scholarly journals What Determines Foreign Policy in Latin America? Systemic versus Domestic Factors in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico, 1946–2008

2015 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Octavio Amorim Neto ◽  
Andrés Malamud

AbstractIs it domestic politics or the international system that more decisively influences foreign policy? This article focuses on Latin America's three largest powers to identify patterns and compare outcomes in their relations with the regional hegemon, the United States. Through a statistical analysis of voting behavior in the UN General Assembly, we examine systemic variables (both realist and liberal) and domestic variables (institutional, ideological, and bureaucratic) to determine their relative weights between 1946 and 2008. The study includes 4,900 votes, the tabulation of 1,500 ministers according to their ideological persuasion, all annual trade entries, and an assessment of the political strength of presidents, cabinets, and parties per year. The findings show that while Argentina's voting behavior has been determined mostly by domestic factors and Mexico's by realist systemic ones, Brazil's has a more complex blend of determinants, but also with a prevalence of realist systemic variables.

Author(s):  
Leilah Danielson

Peace activism in the United States between 1945 and the 2010s focused mostly on opposition to U.S. foreign policy, efforts to strengthen and foster international cooperation, and support for nuclear nonproliferation and arms control. The onset of the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union marginalized a reviving postwar American peace movement emerging from concerns about atomic and nuclear power and worldwide nationalist politics that everywhere seemed to foster conflict, not peace. Still, peace activism continued to evolve in dynamic ways and to influence domestic politics and international relations. Most significantly, peace activists pioneered the use of Gandhian nonviolence in the United States and provided critical assistance to the African American civil rights movement, led the postwar antinuclear campaign, played a major role in the movement against the war in Vietnam, helped to move the liberal establishment (briefly) toward a more dovish foreign policy in the early 1970s, and helped to shape the political culture of American radicalism. Despite these achievements, the peace movement never regained the political legitimacy and prestige it held in the years before World War II, and it struggled with internal divisions about ideology, priorities, and tactics. Peace activist histories in the 20th century tended to emphasize organizational or biographical approaches that sometimes carried hagiographic overtones. More recently, historians have applied the methods of cultural history, examining the role of religion, gender, and race in structuring peace activism. The transnational and global turn in the historical discipline has also begun to make inroads in peace scholarship. These are promising new directions because they situate peace activism within larger historical and cultural developments and relate peace history to broader historiographical debates and trends.


2021 ◽  
pp. 46-67
Author(s):  
Gideon Fujiwara

This chapter begins by outlining Commodore Matthew Perry's arrival and the “opening” of Hakodate port. It analyses the crises of foreign policy and domestic politics of the United States and Japan after a historic treaty was signed to “open” Japan. With such awareness, the chapter documents Hirao Rosen's journeys to Ezo in 1855 and how he rediscovered “Japan,” its regional diversity, and its place within a larger global community. It reviews Rosen's observation on the governance of Matsumae castle town and Hakodate, as well as the diverse populations residing there. As an ethnographic scholar, he was perplexed to see peoples from the United States, England, and other European countries interacting freely, while noticing stark contrasts between the cultures and mannerisms of the Japanese and the Westerners. The chapter also discusses Rosen's documents on the local and Japanese cultures he encountered on the northern island, as well as the commonalities and differences in the seasonal festivals and ceremonies practiced locally and transmitted there from Tsugaru, Nanbu, and elsewhere in Japan. Ultimately, it focuses on Rosen's ethnographic inquiries on Tsugaru and Japan, and his engagement with kokugaku.


Author(s):  
Brian Schmidt

This chapter examines some of the competing theories that have been advanced to explain U.S. foreign policy. In trying to explain the foreign policy of the United States, a number of competing theories have been developed by International Relations scholars. Some theories focus on the role of the international system in shaping American foreign policy while others argue that various domestic factors are the driving force. The chapter first considers some of the obstacles to constructing a theory of foreign policy before discussing some of the competing theories of American foreign policy, including defensive realism, offensive realism, liberalism, Marxism, neoclassical realism, and constructivism. The chapter proceeds by reviewing the theoretical debate over the origins of the Cold War and the debate over the most appropriate grand strategy that the United States should follow in the post-Cold War era.


2010 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 1170-1172
Author(s):  
Robert Jervis

Foreign policy difficulties usually produce extensive scholarship. Vietnam led to numerous appraisals and reappraisals, many of which paralleled the protests in being heartfelt and radical. Perhaps because of the lack of a draft, Iraq's protests have been cooler and more muted, and the scholarship has tended to be more analytical and mainstream. James Lebovic's excellent study looks at both cases to drive home the argument that was part of the Vietnam critique: Even if the United States is the most powerful state in the international system, there are sharp limits to what it can accomplish, and its very power creates some of those limits (see William J. Fulbright, The Arrogance of Power, 1966)


2010 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 305-306
Author(s):  
Graciana del Castillo

This is a highly readable book that provides strong and rigorous arguments to prove a thesis that is intuitive to many but still denied by some—that the United States foreign policy of using military intervention, occupation, and reconstruction to establish liberal democracies across the world is more likely to fail than to succeed.


Almanack ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 244-277
Author(s):  
Bruno Gonçalves Rosi

Abstract Aureliano Cândido Tavares Bastos was one of the main ideologists of the Brazilian Liberal Party in the 1860s and 1870s. Through several books, pamphlets and articles, Tavares Bastos defended that Brazil should follow a greater political and administrative decentralization, granting greater autonomy to the provinces. Another way to summarize Tavares Bastos’s political thinking is to say that he had great admiration for the United States, and understood that Brazil should, within the possibilities, copy more the political model of this country. Thus, this text interprets the political thinking of Tavares Bastos emphasizing as central factor of this the proposal that Brazil should not only more closely copy US federalism, but also get closer to the US in its foreign policy.


Author(s):  
Noura Erakat

This chapter focuses on the United Nations's Palestinian “statehood” bid starting in 2011. In May 2011, the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO)/Palestinian Authority (PA) announced that it would seek membership as a state within the UN. The UN statehood bid would alter the PLO's status as a nonmember observer entity, conferred upon it by the UN General Assembly in 1974. While the benefits of UN membership, or in the alternative, a UN upgrade, are manifold, none of them guarantee Palestinian self-determination or freedom from Israeli control. The chapter suggests that this statehood bid could have been a pivot away from complete reliance on the United States to deliver independence and a return to multilateralism that positioned the world superpower as part of the problem rather than the solution. However, the promise of multilateralism, signaled by Palestinians in 2011, has not been realized. The Palestinian leadership has responded to the ever-diminishing potential of the US-brokered peace process with incremental steps into international forums.


2001 ◽  
Vol 70 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-225
Author(s):  
Roland Blaich

Nazi foreign policy was hampered from the start by a hostile foreign press that carried alarming reports, not only of atrocities and persecution of the political opposition and of Jews, but also of a persecution of Christians in Germany. Protestant Christians abroad were increasingly outraged by the so-called “German Christians” who, with the support of the government, gained control of the administration of the Evangelical state churches and set about to fashion a centralized Nazi church based on principles of race, blood, and soil. The militant attack by “German Christians” on Christian, as opposed to Germanic, traditions and values led to the birth of a Confessing Church, whose leaders fought to remain true to the Gospel, often at the risk of imprisonment. Such persecution resulted in calls from abroad for boycott and intervention, particularly in Britain and the United States, and threatened to complicate foreign relations for the Nazi regime at a time when Hitler was still highly vulnerable. In order to win the support of the German people and to consolidate the Nazi grip on German society, Hitler needed accomplishments in foreign policy and solutions to the German economic crisis. Both were possible only with the indulgence of foreign powers.


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