before the end of the nineteenth century, connections between South Carolina, Liberia and Sierra Leone had turned their regional creoles into a single language, and succeeding events – the growth of a Jamaican diaspora in the 1910s and 20s, the foundation of the Common Market and the Afro-Atlantic University, the spread of mass media and music across the region – brought this trend to the Caribbean. The first university courses in the emerging Afro-Atlantic language were taught as early as 1955, and by the 1960s, it was generally agreed that the creoles of the British and American-influenced nations had merged into one speech.
The media and an increasingly mobile population brought Afro-Atlantic to the rest of the Common Market, and in the process, the new language picked up elements of Cuban and Dominican Spanish, Portuguese, Haitian Creole, standard French and Modern Hindustani. The accretion of loanwords was slow but inexorable: by 1990, literary Afro-Atlantic had as many Spanish words as the Afro-Cuban-Krio fusion of Fernando Po, and common Haitian and Brazilian expressions had made their way into the language through music. In the early twenty-first century, Afro-Atlantic was nearly as much a demotic speech in Santo Domingo, with its large and much-intermarried Jamaican community, as in Kingston or Freetown.
The spread of Afro-Atlantic inspired counter-movements to preserve the purity of regional languages, and it also accentuated regional differences in the Afro-Atlantic speech itself. The English and coastal West African core, and by the 1990s certain loanwords, were common to all dialects of Afro-Atlantic, but other loanwords varied widely from region to region. The Afro-Atlantic of Havana shaded into Spanish, that of Port-au-Prince into Kreyol, that of South Carolina and the Gulf Coast into American English. This is the reason that, even as Afro-Atlantic has become a language of literature and mass media, it continues to defy attempts at standardization, and its boundaries remain a matter of opinion…
… And then there are the
foreign polestars of Common Market culture. Although the Common Market treaty zone is, by some measures, the Afro-Atlantic heartland, the larger Afro-Atlantic world includes every place where there was once African slavery. Two countries in particular, Brazil and the United States, have an outsize influence on Afro-Atlantic culture through their sheer size, wealth and interaction with the rest of the African diaspora.
Nearly every Common Market country has a diaspora in the United States, with some, such as the South Carolina Haitians or the Gulf Coast Jamaicans, going back a century or more. Most of the Afro-Atlantic states also have four-freedoms agreements with America – Liberia and Sierra Leone since 1958 (and informally long before that) and the rest during the 1980s and 90s – and it has become common for their citizens to spend time studying or working there. Add to that Liberia’s American roots, the adoption of an Afro-Atlantist outlook by much of the African-American population in recent decades, and the presence of Afro-Atlantic University campuses and other institutions on American soil, and it’s no surprise that American fashions, figures of speech, sports and political ideas spread quickly from one end of the Common Market to the other. The cultural transmission is two ways and always has been, but parts of the Caribbean and West Africa are nearly as Americanized as the Bahamas and Virgin Islands.
Brazilian influence has traditionally been stronger on the African side of the Atlantic: the Afro-Brazilian origin of several of the Coaster peoples, the regional presence of the Malê and Brazil’s extensive diplomacy toward its African descendants have made sure of that. Since the 1980s, though, Brazilian culture has also made itself felt in the Caribbean, due in large part to the popularity of Brazilian music and design, the commonalities between Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Caribbean religions, and the adoption of Afro-Atlantist ideology by a majority of black Brazilians. The presence of Brazil is still more subtle in the Caribbean than in coastal West Africa, but with the spread of Afro-Atlantic educational institutions to Brazil and vice versa, it can only be expected to increase.
Just as subtle, but still present, is the legacy of Europe. Except for the few islands that are still dominions or integral parts of European countries, there is less ongoing cultural contact with Europe than with the New World powers: Afro-Atlantist ideology is much less common among Africans in Europe than in Brazil or the United States, and although many Common Market countries are part of the Commonwealth or other European-sponsored treaty organizations, those associations are primarily political and economic rather than cultural. Still, centuries of colonialism must inevitably have an impact. In Cuba and Puerto Rico, which retain their ties to the Spanish crown, the cities still have the flavor of old Spain; the same is true of Fernando Po’s old colonial capital on the other side of the ocean. British architecture and sporting traditions still hold sway and have even spread in much of the Caribbean and Sierra Leone. Martinique and Guadeloupe, which are outside the Common Market but interact freely with it, are as French as Paris, and St. Maarten is virtually unchanged from the days of Dutch rule.
Even Mexico has become the home of a growing Afro-Atlantic community, and although most settlement from the Common Market countries has occurred this century, traces of Mexican art and folk religion are already appearing in Caribbean public squares and churches…
… The spread of foreign cultural influence in the Common Market hasn’t passed without reaction. As in the United States and Brazil, a movement to “re-Africanize” speech, art and religion took shape in the 1980s and has thousands of adherents today. But this movement has never gained the support of a majority, even locally. Most of the Common Market’s citizens then and now have adopted Afro-Atlantism’s founding principle: that they are not an African diaspora, or at least not merely one, but instead a new people which is indigenous to both shores of the ocean and whose heritage comes from many nations.
For, if nothing else, Afro-Atlantic ideology has succeeded in overcoming many of the region’s old differences: the enmity between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, for instance, is fading quickly into historical memory, as are the prejudices that divided Jamaicans from people of the smaller British islands. However politically volatile the Common Market may be as it confronts the economic and environmental challenges of the twenty-first century, the Afro-Atlantic nation has made peace with itself…
Laurie Pillai, From Sea to Sea: Canada in a Global Age (Montreal: Union, 2014)
… The failure of the Winninpeg Charter and the subsequent compromise agreement with Québec [4] ushered in a quiet decade in Canadian politics. The voters had shown themselves to be firm supporters of federalism and equally firm opponents of constitutional tinkering, and a suitably chastened political class called a halt to its efforts to restructure the country. Negotiations with the First Nations continued, building on the foundations of the 1950s and 60s and leading to the creation of autonomous entities [5], and Arctic Canada moved closer to self-rule, but otherwise, the status quo between the federal government and the provinces was maintained.
The effective federal response to the 1970s recession did much to quiet sectional tensions for the time being. The quiet era was also aided by the social revolution taking place in Québec. In the 1960s, nationalism had been the major fault line in Québécois politics, but by the mid-70s, the focus had shifted to a three-cornered culture war between Catholic conservatives, socially liberal Catholics who took inspiration from the Portuguese “new opposition” [6], and secularists. The new battlegrounds were feminism, abortion and censorship, and the decade between 1975 and 1985, during which Québec would be transformed from one of Canada’s most culturally conservative provinces into one of the most progressive, left little time for nationalist disputes.
Ironically, though, the Québécois social transformation was precisely what led to the reawakening of national tensions in the later 1980s. The secularist movement, which governed Québec from 1979 to 1986 in coalition with the liberal Catholics, drew much of its support from Anglophones in Montréal and from first and second-generation immigrants. The more conservative Catholics came to see the culture war as not only a battle for social permissiveness but a struggle over Québécois identity. The liberals, both secular and Catholic, saw elections as a forum for deciding social policy; the conservatives saw them as a competition for cultural dominance much like the language disputes of the post-Great War era.
The conservatives’ rhetoric about a threat to Québécois culture resonated with wavering moderates who were uncomfortable with the pace of change, and in 1986, the Rally for Québécois Independence returned to power for the first time since the crisis of the 1960s. The new government resurrected the demands of the Winnipeg Charter era, including control over citizenship and immigration, and strengthened their hand with a non-binding referendum in which 52 percent of voters supported independence if these demands were not achieved.
The federal government, remembering the fiasco of Winnipeg, was reluctant to make another attempt at theorizing the relationship between the provinces and the center. Nevertheless, it saw little choice if it wanted to keep the country together, and it believed that the compromises made with the First Nations and the Métis, including the rules governing tribal citizenship, might provide a suitable foundation. Thus, with considerable trepidation, it entered into another round of negotiations, this time in Victoria. In 1987, these talks yielded another proposed charter which was not as radically post-Westphalian as Winnipeg but which still gave considerable autonomy to the provinces and territories. Provincial citizenship would not replace federal citizenship as the Winnipeg Charter had provided, but would exist alongside federal citizenship and determine qualifications for the local franchise. Provinces would also gain devolved control over many cultural and educational institutions, with a stronger federal bill of rights as a quid pro quo.
The government pitched the Victoria Accord to the voters as a product of experience, one that had taken on board the lessons of Winnipeg and the First Nations negotiations. But again, the voters were more skeptical, especially of the possibility that the proposed constitution might create a class of second-class citizens with only a federal franchise. The Accord passed in Québec and two other provinces, including British Columbia where the still-contentious First Nation claims gave the idea of provincial citizenship some appeal, but failed in the others and did not win an overall majority.
In the wake of the referendum’s failure, the Québécois government declared independence. Québec’s nationhood would be short-lived, as several of the ruling party’s deputies got cold feet and crossed the floor before the government could even begin negotiating terms: a new election brought the liberals and secularists back to power and put paid to any thought of secession for the time being. But this was little comfort to the federal government, which looked forward to a bleak future in which provincial demands would continually escalate and the country would always be on the verge of breakup. Several politicians and editorial writers in the early 1990s went so far as to proclaim the Canadian project finished.
Again, however, Canada would work better in practice than in theory. The expected breakup never quite materialized, with the Québécois Catholic conservatives becoming increasingly marginal in provincial politics, and the later 1990s pointed to a possible way forward. The Victoria Accord had failed as a package, but polling suggested that several of the cultural provisions might have passed if put to the voters individually. Most voters viewed it as reasonable that political units, and distinct societies within them, should have the right to protect their cultural patrimony, a feeling that was heightened by the widespread acceptance of the “Sitka Meetings” between the Arctic peoples of Canada, Alaska, Siberia and Japanese Kamchatka. And as Québécois nationalism softened and the province continued to secularize, cultural autonomy also became an increasingly acceptable solution from their standpoint.
The “Millennium Referendum” of 2000 thus put before the voters only the cultural and educational devolution provisions of the Victoria Accord, carefully worded so that francophone Québécois, as well as the province as a whole, would qualify for devolved institutions if they wanted them. This time, with civic autonomy off the table, the vote succeeded. Québec has, of course, used its devolved powers more fully than most of the other provinces – among other things, it opened an office in the Consistory and joined the French university network – but others have also formed natural ties: the Maritimes with Scotland, Ireland and the Dominion of Newfoundland, British Columbia with the Pacific rim, the Arctic peoples strengthening the links created in the Sitka Meetings.
The years since the Millennium Referendum have been relatively quiet, much like the 1970s. The breathing space is a welcome relief after the tensions of the 1980s and 90s, but it remains to be seen whether Canada has finally found a theory that works in practice or whether the present day is the calm before another storm…
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[1] See post 5304.
[2] See post 4462.
[3] See post 3584.
[4] See post 5944.
[5] See posts 6329 and 6352.
[6] See post 6368.
