The world that emerged after World War II had a large part of what is now the Global South in colonial condition. Suffice it to say that the United Nations (UN) was created by convening in January 1942 a conference of 26 nations to reaffirm the commitment to fight against the Axis (Germany, Italy, and Japan) until the very end.

The allied countries (the United States, the Soviet Union [Union of Soviet Socialist Republics; USSR], the United Kingdom, and China) met from August to October in 1944 in Dumbarton Oaks to prepare the statutes and the design of the future UN. The organization was born at the San Francisco Conference in 1945, with 50 participating countries, which approved the Charter of the UN. The organization formally came into being on October 24, 1945, after France, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Soviet Union, and China ratified the treaty. Only the victors of World War II were founding members. And the Big Five retained veto power, as so-called super victors. Asia had only two participating countries—China and India, which would actually win their independence on August 15, 1947—and Africa had two as well—South Africa and Ethiopia. On the other hand, Latin America had 19 countries among the founding members, allies of the United States and considered winners of the war.

Latin America gained its independence at the beginning of the nineteenth century. But almost all of Africa and Asia had been left out of the creation of the UN. The colonies had formed military units for the armies of the motherlands, whose men, after the conflict, were once again second-class citizens. In the colonies, all positions of power in the economy, in education, in health, and in administration were occupied by white men who came from the colonial powers.

But a new feeling was emerging among the national elites, many of whom had had access to higher education, often in the metropolis: a growing sense of dignity, frustration, and injustice. Colonialism did not invest in education, especially in higher education. When Libya obtained independence from Italy, the total number of people with university studies was 28 men and no women.

Introduction

On the afternoon of the 11th September 1973, national armed forces bombed the Chilean Presidential Palace, La Moneda, dissolved Congress and installed a military Junta headed by General Augusto Pinochet. This was the start of the Chilean military dictatorship that would last for 17 years, overseeing more than 3,000 deaths, 40,000 cases of torture and 200,000 cases of exile.

Compared to Brazil and Uruguay, which had installed its own military regime in an autocoup just a few months earlier, the military takeover in Chile almost immediately incited international outrage. Front-page news articles across Western Europe described the scene in which air and ground attacks destroyed parts of the presidential palace, where President Salvador Allende was reported to have committed suicide. At a most basic level, the comparatively weak reactions to the Brazilian and Uruguayan coups can be explained by the fact that they were carried out with comparatively less violence. In Brazil, the political opposition was initially repressed through the suspension of political rights and forced exile, with torture not being systematically employed until a few years later. In Uruguay, it was the democratically elected president at the time, Juan Bordaberry, who personally and willingly signed the decree to dissolve Congress.

Chile was important for another reason. Salvador Allende, president of the Republic of Chile, had proven the possibility of the ‘democratic road to socialism’. He had gathered significant international support from Western European countries with active Socialist and Communist parties, such as France and Italy, and had inspired Leftist movements and currents across the continent. The fall of the democratic regime and Allende’s subsequent death almost immediately drew mass national and international campaigns and protests of solidarity that cut across classes, including unions, politicians, Christian groups, artists and academics.

The COVID-19 pandemic has led to the reconfiguration of global geopolitics. It accelerated and sharpened pre-existing trends (Acharya 2020; Haass 2020a; Rodrik 2020). In so doing, the pandemic has highlighted something even more challenging than the virus itself, namely, the global competition between the United States and China (Actis and Creus, 2020a).

The current international order is in transition, marked by a pandemic outbreak with highly disruptive effects, within the setting of a structural process of a global dispute between the two main international powers. The scope and magnitude of the impact of both processes pose a huge challenge for the rest of the actors in the system, be they states, companies, or international organizations.

Latin America was affected by this like no other region in the world (Nugent and Campell 2021). The pandemic undermined the region’s power capabilities and starkly exposed its weaknesses. At the same time, the increase in tensions between the United States and China exacerbated strategic dilemmas and revealed the need for Latin American countries to redefine and rethink their place in the new order. This chapter analyzes the impact on Latin America of this global power dispute.

The first section discusses the nature of the international order in the making from the perspective of entropic bipolarism. The second section reflects on the place of Latin America in this dynamic, a place marked, perhaps paradoxically, by a condition of both structural weakness and potential strategic relevance, resulting from a renewed interest in the region on the part of the great powers. The third section highlights the need for a sub-systemic approach since the challenges are not uniform and differ throughout the region. South America is identified as the most problematic area and the focus is placed there. Finally, and as a conclusion, some normative issues are addressed, and the strategic options available for the countries of the subregion are discussed according to possible scenarios, placing special emphasis on the gap between what is desirable and what is possible.

The Era of “Entropic Bipolarism”

In 2014, Randall Schweller pointed out that in geopolitical terms the world was leaving behind the “era of order” to give way to the “era of entropy” (Schweller 2014).

Introduction

It is a widespread assertion in sociology and social theory that systems theory is uncritical. This belief is articulated by theories that call upon society to change (itself, its structure, its inner logics). We want to argue that these assertions conceal the critical potentials which are inherent in Luhmann’s social systems theory. Admittedly, Luhmann was critical about critical theory and embarked on a controversy with Jürgen Habermas and others about the state of critical theory in the 1960s and 1970s. His point of departure was that critical theory was still indebted to ‘old-European assumptions’ about how societies are evolving. He sought to demonstrate that critical theory reproduced distinctions – such as between the ‘part’ and the ‘whole’ or ‘below’ and ‘above’ – which were already melting under an increased functional differentiation of social systems in modern society. Drawing upon Talcott Parson’s sociology and evolution theory, he argued that modern society emerged from a rather anarchic social evolution and, thereby, established a plurality of self-referential social systems that are not reducible to a unitary mode of domination. Based on these insights, Luhmann formulates a critique of society which may be deemed less appealing, less self-assured and void of gestures that support a sociologist’s self-image of an impressive public intellectual, but – as we argue in the following – it takes up motifs of social critique in the tradition of Hegel, Marx and Adorno and classical sociology such as Simmel and Weber. Not the least, a whole strand of critical systems theory from the 2000s onwards investigated into this potential of Luhmann’s theory – be it through clarifying the notion of critique in his work, through combining it with Marxism, post-structural thinking or the legacy of the early Frankfurt School – arguing that modern society calls for different forms of sociological critique.

In this chapter, we focus on a reconstruction of three characteristic dimensions of critical systems theory in order to demonstrate how these resources can contribute to a critique of modern society that operates immanently from within the social. Most importantly, we emphasise how social critique remains connected to a robust social theory instead of collapsing into a free-standing gesture.

A New Tone

In 1968, when I worked as a court clerk and was writing my dissertation, I suffered from acute symptoms of horror vacui. My somewhat naïve hopes in the rationality of legal arguments, but also in the potential of the social sciences to enlighten them, had been disillusioned. I had worked my way through the relevant literature on law and the social sciences, but, of course, without finding a solution to my problem. I doubted the scientific quality of legal scholarship, equated legal doctrine with absurd conceptual acrobatics, and found in legal sociology nothing but irrelevant fact-gathering or artificial theory exercises. In those days, the critique of law as an instrument of brute power was en vogue and I agreed wholeheartedly. My own experience in the courts contradicted what I had learned in law school about the inner persuasiveness of law when it came to solving social conflicts. I realised that in day-to-day practice, legal arguments would neither determine judicial decisions, nor produce plausible reasons for the parties concerned, nor satisfactorily resolve social conflicts. Likewise, as a doctoral student, I had to learn that legal arguments are neither participating in an interdisciplinary debate nor realising social values, not to speak of producing discursive rationality.

Suddenly a new tone! Norms in sociological perspective– a short but brilliant article by a still unknown Niklas Luhmann which radicalised the usual critique of law in a cool and distant language. He showed that legal methods of attribution are untenable in scientific terms. So far, so not astonishing. But what impressed me was that starting with this critique of law, Luhmann developed sociological arguments for legal autonomy which he later transformed into a whole theory of law’s autopoietic self-production. When social or moral conflicts seem to be unresolvable, the law still finds an additional perspective that makes these conflicts resolvable and thus endurable in social life. The argument contradicted the Zeitgeist of these days. Law is not supposed to mirror social communities’ shared understanding of conflicts – but the opposite, to alienate drastically social conflicts is law’s well-founded stubbornness.

Suddenly the absurd legal doctrine made sense.

Latin America is going through a rough patch: recession, increased poverty and inequality, bankruptcy of thousands of companies, crisis of political representation, and growing international marginalization are the most distinctive features of the region today.

The crisis is global. What is in question is the multi-dependency that goes to the heart of the sort of globalization that has taken place in recent decades, as well as the financial insecurity and ecological irresponsibility that go hand in hand with it (Boyer 2020). In this sense, the comparison with the Great Depression of 1929 is not very relevant. The causes of that crisis were rooted in the mismatch between widespread mass production and the absence of mass consumption. It is to Keynes’ credit to have identified this contradiction and proposed solutions to overcome it. The current crisis, caused by a coronavirus (COVID-19) whose origins and possible mutations are unknown, generates a much more radical uncertainty. There are currently no theoretical schemes capable of accounting for the complexity of the current crisis and its possible solutions.

This uncertainty is serious in the case of Latin America, which has turned out to be the worst hit region. With 8 percent of the world’s population, it accounted for 20 percent of infections and 30 percent of deaths caused by the pandemic by the end of 2021. Latin America is the region that has suffered most intensely the rigors of the pandemic, and its epicenter has been in Brazil.

In the economic sphere, the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) (ECLAC 2020) has estimated that the fall in the regional gross domestic product (GDP) reached 7.7 percent, the highest in 120 years. In contrast, the world economy, according to the International Monetary Fund (IMF) (IMF 2021) by 3.3 percent in 2020. Latin America’s performance also compares negatively with that of the Middle East and Central Asia (−4.1 percent), Sub-Saharan Africa (−3.9 percent), and Emerging and Developing Asia (1.7 percent). The macroeconomic figures, however, do not fully describe the depth of a crisis that, together with the loss of more than 1.7 million human lives, has brought with it the collapse of thousands of small- and medium-sized companies and enterprises.

The Active Non-Alignment (ANA) proposal is seductive. Indeed, today Latin America carries less weight than before on the world stage—both economically and politically—and at the same time United States–China tensions are increasing. Being passive in the international arena is not an attractive option, and neither is, in Latin America at least, siding openly with Washington or for Beijing. The thesis of an ANA, then, at least has the advantage of responding to these two concerns that many Latin American analysts have detected for some years.

However, the ANA also has some challenges and they are not easy to overcome. To give this innovative proposal the credit it deserves, it is imperative to identify those challenges and find a way, if possible, to overcome them. I see three initial challenges.

The first is the geopolitical and economic division of Latin America into two distinct spheres, largely determined by the relationship with the United States and with China of the countries in the region. The second is about the difficulty of being symmetrical in the approach and criticism of both superpowers. They are not the same. Third, for Latin America to develop a non-aligned and active international position, it would have to embrace causes that for many countries are still alien or that for many leaders in Latin America today are even anathema.

The division into two subregions occurs mainly through the way countries are linked to the global economy. However, for historical and geographical reasons this division also overlaps others. On the one hand, there is what we could call, following a North American tradition of the 1980s, the Caribbean Basin: Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean islands, and perhaps Colombia and Venezuela, although they rather belong to South America. The countries of the Caribbean Basin, in the first place, have been much more closely related to the United States than the countries of South America. Its main linkage to the world economy is with the United States through the export of manufactures, services—tourism and migration—and other illicit sales such as drugs.

A common thread through this book is that of an international system in transformation. It comprises a declining hegemonic power, new actors, and new configurations of alliances and rivalries, as well as new agendas and challenges.

The more precise characterization of this system elicits a variety of responses among the authors. Some suggest that we are in a multiplex world in the sense of Acharya: “defined by not having a single line of control, nor a meta-narrative about the global order” (Tussie), a “multi-theater cinema”(Heine), “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 dispersed and fragmented” (Roncagliolo and Campodónico). For others, there is an “entropic bipolarism” in which “to the increasingly disorderly and chaotic ‘diffusion of power,’ we must add a ‘transition of power,’ in which a rising power threatens the primacy of an established power” (Actis and Creus) or that of a situation of growing multipolarity—“or more precisely of bipolarity-multipolarity in the global systemic structure” (Armijo).

Yet, there seems to be a coincidence that, in the words of Serbin

Here, Serbin indicates the complexity of the new world by drawing attention to an emerging actor, Eurasia. This overlaps with the analysis of Stuenkel, who proposes the notion of a “Post-Western World” in the making, in which the conventional wisdom about the established international relations patterns in the last centuries is questioned.

It is in this scenario of uncertainty that the ANA proposal arises as a foreign policy doctrine based on certain key principles and not simply contingent interests. The ANA option should not be confused with a certain type of pragmatism that invariably ends in opportunism, doing nothing but eroding the credibility and standing of those who apply it.

Niklas Luhmann never claimed to be an expert on the arts. However, the German sociologist offers a highly instructive, comprehensive and theoretically consistent perspective on art in its various dimensions. Luhmann draws on extensive empirical and theoretical insights in order to develop a substantive theory that applies to different branches of art, including visual art, music, poetry and literature, performing arts, and their various subgenres. This approach is deeply embedded both in his general theory of social systems and his theory of society and its evolution. His definitive account on art, Art as a Social System, published three years before his death, applies to art major innovations in both of these theoretical fields, intertwining a structural description of the art system with an analysis of its evolution and differentiation as a function system in modern society. In particular, Luhmann sheds new light on core topics in the sociology of arts which include the production, reception and mediation of artworks.

Luhmann’s sociological interest in the roots of art poses a seemingly simple question: How is art possible? He rejects both ontological and normative concepts in answering this question. His interest does not lie in improving existing constellations, or realising hidden potentials. Rather, he insists that asking how art is possible requires that a society has already generatedwhat sociologists identify as art. Luhmann’s method investigates how social processes and structures have shaped what we know as art, assuming, however, that everything is contingent, and developments improbable. Potentially, art (as we know it) could be something totally different, or not existing at all. Starting with such an artificial irritation of supposed givens, sociologists need to understand how art has emerged in society. Rejecting teleological and deterministic concepts, Luhmann furthermore explains why developments have taken place that led to the evolution of an art system in society. Based on functional analysis, art in its various dimensions is assumed to be a solution (among a virtual multiplicity of functional equivalents) in relation to a problem located in society. This general research strategy leads to Luhmann’s comprehensive theory of art, in which art in form of artworks is analysed as a specific mode of communication.

Few people today remember a world not dominated by the United States. For more than half a century the latter has exerted a powerful influence across much of the world. The leadership and supremacy of the United States were a decisive feature of Latin America’s twentieth-century international relations and on how its regional relations evolved. The rise of Asia in general and China, in particular, have changed this. A plurality of power sources, economic drivers, and world views have flourished in the last decade. China’s sheer material presence on the global stage is shaping the behavior of most other states. This challenges our understanding of how we conceptualize and analyze practical regional cooperation around key issues of development and conflict.

Regionalism in the twenty-first century takes place in a post-hegemonic framework, one fundamentally different from what can be seen as the hegemonic moment of the twentieth century. As of this writing, the almost complete absence of US leadership has been a remarkable aspect of the global health crisis brought about by COVID-19. This has allowed China, Russia, and India to display what has been dubbed as vaccine diplomacy. China is seeking to expand health-related infrastructure and innovation capacity as part of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI). This speaks to the country’s broader push to position itself as a global health leader. This attempt—with both geopolitical and geoeconomic significance—has been characterized as being as ambitious as the launch of the Bretton Woods institutions and the Marshall Plan in the twentieth century combined. This has the potential to accelerate the shift in balance of the global standing between the United States and its competitors. Perceptions of the United States and its position at the center of the contemporary international order vary, but they have undoubtedly shifted over the last decade. Active Non-Alignment (ANA) and pragmatic regional cooperation are key for Latin America to come to terms with new times, new structures, and new development challenges.

Regionalism in a multipolar world order has its own logic. This is what makes intelligible the confusing mix of cooperation and conflict present in Latin America.

The previous chapter analysed the advice books with a focus on gender. Doing so makes it possible to analyse the ways the books reiterate and support cultural ideas about masculinity and femininity, about what it means to be a man or a woman, and what is expected of the growing boy. However, a focus solely on gender gives the impression that the books are homogenous, that they all represent mothers, fathers and sons in the same way. But, as Sharon Hays has pointed out, a mother’s approach to mothering is influenced by many different factors, such as ‘her class position, race, ethnic heritage, religious background, political beliefs, sexual preferences, physical abilities or disabilities, citizenship status, participation in various subcultures, place of residence, workplace environment, formal education’ (1996, 76). This is also evident in the advice books analysed here. The authors, in addition to their gender, come from different racial, class and educational backgrounds, and their intended readership is addressed, implicitly or explicitly, along race and class lines.

This chapter will thus take an intersectional approach, expanding the analysis to include race and class. This will allow for more complex readings, in order to highlight and explore the diversity amongst the books. At a first glance, they all seem to be the same: advice books aimed at single mothers raising sons. But when analysed from the point of view of race and class, their other concerns, strategies, assumptions, expectations and prejudices come to the surface. The single mother is constructed in different ways, depending on whether she is Black or White, working or middle class, and the aims and goals for the growing boys turn out to be different – individual happiness, fulfilling an expected destiny of success or becoming a valued, productive member of a community. When focusing on the added perspectives, the differences between the ways the books shape the reading subject are highlighted.

Intersectionality

In their book Intersectionality, Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge (2020) demonstrate how intersectionality as an analytic tool allows the scholar to study ‘a range of social problems’ moving beyond seeing people ‘as a homogenous, undifferentiated mass of individuals’ (2020, 4, 19).

This chapter examines how Latin American regional security actors are engaging with the competition between the United States and China. We look at two factors that raise challenges to the emergence of an active regional response to the systemic dispute. On the one hand, a network of institutions has evolved in the realm of defense diplomacy, led by Washington, which claims a hegemonic role in the sphere of security; on the other, there has been a decline of regional projects in general. We argue that the search for autonomy in the sphere of security in regional terms, a traditional discussion among Latin American scholars and political leaders, must confront these major challenges if the Active Non-Alignment approach (ANA) is to move forward. As relations between China and the United States will continue to impact international politics in the next decades, it is essential that regional actors embark on the admittedly difficult path of debate and negotiation leading to collectively deciding on a road that could enhance their autonomy.

We start by exploring the security dimension of the competition between China and the United States in Latin America. We then move to consider the history and features of the institutional network through which Washington’s influence in the region is being exercised. Finally, we look into the linkage between autonomy and regionalism, to the extent to which it has weakened in government postures and policies and to possible ways forward for its revival.

The Chinese–American Competition in Latin America

The past two decades have been marked by the growing Chinese presence in Latin America (Myers 2018). While Chinese economic and commercial interests are the key drivers of this trend, China has also invested in political and diplomatic relations. In the security sphere, we also see a move toward a greater presence.

China’s strategy includes advancing bilateral ties with Latin American and Caribbean (LAC) region countries, isolating Taiwan and increasing its presence in regional and multilateral organizations, in particular, the Organization of American States (OAS), where China was granted observer status in 2004 (OAS 2004), and the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), which China formally joined in 2009 (IDB 2009).

The explicit purpose of the advice books in this study is to help single mothers raise their sons. In doing so the authors outline a number of supposed problems, including how to teach and promote masculinity and how a boy can be made into a man without a man in the house. The stated intention of some of the authors is to rescue boys from a society that has turned its back on them and, in the process, get US society itself back on track. The unspoken assumption of a number of the authors is the conviction that humanity is dichotomous – that there is a basic, foundational difference between men and women. In this, the authors turn to scientific research that will support their claims that there are essential, biological differences between men and women, which will not only translate into differences in parenting carried out by mothers and fathers but also in insurmountable differences between mothers and sons.

The chapter begins with an overview of the concepts of sex and gender as they have been developed and applied by scientists as well as journalists and other lay people to support societal and cultural notions of masculinity and femininity. Then follows an overview of some of the central questions of masculinity studies, before moving on to an analysis of the advice books. The first section analyses the way the books construct and enforce perceived biological differences between men and women and, by extension, mothers and sons. Then follows an analysis of how the books construct masculinity, how this masculinity is intended to be taught to boys and what roles are afforded to the boys. The chapter concludes with an analysis of how heteronormativity is expressed in the books, both in terms of family structure and in assumptions of sexuality.

Sex and Gender

In 1972, sexologists John Money and Anke Erhardt published Man & Woman, Boy & Girl, in which they brought the view of sex and gender as ‘separate categories’ to a wider audience (Fausto-Sterling 2000, 3). In this view, sex pertains to body parts and reproduction, whereas gender is the ‘internal conviction that one is either male or female (gender identity) and the behavioural expression of that conviction’ (2000, 3).

Niklas Luhmann died in 1998. For illustrative purposes, it is an interesting exercise to remember what the world’s concerns were at that time. These were the days of the raw conflict in Kosovo, of the discussions on banning human cloning particularly in Europe. It was also the era of the Clinton–Lewinsky affair, the planning of attacks on Saddam Hussein’s Iraq for violations of peace agreements, and the long and winding trip of weapons inspectors through Iraq. India and Pakistan, countries that tested nuclear weapons and threatened each other, while US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya were bombed, presumably by Osama bin Laden. The 1997 Asian economic crisis hit Latin America strongly in 1998; with massive capital outflows and sharp currency depreciations, plunging the region into a crisis that lasted until 2003. In 1998, the Rome Statute was adopted by 120 States (and later ratified by 60 countries giving birth to the International Criminal Court in 2002), and 1998 was also the year in which the former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet was indicted and arrested by a Spanish magistrate in London for human rights violations committed during the military dictatorship that ruled Chile between 1973 and 1989. In 1998, Hugo Chávez was elected president in Venezuela, introducing the ‘socialism of the twenty first century’ to the world, a populist political system with ramifications relevant for Latin America even today. And if all that were not enough, Google was officially launched in 1998.

Turbulent and critical times far from equilibrium, as we may say in the language of complex systems. The chronological end of the twentieth century is closer to the entangled and contradictory dynamics of the twenty-first century than to the Cold War deflationary bloc politics that prevailed since 1945. Historically, it can be said that the twentieth century came to an end with the fall of the Berlin Wall, the disintegration of the Soviet Union, and the rise of the internet in the early 1990s. With this, politics and economy were released as world social systems in a twofold sense. First, they were freed from the structural and semantic forces that had contained their expansion, namely, the compulsion to understand every political operation as either supporting communism or capitalism and every economic operation as a question of capital or work.