The Routledge Handbook to the Political Economy and Governance of the Americas

Olaf Kaltmeier, Anne Tittor, Daniel Hawkins, Eleonora Rohland, Olaf Kaltmeier, Anne Tittor, Daniel Hawkins, Eleonora Rohland

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9781351138420
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Economy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This handbook explores the political economy and governance of the Americas, placing particular emphasis on collective and intertwined experiences. Forty-six chapters cover a range of Inter-American key concepts and dynamics.

The flow of peoples, goods, resources, knowledge and finances have on the one hand promoted interdependence and integration that cut across borders and link the countries of North and South America (including the Caribbean) together. On the other hand, they have contributed to profound asymmetries between different places. The nature of this transversally related and multiply interconnected hemispheric region can only be captured through a transnational, multidisciplinary and comprehensive approach. This handbook examines the direct and indirect political interventions, geopolitical imaginaries, inequalities, interlinked economic developments and the forms of appropriation of the vast natural resources in the Americas. Expert contributors give a comprehensive overview of the theories, practices and geographies that have shaped the economic dynamics of the region and their impact on both the political and natural landscape.

This multidisciplinary approach will be of interest to a broad array of academic scholars and students in history, sociology, geography, economics and political science, as well as cultural, postcolonial, environmental and globalization studies.

PART I

Political Economy in the Americas

Edited by

Anne Tittor

FRIEDRICH-SCHILLER-UNIVERSITY JENA

Daniel Hawkins

NATIONAL UNION SCHOOL OF COLOMBIA

In collaboration with

Bernhard Leubolt

KATHOLISCHE SOZIALAKADEMIE ÖSTERREICHS

1

Introduction

Political Economy in the Americas

Anne Tittor and Daniel Hawkins

Economic and social structures in different societies and communities across the Americas and the Caribbean are very much connected and, in many ways, entangled. An Inter-American approach offers a novel way of more adequately identifying and examining these structures, drawing on recent debates in cultural and postcolonial studies in the humanities and social sciences. It challenges traditional conceptualizations and their tendency to essentialize and universalize concepts that are grounded in local experiences. Furthermore, Inter-American approaches welcome the important contributions of non-academic actors, especially from social movements and the field of cultural production, in harnessing new meanings and concepts which are key to understanding the diverse interconnections of all types of human interaction across the Americas and the Caribbean.

Inter-American approaches as a new lens within political economy

The Inter-American focus is increasingly discussed in media studies (see The Routledge Handbook to Culture and Media of the Americas), migration research, as well as transborder studies and has gained ground in history with perspectives such as Entangled Histories and Global History (see The Routledge Handbook to History and Society of the Americas). In the field of political economy and governance, the Inter-American approach is still a relatively new perspective. Nonetheless, the key ontological starting point of Inter-American perspectives on political economy and governance is to highlight the multidirectional flows and entanglements of politics and economic production and exchange, across and within the diverse regions of the Americas and the Caribbean. Herein, attention is paid to the heterogeneity of these interactions, which throughout history have been much more complex and multifaceted than is often depicted by perspectives which only highlight the North-South structural power inequalities. Without negating these power asymmetries, it is important to stress their perpetually evolving dynamics. The historically unequal market relations between Canada, the USA, Latin America, and the Caribbean influenced the institutional architecture of the nation-states of the region. As the discourses of development and underdevelopment set hold and were gradually molded within policy, visions of governance and notions of political and economic opportunities as well as constraints were affected, as is discussed in detail in the entry on Development (→ II/6). Nonetheless, neither these discourses or the economic exchange (industrial goods in North America and mineral and agricultural commodities from Mexico to the South) that undergirded Inter-American relations, during colonialism and after independence, were completely binary and path dependent. For example, even after the formulation of the Pax Americana development paradigm based on the Three Worlds – officially projected in Harry Truman’s inaugural presidential address in 1949 (Escobar 1998) and institutionalized via development missions, such as the one led by Lauchlin Currie to Colombia in the same year (Sandilands 2015) – many countries of the Americas continued orienting state policy in line with more heterogenous proposals made by leading Latin American scholars, such as Raúl Prebisch and his team at the Santiago-Based ECLAC (Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean) offices (Prebisch 2016).

Nonetheless, efforts to disentangle Latin American and Caribbean societies from the nexus of economic and political power further north need to be understood within the two-pronged structures of the “coloniality of power” (Quijano 2007) and the boom-bust cycles of capitalism and their distinct manifestations and impacts depending on, to a great extent, the asymmetrical but systemically linked production and export structures found across the region. The changing historical forms and theories of the state express the changes in social relations and how the local, regional, and global were articulated and crystalized in the concrete forms of state apparatuses and discourses, as is discussed in the entries on State Transformation (→ II/21), Capitalism (→ II/2), and Crises (→ II/4) in this volume. The North American version of Fordism-Keynesianism both influenced and was shaped by the evolving regimes of accumulation that emerged across the Americas in the Post-World War II period. Their transregional interactions display the complexity of shaping and conceptualizing models of production and their modes of governance, socialization and the multiple terrains of contestation they face, as discussed in the entries on Fordism (→ II/10) and Transnational Corporations (→ II/23). Furthermore, the practices and discourses of imperialism not only engendered processes of socio-cultural, economic, and political emancipation, but were also often emblazoned in the images of the multiple and diverse guerrilla groups (both urban and rural) that rose across Latin America and the Caribbean from the 1950s onwards. The battle of ideas went beyond the policies of distinct U.S. governments, from Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress to Nixon and Reagan’s War on Drugs, or of Castro’s project to vanquish U.S. dominance in the region and unify Latin America along the lines of Simón Bolívar’s vision at the beginning of the 19th century. The 20th century was rife with social processes of transnational collaboration and support in the fields of labor, human rights, indigenous, and environmental struggles, to name only a few (Anner 2011).

The transregional nature of these interactions forged common fronts of political and economic contestation, many of which were institutionalized in diverse ways across the Americas, becoming key factors of influence in how trade union movements, for example, organized themselves, both in terms of their representation, nationally and regionally, as well as how their alliances shifted across space and time, points that are well covered in the entry on Labor Representation (→ II/14). Furthermore, even the coffee economy, of primary importance to the economic development of Brazil and Colombia as well as many Central America countries, especially throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, evolved along disparate institutional and regional lines in each country due in much part to the intricate social and market relations producers and their respective national coffee federations maintained with U.S. toasters, traders, and the U.S. Government (Topik and Samper 2006).

Economic structures and capitalist dynamics beyond borders

The inter-American perspectives, developed within the study field of political economy, are especially useful in crossing boundaries (spatial, historical and conceptual) as a means of examining the diverse interactions between political and economic structures and the agency of territorially based but regionally and globally bound social actors. The emergence of the neoliberal project, geographically located in the Chile of Pinochet’s initial period, but ideologically and institutionally tied to the political and academic platforms projecting change in the USA and their consolidation through U.S.-backed military interventions and the dominance of Reagonomics across the region during the 1980s, is well illustrated by the entry on Neoliberalism (→ II/16). The entry on Privatization (→ II/17) moves on from here, reflecting on how concrete policies to privatize state assets across the Americas were justified by the emerging elite consensus against what was perceived as excessive state intervention in economic affairs. But the implementation of such doctrines, although more emphatic in Latin America than elsewhere, also encountered more acute opposition and social conflict, a reflection of its enormous social impact, while also molding many of the tensions in state-market-society relations in the intervening decades across the region, with distinct manifestations dependent on the specific institutional configurations and sectoral foci of actual privatization projects. In a similar manner, the entry on Deindustrialization (→ II/5) discusses a common pattern in different nation-states across the Americas, heavily influenced by the changing hegemonic ideas concerning the principle objectives of economic policy. As the entry shows, across the entire continent, millions of industrial jobs were lost, while at the same time there was a trend toward financialization and the installation of export-processing zones, commonly known as maquiladoras; both resulting in the demise of industrial hubs and the simultaneous growth of peripheral neighborhoods across the geographies of the mega-cities and other urban centers of the Americas.

Examining the inter-American entanglements from within the field of political economy permits a more fluid conceptualization of the ongoing changes within structure-agency in concrete socio-spatial contexts. For instance, looking at the ever-more complex modes, forms, and varieties of economic activity across the Americas, from within this lens, highlights the multiple entanglements between the spheres of economics and politics, allowing one to delve into how agency molds evolving structures to create patterns of integration along global commodity chains, which are transformed through the processes of cooperation and competition by lead firms and other downstream and upstream agents. The diverse reconfigurations of distinct chains of sectoral economic interaction (for example, the automotive, textile, and agro-industrial and mining sectors) and their socio-spatial manifestations across the Americas and the Caribbean are well encapsulated and summarized in the entry on Global Commodity Chains (→ II/12).

Land, without doubt is positioned at the crux of issues concerning how wealth and power are distributed within and across societies. In the Americas, with its complex practices of colonialism and imperialism, conflicts over access to, use of, and ownership of land have always been central themes that influence development models, state forms, and broader social conflict. While the social sciences tend to examine land conflicts from within the lens of conflicts between nation-states over their territorial boundaries, inter-American perspectives, grounded in the field of political economy and combining other fields such as agrarian studies and ecology, as discussed in the entry on Land (→ II/15), examine the social implications of different types of land appropriation and land use over time and across geographies, as well as give voice to the processes of social resistance to such projects and processes.

Overcoming methodological nationalism and Eurocentrism

Inter-American perspectives on key concepts from the field of political economy allow for fruitful discussions and reflections on how socio-economic power structures in the Americas were historically constructed and how they operate today, either spreading or becoming fractured due to the heterogeneity of the interactions between social groups within and across the Americas. They allow for more fluid discussions of the multiple political, economic, and social relations that connect people throughout the Americas and shape the societies of the continent. Most of the contributing authors to this volume faced the challenge of having to grapple with the fact that the literature they refer to rarely discusses the advantages and disadvantages, or at least the complexities involved in pursuing an Inter-American approach. Nevertheless, the editors asked for the discussion of a certain term and its relevance for societies in North-, Central-, and South America, as well as the Caribbean, and that they offer reflections regarding the multifarious interactions and relations between them. Most authors refer to literature that can be located in the field of Global Political Economy, and as such, even though these texts may adopt different theoretical frameworks (often Liberal, Marxist, or Realist), implicitly, they often reproduce universalizing hypotheses that perceive the market, the state or the capitalist mode of production as being omnipresent, always shaping the object of analysis despite the concrete place at which a certain development is evolving. Other literature sources are framed within the Latin American Studies field (an academic arena constructed in Europe and the U.S. during the Cold War period, which is strongly susceptible to tendencies of othering). Finally, also highly influential is the literature from within the field of Development Studies, which stresses the importance of inequalities between certain world regions, but often has an underlying idea of progress modeled in a Eurocentric and unilinear way.

This is not the only challenge. The disciplines of Sociology, Political Science, Economics and Anthropology have emerged and evolved over the past two hundred years very much rooted in the nation-state project and a system of academia that has encouraged the compartmentalization of knowledge production. Economy, society, and social problems are – in most cases implicitly – confronted in reference to a specific nationally defined society and often underestimate transnational and transborder dynamics. The disciplines emerged within bourgeois-capitalist industrial social spaces and – with a few exceptions – referred to specific nationally defined societies, the French, the German, or the English. Additionally, these societies systematically ignored the dynamics of colonialism and imperialism, which make transparent their position of power within the world (Boatca 2016, 1). They conveniently overlook the crucial influence that colonialism and enslavement played in their recent history. As argued by Wimmer and Glick Schiller (2003, 107), it is important to understand how concepts, such as the modern nation-state and national populations, developed not in insular territorially constrained spaces, but rather in transborder ones, across which colonial and imperial domination and ideologies evolved alongside counter discourses of popular sovereignty and movements of independence. In recent decades, a growing number of authors have stressed the need of thinking beyond the nation and of transcending methodological nationalism (Levitt and Khagram 2008; Vertovec 2009). However, while this critique pervades the field of study of international relations, political economy, embedded in its epistemological starting point of examining the interactions between states and markets from within the framework of capitalism and its intrinsic drive to expand globally through time-space compression, is helpful in moving analyzes beyond the confines of nation-states and the international system. Despite this caveat, in practice, much of the related literature is still often drawn toward the supposed centrality of the nation-state.

Related to the conceptual pull of the nation-state as being the key realm of explanatory pertinence, an additional, but related, problem is that many of the concepts are not only developed within the nation-state paradigm, but also with a universalist gesture. European and Euro-American colonial expansion and domination constructed a division of universal/superior versus particular/inferior knowledge. This was done by viewing others in the 16th century as “people without writing” and in the 18th and 19th century as “people without history.” Such colonial perspectives were transformed, particularly after the Second World War, into the academic mantra of “people without development” (Escobar 1998) and more recently, in the early 21st century, of “people without democracy” (Grosfoguel 2011, 7). Current discussions, for example about the state and its transformation (→ II/21), are still shaped by ideas of a Western, democratic, well-organized state which is constituted against the construction of a “failed state,” which threatens both itself as well as global stability and security (Rotberg 2002, 5). In this kind of thinking, the West is blessed with certain positive attributes such as an inherent drive toward democratic institutions, while any of its authoritarian experiments are conveniently ignored (for example, the Inquisition, and the governments of Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Salazar, among others) and antidemocratic practices such as colonialism, the slave trade, and imperialism, which all have their roots in Western rule (Stam and Shohat 2012, 65). Additionally, they tend to obscure the m...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Academic Advisory Board
• Acknowledgments
• General Introduction
• PART I: Political Economy in the Americas
• PART II: Geopolitics and Governance in the Americas
• Index