9 Ðependence and autoraomy in sub-xratiomaå åsland iuråsdåetåosãs: the case of tËae tr<åsãgdom of the NetheråaEads Gert Oostindie INTR.ODUCTON: THE COSTS ANÐ BENEFIT.S OF CARIBBEAN ÐECOLONIZATION Two centuries after the Haitian revolution the decolonization of the Caribbean still seems incomplete; nor is this situation likely to change in the near future. Of the four major European colonizers, only Spain has been forced to retreat from the region. With Puerto Rico (3.8 million people) and the US Virgin Islands (110000), the USA has the largest share of the population in the non-sovereign Caribbean, followed by France with its départements d'outre-mer (DOM, roughly 1 million), The Nether- lands with the Netherlands Antilles (1S0000) and Aruba (90000), and the UK with its overseas territories (155 000). In all, some 1,5'/" of the 37 million people living in the Caribbean today reside in non-sovereign territories. Any analysis of political and development issues in the Caribbean must take stock of the fact that the region in itself is small, and that most Caribbean territories are too. Small islands need not necessarily suffer from their scale - some analysts point at advantages such as flexibility which come with smallness. Yet the odds are against small states when it comes to political clout. They are "mostly acted upon by much more powerful states and institutions . . . For all that, it is vulnerabilities rather than opportunities . . . that come through as the most striking manifestations of the consequences of smallness in global politics" (Payne, 2004, p. 634). Another dimension of crucial importance in the Caribbean context is constitutional status. Sovereignty is a mixed economic blessing for micro-states generally. Even if sovereign micro-states may prove to be remarkably viable, non-sovereign territories world-wide definitely score better by economic standards (Armstrong et al., 1'998; Armstrong and Read, 2000). The Caribbean does not present an exception to this rule, as recently documented in a thorough analysis of both Caribbean and Pacific island economies, including their demographic characteristics (McElroy and Sanborn, 2005), and of the Caribbean only (McElroy and de Albuquerque, 1995). In the Caribbean, which contains an extremely heterogeneous collection of both real and virtual islands,l there is an evident positive correlation between non-sovereignty and standards of living (as measured by conventional economic variables), and to some degree between non-sovereignty and good governance, including guarantees of human rights and liberties (Oostindie and Klinkers, 2003, passim). This observation certainly applies if the three major countries of the Caribbean are included in the equation. Cuba (11.3 million), Haiti (8.3 million) and the Dominican ,,_. Republic (8.6 million) together account for three-quarters of the total Caribbean