ABSTRACT
This chapter provides an evaluation of the significance and viability of all the collaborative trends affecting the Caribbean in the mid to late 1990s. In looking at the broad picture of integration in the Caribbean region, the analyst needs to be conscious of certain qualifying considerations. The first is that one must guard against overstating the extent to which integration initiatives in Latin America and the Caribbean are firmly anchored. The mere pronouncement of an integration initiative does not amount to the fact of integration, as there has been a tendency to believe in the past, especially during Latin America's first round of flirtation with integration in the 1960s-1970s when the air was permeated with heady euphoria about regionalism. This was the height of the era of what one might describe as "declaratory integration", but the tendency toward declarations of this type continues in the region today.
