What Can Policymakers Learn from Communauté des Antilles?
From 1981 to 1989, some of the cleverest diplomats and lawyers from around Europe met in Luxembourg to devise what we now know as the Schengen agreements. These agreements, a series of memorialized understandings and treaties, allow free travel through much of continental Europe, though the expansion of Schengen has been both unrelated to the expansion of the Eurozone and only vaguely related to the expansion of the EU. The Schengen agreement is essentially a mutual trust scheme – those any member state is willing to let enter its borders will also gain access to the other Schengen states without further immigration controls.
This freedom of movement also allowed other pieces of modern Europe to blossom, from the explosion of Eurostar’s popularity to the improvement of road links between the former West Germany and the former Soviet states.
Surely, this success came from the huge number of combined IQ points these very savvy lawyers in Luxembourg contributed and no ad hoc regime could create an analogous success story, no? While this may seem true, it is disproven dramatically by Communauté des Antilles, a 1970's relatively-quickly-drawn international group underappreciated in European and American policy circles.
Most positive developments in the Caribbean come from music or cricket, and the CARICOM visa for the Caribbean community came from the latter. Incredibly, on less than six months’ notice, a mix of Dutch-, English- and French-speaking countries was able to invent a way for an area (2,948,400 sq. km.) three-quarters the size of the Schengen area (4,312,099 sq. km.) to exist within a one-visa space. How was this possible?
In short, it was possible due to diplomats’ seeing a not-so-obvious opportunity. The 2007 Cricket World Cup was to be held in a variety of countries throughout the Caribbean. This meant supporters, eager to see matches, would need to travel between ten to twelve countries with frequency.
Because the one-visa space was a political invention, and not one of treaty, the definitions involved could be stretched more liberally. Those in a country solely to see a cricket match were temporarily re-classified as transfer passengers for air travel purposes. Cruise ships in the region were re-classified as floating hotels, dismantling many of the boarding and debarking maritime formalities that normally accompany ships. Customs lines at airports were re-tasked to be more basic security checkpoints and burdened with fewer immigration and naturalization duties.
This led to a Schengen-style space, where a passport needed to only be shown at the initial (“peripheral” in Schengen legalese) entry point and, thereafter, the passport needed to be available for inspection, but not shown or stamped again until the traveler’s exit from the region.
This 2007 scheme was wildly successful, with 300 visas per day being issued during the scheme’s existence. To put this number in perspective, the number of people who received visas under the scheme in five months in 2007 was roughly equal to the number of people who visited Dominica in the entirety of 2008.
The scheme also had other positive effects. Over three hundred million U.S. dollars flowed into local economies in stadium construction alone; while three hundred million might not sound like much compared to the spending in Beijing (or even Stratford), it is half of Grenada’s GDP. All three primary carriers enjoyed substantially more on-time departures from regional airports, likely in part due to a simplified security and aircraft-handling policy. Crime was reduced on all host islands except Jamaica. The scheme tied together enthusiasm for sport with political cohesion in a way that recent Olympic Games and Commonwealth Games have failed to do.
So, what can others learn from the Caribbean visa-free area of 2007? Rather than viewing these international events as an inconvenience, an immigration headache, or a security risk, they should be viewed as an opportunity to rethink the relationships between our nations, many of which are defined by historians and geography rather than contemporary policy needs. Temporary relationships can and should develop between groups of nations, even for periods as short as months, to do away with inefficiencies suffered by travelers, merchants, and investors. Eventually, this concept could spread to more nuanced types of cooperation – CARICOM now facilitates the migration of skilled workers to opportunities around the Caribbean with better treaty provisions for employment and vastly reduced bureaucracy.
Finally, policymakers must not be afraid to experiment in their relationships with their neighbours. Generally, new policies bring with them high initial financial (tax enforcement, immigration) or political (healthcare, peacekeeping) costs. But amortizing the sunk cost of a bad policy over a longer period does no one any good. And avoiding the implementation of potentially-promising policies due to high initial costs is the worst kind of political cowardice. If CARICOM, which contains many of the Western hemisphere’s poorest nations, can afford to be innovative and thoughtful with its policies, then I argue Europe and other regions can’t afford not to.
