The term sustainable development has become a catch phrase of the 1990s, a handy slogan for politicians, bureaucrats, environmental activists, multinational aid officials, and even business leaders. Implementing sustainable development policy, however, is no mere technical problem. Indeed, environmental policy making is classically political: a competition among multiple interests with differing goals, resources, tactics, information, and time horizons. Who “sustains” what, for whom, why, and how? These questions underpin any analysis of the politics of environmental policy.

Scholars have paid little attention to the political side of environmental policy making in developing countries. Although environmental policy making is often understood as a case of “diffusion,” in which ideas flowed from Western Europe and the United States to the developing world, the acceptance of new ideas is always mediated by local institutions and cultures (Sikkink, 1991). Furthermore, as international linkages have come to involve more and more actors outside foreign ministries, the form of diffusion differs from classic examples like social security policy (Collier and Messick, 1975).

While the Latin American economies have been undergoing profound economic reforms in a political context marked by multiparty democracy and free elections, the Cuban government has adamantly rejected meaningful change. During the second half of the 1980s, as the majority of countries in the Western Hemisphere liberalized their economies and rolled back government intervention, Cuba moved in the opposite direction. Since mid-1993 and while in the depths of severe economic crisis, the Cuban government has taken some tentative steps towards liberalizing the economy, but has remained firm on the single-party character of the regime.

The tone of European-Latin American relations in recent years has been strongly influenced by the issue of bananas. At stake has been the future of the banana trade between the European Union (EU) and Latin America, which, even if small in relative size (constituting less than 5% of Latin America’s exports to the EU), has loomed large in international political calculations. This article seeks to make sense of a very complex, and still developing, situation by identifying the interests of the various parties directly concerned. The first part examines the background, the problem, and the solution to this issue as set out in the adoption of a new banana regime (NBR) in the EU.

To what extent has the North American Free Trade Agreement contributed to strengthening and deepening international environmental management in the Americas? Should the system be broadened to incorporate other nations? While a complete answer to these queries is currently beyond reach, there should be little doubt that NAFTA has influenced and continues to influence the direction of environmental management in North America and the hemisphere at large. The agreement has spawned a series of new institutions that are already reshaping current practices and that have considerable promise for broadening the range of international commitments to environmental management in the Americas. The most prominent and most relevant of these is the Commission for Environmental Cooperation (CEC).

Hundreds of thousands of Cuban troops deployed to nearly every corner of the globe—that seemed to be the nightmare of every US administration from the mid-1970s to the end of the 1980s. From its own perspective, President Fidel Castro’s government attempted to use its activist foreign policy first to protect itself from hostile US policies, and second to leverage support from the Soviet Union and other communist countries for Cuba’s own domestic development.

Violence, in its criminal and political aspects, largely reflects the contradictory impulses set in motion by modernization and serves as an expression of the various dislocations — social, economic, psychological and cultural — which accompany that process. Violence increases when the prevailing institutions fail to mediate among the various antagonistic forces unleashed by socio-economic and political change. Colombia represents a country where violence has risen overwhelmingly in recent years, reaching extremes of both extent and duration. A phenomenon well worth scholarly attention, the subject of violence has given rise to an impressive body of literature concerned with exploring its many aspects: its causes, trajectory, and variety of manifestations (see Sánchez, 1991).

Today, the discourse among the countries of our Hemisphere is motivated by a new set of realities, and yesterday’s concerns have emerged as priorities for today’s policymakers. Education, social development, the environment, tourism, sustainable development, culture, and a number of other like-minded issues have all joined trade as priorities. Furthermore, as these have been added to the international agenda, they have tended to push aside, with relative ease, those preoccupations that we were so accustomed to hearing our leaders debate in the past.

How does a country's transition to democracy affect the state? This question is of great importance, given the crucial role that the state has played in the economic, social, and political development of most countries affected by the “third wave” of democratization. Yet this topic has received insufficient scholarly attention. Indeed, definitional assumptions may make this question appear a non-issue: because the state is regarded as more permanent than a political regime, which can change with disturbing frequency, democratic transitions are often assumed to leave the state unchanged. Latin America's “politicized states” (Chalmers, 1977; Power, 1991), however, lack institutional stability. Given the fluidity of state structures in the region, democratization may have a profound effect on the state. It may help institutionalize the state and make it more autonomous from established social forces, or, by contrast, it may further corrode the internal unity and undermine the strength of the state. Because the state has assumed an enormously wide range of responsibilities in Brazil, this country constitutes an especially good case for analysis.

On April 11, 1997, the European Commission, represented by its vice president and UK commissioner, Leon Brittan, responsible for foreign trade and relations with North-America; and the government of the United States, represented by Under Secretary of State for Foreign Trade Stuart Eizenstat, agreed on a compromise that in effect would temporarily neutralize the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act of 1996, better known as the Helms-Burton law, just a year after its approval. In the event that all the portions of the agreement are implemented, this accommodation will represent the end of one of the most serious episodes of disagreement between Washington and Brussels since the end of the Cold War, as well as between the United States and its partners in NAFTA.

In April 1991, the Argentine government initiated the central component of yet another program to stabilize an economy still suffering from continuing bouts of rampant inflation. This effort, unlike its numerous predecessors, which had cut, but not defeated, high inflation, proved a rapid and stunning success. Designed and implemented under the guidance of the new Minister of Economy Domingo Cavallo, the “Cavallo Plan” cut the monthly rate of inflation from 11% (in March 1991) to only 1.3% in August and then to just 0.6% by December of that year. While consumer prices rose 172% in 1991, they increased only 4% in 1994 (see Table 1).

In May 1996 Brazil's National Confederation of Industry (CNI) convened a meeting of industrialists in Brasilia for a mass show of unity and focused lobbying in favor of constitutional reform. Industrialists large and small heeded the call. Nearly three thousand of them from all over Brazil chartered planes and packed shuttles. Fortified by a morning of speeches demanding constitutional reforms, the industrialists fanned out over Brasilia in the afternoon to argue their case to members of the national congress. As if to demonstrate that it could not be intimidated, however, Congress chose that very afternoon to vote down a reform proposal backed by business. By the end of that year, it was clear that business had made little progress in pushing several amendments it supported.

After the great ideological debates of the 1970s and 1980s and the domestic “war” (there is no better term) over Central America policy, a quite remarkable consensus had emerged in the 1990s regarding United States policy in Latin America. The new consensus was surprisingly bipartisan, having been largely continuous from the Bush to the Clinton administrations and actually having its origins in the even earlier Carter and Reagan administrations. For those who remember the rancorous, divisive battles, stretching back over two decades, over such issues as human rights, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, the emergence of a consensus on US foreign policy towards Latin America was nothing short of astounding. There are three basic elements in this new consensus, usually referred to as the "Washington Consensus," all interrelated:

1. (1) an emphasis on furthering democracy and human rights;

2. (2) an emphasis on free (or at least “fair”) trade and economic integration; and

3. (3) an emphasis on open markets, state downsizing, and privatization: i.e., on capitalism or neoliberalism.

The late Professor Carl Stone was perhaps best known in the academic community as a political behavioralist who pioneered the systematic study of voting behavior in Jamaica, using the Michigan model of opinion research. In the Caribbean, he was famous for his "hitting the nail on the head" election predictions, correctly predicting, in terms of the victorious party, the outcome of all national elections held in Jamaica between 1976 and 1993 and, in several instances, in terms of constituency seats and percentage of votes received.

The key to understanding Latin American relations with the United States as the century, and the millennium, draw to a close is to realize that all of the nations in the Western Hemisphere are still caught up in the transition from the Cold War. That transition, which began nearly a decade ago, is proceeding more slowly, and with greater confusion, than most observers had anticipated. The issues that constitute the framework, or infrastructure, for Hemispheric relations in the coming century emerge from the efforts of each nation in the Hemisphere, including the United States, to effect their insertions into the emerging world order. Given the priority accorded commercial and economic questions in the insertion of most Latin American nations, those are the questions that dominate the discourse. However, questions of governance — and what I call the international code of good behavior — are rapidly assuming greater salience in inter-American relations. It is my judgment that they will dominate relations among the nations of the Hemisphere in the 21st century.

The Peru-Ecuador boundary issue is the oldest continuing border dispute in the Western Hemisphere. Furthermore,

In 1942, four such friendly nations brought Peru and Ecuador together, after a short but bitter war between them, to settle their differences once and for all by signing a treaty of “Peace, Friendship, and Boundaries,” known as the Rio Protocol. These four countries were Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and the United States. Their representatives also signed that treaty, “as guarantors that the Protocol would be faithfully executed....” (McBride, 1949: 2-3).