Biography

Dr. Carlyle Corbin, who is speaking on “Contemporary Colonialism and the Challenge to Caribbean Integration,” is an international advisor on governance and multilateral diplomacy. He is the former Minister of State for External Affairs of the U.S. Virgin Islands Government, and the territory’s representative to various United Nations’ bodies.

Dr. Corbin presently serves as the Executive Secretary of the Council of Presidents of the United Nations General Assembly. He has worked as a United Nations’

expert on self-determination and governance for over two decades, and as a U.N. Development Programme expert on governance, serving in this capacity with respect to Bermuda and to the Turks and Caicos Islands. He has served as the constitutional advisor to the Anguilla Constitutional and Electoral Reform Committee, and as the international governance advisor to the US Virgin Islands Fifth Constitutional Convention. He has similarly functioned as member of the US Virgin Islands Political Status Commission.

In addition, Dr. Corbin has served as political advisor to successive chairs of the U.N. Special Committee on Decolonisation, and Secretary-General of the Offshore Governors’ Forum (OGF), comprising the governments of American Samoa, Guam, the Northern Mariana Islands, Puerto Rico, and the US Virgin Islands. He is a former member of the Editorial Board of Caribbean Perspectives, a Journal of the University of the Virgin Islands (UVI), and is on the faculty of the UVI Institute for Future Global Leaders in the Caribbean.

He has lectured internationally on governance, political development and multilateral diplomacy, and is the author of two United Nations studies on the participation of territories in the UN system and another four UN studies on various aspects of global governance. He has also authored four books and numerous scholarly articles on political and constitutional advancement. His book chapters include:

“Direct Participation of Non-Independent Caribbean Countries in the United Nations,” in the book Islands at the Crossroads: Politics in the Non-Independent Caribbean (Ian Randle, Jamaica, 2001).

“A View of the Metropole,” in the book Governance in the Non-Independent Caribbean (Ian Randle Publishers, Jamaica, 2009).

“Dependency Governance and Future Political Development in the Non-Independent Caribbean,” in the book The Diplomacies of Small States (Palgrave Macmillan, United Kingdom, 2009).

He is the Senior Editor of Overseas Territories Review and Overseas Territories Journal, respectively, and Editor of the forthcoming book, “Toward a Full Measure of Self-Government,” a selection of addresses by U.S. Virgin Islands Governor Alexander A. Farrelly (1987-1994).

Article Title

Comparative democratic deficits in United Kingdom and United States Dependency Models in the Caribbean

Abstract

The Caribbean and Pacific regions comprise various political and constitutional arrangements short of full independence. These non-independent countries (NICs) can be classified into the three groupings of non self-governing territories (NSGTs), which are under annual United Nations consideration; autonomous countries (ACs), many of which were prematurely removed from U.N. jurisdiction before achieving a full measure of self-government; and integrated jurisdictions (IJs) which became political units of an extra-regional cosmopole with the attendant implications of such arrangements to full Caribbean integration. As the region in 2012 assesses its achievements and future challenges after fifty years of independence of the first Caribbean countries, an examination of the political disposition of the non-independent countries which did not advance to independence is useful in analysing the nature, form and function of the contemporary dependency dynamic which may serve as an impediment to full Caribbean regional integration. Of the various non-independent governance models in the Caribbean, the United Kingdom (U.K.) and United States (U.S.) administer some seven NSGTs and one semi-autonomous country, whilst the French Republic maintains three large overseas departments and several smaller emerging semi-autonomous collectivities. In the wake of the dismantlement of the erstwhile Netherlands Antilles, the Dutch maintain varying degrees of ‘autonomous’ arrangements with three larger countries, and have partially integrated three smaller ones. Accordingly, the paper will provide a contemporary composition of the full Non-Independent Caribbean (NIC) inclusive of recent political changes, and proceed to analyse comparatively the democratic deficits in United Kingdom and United States dependency models in the region with focus on the power relationship between the respective dependency and the cosmopole. In this connection, the paper will seek to dispel the notion of a ‘post-colonial Caribbean.’