The Caribbean Basin or Caribbean Proper (or the Caribbean Basin region) is a geopolitical term used to describe countries which generally border the Caribbean Sea. As a geopolitical concept, the term often includes the country of El Salvador, which only touches the Pacific Ocean, for its similarities to neighbouring countries. The definition has also been taken literally at times and can exclude areas such as Barbados and the Turks and Caicos Islands which also do not technically touch the Caribbean Sea.
During the Cold War, the then US President Ronald Reagan coined the term to define the region benefiting from his administration's Caribbean Basin Initiative (CBI) economic program, approved in US law in 1983. Thus, the Caribbean basin included only the countries of the Caribbean insular and Central America that met the requirements of the CBI, and Cuba and Nicaragua, which the American government viewed as politically "repressive" and "economic failure" were excluded.
Canadian historians and academics, Professor Graeme S. Mount and Professor Stephen Randall, citing historian Bruce B. Solnick, posits that:
:"...one area of the modern Caribbean basin owes its heritage to the legacy of the Spanish Empire; other segments were traditionally British preserve; a third area was French, and a final area, more diminutive, was dominated by the Netherlands in the colonial years. It is not surprising, therefore, as Solnick notes, that "often the history of the region is treated solely as a function of European colonial expansion."
In the latter part of the 20th century, following the collapse of European colonialism, the Caribbean became "an American lake" which American hegemony seek to provide a form of unity in the region, though the USA never saw itself as a Caribbean nation, nor did Venezuela until the 1970s. That view is supported by the America historian and author, Professor Robert Pastor who argues that: "...all the nations in and around the Caribbean Sea seemed to have in common was a view of the United States as the "colossus of the north" and the U.S. view of them as a "backyard."
Modern Caribbean Basin countries
See also
- Caribbean Basin Initiative
- Caribbean Basin Trade Partnership Act
- Greater Caribbean
Further reading
- McCalla *, R., Slack, B., & Comtois, C. (2005). "The Caribbean basin: adjusting to global trends in containerization. Maritime Policy & Management", 32(3), 245–261. [https://doi.org/10.1080/03088830500139729]
- Pastor, Robert, "Sinking in the Caribbean Basin." Foreign Affairs. Vol. 60, No. 5 (Summer, 1982), pp. 1038-1058. Council on Foreign Relations (1982) [in] JSTOR [https://www.jstor.org/stable/20041274]