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The Americas In Transition: The Contours of Regionalism, by Gordon Mace, Louis Bélanger, and contributors
2. The Origins, Nature, and Scope of the Hemispheric Project
After fifteen-odd years in relative oblivion everywhere but in Western Europe, regionalism returned to global prominence in a variety of guises at the end of the 1980s. Like the first wave of regional integration in the 1960s, current manifestations of regionalism span many continents and involve numerous actors. This phenomenon has also attracted renewed scientific interest (Fawcett and Hurrell 1995; Gamble and Payne 1996; Hettne 1994), although, for reasons of complexity, it remains poorly conceptualized and understood.
As Andrew Hurrell (1995b: 250) has accurately pointed out, regionalism in the Americas has basically adopted two forms or levels: hemispheric-wide regionalism and what could be called subregional integration. These two forms reflect two competing visions that have constantly vied for prominence in the history of inter-American relations. Hemispheric-wide regionalism is rooted in the Western Hemisphere Idea long promoted by U.S. statespeople. It has historically centered on multilateral fora such as the Pan-American conferences and the Organization of American States (OAS), which have provided a loose cooperative framework for addressing a wide array of issues in areas like security affairs, democracy, health, human rights, and trade and development. Subregional integration, which has evolved from the Bolivarian dream of Latin American unity, has essentially taken the form of regional integration schemes featuring more or less binding institutional structures and dealing mostly with economic cooperation, but also, in some cases, social and cultural cooperation as well.
The central focus of this book is the current U.S. project for hemispheric regionalism, the Enterprise for the Americas Initiative (EAI) launched by President George Bush in June 1990. 1 The main elements of this project were laid out in the Declaration of Principles and the Plan of Action signed by thirty-four heads of state at the Miami summit of December 1994. The Miami process is the third major attempt by the United States to establish a framework for inter-American cooperation after the relative failures of 1889 and 1948.
The success of the current proposal for hemispheric integration, essentially a U.S. initiative, largely depends on Washington’s involvement in the process. Although the Miami summit Plan of Action makes it clear that the project for continental integration centers on the establishment of a free trade area in the Americas, the project under discussion goes much further than that. As we shall see in the coming pages, it is also a political project for the management of hemispheric affairs involving cooperation in numerous areas, including democracy, illegal drugs, and the environment.
At the same time, the current U.S. initiative for hemispheric integration is not a well-structured policy that Washington is absolutely determined to impose on the rest of the hemisphere; witness President Bill Clinton’s difficulties in obtaining congressional fast-track authority to negotiate free trade agreements. Instead, the initiative pertains to the realm of expectations and to the vision that U.S. policymakers have for the future of the Americas (Aronson 1996). From the U.S. perspective, inter-American relations at the start of the 1990s offered a window of opportunity, a unique occasion to propose a “new architecture” for the Americas based on what U.S. business and political circles perceived as a new convergence of intents between the United States and her neighbors (Watson 1995: 3, 5). In other words, there is no carefully constructed master plan or grand design. The initiative is essentially a U.S. option made possible by circumstances and will be pursued only if it is accepted by the rest of the Americas.
This chapter has four objectives. In the first section, I return to the historical roots of the project in an attempt to circumscribe the original vision of the Americas held by U.S. policymakers, as well as Washington’s role therein. My intention is to demonstrate how the current hemispheric project is part (and the result) of a U.S. vision that has existed for almost as long as the country itself. In the second section, I deal with previous attempts to promote hemispheric regionalism in order to show how the outcomes of 1889 and 1948 have affected the current situation. In the third part, which focuses on the 1980s, I seek to identify and understand the significant changes underlying the strategic reorientations that occurred in the Americas at the end of the 1980s and continued into the 1990s. Finally, the last part of the chapter traces the outlines of the current hemispheric project and identifies its main components.
The Original U.S. Vision for the Americas
As Anthony J. Payne (1996: 94) has rightly remarked, most accounts of inter-American relations start with an almost inevitable reference to the Monroe Doctrine, whereas in actual fact, the president’s message to the U.S. Congress of December 1823 had little to do with inter-American affairs. Not only were the two sole passages dealing with the subject essentially directed at the Holy Alliance, but it has also been shown that James Monroe and his secretary of state, John Quincy Adams, had no interest in Spanish America prior to 1822 (Connell-Smith 1974: 49). Furthermore, the United States did not at the time have the naval power capable of protecting the Americas against incursions by the countries of the Holy Alliance—it was the British fleet that actually enforced this aspect of the U.S. declaration. The importance of President Monroe’s message to Congress only came later when U.S. policymakers transformed it into the Monroe Doctrine (G. Smith 1994). It was then used by Washington in conjunction with the Roosevelt Corollary to legitimize U.S. policy and intervention in Latin America and the Caribbean.
Although various segments of Washington’s political elite saw no advantage in a closer relationship with the new Spanish republics—which, in Adams’s words, did not “have the first elements of good and free government” (Connell-Smith 1974: 53)—important political figures were already offering a vision of the future state of the Western Hemisphere and of Washington’s place in that system. From the start, this early vision emphasized two distinct aspects: one political, the other largely economic.
The political vision of the future configuration of inter-American affairs first appeared in the writings of Alexander Hamilton and Thomas Jefferson, who as early as 1786 foresaw a system of the Americas centered on the United States (Aguilar 1968: 25). But the main propagandist for the idea was Henry Clay. Clay, a speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives and Adams’s rival to succeed Monroe, submitted a motion in 1820 proposing the creation of a “system of which we shall be the centre, and in which all South America will act with us” (Connell-Smith 1974: 52).
For most of the nineteenth century, however, events in the United States and in Central and South America prevented any form of rapprochement between Washington and its Latin American neighbors. In the South, border conflicts, coups d’état, and chronic instability caused by warring political factions and caudillos made governing almost impossible and prevented serious foreign policy making. In the North, the war with Mexico, the Civil War, the Reconstruction of the South, and the settlement of the West either impeded progress in inter-American relations or diverted Washington’s attention elsewhere. However, the Western Hemisphere Idea was launched anew during the subsequent age of empire through the declarations of President Grover Cleveland and, more important, through what was to become the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. Theodore Roosevelt’s self-assigned role of regional policeman and his “big stick” reference, although unpopular with many in the region, reaffirmed the idea of the United States as a nucleus of the Americas and sustained the political vision of a regional system dominated by the United States (G. Smith 1994: 25).
As for the economic component of the U.S. hemispheric vision, it was essentially trade oriented. The genesis of what is today called the Free Trade Area of the Americas was an idea already present in the thinking of Henry Clay in the 1820s. However, its main advocate in the nineteenth century was Secretary of State James G. Blaine, whose Latin American policy in the 1880s involved two central objectives: the establishment of a customs union among the countries of the Americas and the adoption of a mechanism for the peaceful settlement of disputes. As we shall see in the next section, these objectives were at the heart of Washington’s strategy when it convened the First International Conference of American States in Washington on October 2, 1889.
Historically, then, the U.S. vision of the regional system of the Americas—what Molineu (1986: 13–19) and others have termed the Western Hemisphere Idea—consists of a project built upon three pillars: (1) the political primacy of the United States in the inter-American system, (2) an exclusively American institutional framework for the settlement of disputes, and (3) a free trade area of the Americas. And although, for a number of reasons, the development of this regional system has been anything but constant, it is also accurate, as Gordon Connell-Smith (1974: 121) has pointed out, to speak of “logical growth” from the original vision of Jefferson and Clay, through the attempts by Blaine and Franklin D. Roosevelt, and right up to the current project developed under George Bush. In spite of historical ups and downs, some of them a direct result of U.S. policy itself, the present hemispheric project is in many ways a contemporary manifestation of a U.S. vision kept alive for almost two hundred years.
Attempts at Region Building
Objective conditions throughout most of the nineteenth century were unfavorable to the implementation of the U.S. vision for the Americas. Only in the final decades of the century did the situation change, essentially because of the improved economic and political situation in Latin America and the position of the United States in the world system. By the 1880s, Washington had established effective control over the entire continental United States. The economic outlook was extremely promising, so much so that U.S. business expanded decisively outside U.S. borders in a spirit magnificently rendered in Gore Vidal’s Empire. During the next sixty years or so, the U.S. rise to superpower status led Washington to make two attempts to develop a regional system of the Americas.
The first attempt came in 1889 with the convening in Washington of the First International Conference of American States. In hosting the conference, the U.S. government, led by its most ardent advocate for inter-American cooperation, Secretary of State James G. Blaine, had two specific objectives: the establishment of a customs union to foster inter-American commerce and the adoption of arbitration as a mechanism for the settlement of disputes.
The objectives were related in the sense that both would contribute to creating an environment favorable to the conduct of economic relations in the hemisphere. However, the Latin American governments, under Argentina’s leadership, rejected both proposals out of fear that they would add economic domination to what was already seen as U.S. political hegemony in inter-American relations (Connell-Smith 1974: 110). The only tangible result of this first inter-American conference was the creation of the International Union of American Republics, which ended up essentially collecting and disseminating commercial information, and its agency, the Commercial Bureau. The bureau was renamed the Pan-American Union in 1910 (Connell-Smith 1974: 110–126).
All in all, there were nine Pan-American conferences, the last of which, in 1948, established the OAS as the main institutional structure of the nascent inter-American system. These conferences, understandably, generated limited concrete results because the majority of them were held at a time when Washington’s Latin American policy was dominated by Theodore Roosevelt’s “big stick” policy, William Taft’s dollar diplomacy, and the missionary diplomacy of Woodrow Wilson. The numerous U.S. interventions in Central America and the Caribbean resulting from these policies fostered widespread suspicions and deep distrust of U.S. attitudes and behavior throughout Latin America. This mistrust, in turn, made progress almost impossible in the Pan-American context.
Nevertheless, the first U.S. initiative in favor of Pan-Americanism generated three advantages for Washington, which, although less tangible than a customs union or an arbitration treaty, were nonetheless significant in the long term. First, Pan-Americanism served as a framework to legitimize U.S. involvement and intervention in Latin American and Caribbean affairs. Second, by maintaining the Pan-American conferences as an exclusive dialogue between Washington and the Latin American governments, the U.S. government succeeded in excluding European nations from participating in the management of inter-American relations. Third, Pan-Americanism was extremely helpful in preventing the creation of a Latin American bloc, which Simón Bolívar had seen as essential to balancing U.S. predominance in the region. All of these advantages left the United States in a position of hemispheric hegemony that was virtually unassailable at the outbreak of World War II.
The other significant U.S. initiative in region building in the Americas prior to the 1990s occurred in 1947–1948 and dealt with issues of political, economic, and military cooperation. This initiative complemented Washington’s overall strategy to structure the post–World War II international system and was made possible by two sets of events that laid the groundwork for this second major attempt at inter-American cooperation.
The first set of events was initiated by the announcement by Franklin D. Roosevelt in April 1933 of a new U.S. policy toward Latin America. Subsequently referred to as the good neighbor policy, it had three main elements: the abandonment of intervention, the return to a just and objective policy of recognition, and the establishment of a new Pan-Americanism based on mutual understanding (Molineu 1986: 23). The new policy was ambiguous. On the one hand, its contribution to hemispheric unity was problematic because, as the Cuban episode of May 1933 quickly proved, it did not completely eliminate the threat of unilateral intervention. On the other hand, the policy did reduce some of the apprehensions of Latin American governments regarding larger issues such as sovereign rights. For instance, it established the framework for U.S. acceptance of the Convention on the Rights and Duties of States, which was a major Latin American proposal at the International Conference of American States at Montevideo, Uruguay, in December 1933.
The other set of events that paved the way for the restructuring of the inter-American system was linked to World War II itself. Among the various meetings and conferences held throughout the Americas during the course of the war, three played a significant role in creating what Payne (1996: 96) has called an emergent security community in the Western Hemisphere. The Havana conference of July 1940 was the starting point; Washington was able to persuade the participating governments to sign the Act of Havana. One of the main elements of this agreement was the acceptance of the principle of collective security in the Americas, which meant that an act of aggression against an American state originating from outside the region would be considered an act of aggression against all the states of the region. Eighteen months later, in January 1942, the Third Meeting of Consultation of American Foreign Ministers in Rio de Janeiro established two mechanisms for consultation and coordination related to the conduct of the war effort: the Inter-American Defense Board and the Emergency Advisory Committee for Political Defense. Finally, the Inter-American Conference on Problems of War and Peace, held in Mexico City in February–March 1945, was also important because of the adoption of the Act of Chapultepec. This resolution extended the notion of collective security as applied to the Americas to include not only aggression from outside the region but also aggression from a member state, as well as provisions for sanctions (Connell-Smith 1974: 189). The regional security complex that emerged from the war-related conferences and the improved overall climate resulting from the good neighbor policy played a role in transforming Pan-Americanism into the inter-American system.
This transformation occurred in 1947–1948 with the adoption of four important international documents at two regional conferences. At the Inter-American Conference for the Maintenance of Continental Peace and Security held in Rio de Janeiro in August–September 1947, two issues were on the minds of the participants. Latin American delegates were preoccupied with the postwar economic situation in their respective countries. The U.S. demand for Latin American products and resources was down, and access to U.S. products had been made more difficult by the demands of European reconstruction. For its part, Washington was preoccupied with the emerging Cold War and the containment of the communist threat. The main U.S. objective at Rio was therefore to reinforce the principle of collective security agreed upon in 1940 through mechanisms such as a joint command for U.S. and Latin American military forces in the region similar to that later adopted by the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
Latin America’s preoccupation with economic development received short shrift at the Rio conference, where U.S. representatives rejected the idea of a Marshall Plan for the Americas. At the same time, Washington was only partially successful in its efforts to establish a security complex for the region. Latin American governments refused to accept the joint command of military forces and also limited the binding character of the U.S.-backed principle of collective security with a provision (article 20) stating that “no state shall be required to use armed force without its consent” (Atkins 1977: 530). However, the region covered by the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (also called the Rio Treaty), which went into effect in December 1948, now extended to all of the Americas. Even more important, the notion of aggression was widened to cover not only military action originating outside the region but also “an aggression which is not an armed attack” and which may come from within the region (Connell-Smith 1974: 196–197).
Although an incomplete success for Washington, the Rio Treaty did provide a more solid foundation for the notion of collective security in the region. More significantly, by extending the notion of aggression, it legitimized to some extent U.S. actions and interventions against communist and other forces of subversion. This was an important feature of U.S.–Latin American relations in the Cold War years because, as Anthony J. Payne (1996: 97) has remarked, it was vital for a nascent hegemony to show its control over its sphere of influence.
The other important conference was the Ninth International Conference of American States held in Bogotá in April–May 1948. The most significant achievement of this conference was the adoption of the charter of the OAS, which gave the new inter-American system its basic legal foundation. Essentially, the charter reaffirmed the principles and ideals that had governed the inter-American system since 1889 and described the principal organs of the OAS: the secretariat; the Council of the OAS, with its specialized conferences and subsidiary organs; and the Inter-American Conference, which was transformed into the General Assembly in 1967 (Atkins 1977: 317–320; Connell-Smith 1974: 200–204).
The delegates at the 1948 conference also signed the American Treaty on Pacific Settlement, or Pact of Bogotá, a U.S. government objective dating back to the first Pan-American conference in 1889. All regional governments agreed in principle with the notion of a peaceful settlement of disputes, but, as had been the case in 1889, there were serious divergencies regarding its implementation. As a result, the Pact of Bogotá was signed with so many restrictions that it was for all intents and purposes stillborn. The Economic Agreement of Bogotá, under which Washington hoped to make progress toward a free trade area, met a similar fate. Although complemented by rules concerning the protection of investments and the difficult issue of expropriation, the agreement was not even ratified.
These failures aside, a historical examination of inter-American affairs reveals a remarkable common thread linking Washington’s proposals of 1889 and 1948. What emerges is an almost perennial vision for the future of the Western Hemisphere built around certain key elements. Historically, the U.S. vision of an architecture of the Americas has been focused first and foremost on the establishment of a political regional system, a fact often overlooked, given the emphasis on economics and trade issues in contemporary literature. The most important tangible results of U.S. attempts at hemispheric region building in the Americas have been the regional institutions: the Pan-American Union and the OAS. These institutions, which, given U.S. attitudes toward its sovereignty and role, are expressions of intergovernmentalism rather than supranationalism, have been important for Washington. They have provided the necessary structure for dealing with the problems involved in managing inter-American affairs, they have played a significant role in impeding the creation of a Latin American bloc, and they have been useful, if not always adequate, channels or instruments for the subtle legitimization of U.S. political supremacy in the Americas.
Along with a political regional system for the Western Hemisphere, the U.S. vision of the Americas also foresaw the establishment of a security complex to create an environment favorable for the conduct of business and other types of relations throughout the region. The Rio Treaty contributed to the acceptance of the idea that aggression—and later subversion under the Kennan Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine (G. Smith 1994: 68–73)—had to be resisted by all and that the United States had a certain legitimate role to play in this respect.
Finally, the third element consistently present in the U.S. vision of an architecture of the Americas was the idea of an economic area centered on the notion of free trade and characterized by free movement of capital and limited state intervention in the economy.
In the forty years that followed the Bogotá conference in 1948, the United States was largely unsuccessful in having its vision accepted by other countries in the Americas. One of the main reasons for this failure was the Cold War and its influence on Washington’s behavior toward Latin America, behavior marked by a series of unilateral interventions often followed by what Latin American governments perceived as benign neglect. U.S. interventions in Guatemala and in the Dominican Republic and Washington’s involvement in the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile served to demonstrate that the spirit underlying the good neighbor policy had been short-lived and did not fit in the regular pattern of U.S.–Latin American relations.
As a result of this pattern of successive intervention and disinterest, the attitudes of Latin American governments toward the United States were constantly moving from deep mistrust most of the time to cautious optimism at best, and to vocal opposition on occasion. From the mid-1960s until the end of the 1970s, Latin America’s active participation in the North-South confrontation provided the channel for this vocal opposition and acted as both a catalyst and a structure for the profound divergencies between the U.S. and Latin American visions of the world system and inter-American affairs.
It therefore comes as no surprise that the inter-American system went into a steady decline during the twenty years after the Bogotá conference of 1948. The Alliance for Progress, which, as Peter H. Smith (1996a: 149) rightly points out, was essentially a response to the Cuban threat rather than an attempt at region building, slowly faded away without any significant success. This dissipation is understandable because the Alliance for Progress, like the subsequent Caribbean Basin Initiative, was a context-specific response to a perceived communist threat: Cuba in 1959; Cuba, Nicaragua, and Grenada in 1981. Interest in both initiatives naturally disappeared as the threat itself diminished or was eliminated. As for the Punta del Este Conference of Inter-American Heads of State in 1967, it was supposed to give a new impetus to the regional system, but in fact it served only to confirm the inter-American stalemate.
During the twenty years following Punta del Este, the inter-American system fell into a period of almost complete obsolescence characterized by the declining significance of the OAS, alternately viewed by most members of the Latin American political elite as an empty shell or a U.S.-dominated instrument.
This obsolescence had much to do with U.S. attitudes and behavior toward Latin America from the mid-1960s to the end of the 1980s and with the impact of world events on the countries of the Americas during this period. During the 1960s, the Alliance for Progress was quickly shuffled to the back burner of U.S. foreign policy as the war in Vietnam became the central focus of policymaking in Washington. For most of the 1970s, with the exception of President Jimmy Carter’s efforts to establish better relations with the region, inter-American affairs were deeply influenced by the difficulties and, ultimately, the failure of the North-South dialogue. The adoption of confrontational strategies by Latin American countries such as Chile, Peru, and Bolivia antagonized the United States and created a stalemate in the inter-American agenda. The situation was made even more difficult in the 1980s by President Ronald Reagan’s use of the Central American crisis to reintroduce Cold War attitudes and policies in the conduct of U.S. relations with Latin America and the Caribbean.
A Completely New Environment
With the future of the inter-American system looking bleak at the start of the 1980s, what happened in the course of the decade to modify the situation so significantly? Which events and factors explain the U.S. initiative in favor of hemispheric regionalism at the start of the 1990s and the nature of the response from the other governments of the Americas?
In the literature focusing on the resurgence of regionalism, there is a strong tendency to establish a relationship between globalization and the rise of what is called the “new regionalism” (Axline 1995: 12–17; Gamble and Payne 1996: 247–251; Holm and Sorensen 1995: 3–7; Mittelman 1996b). There are at least three problems associated with this interpretation. First, despite certain attempts to clarify “new regionalism” (Axline 1995: 18–22; Hettne 1994: 1–11; Oman 1994; Robson 1993) and “globalization” (Holm and Sorensen 1995: 4–6; R. Robertson 1990; Stark 1996: 4), both terms still lack conceptual clarity, making it almost impossible to determine specifically how globalization has influenced governments in relation to their regional strategies. Second, as it has been pointed out (Hirst and Thompson 1992), globalization may not be such a global phenomenon after all. It is still essentially related to financial flows and rarely extends beyond the borders of the industrialized world. Finally, although globalization may constitute an attractive scheme of reference for understanding contemporary world society, it is far from certain that this pervasive phenomenon has directly influenced governmental behavior toward regionalism in Washington or Tokyo, let alone La Paz, Tegucigalpa, or Roseau.
Consequently, although globalization may have had a certain influence on shaping strategies for regional integration in the Americas, it has not been the sole and probably not the most significant influence. More appropriately, both the U.S. initiative for hemispheric integration and the ensuing response from Washington’s neighbors in the Americas are the result of events unfolding within the region and in the rest of the world during the 1980s. It is these events, as factored in by states and other actors, that are primarily responsible for the changing environment of the 1980s in the Americas and that explain the thrust toward hemispheric regionalism.
In the case of the United States, it would probably be fair to say that the two main outside influences on U.S. policy on regionalism in the Americas have been economics, particularly trade, and the end of the Cold War. In the case of the former, despite ongoing debate on the “relative decline” of U.S. hegemony (Kennedy 1989; Nye 1990), in the early 1980s many U.S. policymakers felt that U.S. economic supremacy should be based on increased competitiveness and that a more open trade environment would be instrumental in achieving this goal. The main objective was therefore an improved multilateral trade regime. However, the rejection by the other members of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) of a 1982 U.S. initiative in this direction followed by the slow progress of the Uruguay Round that got under way in 1986 left Washington with the impression that other countries, notably those in Europe, were not prepared to follow the multilateral trade route. As a result, a fallback strategy—regional free trade—was deemed necessary as an alternative solution or as a negotiating device in the GATT framework (Gamble and Payne 1996: 102).
The difficulties in concluding the Uruguay Round and the perception that increased protectionism in Europe and Asia could potentially lead to the creation of trading blocs (fortress Europe) all led to the idea of a free trade area of the Americas. In this sense, the regional trade option was a bargaining chip in broader trade negotiations with Europe and Asia. A successful outcome to these negotiations, something partially achieved with the conclusion of the Uruguay Round, implied, of course, that Washington’s commitment to regional free trade could eventually diminish, particularly in the face of strong domestic opposition.
The other main systemic influence on U.S. attitudes toward the Americas was the end of the Cold War, along with the demise of Third Worldism (Fawcett 1995: 17–27). This earthshaking transformation left the United States as the world’s only superpower and restored its status as hegemon on the American continent in the second half of the 1980s (P. Smith 1996a: 224, 1996b: 30–35). With the retreat of extrahemispheric powers from the Americas, Washington once again felt it could impose its will in the region and that it could do so through cooperation rather than intervention (P. Smith 1996a: 233).
Probably more significant in shaping Washington’s views of the hemisphere throughout the 1980s were the events unfolding in the Americas themselves. One such event, albeit not the most important, was Canada’s decision to enter into the negotiations that led to the January 1988 agreement establishing a free trade area between Canada and the United States. The agreement sent the message that if a country like Canada, historically opposed to continentalism and free trade with the United States, could radically change its position, then the same could apply to the rest of the Americas.
Soon after, Mexico’s offer to negotiate a free trade agreement further reinforced U.S. perceptions that new proposals for hemispheric integration would probably meet with a positive response in many parts of the region. Giving weight to this belief was the fact that the Mexican initiative, contrary to the Canadian one, came from a Latin American country with characteristics different from those of the United States and Canada. Mexico’s attitude could also be interpreted as a major breach within the Latin American family of nations, one that opened the door for accommodation between the United States and Latin America.
From the U.S. point of view, however, the most important regional influence and the leading factor behind the decision to launch a new hemispheric initiative was probably the political and economic changes occurring in Latin America and the Caribbean in the 1980s. These changes were a direct result of the debt crisis affecting most of Latin America and the Caribbean that was made official in 1982 with Mexico’s announcement that it was suspending repayments. The debt crisis created an economic and psychological shock whose effects were felt in the region for most of the decade.
This made it clear that drastic changes were required to both the prevailing economic development model and the political landscape, still characterized by military dictatorships and closed political systems. It sparked a region-wide movement toward various forms of economic liberalization and political democratization during the 1980s.
Although the real significance of these changes and the true depth of elite commitment to political and economic liberalization are still questioned by some observers (Wiarda 1997), the U.S. government has viewed these developments in a positive light since the end of the 1980s. U.S. decisionmakers feel that there has been a “convergence of values” between the United States and Latin America. They see this convergence as a “window of opportunity,” a “turning point” representing a “historic” moment that should be seized upon (Aronson 1996: 184; Bush 1989: 505; Christopher 1993: 625, 1995a: 417; Gore 1994: 785; Watson 1995). This reaction to regional dynamics has been the most significant influence in Washington’s decision to make a new attempt at hemispheric integration.
For the other actors in the Americas, 2 developments in the world at large have been more significant than regional events in explaining the response to the U.S. initiative. Canada and Mexico had similar reasons for seeking a free trade agreement with the United States (Barry 1995: 5–11): Both countries were heavily dependent economically on the United States. The eventual emergence of trading blocs in Europe and Asia, combined with what was perceived as increasing protectionism in the United States, would have left Canada and Mexico facing increasingly difficult access to their traditional markets. This factor was the most salient in the decision by both governments to secure access to their major U.S. market through a free trade agreement. Once that decision was made and the agreements signed, the only remaining alternative was to participate in the building of the hemispheric community, a counterweight to the limits on the room to maneuver resulting from membership in the North American system. Mexico’s position in this sense was more ambiguous, but Canada’s participation in hemispheric fora increased dramatically in the 1990s.
The factors influencing the other countries of Latin America and the Caribbean have been somewhat different. In these countries, the end of the Cold War was a key factor for two reasons. First, the implosion of the Soviet Union eliminated the most important extrahemispheric actor, thereby preventing certain Latin American governments from using the threat of rapprochement with Moscow to obtain concessions from the United States as they had in the past. They were now left with the United States as the only valuable interlocutor.
The second reason concerned the reconstruction of the former communist countries of Eastern Europe in a post–Cold War context. Many Latin American governments feared that lending agencies would divert funds previously reserved for the Latin American and Caribbean region to Eastern and Central Europe. Combined with the fiasco of the debt crisis, this anxiety engendered an “acute fear of marginalization” (Hurrell 1994: 170) and grave concerns about the “Africanization” of the American subcontinent.
Along with these perceptions of a newly hostile world environment, many Latin American governments were concerned about regional developments. Mexico’s decision to begin free trade negotiations with Washington was seen as a defection, if not a betrayal, of the Latin American family that left the rest of the hemisphere still more isolated. This sentiment of isolation and exclusion only became more acute after the successful conclusion of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).
Of course, there were specific combinations of factors at work in almost every country involved in the process. Nonetheless, the factors mentioned here sum up the most significant influences bearing on the U.S. government’s decision to launch a new initiative for hemispheric regionalism and the subsequent reactions of the other governments of the region. Together, these elements account for an environment that profoundly modified the traditional context of inter-American relations. Were it not for this completely new landscape, no one would be discussing a new architecture of the Americas.
The Contours of the Hemispheric Integration Project
The Declaration of Principles and the Plan of Action adopted by the thirty-four states attending the December 1994 Summit of the Americas contain the essential elements of the hemispheric integration project initiated by the United States (Rosenberg and Stein 1995: 9–27). By no means did this project materialize instantaneously, and it must be emphasized that what has been called the “Miami process” in some U.S. circles is still just a project with an uncertain future, particularly in light of the Clinton administration’s difficulties in securing fast-track approval from the U.S. Congress. This hemispheric project has been in the making since the mid-1980s and was the result of a process whose main building blocks were the 1988 Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (FTA), the 1990 Enterprise for the Americas Initiative, and the 1994 North American Free Trade Agreement.
As mentioned earlier, the FTA may not have marked a turning point in inter-American relations, but it was significant for the evolution of things to come. It was a trade agreement between two industrialized countries, but two countries that were dissimilar in terms of overall economic weight. Furthermore, the agreement involved a country that had always been extremely vulnerable to U.S. domination and influence, a vulnerability that explains Ottawa’s historical rejection of continentalism as a policy option. That such a country decided to reverse course was a clear message to Washington as well as to other governments of the region. If Ottawa felt that it had to establish a more secure relationship with the United States in the face of a hostile world environment, then this became a possible course of action for the other countries of the region.
Shortly after the implementation of the FTA came the Enterprise for the Americas Initiative, built around three elements of an essentially economic nature: the proposal for a hemispheric free trade zone, debt reduction measures, and an investment package primarily channeled through a fund administered by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). Announced on June 27, 1990, the EAI came only four months after the Cartagena drug summit, where the presidents of the Andean countries had apparently managed to convince President Bush that sweeping changes were occurring in Latin America and that the United States had to become more involved in sustaining the reform process (Bush 1991: 1733). The measures included in the EAI translated U.S. willingness to do just that and also gave a clear signal to governments of the region that NAFTA negotiations with Mexico would not jeopardize U.S. commitments to the region. They also conveyed the idea that the economic dimensions of the hemispheric integration project would rest solidly on the foundations of free market economic liberalism.
The negotiations that would eventually lead to NAFTA ratification in 1994 got under way in 1991. In one sense, NAFTA had little to do with hemispheric integration. From Washington’s point of view, it was not only a trade deal but also a mechanism that could be used to manage problems affecting North America as a whole (such as the environment and human migration). In security matters, NAFTA would in some ways extend U.S. borders to the very fringes of North America. And by establishing a truly North American economy and the potential for a truly North American community, NAFTA would provide the United States with a “continental base, economically and politically,” to promote “U.S. global influence” (Zoellik 1992: 290). In another sense, however, NAFTA was also a link in the chain leading to hemispheric integration. It represented both an example of what could be done between North and South America and a base on which to build hemispheric regionalism. Like the EAI, but even more so, NAFTA was a clear indication that hemispheric integration would be based on market capitalism yet would also take into account environmental and labor issues.
In many ways, the FTA, the EAI, and NAFTA were building blocks in the process leading to the first Summit of the Americas in Miami in 1994. The hemispheric integration project that emerged from the summit is a multidimensional project encompassing measures related to the economic, political, military-strategic, environmental, and social-cultural spheres of human activity.
It is the economic dimension of the hemispheric project that has been most widely discussed. Economics are the material foundation in the architecture of hemispheric regionalism. The main pillar of the proposed economic integration project is a Free Trade Area of the Americas, negotiations for which should be completed by 2005 if government commitments are met. Normally, a free trade area is the lowest level of economic integration, one whose main purpose is to open the markets of participating countries essentially through the elimination of tariff barriers. This hemispheric integration project goes much further. Working groups have been established to examine such matters as market access, customs procedures and rules of origin, investment, technical and sanitary barriers to trade, subsidies, antidumping and countervailing duties, government procurement, intellectual property rights, services, competition policy, and dispute settlement. Other issues being examined include the development and liberalization of capital markets, cooperation in energy, science, and technology, and the development of hemispheric infrastructure in such fields as telecommunications and information (Rosenberg and Stein 1995: 18–20).
Given the items being examined by the working groups and Washington’s insistence on incorporating private sector perspectives into the process (Davidow 1997), current talks go far beyond the relatively technical and neutral issue of establishing a free trade area. The proposed free trade area will be established within the framework of an economic development model characterized by open markets, deregulation, and limited state intervention in the economy. Aside from technical assistance, no provisions have been made for the adjustment problems of smaller economies, and from the U.S. point of view, NAFTA requirements should apply in all areas, though not everyone agrees with this perspective.
Economically, then, the hemispheric project centers on the establishment of a free trade area but has implications that are much more far-reaching than that. The project involves an economic development model within which protectionist policies are replaced by open markets, the private sector is the main economic actor, and growth comes from trade and investment rather than foreign assistance.
The political dimension is also a significant component of the hemispheric project. Political integration is mentioned at the very beginning of the Declaration of Principles, with two central means identified for achieving this goal: the promotion of democratic institutions and the protection of human rights. The former, which Bloomfield has called the “OAS-Defense-of-Democracy Regime” (Bloomfield 1994), is part of a broader plan to reinforce throughout the region institutions and practices associated with Western liberal democracies and pluralist political systems. Essential features of liberal democracies are access to power through regular and fair elections, separation of executive, legislative, and judiciary powers, protection of human and minority rights, fair and equal access to state structures by citizens and groups, and transparency and honesty on the part of state representatives. In seeking to strengthen and generalize this model of democratic governance, the hemispheric project relies heavily on government initiatives but also encourages extensive OAS involvement in promoting and protecting democratic institutions, particularly through the organization’s Unit for the Promotion of Democracy.
Even though it is not mentioned specifically, the OAS is also viewed as a regional political structure and forum for the management of region-wide problems whose solutions can come only from concerted governmental actions. The OAS and the IDB have a significant role to play in the hemispheric project (Christopher 1995b); however, this role does not entail the supranationalism that characterizes certain aspects of the European Commission’s responsibilities. American states are not yet prepared to go that far, and the essential feature of regional decisionmaking will be intergovernmentalism.
As for the security dimension of hemispheric regionalism, participating governments have so far agreed to deal with issues such as drug production and trafficking, prevention of international terrorism, and confidence-building measures (Rosenberg and Stein 1995: 16). However, Washington will clearly try to take further measures to achieve its ultimate objective—the establishment of a true security complex throughout the Americas. To this end, the United States would certainly be supportive of such intermediary steps as the clarification of the role of the Inter-American Defense Board (IADB). The IADB could serve as a “matrix for inter-military cooperation throughout the hemisphere” (Gelbard 1992: 810–811) to provide regional solutions not only to problems already on the hemispheric agenda, but also to other matters such as insurgencies and nonproliferation.
Hemispheric integration also has an important environmental dimension. Participating states have agreed to implement commitments made at the UN Rio Conference on Environment and Development while creating “cooperative partnerships” on issues related to sustainable development, the protection of biodiversity, and pollution prevention. Here again, a good part of the effort will depend on intergovernmental cooperation, but OAS specialized agencies and the IDB will also play an important role.
Another important element of hemispheric regionalism is the sociocultural dimension. It includes the promotion of cultural values and the development of exchange programs, universal access to education, equitable access to basic health services, the strengthening of the role of women in society, hemispheric cooperation in science and technology, and the creation of an Emergency and Development Corps to assist governments of the hemisphere in dealing with development problems and situations of natural disasters.
These additional dimensions aside, however, the fact remains that the free trade area and the related economic proposals form the backbone of the hemispheric integration project. If they fail, it is doubtful that the rest of the integration project can be salvaged. But it is clear that the current hemispheric regionalism project is also a political, strategic, and sociocultural process. It is far from a unidimensional endeavor, and in the long run, its noneconomic dimensions may have a far greater impact on the future architecture of the Americas.
What will ultimately be the fate of the current attempt at hemispheric regionalism? Since the Summit of the Americas in 1994, the mood of both observers and actors in the process has fluctuated wildly as events have unfolded. But if the European integration process has taught a lesson, it is that regional integration is a long-term enterprise marked by waves and undercurrents. Although scholars of regionalism take notice of the waves, those high-profile official gestures or proclamations like the EAI or the Summit of the Americas, often ignored are the undercurrents, the daily actions of the countless smaller actors who keep the project moving forward in response to the waves.
It is still too early to determine the fate of the hemispheric project in any definite way. Only provisional assessments can be made at this time. The only certainty scholars have is that the future of the hemispheric integration process will be determined largely by the responses of the actors involved, namely the national governments, the regional institutions, and the social actors examined in the second part of this book. These actors do not all necessarily share the same vision of the future architecture of the Americas, as reactions to U.S. proposals so clearly indicate. The future of inter-American affairs may also be influenced by the behavior of extrahemispheric actors such as the members of the European Union, which are strengthening their relationship with the Mercosur countries, or by events outside the American continent, such as developments with Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation.
Finally, as we shall see in Chapter 3, the shape of hemispheric integration—if it does occur—will be strongly influenced by such structural constraints as the relative power of the actors involved in the process, basic economic trends, levels of economic development, and the weight of past U.S.–Latin American relations. It will also have to take into consideration the different integration models represented by NAFTA and Mercosur, as we shall see in Chapter 4.
We must therefore keep in mind that when it comes to regional integration in the Americas, nothing is settled. There is a world of difference between the U.S. initiative as incorporated in the Miami process and the result of hemispheric integration. The scope and direction of the process are still uncertain and the final outcome will depend heavily on how the various actors position themselves with respect to continental integration.
Endnotes
Note 1: By selecting such a focus, the authors of this book by no means seek to negate the very rich history of Bolivarian or Latin American experiences with political unity and regional economic integration. We merely want to underline the fact that the current attempt at continental integration in the Americas was a U.S. initiative. The result of this endeavor, should it be successful, will certainly be quite different from what was imagined at the start. Back.
Note 2: This is only a sketchy presentation of the factors taken into consideration by the other governments of the Americas when they decided in the 1980s to reconsider regionalism as a policy alternative. For a more extensive treatment, see the contributions in Mace and Thérien (1996b). Back.
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