Former Governor-General Sir Kenneth Hall says Jamaica’s longest-serving prime minister, P.J. Patterson, was substantially more than the country’s most successful political leader, describing him as one of the Caribbean Community’s (CARICOM) chief philosophical drivers and a monumental contributor to regional development.
In his new book, Caribbean Integration: The Patterson Doctrine — Governance, Transformation and the Future of the Caribbean Community, Sir Kenneth portrays Patterson as an unapologetic regionalist who believes deeply in the aspirations of small nation states in the Caribbean, Africa and the Pacific, and has devoted his life to advancing their unity.
“The focus on him is that he’s the longest-serving prime minister, but he’s also one of the few prime ministers – as I will say in another space – that was a witness and a participant in three of the major steps in the development of regional integration. The first is that he was there as minister of trade when there were only nine men to do. Four prime ministers, four ministers and the secretary general when they recognised Cuba. He was also there when they signed the Treaty of Chaguaramas. And, to the best of my knowledge, he is the only surviving minister who was in that room…,” Sir Kenneth told The Sunday Gleaner.
The 380-page book, comprising 13 chapters, an epilogue and a documentary appendix, opens with a bold assessment of Patterson’s statesmanship as “one of the most significant contributions to the evolution of Caribbean regional thought since the emergence of the modern integration movement”.
It traces the region’s integration journey, from the collapse of the West Indies Federation and the signing of the Treaty of Chaguaramas to the development of the Single Market, the Caribbean Court of Justice and decades of collective diplomacy.
This excerpt is from an article originally published in The Gleaner. Read it here.
