Neither/Nor: Latin America's Response to Neoliberalism and Neoconservatism

MARTIN PLOT; ERNESTO SEMÁN

Constellations. An International Journal of Critical and Democratic Theory

Blackwell

Lugar: Oxford; Año: 2007 vol. 14 p. 355 - 372

1351-0487

The turn of the century has inspired both nation-states and entire regions to reinterpret their past and re-imagine the times ahead. Major international actors went through this experience. On the one hand, 2001 witnessed the inauguration of a new US administration that decided to forget the nineties and restore the international situation to the period at the immediate aftermath of the Cold War. The goal was to recreate the conditions that would allow them to enact the international order that neoconservatives imagined in the early nineties but could not find the political agent willing to put it into practice until George W. Bush came to power. According to the neoconservative narrative, neither Bush father nor Clinton implemented a foreign policy inspired in the idea of a unipolar world – and that was a terrible mistake. Once in office then, the goal of deconstructing the system of international institutions in place during the ColdWar became immediately visible. But it was 9/11 that created the conditions needed to speed up the implementation of the neoconservative vision. This was not the only major shift that dominated the international landscape in the new century. Needless to say, the other international actor involved in 9/11 – al Qaeda – also used the event to speed up its own vision of the new century and its attempt to claim political and intellectual leadership over one billion Muslims around the world by achieving a global polarization with the United States. In this paper we will suggest that the changes taking place in Latin America during the past years are the third major political shift that has characterized the inauguration of the new century– and that this change is contemporary with, and in part a reaction to, the impact of the neoconservative agenda in the international community. We will also suggest that the neoconservative foreign policy – a political phenomenon – generated this reaction particularly in Latin America because it immediately followed the nineties’ so-called neoliberal reforms – an economic phenomenon – and its devastating consequences. To put it differently, what happened is that the hyper-political neoconservatives of the past years followed the anti-political neoliberals of the nineties and both contrasted with the space of democratic politics that had recently been re-enabled in the region during the transitions to democracy. This, in short, is fundamentally what lays behind the wave of left-of-center electoral victories in contemporary Latin America. Revista indexada en: Academic Search (EBSCO Publishing) Academic Search Premier (EBSCO Publishing) IBSS: International Bibliography of the Social Sciences (ProQuest) Philosopher´s Index (Philosopher´s Information Center) PhilPapers POIESIS: Philosophy Online Serials (PDC) ProQuest Central (ProQuest) ProQuest Research Library (ProQuest) Social Services Abstracts (ProQuest) SocINDEX (EBSCO Publishing) Sociological Abstracts (ProQuest) Worldwide Political Sciences Abstracts (ProQuest)