During the radical period of the Forbes Burnham era in Guyanese politics, from 1970 to 1985, the country appeared to have won respect for its foreign policy in the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and in the British Commonwealth, as well as in the broader Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). The general perception was that Guyana was one of a select few small Third World states with a coherent revolutionary foreign policy, for which it paid a high price through superpower retaliatory efforts to destabilize its society.

It is logical to assume that small states focus more attention on the regional, subsystemic or “contiguous” environment (Reid, 1974: 31) than on the broader international system. Given their financial limitations, small states are circumscribed in their ability to influence the international environment but can be effective in the regional context. Even if some small states, by virtue of comparative wealth or ideological commitment, have the capability and inclination to exploit the international environment rather than confine their focus to the region around them, they still find their attention directed, to a large extent, to the immediacy of regional problems and to regional activities that are grounded in social, cultural, political, and economic linkages to the countries nearby. More often than not, economic ties have been formalized in regional integration movements patterned along the lines of the European Community (EC).

At the time of independence, CARICOM states found themselves extremely dependent upon the international economy, in part a legacy from the economic structure developed during their colonial period and in part due to the small size of their economies. Similar to most third world countries at the time, these economies relied heavily on one or two mineral and/or agricultural export commodities for foreign exchange, government revenue and employment. Furthermore, the prices of these commodities were subject to the vagaries of the international market, making the market for their exports unstable to an untenable degree for these vulnerable price-takers. This highly dependent state also exhibited many other well-known characteristics of underdevelopment, such as low levels of human resource development, savings and investment, technological capacity, and foreign exchange earnings.

The term “New Law of the Sea” may be misleading if it conveys the impression that classical Law of the Sea principles have been entirely supplanted by new norms. The distinction is not so sharp. It is true to say that there have been important developments in the Law of the Sea since World War II, but many of the old principles have remained intact. However, it is worth noting that in some cases they have been refined and modified, and in other cases they are stated with greater specificity.

Robert F. Kennedy's observation that “progress is a nice word..but change is its motivator and change has its enemies,” could have been made for the remaining six, all physically small, British dependent territories in the Caribbean: Anguilla, Bermuda, British Virgin Islands (BVI), Cayman Islands, Montserrat, and the Turks and Caicos Islands (TCI). The persistent refusal by the majority of their respective peoples to consider independence, despite, in some of the territories, its propagation by political leaders and its blandishment — at least until recently — by the British, seems an anachronism.

Traditionally most North Americans look upon the English-speaking Caribbean primarily as a place for tourists to pursue their quest for the three S's: sun, sand and surf— a perspective which generates little, if any, concern for the region's political dynamics. Indeed, the prevailing attitude seems to be that these countries, known collectively as the CARICOM states, are not politically important because they are so small and thus not worth the time of US officials or political analysts. However, in the early 1980s this attitude began to change as the Reagan administration elevated the entire Caribbean Basin to the status of a major global trouble spot, on the grounds that the US had vital interests there which were being threatened by Leftist-inspired subversion and which required major economic/security initiatives in order to pacify the area. Although most of Washington's energies and resources were focussed on Central America, the English-speaking territories (e.g., Jamaica and Grenada) also came under close scrutiny.

Under what conditions may a social scientist legitimately pass judgment on the geopolitical climate of a region? The question is not easy to answer. First, it presupposes acknowledgement that there are value issues embedded in such judgments. Second, while a value-free attitude may indeed be attempted, such an attitude is difficult to achieve. All too frequently, evaluation of a region's “climate” is based on the values of the evaluator (and often without disclosure of this fact to unsuspecting readers).This is especially likely when the observer adopts a theoretical position, taking insufficient account of the tension between society and actors. Unfortunately, such theories give social scientists the false feeling that they have some sort of preferred cognitive vantage point. Theories which incorporate an “oversocialized conception of man” (Wrong, 196l) or, alternatively, an “overly psychological conception of society,” ignore the fact that people act and make decisions about those actions, both of which are based upon value-judgments, and which do not have a one-to-one correlation with any given social situation.