Ambassador Elizabeth Harper, Director-General of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Guyana
Professor E. Nigel Harris, Vice Chancellor of the University of the West Indies
Your Excellency Albert Ramdin, Assistant-Secretary-General of the OAS
Mr Henry Charles, Director Commonwealth Youth Programme and Representative of the Commonwealth Secretariat
Members of the Diplomatic Corps
The Honourable Sir Shridath Ramphal, OCC
The Honourable Rashleigh Jackson
Your Excellency Noel Sinclair, Diplomat in Residence
Sir Ronald Sanders and other Distinguished Facilitators
Participants
Members of Staff of the CARICOM Secretariat
Representatives of the Media
Ladies and Gentlemen

It is indeed my pleasure as Secretary-General of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) to address you today, at this the opening of the 2009 Diplomatic Training Exercise for Mid-career Diplomats of the Caribbean Community. I want to join the Director General in welcoming you all to Guyana, the headquarters of the Caribbean Community, and trust that you will find an opportunity to visit the headquarters building of the Secretariat during your stay in Guyana. Even if I say so myself, it is well worth the visit, not least from an architectural point of view. It is a measure of the commitment of our host country to Caribbean regional integration as well as the result of the close ties the Caribbean Community enjoys with its external partners. Maintaining and reinforcing such ties is a critical part of the responsibilities of our diplomats.

This training programme, on which you are embarking today, responds to a mandate of the CARICOM Ministers of Foreign Affairs which was first implemented in 1987. It is a collaborative effort of the CARICOM Secretariat, the Institute of International Relations (IIR) of the University of the West Indies, St. Augustine Campus, and the Commonwealth Secretariat. It also enjoys support from the Commonwealth Hubs and Spokes Projects at the CARICOM and Organisation of Eastern Caribbean States (OECS) Secretariats. The Caribbean Development Bank (CDB) and the Organisation of American States (OAS) have also helped to make it possible. I wish to express my sincere thanks for the collective efforts of all these contributors.

Allow me to confess that in preparing for participation in today’s Ceremony, I found myself retreating into a rather philosophical and nostalgic mood. I was struck by a number of changes in the realities, fears, expectations and indeed the world. Perhaps this was not surprising for someone who has spent a significant part of his life in the diplomatic world in the service of regional integration.

For a start, I noted that your learning process will be delivered through the variety of media that characterises the age you operate in – an information and knowledge era that catapults us along an Information and Communication Technology highway, undreamt of a generation ago. Also your programme takes place in the context of the most daunting global economic and financial crisis for more than half a century. But crisis and opportunity seem to have been the dual inheritance of the Caribbean regional integration movement since its inception more than thirty-five years ago. It is to weather these crises and seize the opportunities, as a group, which prompted the founders of our integration movement to place foreign policy co-ordination as one of the foundation pillars of the Caribbean Community – the others being economic integration, functional co-operation and, more recently, security co-operation.

Indeed one may well be justified in claiming as I did in Jamaica in addressing the recent 12th meeting of the Community’s Council for Foreign and Community Relations that more than any other it is this pillar that truly stamps us as a Community. For it is the one that provides this grouping of small, vulnerable nation states with both the sword and the shield to carve out, protect and eventually broaden the space for its people in the global community.

It also occurred to me that the training process you are privileged to begin today is a mechanism not merely for capacity building, but more particularly for the continuation of the process of regional integration. For it gathers you, the future foreign policy shapers of your respective Member States, not only as national representatives but also as members of the diplomatic corps of the Caribbean Community.

Over the next two weeks you will be addressing the challenges faced by the States and ultimately the Region that you represent with a view to enabling joint strategising on the best means of co-ordinating and executing agreed regional policies. Such an approach will allow the Caribbean Community to safeguard and promote its common interests and lift one unified voice above the din of those of other countries and regions. Yes, today is certainly one of those days that herald a better tomorrow.

Young diplomats, you have the fortune to be walking in the footsteps of and indeed will interact with some of the most eminent CARICOM diplomats who, since the founding of our Community, have defended and promoted the interests of this vulnerable seascape and landscape that we call our Caribbean home. There is a rich history of successful CARICOM diplomacy which illustrates the fact that size has no relation to skill.

It was Caribbean diplomats who were, for example, at the forefront of the historic signature of the Georgetown Accord that established the African Caribbean and Pacific Group of States (ACP). They helped to spearhead the conclusion of the historic Lomé Conventions which created the most advanced trade and development relationship of its time between former colonies and colonial powers. These Conventions were succeeded by the Cotonou and Economic Partnership Agreements.

Caribbean diplomats played an active a role as any in the struggle against regimes that shamed our collective humanity in Southern Africa. It was Caribbean diplomats who led the way in this hemisphere in recognising Cuba at the height of the Cold War and paved the way for other countries of Latin America to do likewise. They are also integrally involved in the fight to get the international community to recognize the special circumstances of small vulnerable economies and to accept that small states should not be marginalised in today’s rapidly evolving socio-economic and geo-political landscape. Caribbean diplomacy has therefore, made an indelible mark in Africa, Latin America, and the wider world. My dear participants, you are the inheritors of that legacy. Throughout your diplomatic pursuits you will be charged with the responsibility of continuing and improving this proud legacy.

Of course, the world and the tasks that you inherit are different to those faced by your predecessors. As I alluded to earlier, the art and science of diplomacy is practised today in a remarkably and fundamentally changed global reality. This age is characterised by globalisation and liberalisation, facilitated by Information and Communication Technology, but also by dysfunctional global financial and economic structures, radically shifting geo-political trends, security and environmental threats and public health crises.

These issues are at the heart of the current global dialogue and are among the issues on which the Region must co-ordinate its positions. They are also therefore issues in which, you, the Region’s diplomats must be versed in order to promote and protect the Community’s interests.

You must also be skilled in crafting and implementing negotiation strategies that will defend the short, medium and long term interests of the people of the Region.

Our international interlocutors are experienced in advancing their interests through shrewdly constructed strategies. You, the 21st Century Caribbean Diplomat must therefore be discerning and strategic, gracious but stoic, decisive but flexible. Never forget that you are the guardians and perpetuators of the Region’s image before the world, the negotiators of the terms and conditions which tomorrow will dictate how the Region participates in that world.

As officials in the Foreign Service of the Member States of the Community, you must not only be at the forefront of the refinement and implementation of our foreign policy co-ordination mechanisms but you must also ensure that, as far as possible, we are all “singing from the same hymn sheet”.

The recent COFCOR meeting stressed that in doing so there needs to be intimate interaction with the other Ministries and Government Departments to ensure that foreign policy considerations are part of a cohesive whole in the pursuit of a viable, secure, prosperous and sustainable Caribbean Community.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we must also not let our smallness and resource constraints be hindrances to effective implementation of regional foreign policy formulation. Let us exploit even our so-called limitations by being flexible and nimble in responding to some of the challenges. Indeed, our capacity constraints oblige us to be more creative and innovative in our approaches. The creativity of our people is our greatest, most enduring, distinctive and renewable regional resource. Let us not underestimate that asset.

Young diplomats, in your quest to exploit existing mechanisms for coordinating CARICOM’s regional policy on the multiple issues that now constitute the substance of international relations, you have at your disposal new Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs). ICT has changed the nature and format, the content and volume, the language and speed of exchange between people, companies and yes, between nations.

A critical one of those issues with which we in the Caribbean must make ourselves thoroughly familiar is climate change. In advancing the Community interest and in trying to ensure a Caribbean voice in the World, the basic requirement is having a Caribbean. Climate change threatens our very existence and that therefore demands that as diplomats you must be knowledgeable not only about its effects but also its causes and mitigation if not solution. This Region’s sustainable development is threatened by this phenomenon which manifests itself, by among other things, the reality of sea-level rise, increasing ferocity of storms and destruction of vital elements of our natural beauty - the bedrock of the major employer and foreign exchange earner in the Region – tourism. Climate change for us is therefore not an academic observation but constitutes a clear and present danger.

In closing therefore young diplomats you must seek sensitize the global community to these facts through the practice of the art and science of diplomacy, remembering always that the science of diplomacy – establishing contacts and networks, garnering and processing information, designing strategies to address various political needs, acquiring the negotiating techniques required to effectively implement the strategies and obtain results - is only as useful as it is artfully practised. The sensitive, nuanced interpretation and analysis of a situation and the equally sensitive and nuanced employ of words, timing and solutions to best exploit a given situation – in other words the art of diplomacy- is the mark of the effective Caribbean diplomat.

This two week training session seeks to contribute to the honing of your skills but also the honing of your artistry. Enjoy it, work hard, network harder and be the Caribbean diplomat that we expect and require you to be. The future of your Region in these troubled but also opportunity filled times depends on your dedication and commitment to pursuing our common vision for our Region and your skill in representing the interests of our Region in the world can be a decisive factor in the future.

I thank you.