As compared with Western Europe, the Middle East, East and Southeast Asia, and most recently Africa, Latin America has been remarkably free of international war during the last 160 years. In a continent supposedly characterized by a “political culture of violence,” the relative absence of major conflict among the countries of the area should offer lessons from which the rest of the world can learn. But the situation is likely to change, according to this important new study of South American geopolitics by Jack Child. Struggles for balance of power, irredentism, conflict among neighbors, and the practice of realpolitik are all likely to increase in the near future; Latin America will no longer be a region of peace.
Geopolitics in Latin America has not received sufficient attention by scholars. This may be due in part to our natural revulsion toward the subject of war and aggression. Geopolitical thinking may have been discredited because of its association in the interwar years with nazism and fascism. Perhaps we think that geopolitics is an old-fashioned idea. Finally, we may wish to disassociate ourselves from the regimes most closely identified with geopolitics: Pinochet and the Argentine and Brazilian generals. But Child shows how the concept is alive and kicking, and that it will extend beyond the recent period of military rule.
Child focuses on geopolitical thinking and ideology in South America. This thinking stems from both military and civilian elements. He argues that the use of geopolitical thinking and policy on the part of the South American states is due not just to the wave of military regimes that swept to power beginning in the 1960s but also to the decline of United States influence in the 1970s and the perception of the U.S. as a declining power unable to keep the peace.
Child shows the close relations between geopolitical thinking and the military’s particular conception of an organic-corporate state. In the case of those regimes and countries where geopolitical thinking has been strongest (Argentina, Brazil, and Chile), the organic-corporate state took a particularly militaristic and Darwinian form. The author has written a fascinating chapter on geopolitics and the national security state in which he shows how the geopolitical national security doctrines require both aggressive actions by these regimes against dissidents within their own population, and competition with other nations for scarce resources, space, and influence in a hostile environment. Students of Latin America often do not appreciate the harsh and brutal implications of these teachings, but Child is correct in arguing that we cannot understand contemporary Latin America without coming to grips with them.
The book contains case studies of South American geopolitics and conflict: Argentina-Chile, Chile-Bolivia-Peru, Peru-Ecuador, Argentina-Brazil, Colombia- Venezuela, as well as the more generalized conflict over Antarctica, the Malvinas/Falklands crisis, and competition and influence in the South Atlantic.
The book is well organized but rather woodenly written. It raises as many questions as it answers, and it cries out for more detailed treatment. A major omission is the entire lack of any discussion of geopolitics and conflict in the contemporary Caribbean and Central America. Still Child has done pioneering work on an important but little-known subject. His own conclusion is quite negative on the implications of geopolitical thinking in Latin America. He is correct, however, in drawing our attention to its importance.
