Key Developments at a Glance
- 9 November 1989: Berlin Wall falls; Cold War order begins to dissolve; Caribbean community marks a global moment of liberation.
- Eastern European communist regimes collapse through autumn 1989: Hungary, Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Romania.
- Ceausescu executed Christmas Day 1989 in Romania; Caribbean community reflects on justice and tyranny in its many forms.
- IRA bomb at Royal Marines barracks in Deal, Kent, September 22: eleven killed; Caribbean community deplores the attack.
- Michael Manley now Jamaica PM since February 1989; CARICOM watches the Cold War’s end with strategic interest.
- Poll tax protests grow as community charge nears implementation in England and Wales; Caribbean community organisations oppose it.
On 9 November 1989, the Berlin Wall falls. The precise sequence of events — an East German government spokesman announces, confusedly, that travel to the West is immediately permitted; crowds gather at the crossing points; the border guards, without orders to shoot, stand aside; East Germans pour through — produces the most dramatic sequence of live television that the second half of the twentieth century has generated. People climb onto the Wall with hammers and begin to chip at its concrete. Searchlights that have for twenty-eight years illuminated the death strip between East and West are switched off. The Cold War order, which has shaped the world since the late 1940s and within which the Caribbean community’s political formation has taken place, begins its terminal dissolution. Across the autumn and winter of 1989, communist regimes fall across Eastern Europe: in Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, and finally Romania, where Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena are executed on Christmas Day. The speed of the change is without precedent in modern European history.
The Caribbean Community and the Meaning of the Wall’s Fall
The Caribbean community’s engagement with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of communist Eastern Europe is shaped by a political tradition that has always valued human freedom and democratic governance more than ideological alignment. The community’s political formation includes significant socialist and democratic socialist currents — the tradition of Michael Manley’s Jamaica, of CLR James’s theoretical engagement with Marxism, of the Caribbean’s own experience of struggle for self-determination — but it has always maintained a clear-eyed distinction between the democratic socialism that Caribbean political thought has advocated and the one-party states of Eastern Europe, which were never models that the Caribbean tradition endorsed.
The freedom that East Germans are claiming in November 1989 — to move freely, to speak freely, to vote in genuinely contested elections — is the same freedom that the Caribbean community has demanded in its own contexts, from the freedom of Caribbean peoples to determine their own political futures during decolonisation to the freedom of Black British citizens to live without racial harassment and discrimination in Britain. The Wall’s fall is welcomed as a moment of liberation without any ambiguity. The question of what replaces the communist regimes — whether the transition to democracy will serve the people who demanded it, or whether the economic disruption of the transition will fall, as transitions often do, most heavily on those least able to absorb it — is one the Caribbean community follows with interest born of its own experience of structural change.
Manley Returns: Jamaica’s New Political Chapter
Michael Manley’s return to the Jamaican prime ministership in February 1989, following the PNP’s general election victory after nine years of Edward Seaga’s JLP government, has been received by the Caribbean community in Britain with a qualified but genuine welcome. The Manley of 1989 is not the Manley of 1972: the democratic socialism of his first two terms has been moderated by nine years in opposition, by the international economic constraints that structural adjustment has embedded, and by the changed global context of the post-Cold War transition. His government is pursuing a more pragmatic economic course than its predecessors while maintaining the commitments to social provision — health, education, housing — that distinguish the PNP’s governing tradition from its opponents’.
The Caribbean community in Britain follows the Manley government’s performance with the attention that a diaspora pays to the country from which it came and to which it maintains connections of family, culture, remittance, and political identification. The specific question of the diaspora’s formal relationship with the Jamaican state — whether diaspora Jamaicans can vote, whether they can hold dual citizenship, how the Jamaican government consults and engages its overseas communities — is one that community organisations have been pressing for years and that Manley’s government is beginning to engage more seriously than its predecessors.
The IRA, the Deal Barracks, and the Community’s Constancy
The IRA bomb at the Royal Marines School of Music barracks in Deal, Kent, on 22 September 1989 kills eleven bandsmen and injures more than twenty. It is one of the deadliest IRA attacks on the British mainland during the Thatcher years, and it comes at a moment when the Caribbean community has been watching the IRA’s mainland campaign with concern and opposition. The Caribbean community’s position on IRA violence is consistent and clear: political violence against civilian and military targets is not an acceptable means of political change, regardless of the political motivations behind it. The Deal barracks bomb is condemned without qualification. The Caribbean community’s aspiration is for a Northern Ireland conflict resolved through political negotiation rather than sustained with bombs and bullets.
Sources: Jamaica Information Service; The Gleaner; Jamaica Observer; Caribbean National Weekly; New Nation; The Voice; BBC News; Reuters; AP; The Guardian; Commission for Racial Equality; Anti-Apartheid Movement; CARICOM Secretariat; Jamaica High Commission London; Home Office (UK); House of Commons Hansard.
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