Rivalry and alliance politics in Cold War Latin America. By Christopher Darnton: Beyond the eagle's shadow: new histories of Latin America's Cold War. Edited by Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Mark Atwood Lawrence and Julio E. Moreno

Abstract

Rivalry and alliance politics in Cold War Latin America. By Christopher Darnton. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2014. 304pp. Index. Pb.: £29.00. ISBN 978 1 42141 361 7. Available as e-book. Beyond the eagle's shadow: new histories of Latin America's Cold War. Edited by Virginia Garrard-Burnett, Mark Atwood Lawrence and Julio E. Moreno. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. 2013. 352pp. Index. £34.00. ISBN 978 0 82635 368 9. The two books under review reflect the extent to which the study of Latin America's role in the Cold War has moved away from an earlier paradigm that viewed regional developments and outcomes as predominantly a function of US policy preferences and initiatives in a clearly defined East–West struggle which supposedly enmeshed the region at almost every level. Political scientist Christopher Darnton's self-assured, vigorously argued, thought-provoking, intellectually demanding, hypothesis-driven work is easily the more ambitious of the two volumes: it attempts to make a novel theoretical, empirically supported contribution to the study of the persistence, and occasional termination, of historical interstate rivalries that ultimately seeks to expand its thesis beyond the chronological and geographical confines of Cold War Latin America. He finds the explanatory power of the theories currently propounded in the International Relations literature under the realist, liberal and constructivist umbrella to be inadequate in accounting for the achievement of bilateral rapprochement between erstwhile foes at specific junctures. He develops a ‘parochial interest’ theory to explain why state agencies—mainly the armed forces, but also foreign ministries—in certain circumstances block rapprochement initiatives pursued by national executives in an environment of common external threat—international communism or, later, Islamist terrorism—that is usually considered to be the anvil on which alliances are forged; as well as how these vested interests are overcome in situations of resource constraint and when the said state agencies are simultaneously presented with an alternative mission to ‘rivalry maintenance’. This parochial interest theory, he argues, best explains the success of the 1980 presidential summit between Argentina and Brazil after three conspicuous failures in 1947, 1961 and 1972; the purported end to Honduran–Nicaraguan ‘rivalry’ in 1961 following acceptance by one side of an arbitral award; and Argentine–Chilean rapprochement in 1984 just a few years after being on the brink of war. The failure to achieve rapprochement in the cited instances—between Bolivia and Chile, El Salvador and Honduras, Algeria and Morocco—is attributed to the absence of the requisite constellation of factors that are present at the right moment in the primary case-studies. In this dynamic, the role of the United States is found to be much more peripheral than is commonly presumed.