Op-Ed: Wither ‘Caribbean’ Unity OR an Idea in Search of a Referent

The recent eruption of tensions between Venezuela and Guyana, marked by territorial claims, border incursions, and a chilling trail of criminal violence possibly tied to Venezuelan military elements, has brought the Caribbean to a moment of reckoning. When Guyana’s soldiers come under fire and its capital suffers a bombing traced to regional criminal networks, the crisis cannot be confined to a border dispute. It exposes something far deeper: the fragility of the Caribbean’s self-conception as a coherent political and moral community.

The disunity within CARICOM over how to respond to this crisis reveals that fragility in real time. While Barbados’ Prime Minister Mia Mottley has asserted that the Caribbean Sea is a zone of peace — and that the U.S. military’s expanding presence is unwelcome — Trinidad and Tobago’s Prime Minister has dissented, refusing to join the regional call for withdrawal and even questioning whether CARICOM retains any strategic purpose. This disagreement is not merely tactical or diplomatic; it dramatizes the historical condition Franklin W. Knight once described — or, perhaps more accurately, produced — in his influential text “The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism.”

Knight’s book title is, in itself, a conceptual drama. It proposes two claims that cannot coexist without contradiction. The first, “The Caribbean”, posits a coherent, nameable entity, a singular geography or civilization capable of being narrated as a whole. The second, “The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism”, immediately withdraws that coherence by describing the very nationalism of this entity as fractured at its birth. Knight’s title therefore stages what Derrida might call a dangerous supplement: it adds to the claim of regional unity precisely by undoing it. The subtitle does not elaborate the title; it undermines it, revealing that the “Caribbean” may be a discursive fiction: a word searching for a referent.