GetachewThe Welfare World
Adom Getachew
in 1972 the socialist left swept to power in Jamaica. Calling for
the strengthening of workers’ rights, the nationalization of industries,
and the expansion of the island’s welfare state, the People’s National
Party (PNP), led by the charismatic Michael Manley, sought nothing
less than to overturn the old order under which Jamaicans had long
labored—first as enslaved, then indentured, then colonized, and only
recently as politically free of Great Britain. Jamaica is a small island,
but the ambition of the project was global in scale.
Two years before his election as prime minister, Manley took to
the pages of Foreign Affairs to situate his democratic socialism within a
novel account of international relations. While the largely North Atlantic
readers of the magazine might have identified the fissures of the Cold
War as the dominant conflict of their time, Manley argued otherwise.
The “real battleground,” he declared, was located “in that largely tropical
territory which was first the object of colonial exploitation, second, the
focus of non-Caucasian nationalism and more latterly known as the
underdeveloped and the developing world as it sought euphemisms