The author, a political scientist, says in his preface that his book “seeks to put the international behavior of the Latin American states in an analytical framework of explanatory and predictive power” (p. ix). To a mere historian this is a rather ominous pronouncement presaging much quasi-scientific jargon to come. Happily the fear proves largely unwarranted. With refreshing candor Bailey quickly concedes that “political science, as a science, is in its infancy” and has barely begun to meet “the most elementary requirements of a scientific discipline, definition, and measurement” (p. xv). In the text itself there is little jargon except for the persistent application of the concept of international society as a “hierarchical structure” composed of “paramounts” and “sub-paramounts,” with their respective “clients” composing “hierarchies” and “sub-hierarchies,” in addition to which there are “floaters” unattached to any hierarchy.
As applied to Latin America, this scheme produces interesting if not startlingly novel results. The Western Hemisphere paramounts, we read, have been Great Britain in the nineteenth century and the United States in the twentieth, though the latter has been challenged since 1954 (first in Guatemala) by an outside paramount, the Soviet Union. The Latin American states, we are further told, have always been clients and a very few have been or may become subparamounts, but not one of them is strong enough to qualify as a floater. If they cease to be clients of the United States, they must become clients of the Soviet Union, as in the case of Castro’s Cuba.
Holding that Latin America’s part in international relations “can only be understood by the combining of two elements—Latin America itself” as well as “the quasi-anarchic society of the sovereign state,” Bailey devotes more space to the former element than to the latter, more to Latin America’s past than to its present situation, and almost as much to its domestic history as to its foreign relations. The freshest of the book’s three main parts (“The Setting,” “The Challenge,” “The Response”) is the third, which describes the Latin American response as made in three ways: through law (notably the inter-American rule of nonintervention), through association (the League of Nations and the United Nations), and through union (from the Panama Congress of 1826 to the present-day Latin American Free Trade Association, or LAFTA). Another distinctive feature of the book is that it takes a hard-boiled, power-politics approach, although it holds that the Organization of American States “can continue to function effectively in many ways” (p. 122).
There are several errors and lacunae in the text and bibliography and no adequate appraisal of Latin America’s relations with Western Europe. Even so, this is the best book on its subject that has appeared in recent years, and it deserves the attention of all students of Latin American history in the national period. An appendix of documents, from the Monroe Doctrine to the LAFTA treaty of 1960, adds to the value of the book, but the index is deplorable.
