Canadian Financial Imperialism and Structural Adjustment in the Caribbean

Abstract

From the start of the early 1980s, structural adjustment was already normalized in the Caribbean given the power of a variety of self-interested actors, including the U.S., IFIs, and Canadian investors who continued to advance and support— by any means necessary— structural adjustment policies in the Caribbean. Debt traps, coupled with incursions on Caribbean state’s sovereignty would see the neoliberal and capitalist doctrine accepted by all of the independent states in the English-speaking Caribbean region by the mid-1980s. Structural adjustment drastically intensified the existing inequalities in states and removed the ability for governments to alleviate these situations. Alongside Caribbean structural adjustment policies (SAPs) in the 1980s was also a successful wave of imperialist (anti-socialist and anti-communist) propaganda. The result being that many of the independent states in the region would see left governments replaced with reactionary conservative ones; And a small number of states confessing themselves to be socialist and/or Marxist-Leninist to receive help from other socialist (and non-aligned) states, like Cuba and the Soviet Union. This article analyzes the causes, characteristics and consequences of the new global international architecture of the 1980s to the 2000s, looking at new opportunities for foreign investors that arose in the 1980s, and how these changes strengthened the already powerful Canadian banks and investors in the English-speaking Caribbean.