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The Commonwealth Caribbean’s current crisis of development is perhaps the gravest it has faced in the post-independence era. It has been generated by the region’s failure to establish for itself a viable role within the wider context of the contemporary neoliberal globalization of the world economy. The Caribbean is actually no stranger to globalization. It has had a long and direct relationship with the modern world economy. Its distinctive characteristics as a region derive in large part from the extent, intensity, velocity, and impact of its interactions with the core countries of the world system over the last five hundred years. The most recent period has been particularly debilitating. Over the last 20 years or so, neo-liberalism has come to shape both the practice and the theory of Commonwealth Caribbean development, rendering the former largely acquiescent in the face of powerful external forces and the latter predominantly defensive and compromising in the face of similar powerful external arguments and ideologies.
The development debate in the region has not, however, been extinguished entirely. It has been kept alive largely by what one might call the tecnicos of the Commonwealth Caribbean: principally either professional policy-makers working for national governments or regional organizations, or politicians offering themselves to their electorates on the basis of their managerial competence rather than the inspiration of their leadership. They have been industrious and imaginative, but they have not shaped a new paradigm.
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