The Ordeal of Hegemony
First published 1990 by Westview Press
Published 2019 by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Poitras, Guy E., 1942
The ordeal of hegemony : the United States and Latin America / Guy
Poitras.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references (p.)
1.Latin AmericaForeign relationsUnited States.2.United
StatesForeign relationsLatin America.3.Latin America
Politics and government1948.4. Latin AmericaEconomic
conditions1945.5.Debts, ExternalLatin America.6.Latin
AmericaDependency on the United States.I.Title.
F1418.P661990
327.7308dc20
90-11939
CIP
ISBN 13: 978-0-367-29457-1 (hbk)
The fate of the United States as a great power has energized academic debate like few issues within recent memory. The declinists in economics, political science, and history argue that U.S. hegemony is on the wane, challenging its leadership and the stability of the liberal economic order in the world. A small, but persuasive, group of skeptics take exception to this view of U.S. power in the world. Like Mark Twains falsely rumored death, the death or even the decline of hegemony has been exaggerated.
The Ordeal of Hegemony owes a great deal to both sides of this prolonged discussion. Extending the debate to regional hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, this book attempts to build three bridges. The first is between international relations theory and the realities of U.S.-Latin American relations. Rather than chronicle the latest and intriguing developments in the unfolding drama of inter-American relations, I have synthesized bodies of literature that may enrich our understanding of the North and the South.
A second bridge links the realist school of international relations with questions of power and change in the Western Hemisphere. Dependency as well as strategic and other perspectives have added to our understanding of U.S.-Latin American relations. In adopting a modified realist view of intraregional ties, I have aimed to see what an eclectic view of hegemony might have to offer rather than to argue that other perspectives are exhausted and no longer useful.
Finally, the book attempts a reappraisal of U.S. power in Latin America, a risky venture in times of indeterminate change and divergent thinking. Although realist hegemony theory is our chosen route, it is not always the most direct path to follow. To understand how U.S. power in the Americas has changed, one must be willing to acknowledge the deficiencies of any approach. Failing that, the enigmas and complexities of the region will remain as difficult to understand as they have been in the past.
My thanks go to Susie DuBose for her diligence in preparing the manuscript.
Guy Poitras
San Antonio, Texas
1
The U.S. Century in the Western Hemisphere
It is the peculiar fate of Latin America to share a continent with and live in the shadow of the foremost world power of the twentieth century. This is not necessarily either a beneficent or malevolent destiny. Rather, it is simply an intriguing and inescapable reality that shapes U.S.-Latin American relations to this day. Assuming a relatively surprise-free future, the United States will wield its great influence in the Americas for decades to come, but this does not mean that U.S.-Latin American relations have calcified. Change will continue to characterize the power relations of states throughout the Americas.
The United States and Latin America share the ordeal of living in a hemisphere that is significantly transformed with every passing decade. During most of the nineteenth century, the Americas went through a difficult period in which new nations were being forged within a Eurocentric world. Then, as the United States strode to the forefront of regional and global leadership in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the nature of the ordeal itself changed. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the challenge facing Latin America was to live with the ascent of a robust, powerful young nation capable of making itself felt throughout much of Latin America.
Today, as the twentieth century draws to a close, the ordeal of hegemony is to live with and adjust to the slow, relative, incomplete, uneven, and complex decline in U.S. power and the sometimes agonizing effect this has on relations between the United States and Latin America. Unfortunately, this fading hegemonic order has not been replaced by a new, coherent arrangement for managing conflict, dealing with pressing problems, or simply relating as mature partners. The modern ordeal of hegemony, then, involves the uneasy coexistence of unequal neighbors who have yet to find a way to cope with the travails of interdependence in an era of U.S. decline.
In examining the ordeal of hegemony, we must answer several critical questions. What is hegemony? How did the United States ascend to hegemony in the Americas? What does the third quarter of the twentieth century reveal about the relative decline of U.S. power? How do domestic and international dimensions of the Central American crisis help us understand why U.S. power is on the decline? And how does this important change in the hemisphere affect the security, economics, and management of the Americas?
Hegemony is a preponderance of power of one state over other states. It is far more than mere inequality among states. The power is derived from economic and military resources, and it is coupled with the ability to use these resources for specific purposes. When a great power like the United States is hegemonic, its share of the economic and military resources is so preponderant that it can control international and even domestic outcomes of a region to suit itself. Furthermore, it can stabilize the economic and political relations between states to its own benefit and to help those who have cast their lot with it.
As the last hegemonic power, the United States has held an overwhelming advantage in economic, military, and political power resources in the hemisphere for more than a century. It has had far and away the largest and most dynamic economy that fostered important technological innovations. Its rapid economic growth enabled it to take on the mantle of regional and even world leader and, by the end of the nineteenth century, it enjoyed a domestic political consensus that enabled it to manage hemispheric affairs to its own liking. In subsequent years, it used these economic and political advantages to build a military to contain Soviet expansion and to soothe the intermittent disturbances in its own hemisphere. Coupled with its will to use these resources, the United States was not only hegemonic (i.e., dominant) in the Americas but so preeminent that no other center of power in the Americas could dare challenge it.
The United States now presides over a peculiar hemisphere, with a distinctive asymmetry that makes the Americas unique. Some have called it an exclusive zone or sphere of influence; others simply refer to the backyard of the United States. What has been clear, at least until recently, is that what the United States wants in Latin America, it usually gets. It has made the rules, enforced the rules, and, when it chose, changed the rules. This is what it means to have a preponderant power base and a will to use it to achieve preeminence.
