Geopolitics as an approach to politico-military matters was of considerable significance up to the end of World War II, when it declined in respectability and prestige due to its association with Nazi theories of world conquest. As a result, very few strategic or military writings in the United States or Western Europe since World War II have been called “geopolitical,” even though they might include many of the concepts subsumed under the pre-1945 term. But, interestingly enough, the concept is alive and well in Latin America, especially in those Southern Cone countries (Brazil, Argentina, and Chile) where the most prolific thinking and writing on geopolitics has taken place in the last thirty years.

The study of politics in british universities has traditionally been historical in approach and parochial in scope. It is only recently that the teaching and research interests of british political scientists have spread beyond the Anglo-European parliamentary tradition to the more ‘exotic’ areas of what is inaccurately called the ‘third world’. In the first half of this century the observation and analysis of political activity in the non-European parts of the world were the unchallenged concerns of travellers, diplomats, and journalists; and their writings found few serious readers in the universities. Their work was regarded, and often conceived, as a species of adventurers' tales describing quaint but essentially pre-political societies.

Agrarian studies in Peru experienced an unusual development in the seventies, when a new generation of scholars emerged whose impact has been considerable. The advances made are the result of their collective contribution. One consequence of recent research has been the displacement of a traditional view consisting of a schematic paradigm of the Peruvian countryside that long dominated the thought of social scientists and laymen. Its origins can be traced to the portrayals by Mariátegui and Haya de la Torre of Peruvian society of the twenties, which at the time were fresh and meaningful. The paradigm can be recognized in works such as Roel (1961) or CIDA (1966) that, despite their merits, failed to place sufficient emphasis upon the new trends that emerged in Peruvian agriculture following the Second World War. The structuralism of the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA) and the reformist agrarian thought of the fifties and sixties reinforced this accepted interpretation that was transformed into an increasingly ideologized vision of reality.

Present conditions in the international energy market and the problems they pose for Latin America hardly need emphasis, especially the uncertainty with respect to the availability and price of specific forms like oil. These concerns are, of course, aggravated by the need to respond to the short-term severe dislocations in the energy market, while at the same time taking coherent steps toward long-term solutions of national energy problems. Indeed, how should oil importing countries offset price increases, which exacerbate national deficits and debt service; deal with inflation, which raises the cost of developing indigenous resources; and successfully increase exports, when a number of other countries around the world are pursuing similar export expansion policies? While in broad terms the international energy market imposes a set of constraints upon all Latin America, there is a wide variety of responses among the countries themselves. The oil importing countries (Dominican Republic, Costa Rica, Brazil) face a set of problems different from that of more-or-less self sufficient nations (Argentina, Colombia), which is in turn quite different from the major oil exporter (Venezuela). The needs of each country are, therefore, a combination of the international context and the specific situation within a country, and this is reflected in the nature of their energy planning and policy institutions.

This study concerns the structure of power in Brazil during the early seventies, when economic growth, and political repression, were at their height. The objective is not to discover the power structure, as if there were serious doubt about its existence or even much mystery about its composition. For all the curiosity value of first-hand information about elites in a virtually closed political setting, there is a danger of confirming what is already known about the workings of authoritarian rule. The point of departure here is that “what everybody knows” about the Brazilian power structure is not so much wrong as it is limited and in some ways misleading. In order to understand this, it is first necessary to outline the common ground among scholars regarding interelite relations in Brazil and then to suggest how this view might be modified.

It requires a lot of temerity to analyze in a few pages such a great and complicated topic as “The Study of Latin American History Today,” especially if one is not Richard Morse. My only vantage point is a rather varied experience. A European historian, I am an autodidact in things Latin American. Since the late 1940s, I have visited and done some research in most of the countries of Latin America, and Spain. I have had the privilege of teaching Latin American history at five major United States universities during a total of five and a half years. At the present time I find myself once again in Europe. Thus I am familiar with the increased European interest in Latin American studies during recent years as well as with the various factors which still hamper us in our job. From the psychological point of view I have probably become a kind of mestizo, a Swedish-Latin-North American blend. Though at ease in any of three environments, I have the feeling of being to some extent an outsider even in the country of my birth. After this presentation-confession I shall first survey the current situation in broad terms. The second point will be to discuss the purpose of the study of Latin American history and finally, to recommend some norms of policy.