Attitudes towards Political Independence in Jamaica after Twelve Years of Nationhood

Abstract

In a follow-up study of 83 Jamaican leaders after twelve years of nationhood, we conclude that attitudes towards political independence have become considerably more favourable. The theory linking social structural inequalities and favourable judgements of equality as joint eauses of nationalist attitudes which had been formulated to account for the I962 pre-independence relationships fits the data in post-independence I974 too, but not as well as before the explained variance in attitude towards independence going from 57 to 25 per cent. Additionally, path models reflect some important changes in the structural and ideational sources of attitlldinal variation, espeeially the disproportionate increase in nationalist attitudes among economic dominants, the wealthiest leaders, and leaders with unfavourable attitudes towards equality. Another change was the new development of Restive Nationalists, elites who were more likely than other leaders to think that political independence had not gone far enough in producing structural change, that problems such as poverty and economic inequality had not been reduced adequately, that more radical changes were needed, and that such changes were not possible under a democratic political regime nor under an economy dependent on international capitalism. No period in history has seen the formation of so many new states as that since the Second World War. For 24 years, from I943 to I966, there was an average of about two and one-half new states created each year, more than one every five months for a total of 6I by I966.1 By I977 the total exceeded 80. The thunderous cries of 'Freedom' and 'Equality' and the jubilant celebrations held on tlle eve of imperialist departure and the raising of the new flag were testaments to the widespread belief among rnany of the new citizens that political independence would be beneficial for them. Prior to independence, the question of national sovereignty was a burning issue. However, mingled with the hopes of the nationalists and the favourable images of the future national society they created were This content downloaded from 207.46.13.158 on Wed, 16 Nov 2016 04:27:43 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Attitudes towards political inde7endence in jtamaica . . . fears expressed by other voices. Often, the well-to-do classes under 209 colonialism, the descendants of the European ruling classes, and differentiated tribal or racial minorities, among others, anticipated more ill-treatment from local nationalists than they had received from the European imperialists. Frequently, they opposed the transition from colony to independent state or tried to delay it as long as possible. In this paper we ask about the fate of such hopes and fears in one new state, Jamaica, after twelve years of nationhood. Specifically, (I) we report changes in elite attitudes towards political independence from just prior to independence to twelve years later. (2) We test for the post-independence period the 'egalitarian revolution' theory of nation formation constructed to explain pre-independence relationships; that is, we ask if the structural and ideational sources of support and opposition to political independence are the same as they were and, if not, how they have changed. And (3) we search for emergent developments in the nature of elite attitudes, new responses after twelve years of nationhood that did not exist before. THEORETICAL BACKGROUND A major conclusion of earlier work on the new states of the Caribbean is that political independence was primarily a means, an organizational tool, to achieve the end of a more egalitarian society.2 There are at least two senses in which this was so. The first was the desire to achieve the status of 'citizen' equal to that of the peoples of already existing independent states, and the second was the desire to achieve distributional reforms, social justice, and more equal rights for people within the new states as well. The nationalist revolution of our time is thus viewed as a manifestation of the demand for equality within an inegalitarian social structure, both nationalism and equality being traced by Bell and Moskos, using the works of other scholars,3 to the eighteenth-century foundations of modern nationalism and the Age of Enlightenment in Western Europe and its North American settlements. Whether or not the master underlying trend is more properly thought of as a 'democratic' or an 'egalitarian' revolution, of course, depends in part on the historical period one is considering. For the formation of the older states, political democracy was of more relevance than questions of economic and social equality. Most true nationalists during the American Revolution, for example, regarded themselves as republicans, advocating a system of government in which officials derived their authority from an electorate (of varying sizes) and assumed that the legitimacy of government rested on 'the people's will'. Even Sam Adams 'who was accused of preferring the company of ropewalkers to men of his own station' would not have understood the demand for economic and socia] equality that was often mixed with-and frequently

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