Латинская Америка в сотрудничестве Юг–Юг на фоне противоречий глобализации

Abstract

Received 05.11.2020. The research focuses on the participation of Latin American states in the South-South cooperation (SSC) against the background of the contradictions of the current stage of globalization. Analyzing the official documents, leaders’ speeches, using quantitative data, the authors consider three factors that model such involvement today: (a) a new context in Latin America, i. e. the growing popularity of the right-wing forces, financial and economic difficulties after the end of the commodities boom in the 2000s, (b) the rise of China and its deepening confrontation with the United States, (c) today’s global coronavirus crisis. According to the authors, all the mentioned factors affect the process of Latin America taking part in SSC in the following ways. First, due to internal and international changes, the foreign policy agendas and the way of self-identification of the Latin American countries in the global world are in transformation. While the cooperation with other developing nations, within the region and beyond, seems less relevant for the New Right, the South-South vector is still in demand as a foreign policy diversification tool. Second, the strategic partnership with China remains an indicator of the region’s actors’ commitment to the ideas of multilateralism, openness, and globalization as such, but at the same time, it goes against the principles of SSC as equal and horizontal by its nature and also because of the tensions between China and the US. As for the pandemic, although in discourse it revives the importance of international cooperation, including SSC, in practice it rather catalyzes the disconnecting trends that have developed in recent years in Latin America. Acknowledgements. The reported study was funded by RFBR, project number 19-014-00042 А “Latin America in the new world order: prospects and challenges”.