Sozialdemokratie Global. Willy Brandt und die Sozialistische Internationale in Lateinamerika

Abstract

The culmination of two decades’ research, Sozialdemokratie Global. Willy Brandt und die Sozialistische Internationale in Lateinamerika is a high-level, political history of the Socialist International (SI) under Brandt’s presidency (1976–1992). Rother elevates Brandt’s SI engagement in a field of political history and biography dominated by attention to earlier periods. The book combines a chronological account of relationships among Latin American and Caribbean reform parties and European democratic socialists in the 1970s and 80s with case studies of practical SI involvement in regional conflicts (Nicaragua, El Salvador, the Falklands/Malvinas). Framed by a biographical orientation towards key actors and a concise summary and assessment of how increased attention to the SI in Latin America might illuminate modes of thinking about Cold War politics and diplomacy beyond national governments, each section converges on an image of the SI as exemplary of an emerging arena of loosely coordinated political action parallel to foreign policy classically conceived. Rother attends productively to the challenges of approaching the SI as a unified political actor. The organization’s ‘diffuse edges’ (p. 30), financial entanglement with and dependency on national party structures and the Friedrich-Ebert-Stiftung, and repeated failure to come to consensus around foundational documents, complicate but never negate its status as a recognized player in an era of political globalization.