Professor Rose Mary Allen extraordinary Professor at the University of Curaçao delivered the keynote at a conference in Curaçao on the theme Caribbean United in Excellence on 9 October 2026, with a message for governments and institutions: agreements must become policies, programs and relationships that people can use. Her address came just over two years after Curaçao became an associate member of CARICOM.
The Connection Was Already There
Professor Allen’s starting point is that Caribbean connection already exists. Long before cooperation was formalized through treaties and institutions, she argued, people created it through migration and labor, family and faith, language and music. Curaçaoans traveled to Suriname, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Panama for work, and the development of the oil refinery in the early twentieth century made Curaçao a destination for workers from the other Dutch islands, the British Caribbean, Suriname, Venezuela and elsewhere.
She did not romanticize that history. Movement was often driven by hardship, and newcomers could be valued for their labor while still being treated as outsiders. The task, she said, is not to create Caribbean connection from nothing, but to recognize what people have already built and give it greater purpose and support. These historical connections, however, do not automatically create unity. Building Caribbean solidarity requires conscious efforts to overcome differences and inequalities.
What Associate Membership Makes Possible
Curaçao became an associate member of CARICOM on 28 July 2024. That allows it to take part in CARICOM bodies and programs in areas where Curaçao has the authority to engage internationally. Professor Allen described Curaçao as an autonomous country within the Kingdom of the Netherlands whose geography, history and culture are deeply Caribbean. Associate membership does not make Curaçao Caribbean, she said, because it already is. It gives the island a formal way to work more closely with other Caribbean societies, as a partner joining an ongoing conversation rather than a completed project.
Associate membership opens doors, she noted, but agreements must become policies, programs and relationships that people can use. She pointed to Professor Roger Hosein of Trinidad and Tobago, who has examined what closer engagement with CARICOM could offer Curaçao in trade, services, tourism and economic development, and she widened the question: beyond what Curaçao can sell to the Caribbean, what can the region build together?
Why Culture Is a Policy Question
Economic cooperation matters, Professor Allen argued, but it cannot be sustained by agreements alone. Migration, organized crime, gun violence, youth unemployment, food insecurity and climate change do not stop at national borders, and no island can address them entirely on its own. That is why she called for a wider Caribbean “we,” an added layer of belonging that does not replace local identities, and why she treated culture as a matter of policy.
Decisions on education, language, mobility, funding, archives and digital access, she said, determine whose stories are taught, who can participate and whose work can circulate. Many young creators, researchers and entrepreneurs work in small markets with limited access to training, funding and regional audiences. Institutions can provide support, but young people and creative practitioners should not simply be invited into programs designed by others. They should help define the questions, shape the projects and decide what cooperation should produce.
Three Questions That Make Cooperation Last
Her framework for turning encounters into results is practical. What can we do together? Cooperation needs a concrete purpose. How will we work together? Partners do not bring equal resources, languages or institutional power, so all of them need a voice in shaping the work and sharing its benefits. What happens next? Every promising encounter needs a clear next step, including who follows up and when the partners come together again. After time has passed, she added, ask what remains: are people still working together, and is what they created still being used?
Her message to governments and institutions was direct: the possibilities should not depend on chance. Education, exchange, supportive policies and sustained investment are how relationships grow into partnerships and ideas become shared action.
Professor Allen closed with the line that sums up her case: “That is how a wider Caribbean ‘we’ comes into being: not through words alone, but through what we choose to build, share and sustain together.”