In this impressive book, Christopher Darnton presents a new theory to explain both the persistence and resolution of international rivalries within broader alliances. Although most of the analysis focuses on Latin America in the context of the Cold War, Darnton’s “parochial interest” approach offers important lessons that he convincingly applies to the current challenge of overcoming rivalries to build coalitions in the Global War on Terrorism.
Darnton argues that in order to understand why some rivalries persist even in the face of a common foe, scholars should look to parochial interests within states, rather than enmity between them. Specifically, he claims that armed forces, foreign ministries, and other state agencies frequently maintain rivalries in order to protect their own vested organizational interests and only accept rapprochement when both an alternate mission and economic constraints are present. The alternate mission—frequently counterinsurgency—gives these groups a new justification for continuing to receive resources and exercise influence, while the economic constraints force them to choose between missions rather than simply adding new ones. Darnton traces this practice of internal obstructionism by following the evidentiary trail of two abnormal diplomatic behavior patterns present during failed attempts at rapprochement: sabotage on the part of state agencies, and presidential “end runs” (appointing alternative agents, conducting secret summits, using hotlines and personal communications, and other such tactics) to circumvent those agencies.
Darnton draws on a wide range of controlled, comparative case studies from across Latin America to test his parochial interest theory against other possible realist, liberal, and constructivist explanations. Each chapter compares one successful case of rivalry resolution, or rapprochement, with other failed attempts. The first and most detailed set of case studies looks at multiple efforts to resolve the long-standing rivalry between Argentina and Brazil. It compares the failed presidential summits of 1947, 1961, and 1972 with the successful summit of 1980 that finally marked the achievement of rapprochement. Darnton argues that despite similar political systems and a shared interest in fighting communism, the two countries were unable to resolve their tensions until the constraints of the economic crisis of the late 1970s and early 1980s forced the armed forces and foreign ministries of both countries to choose between the seemingly more urgent counterinsurgent mission and their centuries-old rivalry.
While the chapter on Brazil and Argentina examines a single conflictive relationship across multiple decades, Darnton’s second and third sets of synchronic case studies control for time and compare the effects of resource availability and alternative missions on rivalry maintenance. In an examination of three Central American rivalries in the years immediately following the Cuban Revolution, Darnton contends that even though the governments of Honduras, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and El Salvador all shared the alternate mission of fighting Cuban-inspired insurgencies, only Honduras and Nicaragua experienced enough economic constraints to compel their armed forces to abandon interstate tensions and focus exclusively on the new mission. In contrast, Costa Rica and El Salvador were more prosperous and could count on support from the United States, which allowed them to both fight insurgents and maintain their conflicts with Nicaragua and Honduras, respectively. And in the last set of Latin American Cold War case studies, the author returns to South America to compare the effects of the 1980s debt crisis on Andean rivalries. He finds that even though all the countries in the region suffered from resource constraints in this period, only those with an alternate security mission—Chile and Argentina—were able to resolve tensions with each other. In Venezuela, Ecuador, and Bolivia, however, the armed forces never adopted the alternate mission of counterinsurgency, and so they clung to their rivalries in order to defend their vested institutional interests.
Darnton includes a final case study from the Global War on Terrorism to demonstrate that these lessons about parochial interests are not limited to the Cold War or Latin American contexts. After acknowledging the limits of analysis by historical analogy, he argues that there are enough similarities between the two global struggles to warrant a careful comparison. He examines the case of Morocco and Algeria, where a long-standing rivalry continues in spite of a clear common threat—this time, jihadist insurgents instead of communist ones. He traces similar telltale patterns of abnormal diplomatic behavior in this case, including presidential end runs and domestic sabotage, and shows that state agencies in both Morocco and Algeria have not faced the sort of resource constraints that would compel them to sacrifice a mission of rivalry in order to accommodate a new, counterinsurgent one. As this situation is still evolving and evidence is less available, it is impossible for Darnton to be quite as confident in this chapter as in the rest of the book, but he still manages to make a compelling case for the influence of parochial interests in preventing rapprochement between Morocco and Algeria.
This is a valuable book for a number of reasons. It addresses a topic—inter-American relations—that has received relatively little attention in the U.S. academy. Darnton makes excellent use of a wide range of sources and methodologies, including impressive multilingual and multicountry archival work. His engagement with research by Latin American scholars is especially noteworthy. I expect that political scientists will find a great deal of merit in his theory of parochial interests, and I know that historians of Cold War Latin America stand to benefit from his many insights into the subject, especially his connections between foreign and domestic politics and his argument that the United States played only a peripheral role in many of Latin America’s Cold War conflicts. Policymakers would also do well to read this book, as Darnton offers a number of counterintuitive recommendations on alliance building and conflict resolution. Most importantly, by highlighting the role of resource constraint in resolving rivalries, he shows that the U.S. policies of foreign aid and capacity building can actually undermine coalitions by perpetuating rivalries.
Darnton concludes by raising crucial ethical questions about the human costs of policy alternatives that national leaders and scholars alike should confront. Although he passes up the opportunity to weigh in on these ethical matters, the information in his book should help others to do so in an informed, responsible manner.
