Latin America and the Active Non-Alignment Option
November 29, 2021
About the author:
Jorge Heine, Research Professor at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, Non-Resident Wilson Center Global Fellow at Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, and Former Ambassador of Chile to China
The recent round of major summit meetings, including the G20 in Rome and COP26 in Glasgow, has underlined how urgent it is for Latin America to rethink its approach to the conduct of its international relations. Although three Latin American countries, Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, are part of the G20, and countries from the region participated actively in Glasgow, the region was far from coming up with a common position. The region has been the most affected by the pandemic. With eight percent of the world’s population, it has endured 30 percent of the fatalities caused by Covid-19. Yet, even this has not led to greater regional coordination. If anything, the pandemic has only increased the divisions we have seen in the past few years. If this were to continue, Latin America would keep losing weight in international affairs, moving from its current peripheral position to one of utter marginality.
It is for that reason that in a recent book, with my colleagues Carlos Fortin and Carlos Ominami, we have set forth what we have called the Active Non-Alignment option for Latin America.[1] This proposal is rooted in a certain diagnosis of the current international system. The latter is transitioning from the United States’ “unipolar moment” to a very different “multiplex world,” in the words of Amitav Acharya, in which the Global South is bound to play a much more significant role.[2] The world’s geo-economic axis has shifted from the North Atlantic to the Asia-Pacific, and we are moving towards what Oliver Stuenkel has referred to as a Post Western World. But the foundations for this new building are being laid now. Those that do not partake in laying the bricks and cementing the walls, will have to conform themselves with rooms in the basement or in the attic. The main rooms will all have been occupied by the time the building is up and running.
As Italian philosopher Antonio Gramsci put it, the crisis erupts precisely when the old dies and the new is not yet born. And that is the conjuncture we find ourselves in right now. The old rules no longer hold, and nobody knows what the new ones are. The United Kingdom, in its
infinite wisdom, leaves the European Union, the biggest market in the world. The United States creates an unnecessary spat with France, a 200-year-plus ally, to curry favor with a finis terrae power like Australia; the pandemic highlights the North-South divide, yet there is no sense of urgency to fight the virus in the developing world.
In this context, the distribution of power in the world is highly unfavorable to Latin America. This was so even under the best of circumstances and has only gotten worse in recent years. Thus, our proposal of Active Non-Alignment. Some have suggested a “mini-lateralist” approach, a low-profile foreign policy, so as not “to rock the boat”, and not “upset the apple-cart”. We think that it is too late for that. The crisis has reached such a boiling point that we need a comprehensive approach, one that provides broad guidelines and a certain direction to the foreign policies to be followed. The basic principle is NOT to take sides in the current tensions between the United States and China but to put the national interest of Latin American countries front and center. The last thing the region needs is to be caught up in geopolitical power struggles, not of its making.
The Active Non-Alignment option draws on the honorable tradition of the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM), of autonomy and independence from the big powers, based on the principles of political self-determination, mutual respect of sovereignty, non-aggression, non-interference in internal affairs and, equality. In the fifties and sixties, many developing countries refused to be drawn into the Cold War being fought between the United States and the Soviet Union. The same principle holds today, as the pressure to take sides with one or another of the big powers grows. At the same time, it responds to the realities of the new century and the rise of this Post Western World mentioned above. The future is no longer being forged in Europe or in North America. It is being forged in Asia, the most dynamic and fastest-growing continent.
The old Third World gave way to a New South, and the action today is in China, in India, and in the countries of ASEAN. The diplomacy of the cahiers des doleances of yesteryear, the one that fought, in the seventies and eighties, for a New International Economic Order (NIEO), albeit from a position of weakness, is displaced by what Leslie Armijo has called “collective financial statecraft”. Entities like the Asian Investment and Infrastructure Bank (AIIB) and the New Development Bank (the so-called “BRICS bank”) address the challenges of the Global South from a position of strength. Five Latin American countries, namely Ecuador, Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina, and Chile have joined the former as full members, and Brazil and Uruguay, the latter.
The strengthening of regional bodies, a commitment to multilateralism, regional coordination in matters of global economic governance and a radical reorientation of foreign policies and of the priorities of foreign ministries are some of the steps any such policy of Active Non-Alignment would entail. The time is now.
This article is from the November issue of TI Observer (TIO), which is a monthly publication devoted to bringing China and the rest of the world closer together by facilitating mutual understanding and promoting exchanges of views. If you are interested in knowing more about the November issue, please click here:
[1] Carlos Fortin, Jorge Heiney Carlos Ominami, El No Alineamiento Activoy America Latina : Una doctrina para el nuevo siglo. Santiago: Catalonia, 2021.
[2] Amitav Acharya, The End of American World Order. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2018.
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