Introduction
Eastern Caribbean nations are unable to negotiate effectively with the larger countries of the hemisphere in order to exploit fully the potentials of their maritime space. They are therefore vulnerable to the dangers inherent in the dumping of hazardous waste products of bigger, more powerful nations in their national space.
Under these precarious conditions--a changing political culture, militarization, and economic development strategies that are inconsistent with social and political realities-political in maritime security in the aftermath of the Grenada invasion will most likely proceed either from elite instability because of the absence of a fully developed capitalist class or from a large, organized, and discontented working class. This will be manifested in the form of plots, coups d'état, and assassinations, which will create new maritime security problems.
During the 1980s, the major maritime security themes that Caribbean scholars studied were geopolitics, militarization, intervention, and instability. The interface between domestic and international politics led to linkages among some of these themes and their domestic, regional, and international dimensions. For example, the militarization of Grenada in the 1980s was predicated on the need to defend the Grenadian revolution against foreign intervention and local counterrevolution. Ironically, the same buildup created the climate that led to the self-destruction of the revolution and presented the United States with a golden opportunity to intervene. In doing so, the United States succeeded in fulfilling a preexisting geopolitical aim of its own.
Elsewhere in the region, militarization and concerns about stability in Dominica, Barbados, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines raised maritime security concerns within the Eastern Caribbean, where several countries created the Regional security System (RSS) in 1982 to bolster sub regional security and became wining accomplices of intervention when the United States intervened in Grenada a year later.
The themes of geopolitics, militarization, intervention.......
