This splendid new survey incorporates and distils more than a decade of a new generation of scholarship that understands the relations between the United States and Latin America as a two-way street, sensitive to cultural, social and economic dynamics, and not limited to the activities of state actors. The book achieves the difficult goal of bringing together many strands of new research (including the author's own work on US corporations) into a satisfactory and coherent whole. The narrative of the book pays due attention to treaties, doctrines, and corollaries to doctrines, but its main innovation comes from showing with telling examples how the activities of non-state actors such as US foundations, corporations, businesspeople, missionaries, labour unions, academics, tourists and journalists, as well as the cultural impact of the press, film and television, have mattered in inter-American relations.
The basic argument is that all these actors and official Washington types (not always different individuals given the revolving door from official positions to corporations and foundations) were shaped by shared experiences and values that gave them a sense of mission. They had a general feeling of responsibility to save Latin America from its failure to adopt faithful copies of US institutions and values voluntarily. The book is particularly successful in showing how social, economic and cultural dynamics internal to the United States have routinely updated and reinvigorated its desire to improve the people down south. Historical change transformed how the United States' perceived superiority to Latin America would be articulated. The book shows how racist views used to rationalise campaigns against Native Americans and the continuation of slavery in the South also justified expansionist adventures in Latin America like the war with Mexico and the shenanigans of filibusters in the 1850s. With rapid economic growth after the Civil War, the mission was to civilise Latin peoples in need of better habits, including consumption and production habits. By the end of the century the US civilising mission took a distinct imperialistic tone with the Spanish–American War and subsequent occupation of Cuba. Thereafter the missionary zeal went into high gear; US activities in the region included not only the expansion of markets and the strategic repositioning advocated by Mahan, but also using the invasions of Caribbean countries ‘to dislodge the remnants of European influence, promote U.S. business interests, and launch campaigns of civilization focused on rationalized government procedures, improved education and public health, and the general promotion of market forces’ (p. 94).
With the Great Depression and the Second World War, a United States that had discovered the virtues of government intervention to promote economic recovery at home redefined once again its civilising mission. Leaving behind the attitude of racial superiority, the mission became the promotion of development. The job of uplifting Latin America was paired with the desire to fight communism. Racial superiority was replaced by social science. Latin Americans were no longer inferior because of their darker skin; they were simply behind in the path to development, and could use some help. They were traditional but capable of being modernised. Modernising Latin Americans was to be an enlightened way to keep the communist conspiracy at bay. Thus, the author proves that condescension has been a durable and malleable guiding force. Using this perspective it is not difficult to extend the argument and discover a civilising agenda behind the relentless preaching of the Washington Consensus gospel of the 1990s.
The inclusion of businesspeople and corporations in a foreign relations survey is hardly novel, but this book moves beyond dependency-theory approaches that concentrate on telling the story of the exploitation of peripheral Latins by the United Fruit Company or Anaconda Copper. O'Brien includes fascinating discussions on the more complex influence exercised by business concerns. In Mexico, for example, Sears Roebuck introduced US-style consumerism with advertising campaigns, store displays and an expansion in the practice of consumer credit. In Venezuela, Creole Petroleum sought to modernise the community; it provided educational and medical services to its workers and gave them loans to encourage home ownership, with a vision ‘based on U.S. postwar suburbs and stressing the American belief in “democratic” capitalism’ (p. 196). Private foundations were as important as businesspeople and corporations in advancing the US agenda. The book includes insightful discussions on the Rockefeller Foundation's health and Green Revolution programmes, and on the Ford Foundation's promotion of modernisation theory and its scholarship programs to train young Latin Americans at the powerhouses of neoliberal economics, such as the University of Chicago. After reading these sections the reader is left in no doubt about the importance of considering the impact of foundations on Latin America. The book is equally successful in showing how Protestant missionaries and labour unions helped to shape inter-American relations.
A significant theme that runs through the book is the analysis of Latin American responses to the missionary zeal coming from the north. O'Brien makes a great effort to show how Latin Americans were not willing to roll over and accept the imposition of institutions, cultural influences, business projects or military invasions. The rejection, resistance, partial embrace, refashioning, reinterpretations, selective adoption, and combinations and iterations of the above are an important part of the story.
Even though recent years have witnessed the publication of a number of good surveys on US–Latin American relations, this work stands out as unique thanks to its distinct early-twenty-first-century sensibility. To end on a pedagogical note: the book works extremely well when used to guide class discussions. Not surprisingly, timely topics such as the civilising mission in Iraq spring up naturally. I have assigned this survey to my students and would encourage anyone teaching courses on this topic to do the same.
