Thomas C. Field, Stella Krepp, Vanni Pettinà, eds. Latin America and the Global Cold War. The New Cold War History Series. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. xii + 422 pp. $39.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-4696-5569-7.
Reviewed by Miles Culpepper (UC Berkeley)
Published on H-LatAm (December, 2020)
Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University)
In recent years, historians concerned with Latin America’s relationship to the outside world have stressed the importance of “de-centering the United States” to better understand the complexities of specific national and local historical contexts, as well as the agency and political acumen of Latin American actors. The important new volume Latin America and the Global Cold War makes a significant intervention in this ongoing scholarly project. Taking as a given that Latin American actors have agency and that US elites have rarely been able to dictate outcomes in the region precisely to their liking, the authors instead trace out Latin America’s relationship to the rest of the global south during the 1960s and ’70s, when the Third World Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was at the heights of its powers.
As editors Thomas C. Field Jr., Stella Krepp, and Vanni Pettinà note in the introduction, this is a neglected topic. Diplomatic historians have long been interested mostly in US policy, and Latin Americanists generally prefer to analyze historical change at the national or local level. Scholars of Third World movements, for their part, have often neglected Latin America in favor of Asia and Africa. The editors argue that this neglect has given rise to an inward-looking, provincialized history of the Americas. Their project is to “bring Latin American history out of its Western Hemisphere ghetto” and provide “a more global perspective” (p. xi). Notably, some fifteen years after the publication of Odd Arne Westad’s seminal monograph The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (2005), there has been relatively little work carried out by specialists to explain how Latin America fits into Westad’s influential analytical framework, which saw the story of the Cold War as primarily a struggle waged by the postcolonial world for political and economic sovereignty, rather than just a series of proxy wars fought between two superpowers vying for power on the international stage. The contributions here represent the most sustained effort to date to understand where Latin America fits into this larger narrative. Westad himself adds a thoughtful, though short, conclusion to the volume on Latin America’s “Third World moment” of the 1960s and ’70s.
The book is divided into two major sections. Contributions to the first section, “Third World Nationalism,” deal with efforts by Latin American political elites to make use of Third Worldist rhetoric of anti-imperialism and neutralism to serve the national interest. Miguel Serra Coelho discusses the slow, halting efforts to build a bilateral relationship between Brazil and India from 1948 to 1961. Field offers a sharp analysis of the foreign policy strategy carried out by the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario (MNR) government led by Víctor Paz Estenssoro in Bolivia, who sought to play Washington, Havana, and Prague off of each other, without provoking backlash from the left or the right at home. Pettinà discusses the efforts by Mexican and Soviet policymakers to build a commercial relationship in the early 1960s, arguing that the failed push for rapprochement speaks to a search for sovereignty in Mexican foreign policy. Krepp analyzes Brazil’s relationship to the broader NAM, arguing that though the NAM appealed more to Brazilian statesmen on the basis of economic development rather than anti-imperialist politics, Brazil’s engagement with the NAM still speaks to the existence of an independent foreign policy. Sarah Foss’s chapter examines community development models in Guatemala in the early 1960s, where local elites used the country’s Third World status as a tool to drum up foreign aid from Washington in the name of democracy and development, even as the aid was used to prop up authoritarianism. Michelle Getchell’s contribution captures the contradictory role of Cuba, the most prominent Latin American member of the NAM. Fidel Castro’s efforts to cultivate an ambitious and independent foreign policy resulted in sharp tensions with his Soviet patrons, while his loyalty to the Soviet Union undermined his ability to position himself as a true Third World neutralist. Last, David Sheinin provides an analysis of Argentina’s engagement with Third World nationalist discourse, concluding that its tercera position was mostly a “vague statement of intent” (p. 194).
The second section, “Third World internationalism,” focuses on Latin American efforts to build transnational connections across the global south. Alan McPherson provides a fascinating account of how efforts to build transnational solidarity networks opposed to US military occupations in Haiti and the Dominican Republic in the early twentieth century were hampered by anti-black racism. Tobias Rupprecht discusses the continued admiration of the Soviet Union in left-wing Latin American intellectual circles (and surprisingly, among some conservative Catholics as well) deep into the 1970s. Eric Gettig analyzes Castro’s efforts to defeat US efforts to isolate Cuba through engagement with other Latin American countries and the NAM. Eugenia Palieraki’s essay covers Algerian-Chilean relations, arguing that an informal transnational network between the two countries eventually evolved into a sustained diplomatic relationship, initially organized along Cold War principles but later built around the concept of Third World solidarity during the Salvador Allende years. Christy Thornton argues for Mexico’s centrality in the push for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) in the 1970s, tying the NIEO to a longer tradition of political and economic sovereignty in postrevolutionary Mexican diplomacy. Miriam Elizabeth Villanueva offers an incisive analysis of the geopolitical maneuverings of Omar Torrijos that resulted in the Carter administration agreeing to relinquish control of the Canal Zone. Last, Eline van Ommen argues compellingly for the importance of the Sandinistas’ diplomacy in Western Europe prior to their victory in Nicaragua in 1979.
Taken together, the contributions trace a history of Latin America’s engagement with the Third World project, politically, intellectually, rhetorically, and economically. The book is at its best when its contributors clearly articulate the stakes to their larger project of globalizing Latin American history rather than merely highlighting a gap in the literature. To their credit, most of the essays here make a compelling case for the larger stakes of the project. Understandably, the contributions mostly center on the 1960s and ’70s, but the book might have benefited from a clearer statement of the broader context of the Third World moment in Latin American history. Westad, in the volume’s conclusion, offers brief comments on the historical context that preceded and followed this Third World phase in the Americas. It is a missed opportunity that only a handful of the book’s contributors consider this broader context, leaving a number of interesting questions left unanswered. For example, looking beyond the exceptional period of the 1960s and 1970s, how should we characterize Latin America’s connections with Africa and Asia? In a similar vein, the book might have benefited from more work addressing how the legacies of Iberian colonization of the Americas shaped Latin America’s position in the NAM. The NAM, after all, was composed mostly of societies that had shaken off systems of colonial rule far more recently than Latin America, and the colonialism that they had fought against was in many ways quite distinct from what existed in Spanish America and Brazil centuries earlier, or for that matter, the informal empire forged in Latin America by the United States (Puerto Rico, the Americans’ formal Latin American colony, is conspicuously underrepresented in the book). For their part, many of the Latin American politicians and intellectuals who participated in the Third World project were arguably as much the heirs of the local criollo elites of the colonial period as they were the anti-colonial rebels who challenged Iberian colonialism, a peculiar dynamic that goes unexamined in the book.
These are, in the end, minor complaints, and speak less to the shortcomings of the volume and more to the need for further research on this fascinating topic. As a whole, the book succeeds in its important goal of globalizing Latin American history. The contributors have greatly expanded our knowledge of the complex relationship that developed between Latin America, the global south, and the socialist bloc during the heyday of the NAM. The volume will certainly find its way onto syllabi and qualifying exam lists for many years to come, as an invaluable supplement to international histories of Latin America that remain too narrowly focused on the Western Hemisphere.
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Citation:
Miles Culpepper. Review of Field, Thomas C.; Krepp, Stella; Pettinà, Vanni, eds., Latin America and the Global Cold War.
H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews.
December, 2020.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55848
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