“‘We Need Not Be Ashamed of our own Economic Profit Motive”: Britain, Latin America, and the Alliance for Progress, 1959–63’

Bevan Sewell

doi:10.1080/07075332.2014.940995

Abstract

This article traces British policy discussions over their position in Latin America between 1959 and 1963. In particular, it looks at the way British officials interacted with the John F. Kennedy administration's flagship Alliance for Progress and examines the reasons behind the gradual support for a more engaged UK policy toward the area. This decision, it argues, came about due to a complex set of reasons that challenge the idea that the Anglo-American relationship determined British policy during the cold war. Both the cold war and Anglo-American relations were important in shaping British thinking, but so, too, were calculations over British economic interests. Indeed, as the article demonstrates, it was the interplay of these three elements that shaped British deliberations.

Highlights

55 Memorandum from the Permanent Under-Secretary at the Foreign Office to Sir Andrew Cohen, October 27 1961, FO 371/155765, TNA
‘Whenever a question involving credit for, or investment in, Latin America comes up,’ he argued, ‘we have found ourselves compelled to give these countries what one could only call least favoured nation treatment.’[27]. To be sure, the Treasury were not entirely unsympathetic
At a conference of the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a British report noted that, in recent years, the Latin American ‘economic position has turned acutely for the worse’[65] and that the ‘Alliance for Progress has unquestionably run into stormy seas.’[66]. This, coupled with the fact that British observers were fearful that their European competitors were rapidly moving ahead in the region, seemed to point in the direction of supporting a change in British policy.[67]