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. Another general feature highlighted by Joyce in her conclusion is the awkward relationship that exists between the policy agenda on drugs and that on trade and other issues. Thus she writes: The transition to more liberal, market-oriented economies, combined with democratisation in Latin America, may have made drug control in the Western Hemisphere more efficient by stimulating international cooperation. But these changes have improved opportunities for drug producers and traffickers as well as for legitimate enterprise: countries with liberal economies trade more with their neighbours, providing more cover for illicit commerce.3 There could be added to this too the push towards increased drugs production as a proven means of generating a livelihood engendered by the pressure of international market competition on otherwise frail industries in the developing parts of the hemisphere. A current case in point relates to the prospect of a further turn towards drugs in the tiny banana-dependent Windward Islands in the Caribbean, now that their preferential access to the European Union banana market has been successfully challenged in the World Trade Organization by the US Trade Representative’s Office, acting on behalf of a US-owned multinational corporation growing bananas in Central America.

The US–Mexico relationship

The US–Mexican border is the most dramatic confrontation between development and underdevelopment in the whole of the world and, by extension, the US-Mexican relationship is the key to any mapping of the new political economy of the Americas. The problem has been that NAFTA, which was manifestly meant to inaugurate a new era of closeness and harmony in the relationship, has not (yet) worked out as its various advocates hoped and planned. Instead, the Mexican economy has entered a deep recession triggered by the financial crash of December 1994, from which it had to be rescued by the Clinton administration; illegal immigration from Mexico to the US has intensified; the US trade balance with Mexico has fallen into substantial deficit, fuelling claims that NAFTA has destroyed jobs in the United States; in sum, political support for deepening the relationship has fallen significantly on both sides of the border. Analytically, there have been broadly two reactions to all of this: one, represented by the Bosworth, Collins and Lustig volume, which has not moved from an essentially benign view of the core relationship and thinks that, notwithstanding all that has happened since the negotiation of NAFTA, ‘nevertheless, it is possible to point to several areas showing positive gains’ 4; the other, holding firm to a fundamentally malign view of the

3 Elizabeth Joyce, ‘Conclusions’ in Elizabeth Joyce and Carlos Malamud (eds.), Latin America and the Multinational Drug Trade (London: Macmillan, 1998), p. 205. 4 Barry Bosworth, Susan M. Collins, and Nora Claudia Lustig, ‘Introduction’ in Barry Bosworth, Susan M. Collins and Nora Claudia Lustig (eds.), Coming Together? Mexico-United States Relations (Washington DC: Brookings Institution Press, 1997), p. 2. Remapping the Americas 511 dynamics of the relationship and represented here by James Rochlin’s book, which in effect wants to say ‘I told you so’. The Bosworth et al. collection derives from yet another conference and is produced, perhaps unsurprisingly, by the Brookings Institution, well known for its liberal take on public policy issues. Indeed, it is hard not to feel that the conference, held in July 1996, was called implicitly at least with a view to redressing the balance of the strongly anti-NAFTA discourse developing at that time in the US, especially in the light of the fact that the Clinton administration had to present Congress with a three-year review of NAFTA in mid 1997. Thus Enrique Espinosa and Pedro Noyola suggest that the change in the bilateral trade balance is more a reflection of the devaluation of the Mexican peso than NAFTA’s trade liberalisation schedule. John Williamson argues that the Mexican crisis of 1994–5 was caused by ‘the excessive size of the capital inflow, which consisted both of foreign lending and a partial repatriation of the flight capital of the preceding years’ 5 and tries to set out the basis of a shift in Mexican macroeconomic policy designed to avoid such a crisis in the future. In their turn, Juan Carlos Belausteguigoitia and Luis F. Guadarrama claim that significant progress has already been made in clearing up border pollution and that the concerns expressed on other environmental issues are exaggerated. George J. Borjas does present evidence that Mexican immigrants into the US have had an adverse effect on the earnings of native American workers, but this is immediately challenged by two discussants whose views are also briefly presented at the end of his chapter. Putting all this together, the editors, whilst not denying the scale of the setback that the Mexican financial crisis constituted, still feel that ‘it is important that the two countries [not only] proceed with full implementation of the NAFTA agreement’, but also extend their cooperation still further in other non- economic areas with a social dimension, such as control of drugs trafficking. For them, NAFTA remains ‘a leading example of the achievements a cooperative approach can produce’.6 James Rochlin, who is a professor of political science at Okanagan University College in Canada, will have none of this. In the most intellectually impressive of all the books under discussion here, he draws together a range of critical theories from international political economy, security studies and international relations theory to provide a persuasive, indeed compelling, account of how, under NAFTA, as he puts it, ‘Mexico is undergoing a crisis of authority’ in which ‘hegemony unravels, and the state is left to rely more upon coercion than societal consent in its attempt to cultivate order’.7 This portrait is constructed via analyses of the rise of neoliberalism in Mexico and its impact on the environment and on migration, of the Chiapas rebellion, of the new ‘militarised’ discourse that has grown up in the country around narcotrafficking, of human rights problems and of the role of the Mexican armed forces in relation to state and society. The important point is that Rochlin succeeds in connecting all of these themes, both analytically and empirically. His thesis in a nutshell is that the Mexican state elite sought during the period 1988–94 to trade the enduring myth of the Mexican revolution for ‘the myth of First World insertion’, only to find that NAFTA has unleashed enormous instability in which the key

5 John Williamson, ‘Mexican Policy toward Foreign Borrowing’, ibid., p. 59. 6 Bosworth, Collins and Lustig, ‘Introduction’, ibid., pp. 21, 23. 7 James F. Rochlin, Redefining Mexican ‘Security’: Society, State & Region Under NAFTA (Boulder, CO: Lynne Rienner, 1997), p. 4. 512 Anthony Payne division ‘concerns whether one’s interests are with or against integration with the United States, broadly defined’.8 Yet Rochlin knows that the situation is at the same time more complex than that, with a range of groups opposing the Mexican system with differing agendas. He writes: There is a complicated mosaic of microstruggles occurring in Mexico. There are neoliberals versus non-neoliberals, pro-integrationists versus anti-integrationists, democrats versus autocrats, guerrilla forces versus the state, PRI communities versus PRD communities, the minuscule club of the super-rich versus the poverty-stricken masses, northern Mexico versus southern Mexico, as well as the struggles of gender, race, human rights, and so on.9 In that sense, a number of scenarios are obviously thinkable, including the possibility that the current Mexican system could be destabilised to the extent that it collapses, but with no clear replacement. In such circumstances the Brookings analysis of NAFTA’s potential would be rendered distinctly implausible, to say the least. Rochlin, in short, has written an important book which deserves to be widely read in policy making circles in Washington as well as in the academy of international studies. A different sort of review would also have drawn attention to, and debated, many of the interesting theoretical syntheses he makes between the different subfields from which he builds his arguments.

Cultural interpenetration

Cultural aspects of the international relations of the Americas have not hitherto been widely discussed in the academic literature, but this too is now beginning to change in line with the ‘cultural turn’ in wider international studies theorising. Indeed, quite a ﬁerce right/left debate is underway about cultural interpenetration in the Americas in which the recent book by Lawrence Harrison and ‘the Latino Studies Reader’ put together by Antonia Darder and Rodolfo D. Torres stand as illustrative, contending viewpoints. This is a debate in which, on the whole, the right is on the attack. Harrison is certainly an unashamed polemicist. A former director of the USAID mission in Nicaragua during the ﬁrst two years of the Sandinista revolution in 1979–81, he has written a daring and, it must be said, entertaining critique of the ‘Pan-American dream’, which sweeps breathlessly over countries such as the US itself, Canada, Argentina, Brazil, Chile and Mexico and issues such as trade and investment, narcotics and immigration. His core thesis is that the realisation of a genuine Western hemisphere community, as opposed to the kind of ‘instant’ community proclaimed at the Miami summit, ‘will depend on the speed with which the values that make democracy and the free market really work displace the traditional values that largely explain why . . . Latin America lags so far behind Canada and the United States’.10 In short, what above all else explains the underdevelopment of Latin America and the Caribbean is its inherited Ibero-Catholic culture, which he views as ‘fatalistic, particularistic, ascriptive, passive, indivi-

8 Ibid., pp. 179, 185. 9 Ibid., p. 186. 10 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), p. 272. Remapping the Americas 513 dualistic and familistic, past- or present-oriented, and hierarchical’.11 Harrison also, however, holds leftist intellectuals committed to the basic tenets of dependency theory to be almost as culpable. Reference is thus made to ‘the costly nonsense’12 of Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s earlier pre-Presidential views, whilst in an extra- ordinarily vitriolic passage such distinguished analysts of Latin America as André Gunder Frank, Susanne Jonas and Richard Fagen are dismissed as ‘a bunch of bright, affluent, guilt-ridden, utopian elitists who never grew up’.13 In these circumstances, it is probably to be hoped that Harrison never alights upon this review essay, because (the maturity or otherwise of the reviewer notwithstanding) there is simply not the space here to mount a serious case against the huge number of sweeping generalisations with which his book is riddled. Frankly, it would be difficult to know where to start and where to end. Such a demolition must nevertheless be done somewhere. Perhaps the wider point to be made is that ‘leftist’ analysis of underdevelopment should not, and need not, concede the argument deriving from culture to the right. The Darder and Torres reader is a welcome reminder of this. Although no over- arching theoretical congruence is claimed for the essays chosen, the editors do broadly seek to make the case for a re-insertion of class analysis into constructionist and discursive accounts of race and identity within the field of Latino cultural studies. The contributions thus embrace attempts to ‘recast racialized relations’, to explore critical discourses on gender, sexuality and power and to map the new role played by Latino labour within the emerging political economy of the Americas. This last section connects in an immediate and telling fashion to more orthodox literatures, with, for example, Zaragosa Vargas arguing strongly that, ‘along with African Americans, Latinos occupy the lowest rungs of a segmented [US] labor market that has been produced by the racism of employers, unions, and US foreign policy in Mexico, Central and Latin America, and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean’.14 To put the argument another way, all this is part and parcel of the important debate about the ‘disuniting of America’ set in motion by the publication of Arthur M. Schlesinger’s short book of that name in 1991. What the Darder and Torres collection shows, as indeed does the Harrison book in its own perverse way, is that this debate is now properly to be understood, courtesy of intense recent cultural interpenetration between North and South America in both directions, as part of a wider debate about the ‘uniting’ or ‘disuniting’ of the Americas as a whole. In sum, then, we are brought back to our starting point. A new era has begun in the international relations of the Americas and analysts are only now beginning to recognise this and make initial sense of it. The period of US hegemony is over and cannot be re-created. The alternative of a straightforwardly coercive US approach has been tried and shown to work only fleetingly and always crudely. Indeed, the key to understanding the dynamics of the new era is to accept from the outset that the core problematic is not best posed as a matter of relations between the US and some part, or all, of Latin America and the Caribbean. Rather, the appropriate field of

11 Ibid., p. 33. 12 Ibid., p. 73. 13 Ibid., p. 94. 14 Zaragosa Vargas, ‘Rank and File: Historical Perspectives on Latino/a Workers in the US’ in Antonia Darder and Rodolfo D. Torres (eds.), The Latino Studies Reader: Culture, Economy, and Society (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998), p. 244. 514 Anthony Payne study is the Americas, understood as constituting different subregions, each with different cultural characteristics and different economic and political agendas. As scholars, we have no choice but to give up on old and easy generalisations and grapple, however inadequately, with the complexities of the new Americas.