FOREWORDAuthor(s): REX NETTLEFORDSource: Caribbean Quarterly, Vol. 27, No. 1, ELECTORAL POLITICS (MARCH, 1981), pp. iii-viPublished by: University of the West Indies and Caribbean QuarterlyStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40653409 .

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FOREWORD

The politics of post-colonialism in the Commonwealth Caribbean is centrally concerned with the structural transformation of the newly independent or partially selfgoverning territories. This, some seek to do through socio-economic policies that would be regarded as radical or revolutionary by both those who are either committed to or disturbed by the disruption of change. Part of the quest for the strategies to achieve this is the reorganisa- tion of power itself. By this is meant the ordering of designs relating to how that power, recently transferred from metropolitan Britain, is to be redistributed and re-located. In other words, who is to take the decisions of national moment now that the expatriate viceroys have departed? What class(es) of persons, what race or colour of persons even, what ideological grouping of men and women, what age-range or mix of gender from the* native population should be allowed to both define the new polity and follow through with action on the basis of such définit ion(s)?

Many Third World countries in the Americas have, according to Miles Wolpin, (see below), settled for professional militarism even while invoking or exploiting radical populism. But the "coup" has long been regarded even by Caribbean 'progressives' as a political species that is alien to Commonwealth Caribbean traditions, until the island of Grenada broke the chain of events with a "revolution" against the corrupt and oppressive regime of the albeit elected Eric Gairy. To many in the region that event, though apposite in the political circumstances of the time, remains an unfortunate abberration of the hal- lowed Westminster norm and, at last, the sorry exception that proves the golden rule. For the rule remains to many in the region the use of frequent, free and fair elections as the rhetoric of Westminster parliamentary politics designates the quinquennial ritual of choosing leaders through the ballot-box. The cardinal sin of the Maurice Bishop regime in Grenada, according to its most ardent detractors, is the withholding of that kind of ritual from the people of Grenada. And despite Mr Bishop's claim that democracy flourishes in his island-state in terms of providing the general populace with freedom from hunger, ignorance and disease as well as offering them a sense of place and purpose through actual participation in the taking of decisions, his colleagues in the Caribbean Community have repeatedly indicated that they would be less uneasy were such freedoms legitimized by the formal polling of votes, however imperfectly, in open elections rather than by unilaterally maintaining political authority acquired, as it were, through the barrel of a gun. Many would probably say that this position on elective politics is a 'natural feature' of the political culture of that part of the Caribbean which grew up under the 300-year-old tutelage of Great Britain, the "mother of Parliaments".

Events over the past eighteen months would tend to give credence to this view. For the electorates in six Eastern Caribbean islands and Jamaica went to the polls between November 1978 and October 1980. General elections took place in Montserrat in November 1978, in St Lucia on July 2, 1979, in St Vincent on December 5 of the same year, in St Kitts-Nevis on February 18, 1980, in Antigua on April 24, 1980 and in Dominica on August 29, 1980. Dr Lindei Smith in his article Elections and Politics in the

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Eastern Caribbean: July 1979 to August 1980 quite properly suggests that it is difficult to attempt to look at the elections and the politics of the islands in any general way because of the different circumstances in which each of the elections were held. He further suggests that the "wind of change" was felt largely in those territories where one party had occupied the seat of government for fifteen years and over. Montserrat, judging from Howard Fergus's account in his article Electoral Behaviour in Montserrat, is a clear exception. The emergence of left-wing parties in the various islands, with or with- out the benefit of electoral legitimation, is seen as a factor worth discussing however; and Dr Smith optimistically concludes that given the socio-economic situation existing in the islands, the future of these left-wing parties may be secured.

•The Jamaican general election of October 31, 1980 would seemingly contest Dr Smith's conclusion for "approximately 30% of the voters who supported the PNP" (the People's National Party) led by a populist and charismatic leader who declared a democra- tic-socialist ideology, switched to the more conservative Jamaica Labour Party (JLP) which campaigned on a platform of bringing back to Jamaica an undoubtedly moderate programme of developmental change. Such substantive issues are very much the subject of Public Opinion and the 1980 Election in Jamaica by Carl Stone. But as the leading and most credible psephologist in the region, Dr Stone sheds further light in his contribu- tion on the voting patterns in the 1980 election with an impressive battery of statistical data and a sharp-edged analysis which takes into account the historical trends since 1944 when the country had its first general election under universal adult suffrage. He makes the following prediction about Jamaican electoral behaviour based on his research: "... loyal party voting will continue to be weak and the future elections are likely to see volatile and unstable voting patterns similar to the trends initiated in the 1980 election. Its basis", he concludes, "lies in the severity of the economic crisis facing the country and on the reality that neither the more moderate JLP elected to power in October 1980 nor the left of centre PNP promoting socialist reforms have it within their grasp to solve these problems that provoke revolts within the electorate."

Such "revolts" arising out of the anguish of frustrated aspirations to economic better- ment among the mass of the people, are not always neatly conducted within the ordered framework of electoral contest, as Miles Wolpin in his article Contemporary Radical Third World Regimes, reminds his readers. "A third related development [i.e. besides the emergence of communist-led parties or radical-socialist political elites] is the growing attraction of radical socio-economic policies to professional military officers." Regarded as a 'Latin-American phenomenon' by many Anglophone Caribbean inhabitants, such a development shares with experience in that self-same Caribbean some common charac- teristics. These turn, indeed, on the inherent contradictions to be found in radical regimes, socialist or otherwise. Small wonder, then, that such regimes "facilitate the success of destabilizing intervention" since, according to Dr Wolpin, "the unintegrated values and incentive structure of the radical systems themselves" are a major contributory factor to "the uneven and poor performance of such weakly legitimized regimes in social, economic and political areas." The democratic socialist PNP regime was regarded by its

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supporters at home and abroad as fair game for CIA interventionist activities and by its detractors as administratively inept making it ripe, by October 1980, for rejection despite the electoral legitimacy it enjoyed after 1976 when it won a landslide victory over the opposition JLP. The election issues of mismanagement of the public sector, violation of the values of the bourgeois synthesis bequeathed by the imperial power, and betrayal of the sturdy middle class which provided the leadership for both the self-government movement and the institutions of growth all find resonant echo in Miles Wolpin's percep- tion of the situation in Latin- American "socialist" polities. While the upper class are partially expropriated and therefore antagonized, their residual socio-economic resources provide a basis for exercising political influence upon inexperienced and often ideological- ly confused bureaucratic elites. He adds that the simultaneous attraction at the civil (and military) elite level of bourgeois amenities (e.g. the disdain for manual labour) make it difficult for the new "socialists" to serve as an inspirational model for mass mobilization. For these bourgeois consumerist and petty investment opportunities facilitate the use of residual or imported economic resources to corrupt regimes at all levels. At the same time the upper classes subvert the political programmes by curtailing economic invest- ments, smuggling, organizing the flight of capital or negotiating for policy moderation as the price of new investments.

Despite the effectiveness of similar strategies designed to render impotent the impact of the Jamaican democratic socialist regime regarded as "radical" and even Communist- oriented, the government of the day yielded to the Loyal Opposition's call for an early general election and, even more important, for a bipartisan electoral commission that would restore credibility and legitimacy to the highly suspected electoral system and the ailing governmental process. G.E. Mills describes the resulting phenomenon from the horse's mouth as it were. For he was (and continues to be) the Chairman of the Electoral Advisory Committee bipartisan in composition with a politically independent chairman as well as members and charged with the responsibility for the conduct of the general election of October, 1980. That election was admittedly "the focus of considerable international attention" with emphasis primarily on the struggle between the contending parties and "the divergent forecasts [by opinion pollsters based at the University of the West Indies] of the likely outcome". Professor Mills's essay Electoral Reform in Jamaica with special reference to the 1980 election is a welcome reminder of the fact that behind the intense political polarization and the unprecedented hostility bordering on tribal warfare, if not civil war, the political will to establish a credible institutional framework for the guarantee of free and fair elections existed and was given practical expression in the setting up of a bipartisan committee. This is significant against the background of post-colonial experience in electoral practices in the Third World. Rather than falling back on his own extraordinary advantage which a Prime Minister in the Westminister model of government possesses for deciding the time and timing of a general election, the Jamaican Prime Minister, Professor Mills records, was willing to be guided by the pro- fessional advice of that bipartisan committee as to the appropriate time to call a general election. So despite speculation about the proffered option of a 'military solution', the

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Anglo-Saxon prejudice for compromise, constitutionalism and 'government by commit- tee' held sway over the brutally spirited and ruthless electoral campaigning. The actual day of polling was peaceful and political violence abruptly ended with the outcome of the elections which gave to the Jamaica Labour Party a massive landslide victory over the Government party. The lesson learnt, inter alia, was (as Professor Mills concludes) that "a bipartisan group, associated with independent members, can co-operate in con- ducting effectively, an exercise of such sensitivity in an extremely polarized environ- ment..."

But there are other lessons of Caribbean-wide implication from the electoral behaviour of the citizenry whose political consciousness has been raised by the febrile activity of the past four decades. Mr Fergus describes the electoral behaviour in the tiny colony of Montserrat as enigmatic, schizophrenic and unpredictable in the almost total switch by the electorates from one set of contenders for political power to another in recent elec- tions. But such a description answers less to the charge of caprice, opportunism and political immaturity and more to the vulnerability of all political contenders of what- ever ideological persuasion or class pedigree to electoral "revolt" once they fail to deliver to the aspiring masses the fruits of those sumptuous promises made in the heat of politi- cal combat.

The poems by Ronald Fagan capture the mood of political polarization over the past decade while the reviews of Aggrey Brown's Color, Class and Politics in Jamaica and of David Nicholls's From Dessalines to Duvalier help put into perspective the enduring social forces that have helped to determine the parameters of political concern through- out the modern history of the Caribbean.

REX NETTLEFORD.

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