|
Caribbean Islands ST. CHRISTOPHER AND NEVIS
COUNTRY PROFILE: St. Christopher and Nevis
Official Name: St. Christopher and Nevis
Term for Citizens: Kittitian(s), Nevisian(s)
Capital: Basseterre
Political Status: Independent, 1983
Form of Government: democracy and constitutional
monarchy
GEOGRAPHY
Size: 269 sq. km.
Topography: Mountainous; intermittent grasslands and
forests
Climate: Tropical, wet
POPULATION
Total estimated in 1986: 45,000
Annual growth rate (in percentage) in 1986: 0.1
Life expectancy at birth in 1982: 70
Adult literacy rate (in percentage) in 1986: 90
Language: English
Ethnic groups: Black (over 90 percent); remainder white
or mulatto
Religion: Primarily Anglican
ECONOMY
Currency: Eastern Caribbean dollar (EC$)
Exchange rate: EC$2.70=US$1.00
Gross domestic product (GDP) in 1985: US$67.3 million
Per capita GDP in 1985: US$1,500
Distribution of GDP (in percentage) in 1985:
Government and other services 23.7
Agriculture 15.0
Manufacturing 12.8
Tourism 6.0
Other 42.5
NATIONAL SECURITY
Armed forces personnel: 0
Paramilitary personnel: 80
Police: 220
St. Christopher (hereafter, St. Kitts) and Nevis share a long
history of British colonization. St. Kitts has been referred to as
the "mother colony of the West Indies," a reflection of its status
as the first English colony in the Caribbean. Although discovered
by Christopher Columbus in 1493, St. Kitts was not settled by
Europeans until 1623, when a small group of Britons established
themselves at Sandy Bay. As elsewhere in the Caribbean, the French
were not far behind; they established settlements the following
year. Nevis was colonized in 1628 by an English party dispatched
from St. Kitts.
The British and French kept up an uneasy cohabitation on St.
Kitts until 1713, when Britain was granted sole dominion under the
Treaty of Utrecht. The only apparent cooperative venture between
the two groups of settlers during this period was a series of joint
military operations against the native Carib Indians that resulted
in their virtual elimination from the island. Although officially
sovereign, the British were unable to solidify their control over
the islands and secure them against French assault until the late
eighteenth century (see Historical and Cultural Setting, ch. 1).
This consolidation of British rule was recognized by the Treaty of
Versailles in 1783.
Under British rule, St. Kitts and, to a lesser extent, Nevis
provided classic examples of the plantation system. On tracts owned
by well-to-do Britons, often on an absentee basis, cash crops were
raised for export by indentured laborers and, eventually, by
African slaves. After brief attempts at indigo and tobacco
cultivation, sugarcane was introduced to both islands by the mid-
seventeenth century (see The Sugar Revolutions and Slavery, ch. 1).
Sugarcane cultivation and its by-products--land scarcity, price
fluctuation, seasonal employment and unemployment, and migration--
went on to shape the history of St. Kitts and Nevis, although soil
erosion and depletion in Nevis eventually led to the abandonment of
sugarcane cultivation by the plantation owners and the
establishment of peasant smallholdings.
The two islands, along with the somewhat more distant Anguilla,
experienced a number of administrative configurations and changes
of status during the course of colonial history. Beginning in 1671,
St. Kitts and Nevis joined Antigua (with Barbuda and Redonda) and
Montserrat as part of the Leeward Caribbee Islands Government under
a British governor. This arrangement endured until 1806, when the
Leeward Caribbees were split into two separate governmental units,
with St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla and the British Virgin Islands
comprising one of these units. The Leewards were reunited as a
single administrative entity in 1871, with Dominica included in the
grouping. St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla was established as a
"presidency" within the Leeward Islands Federation in 1882, a
status it kept until 1956.
The three-island grouping participated in the ill-fated West
Indies Federation from 1958 to 1962 and took part in the
unsuccessful negotiations of the so-called Little Eight (Antigua
and Barbuda, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, Montserrat, St. Kitts-
Nevis-Anguilla, St. Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines),
which broke off in 1966 when the government of Antigua and Barbuda
would not agree to have its postal service absorbed into a federal
framework. When these efforts failed, St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla,
along with most of the other small Caribbean colonies, accepted the
British offer of associated statehood (see Glossary), which
provided for domestic self-government while Britain maintained
responsibility for external affairs and defense. St. Kitts and
Nevis remained an associated state until it declared full
independence in 1983 (the last of the associated states to do so).
By that time, Anguilla had long since declared and demonstrated its
opposition to continued union with St. Kitts and had assumed
dependency status (see British Dependencies: British Virgin
Islands, Anguilla, and Montserrat, this ch.).
The political history of St. Kitts and Nevis is closely
intertwined with its economic development (or lack of it). The
issue of land is at the heart of Kittitian politics. The dominance
by estate owners of this already limited natural resource and the
single-minded application of that resource to one industry
precluded the development of a stable peasant class. Instead, the
system produced a large class of wage laborers generally resentful
of foreign influence. The nature of the sugar industry itself--the
production of a nonstaple and essentially nonnutritive commodity
for a widely fluctuating world market--only served to deepen this
hostility and to motivate Kittitian laborers to seek greater
control over their working lives and their political situation.
The collapse of sugar prices brought on by the Great Depression
precipitated the birth of the organized labor movement in St. Kitts
and Nevis. The Workers League, organized by Robert Bradshaw in
1932, tapped the popular frustration that fueled the labor riots of
1935-36. Rechristened the St. Kitts and Nevis Trades and Labour
Union in 1940, the union established a political arm, the St. Kitts
and Nevis Labour Party, which put Bradshaw in the Legislative
Council in 1946. The Labour Party would go on to dominate political
life in the twin-island state for more than thirty years.
During its long tenure, Bradshaw's Labour government moved
increasingly toward a statist approach to economic development.
This tendency culminated in 1975, when the government took control
of all sugarcane fields. It assumed ownership of the central sugar
factory in Basseterre, the capital, the following year. By this
time, opponents of the Labour government had discerned a
corresponding tendency toward political rigidity and even
repression, mainly through the vehicle of the St. Christopher and
Nevis Defence Force. Resentment of Labour rule was particularly
acute on Nevis, where citizens not only saw themselves as neglected
and ignored politically but also felt that their island was being
unfairly deprived of services and revenue by its larger neighbor.
Nevisian disenchantment with the Labour Party proved a key factor
in the party's eventual fall from power.
The decline of the Labour Party was marked by the passing of
its longtime leader, Bradshaw, in 1978. He was replaced as premier
(the preindependence title for prime minister) of St. Kitts and
Nevis by a close associate, C. Paul Southwell. When Southwell died
only one year later, the government and the party fell into a
leadership crisis that strained the unity required to fend off a
growing opposition. The new Labour leader, Lee Moore, apparently
was unprepared to fill the void left by Bradshaw and Southwell.
By 1979, the political opposition had coalesced into two party
groupings, one on St. Kitts, the other on Nevis. The Kittitian
opposition party was the People's Action Movement (PAM), a middle-
class organization founded in 1965 on the heels of a protest
movement against a government-ordered increase in electricity
rates. The PAM first participated in elections in 1966. Its
platform eventually came to advocate economic diversification away
from sugar and toward tourism, increased domestic food production,
reduction of the voting age to eighteen, and increased autonomy for
Nevis.
On Nevis, the party that came to enjoy widespread support was
the Nevis Reformation Party (NRP). Established in 1970, the NRP
advocated secession from St. Kitts as the only solution to the
island's lack of autonomy. Campaigning almost exclusively on this
issue, the party won 80 percent of the vote on Nevis in the
elections of 1975, capturing both Nevisian seats in the
legislature.
Labour's decline was confirmed by the elections of 1980.
Although Labour outpolled the PAM on St. Kitts, taking four seats
to three, the NRP again captured both seats on Nevis. This made
possible the formation of a PAM/NRP coalition government in the
House of Assembly (the legislative body that succeeded the colonial
Legislative Council) with a bare majority of five seats to four, a
development that placed the Labour Party in the unfamiliar role of
parliamentary opposition. Kennedy Simmonds, a medical doctor and
one of the founders of the PAM, assumed the post of premier
(Simmonds had won Bradshaw's former seat in a 1979 by-election).
Simeon Daniel, the leader of the NRP, was appointed minister of
finance and Nevis affairs.
The change in government reduced the demand for Nevisian
secession. Most Nevisians had long focused their objections to
Kittitian government on the Labour Party. The PAM, advocating as it
did an enhanced autonomy for Nevis, facilitated the incorporation
of the NRP and its followers into national life. The PAM/NRP
coalition also cleared the way for the national independence of St.
Kitts and Nevis as a two-island federation. Although Simmonds and
the PAM had formerly stated their opposition to full independence,
they now reversed themselves, citing economic advances since the
change of government and the prospect of further development
through increased foreign aid after a formal separation from
Britain. Accordingly, the coalition hammered out a constitution
that granted Nevis considerable autonomy as well as a guaranteed
right of secession (see Government and Politics, this section). A
constitutional conference was held in London in December 1982, and
St. Christopher and Nevis was declared an independent state on
September 19, 1983.
Although Moore had participated in the constitutional
conference, the Labour Party expressed strong objections to many
provisions of the new Constitution, particularly those dealing with
Nevis. The arrangement worked out by the PAM and NRP, it claimed,
was not a true federation, since St. Kitts was not granted the same
powers of local government as Nevis, i.e., there was no separate
Kittitian legislature, and was not allowed the same right of
secession.
Labour's objections, however, did not seem to be widely shared
by the electorate. Simmonds, now the prime minister, called early
elections in June 1984. In the expanded parliament, the PAM
augmented its majority by capturing six seats to Labour's two. It
also scored a symbolic victory by defeating Moore in his
constituency and denying him the post and platform of leader of the
opposition. The NRP captured all three seats in Nevis, yielding the
coalition government a commanding nine to two advantage in
Parliament and an apparent mandate to pursue its policies of
development through diversification and an enhanced private sector.
Data as of November 1987
|
