Foreign Policy in Latin America PDF

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© Springer International Publishing AG 2017 Editor: Ali Farazmand Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-31816-5_2683-1 pp 1-8 Date: 23 January 2017 Foreign Policy in Latin America Sébastien Dubé1 and Shirley Gotz2 (1)Universidad de Santiag...

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Foreign Policy in Latin America Shirley Gotz, Sebastien Dube

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© Springer International Publishing AG 2017 Editor: Ali Farazmand Global Encyclopedia of Public Administration, Public Policy, and Governance DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-31816-5_2683-1

pp 1-8 Date: 23 January 2017

Foreign Policy in Latin America Sébastien Dubé1 and Shirley Gotz2 (1)Universidad de Santiago de Chile, Santiago, Chile (2)Universidad Alberto Hurtado, Santiago, Chile

Sébastien Dubé (Corresponding author) Email: [email protected] Shirley Gotz Email: [email protected]

Without Abstract Synonyms Cooperation; Dependence; Foreign policy decision-making; Hyperpresidentialism; Identity; Institutions; Latin America; Periphery

Introduction Latin American foreign policies are public policies implemented by the political leaders of the countries of the region in order to reach higher levels of development and security through cooperation with the international system. Their analysis, therefore, has to combine a high number of elements ranging from world politics, patterns and trends of the global economy, national political systems, leaders’ worldviews, and strategies of development to the nature of the threats to the states or their population. A comprehensive overview of the literature leads to claim that the analysis of Latin American foreign policies, by both practitioners and students, has to consider the impact of the following five I factors : the international system; the institutions; the individuals; the shared Latin American identity; and the countries’ interests. The principal idea of this entry is that both practitioners and students of the field would miss the whole picture if they chose to focus only on some of these factors. The five factors are strongly interrelated and their combination is fundamental to understand the logic of Latin American foreign policies at two different levels. The first one is the real political level, which means the day-to-day behavior of Latin American leaders when it comes to the relations between their countries and the region and/or the rest of the world. The second level is the academic

level, meaning the way scholars of Latin American foreign policies and Latin American International Relations have built this research field. Although it is clear that each and every Latin American country has its own particularities, this entry focuses on the broad similarities that they share. Therefore, the focus is on the known information about Latin American foreign policies in general, and the entry does not include the vast production of national case studies. It also leaves to a second plan the numerous contributions focused on particular issues or topics such as the relations between the region and the United States or China. Finally, the entry refers to a traditional geographical definition of Latin America, meaning all the independent countries of the hemisphere excluding Canada and the United States. Or, to put it in simple terms, it includes the 33 states forming the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC).

The Five Factors The interaction between the geographic and economic context in which the region is inserted, the political processes at the national level, and the challenges of Latin American countries are the point of departure of the five fundamental I factors mentioned to understand and analyze Latin American foreign policies. Even though these factors may directly affect one another, they are presented separately all along the next section. This allows describing more precisely why they are central and how the literature has addressed each of them.

International Context Since the independence processes from European colonial rule at the beginning of the nineteenth century, Latin American countries have formed a region deeply integrated into the international political and economic system. Nevertheless, from a global perspective, neither the region nor any of its member states has ever been a major player on the international scene. Historically, at some point, countries like Cuba or Panama have momentarily been at the center of geopolitical issues with international consequences. But this was never explained or caused by their own power. Nowadays, no Latin American country can claim to be a top-level actor in any of the elements that Susan Strange described as the sources of structural power: security, finance, innovation, knowledge, or welfare (Sanahuja 2008). Regarding soft power, the countries of the region also have limited resources. In 2010, McClory ranked Brazil and Mexico the top two countries of the region in terms of soft power, but both outside the top-20 countries at the global level (McClory 2010). Moreover, in the last years, both of them have been facing major crises related to internal political and social stability, limiting their capacity and will to play a bigger role on the international scene. This low importance of the region in the world system is simple to explain and understand. No Latin American country figures in the top-40 countries of the world in terms of economic and human development; no Latin American country possesses nuclear weapons or weapons of mass destruction; and no Latin American country presents a security threat for North American and European countries. At the regional level, for decades Latin American countries have been highly able to avoid the militarization of their conflicts. This explains why the literature frequently refers to Latin America as a zone of peace within the international system. Therefore, it is possible to argue that the region is too weak to be naturally present at the decisionmaking level in the most powerful international organizations. On the global scene, none of its

countries can pretend to the rank of a veto player. Nevertheless, Latin America is also too developed or too advanced to be a top priority for international cooperation. This is true both at the regional level and at the national level, in the latter case the State of Haiti being a notable exception. In the end, broadly speaking, the region is in the periphery of the world system because it is not a trouble-maker that can challenge international order nor a problem-solving actor. That is, Latin America as a whole does not threaten the security of the great powers and it lacks the capacity, will, leadership, and political capital to be a reference on the global scene. This peripheral situation of Latin America in the world system has major consequences at both theoretical and real politics levels. As Tickner argues, the questions of dependency and autonomy of the region have been central in the theoretical debates in Latin America (Tickner 2015). Arguably two of the most important theoretical contributions of Latin American theorists – dependency theory and peripheral realism – are directly related to this issue. In one of the few books that precisely look at Latin American foreign policies, Mora and Hey claim that dependency theory and the realist paradigm applied to the third world are two dominant explanatory themes also related to the fact that they both pay attention to the asymmetries in the relationship between the United States and Latin America (Mora and Hey 2003, pp. 2–3). The logic of the dependency theory was developed in the 1960s and 1970s. Some of its most important authors, sociologists Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, tried to explain from a sociological perspective the underdevelopment of the region and its peripheral-dependent relation with the global capitalist system. Since its formulation, the theory has been submitted to numerous challenges. Its overtly deterministic logic and its empirical limits, above all since the region started to experience greater economic development in the 1990s, brought it many justified critiques. Nevertheless, as Tickner argues, dependency theory still has theoretical validity and influence today for its original Latin American contribution regarding the thinking about the state, national development and sovereignty (Tickner 2013, p. 88). In the political field, the dependency theory also echoes in the actual debate regarding the costs and benefits of the patterns of insertion of the region in the world. The issue of economic reprimarization related to the region’s economic growth of the 2000s caused by higher trade levels of primary products with Asian countries is a concrete example of the current application of elements of dependency thinking. At the foreign policy decision-making level, this intellectual framework also helps to explain the ideological divide between regional integration processes such as the South American Common Market (MERCOSUR) and the Pacific Alliance (AP). While the former has maintained a regional industrialization agenda, the latter had predominantly looked for the increase of exports of raw materials to growing Asian economies. A second major theory of international relations coming from the region was proposed by Carlos Escudé at the beginning of the 1990s with the objective of explaining that being in the periphery is not a synonym of a total lack of autonomy (Escudé 2015). According to the author, being in the periphery gives at least two options to the states: being a rule taker or a rebel state. This room for maneuver explains, among other things, why Latin American countries do not all and always follow the same policy lines, even when the international system has limitations on them. Following the same logic, Russell and Tokatlian identify no less than five different foreign policy models that Latin American countries have implemented towards the United States since the end of the Cold War (Russell and Tokatlian 2009, p. 213). It is important to mention that this contribution of Escudé is also based on the groundbreaking works of Helio Jaguaribe and Juan Carlos Puig, two influential thinkers of the 1970s and 1980s, respectively, who proposed their vision of Latin American international relations from a normative and Law-oriented perspective. For Jaguaribe and Puig, a major part of the problems of Latin

American governments in their relations with developed countries resulted from the erroneous appreciation of their proper room for maneuver to take decisions autonomously. For these authors, the world’s systemic conditions made possible the construction of internal decisions, allowing Latin American national elites to define policies such as regional integration to increase the autonomy of the region. In this sense, it is possible to argue that Escudé’s major contribution is also inspired by decades of academic reflections regarding regional integration and by numerous attempts to construct Latin American regional political and economic organizations since the 1960s. At the real politics level, the condition of being in the periphery has three main consequences on the definition and orientation of Latin American foreign policies. First, the economy of each and every Latin American country highly depends on the exploitation and exportation of primary products. This reality places Latin American countries in a constant situation of competition for foreign investments and access to external markets. As Cason claims, this is one of the major disadvantages that lead countries to limit their integration projects to commercial liberalization, and […] make developing countries especially unwilling to give up sovereignty to or even pool it with supranational institutions (Cason 2011, p. 3). In other words, the level of complementarity between the economy of Latin American countries is arguably the lowest of the whole world, and this fact is fundamental to understand the tensions that characterize many regional organizations. The second impact of regional economic dependency, when related to economic underdevelopment, is the necessity for Latin American governments to focus their foreign policies on short-term goals and benefits. About two decades ago, Van Klaveren ( 1992) claimed that the combination of international with national factors helped understand why Latin American countries historically looked for security, development, and regional power equilibrium through their foreign policy. More recently, Gardini and Lambert have listed the main goals of Latin American foreign policies as follows: economic prosperity, poverty alleviation, quality of democracy, human rights and regional and multilateral cooperation in spheres other than security (Gardini and Lambert 2011, p. 4). The third consequence is also identified by Gardini and Lambert. For these authors, the objectives of Latin American countries in the international context also explain why leaders conduct their foreign policy with both ideology and pragmatism. According to them, the combination of both elements explains the apparent contradictions in Latin American foreign policies. For Gardini and Lambert, the decisions that are taken by Latin American leaders are not a sign of incoherence or inconsistency, but the reflect [of] the dynamic tension between ideology and pragmatism, between the desirable and the achievable ( 2011, p. 2). Examples of this pragmatism that explains contradictory behavior in Latin American foreign policies include Hugo Chavez’s policy of maintaining the oil exportations to the United States in spite of his anti-imperialist discourse, leftwing Evo Morales’ Bolivian government’s legal recognition of the right-wing Brazilian government of Michel Temer in order to maintain Brazilian investments or the numerous protectionist measures adopted by countries against their partners in free trade or custom union agreements.

Institutional Weaknesses Latin American foreign policies and Latin American leaders’ behavior on the international scene can also be analyzed through the lens of political institutions. Globally speaking, Latin American countries are characterized by what many authors describe as hyper-presidential systems, that is, presidential systems with weak limits and controls on the executive power. In a seminal article, Roberto Russell underlined the necessity to look at institutions in order to understand foreign policy decision-making processes in Latin America. According to Russell, the limited number of actors able

to compromise societies’ resources is a key characteristic affecting the structure of foreign policy decision-making in the region (Russell 1990). From a comparative perspective, it is also interesting to note that this focus on institutions and on the concentration of power at the presidential level allows applying similar methodological frameworks to democratic and authoritarian regimes. Hyper-presidentialism and its historical background also explain why the study of Latin American foreign policies puts little or no emphasis at all on legislative bodies. In the same line, it is worth mentioning that the literature often considers the foreign policy decision-making process to be highly unified at the executive level and/or abdicated by the legislative power. Here, the questions of the legislative power’s will and capacity are central to explain this frequent postulate. The lack of capacity or interest by congressmen and women to influence on Latin American foreign policies can be explained by a low electoral interest related to international issues, a low parliamentary capacity to affect the policies, and also by the consensual idea of the necessity to protect the treaties signed by the states. The Chilean case is an archetype of this dynamic. The constitution gives the President the authority to define and lead the foreign policy, the Congress basically does not question it and political parties tend to consider the foreign policy as a state policy above party lines (Gotz 2015). Colombia is another interesting example. According to Tickner ( 2007), the predominant characteristic of its foreign policy decision-making process is the consensus between political and economic elites. This allows the President and his close advisers to play a central role in the definition of the policy, particularly since the 1991 Constitution. In the Colombian institutional context, the bureaucracy of the foreign affairs department has limited institutionalization, low professionalization, and limited autonomy in front of the executive (Tickner 2007, pp. 97–98). This tends to be the norm in the whole region, arguably with the notable exception of the Brazilian case. Scholars of Latin American foreign policies consider the Foreign Relations department of Itamaraty a model for its high level of professionalization and its capacity to formulate strategies of foreign policy. Nonetheless, the strong bureaucracy of Itamaraty is also challenged by the President’s will to play a more active and conducting role in the country’s foreign policy (Cason and Power 2006, pp. 121–122).

Individuals Considering the institutional weakness in the foreign policy decision-making in Latin America, the other side of the coin is obviously the importance of who is the President in office. At a micro level, the claim of Valerie Hudson ( 2007) according to which leaders are more prone to define the foreign policy in a personalist system is definitely applicable in the region. According to Malamud ( 2015), this is also related to the cultural tradition of caudillismo in Latin America. In this context, the personal traits of the leaders have a major importance, for example, the individual propensity to seek consensus or to provoke polarization (Gardini and Lambert 2011, p. 6). At a macro level, leaders are also important in the analysis of the socialization dynamics they create between themselves. A recent edited book by Gordon Mace et al. ( 2016) sheds light on the effect of summitry on the regional organizations. As the authors claim, socialization has become a central dimension of Latin American international relations at the diplomatic level. This is especially the case since leaders of the region have been participating, on average, 13 times a year in some 10 different summit levels between the end of the Cold War and 2012 (Portales 2016). Nonetheless, intense diplomatic activity and centralization of foreign policy decision-making processes are no guarantee of foreign policy efficiency or consolidation of regionalism. On the

contrary, it is rather a symbol of the leaders’ outright rejection of transferring powers to supranational organizations and to losing control on their foreign policy. In that sense, as Dabène argues, Latin American leaders just tend to reproduce at the international level their traditional behavior towards institutions at the national level (Dabène 2009). This last idea is significant for both practitioners and students of Latin American foreign policies because it tends to reverse the direction of the causal relation between hyper-presidentialism in decision-making processes and poor institutionalization of regional organizations. Here, the lack of institutionalization of foreign policies and organizations is not just the cause of poor results of integration. It is above all the result of deliberate decisions taken by the leaders. The most recent illustration of this tendency is the Pacific Alliance treaty between Chile, Colombia, Mexico, and Peru. The foundational treaty of this integration project signed in 2012 explicitly puts the decision-making processes in the hands of the four Heads of State and their ministers of Foreign Affairs – or ministers of Trade or Cooperation – or their corresponding vice ministers. No strong and stable autonomous institution is considered in the treaty. Therefore, ...