The Region in the Face of a World Economy in Crisis

The modalities of insertion of Latin America into the international economy have been at the core of the reflections of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) since its creation in 1948. The world economic order has undergone major transformations since the beginning of the post-war period and the same goes for the prevailing economic paradigms in the region. ECLAC has interpreted the evolution of this process from the realities and particularities of the countries of the region. This chapter focuses on a specific dimension of this perspective: the region’s pattern of insertion in world trade. After presenting its main features, it offers some observations aimed at improving the quality of this linkage. They are made against the backdrop of the deep crisis that the prevailing mode of organization of the world economy has gone through in the last four decades.

The defining feature of the world economy from the 1980s onward has been commercial and financial hyper-globalization, which put an end to the era of greater state intervention and control of capital movements known as the 30 glorious years (1945–1975). The neoliberal reforms initiated in the United States and the United Kingdom; the end of the Cold War; the adoption of the so-called Washington Consensus in much of the developing world; and the emergence of China in the world economy were some key milestones in the emergence of a global market with high cross-border mobility of goods, services, and capital, and whose counterpart was the loss of relative power of workers.

The main expression of hyper-globalization in the productive sphere was the proliferation of global value chains in the 1990s and 2000s. Under this modality, transnational companies—generally based in advanced countries—relocate segments of their production processes to developing countries to benefit from lower labor costs, tax exemptions, or other advantages. Several trade and investment agreements promoted this phenomenon, such as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the Uruguay Round agreements of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), and China’s accession protocol to the World Trade Organization (WTO). In this way, the three great world factories were formed: East and Southeast Asia, Europe, and North America.

The single mother is a divisive figure in US society that has incurred great ire from various voices in society, such as in the media and politics. She is often constructed as a moral hazard or a financial drain on society. A particular target in public conversations is the single mother raising a son, who is also represented as a threat to the child. Freelance author Shawn James, for example, sums up this attitude in his blog post, ‘Ways Single Mothers Destroy Their Sons’, in which he writes that ‘[t]he most toxic environment for a boy growing up is in a single mother household’ (James 2013, 43). James’ claim clearly resonates with the public and has been referenced by many bloggers and YouTubers since. The single mother is often portrayed as a ‘deviant’ (De Benedictis 2012, 3). Through her deficient mothering, she is ‘responsible for societal collapse through male juvenile delinquency’ as sociologist Sara De Benedictis notes in an analysis of neoliberal discourse on single mothers (2012, 3). Faced with such unrelenting criticism, the single mother may turn to advice books for help.

In this she would not be alone. Up to one-half of Americans are said to have bought a self-help book at some point in their life (McGee 2005, 11), making them a ‘visible and powerful force in American society’ (Starker 2008, 1). As sociologist Micki McGee observes, advice books ‘are available to cover any and all issues, with titles specialized to address every market segment’ (2005, 12). One very popular market segment is parenting books. Amazon, for example, lists over 70 000 titles in this category, which places it on a par with genres such as career books (over 60 000 books) and dieting books (over 60 000 books). Such numbers suggest that many parents turn to parenting books for advice. Whether they take that advice is another matter. The books cannot tell us what parents actually do, but ethnographers and historians have tended to use ‘parent advice literature … as a window on cultural norms for childrearing’ (Hoffman 2009, 16). The books can tell us what ideas of parents, parenting and children are circulating in society, and accepted as reasonable (Faircloth, Hoffman, and Layne 2013, 9).

This chapter aims to introduce an aspect that is mentioned, though not elaborated upon, by the proponents of Active Non-Alignment (ANA). For the proponents of the ANA, in the case of Latin America, it is not just a question of

In summary, the ANA refers in scope and subject to multiple aspects that include, although they transcend, the main protagonists of the current power shift: the United States and China.

The intention of this chapter is to emphasize that the treatment of Latin America’s relationship with Beijing and Washington should be more specific. And for this purpose, the relevance of considering both the opportunities and the restrictions of deploying equidistance diplomacy (ED) is set forth. The concept of equidistance refers to being at an equal distance from two points or parts. The notion of equidistance is associated with that of eclecticism, a perspective not associated with certain axioms. Equidistance does not imply, at least in politics, exact symmetry. There may be equidistant behavior in a situation of disparity. The disparity makes a difference. In this case, for foreign policy purposes and for historical, geographical, political, and cultural reasons, the United States and China are not at the same distance from Latin America. The various links with the United States have had and still have a very different specific weight from those that the region has with the great Asian power.

In the words of Kishore Mahbubani (2013), “In the last thirty years the world has changed more than in the previous three hundred years.” According to him, we are experiencing the “great convergence,” the result of a long process that runs throughout the twentieth century and which has led the countries of the Global South to participate in world affairs, no longer as colonies subordinate to empires, but as independent nations. In this sense, a true world order is only now emerging, since the previous ones, as Kissinger has pointed out, “were not truly global” (Kissinger 2014, 3)

This epochal change corresponds to the “end of the American world order” (Acharya 2018) and the statement that “every empire will perish” (Duroselle, 1981). Amitav Acharya considers that “this new reality will be of another type: complex, decentralized and interdependent […] a multiplex world”, defined as a world without hegemon, culturally and politically diverse, although economically connected, whose security challenges are increasingly transnational, but in which the power to break and build order is scattered and fragmented (Acharya 2018, 8). It will be like a multiplex cinema, in which the most diverse films are screened simultaneously (Tokatlian 2015).

In the complex process of emergence of this new landscape, the ranking of the countries, according to their purchasing power parity (PPP), projected to 2030 and 2050, offers the following ranking:

In other words, by the middle of the twenty-first century 10 of the main economies in the world will be made up of 4 of the 5 BRICS countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), 3 will be from the West, 4 from the East. and 2 will be from Latin America. Thus, the twenty-first century heralds not only the decline of the American empire but also the advent of a world that is both post-North American and post-Western (Stuenkel 2016).

In this new era, the central actors are the United States and China. Their participation in the global GDP, in current dollars, is 44 percent of the total of US$88 trillion in 2019, with US$ 21 trillion in the case of the United States and US$14 trillion in that of China. Projections indicate that China’s GDP will equal that of the United States in 2028, as its growth rate is higher (Bloomberg 2021).

The story of Brazil and the transnational human rights movement is as much about the individuals, groups, ideas and practices that connected these two spheres as it is a struggle for their definition. In this context, Brazil and the Transnational Human Rights Movement has explored the multiple meanings of Brazil, of human rights and of democracy that emerged within transnational solidarity and advocacy networks over the course of the military dictatorship of 1964 to 1985.

Transnational human rights advocacy and solidarity were radically transformed by the global Cold War. What emerged was a movement that reinterpreted human rights to ‘penetrate the impregnability of state borders, slowly replacing them with the authority of international law’. This movement emerged through extensive and complex advocacy networks and international organisations, and it grew to encompass a broad range of issues such as political repression, torture, social and economic equality, women’s rights, racial and ethnic minority rights, indigenous rights, environmentalism, access to natural resources, sustainable development, the human rights responsibilities of transnational entities, among many others. The human rights paradigms that materialised during this period continue to structure globally evolving human rights discourses and practices today.

Yet the Global South dimensions of this history are markedly absent from mainstream scholarship. One of the objectives of Brazil and the Transnational Human Rights Movement is precisely to address this radically incomplete narrative; simply put, to tell the stories that have not yet been told. On the one hand, this has meant looking beyond the well-established authority institutions like the United Nations and organisations like Amnesty International to focus on the theorisation and promotion of human rights from below (emerging from concrete struggles in the regional and national context) as opposed to human rights from above (emanating from international organisations and national parliaments). On the other hand, it also meant raising the profile of Brazilian actors who have often only ever been remembered for the domestic social and political impacts of their actions, rather than the ways in which they impacted global processes and communities.

Mapping the interactions between Brazilian actors, ideas, histories, narratives and their Western European networks has made it possible to challenge the global, international and/or transnational history of human rights in a number of ways.

Problems of Automation in the 1960s

In the 1960s, what did Luhmann know about digitisation and algorithms? It may sound like a rhetorical question, but Luhmann already knew a surprising amount of information about these subjects, which I should like to demonstrate by way of analysing the 1966 text Recht und Automation in der öffentlichen Verwaltung (Law and Automation in Public Administration). I use quite a few direct quotations from Luhmann’s text, which is unusual for me, but I hope that the quality of the citations will speak for themselves. Of course the argument in the end is my own, yet it has been inspired by and constructed with material from Luhmann’s text.

Big data and self-learning algorithms obviously did not yet exist, but Luhmann was already anticipating them, as various passages show. For example, he suggested that the idea that machines cannot solve system problems through other than purely logical means:

The current competition/cooperation between humans and machines in the development of game algorithms (and machine-learning in general) could hardly be better described. For example, there is the famous case of DeepMind’s ‘AlphaGo’ programme that plays the Chinese board game Go, in which the machine learned from humans how to beat the best human players, who then learned from the machine how to improve their strategies, leading to a further improvement in the programmes. Luhmann was also informed about attempts to build ‘a general problem-solving computer programme with learning possibilities’, which is what we have today with self-learning algorithms.

The acuity of Luhmann’s text, however, lies not only in his foresight, but above all in his approach.

Introduction

Scholar Leslie Bethell has argued that for most of its history, Brazil never fully conceptualised itself as ‘Latin American’. In terms of its political trajectory, language, cultural production, intellectual debates, diplomatic relations and foreign policy style, Brazilians and Latin Americans alike tended to point to distinctions rather than similarities. This changed somewhat during the latter half of the twentieth century, when active political cooperation between the region’s Left signalled Brazil’s identification with neighbouring countries. ‘The region, however, was South America, not Latin America’.

The transnational experience of Cold War Brazil expands on this narrative. As this chapter shows, within certain human rights and solidarity circles, Brazilians not only more forcefully presented themselves as part of a wider South American community but also as part of wider Latin America and the ‘Third World’. From 1975, networks and organisations reinforced the idea of a shared identity around the experience of human rights violations in Latin America, as well as the specific developmental needs of the oppressed and peripheral nations. This shift was influenced by both Brazilians and their Western European networks.

The relationship between Brazilians and other Latin Americans was built along the lines of regional Leftist and liberationist solidarity networks and political communities. Since the late 1950s, new political identities were forged around the idea of Latin American unity and revolution, inspired by the Cuban Revolution of 1959 and growing dialogue between progressive liberationist Catholic bishops. Although it would later splinter along various lines, this common ground set the foundations for crucial lines of communication and networks of solidarity between Latin American revolutionaries and guerrilla for the next decades. As was shown in Chapter 1, the first wave of Brazilian exiles predominantly moved to other Latin American countries such as Uruguay, Chile, Mexico and Cuba, where these networks were activated. Likewise, liberationist theologians were building ties across the continent and in some cases becoming more actively involved with Left-wing opposition, including through armed struggle.

Latin American authoritarian regimes sought to contain regional exile and opposition by devising mechanisms to locate, imprison and disappear so-called ‘subversives’ beyond borders. In 1975, Operation Condor, which trained and integrated dedicated teams of security and intelligence personnel from across Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Paraguay and Bolivia, significantly expanded and advanced its operations.

Introduction

A key dimension of the hegemonic conflict between the United States and China is the design of the rules, structures, and processes that govern the world economy.

The subject is, of course, not new. Already at the beginning of the 1980s, the governments of developed countries—particularly the United States—and multinational companies in those countries argued that it was necessary to reformulate global economic governance to bring it into line with globalization. The explicit objective was to establish international regimes that would provide a normative framework to facilitate and deepen globalization. The implicit objective was to consolidate this model of market capitalism and to promote the global expansion and penetration of multinational capital through the establishment of international disciplines.

In the field of international trade, the effort was initially successful. The Uruguay Round of trade negotiations concluded in 1994 with the creation of the World Trade Organization (WTO)—the successor to the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT)—designed to be the nerve center of global trade governance.

Less successful was the effort in the area of international investment. As outlined further in this chapter, the constitutive instruments of the WTO agreed at the Marrakesh Conference in April 1994 included a basic agreement on trade-related investment measures; however, a proposal to fully incorporate this into the organization’s rules and ensure the free movement of foreign capital failed at the first Ministerial Conference in Singapore in 1996, largely due to opposition from developing countries.

However, the effort of governments and companies from developed countries to set up a unified international regime for global economic governance to reflect their interests continued at multilateral, plurilateral, regional, and bilateral levels. A brief account of that process provides a useful background for understanding today’s hegemonic conflict.

The Governance of Economic Globalization: The Central Issues

Debates and conflicts about the governance of economic globalization during the last four decades have revolved around four main questions: (1) Is a fundamental reform of global economic governance necessary, and should this be done by establishing a general normative framework for globalization? (2) Should this framework be extended to areas previously accepted as belonging to the sphere of national autonomy?

This chapter has been written during the global coronavirus pandemic. The question thus must be: Can we use this crisis to see farther? My contribution advances four theses. First, the new millennium has brought rising multipolarity in the global distribution of hard power capabilities among sovereign states. Second, shifts in the international systemic structure have mixed implications for Latin America. Third, Latin American publics and a broad consensus of leaders share pragmatic agreement in several important policy arenas, while regional cohesion, even if partial, advances voice in global governance. Finally, recent Canadian experiences may hold some relevance for Latin America.

Multipolarity and Its Implications

The global distribution of capabilities among sovereign states is becoming more multipolar. The international system has moved from Cold War bipolarity to a brief era of unipolarity following the breakup of the former Soviet Union (USSR) and to the twenty-first century of rising multipolarity (Krauthammer 1990; Zakaria 2012; Stuenkel 2016). Two countries, the United States and a relatively rising China, will each remain larger than any others. However, in the twenty-first century, the gap between the two great powers and other major players will not be so large as to open a new era of rigid bipolarity. Western Europe is an equivalent great power to the extent it can act jointly. Britain’s choice to leave the European Union (EU), known as Brexit, likely lessens the United Kingdom’s global influence while focusing the minds, and thus strengthening the cooperation, of most remaining members. If the members of the EU, or even only the triumvirate of Germany, France, and Italy, can act collectively, then the twenty-first-century political system will have three political poles: the United States, China, and the EU.

Table 5.1 shows shifts in relative global power relations over the critical transition period 1995–2019. It draws on a new measure, the Material Capabilities Index (MCI), which combines indicators of country’s shares of global population, income, trade, technology, and military spending (Armijo, Tirone and Chey 2020). Of course, such an index must be treated with great caution, as it aggregates shares of dissimilar units and necessarily omits a wide range of factors relevant to a state’s international capacity for influence.

Latin America was the region with the lowest growth from 2000 to 2020, with a performance similar to that of the so-called lost decade of the 1980s. It shows a worrying lack of competitiveness—only 2 countries are present in the top 50—and innovation—only 1 country in the top 50, and it continues to be one of the most unequal—18 countries among the 50 with the worst income distribution according to the Gini Index. It is difficult to think that Latin America can achieve sustainable growth, reduce inequality, and innovate without diversifying production and exports, without improving the quality of international linkages, and without substantive investment in education, innovation, and worker training.

Considering trends in globalization, technological change, and productive organization around value chains (VC), the question is whether regional integration can help to address these issues. The answer is yes, of course. Integration can and should help diversify the productive apparatus and improve the quality of the region’s international linkages. However, getting there involves overcoming several obstacles. Examining some of them and suggesting policy proposals is the goal of this chapter. We will first examine the logic of VCs and the impact on them of the pandemic and of former US president Donald Trump’s protectionist and mercantilist policies. We will conclude with a reflection on the spaces for action that the region can use to improve the quality of its international linkages and strengthen its spaces for regional cooperation and integration.

Value Chains: Breakthrough, Features, and Phases

From the 1980s onward, the rise of new information and communication technologies, on the one hand, and trade liberalization, on the other, facilitated the relocation of productive operations, breaking them down into multiple segments and locating them to maximize price efficiencies. This gave rise to the process known as relocation. In it, companies migrate from their native country and locate the various segments of the production process in those places where the cost can be minimized, without affecting the quality of the product. Thus, VCs arise in instances where multiple companies from different countries participate, each one representing a link in the manufacturing process.

This chapter begins by laying out the key elements of the Post-Western World, one shaped by an increasingly Asia-centric global order, great power competition that directly impacts globalization, and a highly uneven recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic. In the second part, it points to three advantages Latin America enjoys in this context: relatively high economic compatibility with Asia; geopolitical and diplomatic versatility that allows it to articulate a strategy that involves neither automatic alignment with China nor the United States; and a guaranteed seat at the table in the global debate about climate change, arguably one of the key issues that will influence the global order going forward. Third, it proceeds to analyze the key obstacles that Latin America faces in such a new global environment, ranging from a lack of regional coordination to a “Western-centric” mindset among political and economic elites—which leaves the region unprepared to adapt to the shift of power toward Asia—to enormous domestic challenges which reduce the time and attention political decision-makers can dedicate to global issues. Finally, this chapter points to three specific recommendations of how Latin America can react to the momentous political shifts and the arrival of the Post-Western World and great power politics. That involves, above all, mechanisms to avoid “importing” the dawning ideological struggle between Washington and Beijing into domestic politics of Latin American countries. Second, the new geopolitical context calls for the development of a broader debate in Latin America about how to strengthen regionalism in the face of returning great power politics and ways to balance constructive ties with both the United States and China (Fortin, Heine and Ominami 2020), which is what Active Non-Alignment (ANA), the subject of this book, is all about. Third, there is an urgent need for initiatives that help policy makers, civil society, and businesses adapt to a more Asia-centric world, a region numerous decision-makers across the continent are not familiar with.

The Post-Western World: Three Trends

The arrival of the Post-Western World is often associated with a historic shift of economic power away from the West and toward Asia, but it would be a mistake to limit its impact to the economic realm.

In Chapter 2, I discussed the borderwork that some advice authors undertake, attempting to demonstrate which particular aspects of childrearing that only fathers carry out. Some authors also betray an anxiety that fathers will be completely excluded from their children’s lives. William Small, for example, writes of his concern that media representations of single mothers give ‘the impression that a daddy is not necessary’ (2017, x). John Dennis notes that one of the most common phrases on television when a sportsman, or an actor or just a person in the street is interviewed is ‘Hi mom’ (2015, 17). Yet, fathers loom large even in their absence in these advice books. It is claimed that good male role models will suffice, but many of the authors still write to and about the missing father, making these books ‘sites in which discourses on fathering are reconstructed and reproduced’ (Hunter, Riggs, and Augoustinos 2020, 151). As Hunter et al. argue, it is important to ‘consider the implications of such discourses’ (2020, 151). Not only do they affect fathers and the way they approach caregiving, but they may also affect and shape the way mother readers care for their sons.

Beginning with a brief overview of how societal attitudes towards fatherhood have changed over the last century, including how fathers have been represented in media and popular culture, I then move on to an analysis of how fathers are presented in the advice books, with a particular focus on the privileging of fathers over mothers. The chapter then concludes with a brief analysis of advice books aimed at (single) fathers raising daughters. I juxtapose them as regards type of advice given, reader address and parental sexuality. As will be evident, the most striking difference is the way the father reader is assured of his centrality in his daughter’s life. Many of the books are read as an attempt to persuade the father to involve himself with her, which is quite different from the message given to the mothers.

Fathers in Times of Change

In historical and sociological investigations of fathers and fatherhood, there is an intriguing movement, where the figure of the authoritative father is shunted ever backwards.

At the beginning of the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, in 2003, a young television journalist asked me: “Minister, why do you pay so much attention to South America?” The question reflected both the diplomatic effort developed in the region and a worldview that prioritized the large, developed countries. My answer was simple: “Because I live here.” The same goes for our priority for the countries of the south.

Except for Latin America, the Global South only appeared on the radar of Brazilian diplomacy in the early 1960s, fueled by the independence of African nations. Before that, the rise of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was something that Brazil followed at a distance with little or no participation. Our interests and relationships were centered in the Western, European, and North American developed world. Even in our region, our vision went little beyond the countries with which we border. Chile and Mexico attracted the attention of some academics but were not the focus of major diplomatic initiatives. Starting in the 1950s, in part due to studies carried out by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), a specific Latin American outlook began to take shape, which was expressed in the initiative of President Juscelino Kubitchek’s Pan-American Operation in 1958.

Some embassies were opened in Africa, something that would continue in the governments of Janio Quadros and João Goulart. Writings about an “independent foreign policy,” as conceptualized by Santiago Dantas, would project our external view to what today would be called the Global South. The movement for the liberation of the Portuguese colonies, beginning in 1961, would attract intellectuals, politicians, and international officials. The 1964 military coup would curb that Third World momentum—but not entirely.

If we think about Brazil’s foreign policy in the last half-century, which includes almost half the period of the military dictatorship (1964–1985) the Global South, with or without that name, has always occupied a prominent place.

For more than four decades, the Cold War imposed on the world a binary logic marked by the confrontation of the West with the Soviet bloc. Attempts to break this geopolitical logic failed to be dented by the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) or by the emergence of the Third World, later renamed as the Global South. After the implosion of the United Socialist Soviet Republic (USSR) and the end of the Cold War, the configuration of a unipolar world under the hegemonic dominance of the United States and its Western allies imposed a liberal international order and the apparent end of geopolitical confrontations on a global scale.

However, the world is currently experiencing a series of tectonic changes that mark the emergence of a new world order and, consequently, rising geopolitical tensions. In fact, we live in a world in transition, in which the dilution of traditional power relations is associated both with the emergence of new poles of power and new ways of concep-tualizing the complex links between economic, technological, political, and military power. New visions about regional orders and the global order emerge and compete, and a new world geopolitical map is emerging. Multiple narratives emerge to interpret this transition—generally anchored in national interests or regional approaches—that compete to legitimize interests and strategies of the states not only in regions but also within the global order.

While the international economy presents a fragile global outlook in which developed economies are recovering more slowly than expected and global trade has slowed down, it is clear that, since the 2008 crisis, the main developed countries of the Atlantic Basin—the European Union (EU) and the United States—have had limited growth, while emerging economies including China and India have had higher economic growth, even in the context of the global pandemic. In the last decade, the economic dynamism in the world has tended to move from the Atlantic Basin to the Asia-Pacific, driven by the accelerated growth of China, which will become the world’s leading economy by the end of the current decade according to most projections.

After several centuries of Western hegemony, reflected in its ability to formulate international norms and rules and control the global agenda, we now witness the emergence of new powers and a multipolar world.

The IV Conference of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) ended in Algiers on Sunday, September 9, 1973. Scheduled to conclude a day earlier, it had to be extended so that the numerous heads of state and government and foreign affairs ministers in attendance could deliver their speeches. A total of 75 of the 135 member states represented at the United Nations (UN) were present at the highest level, including the pioneers of Bandung, the founders of the Group in Belgrade, and the rulers of most of the recently decolonized countries. There was a significant presence from the Arab world and from Asia and Africa and two Latin American countries—Chile and Peru—joined Cuba, a NAM founding member. Several of the newly independent Caribbean countries like Guyana and Jamaica were also participating in their first summit.

The NAM had gone from being just a small group of countries that rejected the Cold War and bloc politics to embodying the most representative entity of the so-called Third World—also associated with the great issues of the fight against colonialism, neocolonialism, racism, and apartheid. With a close link with the Group of 77 (G77)—created at the first United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) in 1964—the NAM would also acquire an economic dimension that would be enshrined for the first time in the Final Declaration of Algiers.

There was, however, an important absence: the announced participation of the president of Chile Salvador Allende, a milestone that would mark a much more determined presence of Latin America in the NAM, was canceled shortly before the beginning of the summit. Chile had, however, an important presence, with a large delegation headed by Foreign Minister Clodomiro Almeyda. The coup d’état that caused the death of President Allende and the end of democracy in Chile occurred just two days after the end of the Algiers Summit. Chile had joined the NAM in September 1971, and two years later that participation was terminated. The movement—which had issued a declaration in support of the Allende government at the summit—would later reject the attempts of the Pinochet dictatorship to join it.