Latin America’s Pivot toward Asia

Dragonomics ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 229-240
Author(s):  
Carol Wise

This concluding chapter summarizes the book’s conceptual framework with regard to China’s economic integration with select LAC countries since 2000. The author disputes realist interpretations of China’s rise in Latin America as a security threat to US hegemony and argues that China needed to internationalize its development strategy to compensate for its natural resource deficit. China’s ten LAC strategic partners now represent the majority of trade, loans, and FDI outflows from China to Latin America, and China is now the second-most-important trade partner for the region after the US. This relationship is contributing to the development of select LAC countries in order to propel China’s own growth and development. The author then moves to the political economy scenarios that have evolved within those LAC countries that have the strongest trade links and FDI inflows from China, in order to dispute the critique of neo-dependency scholars before offering the main takeaways.

Author(s):  
Evangelos Siskos ◽  
Konstantia Darvidov

About 2/3 of the EU trade is the intra-EU trade, but the extra-EU trade pro­vides additional demand for the European products and is a source of necessary supplies. It is especially important for some products and services. Despite a de­creasing trend, the US continues to be an important trade partner for the EU. But prospects for transatlantic integration turned into rise of protectionism, which wor­ries the EU politicians. In the paper we assess the fiscal and protectionist role of tariffs for the EU-US bilateral trade and the determinants of the US imports.


Author(s):  
Sally-Ann Treharne

US involvement in Nicaragua during the Reagan administration became synonymous with subterfuge, illegal and covert operations, a disregard for congressional and public approval, and the infamous Iran–Contra scandal. Nicaragua was a country of significant strategic geographical importance to the US due to its central location in Latin America. It provided the Reagan administration with a chance to quash the perceived communist threat in the form of the Sandinista government. Thus, US involvement in Nicaragua was characterised by deep-rooted Cold War suppositions. Removing the Sandinistas from power became one of the foremost foreign policy objectives of the Reagan administration. US hegemony in the region was threatened by what the Americans saw as a Marxist proxy in Latin America in the guise of the Sandinistas. Nicaragua’s close association with Cuba and the Eastern bloc fuelled US fears of Marxist expansionism in the region. Reagan could not, nor would not, allow the US to be further isolated in its own backyard.


Author(s):  
Jeffrey Lawrence

This chapter focuses on a paradigmatic misencounter between an American experiencer and a Latin American reader. Examining an implicit debate about the sources of Walt Whitman’s poetry and vision of the Americas, I argue that Waldo Frank, one of the twentieth century’s main literary ambassadors from the US to Latin America, positioned Whitman as the representative US writer whose antibookish experiential aesthetics could serve as a model for “American” writers both in the North and in the South. I show how Frank’s framework provided a foil for Borges’s idiosyncratic view that Whitman’s poetry about America derived entirely from his readings of European and US writers. Although much of the best scholarship on Whitman’s reception in Latin America has concentrated on poets like José Martí and Pablo Neruda, who adapted Whitman’s naturalism, I contend that Borges’s iconoclastic portrait of Whitman as a reader profoundly influenced a range of anti-experiential literary theories and practices in Latin America.


Author(s):  
Timothy Doyle ◽  
Dennis Rumley

In the twenty-first century, the Indo-Pacific region has become the new centre of the world. The concept of the ‘Indo-Pacific’’, though still under construction, is a potentially pivotal site, where various institutions and intellectuals of statecraft are seeking common ground on which to anchor new regional coalitions, alliances, and allies to better serve their respective national agendas. This book explores the Indo-Pacific as an ambiguous and hotly contested regional security construction. It critically examines the major drivers behind the revival of classical geopolitical concepts and their deployment through different national lenses. The book also analyses the presence of India and the US in the Indo-Pacific, and the manner in which China has reacted to their positions in the Indo-Pacific to date. It suggests that national constructions of the Indo-Pacific region are more informed by domestic political realities, anti-Chinese bigotries, distinctive properties of twenty-first century US hegemony, and narrow nation-statist sentiments rather than genuine pan-regional aspirations. The book argues that the spouting of contested depictions of the Indo-Pacific region depend on the fixed geostrategic lenses of nation-states, but what is also important is the re-emergence of older ideas—a classical conceptual revival—based on early to mid-twentieth century geopolitical ideas in many of these countries. The book deliberately raises the issue of the sea and constructions of ‘nature’, as these symbols are indispensable parts of many of these Indo-Pacific regional narratives.


Languages ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 46
Author(s):  
Patricia González Darriba ◽  
Benjamin Kinsella ◽  
Crystal Marull ◽  
Nathan Campbell

The rising population of heritage speakers (HS) in university courses in the US has increased the need for instructors who understand the linguistic, social, and cultural profiles of their students. Recent research has discussed the need for specialized courses and their differentiation from second-language (L2) classes, as well as the intersection between HS and language attitudes. However, prior studies have not examined HS students’ language attitudes toward the sociolinguistic background of the instructors and their effect on classroom interactions. Therefore, this study explores HS students’ overall language attitudes and perceptions of their instructors’ sociolinguistic background. In a survey, HS university students (N = 92) across the US assessed four instructor profiles along five dimensions. Results showed that students rated more favorably instructors born and raised in Latin America, followed by those from Spain. Furthermore, HS favored these two profiles over HS or L2 profiles as their course instructors. However, preferences were less marked in the online context. These findings demonstrate that to design supportive learning spaces with—rather than for—HS students, programs must first acknowledge how classroom dynamics are shaped by the perspectives brought into the learning space and by the context of the learning space itself.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Kenneth M. Roberts

Abstract Polarization may be the most consistent effect of populism, as it is integral to the logic of constructing populist subjects. This article distinguishes between constitutive, spatial and institutional dimensions of polarization, adopting a cross-regional comparative perspective on different subtypes of populism in Europe, Latin America and the US. It explains why populism typically arises in contexts of low political polarization (the US being a major, if partial, outlier), but has the effect of sharply increasing polarization by constructing an anti-establishment political frontier, politicizing new policy or issue dimensions, and contesting democracy's institutional and procedural norms. Populism places new issues on the political agenda and realigns partisan and electoral competition along new programmatic divides or political cleavages. Its polarizing effects, however, raise the stakes of political competition and intensify conflict over the control of key institutional sites.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-19
Author(s):  
Sidney Xu Lu

Abstract This article explains how the US westward expansion influenced and stimulated Japanese migration to Brazil. Emerging in the nineteenth century as expanding powers in East Asia and Latin America, respectively, both Meiji Japan and post-independence Brazil looked to the US westward expansion as a central reference for their own processes of settler colonialism. The convergence of Japan and Brazil in their imitation of US settler colonialism eventually brought the two sides together at the turn of the twentieth century to negotiate for the start of Japanese migration to Brazil. This article challenges the current understanding of Japanese migration to Brazil, conventionally regarded as a topic of Latin American ethnic studies, by placing it in the context of settler colonialism in both Japanese and Brazilian histories. The study also explores the shared experiences of East Asia and Latin America as they felt the global impact of the American westward expansion.


2021 ◽  
pp. 205789112110145
Author(s):  
Renato Cruz De Castro

This article examines how the ASEAN is managing the quintessential security challenges of the 21st century, particularly China’s emergence as a regional power, its expansive territorial claim in the South China Sea, and the US–China strategic rivalry in the Indo-Pacific region. As an organization tackling these security concerns, the ASEAN lacks the essential mechanism for conflict resolution, operates through informal diplomacy and moral suasion, and relies on consensus in making decisions. As a result, China has effectively divided the association during the talks on the peaceful settlement of the South China Sea dispute. China is currently formulating with the ASEAN a Code of Conduct of Parties in the South China Sea. All the same, China has made sure that any future agreement with the ASEAN imposes no constraints on its expansionist moves in the contested waters, and contains provisions that benefit its interests in the long run. Meanwhile, US–China strategic competition has prompted the ASEAN to think of ways to deal with this potential security threat. However, the association has failed to come up with a common strategy. In conclusion, this article argues that China’s emergence as a regional power, its maritime expansion into the South China Sea, and the US–China geopolitical contest are testing both the capacity and the limits of the ASEAN in resolving these security issues.


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