The Remapping of the Americas

Review of International Studies (1999), 25, 507–514 Copyright © British International Studies Association The remapping of the Americas ANTHONY PAYNE Richard G. Lipsey and Patricio Meller (eds.), Western Hemisphere Trade Integration: A Canadian-Latin American Dialogue (London: Macmillan, 1997) Elizabeth Joyce and Carlos Malamud (eds.), Latin America and the Multinational Drug Trade (London: Macmillan, 1998) Barry Bosworth, Susan M. Collins and Nora Claudia Lustig (eds.), Coming Together? Mexico-United States Relations (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997) James F. Rochlin, Redefining Mexican ‘Security’: Society, State and Region under NAFTA (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1997) Lawrence E. Harrison, The Pan-American Dream: Do Latin America’s Cultural Values Discourage True Partnership with the United States and Canada? (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997) Antonia Darder and Rodolfo D. Torres (eds.), The Latino Studies Reader: Culture, Economy, and Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998) International studies of the Americas have been dominated for at least the last forty years by an orthodoxy which framed the field of study as constituting the relations of the United States with the governments of something called ‘Latin America and the Caribbean’ (hereafter LAC). Often, as it happens, the Caribbean part of that construction was largely excluded from vision, especially the non-Spanish-speaking parts of that region; Canada was ignored almost as often; and the United States, needless to say, was automatically viewed as central. In power politics terms, this was understandable enough. The US perceived itself as a hegemonic power and associated its credibility in the eyes of both its enemies and allies in all parts of the world with its capacity to maintain and demonstrate control of its own hemispheric community—its ‘backyard’. Yet what we can now see is that the politics of this recent past (defined essentially as the Cold War period) were distinctive, not typical, in the longer history of US interactions with the rest of the Americas. Viewed historically, the Cold War era makes up only one of several different phases that can be detected in the unfolding of US policy within the Americas. Broadly, these reflect a progression in the US position from national consolidation in the 19th century; to the assertion of regional power status in the Caribbean and Central America in the first thirty years of this century; to a tentative wider embrace of (unequal) partnership with Latin America from the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s; to the acquisition of a globally hegemonic position with all its attendant symbolic ramifications for the whole of the hemisphere; and finally to the ultimately un- 507 508 Anthony Payne successful reassertion of that hegemony under Reagan in the 1980s. From such a perspective, the Cold War years stand not as a norm, but merely an episode. Moreover, this era was novel in the longer history of US relations within the Americas in that the imperatives of global hegemony required the US to have a strategic concern for all developments in all parts of the hemisphere. Nowhere was too small, no incident too insignificant, to draw a US response, provided that it could be connected to the global agenda. For the first time, therefore, US foreign policy treated the whole region as if it was a coherent unit. In other words, it was the US—not the regional states and societies—which created our contemporary understanding of ‘Latin America and the Caribbean’ as a region. It did so for reasons of national advantage in the very specific context of the Cold War. Quite obviously, it did not develop the concept in order to facilitate the integration or liberation of LAC. Indeed, the consequence for the countries of LAC was an enforced prioritisation of their relations with Washington and the establishment of very tight boundaries within which they could pursue their own developmental goals. The Cold War years are of enormous importance in the modern history of the Americas and not only because they are the immediate backdrop to the present. But they have passed and we now need to think about the international studies of the Americas in a more subtle and fluid way than the LAC concept allows. All of the six books under review here seek in their different ways to contribute to this rethinking. They in fact offer contrasting interpretations of three important contemporary debates in the field. The first concerns the very definition of the core issues at stake in the international relations of the Americas where views differen- tially emphasise trade and security; the second addresses the specific, and crucial, question of the US-Mexico relationship; and the third raises the matter of the extent and significance of the cultural interpenetration that has lately taken place between ‘North (Anglo) America’ and ‘South (Latin) America’. Trade versus security No-one can of course deny that trade has lately become the issue driving forward relations between the US and other parts of the hemishere. President George Bush’s so-called ‘Enterprise for the Americas’ speech of June 1990 was a genuinely historic moment which picked up existing trends in the political economy of the hemisphere and assembled them into a new agenda which gave rise to the North American Free Trade Area (NAFTA) and the subsequent commitment made at the Miami ‘Summit of the Americas’ in December 1994 to negotiate a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) by the year 2005. All of this has already generated a substantial literature mostly devoted to a discussion of the case for and against NAFTA from different perspectives. Less attention has been paid to possible NAFTA expansion and the wider question of Western hemisphere trade or economic integration as a whole. In this respect, events have certainly slowed. The early accession of Chile to NAFTA has not happened, thanks largely to domestic opposition in the US Congress, and progress towards the enactment of an FTAA remains mired in a series of inter- governmental working groups. Remapping the Americas 509 The edited collection put together by Richard Lipsey and Patricio Meller does at least seek to address this latter question. It also has the singular merit of ‘bringing Canada in’ to the debate, since it emanated from a conference held in 1995 in Chile deliberately designed to bring together Canadian and Latin American (but not US) economists and political scientists. As the editors note at the beginning of their introduction, ‘Canadians and Latin Americans have just acknowledged that they are in the same geographical hemisphere’. They go on to say that ‘a key ingredient for establishing a joint trading arrangement is mutual knowledge of eventual partners, and there is a profound mutual ignorance between Canadians and Latin Americans’.1 As other chapters reveal, there is also presently very little trade between these two parts of the Americas—about 2 per cent of Canada’s exports go to countries in the Western hemisphere other than the US and about 3 per cent of its imports come from these countries. Beyond this, there also emerge significant differ- ences of political vision of the desired future, with Latin America advancing the European Union as the relevant reference model (as having a geographical member- ship, a willingness to go beyond free trade and a commitment to social com- pensation mechanisms) and Canada, not to mention the US itself, still adhering to the limited prospect of a free trade area. For all that they are raised, these political difficulties are not well developed in the book. Amongst the contributors there are more economists than political analysts and they mostly confine themselves to bland, although still useful, descriptions of current trade links and prospects. Only Maureen Appel Molot really steps on to a political economy agenda in discussing the problems involved in distinguishing in the North American context between policy-led and investment-led integration. She concludes by noting the importance of ideology and, specifically, of changes in ideology. In both Canada and Mexico, she reminds us, ‘political leaders radically altered their views on the appropriate relationship with the United States . [and] . led their corporate sectors into support for free trade’.2 As important as it may have become, free trade as an issue has not eliminated US security concerns about the Americas. But it has placed the security debate in a new light and, to some extent, rendered security policy a derivative of the economic agenda. Most obviously, the traditional US concern of the hegemonic era, defending the hemisphere against Communist incursion, is obsolete. Its new security anxieties are less stark but in many ways more complex: they focus in particular on the creation and preservation of democracies in the Americas; on the containment of the threat posed by illegal drugs trafficking; on the control of migration into the US from Latin America and the Caribbean; and on the protection of the people and territory of the US from the environmental problems of other parts of the region. Of these issues drugs is the most intractable and least understood, which is reason enough on its own to welcome the book edited by Elizabeth Joyce and Carlos Malamud. Again the product of a conference held in 1995, this time in Spain, this contains some excellent, highly political analyses. One general point that emerges is that the drugs trade engages different parts of LAC in different ways. It is princi- 1 Richard G. Lipsey and Patricio Meller, ‘Introduction’ in Richard G. Lipsey and Patricio Meller (eds.), Western Hemisphere Trade Integration: A Canadian-Latin American Dialogue (London: Macmillan, 1997), p. 1. 2 Maureen Appel Molot, ‘The North American Free Trade Agreement: Policy- or Investment-led?’, ibid., p. 189. 510 Anthony Payne pally an Andean and Caribbean Basin problem, the detailed chapters in Joyce and Malamud focusing on Colombia, Bolivia, Peru, Mexico and Panama.

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