Creating Good Neighbors? Die Kultur- und Wirtschaftspolitik der USA in Lateinamerika, 1940-1946 (Creating good neighbors? American cultural and economic foreign politics in Latin America, 1940-1946). By Ursula Prutsch. (Stuttgart: Steiner, 2008. 476 pp. 56.00, ISBN 978-3-515-09009-4.) In German

Abstract

In this superb study of U.S. cultural and economic policy toward Latin America during World War II, Austrian historian Ursula Prutsch offers a wide-ranging analysis of the pursuits of the Office of Inter-American Affairs (oiaa). Based on extensive research in the National Archives and the Rockefeller Archive Center as well as work in other archives and research libraries in the United States, Britain, Argentina, Brazil, Germany, and Austria, Prutsch's remarkably rich monograph combines a survey of the oiaa's general policy with two extensive case studies of the oiaa's actual presence and concrete activities in Brazil and Argentina. Prutsch casts the oiaa—founded in 1940 to expand American influence and combat Nazi presence in the Western Hemisphere—as a “missing link” in U.S. foreign policy (pp. 12, 21, 129, 446). In its combining of public diplomacy, a civilizing mission, and economic promotion, the oiaa played a pivotal role in U.S. hemispheric policy during World War II, she argues, and the organization provided a template for subsequent U.S. practices in Latin America. Moreover, because the oiaa drew upon the model set by philanthropic organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation; involved networks of business, political, and cultural elites; and followed a trial-and-error approach, it was an innovative exercise in empire building that charted new pathways beyond the Western Hemisphere. According to Prutsch, the oiaa was a laboratory for the methods that U.S. policy makers came to employ in other parts of the world as part of their postwar plans for economic and cultural globalization.