AN ATLANTIC RIM PARTNERSHIP: AN IDEA WHOSE TIME HAS COME?

By Raymond Lloyd

The end of the Cold War, and its hot war proxies, has loosened up such trading and security blocs as the OECD and NATO, but without always creating the changed alliances necessary to meet the challenges of the new century. One particular challenge is that of finding a partnership with the new democracies of Africa, independent of Lome and other European aid conventions, which grouped together all former colonies, however repressive their regimes.

A new beginning might be made with an Atlantic Rim Partnership, drawing from the trading experience of the Pacific Rim and Indian Ocean Rim alliances, but now based also on shared democratic, and even religious and cultural, ideals. Indeed, with the coming bicentenary of the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, there is also a moral challenge to assist those countries whose human resources were pillaged by the Western democracies, and whose descendants in both hemispheres were too often left in economic, social and political stagnation.

For over three centuries, from the early 1500s to the mid 1800s, the Atlantic Rim constituted the world's most important trading bloc, with metals and textiles going to Atlantic Africa, human cargoes being transported to the plantations of the Atlantic Americas - 15 million slaves alive, 3 million dead - and sugar, rice, coffee, tobacco and cotton coming to Atlantic Europe. For a critical period in the mid twentieth century the Atlantic also formed the oceanic lifeline of European democracy, with many troops also coming from Brazil and South Africa, the West Indies and the African colonies, to fight for Europe's freedom.

Thus, while NATO's current focus is justifiably on Central and Eastern Europe, to make up for our standing by during the soviet repressions in 1956 of Hungary, in 1968 of Czechoslovakia, and in 1981 of Poland, our duty should not be forgotten toward those who, between 1939 and 1945, volunteered to fight for freedom, despite their having a much poorer educational base on which to reconstruct their postwar, postcolonial world. In 1816, 1823 and 1831 it had been the British who savagely repressed their fellow Christians seeking freedom in Barbados, Guyana and Jamaica. And, with all the current concern for child labour, it was the British who put slave girls to work at the age of six.

The whole rich North Atlantic should now develop a free trade area with the new democracies of Africa, and with the black and aboriginal peoples of the Americas, and offer security arrangements, such as partnership-for-peace programs, to help protect their freedoms. In the last few years we have seen how fragile have been would-be democracies in the Congo and Gambia, and in Haiti and Venezuela. Too often our reaction, where not one of indifference, has been of an adhoc curative nature, rather than a longterm constructive approach. The situation has been particularly tragic in Sierra Leone, created as a slave rehabilitation state, along with Liberia, whose 150th anniversary as an independent republic we remembered in 1997.

The first country to abolish the Atlantic slave trade was Denmark, by decree on 16 May 1792 and fully effective by 16 May 1802. Britain, after transporting 2.8 million blacks, abolished the slave trade on 25 March 1807, and slavery itself throughout the Empire in 1838. The movement continued for at least another fifty years, till Brazil, the recipient of 4.2 million Africans, abolished slavery in 1888. But the involvement of most of the great European powers is evidenced by the fact that Dutch, English, French, Spanish and Portuguese (though no longer Danish and Swedish) are all official languages on the Atlantic coasts of both Africa and the Americas. Slaves were also traded from non-Atlantic East Africa, by Arabs and Persians, but in nothing like the same numbers. And, while no reparations can be expected before the Middle East becomes democratic, it is also true that Islam absorbed the blacks more fraternally than most Christians, or Protestants, as the faces of many current Gulf rulers show.

Several Atlantic cities, from Nantes to Liverpool, now have exhibitions or museums dedicated to an erstwhile prosperity based on the slave trade, and there is a growing movement for black reparations. In June 1997 the US President pondered publicly on making an apology for slavery, but offered no restitution comparable to the $20 000 per person paid to all Japanese Americans sent to concentration camps during World War II, or the $60 billion paid by Germany to compensate for the nazi holocaust.

In the 30 June 1997 issue of Time magazine, it was calculated by Jack E White, the grandson of a slave, that the 244 years of unpaid labour between 1619 and 1863 by ten million slaves, at 25 cents a day, doubled for pain and suffering, would come to $444 billion which, compounded at 3% interest over the 134 years since emancipation, would amount to some $24 000 000 000 000 ! In the 1830s, of course, it was the slave-owners who received £20 million from the British Parliament, not the slaves.

In recent years, as long as African dictators bought golden bedsteads or crowned themselves emperor, and as long as an apartheid South Africa tracked the soviet navy, we could postpone our moral debt to the African people. But just as, in the nineteenth century, abolition went hand in hand with the extension of the franchise within a country, so now, with the beginnings of democracy in Atlantic Africa, we will realize that political rights and civil liberties are interdependent with the prosperity and security of all free peoples. Already many citizens have begun to appreciate this - for example, the UK Atlantic Council has long fostered concomitant ties with London-based Africans. It is now time for politicians to follow their lead, with an initiative such as an Atlantic Rim Partnership.

Here I have drawn up a list of some 85 states and territories, 69 of them electoral democracies, which would be eligible to become members or associate members of an Atlantic Rim Partnership. Their current ratings for Political Rights (PR) and Civil Liberties (CL), where 1 represents the highest degree of freedom and 7 the lowest, are those given in "Freedom in the World 2000-2001" published by Freedom House of New York:

NATO Democracies PR CL

Belgium 1 2
Canada 1 1
Denmark 1 1
France 1 2
Germany 1 2
Iceland 1 1
Italy 1 2
Luxembourg 1 1
Netherlands 1 1
Aruba 2 1
Neths Antilles 1 2
Norway 1 1
Portugal 1 1
Spain 1 2
United Kingdom 1 2
Anguilla 2 1
Bermuda 1 1
Br Virgin Islands 1 1
Caymans 1 1
Falklands 2 1
Montserrat 1 1
St Helena 2 1
Turks & Caicos 1 1
United States 1 1
Puerto Rico 1 2

Other EU Atlantic

Ireland 1 1
Sweden 1 1

African Democracies

* Inland countries dependent
on Atlantic outlets

Benin 2 2
*Botswana 2 2
Cape Verde 1 2
*Central African Rep 3 4
Ghana 2 3
Guinea Bissau 4 5
Madagascar 2 4
*Mali 2 2
Mozambique 3 4
Namibia 2 3
*Niger 4 4
Nigeria 4 4
Sao Tome & Principe 1 2
Senegal 3 4
South Africa 1 2

Other OAU Atlantic Members

Angola 6 6
*Burkina Faso 4 4
Cameroon 7 6
Congo Brazzaville 6 4
Congo Dem Rep 7 6
Cote d'Ivoire 6 5
Equatorial Guinea 7 7
Gabon 5 4
Gambia 7 5
Guinea 6 5
Liberia 5 6
Mauritania 6 6
Morocco 5 4
Sierra Leone 4 5
Togo 5 5

Caricom Democracies

Antigua & Barbuda 4 2
Bahamas 1 2
Barbados 1 1
Belize 1 1
Dominica 1 1
Grenada 1 2
Guyana 2 2
Jamaica 2 2
St Kitts Nevis 1 2
Saint Lucia 1 2
St Vincent 2 1
Suriname 1 2
Trinidad & Tobago 1 2

OAS Atlantic Democracies

Argentina 1 2
Brazil 3 3
Colombia 4 4
Costa Rica 1 2
Dominican Republic 2 2
Guatemala 3 4
Haiti 6 5
Honduras 3 3
Mexico 2 3
Nicaragua 3 3
Panama 1 2
*Paraguay 4 3
Uruguay 1 1
Venezuela 4 5

Other Slave Recipients
Cuba 7 7

Because of its potential size, the Partnership could have as its nucleus a new Group of Five, comprising the most populous Atlantic democracies or democratic groupings, namely Brazil, Nigeria, South Africa, the United States and the European Union, supported by a rotating council of two or three members from each of the Partnership's four quarters: Africa, Caribbean, Europe and Latin America.

But the details can wait. What is needed now are statespersons who will take up the challenge of a new Atlantic Rim Partnership, just as fifty years ago the challenge of the European Recovery Program was recognized by President Truman and Secretary of State George Marshall. The current US Administration may well have laid the groundwork, both in President George W Bush's choice of another distinguished general as Secretary of State and of the first woman National Security Adviser, the African-Americans Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice, and in the President's focus on Africa at the G8 summit in Genoa in July, and in his 15 June address at Warsaw University:

We must bring peace and health to Africa
- a neighbour to Europe, a heritage to many Americans,
a continent in crisis, and a place of enormous potential.

Two approaching events make this challenge timely. The first is the World Conference against Racism beginning on 31 August in Durban, where the denunciation of slavery, if not reparations, is on the agenda. The conference comes at a time when Africans are beginning to articulate their own responsibility for the slave trade, as in the new epic film "Adangaman", by Ivory Coast director Roger Gnoan M'Balla, which has just gone on world commercial release. It could well be followed in the new West African democracies by internal reparations, such as occurred in New Zealand in June with an independent tribunal's report that the descendants of the Moriori people in the Chatham Islands be compensated for the slavery inflicted on them by the Maori in the 1840s.

The second event is the 60th anniversary on 14 August 2001 of the Atlantic Charter, when the leaders of the US and Britain met off the coast of Canada to plan for a world in which all peoples "may live out their lives in freedom from fear and want". On that occasion servicemen and women came from all four corners of the Atlantic to restore those freedoms to Western Europe. Now it would be good to have a Pan-Atlantic Charter to consolidate and enhance the movement to democracy recently undertaken by most countries bordering the Atlantic.

Raymond Lloyd is the originator of several proposals for a more humane world, including that for the Development Decade, published in UN Special (Geneva) in January 1961 and announced to Congress on 22 March 1961 by President Kennedy; for a World Population Year, published in The Guardian on 24 February 1968 and instituted by the UN in 1974; for a World Food Day, observed on 16 October every year since 1981; and for a Decade of Democracy, published in the Freedom House magazine in July 1989, and designated for the 1990s by the Group of Seven at its Houston summit on 10 July 1990.