The Pan-american Dream

Do Latin America's Cultural Values Discourage True Partnership With The United States And Canada?

Lawrence E. Harrison

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9780429975660
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Politics
• Index: Politics & International Relations

The initiative of Presidents George Bush and Bill Clinton to forge a Western Hemisphere community has been staggered by Mexico's economic and political crisis. Is this latest grand design for the hemisphere destined to follow John Kennedy's Alliance for Progress and Franklin Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy into the cemetery of frustrated Pan-American dreams? The United States and Canada are prosperous first-world countries with centuries-old democratic institutions; Latin America's countries are poor and, in most cases, experimenting with democratic capitalism for the first time. Can a coherent, durable community like the European Union be constructed with building blocks so different?Why are the United States and Canada so much more prosperous, so much more democratic than is Latin America? Why has it taken so long for Latin America to conclude that democratic capitalism and good relations with the United States are in its best interest? And what might be done to enhance the prospects for a dynamic community in the Western Hemisphere?These are the questions Lawrence Harrison addresses in The Pan-American Dream. Central to the contrasts between Latin America and the United States and Canada are the fundamental differences between the Ibero-Catholic and Anglo-Protestant cultures, reflected in contrasting views of work, education, merit, community, ethics, and authority, among others. But, as he stresses, cultural values and attitudes change, and Pan-Americanism can be more than a dream.A Pan-American community depends on shared values and institutions, as the community now embracing the United States and Canada demonstrates. Experiments with democracy and the free market in Latin America will help strengthen the values that lie behind the success of the United States and Canada, Western Europe, and East Asia. But if Latin America's political and intellectual leaders do not confront the traditional values and attitudes largely responsible for the region's underdevelopment?with sweeping reforms in education and child-rearing practices, for example?realization of the Pan-American dream will be painfully slow and uncertain.

1
The Roots of the Divergence: Anglo-Protestant versus Ibero-Catholic Culture

In the five centuries since Columbus stumbled upon the New World in his quest for a western sea route to Asia, the colonies and subsequent countries of the Western Hemisphere have followed very different paths that have led to striking contrasts in their circumstances at the end of the twentieth century. The United States and Canada, where democratic institutions and capitalism tracking back to the colonial period have been refined and blended to promote high levels of national progress, have evolved from remote, dependent colonies of Britain or France into the dominant of the three contemporary regional poles of world power: North America, Western Europe, and East Asia. The United States and Canada have their problems, of course, but many stem from success, and they seem almost trivial by comparison with the problems Latin America confronts.

Spain's and Portugal's former colonies, which had a century's head start and are half again more populous than the United States and Canada, are today roughly half a century behind them with respect to the maturity and stability of their political institutions, prosperity, and social justice. It is only in recent years that democratically elected governments have predominated in Latin America, and many of the democratic experiments are precarious. The standard of living is roughly one tenth that of the United States and Canada. Distribution of land, income, wealth, and opportunity is highly inequitable by the standards of the advanced democracies.

Contrasts in progress have reinforced colonial origins—British versus Iberian—in defining the nature of relationships in the Hemisphere. The United States and Canada, both affluent, behave essentially like members of a family—some ideological, institutional, and psychological differences notwithstanding—occasional spats and all. Citizens feel at home in each other's countries and cross the border frequently, and with remarkably little hassle, to visit. They trust each other substantially, a trust born of shared values and similar institutions; the greatest volume of trade between any two countries in the world; an intricate web of relationships that include private enterprises, social and professional organizations, the arts, and sports; and a tradition of intimate cooperation in defense matters. The foregoing applies particularly to anglophone Canada, but it is also substantially true of fran cophone Quebec Province.

Relationships among the Latin American countries are facilitated by common culture, including language. But those relationships are less comprehensive, less open, less trusting than that between the United States and Canada, and border disputes that sometimes erupt into threats or even violence are common—for example, between Honduras and El Salvador, Venezuela and Colombia, Peru and Ecuador, Chile and Argentina.

At the root of the troubled relationship between the United States and Latin America during the past century is the imbalance in progress and power between them. (Canada has been substantially exempt from the North-South tension because its population is one-tenth that of the United States; its projection of power and influence into the world is correspondingly smaller; and it is geographically more remote from Latin America and the Caribbean.) The imbalance is reflected, in the extreme, in repeated U.S. interventions in the Caribbean Basin, motivated chiefly by fear that chronic instability, particularly in Nicaragua, Haiti, the Dominican Republic, and Cuba, would be exploited by adversaries—Germany at the time of World War I, the Soviet Union and Cuba during the cold war. The imbalance is more generally reflected in the tone of post—World War II relationships, at least until the past few years: often mistrustful and adversarial, and commonly referred to in government and academic circles as "the dumbbell"—the United States at one end, Latin America at the other.

The Special Case of the English-speaking Caribbean

The English-speaking Caribbean countries, all former British slave colonies, are, with about 6 million people, tiny by comparison with the rest of the Hemisphere.¹ (Latin America has about 425 million people, the United States about 260 million, Canada about 30 million.) They have been generally more successful than Latin America in building democratic institutions and social justice, modestly more successful in economic development. All gained independence from Britain after World War II. With the exception of Belize and Guyana, all are islands.

Relationships between the United States and the English-speaking Caribbean have benefited from a common language and the common British heritage. But the vast discrepancy in power and economic progress as well as racial issues and the cold war have produced episodes of tension and conflict: the excesses of Black Power, particularly directed against tourists in the 1970s; the first term of Michael Manley in Jamaica in the mid-1970s, when he tilted toward Fidel Castro; the invasion of Grenada in 1983. These episodes notwithstanding, relations between the United States and the English-speaking Caribbean countries have generally been warmer and more open than those between the United States and Latin America. The relationship is even warmer between Canada and the English-speaking Caribbean, fellow members of the British Commonwealth. The level of development of the Caribbean countries places them closer statistically to Latin America than to the United States and Canada. But common language and institutions make for easier communication with North America.*

To be sure, the English-speaking Caribbean preserves strong ties with the United Kingdom, including preferential trade access to Europe under the Lomé Convention

Some interesting questions related to culture arise in the context of the English-speaking Caribbean, particularly with respect to the political and economic diversity among the various countries. The political stability of Barbados is not representative: the bounds of democratic conduct have frequently been overstepped, for example, in Trinidad, Guyana, Grenada, and Antigua. Nor is Barbados's prosperity ($6,540 GNP per capita in 1992) representative: in the same year, the per capita GNP of Guyana was $330 and of Jamaica $1,340; that of neighboring St. Vincent and the Grenadines was $1,990, and Belize, Grenada, and Dominica were only slightly higher. I argued in Underdevelopment Is a State of Mind that extensive acculturation to British values, attitudes, and institutions explains Barbados's political and economic success. The quite different conditions in, for example, neighboring St. Vincent and Grenada and distant Jamaica suggest a less complete degree of acculturation, the reasons for which would be well worth investigating.

But the English-speaking Caribbean is not a major actor in the Western Hemisphere, and its continuing ties to the U.K. and Europe are underscored by a comment a U.S. government official made to me early in 1995: "The English-speaking Caribbean doesn't see itself as a member of the Western Hemisphere community." Nor have its own efforts at economic and political integration through the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) been particularly successful. To be sure, many people from the English-speaking Caribbean have migrated to the United States. The flow from Jamaica, in particular, has been so substantial that Caribbean expert Anthony Maingot has labeled it a "binational" society, along with Haiti and the Dominican Republic.² And the area also plays a role in narcotics trafficking (see chapter 10).

But the English-speaking Caribbean is peripheral to the central question this book addresses—the possibility of a genuine community that embraces the more than 700 million people of Latin America, the United States, and Canada—and, except as the English-speaking countries may play a role in issues like immigration and narcotics, they will not be addressed further here.

New Meaning to the Western Hemisphere Idea

What is sometimes referred to as the "Western Hemisphere idea" was first articulated by President James Monroe at the time the former Spanish colonies to the south were gaining their independence. But the Monroe Doctrine, enunciated in 1823, was not so much a vision of a hemispheric community as a warning to European powers to stay out of the Hemisphere. It has been interpreted by the Mexican intellectual and politician Adolfo Aguilar Zinser as a declaration of hegemony (see chapter 8). But, in fact, the United States repeatedly shied away from association with Latin America for much of the nineteenth century.

It was not until 1889 that the U.S. committed itself to a concrete expression of the Western Hemisphere idea, joining with the Latin American republics to create an organization known first as the International Union of American Republics. The Union's trade orientation was apparent from the name of its executive organization: the Commercial Bureau of the American Republics. The name of the Bureau was changed to the Pan American Union in 1910. In 1948, the role of the organization was expanded to incorporate a collective security treaty and to strengthen the mechanism for peaceful settlement of disputes, and the name was changed to the Organization of American States.

Within a few decades of that first hemispheric meeting, and particularly in the wake of U.S. involvement in Cuba during and after the Spanish-American War and the interventions in Nicaragua, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic at the time of World War I, Latin America's chief security concern had shifted from European interventionism to Yankee interventionism. Through the years of Franklin Roosevelt's Good Neighbor Policy, World War II, the cold war and the Cuban Revolution, John Kennedy's Alliance for Progress, and the malaise of the 1970s and 1980s, the Western Hemisphere idea translated for Latin America into a blend of respect, cooperation, resentment, mistrust, and hostility that has often been referred to as "the love-hate relationship" with the United States.³

While the relationship between Latin America and the United States was born in amity (to be sure, a passive amity on the part of the U.S.), the relationship between Canada and the United States was born in hostility. Nova Scotia, the Eastern Townships of Quebec, and what would become Ontario and New Brunswick were largely populated by colonials who sided with Britain during the American* Revolution and who fled northward from what would become the United States. The hostility persisted through the War of 1812, one of the American objectives in which was the expulsion of the British from, and annexation of, Canada. Thereafter, relations steadily improved between the United States and "the British provinces of North America," and in the 1850s, following Britain's repeal of the Corn Laws at the expense of Canada's trade preferences, the Canadians considered severing the link to Britain and joining the United States. Liberalization of British policies led in 1867 to Canada's Dominion status. By 1876, the United States had displaced Britain as Canada's principal source of imports; by 1920, the United States had displaced Britain as Canada's principal market; Canada subsequently became the principal market of the U.S. and the principal source of its imports.

The two countries were allies during World Wars I and II and the cold war, and in 1988 they took a major step toward merging their economies by signing the Canada-U.S. Free Trade Agreement (CUFTA), which became the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with the accession of Mexico in 1994. After decades of avoidance of the OAS, mostly because of presumed U.S. domination of it, Canada finally signed up in 1989.

In recent years, and particularly since the collapse of communism—the alternative to democratic capitalism favored by many Latin American intellectuals and politicians—the Western Hemisphere idea has taken on new significance. Mexico's joining with the United States and Canada in NAFTA is the most dramatic evidence of the shift. But there are several other developments that add substance to what was heretofore far more rhetorical than real.

Pressures are growing from other Latin American countries to join NAFTA, and it is U.S. policy to encourage those aspirations, in part as a hedge against regional trading blocs in Europe and East Asia, particularly should the worldwide trading system embodied in the new World Trade Organization falter. (At the 1994 Miami summit, Chile was designated the next candidate for NAFTA membership.) Latin America's new eagerness to engage the United States in trade and investment relationships is a startling departure from a decades-long—and extremely costly—strate-gy of avoiding "dependency" and "economic imperialism" by avoiding the world market, a departure that symbolizes a huge rethinking of ideology and policy. As recently as the 1980s, Mexico's NAFTA initiative would have been viewed throughout Latin America—and particularly in Mexico, the foundation of whose foreign policy for decades was anti-Americanism—as akin to thrusting one's head into the mouth of the lion.

The wave of democratization in Latin America of the last fifteen years, given impetus by the collapse of communism, adds substance to the Western Hemisphere idea, as does the rejection of nationalistic and statist economic policies, which have universally been displaced by free-market, open economic policies—except in Cuba. So does growing awareness of environmental problems and the realization that they do not stop at national borders, as we were reminded by the highlighting of environmental issues in the NAFTA negotiations with Mexico. The massive flow of immigrants, legal and illegal, from Latin America and the Caribbean to the United States and Canada poses major questions of economic, social, and cultural absorption in the receiving countries, at the same time increasing the human and economic ties between the sending and receiving countries. The vast narcotics trade is a tragic, destructive bond between the South and the North in the Hemisphere, one that threatens the social fabric of the consuming countries and the democracy and stability of the producing countries.

For good or bad, cultural diffusion has intensified in both directions. Television and the movies in Latin America and Canada are often the creations of Hollywood and New York, but Spanish-language radio and television stations are increasingly numerous in the United States. Popular music and food fads move freely in both directions, as do literature and the arts. Baseball remains the dominant sport linking the United States, Canada, and the Caribbean Basin. But soccer, the national pastime in most Latin American countries, has caught on in the United States, particularly after it hosted the 1994 World Cup competition. Canadian football is very similar to American football, and most of the players in the Canadian Football League are Americans. American football is popular in Mexico. And it may not be too many years before there are major league baseball, National Football League, National Hockey League, and National Basketball Association teams both south and north of the border.*

The Power of Culture

How far will the expanding web of trade, business, family, cultural, and other relationships go? Is it possible that the resentment, mistrust, disrespect, and hostility that have often characterized relationships between the United States and Latin America for more than a century will pass into history to be replaced by the attitudes one associates with good friends, or even family, as in the relationship between the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Dream or Reality?
• 1 The Roots of the Divergence: Anglo-Protestant versus Ibero-Catholic Culture
• 2 Canada and the United States: Siblings, Not Twins
• 3 Latin America and the United States: Can Two So Divergent Paths Merge?
• 4 The Destructive Role of American Intellectuals (and the Savaging of the United Fruit Company)
• 5 Argentina: First World to Third World?—And Back?
• 6 Brazil: Is the Future Now?
• 7 The Chilean Miracle: Policies, Culture, or Both?
• 8 Mexico: The Failure of a Revolution, the End of a Dynasty
• 9 Trade and Investment: From "Imperialism" to Integration?
• 10 Narcotics: A Grotesque Distorting Mirror of Both Cultures
• 11 Immigration: The Latinization of the United States?
• 12 Conclusion: Democracy and the Free Market Are Not Enough
• Notes
• Index