Trinidad and Tobago and Venezuelan Conflict Whenever

Trinidad and Tobago and Venezuelan Conflict

Whenever countries share resources there is the potential for conflict to arise between the two nations, which may each feel entitled to a greater share than it is receiving and each of which has different legal systems, cultural value, and sometimes languages. The ability of two countries to negotiate with each other is limited by a number of pragmatic issues as well as by the desire (or lack of desire) of the two sides to find any common ground. This paper examines one such international conflict - the stance between the nations of Venezuela and Trinidad and Tobago over fishing rights.

It is important to note at the beginning of this discussion that the mining of natural resources (whether gold or fish) that a dependence on extractive, primary resources tends to keep nations poorer, thus making them more desperate to claim what they can from the resources available to them.

Both Venezuela and Trinidad and Tobago are relatively poor countries (or at least countries where the majority of the people are poor) and this tends to exacerbate their disputes over fishing rights. Venezuela, both larger and more economically powerful (a "semi-peripheral" nation), tends to have an advantage over Trinidad and Tobago, a "peripheral" nation, as explained in the model below.

American economist Immanuel Wallerstein has argued in many of his writings that the best way to understand the relationship amongst the First, Second and Third Worlds (and possibly a Fourth World consisting of countries that have recently cast off colonial status) is to consider all of the world's nations as being a part of a single economic system. This system - which is political as well as economic - is highly complex and can only be understood if it is seen as a highly interdependent world system. Wallerstein argued that this world system had its origins in the rise of modern capitalism in the 17th century (McMichael, 2000, p. 669).

In Wallerstein's model, countries are arranged spatially - although in a metaphorical rather than in a literal or geographic sense. Core countries (such as the United States) are those closest to the world's economic and political power. Semi-peripheral countries (such as Hungary) are farther away from political and economic power but have a relatively high degree of sophistication and stability in their economic and political systems. Peripheral countries such as Cuba and most African nations are economically fragile, politically and economically unstable and highly dependent on countries closer to the core. They effectively do not control their own national economies (Friedman, 2000, p. 638). In at least some important ways, this dependence of poor countries on wealthy ones is the result of colonialism; those countries that were once colonies often are left with no functional infrastructure (and no remaining traditional social structures) upon which to create functioning economies.

Wallerstein's model is based on the idea that we are all linked economically to one another. Companies (and individuals) make key decisions about how to invest capital within in a world context and on a global scale. It is no longer countries but giant multinational corporations that are the most significant new actors on the world stage - and this fact has a substantial effect on the ways in which different regions will experience economic growth and prosperity. Companies now send their manufacturing plants to the Third World (i.e. To the periphery) because labor costs are cheaper there while they keep their R&D divisions in the First World (i.e. The core) where the necessary trained workers are - and then declare their profits in whatever country has the lowest taxes. This divvying up the world across national lines by multinationals tends to keep those countries that are already poor in the periphery and those already in the core to remain wealthy, and even to grow wealthier.

We see the fall-out from this world economic system in these two nations as they fight over fishing rights, which have disrupted both the relationships between the two nations and affected their internal politics, as in the following description of Trinidad and Tobago:

In March 1996 Robinson was elected president. A series of incidents with Venezuela involving maritime rights -- revolving around oil exploration and fishing rights, and Venezuelan drug interdiction efforts -- dominated the news. Internal divisions within the NAR, resulting from the strain of being the minority member of a governing coalition, threatened to cause the coalition to disappear. More recently, unemployment has fallen to its lowest level in a decade and a half (http://www.freedomhouse.org/research/freeworld/2000/countryratings/trinidad.htm).

The two nations have been working together to create diplomatic means of solving the conflict over maritime rights, and there has in fact been a fair amount of progress made in recent years as a joint commission on such issues as the nationality of vessels, exact territorial markers and fish catches have been agreed to.

However, it is unlikely that such an agreement will end all further conflicts over maritime rights so long as the two nations continue to see themselves as being primarily in conflict with each other. The leaders of each nation have to come to a realization that the major economic (and political) problems in their nation arise not from the fact that each country's fishers want some of the same fish but rather that the two countries both occupy a subservient position in the world economy.