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The Americas In Transition: The Contours of Regionalism, by Gordon Mace, Louis Bélanger, and contributors
5. U.S. Foreign Policy and the Regionalist Option in the Americas
It might be tempting to see in the sequence of post–Cold War events that have advanced the idea of regionalism in the Americas the manifestation of a triumphant, unilateral, and virtually unrivaled U.S. leadership on the North American continent. However, such an impression would be wrong. First, it rests on an exaggeration of the extent to which the Eastern bloc was previously able to act as a counterweight in the region and the current dependence of Latin American states on the United States. Second, although the U.S. administration has played the central and indispensable role in the recent process of reactivating and redefining Pan–American cooperation—from President George Bush’s Enterprise for the Americas Initiative (EAI) to President Bill Clinton’s first Summit of the Americas—when all is said and done, the United States has so far failed to provide strong leadership or a clear vision in its policy on hemispheric regionalism. It is clear, however, that every overture made by Washington, especially in the area of trade liberalization, has greatly raised expectations among the other states in the region, which have seized the opportunity given to them to successfully advance their own regionalist agenda.
It it is important to remember that Mexico, not the United States, took the first steps toward negotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in 1990, opening the “hemispheric floodgates” of regional trade liberalization (Pastor 1992: 96). That same year, George Bush presented his EAI, which, in addition to bilateral economic measures that had little impact, contained a vague statement of intent regarding the possible negotiation of a hemisphere—wide agreement on trade liberalization. This proposal, which was obviously made without much evaluation of its impact, generated immediate enthusiasm among the Latin American states, which were not about to pass up such an opportunity. This attitude was illustrated by the reaction of Luis Lacalle, who was then president of Uruguay: “When, after years of our complaining of neglect, the most important man in the world offers his hand, then, I think we should grab it—and the arm and the elbow and the shoulder, too” (Pastor 1992: 97).
On the basis of a vague U.S. proposal, Latin American political elites set out to build a genuine regional agenda. However, while these states were taking unilateral measures to lower their tariff barriers and liberalize their economies, as well as forging subregional alliances in preparation for the approaching negotiations, the U.S. leadership was showing signs of weakness: Bill Clinton did not seem to share his predecessor’s enthusiasm for bold foreign policy initiatives; NAFTA’s adoption by Congress was difficult and exposed the ferocious resistance to free trade that existed in the political class and U.S. society; and the administration was unable to obtain a renewal of fast–track authority from Congress allowing it to undertake new trade negotiations. When, in another example of policy improvisation, the United States finally proposed that a Summit of the Americas be held in Miami, the other states in the hemisphere were surprised to find that they had to insist that their host put trade at the top of the agenda (Wiarda 1995a). A commitment was made in Miami to have a hemispheric free trade agreement signed by 2005, but the Clinton administration has still not obtained fast–track authority from Congress and had to water down its own commitment at the second Summit of the Americas held in 1998 in Santiago, Chile, putting education on the front burner instead.
While the United States hesitates, other governments are forging ahead: The Southern Cone Common Market (Mercosur) countries have consolidated their own common market; Chile has both moved closer to Mercosur and signed free trade agreements with Canada and Mexico; Mexico and Mercosur have started free trade negotiations with the European Union; and all of these countries are participating actively within the technical groups preparing for the negotiations that were launched officially in Santiago. Indeed, as Sidney Weintraub points out, the United States has now lost by default its de facto leadership position within the process of regionalization, which it possessed during the Bush era (Weintraub 1997: 64). As a result, instead of the preferred U.S. scenario of a progressive and selective enlargement of NAFTA, the ongoing FTAA negotiations are based on the principles of hemispheric inclusivesness and single undertaking. The FTAA principles form a much heavier and more multilateral institutionalized path toward regional economic liberalization than the one initially foreseen by Washington.
Thus, since 1990, U.S. foreign policy on hemispheric regionalism has been both tentative and ambiguous. In fact, the U.S. position could probably best be characterized as maintaining a regionalist option rather than following a clear regionalist policy. It is therefore just as important to understand why the U.S. position represents a mere option as it is to understand what exactly that option is.
This chapter attempts to answer these questions by examining how the regionalist option for the Americas fits within the general framework of U.S. foreign policy. Commentators and scholars have often invoked the combination of two features of the domestic political climate to explain why Washington is reluctant to move from a regionalist option to a regionalist policy in the Americas: namely, the lack of bipartisan consensus in Congress and the influence of organized groups—mainly labor unions and environmentalists—traditionally opposed to free trade and close to the Democrats. Although these are undoubtedly important factors, their importance in the political process determining U.S. regional policy is precisely due to the fact that the administration has been unable to propose a regionalist policy that is sufficiently consistent and integrated into its world foreign policy for it to generate the necessary support (Pastor 1997: 121). Referring to the general inability of the current administration to build up public support in favor of foreign policy initiatives, Fareed Zakaria notes: “The public was, after all, initially against American involvement in World War II, the Marshall Plan, the Gulf War and almost all free trade agreements” (Zakaria 1998: 80). For this reason, the present chapter examines how the international environment, as opposed to internal political processes, affects the definition of U.S. interests and preferences toward the region.
Beyond Hegemony and Harmony: Security and Existing Institutions
International relations theorists have long maintained that although at any particular point in time the international social order reflects the underlying structural distribution of power in the system, there also exist a number of forces of inertia that help prevent this social order from being immediately affected by each disturbance to the distribution of power. The institutional and normative order that organizes international relationships is adjusted only at dramatic points, when some states have enough power to provoke a change and an interest in doing so (Gilpin 1981; Krasner 1983b). The end of the Cold War certainly represented such a dramatic moment, but with the defeat of its main rival for international influence, the dominant power was left in place, its dominance strengthened but facing a completely new strategic situation. This allowed institutions and ideas forged in the Cold War period to survive at the global and regional levels and continue to shape an international order, which nevertheless needed readjustment. Moreover, it allowed them to continue to shape U.S. foreign policy, both globally and regionally.
This state of inertia raises the question of what might provoke a change in the U.S. attitude in the current international context of opportunities brought about by the end of the Cold War. What would cause the United States to change established institutional arrangements or create new ones? After all, this is precisely the focus of the hemispheric regionalist project. In this regard, both neorealism and neoliberal institutionalism can help us better define the area of investigation. To a certain extent, since the early 1990s, relations between the United States and the other states in the hemisphere could be described as both hegemonic and harmonious. However, although hegemony and harmony may contribute to establishing regimes of institutionalized cooperation, by themselves they do not constitute sufficient reasons for initiating such a form of cooperation.
Looking first at hegemony, classic realist theories point to the distribution of power as the ultimate explanatory factor of institutional arrangements. From the point of view of hegemonic stability, for example (Gilpin 1981; Kindleberger 1973), it would be in the interest of the United States, as the regional hegemonic power, to use the existing power relationship to institutionalize the regional economic and political order to its advantage. This is in fact the interpretation frequently put forward by authors who are surprised by the lack of eagerness on the part of the United States to espouse the regionalist cause in the Americas, prompting some to ask whether this lack of leadership is indicative of a relative decline in U.S. hegemonic power in the region (Atkins 1992).
Indeed, since the early 1980s, Latin American countries have acted more independently of the United States at the diplomatic level than they had previously, particularly in the management of regional affairs (e.g., in the area of conflict resolution in Central America), but should this be interpreted as a sign of growing U.S. incapacity? It certainly suggests that Washington’s current attitude toward the regionalist project should probably be situated within a long–term historical perspective (Atkins 1992: 6). However, it would be difficult to argue that the United States has declined as a hegemonic power. As Peter Smith (1996a: 223ff) has pointed out, and as Gordon Mace, Louis Bélanger, have demonstrated in Chapter 3 of this volume in their analysis of the distribution of power in the hemisphere and the structure of trade relations, the United States continues to enjoy unquestionable economic and military supremacy on the continent. Moreover, there is no source of countervailing power outside the hemisphere that can challenge this supremacy. Expressed in structural terms, regional hegemony in itself does not seem sufficient to give rise to a U.S. regionalist policy: It didn’t have this effect in the past, and it doesn’t today.
This circumstance, in fact, is perfectly understandable. Institutionalization doesn’t necessarily follow hegemony because, for a hegemonic actor, an institutionalist strategy has some serious disadvantages (Keohane 1984; Grieco 1990). First, institutions limit its room to maneuver. If the hegemonic power is not dependent on the collaboration of other members of the international system to achieve its goals, if it can act unilaterally through the sole exercise of its power, it is unlikely to allow itself to be constrained by an institutional framework. Second, in cooperative regimes founded on a hegemonic relationship, the hegemon generally assumes a large part of the costs of cooperation by being ultimately responsible for ensuring that rules are respected in the regime, by being the main source of benefits to its partners—which are, of course, primarily interested in its market and resources—and by ensuring that its partners are protected against intraregional and extraregional instabilities. Thus, hegemons do not automatically seek to project their domination into institutions.
Like hegemony, harmony is often seen as favoring the emergence of regional institutions. A classic liberal conception of international relations would lead us to expect that, given the benefits to the United States of increased trade between it and the other countries in the region and the growing convergence of Latin American political systems with the U.S. system, the United States should seek to institutionalize the present state of affairs. Once again, this discourse is often heard from those who are surprised by Washington’s demonstrated lack of regionalist conviction in the hemisphere. Relations between the states of the Americas have never been so harmonious, scholars and politicians say. Almost all of the states share the same commitment to democracy (see Chapter 3 of this volume for data). They are all working toward liberalizing their economies and opening them to foreign capital and products. The United States should leap at this opportunity to consolidate and perpetuate these conditions by setting up common institutions (Feinberg 1997: 40, 46).
What these authors and decisionmakers overlook is that although harmony provides a context that encourages cooperation, it is not in itself a motive for cooperation. In After Hegemony, Robert Keohane demonstrates convincingly that cooperation is a response to a problem of adjusting behavior to obtain a common benefit. If this adjustment takes place on its own, the institutionalization of mechanisms of cooperation loses its raison d’être (Keohane 1984: 51–55). Obviously, in the area of trade, as in other fields, complete harmony is rare. Thus, what must be determined in each case is whether the gains to be made from regional cooperation in terms of adjusting behavior are worth the investment. From the U.S. point of view, even if the regionalist option was more advantageous, for example, in terms of trade relations in the region, it would still have to be enough of a gain to compensate for the loss of autonomy implied by such an option.
Hegemony and harmony may lead the United States to consider the regionalist option, but it is unlikely that in and of themselves they will be sufficient to give rise to the change of attitude needed for Washington to make a firm commitment to a regionalist policy that would overthrow the status quo. The literature on institutionalized forms of cooperation reveals that, in similar contexts, the presence of two factors—a strategic issue and already existing institutions—may prove to be decisive. As I discuss later in the chapter, the two are not unconnected.
A great power would be ready to accept such a loss of autonomy implied by regional institutions in order to counter a threat. In Europe, for example, the United States used an institutional strategy and encouraged regionalism after World War II because they were the best ways to include Germany in the West’s defense system. However, the United States resisted using such a strategy in Asia, for example, where it would have been counterproductive from a strategic point of view (Grieco 1996). This argument is of interest here because it helps illustrate the point that if regionalism in the Americas is not linked to a strategic issue, it is unlikely to be sufficiently attractive for the United States to consider sacrificing the enormous maneuvering room that it enjoys in the hemisphere. Thus, if we want to understand U.S. policy on regionalism in the Americas, we need to determine the global strategic vision animating the U.S. government and how this vision is connected to its attitude toward the institutionalization of foreign relations.
Another factor that appears to determine the decision to pursue a regionalist strategy is the presence of already existing regional institutions. Because the initial costs associated with the creation of international institutions are high, it is easier to carry on a regionalist policy based on existing institutions. Students of European regionalism, for example, wondered if the end of the Soviet threat in Europe would provoke a collapse of the institutions created in the Cold War era. In fact, they realized that these institutions had acquired a structuring effect on the cooperative behavior of states (Keohane, Nye, and Hoffmann 1993). Conversely, the weak development of institutional ties among the states of East Asia, a situation fostered by the manner in which the region’s actors and the United States reacted to the strategic context of the Cold War, continues to be detrimental to the development of an East Asian regionalism: The lack of development “surely reduces sharply the frameworks, and the possibilities for the ‘nesting’ of new arrangements in more established frameworks, and the possibilities for the development of the habits of trust and cooperation—that is, international ‘social capital’—needed to pursue such arrangements” (Grieco 1996: 13). Regional institutions conceived to cope with a particular strategic situation at a given moment therefore continue to influence the attitudes of actors regarding the construction of a region even after the strategic situation has changed dramatically.
Thus, if the current U.S. position on hemispheric regionalism is to be understood, two elements of its general foreign policy attitudes and preferences require particular attention. First, it is important to look at how the region fits into the U.S. evaluation of its global strategic situation in the region and what strategies it is most likely to deploy in response to that evaluation. Second, it seems equally important to situate the regionalist option within the present U.S. attitude toward institution building as a suitable strategy of action.
The Missing Strategic Link
The further away we get from the Cold War period, the more we realize how important the conflict with the USSR was for mobilization and as a source of popular support for the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. Among other things, the Truman Doctrine allowed the United States to get involved in regions of the world where, had it not been for the alleged goal of halting the advance of communism, very few U.S. interests were involved. Thus, what is commonly called the periphery of the international system—regions such as Latin America where there are neither major strategic issues nor a great power—became linked to U.S. interests (Mandelbaum 1996: 19–20). Moreover, in the specific case of Latin America, it seems that historically the perception of an external threat and foreign intrusion, rather than the search for economic advantages, has been the deciding factor in U.S. foreign policy in the region (Atkins 1992). Whether the impact on Pan–American cooperation has been positive (the Alliance for Progress of the 1960s) or negative (the Central American policy of the 1980s), the perception of an external threat has functioned as a catalyst for U.S. interest in a region that in itself has always been the object of a “strategic denial” by Washington (Atkins 1992).
This strategic denial has an important cognitive corollary that affects the manner in which U.S. leaders perceive and describe the region’s states and peoples. Martha Cottam accurately describes how U.S. decisionmakers, by reducing their interest in the region to a question of allegiance of countries to an external power, construct an image of Latin American elites and peoples as essentially “dependent” (Cottam 1994: 25–26). Unlike other countries that occupy more central positions in the international system and that the United States is prepared to recognize as having a certain degree of autonomy, the countries that it sees as dependent are considered to be incapable of independence. A show of autonomy is immediately perceived as a real, or at least a potential, switch in allegiance. Above all, relations founded on a relationship of equality are unthinkable with dependant countries:
Latin American countries are the prototypical example of the U.S. dependant image: weak, childlike, inferior, inept, and led by a small and often corrupt elite. This type of country is viewed with contempt, and its society and polities are seen in very simple terms; they are not treated as equals because they are not seen as equals. (Cottam 1994: 25)
The Cold War linkage between U.S. national interests and Latin America no longer exists today. The question is thus whether the U.S. tradition of strategic denial regarding the region will reassert itself or whether a new conceptualization of the relationship between the United States and the periphery will emerge to take its place. Immediately following the end of the Cold War, during the final years that Bush was in power and the early years of Clinton’s presidency, the U.S. administration behaved as if foreign policy resources, having been freed from the burden of containment, could be reallocated to a periphery that, if not neglected, had at least been mistreated during the forty years of the Cold War. However, in the absence of a coherent view of the world and a doctrine that could link U.S. national interests to these peripheral zones, it quickly became obvious that Washington could not sustain such a project. For example, after its involvement in Bosnia, Somalia, and Haiti, guided by bold and generous intentions—what Michael Mandelbaum (1996) refers to as “foreign policy as social work”—the United States was obliged to withdraw because it could not generate the necessary support.
Nearly a year after the 1992 presidential election, the Clinton administration finally got down to the work of devising a new foreign policy doctrine that could replace containment and provide an instrumental rationality for its ambitions. What resulted was the “enlargement” doctrine, which was introduced by National Security Adviser Anthony Lake: “The successor to a doctrine of containment must be a strategy of enlargement, the enlargement of the world’s free community of market democracies” (Haass 1995: 44). In fact, this approach meant a reduction of the U.S. ambition to play the role of global crusader and the delimitation of an order of priority for action from center to periphery. At the center, the new doctrine called for a strengthening of the community of market democracies, and on the periphery, U.S. foreign policy would seek to “foster and consolidate new democracies and market economies where possible” (Lake cited in Brinkley 1997: 116). The key words here are “where possible.” The Clinton administration decided to focus its efforts on countries where it considered the chances of democratization and liberalization were good and no longer to make commitments to countries where aid seemed unproductive and involvement could lead to risky and unsustainable promises. It was hoped that encouraging the success of some countries would create a domino effect for others, drawing them into the family of market democracies through example and competition (Lake cited in Brinkley 1997: 116).
In this strategy, trade is not considered in primarily economic terms, but as both a means of global action and a way of linking foreign involvement to the U.S. national interest. First, entering into free trade with certain countries is seen as the best way to give rise to political, social, and economic structural changes in those countries, making them better partners for the United States. Moreover, this strategy can be pursued with minimum commitment but carries the possibility of an economic benefit. It is expected that trade liberalization will favor the development in certain countries of a middle class, which will become the engine of change toward greater political openness, meaning, in turn, greater stability and prosperity for the United States. Second, by focusing its attention on countries that are already significant, though perhaps modest, trading partners or that have the potential to become so, Washington gives itself the ability to invoke the economic argument to justify to Congress and to the U.S. people a deeper political or financial involvement should circumstances require it.
However, enlargement does not offer peripheral regions a genuine strategic substitute for containment, because it only situates within a conceptual framework the recognition that these regions no longer represent strategic interests for the United States. The enlargement doctrine proposes that in regions where there are no major powers, the United States should limit its action by carefully selecting partners and focusing on trade. This course has already given rise to a significant strategic shift in Africa, where Washington has decided to distance itself from turbulent spots and to focus on countries that, apart from South Africa, have no strategic leverage but nonetheless make respectable prospective trade partners, such as Uganda, Ghana, and Botswana. In the Western Hemisphere, such a strategy helps explain the United States’ resistance to carrying through the regionalist project that it initiated before it started to think in terms of enlargement theory.
Since the Enterprise for the Americas Initiative was launched, the United States has clearly reevaluated its strategic interests in the hemisphere. There is no longer a power outside the region whose influence could constitute a threat to U.S. security, and there is no power in Latin America or the Caribbean that the United States would want to neutralize.
Other endogenous dangers exist, but they do not significantly threaten U.S. national interests. One by one, drug production and trafficking, violations of democratic and human rights, and uncontrolled immigration have been invoked by the U.S. administration, but these threats have not generated support for costly involvement in the region. For example, neither the possibility of a massive influx of refugees nor the evocation of the risk that the new hemispheric standards of democracy would be undermined was enough for the Clinton administration to win the support of Congress and the U.S. people for its decision to use force to restore democracy to Haiti in 1994 (Mandelbaum 1996: 20–22).
The emergence of the enlargement theory within the U.S. administration signaled its renouncement of extensive involvement in regions where there is no traditional strategic issue. Accordingly, it follows that the administration now has a more limited and selective conception of where its interests lie in the hemisphere. The United States wants to be able to develop certain special partnerships (for instance, with Argentina, which has proved to be an important ally since its conversion to democracy and the market economy) while limiting its commitments to less stable countries that do not affect its interests.
Another important change is the role accorded to trade policy in U.S. foreign policy. Bush’s initiative included non–trade issues and was not as closely integrated into U.S. global strategy as it is now. However, now that trade policy is a central policy lever, it is no longer certain that the current regionalist project, which foresees the negotiation in one fell swoop of a free trade zone embracing all of the states in the region, will satisfy Washington. In light of U.S. behavior in other peripheral zones, it might in fact be concluded that the United States would prefer to use the leverage flowing from its trade power in a more selective manner, that is, by granting selective trade advantages to those countries that are undertaking the economic and political reforms that Washington believes are necessary. If the United States had to apply its trade policy consistently or if it lost control over the phasing–in of the free trade zone, this would amount to, in Washington’s view, giving a free ride to a large number of states. That is, those states would benefit from free trade without having to implement the economic and political reforms that Washington could otherwise require them to adopt if trade negotiations remained on a bilateral basis.
Another reason for U.S. reticence regarding a rapid implementation of free trade is that if such an implementation were to occur, the United States might have to assume financial and security obligations on behalf of a significant number of states that are not seen as important in terms of U.S. interests. A selective, gradual, and modulated enlargement of a core trade pact zone like NAFTA would undoubtedly be easier to sell to a skittish Congress.
Perhaps the most dramatic consequence of current strategic thinking in Washington is that it perpetuates the U.S. attitude of strategic denial toward Latin America and the Caribbean. Thus, the image that the United States constructed of the region and its relationship with the southern part of the hemisphere during the Cold War survives even after the end of that era. As Cottam shows in her analysis of the behavior of the Bush administration in the region, and particularly the war on drugs in the Andean countries, U.S. foreign policy may have abandoned the containment script regarding the strategic situation on the ground, but the image of dependence still strongly shapes how policies are conceived and implemented (Cottam 1994: 162–177). Cottam demonstrates how Washington, informed by a dependent image of the Andean countries, refused to incorporate the ideas and expertise of states from the region into the establishment and implementation of the Andean Initiative, relying instead on its superiority to impose an essentially military solution to the problem. This analysis may be extended to include the unilateral and profoundly paternalist nature of Washington’s annual practice of certifying those Latin American nations that in its view have made a demonstrably conscientious effort to eradicate the production and trafficking of drugs. The dependent image is clearly deeply rooted.
This brings us to the democratic dimension of the U.S. regionalist project. The econocentrism that has taken shape within the foreign policy of the Clinton era has resulted in democracy being given a lower priority. Elsewhere, notably in Asia and Africa, it has become obvious that, although democratization is always a stated goal of U.S. action, it is not always an immediate objective. An emphasis is placed, first and foremost, on economic stability and development, which, it is assumed, will lead more or less naturally to democracy (Brinkley 1997: 116). This has two implications for the U.S. attitude toward the regionalist project.
First, the progress of democracy in Latin America and the Caribbean cannot be considered by the United States as a strategic objective to which other objectives should be subordinated. That is, the promotion of democracy does not in itself constitute a sufficient reason for the United States to adopt a regionalist policy.
Second, and conversely, “promoting democracy” will continue to be a stated objective of U.S. policy in the hemisphere, but the significance of this objective will vary, as it has in the past, as a function of more immediate U.S. interests (Volk 1997). If free trade is thought to be in U.S. interests, then free trade will come first. This suggests that if the United States opts for regionalism, it will not be because U.S. leaders have adopted a new attitude toward democracy in the region (Martz 1992; Volk 1997). Perhaps the most striking example of this phenomenon may be found in the United States’ attitude toward Mexico since the signature of NAFTA. Clearly, in this case Washington shows remarkable confidence about the long–term effects of free trade on democratization.
Institutional Strategies
Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has not developed a firm institutional strategy in its international relations. Of course, the Clinton administration extended the spirit of Bush’s “new international order” with a commitment to “assertive multilateralism,” that is, by encouraging the development of the capacities and legitimacy of international organizations and formal alliance systems (Haass 1995: 51). However, this commitment has not prevented the United States from resorting to unilateral action when it was considered necessary, often, as in the Haitian crisis, under the cloak of legitimacy provided by the National Security Council. In fact, several constants in the U.S. attitude toward institutions can be identified from its recent actions.
First, the United States appears to have made a deliberate choice to build on existing institutions instead of creating new ones. The most striking example of this decision was the strategy of enlargement of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the Partnership for Peace, which uses NATO as the basis for formalizing security relations with countries of the Commonwealth of Independent States. Such a development confirms the views of those who predicted that the end of the Cold War would not result in the disappearance of the institutions created to respond to the strategic context of the era and believed that it was more rational to adapt and broaden their mandate.
Second, the further the United States moves away from the area of security and the core of relations between the powers that form the heart of the current international system (the United States, Russia, China, Japan, the European Union), the less it tends to favor institutional strategies and the more it resorts to unilateralism. For example, in the area of trade or even in narcotics, Washington does not hesitate to use unilateral strategies—the threat of sanctions in the former case and its certification policy in the latter. Similarly, in relations with Cuba and Iraq, the United States has demonstrated that it is ready to take action despite the disapproval of its allies.
Finally, when the collaboration of other states is needed to accomplish U.S. objectives in a situation where already existing institutions are not available, the United States favors the building of informal coalitions rather than the creation of new formal organizations—what Haass refers to as the “leadership approach” (Haass 1995: 52). A case in point is summitry in the Americas, an approach that has also been proposed more recently to the African nations. However, contact groups and other configurations have been instituted to deal with a number of specific situations in, for example, the Middle East, the Balkans, and Northern Ireland.
Thus, the general attitude reflects a concern for minimalism consistent with an enlargement strategy: Do not invest in new structures in which there is a danger of getting entangled; work from existing institutions; and, above all, retain as much maneuvering room as possible in regions where U.S. strategic imperatives so allow. This general approach also entails the use of socialization as a means to get states to adopt certain domestic or foreign policy behaviors rather than their integration into an institutionalized framework of formal commitments. Thus, U.S. action—whether unilateral or coalition based—remains regulative in the sense that it establishes a set of standards of behavior that are enforced through rewards and sanctions.
In this context, the combination of existing institutions and strategic imperatives is fundamental. How, then, does this combination work in the regional context of the Americas? The region has inherited the institutionalized Inter–American System (IAS), which, contrary to the system that exists in Europe and Asia, predates the Cold War, its principal components being the Organization of American States (OAS) (founded in 1890 as the International Union of American Republics), the Inter–American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (Rio Treaty) of 1947, and the Inter–American Development Bank (IDB). This system has suffered rather than benefited from the strategic context that has existed since the late 1950s. At the height of the Cold War, after U.S. intervention in the Dominican Republic, the Latin American states abandoned the system. Whereas the United States increasingly resorted to unilateral action, the Latin American countries developed their own multilateral subregional mechanisms to solve conflicts in the region, in particular in Central America (Atkins 1992: 14). Thus, at the end of the Cold War, the hemisphere possessed an institutional system, but one that was fragile.
Given the absence of strategic issues that would justify using the IAS, the United States will develop its regionalist option outside these institutions, except perhaps in the field of human rights and democracy, in which the OAS has acquired a solid reputation and expertise during the 1970s and 1980s. The U.S. strategy favors the combination of maintaining existing multilateral fora such as the OAS and the less formal coalition building represented by the current trend toward summitry that was initiated by Washington in Miami in 1994.
The only significant regional institution building in which the United States has been engaged is NAFTA. In order to appreciate the significance of this move, we should keep in mind that NAFTA is much more than a trade agreement (see Chapter 4 in this volume). The NAFTA zone has no political institutions, but NAFTA has highly institutionalized norms. Plus, the agreement established a series of common institutions, from the Free Trade Commission to various working groups, and it opened the way for the future creation of additional coordination mechanisms (Weintraub 1997: 64ff). The U.S. decision to opt for the creation of new institutions in this case may be explained by the fact that the integration of Mexico into a common institutional structure was fundamentally motivated by a security, not a trade, objective. The strategic impulse was rooted in the imperative to shore up its immediate neighbor’s political stability and to guarantee U.S. access to Mexican petroleum resources (P. Smith 1996a: 246–247).
Strategic issues of this kind do not exist elsewhere in the hemisphere. This leads Peter Smith, for example, to conclude that the main obstacle to creating a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) is probably the absence of clear political motivation on the part of the United States: “Geopolitical motivation could come about in response to major events, realignments, or developments in the international arena, but it was not apparent by the mid–1990s” (P. Smith 1996a: 251). At the end of the 1990s, this lack of motivation is still keeping the issue on hold. Without an issue of this kind, the idea of an FTAA does not fit into the institutional strategy supported by enlargement thinking. Much closer to the enlargement strategy is the idea of gradually widening the NAFTA zone, a proposal that has not been abandoned by Washington, even though it is having difficulty gaining congressional approval to move forward on the promise to make Chile a partner in NAFTA. A trade–based enlargement strategy in the Western Hemisphere could also make room for IAS institutions. Sidney Weintraub has already proposed such a solution, which would combine the gradual and prudent extension of the NAFTA zone and the use of the IDB, the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, and the OAS, for example, as intermediate institutional bases in order to advance the regional agenda (Weintraub 1994b: 101–102).
But the widening of NAFTA will inevitably raise the problem of its articulation with the Mercosur zone. The creation of Mercosur has not escaped the kind of political imperatives that were at play in the case of NAFTA. Indeed, Argentina and Brazil became involved in this undertaking above all to stabilize their political relations (Sánchez Bajo 1992). Beyond the questions raised in Chapter 4 of this volume related to the economic and technical linkages between the two zones, it appears that the problem of the political connection will need to be resolved before the United States could envisage such an association. If a NAFTA–Mercosur merger were to take place, it would have enormous strategic implications for Washington, which would find itself directly linked to the political situation of the Southern Cone countries.
Conclusion
Regionalism, as an instrument of foreign policy, has never been an automatic response by the United States to either harmony or hegemony. As a superpower, the United States has developed regional institutional strategies and has thus relinquished part of its autonomy in cases where it was justified by a serious security issue. With the end of the Cold War, after a period of juggling the different versions of neo–Wilsonian multilateralism, the United States renounced a wider definition of its national interests as a basis for the redeployment of its engagement in the periphery of the international system. In the meantime, however, heightened expectations were created, and Washington must now inevitably deal with these expectations. This situation explains the hesitancy and apparent inconsistency of current U.S. diplomacy with regard to regional construction in the hemisphere.
Current U.S. foreign policy has made trade the central instrument of geopolitical action. A project such as the FTAA is therefore not seen simply in terms of economic rationality. Paradoxically, this means that perhaps the FTAA is no longer as attractive to the United States as it used to be. Because it now intends to use the leverage of its powerful trade position to regulate the international order, the United States would probably prefer to use this instrument in a more targeted way with the region’s countries rather than get involved in an already inclusive project.
Endnote
*: I would like to thank Alexandre Brassard–Desjardins and M. S. Baruti for valuable research assistance, Martin Roy for having read and commented on a first version of the text, and the Center for North American Studies at Duke University for its hospitality during the research. Back.
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