Strategic Culture(s) in Latin America: Explaining Theoretical Puzzles and Policy Continuities 0367692155, 9780367692155

Table of contents :
Foreword xi
ARIE M. KACOWICZ
Introduction 1 FÉLIX E. MARTÍN, NICOLÁS TERRADAS, AND DIEGO ZAMBRANO
PART I
The Theoretical Framework 17
1 The Concept of Strategic Culture 19 JACK L. SNYDER
2 Updating, Decentering, and Extending Strategic Culture 29 ONUR ERPUL
PART II
Latin American Case Studies 53
3 The Role of “Diplomatic Culture” in the Preservation
of Order in South America 55 NICOLÁS TERRADAS
4 South American Political Economy: Strategic Culture
and the Question of Agency 86 DIEGO ZAMBRANO
5 Militaries as Influencers and Gatekeepers: Continuity
of the Intraregional War-Avoidance Policy 115 FÉLIX E. MARTÍN
x Contents
6 The Strategic Culture of Prohibition and the Puzzling
Continuity of Drug Policies in South America 155 NICOLAS A. BECKMANN
7 No Place for Cosmopolitanism Peacekeeping: South America
and Its Prevailing Strategic Culture of Security 182 NICOLE JENNE
PART III
Conclusions 201
8 Strategic Culture Travels to Latin America 203 JACK L. SNYDER
Conclusion 207 ONUR ERPUL, FÉLIX E. MARTÍN, NICOLÁS TERRADAS,
AND DIEGO ZAMBRANO
Notes on Contributors 220 Bibliography 222 Index 239

Citation preview

Routledge Advances in International Relations and Global Politics

STRATEGIC CULTURE(S) IN LATIN AMERICA EXPLAINING THEORETICAL PUZZLES AND POLICY CONTINUITIES Edited by Félix E. Martín, Nicolás Terradas, and Diego Zambrano

Strategic Culture(s) in Latin America

Strategic Culture(s) in Latin America elucidates why many state actors in the Global South exhibit a remarkable degree of policy continuity in their external behavior despite structural incentives for change. This book contends that the theoretical notion of strategic culture is instructive to explain such a puzzle. It extends the application of strategic culture beyond the policy of nuclear deterrence among great powers into other equally strategic areas of policy, such as diplomacy, political economy, regional international institutions, legal norms, politico-military institutions, and different security agendas beyond war and peace, for example, the illicit drug trade and peacekeeping missions. The overall contribution of this book is three-fold: first, it rescues, updates, and expands the original conceptual and theoretical dimensions of strategic culture. Second, it extrapolates further theoretical implications of the concept through its application to five policy domains in Latin America beyond the original application of the strategic culture perspective to nuclear weapons strategy among great powers in the 1970s. Third, it draws together the theoretical and policy implications of the strategic cultures in Latin America and identifies possible applications for other peripheral, non-great power policy areas and issues in the Global South. This book will be of interest to academics, graduate and undergraduate students, policy analysts, and practitioners of Latin American Studies, International Relations Theory, and Security Studies. Félix E. Martín is an Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations in the School of International and Public Affairs at Florida International University in Miami, USA. His areas of specialization include international relations theory, security and peace studies, and international political economy. He is a specialist in the security and political economy of Latin America and Southern Europe. He is currently working on a forthcoming book with Edward Elgar Publishing on the notion of “dis-development,” its theoretical foundations, and its manifestations in selected Latin American countries. Nicolás Terradas is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PUCP), in Lima,

Peru, where he teaches courses on IR Theory, Methodology, and IR of Latin America. His general research interests are IR Theory, Security Studies, and Latin American international politics. Currently, his work explores the application of English School insights to the study of Latin America’s international politics, as well as the incorporation of qualitative research tools, such as processtracing analysis, archival research, and case-study research, to the English School methods. Diego Zambrano is a research and performance analyst at Paradine. His academic research focuses on International Political Economy, particularly on how global economic conditions shape political and economic relations in South America. His doctoral dissertation from Florida International University in Miami, USA, reinterprets the formation of the South American state to explain the continuity of poverty and inequality in the region.

Routledge Advances in International Relations and Global Politics

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For information about the series: https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Advances-inInternational-Relations-and-Global-Politics/book-series/IRGP

Strategic Culture(s) in Latin America

Explaining Theoretical Puzzles and Policy Continuities Edited by Félix E. Martín, Nicolás Terradas, and Diego Zambrano

First published 2024 by Routledge 4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2024 selection and editorial matter, Félix E. Martín, Nicolás Terradas and Diego Zambrano; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Félix E. Martín, Nicolás Terradas and Diego Zambrano to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Martín, Félix E., editor. | Terradas, Nicolás, editor. | Zambrano, Diego, editor. Title: Strategic culture(s) in Latin America : explaining theoretical puzzles and policy continuities / edited by Félix E. Martín, Nicolás Terradas, and Diego Zambrano. Other titles: Explaining theoretical puzzles and policy continuities Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York, NY : Routledge, 2023. | Series: Routledge advances in international relations and global politics | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023027234 (print) | LCCN 2023027235 (ebook) | ISBN 9780367692155 (hbk) | ISBN 9780367696061 (pbk) | ISBN 9781003142508 (ebk) Subjects: LCSH: Strategic culture--Latin America. | Security, International--Latin America. | Latin America--Military policy. | Latin America--Foreign relations. Classification: LCC UA602.3 .S77 2023 (print) | LCC UA602.3 (ebook) | DDC 355.03308--dc23/eng/20230901 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023027234 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023027235 ISBN: 978-0-367-69215-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-367-69606-1 (pbk) ISBN: 978-1-003-14250-8 (ebk) DOI: 10.4324/9781003142508 Typeset in Times New Roman by KnowledgeWorks Global Ltd.

To my precious little ones, Eliza Ruth and Colette Marie, and my dearest wife, María de los Ángeles, for always supporting me. Their love inspires me. Also, to all my former and present doctoral students whose academic journeys have been the source of my continuous scholarly renewal. The present volume is the evidence. Félix E. Martín, North Bergen, New Jersey, May 23, 2023. To my mother, Elsa, and the memory of my dad, Luis. “Siempre como los mejores.” Nicolás Terradas, Lima, Perú, May 23, 2023. To Diana Sofía, the love of my life. Diego Zambrano, Barcelona, Spain, May 23, 2023.

Contents

Foreword

xi

ARIE M. KACOWICZ

Introduction

1

FÉLIX E. MARTÍN, NICOLÁS TERRADAS, AND DIEGO ZAMBRANO

PART I

The Theoretical Framework 1 The Concept of Strategic Culture

17 19

JACK L. SNYDER

2 Updating, Decentering, and Extending Strategic Culture

29

ONUR ERPUL

PART II

Latin American Case Studies 3 The Role of “Diplomatic Culture” in the Preservation of Order in South America

53 55

NICOLÁS TERRADAS

4 South American Political Economy: Strategic Culture and the Question of Agency

86

DIEGO ZAMBRANO

5 Militaries as Influencers and Gatekeepers: Continuity of the Intraregional War-Avoidance Policy FÉLIX E. MARTÍN

115

x Contents 6 The Strategic Culture of Prohibition and the Puzzling Continuity of Drug Policies in South America

155

NICOLAS A. BECKMANN

7 No Place for Cosmopolitanism Peacekeeping: South America and Its Prevailing Strategic Culture of Security

182

NICOLE JENNE

PART III

Conclusions

201

8 Strategic Culture Travels to Latin America

203

JACK L. SNYDER

Conclusion

207

ONUR ERPUL, FÉLIX E. MARTÍN, NICOLÁS TERRADAS, AND DIEGO ZAMBRANO

Notes on Contributors 220 Bibliography222 Index239

Foreword Arie M. Kacowicz

Within the vast discipline of International Relations, including Security Studies, there has always been an embedded bias in focusing upon great powers and their interactions; i.e., the quest for hegemony, balances of power, and geopolitics. Thus, we have witnessed both in the literature of IR and in its practices a paramount gap between the emphasis on subjects such as war, peace, strategy, and political economy in the North and the neglect of the Global South, the “periphery,” including the study and understanding of Latin America. This edited volume by Félix E. Martín, Nicolás Terradas, and Diego Zambrano is a welcomed and refreshing scholarly contribution in an attempt to engage in a theoretical North-South dialogue with practical implications for the Latin American region and beyond. This timely and relevant volume can be located in the context of Global International Relations, as an attempt to build bridges between concepts and theories developed in the North, and extensions and interpretations to a particular (and neglected) region of the world, Latin America. The starting point of this fascinating study is the concept of “strategic culture” that Jack L. Snyder had developed in the context of nuclear policies and the Cold War. “Strategic culture” encompasses a set of enduring beliefs, attitudes, and habits, pertaining to a certain group of decision-makers, in a domain of statecraft, amenable to the logic of strategic action. In this particular case, the editors and authors attempt to extend and apply it to make sense of Latin American realities. The main puzzle guiding the contours of this intellectual exploration of and in Latin America is the attempt to explain why peripheral actors, including Latin American states and political élites, may display strong commonalities in their behaviors and habits in certain strategic settings, even when structural forces and constraints no longer explain their sticky and sometimes counter-intuitive behavior. This is not just organizational inertia, but rather a convergence of national strategic cultures that create a common regional setting, granting agency and relevance to Latin American autonomous actors to make sense of their behavior. This is also a deliberate attempt to apply a sociological analysis to make sense of the emergence, and especially the persistence, of a set of policy rationales and tool kits for action that continue over time and across countries. This is also an exercise in “intermestic” analysis by combining and investigating international and domestic structures simultaneously.

xii Foreword In empirical terms, this edited volume addresses four different dimensions of strategic statecraft, broadening the concept of security beyond the narrow and traditional sense. First, as I observed about twenty-five years ago, South America is a “zone of peace” that contradicts structural expectations and traditional theories of war and peace. Nicolás Terradas and Félix E. Martín, in turn, explain this apparent “anomaly” by importing and adapting Snyder’s concept of “strategic culture” in two different but related domains. Terradas focuses on the particular “diplomatic culture” of the regional society to explain the long South American peace. Similarly, Martín centers upon the role of the military in developing a war-avoidance policy in the region. In his analysis, strategic culture can help us understand the endurance of this policy. A second and surprising domain of statecraft that reflects a consistent and stubborn strategic choice is that of political economies based on extractivism and an export-oriented logic. In this context, Diego Zambrano explains why Latin American countries continue to operate under a political economy model that is counterproductive and has been criticized for its ineffectiveness. Again, “strategic culture” is imported to emphasize the agency of (state) actors in this issue area. A third policy domain of strategic statecraft that discloses the continuity in ineffective habits and behavior on the part of Latin American countries relates to the “war on drugs” and the strategic culture of prohibition, as explained by Nicolas Beckmann. We find again a similar pattern of stickiness and apparently irrational behavior, despite the contestation of prohibition and the rising prominence of harm reduction as an alternative policy. Finally, a fourth issue-area refers to peacekeeping. Despite individually persistent national participation in peacekeeping operations around the world by South American states, Nicole Jenne explains the lack of a “cosmopolitan” regional approach to peacekeeping as a function of a strategic culture that prioritizes traditional security arrangements in South America. In sum, those five empirical chapters nicely adopt and adapt the concept of strategic culture to make sense of empirical puzzles that cannot be properly understood by other theories and approaches of IR. These patterns, across countries and regions, demonstrate the relevance of strategic culture both in its “cultural” and “strategic” sense, to better understand the realities and practices of international relations in Latin America. Moreover, they prove the relevance of agency in juxtaposition to the “usual suspects” type of explanations (the United States’ impact and other structural elements).

Introduction Félix E. Martín, Nicolás Terradas, and Diego Zambrano

In 2001, sociologists Miguel Ángel Centeno and Fernando López-Alves edited a volume titled The Other Mirror: Grand Theory Through the Lens of Latin America. Motivated by a “shared […] common frustration with the provincialism of our home disciplines as well as with the antitheoretical tone of much of the work in our specific areas of study” (2001: Preface), this book created a much-needed dialogue between dominant theories in the Social Sciences and the history of Latin America. Eleven essays by authors from various disciplines debated how general theory informs Latin American studies, in general, and how Latin American history, in particular, challenges, confronts, and reshapes dominant or universal narratives about the region. Overall, the essays concluded that the disconnect between general discussions of comparative history or grand theory and Latin American history resulted from the predominance of European and North American explanations in the Social Sciences. Dominant narratives shaped by European and North American experiences created inadequate explanations for Latin America, for example, by relegating the region to a marginal space in grand theory or by using it mostly as a negative counterfactual (Centeno and López-Alves 2001: 4–10). This dominance, moreover, pushed Latin America to “practically disappear from the leading political science and sociology journals” (Centeno and López-Alves 2001: 3). Yet the most frustrating aspect of Latin American studies was not just its reduced presence but also the atheoretical tone that dominated this academic field. In general, research in Latin American studies has been characterized by being mostly driven by case studies, rather than theory—thus focusing on descriptive and/or particular questions. In the words of Centeno and López-Alves (2001: 14): “Rare is the book that begins with a large macro question divorced from the peculiarities of the field.” Two decades after the publication of The Other Mirror, the frustrations that initially motivated Centeno and López-Alves still affect the Social Sciences in general, and International Relations (IR) in particular. First, as an academic discipline, IR has been historically dominated by the experiences of Europe and North America (Hoffmann 1977: 56–57; Darby 2008; Nayak and Selbin 2010). Theoretical knowledge in the discipline has largely emerged, therefore, from studying the history of Europe and North America and generating dominant concepts that try to respond to these particular experiences as if they were actually universal. The DOI: 10.4324/9781003142508-1

2  Félix E. Martín, Nicolás Terradas, and Diego Zambrano result is a discipline that is, at the very least, ill-equipped not only to explain the history of non-European/North-American (i.e., “peripheral”) areas but also to answer their most pressing concerns (Darby 2008: 94–95). In the words of Juan Pablo Luna, María Victoria Murillo, and Andrew Schrank (2014: 4), “social scientists have done little to generate empirically grounded studies that can help us understand, let alone respond to, Latin America’s transformation.” Second, Latin American IR also presents the antitheoretical and atheoretical tone that has characterized much of Latin American studies for decades. Arlene Tickner and Mônica Herz argue that most of Latin American IR seem to understand theory differently: “Even in those cases in which scholars set out to explore security ‘concepts’ and ‘theories’, what emerges in their stead are descriptive reflections on Latin American security dynamics and prescriptive recommendations” (2012: 93). For instance, most of the works published since the early 1990s on Latin American IR focus on idiosyncratic, historiographical, or atheoretical questions and issues. Furthermore, the majority of the over 500 works published on Latin American IR in the past decade, as reviewed by the U.S. Library of Congress’ Handbook of Latin American Studies, do not engage explicitly with theoretical IR approaches (see Martín 2021; 2019; 2016a; 2016b; 2014). Therefore, Latin American IR continues to be affected by the same provincialism and antitheoretical tone that characterizes Latin American studies in general. More importantly, the latter is still dominated by inadequate explanations that are empirically grounded on historical realities which remain foreign to the region itself. This still frustrates scholars studying the empirical reality of the Americas, as much as it motivates efforts at reconciling theoretical knowledge with Latin America’s inherent experiences. In this edited volume, although the term “Latin America” is used extensively in the theoretical as well as the empirical chapters, neither the editors nor the individual contributing authors adopt a restrictive understanding of the region. In this sense, although much of the content of the empirical chapters is focused on the sub-region of South America, the use of the term “Latin America” must be understood in both a cultural as much as a purely geographical sense. Many of the characteristics, trends, and dynamics analyzed in the empirical chapters, for example, can also shed light on larger phenomena that transcend the geographical confines of the actors studied in the case studies, for they can also have an impact on the region as a whole. Latin America and the “Structural Tradition” in International Relations Like most peripheral actors in international relations, Latin America’s reality is often understood through the prism of Europe and North America. In most academic discussions, Latin America emerges as a case study to contrast against a “universal” explanation, or general theory. In this view, the region either fails to achieve something, lacks the necessary factors to do so, or is essentially constrained by great power politics. In other words, Latin America’s agency is but an afterthought, an assumed reaction derived from a set of dominant trends and concepts in IR. This relies on an older tradition in IR, in which most of the theoretical knowledge at the

Introduction 3 center of the discipline remains largely based on the study of great power competition. Concepts relevant to international order, international structure, or balance of power, for instance, are delineated around the experiences of ancient European city-states, like Athens or Sparta, or modern great powers, like Great Britain, France, and the United States of America. These powers dictate the contours of international politics; they are the only ones capable of defining and shaping an international structure, while the rest must align and conform to certain imposed and predetermined expectations. In such a theoretical framework, the study of peripheral actors’ capacity for agency centers on merely describing how great powers and structural forces influence, condition, or direct their behavior. Thus, for small, weak, or peripheral actors the only room for agency is reduced to “reading” the international structure “well” and acting accordingly. If one understood what an actor with limited power could and could not do within a particular structure, one could anticipate and explain its behavior. This “structural tradition” in IR assumes that under similar structural constraints, actors’ behavior must ultimately align, producing similar outcomes over time (see, e.g., Waltz 1979). Thus, peripheral actors, subsumed in their marginal status and incapable of effecting any changes on the international structure, are expected to converge toward one particular type of behavior, either constrained or conditioned by the structural forces of great power politics—much like in Thucydides’ famous adage about the powerful doing what they can, and the weak suffering what they must. In 2006, however, Randall L. Schweller—then a strong exponent of the structural tradition in IR—found that this structural argument, when extended to its logical conclusions, leads to a theoretical paradox. In the closing chapter of his Unanswered Threats: Political Constraints on the Balance of Power, Schweller (2006: 130) concluded that, contrary to what his prevailing Neorealist beliefs would suggest, Thucydides’ maxim must in fact be “turned somewhat on its head” as “the strong do what they must and the weak suffer what they can.” Schweller’s objective in the book was to clarify one of the still unresolved theoretical puzzles at the core of Neorealism: that is, whether structural pressures and incentives shaped more powerfully the behavior of the weakest actors in the international system (given their constrained predicament), or the strongest ones’ (given their internal cohesiveness and strength). Schweller (2006: 130) concluded that Only strong and unified States can effectively adapt to structural-systemic incentives, even when they are quite compelling and intense. In other words, for structural systemic explanations to work, they must be applied to strong agents—those capable of taking dramatic and timely steps to adjust their internal and external policies to changed circumstances. Stable and unified regimes that govern united polities have the capacity to mobilize the necessary national resources to deal with new threats and opportunities. In contrast, unstable and fragmented regimes that rule over divided polities will be significantly constrained in their ability to adapt to systemic incentives; they will be least likely to enact bold and costly policies even when their nation’s survival is at stake and they are needed most.

4  Félix E. Martín, Nicolás Terradas, and Diego Zambrano Following the “structural tradition,” it would seem logical to conclude that the weakest actors—rather than the strongest ones—would be the most affected, shaped, and constrained by external structural imperatives. However, as Schweller noted, their very same weakness is what may prevent these actors from “properly” adapting to the regular “shaping and shoving” (Waltz 2000: 24) of the international system. Paradoxically, it is precisely because the strongest actors have a larger capacity to assess their strategic environment better that they become strong actors in the first place— and thus can also maintain their status as great powers. In this sense, the structure is said to “reward” those who perceive and adapt to its incentives (Waltz 1979; 2000). Beyond Schweller’s own conclusions, his discovery of the paradox contained within the “structural tradition” in IR opened a crucially important discussion about the overall logic behind mainstream theories used to explain the continuity of behavior solely by the presence of compelling structural factors that discipline behavior. A more compelling exposition of the incomplete picture painted by the “structural tradition” in IR, however, can be found in the work of Arnold Wolfers (1962). In his celebrated essay “The Actors in International Politics,” Wolfers argued that explanations of common or shared behavior based solely on structural factors, although persuasive in a general sense, can only really explain behavior when structural factors are extremely powerful and compelling. The problem is that such conditions are only rarely found in world politics; which leaves most of what happens in international relations largely unexplained or undertheorized. Wolfers (1962: 13–16) used the analogies of a “house on fire” and a “horse race” to illustrate the problem. Given the clarity with which Wolfers presented these arguments, it is essential to quote them here at length: Imagine a number of individuals varying widely in their predispositions, who find themselves inside a house on fire. It would be perfectly realistic to expect that these individuals, with rare exceptions, would feel compelled to run toward the exits. […] Surely, therefore, for an explanation of the rush for the exits, there is no need to analyze the individual decisions that produced it. The situation would be different if one or several members of the group had not joined the stampede, but had remained unmoved after the fire was discovered or had even failed to perceive it. Such “deviationist” behavior, running counter to expectation, would justify and require intensive psychological inquiry. A different situation would arise if, instead of being on fire, the house in question merely were overheated. In such a case, […] reactions of different inhabitants might range all the way from hurried window-opening and loud complaints to complete indifference. To formulate expectations concerning behavior in an overheated house, one would need intimate knowledge of the varying individual predispositions and of the symptoms by which they could be recognized. (Wolfers 1962: 13–14) Similarly, in situations marked not by a powerful external compulsion, as in the house on fire analogy, but instead by a weak, lax, or minimal external pressure, a different set of incentives might arise for different actors, driven not by external

Introduction 5 factors but by dynamics, preferences, or appetites internal to the actors themselves. In Wolfers’ own words: Let us assume that several individuals were attending a horse race, where they found themselves unable to see the race clearly because of the crowds who had arrived before them. Suddenly an opening occurs in front of them, offering an opportunity to move up close to the track. Under these circumstances, it would be reasonable to expect and predict that a rush to fill the gap would ensue. Here again, even with no knowledge about the individuals in question, behavior could be explained or predicted by reference to a general trait of human nature (the desire for benefit or enjoyment) coupled with an external circumstance (the opening of the ranks). Here, also, a decisionmaking analysis would be useful only in regard to individuals who decided to remain where they were rather than join the general and expected rush. (Wolfers 1962: 14) The key element in this discussion is that most of what happens in international relations “shows a striking resemblance” (Wolfers 1962: 14) to the situation described in the second analogy. In other words, Wolfers was the first one to point out that in the field of IR, although commonality of behavior is traditionally explained through a quasi-mandatory quest for external or structural factors, the commonality of behavior through the convergence of internally shared factors has been muted, despite its larger empirical prevalence. It is precisely this area of theoretical inquiry that the present volume tries to bring back to the fore and link with the concept of Strategic Culture. Based on Arnold Wolfers’ discussion of actor behavior under structural compulsion or conformity, therefore, Figure 0.1 [see infra] illustrates the intersection between the structural context and two types of behavioral options by peripheral actors. Every outcome represented by each quadrant in the 2 × 2 matrix is the result

Figure 0.1  Intersection between Structural Context and Actor Behavior

6  Félix E. Martín, Nicolás Terradas, and Diego Zambrano of the interaction between the permissiveness or restrictiveness of the structural context and the conformity or change by the actor/s. In the “structural tradition” of IR, as discussed above, the behavior of peripheral actors is assumed to be deeply constrained by structural forces, making all expected outcomes to move along the diagonal between quadrants 1 and 4. While a permissive structural context (i.e., a strategic environment with a lax compulsion or weak incentives) allows for actors to change their behavior according to other factors beyond structural ones, a restrictive context constrains actors’ behavior until it conforms to structural expectations. Although some actors, in certain instances, may defy structural constraints, traditional IR assumes the disciplining nature of the structure will ultimately punish all “deviant” behavior. Much of Latin American IR follows the dominant structural logic of the discipline. The behavior of Latin American actors is often understood through the lens of great power politics, most notably the experience of the United States. The trend is that, when traditional IR encounters an empirical reality that contradicts “basic foundational knowledge,” such reality is depicted as diverging from a “universal” explanation. In this context, Figure 0.2 [see infra] illustrates an analytical representation of the historical experiences that contradict or are not explained by traditional IR. Thus, the diagonal in Figure 0.2 illustrates behavior from peripheral actors that is not logically expected by the structural tradition in IR. For instance, quadrant 2 represents instances in which peripheral actors are able to behave differently from structural expectations, despite being under a restrictive structural context. The diagonal between quadrants 2 and 4 illustrates “puzzling” instances where a peripheral actor is able to deviate from structural compulsion under a restrictive context or conform to structural expectations despite a permissive context. In principle, the arrow in Figure 0.2 allows one to identify different types of variations in the behavior of peripheral actors beyond the expectations of the “structural tradition.” Applied to different historical experiences, the matrix could

Figure 0.2  Unexplained Peripheral Actor’s Behavior

Introduction 7 illustrate instances in which an actor decides to move from defiance to conformity even within the same permissive structural context (a vertical move from quadrants 1 to 3). Such an instance would have to inevitably assume an explanation of actor behavior that is not structural, given that the variation in behavior occurs under the same structural context. In fact, instances in which actors maintain behavior adopted previously under restrictive structural contexts, even after the structural context withered away or changed from restrictive to permissive, require explanations beyond the scope of the “structural tradition” in IR (i.e., a horizontal move from quadrants 4 to 3). The most interesting combination to explore, therefore, is that of common or shared behavioral outcomes that fall into quadrant 3, for they illustrate historical experiences of persistent behavior à la Wolfers that cannot adequately be explained by purely structural theories. Put differently, structural restrictiveness cannot explain why a set of actors would pursue common behaviors when structural compulsion remains weak. Under such permissive contexts, structural conditioning varies, incentives and disciplining mechanisms relax, and peripheral actors enjoy a greater range of behavioral options in the absence of strong external compulsion. The same is true for an instance in which an actor continues to conform to structural expectations even after the structural context has fundamentally changed. In the most abstract sense, the cases that deviate from the theoretically expected outcome illustrated in Figure 0.2 represent a logical contradiction to traditional structural theories in IR. Addressing the significant disconnection between traditional IR and the historical experiences of peripheral actors represents a task beyond the means of this edited volume. Instead, this volume is preoccupied with one particular type of instance that runs counter to structural theories’ expectations. Figure 0.3 [see infra] illustrates the type of case at the heart of this volume. This book essentially explores why peripheral actors may display strong commonalities in their behaviors without the presence of structural forces pressuring, compelling,

Figure 0.3  Continuity of Behavior under Structural Context Variation

8  Félix E. Martín, Nicolás Terradas, and Diego Zambrano or incentivizing such behavior. Our preoccupation with still unexplored instances, as captured by quadrant 3, and most specifically the study of historical experiences illustrated by the move from quadrants 4 to 3, is not merely analytical, however. Although Latin American IR has become increasingly antitheoretical, reducing the historical experience of the region to negative counterfactuals, based on inaccurate assumptions and simplifications, it remains plagued with empirical examples that contradict traditional structural explanations. In effect, the motivation behind this volume emerges from the constant encounter with empirical examples throughout Latin American history that are often misconstrued, inadequately explained, or simply accepted as “anomalies.” Instead of assuming that the “structural tradition” in IR is universally applicable and that Latin America is a negative counterfactual to that narrative, this volume understands these inadequately explained examples in Latin American history as essential “theoretical puzzles” and, furthermore, attempts to explain them. Overall, in the context of this volume’s discussion, a “theoretical puzzle” is defined as an empirical case that cannot be easily explained by means of structural theories or explanations. More specifically, this volume concentrates on those “theoretical puzzles” that show continuity of behavior by one or several actors that defy the incentives and opportunities created by the international context at that point in time. The use of the word “puzzle,” moreover, should in no way presuppose a “normality” or standard narrative to use a foil or base, as does occur in the case of the words “anomaly” or “deviant case.” In this sense, the situational change brought by a transition from quadrants 4 to 3 is not only “puzzling” because it cannot be readily explained by structural theories, but also because the structure of incentives and strategic opportunities also changes. In principle, this change would make it easier, less costly, or more rewarding for actors to pursue other types of policies. It is a puzzling case, therefore, when actors maintain (or “double down” on) a specific type of behavior—which intrinsically creates new costs in the sense that the actor misses out on other potential advantages created by the new context. Following Arnold Wolfers’ analogies, this edited volume is primarily interested in understanding why certain peripheral actors maintain a certain strategic policy preference and behavior that was initially adopted while the “house was on fire” after the fire is long extinguished. The Concept of Strategic Culture In order to study the types of “theoretical puzzles” discussed above, this edited volume re-introduces Jack Snyder’s concept of “strategic culture” as a tool for systematically understanding and explaining the behavior of peripheral actors under such conditions. Originally defined by Snyder (1977: 8) as the “sum total of ideals, conditional emotional responses, and patterns of habitual behavior that members of the national strategic community have acquired through instruction or imitation and share with each other with regard to nuclear strategy,” the concept of strategic culture tried to explain differences in nuclear strategy between the United States and the Soviet Union. At the time, many U.S. nuclear policy-makers preferred strategies aimed at limiting the damage of a potential nuclear exchange by adopting

Introduction 9 a policy of limited nuclear war. They expected to mount nuclear attacks mainly on military targets while counting on the fear of mutually assured destruction to deter further escalation to attacks on major cities. Influenced by rational-choice models, civilian analysts assumed that Soviet decision-makers would mirror their strategies of mutual restraint in a limited nuclear war. Contrary to these policy assumptions, in 1977 Jack Snyder’s RAND report concluded that the Soviet bureaucracy actually favored strategies of rapid escalation to unrestrained, indiscriminate nuclear war-fighting. At the time, the U.S. decision-makers preferred strategies aimed at limiting the damage of a potential nuclear exchange on the basis of deterrence and mutually assured destruction strategies. Socialization within Soviet bureaucracy, Snyder argued, explained why Soviet decision-makers were acculturated to strategies different from those upheld by the U.S. bureaucracy and rational-choice models. Put differently, the material and ideational contexts under which Soviet decision-makers were socialized shaped their views, attitudes, and preferences about nuclear strategy, ultimately determining their favored offensive approach. Snyder defined these views and attitudes about nuclear weapons as a semi-permanent distinct mode of “Soviet thought,” or a particular “strategic culture.” Snyder’s concept of strategic culture is thus positioned at the intersection between material–rational and cognitive–ideational approaches in IR. Abstracting from the particularities of the U.S.-Soviet nuclear dynamic, Snyder argued that actors’ views and attitudes about their behavior are conditioned and shaped by their social context. Through socialization, actors internalize a set of ideals, conditional emotional responses, and patterns of habitual behavior that inform and filter their behavioral preferences. The particular characteristics of those ideals and habitual behaviors are defined by the specific material and ideational contexts under which an actor is socialized. In other words, actors develop a strategic culture that defines their specific behavioral preferences for strategic behavior, explaining why certain actors under certain circumstances might not conform to rational-model expectations. In the context of the present book, Snyder’s concept of strategic culture provides an excellent blueprint with which to examine “theoretical puzzles” for at least two main reasons. First, Snyder not only developed the concept of strategic culture as a complementary approach to what we have called the “structural tradition” in IR, but also favored a restrictive use of the term. This restrictiveness implied that strategic culture was not a blanket concept to explain any and all types of actor behavior. On the contrary, the concept was best employed when applied to cases in which actors showed a preference for maintaining a particular behavior despite a change in structural incentives or level of external compulsion. With this in mind, this book attempts to explain why certain peripheral actors in Latin America display a tendency to maintain a particular behavior when structural forces can no longer explain it. Second, Snyder’s concept of strategic culture is potentially useful in the study of agency in IR. The application of the concept to study historical examples that are inadequately explained by structural theories sheds light on one still understudied research area: the agency of non-great-power actors. Since Snyder’s approach first delineated which relevant material and ideational contexts shape strategic culture,

10  Félix E. Martín, Nicolás Terradas, and Diego Zambrano it also opened the door for a systematized way of thinking about agent-based explanations of patterns of shared behavior. For example, Snyder’s concept of strategic culture can help one understand behavior as a consequence of the logic of socialization within clearly defined groups of decision-makers, instead of general national, cultural, social, or even geographical contexts. Those contexts are relevant, however, as long as they help shape the logic of socialization of certain decision-makers in a more general sense. In this edited volume, Snyder contributes two previously unpublished manuscripts, which speak directly to both the theoretical aims of the project as a whole and the more empirical case-study analyses of each chapter contribution. In Chapter 1, Snyder sets the record straight in terms of the subsequent uses of the concept of strategic culture beyond his initial 1977 RAND report. Contrary to his original conceptualization, a diverse group of scholars have adopted a more expansive understanding of culture, downplaying the strategic dimension. This chapter includes a reaction to some later interpretations that tried to stretch the concept of strategic culture to become a “national-character” explanation for all sorts of foreign policy behavior. Chapter 8, Jack Snyder’s second contribution to the volume, is a brief reflection on the empirical and theoretical findings of the case-study chapters, with the intention of drawing practical lessons from Latin America’s experience, as the framework of strategic culture may in the future become the core of a new type of research agenda focused on non-great-power actors, the regional level of analysis, and other strategic policy domains beyond Latin America proper. Strategic Culture(s) and Latin American Continuities This book returns to Snyder’s original formulation of the concept of strategic culture to explain certain “theoretical puzzles” in Latin American IR. In this sense, the book seeks to expand the concept of strategic culture beyond the U.S.-Soviet dynamic of nuclear deterrence. By adopting a broader definition of strategy (i.e., Clausewitz 1976: 75), the book expands the areas of study relevant to strategic culture beyond the single issue of nuclear weapons—which still dominates the literature on strategic culture. In the international system, actors pursue their wide array of goals in different strategic settings. These strategic settings are defined as “domains of statecraft,” for there are multiple areas of policy-making presenting a strategic logic. International actors interact through strategic reasoning in a wide array of domains—such as military security, diplomacy, economic relations, or social policies—which are also amenable to strategic culture analysis. Such an expansion in terms of the domains of statecraft is central to an updating of the concept that goes beyond great power politics and nuclear weapons strategy. Non-great powers face strategic challenges that are not central to traditional IR or existing strategic culture analysis. In fact, the experiences that informed Snyder’s original formulation were not shared by non-great powers. Therefore, updating Snyder’s concept of strategic culture not only expands the areas that are susceptible to strategic culture analysis but also engages with the neglected strategic realities of non-great power actors, while expanding our “traditional” IR knowledge.

Introduction 11 Similar to mainstream theoretical approaches in IR, Snyder’s original concept of strategic culture was developed from the study of inter-great-power dynamics. Latin America, however, has never possessed—and is unlikely to develop in the near future—nuclear weapons. Therefore, it is pertinent to question how applicable is the concept of strategic culture to Latin American IR. Prima facie, nothing in Snyder’s original insight precludes a wider application of the concept to socalled peripheral or non-great-power cases. But more importantly, instead of discarding the valid insight behind the logic of Snyder’s concept of strategic culture because of its narrow focus on U.S.–Soviet relations, this edited volume engages core theoretical knowledge and confronts it with Latin America’s historical experience. Echoing Centeno and López-Alves (2001: 3): “We are not proposing a ‘Latin American’ theory to supplant a ‘European’ one. Rather, we merely wish to encourage including a greater variety of cases that may produce a better and truly generalizable map of the social world.” This is how Latin America can “speak back” to the theoretical core or mainstream in IR. Applying strategic culture to study examples in Latin American history provides a better understanding of the region’s experience in its own terms. Thus, confronting Snyder’s original formulation with Latin America also updates or refines the concept of strategic culture. Through a series of Latin American case studies, this volume expands the concept of strategic culture by exploring the possibility of regional convergence. More specifically, applying a strategic-cultural approach to the regional level opens the analysis to the study of converging “national” strategic cultures qua sub-strategic cultures within a region. Since non-great-power or peripheral states, such as those in Latin America, share an array of material, social and ideational contexts, and interact more deeply within the same region than with the rest of the world, the opportunities for decision-makers to develop distinct strategic cultures that resemble one another increases. In this sense, it is logical to explore how peripheral “strategic communities” can develop similar preferences and stylistic predispositions that defy powerful changes in the system of structural incentives. Such national strategic communities, given their shared peripheral condition, are typically socialized within a common political environment and further influence one another through continuous interactions. In the Latin American case, for instance, strategic communities have evolved from a similar colonial context and have continued—after independence—to influence each other across different domains of statecraft, ranging from diplomacy, economic development, and institutional cooperation. In this context, therefore, Latin America’s experience initially expands the concept of strategic culture by incorporating the idea of convergence of national strategic cultures at a regional level. This regional perspective, as well, avails three methodological advantages to this edited volume. First, if the material structure of international politics and strategic interactions influence how strategic cultures form, then it is vital to study strategic cultures especially among non-great-powers and in their particular regional contexts. This is crucial because non-great-power states have (in theory) less institutional capacity to resist changes in their structure of incentives and pressures. Regions are constituted by geographically proximate states that have

12  Félix E. Martín, Nicolás Terradas, and Diego Zambrano sustained political, economic, and social interactions over long periods of time. This multidimensional proximity engenders interactions that are more diverse and frequent than those between, for example, the nuclear dyad comprised of the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War, suggesting the possibility for a stronger process of isomorphism among particular strategic communities or political élites. Second, a regional lens provides ample testing opportunities for non-nuclear, as well as non-military, aspects of strategic culture. More importantly, regions are useful to study the fundamental relationship between material structures and the international context, and the processes of decision-making and culture in the traditional sense. This is because regions are profoundly influenced by geography and history, and often contain culturally “similar” societies (or at least “more similar” inter se than with extra-regional actors). Therefore, the discovery of different strategic cultures among regional states on similar domains of statecraft could help distinguish between the causal effects of material structures, decisionmaking contexts, and culture more broadly defined (Snyder 1990: 5–6). Third, the volume of interactions between states in a given region, and the decision-making groups within it, tend to be denser over time. For example, studying the operation of diplomatic or military as well as other intra-regional and cross-national channels opens the possibility for theorizing about the evolution of shared strategic cultural communities beyond the territorial limits of the state. Organization of the Book The theoretical framework and contribution of this book are motivated by two challenging tendencies in traditional IR theory: first, non-great power politics is often ignored, understudied, and undertheorized; and second, and more specifically, the structural tradition in IR inadequately explains much of the interactions among peripheral actors. Therefore, in order to study the agency of peripheral actors under structural permissiveness, this edited volume rescues, updates, and expands the concept of strategic culture to the study of Latin America and some of its puzzling policy continuities. In this context, the book rescues important aspects of Snyder’s original formulation, like the influence of material contexts and the importance of retaining a more restrictive sense of culture. The book also updates the concept of strategic culture to address previously unexplored strategic settings (or “domains of statecraft”) beyond nuclear deterrence. Finally, the chapters comprising this book expand the application of strategic culture beyond great power politics by studying the agency of Latin American actors in specific historical examples. In order to rescue, update, and expand the concept of strategic culture to study Latin American continuities, the eight chapters comprising this volume are organized into three parts. Part I focuses on updating Snyder’s original formulation and analysis. In Chapter 1, “The Concept of Strategic Culture,” Jack L. Snyder reflects on the origin, evolution, and misuse of the concept of strategic culture in IR. In Chapter 2, “Updating, Decentering, and Extending Strategic Culture,” Onur Erpul argues that the changing nature of geopolitics in the aftermath of the Cold War, the rising eminence of non-state actors in international relations, and the reality of new

Introduction 13 domains of competition between new and old political actors, call for an expansion of the strategic culture research agenda. Accordingly, Chapter 2 reviews the trajectory of the literature on strategic culture, elaborates on relevant developments in contemporary IR theory, and explores how strategic culture can enrich debates in the broader field of IR by making inroads into themes beyond traditional security and toward other, previously understudied regions of interest, like Latin America. In this sense, Chapters 1 and 2 further elaborate the theoretical, conceptual, and analytical framework first presented in this Introduction to the book. Part II focuses on expanding the application of the concept of strategic culture to peripheral actors. It consists of five chapters that explore how strategic culture can explain the preferred behavior of Latin American actors in different historical examples. For each chapter, the contributing authors were asked to follow a common format: (a) To identify what is the specific policy domain of the case study in the chapter, and to clarify how the international context/structure is defined for this case study within their policy domain. This includes, as well, the identification of a type of expected policy given the environmental context in question. This creates a sense of “continuum” of policy options that helps in the exploration of why the actual policy is “puzzling” as it runs against the structural incentives and opportunities of the case study. (b) To “merge” the analytical components of the concept of strategic culture discussed in Chapter 2 (by Onur Erpul) with the specific research problem of the case study in question. This sub-section, therefore, explores the potential of the concept of strategic culture for building bridges across different, seemingly contending, theoretical perspectives. In addition to delineating a domain of statecraft, or identifying an issue area and the specific group of decision-makers, each contributing author was prompted to consider how the analysis can supplement an IR theory. If culture is an explanation of the “last resort” or a supplement to structural theories, it is not possible to expand the scope of strategic culture or examine a domain of statecraft without also clarifying what are the relevant axioms of one’s broader theoretical perspective that inform an environmental structure. In other words, the utility of strategic culture increases when “merged” with insights from broader theoretical perspectives in IR. In Chapter 3, titled “The Role of ‘Diplomatic Culture’ in the Preservation of Order in South America,” Nicolás Terradas discusses how a distinctly Latin American “strategic diplomatic culture” helps explain the region’s preference for stability and peace even under structural pressures for conflict. The theoretical puzzle in question, which is also the focus of Félix Martín’s chapter, concerns the so-called Latin American “long peace”—or the prolonged absence of inter-state war since the early decades of the twentieth century. Terradas further “merges” the concept of strategic concept with the English School (ES, or international society approach), in particular through the contributions of one of its main proponents, Hedley Bull, who explored the idea of a “diplomatic culture” in international society. In Chapter 4, titled “South American Political Economy: Strategic Culture and the Question of Agency,” Diego Zambrano discusses how a strategic culture of resource exploitation accounts for the region’s strong preference for political economic policies that perpetuate an “embryonic” or dependent development.

14  Félix E. Martín, Nicolás Terradas, and Diego Zambrano Zambrano’s theoretical puzzle, therefore, focuses on the contradiction between the structural context and the policy preferences of Latin American states despite the changing international incentives and alternating “left and right” ideological inclinations of state governing élites over time. The chapter uses strategic culture a theoretical attachment to the traditional argument of dependency theory to advance an explanation of Latin America’s puzzling economic policy continuities. In Chapter 5, Félix E. Martín examines how the notion of a distinct regional strategic culture, nurtured by the militaries since the end of the Chaco War, stimulated the continuity of war-avoidance policies despite objective structural conditions for war. Titled “Militaries as Gatekeepers: The Continuity of the Intraregional, Interstate War-avoidances Policy,” this chapter also tackles the theoretical puzzle introduced in Chapter 3 on the regional “long peace,” but advances a different, yet complimentary, perspective by looking at the military institution—rather than diplomacy—as an additional source of stability in Latin America, which Martín calls “war-avoidance policy.” The chapter also presents a distinct continuum between inter-state peace and war, with the “war-avoidance policy” placed at the center, and explores this longitudinal dynamic process as it has resulted in the formation of a “paradox of external-peace-and-internal-violence,” in which Latin American militaries, in their sustained preference for war-avoidance policies, have given way to the emergence of a strategic environment marked by inward-looking governments focused more on internal security problems, political control, and even violent repression of their population, than on traditional external concerns, fears, and threats from neighboring states. In Chapter 6, titled “The Strategic Culture of Prohibition and the Puzzling Continuity of Drug Policies in South America,” Nicolas A. Beckmann uses the concept of strategic culture to explain the continuity of prohibitionist drug policies in South America, despite their evident practical failure over the years despite an international context that has become more favorable to the implementation of changes. Thus, the chapter presents South America as the host of a region-wide “strategic culture of prohibition,” which has internalized the goal of undermining drug use at all costs, even though the means to accomplish this goal do more harm than good. This strategic culture of prohibition has become deeply ingrained in the governmental institutions that participate in defining and implementing the states’ security objectives, such as the military, the police force, the legislative and judicial branches of government, and the ministries of the interior. These “gatekeepers” of a country’s strategic culture not only exert their influence in defining policy choices but also dominate national discourses on drugs and public security. Finally, in Chapter 7, titled “No Place for a Cosmopolitan Peacekeeping: South America and its Prevailing Strategic Culture of Security,” Nicole Jenne argues that the reason why the region has not adopted a cosmopolitan approach to peacekeeping, as the rest of the international community since the 1990s, is the result of the prevalence of a regional strategic culture favoring traditional security arrangements. To explain this persistence of traditional, non-cosmopolitan security arrangements in South America in the context of structural change, the concept of

Introduction 15 Synoptic Table 0.1  E  mpty Case Study Chapter Summaries Chap. 3

Chap. 4

Chap. 5

Chap. 6

Chap. 7

“Puzzle” Policy domain “Merging” “Continuum” SC explanation

strategic culture is used to show how certain “gatekeepers” and new countervailing incentives prevented the emergence of a more modern regional peacekeeping arrangement, as evidenced in other regions of the world. In this general context, a Synoptic Table 0.1 [see infra] offers a preliminary presentation of what each chapter offers to the general framework both in terms of its empirical case study as well as theoretically, highlighting the main puzzle, the theoretical body to which the concept of strategic culture is being “merged,” the relevant policy domain, the range of policy options considered, and a strategic culture explanation of the various policy continuities in Latin America. In the Conclusion to this volume, this table will be populated with the core findings from the case-study chapters. Finally, Part III consists of two chapters. In one of them, Jack L. Snyder assesses the case-study findings and discusses potential applications and future research possibilities for strategic culture as a new type of research area that incorporates actors and regions from the Global South. In the other chapter, the editors offer a general reflection on the entire project and advance some preliminary guidelines for further research. References Centeno, Miguel Á. and Fernando López-Alves (eds.) (2001): The Other Mirror: Grand Theory Through the Lens of Latin America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Clausewitz, Carl von (1976): On War, ed. by Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press [1832]). Darby, Phillip (2008): “A Disabling Discipline?” in The Oxford Handbook Of International Relations, ed. by Christian Reus-Smit and Duncan Snidal (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 94–105. Hoffmann, Stanley (1977): “An American Social Science: International Relations,” Dædalus, Vol. 106, No. 3 (Summer), pp. 41–60. Luna, Juan P.; María V. Murillo and Andrew Schrank (2014): “Latin American Political Economy: Making Sense of a New Reality,” Latin American Politics and Society, Vol. 56, No. 1 (Spring), pp. 3–10. Martín, Félix E. (2014): “Critical Review of the International Relations Literature of the Spanish Caribbean,” in Handbook of Latin American Studies, ed. by Tracy North and Katherine McCann, Vol. 69: Social Science (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press), pp. 351–364.

16  Félix E. Martín, Nicolás Terradas, and Diego Zambrano Martín, Félix E. (2016a): “Critical Review of South America’s International Relations Literature,” in Handbook of Latin American Studies, ed. by Tracy North and Katherine McCann, Vol. 71: Social Science (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press), pp. 366–389. Martín, Félix E. (2016b): “International Relations Literature Review of the Hispanic Caribbean,” in Handbook of Latin American Studies, ed. by Tracy North and Katherine McCann, Vol. 71: Social Science (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press), pp. 356–365. Martín, Félix E. (2019): “Critical Review of Spanish-speaking South America’s International Relations Literature,” in Handbook of Latin American Studies, ed. by Tracy North and Katherine McCann, Vol. 73: Social Science (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press), pp. 372–391. Martín, Félix E. (2021): “South America’s International Relations Literature: Thematic Diversity and the Intersection of Multiple Disciplines,” in Handbook of Latin American Studies, ed. by Katherine McCann, Vol. 75: Social Science (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press), pp. 362–380. Nayak, Meghana and Eric Selbin (2010): Decentering International Relations (New York, NY: Zed Books). Schweller, Randall L. (2006): Unanswered Threats: Political Constraints on the Balance of Power (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Snyder, Jack L. (1977): The Soviet Strategic Culture: Implications for Limited Nuclear Operations (Santa Monica, CA: The RAND Corporation, Report R-2154-AF, September). Snyder, Jack L. (1990): “The Concept of Strategic Culture: Caveat Emptor,” in Strategic Power: USA/USSR, ed. by Carl G. Jacobsen (London: Palgrave Macmillan), pp. 3–9. Tickner, Arlene B. and Mônica Herz (2012): “No Place for Theory? Security Studies in Latin America,” in Thinking International Relations Differently, ed. by Arlene B. Tickner and David L. Blaney (New York, NY: Routledge), pp. 92–114. Waltz, Kenneth N. (1979): Theory of International Politics (Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley). Waltz, Kenneth N. (2000): “Structural Realism after the Cold War,” International Security, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Summer), pp. 5–41. Wolfers, Arnold (1962): Discord and Collaboration: Essays on International Politics (Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press).

Part I

The Theoretical Framework

1

The Concept of Strategic Culture Jack L. Snyder

Over the past few decades, a diverse community of security studies scholars has found the concept of strategic culture to be useful in articulating its research questions. Reflecting their diverse purposes and orientations, these scholars have not all defined or used the concept in the same way. Consequently, it may be timely to review what are the main attributes of strategic culture according to those who have found the concept useful, what they have used it to explain, and what’s at stake in these debates. Based on surveys of this literature, it appears that most writing on strategic culture examine beliefs, attitudes, and habits pertaining to the use of force that are distinctive, enduring, and shared within a group (Johnston 1995b; Desch 1998; Lantis 2002; 2009; Glenn 2009; Bloomfield 2012). In some cases, strategic culture aims to explain a group’s philosophical orientation toward the use of force, such as its ideas about the relationship between war and politics. However, studies of strategic culture often focus on a group’s choice of means to accomplish whatever strategic objectives it may have—for example, attitudes toward offensive versus defensive tactics, orientation toward deterrence through punishment or through denial, attitudes toward the appropriateness of preemptive attack, and attitudes toward limitations on the use of force in war, as well as more specific tendencies pertaining to such operational issues as targeting preferences in strategic bombardment or preferred tactics in counterinsurgency warfare. Potentially, the strategic culture approach can provide insights into “knowing your enemy” and “knowing thyself.” If opponents have predictable habits in their decisions about the use of force, this knowledge can be used to defeat them by anticipating their moves. It can also serve as a guide to avoiding hidden tripwires that could trigger unwanted escalations of violence. At the same time, one’s own reform efforts to improve decision-making and implementation of military policy might be enhanced by taking the cultural sources of outmoded or inefficient behavior into account. Despite these potential benefits, however, strategic culture can sometimes become a superficial catch-all category used in an analytically lazy way simply to describe a group’s military practices without probing deeply into its causes. Description is a useful first step, but to get analytical leverage on predicting an actor’s future DOI: 10.4324/9781003142508-3

20  Jack L. Snyder moves, a causal theory is needed. To get the most value out of the strategic culture approach as a tool for causal analysis, it is worthwhile to think more explicitly about what culture is, how it shapes behavior, and what distinguishes culture from other sources of variation in the strategic patterns that are of interest. Culture: Distinctive, Enduring, and Shared? Studies of strategic culture usually focus on what’s distinctive in a group’s approach to strategy. Most uses of the term highlight the proposition that different strategic cultures would take a different approach to the use of force even when facing similar strategic circumstances. For example, my early paper on strategic culture argued that the United States would be more likely to exercise targeting restraint in nuclear operations, seeing nuclear strikes as part of a controlled bargaining process, whereas the Soviet Union, facing the same situation, would be more likely to use nuclear weapons in an unrestrained fashion, seeing nuclear strikes as part of a strategy of decisive military victory intended to disarm the opponent (Snyder 1977). However, not everyone who uses the term strategic culture emphasizes distinctiveness. For example, Iain Johnston’s Cultural Realism argues that imperial Chinese thinking about the use of military force shares many features with the power politics approach that Westerners often call realism (Johnston 1995a). What makes this cultural in Johnston’s view is that the Chinese version of realism (and by implication the Western version of realism as well) is not simply deduced from the objective strategic implications of violent competition in international anarchy, but rather is an enduring pattern transmitted through the socialization of strategic experts to canonical Chinese texts and habitual practices derived from them. Just as there are dissenters from the criterion of distinctiveness, so too there are dissenters from the criterion of persistence over time. Contemporary conceptions of culture try to avoid reifying culture as a fixed body of beliefs and practices that its members are thoroughly and uniformly socialized to adopt. Instead, today’s scholars often think of culture as a tool kit of arguments, metaphors, and operational techniques that strategic actors can draw upon creatively and selectively to accomplish their tasks, add to their power, and persuade others to join them (Swidler 1986; Brubaker 2004). This view places at least as much emphasis on cultural change as on cultural continuity, as actors combine old cultural ideas in new ways, engage in culture wars, and innovate (Eckstein 1988; Lantis and Charlton 2011; Libel 2016; Pirani 2014; Moran and Lynch 2017; Lonergan and Snyder 2023). For example, in the wake of the French Revolution, the development of a mass army motivated by popular nationalism reflected a new and distinctive French strategic culture that emerged through intense political and cultural struggle (Posen 1993; Bukovansky 2002). What makes this a cultural process is that the power, interests, and tools of the actors are derived in part from their manipulation of symbols and cultural identities, and the claims they advance about shared normative assumptions. Strategic culture is necessarily a property of a group. Individuals can have beliefs, attitudes, and habits on their own, but strategic culture concerns shared

The Concept of Strategic Culture 21 beliefs, attitudes, and habits. Shared beliefs, attitudes, habits, norms, symbols, values, and common identities help people to form groups and carry out collective tasks. Individuals get socialized into group norms and identities through both formal and informal processes—through education, training, emulation, as well as rewards and sanctions. But what kinds of groups have strategic cultures? Many scholars who have written about strategic culture take the nation-state as their unit of analysis, for example, discussing German or Japanese strategic culture (Berger 1996). Those who take the nation as the unit of analysis sometimes argue that the nation’s strategic culture reflects the nation’s political culture more broadly. For example, Richard Pipes, writing on “why the Soviet Union thinks it could fight and win a nuclear war,” drew on alleged attitudes of the nineteenth-century Russian peasantry as evidence (Pipes 1977). My own treatment of Soviet strategic culture, however, explicitly denied any connection to the broader Russian “national character,” focusing instead on the historical legacy of Russian nuclear inferiority and the dominant role of military officers rather than civilians in working out nuclear doctrine. Some authors, such as Elizabeth Kier, take the military, not the nation, as their unit of analysis (Kier 1997). She writes about the “military culture” of the strategic thinkers of a country’s professional military officer corps, arguing that the broader political climate of the nation affects the military culture, but treating civilian strategic ideas as a separate topic. Finally, Alexander Wendt (1999) writes about the “culture of anarchy” in the international system as a whole, which includes prevailing assumptions about the use of force that he argues emerge through interactions as shared understandings among states. His cultures of anarchy include brutally warlike Hobbesian ones, more limitedly competitive Lockean ones, and more cooperative Kantian ones. Whereas most strategic culture studies try to understand what is distinctive and enduring about the way that a particular strategic actor uses force, Wendt examines patterns in relationships across actors. In short, strategic culture studies investigate shared beliefs and practices within a group, but the group might range in size from a terrorist cell to the international system as a whole. Like cultural studies more generally, research on strategic culture has been divided on whether culture comprises only ideas (symbols, beliefs, attitudes, values, and texts) or whether it also includes behavior (habitual actions, standard operating procedures, repeated policy outcomes, military training, and military exercises) and artifacts (weapons systems, war plans). Iain Johnston argues for keeping behavior out of the definition of strategic culture because he is interested in studying the impact of culture (ideas) on outcomes (behavior). This might be going too far, however, since military training, for example, is a behavioral activity that is designed to socialize new generations to prevailing cultural ways as well as to impart technical skills. In any case, to avoid tautology, strategic culture arguments need to keep the behavioral outcomes they are trying to explain, such as variations in the use of force, conceptually separate from the strategic cultural elements that purportedly explain those outcomes.

22  Jack L. Snyder Finally, this raises the question of hypocrisy in strategic culture. Lantis (2009) notes that some scholars have argued that the function of strategic culture is not to guide action so much as to mislead observers about policy and the reasons behind it. Strategic culture, in this view, rationalizes military behavior so that it seems to comport with the social norms accepted by on-lookers. I made similar arguments about the strategic myths propounded by overextended empires that claimed they needed to expand in order to increase their security, but in fact, the expansionist policies were caused by a variety of domestic political and parochial interests (Snyder 1991). This does not necessarily mean that strategic hypocrisy has no impact on behavior. Hypocrites need to make sure that their behavior does not deviate too obviously from the principles to which they give lip service (Finnemore 2009). I argued that the myths of empire came to constrain the élites who initially espoused them cynically because they were held accountable by their audiences and because follow-on generations socialized to mythologized discourses came to be true believers in them. Cultural and Non-Cultural Explanations for Strategic Behavior States vary in their strategic behavior, but not all of those variations reflect differences in strategic culture. Let’s think, for example, about the choices that states and their militaries make in adopting offensive versus defensive strategies. States might choose offensive strategies for reasons having to do with their goals, their power, the technologies available to them, or their geographical circumstances. Some states have imperial conquest as a policy objective, so they need offensive military doctrines, strategies, and forces to achieve that objective. Some states are militarily very weak compared to their neighbors, so conquest might be out of the question for them. Since defense is normally easier than offense for weak actors (except for hit-and-run attacks on civilian targets), weak states tend to adopt defensive strategies. Some technologies, such as vulnerable weapons that can maneuver to attack distant targets, create an incentive for striking first in surprise, so any state with such technologies has a motive to adopt an offensive strategy. Some states, like historical Germany, are surrounded by powerful competitors on all sides and lack geographical barriers for protection. Consequently, they have an incentive to prepare to defend themselves by attacking opponents sequentially, quickly, and decisively, in the manner of Germany’s Schlieffen Plan in 1914. Other states are well protected by mountains, like the Swiss, or by seas patrolled by a strong navy, like the British, so they can wait on the defensive, forcing potential aggressors to reveal their intentions and to fight at a logistical disadvantage away from their home bases. Some of the factors that lead a state to prefer offensive or defensive strategies might be both distinctive and enduring, but still not cultural. For example, Frederick the Great of Prussia faced some of the same geographical incentives for short, victorious offensives that later led Schlieffen in the same direction. Even so, we cannot call geography a cultural factor. Even Alexander Wendt (1999) who argues that international politics is shaped by “culture all the way down,” acknowledges

The Concept of Strategic Culture 23 that geography and human biology constitute a “rump materialism” that cannot be subsumed under culture. Arguably any strategist from any strategic culture who was given the task of commanding the German General Staff would have felt the pull of the incentives to attack quickly and sequentially on two fronts in the manner of Frederick and Schlieffen. That said, geography can be seen as a background factor that is conducive to a distinctive way of thinking about war, leading in the German case to a cult of the offensive that glorified the role of the military in providing quick, decisive victories that could cut through the tangle of diplomacy. In this view, geography might have been one of the factors that loaded the dice in favor of offensive German strategies, but the dice became even more unbalanced through the accretion over time of an offensive military culture: through military literature, training, and the increasing autonomy from civilian control of successful military practitioners of offensive strategies. Arguably, strategic culture became unhinged from some of the objective strategic factors that contributed to its rise to it in the first place, such that subsequent true believers socialized into that culture began to see offensive strategies as always right and defensive ones as unthinkable. In that sense, the hypothetical officer from a non-German strategic culture who is handed command of the German General Staff might disagree with Schlieffen, deciding that the geographical incentives for the offensive were outweighed by other considerations, such as the complex railroad logistics of the offensive or the diplomatic disadvantages of appearing to be the aggressor. Thus, non-cultural factors such as geography might stimulate the development of cultural beliefs, attitudes, and habits that take on a life of their own in shaping strategic choices and outcomes. Analytically, this creates the risk of conflating cultural and non-cultural dimensions of a strategic choice to the point where the concept of strategic culture becomes so watered down that it explains everything and therefore nothing. What are some rules of thumb for avoiding this problem? One good analytical practice is to be very concrete about the causal mechanism that is claimed to be at work in the given situation. Some mechanisms highlight specific cultural processes involving ideas and socialization. For example, did Schlieffen incline toward the offensive because his early training in the military academy stressed that all great commanders from Hannibal to Napoleon strove relentlessly to seize the initiative in battle? Did Schlieffen and his collaborators insist on the offensive because they imbibed the heady brew of Social Darwinism propounded by German military writers? In contrast, other mechanisms highlight objective constraints and rational calculations that would seem to cut across most cultural differences. Thus, did Schlieffen pore over calculations of troop strength, marching times and distances, and topographical maps, thinking hard about both offensive and defensive options, picking the former only on the basis of firm calculations? Or, as I argued in The Ideology of the Offensive (1984), did he do these calculations, but structured them in a way that was biased by his military organizational interests and his uncritical acceptance of the strategic-cultural assumptions of the “cult of the offensive”? If the latter, then the right causal model is the twostep mechanism that begins with constraints and incentives such as geography,

24  Jack L. Snyder technology, national goals, and the parochial interests of the military, but then adds intervening cultural processes, such as the creation of ideology or socialization, through which underlying constraints and incentives get skewed or exaggerated. Another useful analytical practice that helps clarify an argument is to ask a counterfactual question: What causal factor would have to have been different for the outcome to have been different (Fearon 1991)? Would Schlieffen have adopted a defensive strategy if some objective constraints had been different—e.g., if the Russian army were five times as strong, if Germany had had nuclear weapons, or if Germany had been ruled by a democratically elected President advised by civilian defense experts rather than by an emotionally labile Kaiser with a withered arm advised by horseback-riding Junker aristocrats? Or would Schlieffen have adopted a defensive strategy if the elder Field Marshal von Moltke, victor of the glorious campaigns that forged the German Reich, had rewritten the curriculum of the staff colleges and gone on a public speaking tour on behalf of a new “cult of the defensive” that would have justified his switch to defensive war plans after his victory over France in 1870? Counterfactuals are not evidence, but they can be useful in clarifying what precise causal claims the analyst is making—and how culture enters into the explanation. Repertoires of Violence One potentially promising, but largely untapped area for analysis in terms of strategic culture is repertoires of violence. The historical sociologist Charles Tilly, famous for his dictum that “war made the state and the state made war,” studied a phenomenon that he called repertoires of contentious political action, which included both violent and non-violent behaviors designed to advance a political objective through struggle. These ranged in scale and degree of violence from petition drives through social revolutions. The repertoire concept is consciously intended as a theatrical metaphor signaling that “contentious actors perform in dramas in which they already know their approximate parts, during which they nevertheless improvise constantly.” This conception “reeks of culture,” says Tilly (2008: 129), “in insisting that shared understanding […] constrain[s] social interaction.” This conception raises the question of whether particular strategic cultures gravitate repeatedly to distinctive repertoires of coercion that have become engrained through indoctrination, training, institutionalization, law, habit, or symbolism. Common stereotypes imply that this may be the case: Hindus riot (except when they followed Gandhi in using tactics of civil disobedience!), Muslims employ terrorist attacks on civilians (but then so did the Tamil Tigers and Curtis LeMay), Serbs use atrocities to carry out ethnic cleansing (but so did almost every people in Eastern Europe at some point during the twentieth century), and African-Americans engage in sit-ins and bus boycotts (or at least they used to). Less deterministically, some strategic cultures may be said to have rioting, suicide bombing, or civil disobedience in their cultural tool-kit, but others do not. Skeptics, however, may doubt that culture explains much about variation in the choice of coercive tactics. Instead, the choice of different tools in contentious politics

The Concept of Strategic Culture 25 could be explained by differing circumstances that create different constraints and incentives that affect actors regardless of their culture. Contrary to Tilly’s remark, what constrains may not be culturally shared understandings about the meaning of a coercive action, but variations in the resource endowment of the actors or in the institutional setting that constrains the set of feasible tactics. As Samuel Huntington (1968: 196) noted, when state institutions are weak, “the wealthy bribe; students riot; workers strike; mobs demonstrate; and the military coup.” Strategic cultural explanations for variations in repertoires of violence should be required to pass tests showing distinctiveness, persistence, cultural causal mechanisms, and ruling out non-cultural alternative explanations. Let’s take rioting, for example. Variations in the prevalence of rioting are caused in part by differences in circumstances and incentives. Religious and ethnic riots tend to happen in culturally mixed cities in countries where the coercive power of the central state is significant, but is applied inconsistently, as in India, Nigeria, and Indonesia. In India, some cities repeatedly have riots, others never do, and others do sometimes. The most rigorous study argues that rioting tends to happen when impending city elections are expected to be close, and when politicians of the religious or ethnic majority have an incentive to polarize the electorate around religion to undermine the class appeals of rival parties. In addition, riots are allowed to happen when politicians at the state level, who command substantial police power, have no electoral incentive to court voters of the targeted minority (Wilkinson 2004). Such riots are sometimes triggered by paid thugs in an “organized riot system” that responds to the wishes of political and economic élites (Brass 1997). In Nigeria, different circumstances produce a different pattern of rioting. Riots happen in vulnerable neighborhoods lacking police protection, where the Christian and Muslim urban poor live in close proximity to demographically balanced populations. This situation creates a classic security dilemma, in which minor incidents and provocations spiral out of control as each side takes aggressive action in selfdefense (Scacco 2009). In Indonesia, rioting between Christians and Muslims on the outer islands and between ethnic minorities on Kalimantan (Borneo) coincided with the collapse of the Suharto dictatorship. As the power of the central state to enforce order diminished and local politics began to democratize, local élites played the religious and ethnic cards to gain mass support in their scramble for government jobs (Klinken 2007: esp. chs. 3, 5–7). These situational causes of rioting are arguably entwined, however, with other factors that “reek of culture,” to use Tilly’s term. Indian cities’ organized riot systems draw on a cultural tool kit of shared understandings about what kinds of allegations are appropriate triggers for rioting. Typically, this involves rumors of intercommunal rape or defiling a temple (Brass 1997: chs. 3 and 4). Ashutosh Varshney conjectures that cities that have fewer riots are ones with intercommunal civil society organizations that can share information to refute such rumors (Varshney 2002). In Nigeria, although there is no evidence that rioters are motivated by religious piety or manipulated by religious élites, the increased wave of urban rioting over the past decade has coincided with a rising tide of demand for shar’ia

26  Jack L. Snyder law on the part of an increasingly vocal Islamic movement in northern Nigeria. In Indonesia, rioters divided along the lines of cultural identities, whether religious or non-religiously defined ethnic groups. Which of these cultural factors should count as examples of strategic culture at work? The fact that the rival sides are divided along a cultural cleavage is not in itself evidence for strategic culture, which concerns itself not with who fights but with the fighters’ beliefs and habits concerning the use of force. By this criterion, the crudely instrumental aspects of the organized riot system (the paid thugs) probably should not count as strategic culture (even though they are distinctive, enduring, and in the tool kit), but the culturally shared understandings of the implications of cultural transgressions like rape and defilement as triggers to rioting should count as part of strategic culture. To take another example, what would be needed to show that strategic culture explains repertoires of violence that involve intended or foreseeable harm to civilians, such as indiscriminate urban aerial bombardment? The organizational cultural explanation of British indiscriminate nighttime strategic bombardment doctrine in World War II arguably passes the distinctiveness test on the grounds that the contemporaneous U.S. doctrine of precision daytime bombardment initially strove to avoid civilian casualties (Legro 1995). Persistence in aerial bombardment culture is shown in the carry-over of U.S. military organizational culture from standard operating procedures in the firebombing of Japan to preparations for urban-industrial nuclear attacks on the Soviet Union. Cultural causal mechanisms are perhaps evident in the extensive ideological preparation to justify the targeting doctrine, in the development of euphemistic language around the targeting of civilians, in the socialization of specialists to procedures that became taken for granted, and in implementation from a standard tool kit. But can technical rationality provide a sufficient alternative explanation for such doctrines and training? Was the U.S. Strategic Air Command’s force-employment concept reasonably close to optimal given technical facts and the strategic logic of the interaction with the opponent? Criticism by experts at the RAND Corporation of SAC’s 1950s doctrine of massive, preemptive, urban-industrial, and counterforce attacks suggests that organizational culture was indeed running amok in a way that technical rationality cannot adequately explain (Kaplan 1984; Eden 2004). In short, Tilly’s notion of culturally shared repertoires of contentious action offers a potentially fruitful research agenda for studies of strategic culture. However, in this area as in others, convincing strategic cultural arguments need to pass tests of distinctiveness, persistence, the presence of cultural mechanisms, and the insufficiency of non-cultural mechanisms such as technical rationality. Getting the Most Out of the Concept of Strategic Culture The concept of strategic culture has proved its staying power, attracting the attention of creative, successful scholars of international security affairs for over three decades. However, it has also proved to be a polymorphous concept, subject to varied meanings and used for various purposes. Sometimes strategic culture is employed as a variable in causal explanation, sometimes as a lens for trying to see

The Concept of Strategic Culture 27 through the subjective eyes of the strategic other, and sometimes as an empty metaphor to adorn superficial description. Its potentially most valuable use—but also a potentially dangerous one—is as a tool for predicting strategic behavior. Successful predictions of a group’s strategic choices based on its strategic culture ought to be anchored in thoughtful tests designed to show distinctiveness, persistence (and the conditions under which the strategic culture is likely to change), the operation of specific cultural mechanisms, and the impact of non-cultural factors, especially technical rationality, on culture and on the strategic behavior to be predicted. Implemented in this way, strategic culture should constitute a promising program for research and a useful tool for policy analysis. References Berger, Thomas U. (1996): “Norms, Identity, and National Security in Germany and Japan,” in The Culture of National Security, ed. by Peter J. Katzenstein (New York, NY: Columbia University Press), pp. 317–356. Bloomfield, Alan (2012): “Time to Move On: Reconceptualizing the Strategic Culture Debate,” Contemporary Security Policy, Vol. 33, No. 3 (December), pp. 437–461. Brass, Paul (1997): Theft of an Idol: Text and Context in the Representation of Collective Violence (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Brubaker, Rogers (2004): “Ethnicity without Groups,” in Facing Ethnic Conflicts: Toward a New Realism, ed. by Andreas Wimmer (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield), pp. 34–52. Bukovansky, Mlada (2002): Legitimacy and Power Politics: The American and French Revolutions in International Political Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Desch, Michael C. (1998): “Culture Clash: Assessing the Importance of Ideas in Security Studies,” International Security, Vol. 23, No. 1 (Summer), pp. 141–170. Eckstein, Harry (1988): “A Culturalist Theory of Political Change,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 82, No. 3 (September), pp. 789–804. Eden, Lynn (2004): Whole World on Fire: Organizations, Knowledge, and Nuclear Weapons Devastation (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Fearon, James (1991): “Counterfactuals and Hypothesis Testing in Political Science,” World Politics, Vol. 43, No. 2 (January), pp. 169–195. Finnemore, Martha (2009): “Legitimacy, Hypocrisy, and the Social Structure of Unipolarity: Why Being the Unipole Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be,” World Politics, Vol. 61, No. 1 (January), pp. 58–85. Glenn, John (2009): “Realism versus Strategic Culture: Competition or Collaboration?” International Studies Review, Vol. 11, No. 3 (September), pp. 523–551. Huntington, Samuel P. (1968): Political Order in Changing Societies (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). Johnston, Alastair I. (1995a): Cultural Realism: Strategic Culture and Grand Strategy in Chinese History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Johnston, Alastair I. (1995b): “Thinking about Strategic Culture,” International Security, Vol. 19, No. 4 (Spring), pp. 32–64. Kaplan, Fred (1984): Wizards of Armageddon (New York, NY: Simon and Schuster). Kier, Elizabeth (1997): Imagining War: French and British Military Doctrine between the Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Klinken, Gerry van (2007): Communal Violence and Democratization in Indonesia: Small Town Wars (London: Routledge).

28  Jack L. Snyder Lantis, Jeffrey S. (2002): “Strategic Culture and National Security Policy,” International Studies Review, Vol. 4, No. 3 (Autumn), pp. 87–113. Lantis, Jeffrey S. (2009): “Strategic Culture: A Multifaceted Cultural Approach to the Study of Latin America,” paper prepared for the FIU-SouthCom Academic Consortium at Florida International University’s Applied Research Center, May, pp. 1–22. Lantis, Jeffrey S. and Andrew A. Charlton (2011): “Continuity or Change? The Strategic Culture of Australia,” Comparative Strategy, Vol. 30, No. 4, pp. 291–315. Legro, Jeffrey W. (1995): Cooperation under Fire: Anglo-German Restraint during World War II (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Libel, Tamir (2016): “Explaining the Security Paradigm Shift: Strategic Culture, Epistemic Communities, and Israel’s Changing National Security Policy,” Defence Studies, Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 139–140. Lonergan, Erica D. and Jack L. Snyder (2023): “Can Military Cultures Adapt to Cyberspace? Hackers and Warriors in the U.S. Army,” unpublished manuscript (April). Moran, David and Cynthia E. Lynch (2017): “Organizational Culture and Change: What Impact Will the United States Marine Corps’ Culture Have on the Implementation of the Don’t Ask Don’t Tell Repeal?” Public Administration Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 2, pp. 254–272. Pipes, Richard (1977): “Why the Soviet Union Thinks It Could Fight and Win a Nuclear War,” Commentary, Vol. 64, No. 1 (July), pp. 21–34. Pirani, Pietro (2014): “Élites in Action: Change and Continuity in Strategic Culture,” Political Studies Review, Vol. 14, No. 4 (November), pp. 512–520. Posen, Barry (1993): “Nationalism, the Mass Army and Military Power,” International Security, Vol. 18, No. 2 (Fall), pp. 80–124. Scacco, Alexandra (2009): Who Riots? Explaining Individual Participation in Ethnic Riots (Ph.D. Dissertation, Columbia University). Snyder, Jack L. (1977): The Soviet Strategic Culture: Implications for Limited Nuclear Operations (Santa Monica, CA: The RAND Corporation, Report R-2154-AF, September). Snyder, Jack L. (1984): The Ideology of the Offensive: Military Decision Making and the Disasters of 1914 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Snyder, Jack L. (1991): Myths of Empire: Domestic Politics and International Ambitions (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press). Swidler, Ann (1986): “Culture in Action: Symbols and Strategies,” American Sociological Review, Vol. 51, No. 2 (April), pp. 273–286. Tilly, Charles (2008): Explaining Social Processes (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers). Varshney, Ashutosh (2002): Ethnic Conflict and Civic Life: Hindus and Muslims in India (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press). Wendt, Alexander (1999): Social Theory of International Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Wilkinson, Steven I. (2004): Votes and Violence: Electoral Competition and Ethnic Riots in India (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

2

Updating, Decentering, and Extending Strategic Culture Onur Erpul

The “Culture” of Strategic Culture In 1977, Jack L. Snyder posited the notion of “strategic culture” as a novel analytical concept at the intersection of material-rational and cognitive-ideational approaches. His primary interest was to investigate the defining security problem of the Cold War: the prospective use of nuclear weapons. He argued that Soviet decision-makers were socialized within their organizational and bureaucratic context into a distinct mode of “Soviet thought,” such that their attitudes and beliefs about the use of nuclear weapons acquired a semi-permanent quality, tantamount in ways to culture (understood in a restrictive way) (Snyder 1977). In other words, Snyder’s approach was arguing that the social setting within which rational actors pursue their interests conditioned the way they rank their preferences and engage in strategic behavior. The material conditioned the ideational, and the ideational explained policy choices that did not correspond to the international strategic environment. Nevertheless, the original formulation (and goal) of strategic culture was later misapplied by scholars who attached too much analytical prominence to “culture,” downplaying the analytical significance of material structures such as external threats or domestic interests. However, this chapter argues that the original formulation of strategic culture remains invaluable and is a remarkable expansion of our understanding of the decision-making process. Nonetheless, it is an underappreciated starting point for fruitful theoretical discussions in International Relations. In this volume, we intend to amend this and propel the analysis and theoretical value to different regions, sets of actors, and sociopolitical issues. Since the early years of International Relations (IR) as an academic discipline, a growing number of studies in the United States have debated the finer points of decision-making. In the search for theoretical parsimony, the idea of a homo economicus swiftly took root in the Social Sciences, positing that human beings tend to behave similarly when confronted with the same strategic circumstances. Decisionmakers, therefore, were thought to be “rational strategists” seeking to maximize utility—however, defined. Accordingly, decision-maker’s preferences and calculations could be modeled to engender policy-predictive analysis. In this context, the classical approach to foreign policy and strategy, predicated on intangible and immaterial factors, was commonly perceived as a rather inefficient relic of the DOI: 10.4324/9781003142508-4

30  Onur Erpul past, wholly unsuited to the unique circumstances of the Cold War. With the grim prospect of nuclear war afoot, the comforting belief that the international politics of nuclear armed states operated in a world of rational, unitary, and similarly disposed states made Cold War security dynamics palatable to decision-makers, analysts, and academics alike. In the backdrop of these assumptions, academics gradually rediscovered the importance of incorporating alternative conceptual frameworks to the rational-actor model to study and derive policy-predictive analyses effectively. Nevertheless, such views also garnered much opprobrium from proponents of the classical approach, who had a different take on what animated decision-making. The plurality of international politics reflects vast geographies, different historical contexts, diverse moral aspirations, and political differences, all of which have contributed to fundamental institutional and ideational differences among political communities (Booth 1979). Even if one were to insist on the assumption of states and decision-makers as rational actors, it seemed clear that states operated within different strategic realities and often enacted policies that appeared contrary to purely material and rational precepts. This chapter offers an overview of the origins of strategic culture through an examination of the development of the IR subfield of Security Studies. It then discusses Snyder’s original contribution, highlighting its untapped potential, while also discussing the limitations of succeeding research on a strategic culture that over-emphasizes “culture” (understood expansively). The penultimate section expands on the original definition of strategic culture using insights not only from Snyder’s caveats and reflections but also ideas from strategic behavior and diverse domains of statecraft. For this endeavor, the chapter advances the following formal definition of strategic culture: “Strategic Culture refers to the semi-permanent and unique behavioral tendencies that a group of decision-makers internalizes concerning strategic challenges and that inform their approach to statecraft.” The final section concludes our discussion by way of suggesting avenues for future research on strategic culture. The IR Culture of Security Studies Before Snyder Rather than speculating whether and how states responded to similar stimuli, there were inherent cultural, geographical, historical, and psychological reasons that made each nation and its decision-makers unique. However, the development of the IR discipline, combined with the new institutional connections between academia and policy circles, engendered a shift toward “scientific” solutions to social and political problems (Buzan and Hansen 2009: 101–153). The so-called Behaviorist revolution in the 1950s profoundly affected how academics in the United States conceived of IR. The most important consequence of this development was the conceptualization of states as “rational actors,” a notion originating from economics. The rational-actor assumption allowed scholars and strategists to simplify many complex strategic situations. By reducing the motivations of other states to utility-maximizing behavior, and logically inferring the best policy in each situation, the prevailing belief was that analysts could predict and counter the

Updating, Decentering, and Extending Strategic Culture 31 opponent’s moves. However, approaching Security Studies with these assumptions and “tool kit” could also delude the strategist into arriving at logical, yet fundamentally incorrect, conclusions. If there is, indeed, a clear relationship between the environment and ideal strategies for statesmen to implement, how could analysts make sense of the multitude of historical examples in which policies defied a priori rational expectations? One of the ways to tackle this disparity in material context and agent behavior attributed the problem to pathologies within the state. Specifically, foreign policy decision-making models, such as the bureaucratic-politics and organizationaltheory ones, sought to open the “black box” of the state, thereby supplementing the rational-actor model. The organizational approach reduced the problem to one of the operations of specialized agencies that make up the government. By replicating the policies designed to achieve their organization’s goals, the multifarious organs of a state could develop a tendency to approach their strategic environment based on their previous experiences and procedures. Succinctly put, the way organizations are socialized within the broader international and domestic strategic environments, and the way those organizations socialize their own functionaries into following standard operating procedures (SOPs), make state policies remarkably rigid over time and often insensitive to structural changes. Similarly, the bureaucraticpolitics model also attributes “deviations” from rational policy-making to internal processes, such as the politicking among political and bureaucratic actors. This approach does not portray the state as a rational unitary actor but as a crucible of conflict and negotiation. Accordingly, deviation from rational state policy is the result of the morass of political competition between the parochial interests of dominant and influential groups and individuals that comprises a domestic political system and is bound to produce unintended policy outcomes. For example, Lawrence Freedman (1976) argues that the rational-actor and bureaucratic-politics models (or “logic” versus “power”) are not mutually exclusive. In fact, political conflicts merely help shape the power structure of the domestic system; in the long run then, the “national interest” is negotiated and privileged by domestic actors. This is also evidenced by the fact that the system is ultimately hierarchical, which “disciplines” bureaucratic actors. While these approaches can be considered as “within-paradigm” refinements, a far more fundamental debate had lingered on from the earliest period of the Behaviorist revolution. Within the IR discipline, rationalist scholars confronted challenges from the traditional approach, who viewed statecraft more as an art and insisted on the centrality of history and philosophy to study the international. One such scholar, Hedley Bull (1968: 100), contended that although game-theoretical analyses had some utility, their practitioners tended to downplay the significance of all other international security matters not directly involving the Soviet-American nuclear dyad. Critically, analysts had also failed to recognize the significance of the myriad of conflicts raging in the so-called Third World because these conflicts could not be abstracted so neatly into parsimonious formal games (see also Bull 1965; 1966). Similarly, Colin S. Gray (1971: 128) maintained that the methodological preferences of social scientists rooted in economic theory undermined sound

32  Onur Erpul strategic analysis because such inquiries tended to create a “mirror image” of the enemy. Since a rational mind can operate only based on the information provided, a strategic signal that is not communicated correctly, or misperceived, could lead to unpredictable outcomes. More important, however, was the issue of whether rationality obtains at all in international politics. If states can misperceive, could they reliably and objectively assess the strategic calculi of their opponents? (Bull 1968: 102). Ken Booth (1979) echoed this opinion in his study of ethnocentrism in strategy, which cautions analysts against making inaccurate assumptions about one’s opponent. Booth revived “culture” as a relevant factor in strategic affairs. He argued that subjectivity does not arise solely from making essentialist claims about the culture of an opponent. In fact, subjectivity can manifest itself by assigning to the opponent a uniform strategic logic comparable to one’s own. This reasoning would be tantamount to suggesting that there is a timeless and universal logic to strategy applicable to all human endeavors. Essentially, the challenge for analysts was not only to remain impartial and detached but also to avoid creating a mirror image of the adversary. This endeavor could be further supported by understanding the relationship between strategy and foreign policy, and the internal workings of a state’s bureaucracy (Gray 1971: 127). Nowhere was the need to dispel the mirror image more crucial than in nuclear strategy. For American strategists, the crux of the problem was nuclear deterrence and the efficacy of its premise. American nuclear strategy had adopted the idea of a second strike against counter-value targets to ensure credible deterrence. American strategists believed that Soviet decision-makers, as rational actors, understood the nuclear exchange in similar terms. However, how would the Soviets react if the United States was to introduce a flexible response to their nuclear doctrine? Did the Soviet Union even perceive the strategic context as their American counterparts? The solution lay in bridging the gap between the two sets of critiques above, combining both the domestic political factors as well as ideational ones. Inventing Strategic Culture In the 1970s, Snyder’s RAND report advanced “strategic culture” as a via media between purely structural and ideational approaches. Snyder (1977: 8) initially defined strategic culture as the “sum total of ideals, conditional emotional responses, and patterns of habitual behavior that members of the national strategic community have acquired through instruction or imitation and share with each other with regard to nuclear strategy.” The original formulation of strategic culture was therefore developed to address a specialized and politically salient strategic subject concerning the balance of nuclear terror. Snyder argued that Soviet decision-makers, socialized not only into their broader national context but more specifically within the Soviet bureaucracy, were acculturated into favoring an offensive first-strike nuclear strategy. This thinking was unlike their American counterparts, who favored “rational” damage-limiting strategies. The so-called “Soviet Man” was thus not the rational strategist envisaged by earlier American civilian analysts, who would moderate their doctrine on the merits of credible deterrence and mutually assured destruction.

Updating, Decentering, and Extending Strategic Culture 33 When attempting to unpack this definition, the first major feature of Snyder’s study, as compared to other approaches adopting the “strategic culture” label, is the attention to the material and ideational contexts of decision-making (Snyder 1977: v, 8, 39). Strategic culture combines insights both from the organizational-theory and bureaucratic-politics models, which attribute foreign-policy outcomes to the propensities of organizations and the domestic play of power between bureaucratic actors, respectively. Thanks to the emphasis on the social structure of decisionmaking and key insights from individual cognition, Snyder not only addressed the explanatory gap in existing theories, especially within the rational-actor model, but also improved upon models that sought to supplement it. This emphasis on context matters because no “strategist” could ever operate in a social, cultural, and political void. The abstract notion of rationality is limited in its applicability, since it is bounded due to the numerous limitations on human cognition. The cognitive processes by which we attempt to reduce uncertainty, such as substituting gaps in knowledge with cognitive misers and heuristics, mean that objective and unbiased decision-making is an untenable proposition. More importantly, making and executing decisions is a collective endeavor, which is something that the rational-actor assumption cannot effectively model. In the IR discipline, the rational-actor model concerns the decisions of an aggregation of groups of individuals, which have distinct logics of their own depending on the way their relations are structured. These dynamics not only intensify the biases of individuals in a group but also disseminate them among other members for political reasons. Groupthink is one notable example. It refers to the idea that decision-making groups will always promote consensus among their members and eliminate alternative decision choices. The desire of group members to fall in line with the rest of the group will eventually result in costly or inappropriate, in other words maladaptive (Janis 1973: 19–25). The institutional and bureaucratic contexts of decisionmaking, therefore, engender socialization (Snyder 2010: 6). From regulations and procedures to vocational learning and intra-bureaucratic bargains, decision-makers internalize specific ways to make sense of their situation to fulfill their missions and, therefore, adopt similar attitudes. Meanwhile, bureaucratic interests and the career-formed attitudes of decision-makers can also affect the decision-making process itself through negotiation within states, while agents at various echelons form subgroups and cliques (Allison and Zelikow 1999: 25–26, 49). Consequently, individual behaviors and beliefs acquire prominence and become impervious to change, while others can transform. Consistent exposure overtime within organizations and transmission across generations of decision-makers cause these attitudes to become enduring across succeeding policies, and ingrained enough so to be considered as “semi-permanent” (Snyder 1977: v, 8). In other words, the proclivity of states to favor existing policies despite changes in the international material context is equivalent to a “culture” (Snyder 1977: v). A comprehensive study of the history and evolution of the state apparati, culture, and especially strategic culture, does not purport to distill centuries of historical “tradition” or introduce purely ideational notions of a broader national culture. Snyder’s definition bestows prominence on the logic of socialization

34  Onur Erpul within narrowly circumscribed in-groups and the formation of mutually reinforcing attitudes about the international strategic environment and the most appropriate policies that a state ought to pursue. That is, the argument is not those geographic, historical, and sociopolitical legacies (e.g., being a Soviet Russian) necessarily lead to a unique way of viewing security issues, although material factors like geography may help explain military dispositions (Snyder 1990: 7). Context-driven attitudes have a staying power that helps to explain why states tend to lag in adjusting their policies to better correspond with the international system; or why policies outlive the environments that gave rise to them (Snyder 1977: 8, 9, 38; 1990: 4). Insights from organizational theory are most useful to explain persistence and change in policy. In moments of considerable ambiguity, such as crises, decisionmakers take cues from standard scenarios and the preexisting beliefs they developed within their organizational settings; or in other words, organizations are likely to exhibit policies similar to their past ones (Allison and Zelikow 1999: 175–180). These situations do not preclude states from change or innovation. Changes can come in various forms. Technological improvements can prompt changes at the operational level ultimately affecting the deployment of capabilities and broader doctrines (Snyder, 1990: 4, 5). Unambiguous structural changes can also send cues to decision-makers to change their policies to ones more suited to new strategic realities. These are the types of situations in which the will of the “agent” acquires explanatory power. However, as these are filtered through the preexisting attitudes and procedures, change is nevertheless limited and steady (Snyder 1977: 38, 39; Allison and Zelikow 1999: 164–185). Likewise, the political struggle within and among top decision-makers and bureaucracies also affects continuity and change. Despite the logic of socialization within organizations, decision-makers are not single-minded and internally consistent monoliths. There are always cliques within organizations and bureaucracies with differing priorities, skill sets, and areas of expertise, and may even carry contradicting parochial and career-informed interests. Since policies result from negotiation and satisficing, the policies and beliefs concerning policy will tend to display absolute consistency. Policy attitudes may change, especially in times of ambiguity through changes in the dominant clique, the imposition by the top echelon of decision-makers, or renegotiations. The role of institutions, the logic of socialization, and the domestic play of power are all crucial. However, this should not lead one to neglect the crucial details that separate strategic culture from other alternatives to game-theoretical and rational-actor models. For one, strategic culture is not technologically deterministic. Organizations indeed tend to acquire similar sets of practices and policies due to isomorphism (Snyder 1977: 7). Over time, organizations with similar missions and capabilities come to resemble each other as concerns over efficiency animate them to adopt similar policies. Like with the rational-actor model, the organizational theory appears to suggest that there are some immutable principles to various strategic scenarios that force organizations toward similar policies overtime. Strategic culture does not confine itself to technical innovation or a drive toward policy efficiency. There are further factors that come into play, namely, intra- and extra-agency politicking, the adaptation of new heuristics, attitudes and biases, and

Updating, Decentering, and Extending Strategic Culture 35 discernable cues from changes in the international context. Unlike strategic culture, however, organizational theory in and of itself is unable to produce specific and distinct explanations, which questions the idea that there are inherently general and immutable characteristics to all organizations as there is no incontrovertibly “correct” way for strategic actors to solve a given problem. The consideration of context, both institutional as well as strategic, grants an additional explanatory power by demystifying the conditions that may lead to distinct ways of strategizing, thereby helping analysts conceive of testable hypotheses and aid in policy prediction (Snyder 1977: 7, 15–16). Strategic culture also provokes honest discussions about the rationale of the opponent. That is to say, it takes the mirror-image problem head-on by calling into question the conflicting motives, perceptions, and context of not only one’s opponent but also one’s self (Snyder 1977: 7). Another way the strategic-cultural lens can be helpful is during crisis situations. The organizational theory posits that SOPs and standard scenarios provide guidelines for statesmen to navigate the uncertainty of crisis situations. The strategic-cultural lens reminds us that there may be exceptional circumstances at play that require a deeper analysis of context, possibly enabling more reliable hypotheses and facilitating more reliable predictions (Snyder 1977: 15–16). Compared to a pure organizational approach, strategic culture offers a more indepth view of the many forces at play within a state that determine their strategies. While military establishments, by necessity, are prominent in formulating doctrines and force postures, a host of complications can arise. Military organizations, while influential, may not necessarily have the final say in matters of doctrine or development, as a host of other bureaucratic and political infringements can influence the actual disposition of their forces, thereby leading to a maladaptation to strategic circumstances despite their organizational expertise (Snyder 1977: 9, 29, 31, 28). Maladaptation, in this sense, can also be caused simply by the ingrained attitudes of military decision-makers whose doctrines and discourses may not translate directly and effectively into operational practice. Among other things, the vested interests of influential actors within an organization may favor a different disposition. Alternatively, the “cultural” attitudes of such groups may hamper the policy process by underscoring their biased attitudes. This scenario suggests that it would be counterproductive to infer a “strategic culture” through discursive or doctrinal materials alone, for these can also be laden with broader sociocultural attitudes. However, such evidence remains vital to piece together the context in which decision-makers say and do what they do. To divine a Soviet strategic culture; therefore, Snyder first examined the unique Soviet strategic position and its disposition toward deploying troops, because geographical and other material realities are the foundation of any notions of culture (Snyder 2010: 6). An elaboration on the historical legacies of the Soviet military institutions and their organizational histories are also necessary. From the Second World War to then-contemporary notions of nuclear deterrence, as well as through the influences of notable political figures (such as Lenin), the operational evolution of Soviet strategic thinking offers an interesting contrast to its American

36  Onur Erpul counterpart. They ultimately derived their views about violence and politics from similar intellectual and institutional traditions, for both drew inspiration from the writings of Carl von Clausewitz. In a sense, the original formulation of strategic culture by Snyder is a comparative design offering a synopsis of the different trajectories of two security establishments which, on paper, have similar institutional and intellectual foundations, but which have changed over time in response to global and technological changes. Nonetheless, while the Soviets exploited a perceived advantage from unlimitedaim warfighting strategies, American strategists settled on damage-limiting strategies. In line with Clausewitz, as a pretext to extol the virtues of unlimited war, the United States adopted the strategy of flexible response for similar reasons. The power discrepancies between the United States and the Soviet Union, as well as high-level and low-level bureaucratic processes, all help to suggest that myriad factors determine the overall context of decision-making. Importantly, culture shaped strategic culture (in the broader sense) and history insofar as they are transmitted through institutions and socializing processes rather than passed on purposively through notions of political culture or other prevailing social values (Snyder 1990: 4). The socializing processes themselves are not uniform (Snyder 1977: 8). Key decision-makers or various cliques within organizations may develop and perpetuate, a unique type of groupthink, or what Snyder (1977: 10) labelled “subcultures.” None of these groups, or specific individuals, necessarily have a decisive influence in the shaping of culture, or even strategy, although key decision-makers can shape the agenda by structuring the overall debates within these organizations. It is also worth considering that a strategic culture’s, or subculture’s, habitual preferences are not absolutes and can be measured instead along a spectrum of possibilities. Strategic culture, armed with such refinements, is a viable way with which to understand the emergence of a set of persistent policy rationales and tool kits for action that can become ingrained in the minds and corresponding practices of generations of decision-makers. Through such socialization, these attitudes become internalized among circumscribed groups and consequently, it becomes difficult to dislodge such attitudes even when the original context changes. Decision-makers, therefore, very often perpetuate practices that no longer adequately satisfy the dictates of newer strategic contexts. In this context, the ideal way to understand the continuity of state behavior is not through the rational-actor model or generic theories of content analyses of language employed by decision-makers (Snyder 1977: 14). Instead, one need only look at the regularities of state behavior to infer the stylistic dispositions of decision-makers. Here, strategic culture can help supplement rational and game-theoretical models and also understand how decisionmakers legitimate certain policy choices over others. Most importantly, it can help predict how an organization is likely to comport itself when faced with a new, and therefore uncertain, strategic context. Once the overall structural context thrusts ambiguity and duress upon decision-makers, strategic-cultural factors become prominent by providing them with a heuristic template with which to guide policy. Thus, wherever structural and material explanations fail, strategic culture can viably supplement them (Snyder 1977: 4; Desch 1998).

Updating, Decentering, and Extending Strategic Culture 37 Waves of Culture

Since Snyder’s publication, the field of Security Studies has witnessed a growing number of studies adopting, sometimes quite problematically, the concept of strategic culture. Although Snyder’s original definition and methodological concerns were stringent, his caveats have not prevented succeeding generations of scholars from expanding the scope and agenda of research. Following Alastair I. Johnston (1995b), for instance, it has become customary to categorize strategic-cultural research through an examination of distinct “generations” or “waves,” although notably Desch (1998) has pushed back against this (mis)classification, citing a rich literature on pre-IR national character research conducted at the behest of the U.S. Government in the 1940s. Johnston’s scheme nevertheless retains its usefulness as a tool for grappling with the varying epistemological and ontological assumptions of the modern academic research program on strategic culture, and helping us to investigate how each generation has detracted from the original notion of strategic culture in notable ways. Initially, the agenda centered on disentangling strategic studies from assumptions about universal bounded-rationality. In this respect, one of the most prominent studies on strategic culture in the so-called “first generation” of scholarship has been that of Colin S. Gray, who advanced the idea of strategic culture as a milieu in which strategic actors debate policy. This idea became a standard and distinguishing feature of the first generation of strategic culture (Gray 1981; 1999; Lord 1985; Snyder 1991: 7). However, this approach suffered from various problems. Notably, its scholars identified too many factors as important, which led to a “kitchen-sink” list of conditions that ultimately rendered the concept unwieldy and imprecise. Was strategic culture a sum of social, political, economic, institutional, geographic, and historical factors? Was it an outcome of the context formed by some relevant factors, as Snyder suggested? The milieu approach, which originated from research on “national styles,” detracted from Snyder’s original framework in all but sensitivity to context. Indeed, Gray hints at the importance of a national security establishment, akin to the organizational logic; however, the interpretivist characteristics of a milieu tend to preclude such an approach from being a viable supplement to structural–material and rationalist theories. Moreover, the internal processes of socialization and institutionalization are absent from such first-generation studies.1 There are also a series of additional methodological problems in this generation of research. Johnston argues, for example, that the first generation’s approach is tautological and therefore methodologically questionable (Johnston 1995b: 41). Certainly, if all security establishments have been enculturated in a particular national setting, how could strategic-cultural analyses provide any helpful guidance without a basis for commonality? If such an assumption holds, moreover, comparative studies of strategic culture or national-security establishments could not be conducted in any meaningful way. Even if one were to infer a strategic culture reasonably, analysts would nevertheless be hard-pressed to explain situations when security establishments detracted from their broader “culture.”

38  Onur Erpul The succeeding generation of research also shifted the agenda, moving further away not only from Snyder’s initial definition but also from first-generation scholars. The second generation defined strategic culture as the practices of ruling classes to legitimate a favorable world order (Lock 2010). A prominent example is Bradley Klein’s incorporation of strategic culture within a Neo-Gramscian framework of world order, which was an innovative contribution to the theoretical discussions in the IR discipline at the time. Accordingly, Klein (1988: 136) defines strategic culture as “the way in which a modern hegemonic state relies upon internationally deployed force.” In his view, the domestic facet of strategic culture leads to practices aimed at justifying the deployment of forces abroad, such as political ideologies, myths, and discourses. Klein thought this as a necessary evolution in strategic-cultural studies because many of the analysts of the first generation had failed to consider the political significance of the civilian analysts, whom they derided for their “poor strategy planning” as well as for relying on methodologies too deeply rooted in economics. Instead, the inclusion of civilian technicians served the purpose of creating a frame for national security that appeared to be scientific and inclusive. The reflexive tone of this study and its focus on ideational factors as a justification for troop dispositions and societies somewhat resembles the way prominent decision-makers attempt to legitimize practices or justify the way an organization perceives and grapples with its environment à la Snyder; so some insights remained. However, these types of studies do not attempt to craft hypotheses with which to test strategic-cultural propositions—a problem notably shared by the preceding generation of research. The emphasis on immaterial factors and the prominence of discourses and élite narratives, which may not necessarily hail from military agencies or other state institutions, also fails to provide a compelling way to study continuity and, thereby, infer a strategic culture. Discourses, in and of themselves, do not constitute sufficient reliable evidence for researchers to distinguish between declaratory and actual practice. Although strategic culture started to become a popular subject in the 1990s, there have been very few publications on strategic culture from the second-generation perspective. With the end of the Cold War, there was a concomitant “culture-turn” in the discipline of IR, and the Social Sciences more broadly, which re-ignited an interest in strategic culture. The extent to which these studies faithfully advanced the critical insights of strategic culture à la Snyder, however, is debatable. The third wave is more eclectic and methodologically diverse than previous generations. Given the alleged failure of structural theories to account for the end of the Cold War, the third wave of strategic-cultural studies necessarily took shape and rose to prominence in the post-Cold War environment. Although cultural approaches, in general, were already gaining popularity in IR, they finally consolidated with the unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union, for realist and other “materialistic” approaches were said to have failed to predict this momentous geopolitical transformation (Kegley 1993; Kratochwil 1993), although realists deny this (Wohlforth 1994/1995; Schweller and Wohlforth 2000). This change was seen as underscoring the power of ideas and culture to explain international security dynamics, all the while downplaying the

Updating, Decentering, and Extending Strategic Culture 39 determinism of structural theories, which had ostensibly failed to explain their primary subject area: great-power politics and polarity. In other words, the discipline became highly receptive to a constructivist agenda that highlighted the importance of ideas, norms, and intersubjective cultures and identities for studying international relations (Lapid 1989; Wendt 1992; Katzenstein 1996). One of the most important contributions from this generation was Johnston’s research on strategic culture as a variable impacting decision-making in China during the Ming dynasty (Johnston 1995a; 1995b). To distinguish between the relative impact of cultural and ideational variables versus others, Johnston contrasted a “Confucian” strategic culture with a generic “parabellum” (or realpolitik) cultural paradigm based on how the Ming approached issues of war and peace, and the use of force in politics more generally (Johnston 1995a: ix). Johnston also specified a t–1 or timeframe in which to study the behavior of Chinese élites to see whether culture impacted their choice of grand strategy. He argues that strategic culture can be derived from an “integrated system of symbols that acts to establish pervasive and long-lasting grand strategic preferences by formulating concepts of the role and efficacy of military force in inter-state political affairs, and by clothing these conceptions with such an aura of factuality that the strategic preferences seem uniquely realistic and efficacious” (Johnston 1995a: 36). Ranked preferences thus form based on the frequency of war, beliefs about the efficacy of violence against external threats, and beliefs about the utility of force. These then shape the actual strategic behavior of élites. Ultimately, although strategic culture may independently affect decision-making, Johnston finds significant support for the realpolitik strategic culture. In the process of trying to tailor strategic culture in the language and methods of positivism, that is: crafting testable hypotheses, Johnston (1995a; 1995b; 1999: 519–523; Poore 2003: 279–284) unleashed a scathing, but ultimately inconclusive, attack on the first generation. By treating culture as a distinct variable and creating conditions for controlling cultural and non-cultural factors, Johnston and other contemporary researchers after him attempted to construct a “positivist” and “explanatory” framework (Legro 1994; Berger 2005; Kier 1997; Tannenwald 2005). Similarly, Peter Katzenstein’s (1996) edited volume advances cultural variables, such as norms and identity, as alternatives to purely material and structural theories. The overarching theme for this generation, therefore, has been a problematic treatment of culture as an independent variable that purports to explain change rather than continuity—as in Snyder’s original formulation. A brief survey of these successive waves clearly shows that the strategic culture literature has failed to produce a consensus on what constitutes rigorous or, at the very least, progressive research on strategic culture. As the Johnston-Gray debate suggests, it is difficult to compromise between rigor and relevance. Critics of ideational variables and cultural studies, such as Michel Desch (1998: 4–5), are unwilling to concede to contemporary studies on strategic culture any theoretical significance beyond a “supplementary role” to structural-materialist theories. Snyder (1977; 1990: 4–5) originally sought to explain the recurrence of attitudes within a highly specialized organizational environment or context. Scholars of the first

40  Onur Erpul generation expanded this discussion into a milieu encompassing broader social and political forces while resulting in tautological analyses. Second-generation scholars, for their part, were more reflexive and adopted entirely different research commitments in their (mis)use of the concept. Finally, the third generation concedes too much to pure cultural and ideational analyses, enlarging their understanding of “culture” and redirecting research toward change rather than continuity. But while the third generation is overall sympathetic to a rigorous methodology, it advances purely ideational hypotheses as stand-alone causal arguments, instead of opting for a more modest view in which strategic culture could help explain persistence or continuity in policy as interacting with structural explanations. In Snyder’s (1990: 5–6) view, such “vulgar idealism” neglects the immanence and necessity of material constraints and human biology in the formation of ideas. There is much scholarly endeavor beyond inter-generational debates as strategiccultural analyses continue to flourish. The most salient discussion point revolves around the issue of developing a causal and falsifiable theory that avoids the pitfalls of previous research. We can identify two important trends. First, taking the cue from Johnston’s desire to develop strategic culture as an independent variable in a positivist and explanatory framework, another recent development in strategiccultural studies has been the idea of using it in a supplementary role to structuralmaterial theories. Structural realism, for instance, is a theory of how the international system, through the dynamics of competition (elimination) and emulation (isomorphism), socializes states into acquiring over the long haul similar characteristics, which then produce international outcomes such as the balance of power (Waltz 1979: 166–168). However, how states and decision-makers come to develop similarities, as well as distinct behaviors, can be better qualified with cultural analysis. This understanding is most evident in what has come to be known as neoclassical realism, which takes system-level phenomena (such as the material distribution of capabilities in the international system and permutations of threats) as an independent variable and combines them with, among other analytical concepts, strategic culture as an intervening variable, was a much-criticized move on the part of realists, who were accused of “degenerating” their own research program (Legro and Moravscik 1999). Proponents of neoclassical realism, a research program within realism that studies how material factors at the level of the international system interact with unit-level variables to affect particular state behavior, meanwhile, have found plenty of areas of syncretism between system-level and unit-level variables (Schweller 2003; Rathbun 2008; Lobell, Taliaferro, and Ripsman 2009), including specific ways in which strategic cultural analysis can be incorporated into otherwise structural realist research (Dueck 2006; Glenn 2009). In this view, the foreign policy executive (or FPE) acts as the interpreter of the international and domestic security environments, thus creating an “imperfect transmission-belt” between an international parameter and a unit-level parameter that shapes élites’ behavior and, therefore, policy outcomes in particular ways. John Glenn has called such analyses “epiphenomenal” studies because cultural variables are partially used to explain why states deviate from the expectations of pure structural realism (Glenn 2009: 539). In this respect, culture can be employed

Updating, Decentering, and Extending Strategic Culture 41 in a sound way to explain persistence, like Snyder did, by addressing how state behavior remains the same despite a changing strategic conjuncture. Used in this way, it may also help explain maladaptive state behavior; that is, how states fail to assess their environment and commit to ex post facto counterproductive policies. This branch of strategic-cultural scholarship, predicated on neoclassical realism, is perhaps the closest to the original formulation of strategic culture first suggested by Snyder. In effect, Snyder’s original work stands as a precursor of sorts of the development of neoclassical realism today. Another recent development is the emergence of a fourth wave of strategic cultural studies (Bloomfield 2012; Libel 2020a), underscoring the need for building falsifiable theories of strategic culture that examine change rather than continuity based solely on material factors. This can perhaps be interpreted as a qualified return to the culture-as-context notion associated with the with the first-generation scholarship (Haglund 2014: 319). One important aspect of the cultural context that is amenable both to change, and measurement, is the existence of strategic subculture. The fourth generation rightly problematizes the absence of subcultures in strategic cultural analysis and highlights their potential to understand not only continuity in behavior but a change in policy position too. As actors operating in institutional environments and carrying distinct ideas, ideologies, and policy positions, studying the influence of decision-making (sub)groups may be particularly advantageous for theory-building purposes. For instance, Libel (2020b: 358–360) offers a compelling model of strategic cultural change that underscores how exogenous shocks can affect the policy discourse, and how the ensuing competition between subcultural groups within the decision-making institution can lead either to a reaffirmation of the hegemonic strategic culture, and therefore policy, or result in a policy change due to the victory of another subculture. Perhaps it may be possible to think about the relationship between these new trends as the difference in the degrees to which material factors and cultural/ contextual factors analytically prevail. By applying the reasoning put forward by Götz (2021) on the various shades of neoclassical realist research, fourth-generation scholarship is more akin to a liberal approach as it is sensitive to international systemic changes but nevertheless assumes an inside-out hierarchy in which domestic processes like discourses and subcultural competition take precedence. The other model meanwhile envisages a greater role for systemic factors, making it not only more analytically consistent with neoclassical realism but, perhaps, truer to its original intentions, as argued below. Regardless, both research trends present promising pathways for developing strategic cultural research. Substance, Not Labels

The discussion above, on the original rendition of strategic culture and the underappreciated and underrepresented qualities of the concept by later generations of scholars, also points to a remarkable intellectual history in which the original insights of strategic culture survived within rationalist and structural paradigms of international relations rather than the succeeding “generations” of interpretivist

42  Onur Erpul and constructivist research on strategic culture. After his seminal publications on strategic culture, Snyder appears to have distanced himself from the label “strategic culture.” Snyder’s (1990: 5–6) later suggested certain skepticism toward attributing too much analytical power to the concept as others did. He cited not only the importance of limiting relevant contextual factors to organizational and bureaucratic processes but also recognized that structural changes could concomitantly prompt countries to “converge” concerning practices. As such, culture was merely a “blunt instrument,” an “explanation of the last resort” (Snyder 1990: 4). In the same volume, Ken Booth (1990: 122) affirmed that, while Snyder’s coinage and examination of strategic culture was a long-awaited development, his use of the word “culture” to frame what was essentially material and institutional contexts was done “in a fit of absent-mindedness.” While Snyder appears to have lost interest in the label, much of his succeeding research remained linked by a common theme: to address the exceptional cases in which actors deviate from “rational” behavior and the dictates of both the structural and material context of world politics. In The Ideology of the Offensive, for instance, the term strategic culture is not explicitly adopted as such (Snyder 1984: 16). Instead, Snyder shifted his focus to related concepts rooted in organizational theory and cognition. He argued that the preferences of war planners and the ultimate strategic dispositions of the European great powers prior to the First World War were shaped not only by the expected utility of war plans, which could not resolve material uncertainties on their own, but also by their motivated biases and organizational tendencies. The socialization of war planners within their strategic and organizational settings, combined with the practical need to reduce complexity and uncertainty, propelled the belligerents toward offensive military postures that ultimately explain the counter-intuitive “ideology of the offensive” in an international military context that favored defensive force postures (see also Van Evera 1984; 2003). Snyder (1991) further enriched the discussion by tackling the question of why states often engage in “maladaptive” foreign policies. Specifically, he examined domestic political processes, observing how late-industrializing states adopted over-expansionist grand strategies that ultimately led to encirclement. In lateindustrializing states, élites pursue their parochial interests by propagating “myths” concerning the benefits of imperial foreign policies. The major contribution of Myths of Empire was to expand the discussion to a diverse set of powerful domestic actors that sought to trade favors with each other to achieve their narrow, parochial interests. The myths employed by these self-serving interest groups came to constrain the foreign policy options of these states, thereby leading in some cases to expansionist foreign policies, somewhat akin to the ideology of the offensive discussed above. This finding is significant because it once again shows how prevailing beliefs within a decision-making group capture the policy-making process. Ideology of the Offensive and Myths of Empire convincingly show that rationality, self-interest, biased thinking, and the logic of strategic culture can operate in organizational and decision-making contexts beyond nuclear strategy. Finally, on the point of pluralistic domestic structures, Snyder also observed how domestic political transformations, such as democratization, encouraged leaders to employ

Updating, Decentering, and Extending Strategic Culture 43 exclusionary rhetoric, and policies to mobilize public support in their favor. These processes served to destabilize domestic decision-making and exacerbate international tensions, making democratizing states more war-prone, at least in the shortterm, than other states (Mansfield and Snyder 1995; Snyder 2000; 2005). A final but crucial point concerns Snyder’s attempts to investigate international and domestic structures simultaneously. In a sense, we can consider his research agenda as a prototypical form of neoclassical realism that views state behavior as the consequence of a transmission belt in which decision-makers make choices based on the international environment as well as domestic politics. Much like Snyder’s (1991) original attempt to improve upon the limitations of the rationalactor model, neoclassical realism seeks, among other things, to explain the “maladaptive” policies of states—although Zakaria (1992: 193) argues otherwise. Armed with a wealth of theoretical insights about what animates states, we now need to ask how we can push the research agenda beyond explaining foreign policy and the realm of military affairs. Strategic Culture’s Untapped Potential Experts originally applied the concept of strategic culture to security issues in the context of the superpower nuclear rivalry. As a supplement to rational and structural theories, and as an approach rooted in the principles of organizational theory, bureaucratic politics, and cognitive approaches to foreign policy, the potential applications of strategic culture are far more varied than commonly assumed. It is possible that Jack Snyder (2010: 6–8) himself was unaware of the untapped potential of his original definition of strategic culture beyond nuclear strategy. In addition to the aforementioned proto-neoclassical realist investigations, his recognition of non-state actors through Charles Tilly’s (2008) notion of “repertoires of violence” for contentious politics is one prominent example (see Snyder 2010: 6–8). The strategic circumstances in which actors operate and the available capabilities not only influence their means but also offer yet another explanation as to why strategic actors can display unique modes of behavior across similar issues. While previous generations of research have problematized the “culture” component of strategic culture, expanding upon anthropological and sociological understandings of culture in a broader sense, the “strategic” component has been severely neglected. In order to resuscitate the insight and theoretical contribution of Snyder’s original concept, however, closer attention has to be paid to its potential for application beyond the realm of nuclear deterrence and into other equally strategic domains of statecraft. Therefore, to expand the concept of strategic culture and effectively broaden its analytical scope, the component of “strategy” is a crucial starting point, for so long as the logic of “strategic” action obtains, the application of Snyder’s concept of strategic culture is also viable. Game-theoretical analyses of bargaining situations, for example, examine decision-making across many policy issues and attempt to predict the likely policy preferences of actors. While the latter endeavor is beyond the strategic cultural lens, its applicability is not just limited to nuclear strategy or deterrence.

44  Onur Erpul For the purposes of this project, the volume seeks to analyze the behavior of groups and sub-groups of key decision-makers that compete or cooperate on issues specific to their goals and functions. In effect, one could not even begin to think strategically in the absence of distinct groups with specialized functions. Equally, this is not to suggest that every political group can be analyzed with a strategiccultural lens because there must be a specifically strategic component to such a study. With this in mind, we define “strategy” as the process through which political wills pursue their interests in a competitive environment and among other political wills (Clausewitz 1976: 75). There are two essential components of a strategy. First, strategy concerns the vital interests of a political will; and second, there is an interdependence between the political wills that pursue a goal as the calculations and behavior of one affect those of the other. Any strategic cultural analysis must, therefore, be sensitive to the desired goals and the various policy options available to actors. Decisionmaking groups, therefore, with clearly defined policy agendas and tool kits, are an appropriate unit of analysis for strategic thinking and behavior. The most definitive statement of strategy in Western strategic thinking (Clausewitz) highlights the achievement of political goals by military engagements. A series of self-contained and complete actions (or “engagements”) thus constitute war. Although there are numerous good definitions of strategy, one can logically infer that the “political goals” that Clausewitz wrote about can also extend beyond the mere deployment of force and military campaigns. Pursuing power (polity) and plenty (economy), or negotiating peace (diplomacy), constitute “politics” as much as does war (Paret 1986: 3, 29; Luttwak 2001: 2; Heuser 2010: 3). In this respect, Edward Luttwak’s (2001: 88–89) definition is instructive as it recognizes the multifaceted dimensions of strategy, but argues that distinct levels of strategy and tools of statecraft combine at the highest level of strategy in a “grand strategy.” Economic policies, diplomatic practices, or specific aspects of nuclear strategy, are thus comprised of such “engagements.” By extension, therefore, another way to think about strategic culture is as a group’s institutionally learned proclivity toward preferring various types of engagements. Based on these considerations, forward-thinking employment of strategic cultural research, as adopted by the contributions to this volume, may benefit from the following considerations. First, it is possible to think about “domains of statecraft” as a notion that refers to multiple areas of policy-making that are highly specialized and amenable to the logic of strategic action beyond nuclear deterrence. Domains of statecraft refer to the multiple channels, or issue domains corresponding to tools of statecraft that constitute a strategic environment. These domains include military security, diplomacy, the economic sphere, and even social policies. By this logic, military doctrine, diplomatic interactions, as well as the economic and social policies of states, are all amenable to strategic reasoning. More importantly, these realms of action can be clearly observed, analyzed, translated, and acted upon by social groups with varying levels of expertise. It is not meaningful to argue that the totality of myths and ideas or historical, political, social, and other factors within can exercise a robust and independent effect on the conduct of strategy. Doing so could make a

Updating, Decentering, and Extending Strategic Culture 45 researcher culpable for the same problems as those perpetrated by those who misappropriated strategic culture. However, examining the modus operandi of groups of specialists within organizations inter se may reveal more about strategic culture since their institutional dynamics can be examined from a sociological perspective, thus justifying a strategic cultural lens. If the axioms of systemic, material, and ideational theories predict institutional isomorphism, strategic culture can explain its limits, among other things. A second consideration pertains to strategic engagements within the domains of statecraft along strategic continua, offering typologies of possible habit policies.2 For instance, Snyder’s (1977) original study compared distinct Soviet strategic cultures in terms of offensive/defensive postures with respect to nuclear deterrence. Decision-makers’ habits can be conceived along continua in every conceivable domain, whether it is deciding between domestic to external military orientations to policy-planners’ predilection for innovation or emulation. It could also include a decision-making body’s tendency to cooperate or defect in negotiations and even a peacekeeping organization’s modus operandi with respect to providing aid, among other things. This emphasis on typologies and continua underscores the importance of a third innovation, and one advocated by the fourth generation of strategic cultural scholarship, which is research into strategic subcultures. Indeed, subcultures can help to delineate specific habits and policy-making options. For instance, one area upon which strategic cultural discussions have expanded includes epistemic communities (Libel 2016) and the use of discourses (Libel 2020a) to understand subcultures and the potentially productive and transformative aspects of strategic culture to provide falsifiable theories of strategic culture. The Limitations of Strategic Culture This volume addresses a significant imbalance in the IR discipline and, specifically, in the subfield of security studies. Strategic-cultural analyses have limited their inquiry to Western and great-power cases. It is contended that such a narrow research agenda hampers productive research and the crafting of generalizable propositions by reducing one’s universe of cases. If all states engage in “strategic” behavior, then all states must, by necessity, have a strategic culture and are valid cases from which to derive generalizable statements about strategic culture. Perhaps such a “great-power” bias exists because lesser powers do not employ force as often as great powers. Conventional wisdom would argue that non-great power and nonWestern states theoretically face more existential threats than great powers because of their limited capabilities. This material weakness would logically make them more susceptible to the conditioning effects of the international system and encourage appropriate policy responses. If strategic culture is a supplement to structural and rational theories, then, the persistence in the behaviors of weaker states in the face of changing structural circumstances offers a litmus test for the agent-structure debate by questioning the explanatory power of structural arguments. In fact, structural theory’s limits can be

46  Onur Erpul further defined through strategic cultural models. For instance, policy continuity is a likely possibility too, even when the international structure presents a permissive environment, offering no strong incentives or cues to key decision-makers to alter their policies. One would expect under such circumstances for states to adopt new policies due to the dynamism of domestic political factors that could take precedence in policymaking under such system-level configurations. Here too strategic culture can succeed as a theory of continuity, explaining states’ proclivity for continuity. Finally, taking a cue from the fourth generation of strategic cultural research, one can posit strategic culture as a productive force, potentially explaining policy change in the face of enduring structural constraints. With all that said, research into strategic culture, especially in the context of minor and regional powers, must proceed with caution. It is possible to find a prevalence of similar strategic cultural attitudes among different countries. This is an illustration of what is meant in this volume by convergence. In trying to discover strategic cultural uniqueness, however, many have neglected the inevitable diffusion of attitudes among security establishments, and the tendency of similar organizations to become “like-units” through isomorphism (Ikenberry and Kupchan 1990). Writing in the aftermath of the Cold War, Snyder (1990: 8) underscored the idea of “convergence”: that the security establishments of the U.S.S.R., and its successor, the Russian Federation, adopted similar views to their American counterparts concerning the use of nuclear weapons. Once again, the effort to analyze non-great power cases and a specific geographic region helps to augment the analytical power of strategic culture. Regions are circumscribed and distinct geographical entities comprised of proximate states. One could expect constituent states to face similar structural constraints acted upon them by systemic factors, but also that their propinquity would engender frequent interactions along different domains of statecraft. These conditions make possible the notion of a strategic cultural convergence as multiple countries may come to adopt a similar strategic cultural modus operandi, especially along domains involving key decision-making groups at the level of international organizations. In Lieu of a Conclusion: Toward a Strategic-Cultural Research Program? It is clear from the etiology, evolution, and (mis)utilization of the concept that strategic culture is an idea that lies at the intersection of structure and agency, interweaving both environmental and material factors with social ones. Accordingly, research on strategic culture must take as a starting point of inquiry the disjuncture in material realities and the responses of decision-makers. A strategic-cultural research agenda is a means to address why decision-makers persist in various policies that seem not to reflect strategic realities adequately. Perhaps an appropriate way to illustrate the best utilization of a strategic-cultural lens is through harkening back to the seminal period of the IR disciple in the United States and recalling Arnold Wolfers’ analogy of the “house on fire” (Wolfers 1962: 13). The international system induces states to respond to anarchy the same way as a raging fire would compel the denizens of a building to flee a burning house.

Updating, Decentering, and Extending Strategic Culture 47 A strategic-cultural lens may help to explain why someone would decide to endure the inferno rather than abandon the house on fire. However, as Wolfers suggests, the house is not always on fire, nor everywhere with the same level of intensity. Strategic-cultural research, therefore, can also be employed with the view of addressing why decision-makers persist in their policies long after strategic realities have changed, and different policy approaches would yield more significant benefits. Why would some individuals extricate themselves from a building upon encountering the incandescence of a small candle? While most critics of Snyder’s (1977) original conception have focused on “culture,” there has been a tendency to neglect strategy. The waves of culture-heavy research have unproblematically reduced strategy to context-insensitive principles and guidelines existing in the loftiest realm of decision-makers’ thoughts. Strategy is not merely a belief about when and how to use force, or about which types of weapons to employ—as critics commonly seem to imply. Reducing the concept in such a way precludes the possibility for researchers and analysts to explore policy domains beyond traditional military affairs. The sufficient conditions for “strategy,” as explained earlier, are a competitive setting and the interdependence of decisionmaking. That is, an issue becomes strategic when actors must make decisions based on the expected responses of other actors. So long as this prerequisite is met, the scope of strategic culture can logically and fittingly expand into other policy domains of statecraft. Moreover, research on strategic culture cannot take place in a void. We can glean from the impressive literature on strategic culture that many of its proponents have mistakenly sought to create standalone theories of how various ideational factors affect decision-making without sufficiently defining how culture constrains or enables certain actions. For Snyder, strategic culture is not originally a standalone theory but a last-resort explanation. Thus, strategic culture was a complementary addition to preexisting rational-choice theories, which had failed to capture important nuances pertaining to the Soviet decision-makers and the interdependence of cause and effect between the United States and the Soviet Union. In this respect, our goal is not to suggest that strategic culture ought only to proceed from the rational-actor model. Instead, we envisage a prominent role for strategic culture as a complement to theoretical studies that infer behavioral expectations from structural context and help explain continuity and convergence of behavior when structural explanations fall short. In one way, this is akin to what neoclassical realism has sought to do for Kenneth Waltz’s original structural theory. Yet, the gamut of structural theories extends far beyond structural realism. As we endeavor to prove in this volume, strategic culture can clarify exceptions to actors’ surprising choices (from a theoretical perspective) in forging a “thicker” international society based on a stronger consensus among the great powers, or responding to the systemic incentives of the global economy, among other examples. Strategic culture is undeniably a promising venue for generating useful insights about decision-making, especially when researchers are sensitive to key principles and limitations. Having acknowledged some of the uses and qualities of a classicalminded approach toward a strategic-cultural research program, we nevertheless

48  Onur Erpul view askance the possibility of offering a comprehensive user’s manual on how to conduct strategic-cultural research. As with the writings of one of the most important Western strategic thinkers, Clausewitz, we also stress that strategic circumstances vary. The strategist can, therefore, be taught only the most general of principles to increase one’s chances of victory, but there can be no comprehensive guide to victory applicable to every situation. Notes 1 Fonseca and Gamarra (2017) is a prime example of how even contemporary works on strategic culture remain stuck in a similar “kitchen-sink” mode of thinking, typical of the “first wave” of strategic culture, despite professing to be “inspired” (p. xix) by, and “maintaining consistency” (p. xii) with, Snyder’s original formulation. Beyond the obvious methodological quandaries involved in following such an approach, one of the key insights of Snyder’s original conceptualization is precisely its focus on clearly defined élites, decision-makers, or strategic communities as the carriers of a strategic culture. Most crucially, these may differ fundamentally from their broader “national” culture, understood in a general sense. In this “first wave” type of approach, however, even the “context” is treated vaguely and imprecisely, leading to ever-expanding understandings of strategic culture as if comprised of technology, climate, geography, resources, country size, and population, levels of development, as well as “public attitudes,” “general cultural values,” and myths(!) (see, e.g., Fonseca and Gamarra 2017: 5–8). In the end analysis, élite beliefs are considered as just one among an ocean of variables—instead of as the central focus of a definition of strategic culture à la Snyder. 2 I am very grateful for Jack Snyder’s helpful comment highlighting the importance of typologies.

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Part II

Latin American Case Studies

3

The Role of “Diplomatic Culture” in the Preservation of Order in South America Nicolás Terradas

This chapter combines Jack Snyder’s classical formulation of strategic culture with Hedley Bull’s notion of “diplomatic culture” to advance a new explanation for South America’s puzzling long history of peaceful inter-state relations amid persistently high levels of intra-state violence. The main objective of this effort is twofold. On the one hand, to give “diplomatic culture” a more robust and systematic definition and to make it more applicable than in its current form. On the other, to help illustrate the continued vitality of Snyder’s original concept when applied to certain theoretical puzzles, as in the case of South America’s “long peace.” In this context, the first section of the chapter offers a brief review of the main academic arguments debating this “long peace,” while also emphasizing the empirical challenge created by the inability of traditional structural theories of International Relations (IR) to explain this particular regional case. In a second section, the chapter takes up Bull’s largely underdeveloped notion of “diplomatic culture” and merges it with Snyder’s concept of “strategic culture”—as reintroduced by Onur Erpul in Chapter 2 of this volume. The final section offers a preliminary stylized application of this merged concept of diplomatic culture qua strategic culture to the South American case, suggesting a new theoretical explanation for this regional “long peace” that can avoid some of the common limitations, paradoxes, and dead-ends of the existing theoretical literature. The “Long Peace” in South America: A Theoretical Puzzle Since the early 1990s, it has become commonplace in academic and policy circles to characterize South America as a consolidating “zone of peace” where the recurrence of war and conditions of intense security competition have been escaped or irreversibly transcended. In January 2014, for instance, the Heads of State of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) officially proclaimed the region as “a zone of peace.” Based on “the respect for the principles and rules of International Law,” signatory states declared their “permanent commitment to solve disputes through peaceful means with the aim of uprooting forever the threat or use of force in our region” (CELAC 2014). Back in 2008, when the South American Defense Council of the—now defunct—Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) was created, member states had also expressed a similar DOI: 10.4324/9781003142508-6

56  Nicolás Terradas aspiration toward the consolidation of the region as “a zone of peace” as their number one objective. Apart from these two important institutional pronouncements, there is a long history of regional consensus in favor of the formal establishment of a zone of inter-state peace. Earlier, for example, on August 31 and September 1, 2000, during the First Summit of the South American Heads of State, celebrated in Brasilia, the region was praised for its stable peace and the context of friendship and cooperation. This self-proclaimed “South American Zone of Peace,” moreover, was said to be marked by the “definitive overcoming of territorial disputes, following the example of the 1998 agreement between Ecuador and Peru, which constitutes a recent demonstration of the spirit that predominates in South America, and which has made and will make of this part of the world an area of peace and cooperation, without territorial conflicts” (IIRSA 2000). Similarly, several studies of Latin America’s international relations have echoed this popularized view, further reinforcing the idea of the region as an island of “stable peace,” surrounded by a vast sea of endemic ethnic, religious, and ideological violent conflict and war around the world (see, inter alia, Peceny 1994; Kacowicz 1998; Hurrell 1998a, 1998b; Centeno 2002; Buzan and Wæver 2003: 325–327, 335–338; 2005; Oelsner 2005a; 2005b; Miller 2007: 306–336). As one of the leading exponents of this view put it, “South America has been the most peaceful region in the world in the twentieth century,” given that “on a comparative regional basis, the number of territorial conflicts that were resolved peacefully in South America remains unique” (Miller 2007: 325–326). Similarly, Arie Kacowicz (1998: 68), one of the most prominent voices in this debate, finds that “unlike other areas of the developing world, South America has been one of the most harmonious regions in terms of absence of international wars.” According to the well-known Correlates of War (COW) Project, there has been only one major inter-state war in South America in the entire twentieth century and none during the early twentyfirst century.1 Seen in this light, South America certainly stands out as one of the most peaceful regions of the world in terms of inter-state relations. Despite the popularity of the characterization of the region as a zone of peace (Singer and Wildavsky 1996), however, Latin American experts have been unable to reach a consensus regarding the main causes and historical preconditions underpinning this regional peace. Scholars often disagree about the very meaning of the word “peace,” as well as the exact duration and geographic reach of this regional “long peace” among states. Some studies, for example, view the entire period from their early independence (1810s) to the present as marked by an overall peaceful disposition among Latin American states, while others identify a turning point somewhere between the 1880s and the 1930s (cf. McIntyre 1995: 1–2; Holsti 1996: 150; Kacowicz 1998; Centeno 2002: 34; Martín 2006: 1, 7; Miller 2007: 324; Jones 2007; 2008). Similarly, experts continue to debate whether the long peace is a region-wide phenomenon, or whether the term “zone of peace” should apply solely to the Southern Cone sub-region (cf. Kacowicz 1998; Mares 2001; 2012; Centeno 2002; Oelsner 2005a; Martín 2006; Terradas 2021; 2010). Yet, although the literature on South America’s long peace is by no means insignificant in volume, it has not been able to identify a precise set of factors around which a consensus might

“Diplomatic Culture” in Preservation of Order in South America 57 form to explain in a truly comprehensive way South America’s persistent peaceful condition. What makes the South American case particularly puzzling is that, unlike other regions, it has remained free of major inter-state war in the absence of the same factors that seem to have helped keep other parts of the world at peace. Put differently, although the international context changed in fundamental ways from the early nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century in terms of disincentives and opportunities for peace, no major wars have taken place. South American international relations, for example, cannot be explained by nuclear deterrence or the military presence of a preponderant power guaranteeing regional order in situ. The most well-studied cases in this sense are those of Europe’s North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) and the United States’ presence with large military bases in East Asia. Other comparable cases are those of Sub-Saharan Africa and the Norden region (Scandinavia). Traditional theories of IR seem to encounter no major problems in explaining the prevalence of order and peace in these regions. Similarly, the Kantian idea of “peace among republican democracies” runs into empirical problems when applied to South America because, during the 1930–1990 period, the region was populated by a multiplicity of authoritarian regimes, yet inter-state peace prevailed (see Andreski 1980; Little 1986; Peceny, Beer, and Sanchez-Terry 2002; Martín 2006). Furthermore, one of the most enduring rivalries in twentiethcentury South America was precisely between two formal democracies (Ecuador and Peru), which led to limited armed confrontations in 1941, 1981, and 1995. In parallel to this relative “long peace” among states, another puzzling aspect of South America’s international relations has been its high levels of intra-state armed violence for most of its history (see Frühling and Tulchin 2003; Prillaman 2003; Arias and Goldstein 2010; Pearce 2010; 2018; Müller 2018; Kurtenbach 2019; Warnecke-Berger 2019). This phenomenon, which one scholar has called the “external-peace–internal-violence paradox” (see Martín 2006: 163, 179, 6, 7, 149), has been particularly pronounced since the 1930s, when a wave of dictatorial regimes began to spread across Latin America. Indeed, the egregious record of human rights violations and protracted civil wars in Latin America has few parallels anywhere else in the world. Despite the advent of a new and more stable wave of democratic regimes in the late 1980s, Latin America still occupies today the rarest of positions: it is simultaneously one of the safest neighborhoods for the state, while also the most violent and dangerous region for the individual citizen (cf. Kacowicz 1998: 72; 2005: 10; Centeno 2002: 66, 262–264; Martín 2006: 179). This distinctive aspect of the region further challenges not only popular ideas about the impact of the type of regime on the achievement, maintenance, or deepening of regional peace, but also other popular types of explanations. Cultural accounts, for example, which highlight Latin America’s relative homogeneity in terms of language, religion, customs, and identity, as a factor conducive to peace, have equally failed to account for the region’s persistent low levels of political and economic integration, as well as the problematic coexistence of high levels of interpersonal violence amid inter-state peace (see, e.g., Ebel, Taras and Cochrane 1991). All of these factors make South America’s “long peace” an exceptionally

58  Nicolás Terradas hard regional test for the application of traditional, structural theories about the causes of war and the conditions for peace. In this context, this chapter examines a fundamental puzzle confronting those who seek to explain South America’s enduring type of regional order amid changing international conditions throughout the long period from the early nineteenth century to the present. Contrary to prevailing views, which tend to emphasize the absence of war (or “negative peace”) among states, this chapter suggests focusing on the notion of regional “order” and the formation of a “society of states” in South America as a better alternative explanation. As Andrew Hurrell (2004: 4) eloquently put it, “what is most interesting about the use of force in the region is not its frequency or infrequency, but rather its particular character.” Similarly, Miguel Á. Centeno (2002: 34) argues that, in order to fully grasp the unique aspect of South America’s pattern of war and peace in its long history since independence, one has to go beyond the common understandings of “war” in IR and Political Science and set aside their more simplistic analysis fixated on its material effects (number of casualties, for instance). Centeno suggests, therefore, to focus on a sociological understanding of war that stresses the political will and social commitments underpinning the decisions to use force, or to refrain from doing so. A more holistic definition of war, therefore, allows us to escape the so-called “tyranny” of statistical methods in Security Studies and its rather arbitrary definitions, and to study the phenomenon of the use of force from other, more productive angles (cf. McIntyre 1995: 2, 167; Mares 2001: 32–35; Domínguez 2003: 20 fn. 16). In this chapter, I borrow from Hedley Bull’s (1977) work on international society and combine it with the classical notion of “strategic culture” to propose an alternative explanation for South America’s historical evolution from an early period of intense armed conflict to the current condition of regional order and relative inter-state peace. Specifically, I argue that South America’s regional order can be best understood as an evolved “society of states,” as defined by Bull, underpinned by a distinctive “diplomatic culture” that is characterized by the predisposition of Latin American diplomats and statespersons toward a prudential and restrained use of force against neighboring states. The historical formation and progressive consolidation of such a “diplomatic culture” has led to a strong shared preference for the prioritization of regional order and stability, which has been further undergirded by the creation of a record-high number of regional organizations and legal/diplomatic conventions (see Domínguez 2007; Becker Lorca 2014; Sabatini 2014; Van Klaveren 2017). Quite paradoxically, this thickly enmeshed “diplomatic culture,” embedded in Latin American diplomats and foreign-policy executives, has not only underpinned a South American order—helping bring regional stability, resolving peacefully multiple border disputes, and limiting war inter se—but also indirectly has made possible an unprecedented amount of intra-state violence, civil wars, and systematic human rights violations during most of its long history. Functionally, therefore, this violent side of the regional order has largely remained contained within national territorial borders. By refocusing on regional “order,” rather than “positive”/“negative” peace, it becomes possible to grasp the South American case in its most crucial aspects,

“Diplomatic Culture” in Preservation of Order in South America 59 as in recognizing that the use of force can be compatible with order and stability (Bull 1977), and should not be reduced merely to its antithesis. Since political orders are social constructions, and not automatic processes of power balancing and accommodation, its protection and enforcement cannot exist without some consideration for what states consider legitimate uses of force. For instance, several armed conflicts that erupted throughout the twentieth century (after the 1930s) can thus be recovered for the analysis—as in the case of the conflict between Peru and Colombia in the mid-1930s, or the recurrent military confrontations between Peru and Ecuador in the 1940s, 1980s, and 1990s; not to mention the Falklands/ Malvinas war between Argentina and the United Kingdom in 1982. Traditional analyses commonly adopt as a key component of the definition of “war” the COW Project’s threshold of 1,000 battle-related casualties in a year between neighboring states. Yet, by following this database, they blind themselves to the many post1930s Latin American armed conflicts by the simple methodological limitation of having to settle on an arbitrary number of casualties to define what may count as war. However, a focus on “order” that drops this strict methodological element can offer a more comprehensive explanation of the long evolutionary historical process of changing attitudes and characteristics regarding the legitimate use of force in the region, which underpins South America’s long peace. The key insight here is that the use of force (i.e., “war”) in the region has become progressively tamed and limited, yet not entirely discarded as a policy option. This aspect shifts the center of gravity of the debate away from the “absence-of-war” and “frequency-of-war” mentalities that predominate in the debate, toward the changing character and progressive limitation of the legitimate use of force in the region. “The Most Peaceful Region in the World”

Academic discussions on the “long peace” in South America seem to be far from producing a general consensus on the causes behind such an important historical development. There has been a strong and growing interest in excavating a theoretical explanation for this case, which has been reflected in the large number of publications on the subject in the 1990s and early 2000s. This literature overwhelmingly shares in the popular view of South America as a “puzzle,” an “anomaly,” or even an “exception”—which immediately begs the question: “puzzling, anomalous or exceptional in relation to what?” In response to this point, I argue that most of the theoretical contributions have not only failed to explain convincingly a discrete set of factors driving the prolonged peace among states in the region, but also moved to declare the region’s transcendence of the security dilemma (see, e.g., Holsti 1996: 180, 182; Oelsner 2005a; Miller 2007: 47, 335). By concluding that South America’s long peace is simply an “anomaly” or an “exception,” most contemporary studies leave unexplained the identification of what really explains the case. On the other hand, the provocative argument claiming the region’s transcendence of the security dilemma is not only overly optimistic but also practically dangerous, for it may reinforce misguided and voluntaristic regional security policies that instead of protecting the regional order may end up undermining it.

60  Nicolás Terradas The first studies of South America as a “zone of peace” began in the mid-1990s and highlighted the unique geographical characteristics of South America (see, e.g., McIntyre 1995; Kelly 1997; Child 1985). Its vast, open land spaces, slashed by unsurmountable peaks and swampy tropical forests, all conspired against a swift and efficient state formation after independence. Equally, these geographical traits favored the bold by making it easier to accomplish “land grabs” on the fringes of larger countries, or to solve in this way many border disputes over unmarked frontiers that states had inherited from Spanish-Portuguese domination in the past. The main problem with this rather deterministic view of the role of geography in the region is that it took geopolitics and Neorealism in a crude and unsophisticated way, paying no attention to the role of technology and domestic politics in how South American states carried out their diplomatic relations in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In essence, geography is treated as a fixed condition, not susceptible to any bypassing or modification by those actors, which seem to be “trapped” in it. What, then, explains the variance in outcome from regular war and violence in the nineteenth century to stable peace in the twentieth? In reaction to McIntyre and others, in the late 1990s two works offered important alternative explanations. Arie Kacowicz (1998: 67–124), for instance, suggested a more nuanced view of regional peace by comparing it to the Western-African case. In regard to South America, Kacowicz argued that a set of factors explain the “long peace.” Not only was a regional balance of power relevant, but also the towering and ever-vigilant presence of the United States helped reinforce a sense of needed discipline in South American inter-state relations—lest they “invite” any foreign intervention. Important among these hypotheses was the role of democracy as a reflection of what Kacowicz terms “satisfied powers.” All these factors, coupled with a growing economic interdependence and consolidating hemispheric institutional framework, drive the explanation in Kacowicz’s book. However, the listing of so many variables leads to an over-determination of the regional long peace. For instance, Kacowicz fails to demonstrate which variables matter more, and why, or how are these more or less operative at different moments in the rather long period between the 1880s and today. Democracy, for example, one of his main variables, only consolidated across the entire region in the mid to late-1980s—thus, casting a dark shadow on that variable as a powerful explanation for the entirety of the relevant period. Equally, and most interestingly, Kacowicz chooses to mark the starting date of this “long peace” in the 1880s, after the end of the War of the Pacific (1879–1884) between Chile and the Bolivia–Peru alliance. It is “interesting” because the Chaco War of 1932–1935 is casually cast to the side as an “exception.” Why Kacowicz (1998) dates the long peace in terms of 1880s–1998 (with one [major!] exception), instead of 1932–1998 (with no exception at all), is puzzling in and of itself. In the late 1990s, Félix E. Martín took a different view from that of McIntyre and Kacowicz. Arguing that beyond the post-independence experience of sustained “caudillo” warfare, which had left an indelible mark on how states formed in South America, Martín (2006) changed the emphasis away from deterministic geopolitical views and over-deterministic “laundry-listing” of variables, to bureaucratic and

“Diplomatic Culture” in Preservation of Order in South America 61 civil-military relations in the twentieth century as the main explanation. Much in line with what Miguel Centeno argued later in 2002, Martín (2006) highlighted the deep domestic involvement that the military sector had always enjoyed in South American national politics. A long history of internal struggle against caudillos, warlords, and domestic interventions by foreign powers, had left the armed forces of each consolidating state as the most (and sometimes the only) professional, efficient, and bureaucratized political actor with which to finish the dramatically long process of state-formation and state-consolidation in the region toward the end of the nineteenth century. In the twentieth century, argues Martín (2006), Latin American states were already understandably inward-looking in terms of security and defense. During the Cold War years, with the global expansion of Communist ideology, the military sectors bonded transnationally against a “common enemy”, leaving behind swaths of terrorized populations, but also, and quite paradoxically, a marked record of inter-state peace. Contrary to previous explanations, Martín’s was the first one to account for both the prevalence of international peace amid extremely high levels of domestic violence and terror in South America. With the so-called “return to democracy” in the 1980s, and the passing of the dictatorial era in Latin American history that had initiated in the 1930s, Martín (2006) suggests that an institutional legacy helped maintain external peace even after the end of such transnational military linkages. One important complication with this explanation, however, has been the persistence of “peace” in the region after the end of the era of military rule in Latin America (on this point, see Martín’s chapter in this volume). In sum, South America’s long peace becomes a two-faced phenomenon that should provoke less pride and more vigilance than the more naive versions of the regional peace typically maintained by politicians, who sometimes call on other regions to “learn” from, and even “imitate,” the region’s experience. These conflicting accounts of the actual driving factors behind South America’s long peace are become extremely relevant for understanding our contemporary efforts to maintain it, and even to enlarge it, if possible. In this context, reinvigorated academic interest in this regional “puzzle” took shape with the publication of Miguel Centeno’s Blood and Debt (2002), which was accompanied by two books: one by Kalevi Holsti (1996), and another by Buzan and Wæver (2003). Both works dealt with South America again as an “anomaly,” and only in chapter form; demonstrating both an interest in the regional case but also not elaborating on it more deeply; treating it as a peripheral case-study set in a larger theoretical argument. Centeno’s book quickly became one of the most respected and widely read treatments of the South American long peace. The argument is couched in terms of Charles Tilly’s classical assessment of the role of warfare in how states form and consolidate. Centeno (2002) found that in the case of South America, states failed to profit from regional war-making in order to build a strong state, and instead entered a different vicious cycle of debt and protracted internal violence to enforce taxation, institutional control, and political stability internally. Thus, in Centeno’s view, weaker states ravaged by chronic internecine violence seldom go to war with other states. The absence of fast, efficient, and powerful authority centers helps to explain in large part the paradoxical coexistence of “violence at home,” while

62  Nicolás Terradas simultaneously maintaining “peace abroad.” One of the more problematic angles of Centeno’s hypothesis, however, has to do with the cases of major war that did take place in South America’s long history since independence. Centeno, for example, tends to dismiss rather quickly the Paraguayan War (1864–1870) and the War of the Pacific (1879–1884) as “exceptions” in an otherwise longer “long peace” that begins not in 1880s, as problematically suggested by Kacowicz, but with the achievement of independence itself in the early 1810s. In this sense, Centeno expects that weak states, like the ones populating the South American system of states in the nineteenth century, not only should fight less wars over time but also fight small ones—in the sense of fighting shorter, more circumspect and less impactful wars. The historical record shows the contrary, however. The Paraguayan War, as much as the War of the Pacific, far from being exceptional in Centeno’s sense, were truly major wars involving hundreds of thousands of combatants on each warring side and had devastating effects both in demographic terms as well as in geopolitical, strategic, economic, and of course human terms. Ironically, state “weakness” in these two cases made the wars to drag on for longer and, therefore to have deeper effects, than otherwise expected by Centeno. The Paraguayan War was technically lost by Paraguay in less than a year, after its “fleet” was destroyed and its best troops ineptly squandered early in the war. However, the Allies’ lack of knowledge of the terrain, the improvised methods of troop recruitment, the poor management of state finances, lack of grand geo-strategic “vision” by the respective élites, and (quite importantly) many health-related issues, like cholera, yellow fever, and trenchfoot, not to mention the stubbornness of Paraguay’s supreme leader who presented a “fight to the death,” all contributed to a costly war that lasted five years in total (see Whigham 2017; 2018). Similarly with Chile and the War of the Pacific, which also was technically over in less than a year after Bolivia was knocked out early of the fight and Peru’s capacity to fight on the sea was terminated by the capture of the Huáscar. The fighting dragged on until 1881, when Chile finally occupied Lima; taking another three years of costly occupation until both Peru and Bolivia settled for peace. As in the previous case, guerilla tactics by resistance forces in the countryside and the mountain areas of the country made Chile to maintain a ruinous three-year occupation of the Peruvian capital that almost drained the “victor,” not only of its financial capacity to sustain the war effort but also of most of its political will and domestic consensus behind the war (cf. McEvoy 2006; 2011; Sater 1985). In direct contradiction with Centeno, Holsti (1996: 150–182) argues that when states are weak, more (external) war should be expected. In this sense, Holsti advances the exact mirror hypothesis to Centeno’s. That is, ill-defined borders, porous states, and pseudo-anarchical political actors spiral downwards into more conflict and violence, which almost necessarily implicates transnational actors and spill-over effects. Among these effects, Holsti contends, military conflict takes the front seat. Therefore, according to Holsti, war should be expected more during periods when South America displayed an array of weak states trying to consolidate internally; while peace be expected more during periods when states are stably consolidated. The implications for this mirror-image of Centeno’s own view are relevant to us, for they may help explain South America’s progressive decline in

“Diplomatic Culture” in Preservation of Order in South America 63 external violence (inter-state war) exactly as the twentieth century gives way to more consolidated states region-wide. The implications from Centeno’s own argument, on the contrary, would point to the more disturbing conclusion of expecting more potentially devastating (although perhaps less often) inter-state wars in the region once these states are fully formed, well-armed, and socially capable of mobilizing while maintaining internal order and stability. Although Holsti’s hypothesis seems to have been confirmed by the history of relative inter-state relations in South America in the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries (i.e., stronger states—less war), Centeno’s argument must still be considered, for wars between states—although of a “limited” character—have actually taken place (Peru–Ecuador in 1941, 1980s and 1995, as well as Peru–Colombia in the 1930s, not to mention The Falklands/Malvinas conflict in 1982). Similarly, if we consider Central America’s experience, something Centeno (2002) avoids but which Holden (2004) incorporates to the academic conversation, then the idea of an inertly peaceful Latin America (instead of merely South America) becomes a dubious proposition, and more relevance has to be assigned to Centeno’s over Holsti’s perspective (see Mares 2001; 2012; Mares and Palmer 2012). Buzan and Wæver (2003: 263–342), for their part, studied South America’s “under-conflictual anomaly” in a chapter of their ambitious volume Regions and Powers. Couched in their particular post–Cold War perspective about regional security complexes (RSCs) theory, Buzan and Wæver conclude that the “long peace” in South America represents a challenge to all established theories in IR and that the main regional dynamics owe much to the progressive “maturation” of an RSC—which excludes the United States. Beyond this rather ill-defined point, Buzan and Wæver offer a rich descriptive assessment of the evolution of security relations in South America, but do little in terms of clarifying what concrete sets of factors really drive the long peace in the region. Their final answer is the same one with which they began: the region is an anomaly. One final contribution worth mentioning is that of Benjamin Miller (2007: 306–336), who has tried to fit South America as one of his case-case studies from a larger project that tries to explain why certain regions are more war-prone than others. In this general framework, the argument runs like this: when a region contains states that do not overlap homogenously with a national identity, then they will tend to be more war-prone. On the contrary, when a region shows a high homogeneity between states and borders with national identities, then regional peace will prevail. This is what Miller calls the “state-to-nation balance.” Applied to South America’s case, Miller’s argument is—predictably—straightforward: South America has enjoyed a “long peace” due to the fact that its “state-to-nation balance” has been coherent and homogeneous. Miller even dares to extend his argument to explain the comparatively more conflictual nineteenth century in South America, and further suggests that in the 1990s the region has entered a postsecurity dilemma phase (Miller 2007). Channeling parts of the arguments made by other scholars before him, Miller declares the end of war and of pernicious security-dilemma dynamics in South America. Of course, he also endorses the view defining the regional instance of long peace as an “anomaly.”

64  Nicolás Terradas In this general context, given the incompatibility inter se of most of these hypotheses trying to explain the South American case, both because they help illuminate only some aspects of the theoretical puzzle, or because they fail to account unproblematically for most of the issues behind the regional case of long peace, the next section suggests reframing the problem in terms of a regional “society of states” that, as part of their historical evolution and expansion, has produced a stable regional order that has “tamed” war among its neighbors. Paradoxically, however, this has happened not by advancing the eradication of the possibility of waging war, but by “taming” or curbing war and by channeling it through the workings of certain key regional institutions and the legitimation of collective action. Defining and Refining “Diplomatic Culture” The notion of “diplomatic culture” is an important, although severely understudied, aspect of the international society approach to IR (or English School [ES]). Even Hedley Bull, one of its chief contributors, made only passing references to the concept. The idea of culture, however, did carry great importance in his overall argument in The Anarchical Society (1977). Although it would be unfair to reduce Bull’s famous definition of international society (or “society of states”) simply to an expression of a diplomatic culture among states’ élites and diplomats, the latter concept occupies a fundamental place in the proper understanding of the former. “For example,” as Bull (1966: 367) asked, “does the collectivity of sovereign states constitute a political society or system, or does it not? If we can speak of a society of sovereign states, does it presuppose a common culture or civilization? And if it does, does such a common culture underlie the worldwide diplomatic framework in which we are attempting to operate now?” Since Bull (1977: 16, 13–14, 183) defined a society of states as the development of a consciousness, or sense of awareness, by state officials of certain common interests and values (particularly in relation to the creation and maintenance of political order inter se), international relations in this sense presuppose not only a “system” but also a “society” of states in which a set of rules and institutions are underpinned to some extent by a common culture. In this case, “to some extent” implies that Bull had an expansive understanding of culture, encompassing more than simply a diplomatic one (Figure 3.1). According to James Der Derian (1996: 87–88), one of his most prominent students, Bull saw the role of culture as occupying three concentric circles, divided into other intellectual and moral inner circles. The outer circle was world or cosmopolitan culture and encompassed the entire global community. It is in this particular sense that Bull (1977: 316) argued that “all historical international societies have had as one of their foundations a common culture.” The next inner circle was both an intellectual culture, characterized by a common language, philosophy, and epistemological outlook, as well as a culture of common values, such as common religion or moral codes. It is only in the smallest inner circle of culture that Bull believed a truly diplomatic culture could operate. Bull (1977: 316) defined such a diplomatic culture as “the common stock of ideas and values possessed by the official representatives of states.”

“Diplomatic Culture” in Preservation of Order in South America 65

Figure 3.1  Bull’s Three Concentric Circles of Culture

Unlike other prominent thinkers in the international society approach, such as Martin Wight, Bull believed that the main difference between a “system” and a “society” of states was not necessarily the presence (or absence) of a common culture per se. Bull (1977: 316) argued that “[i]t is reasonable to suppose that where such elements of a common civilization underlie an international society, they facilitate its working in two ways.” One way in which a common culture or civilization helps reinforce the elements of order in an international society is through the improvement of “easier communication and closer awareness and understanding between one state and another”—which also allows for a better definition of common rules and the evolution of common institutions to that same end. A second way is by reinforcing “the sense of common interests that impels states to accept common rules and institutions with a sense of common values” (Bull 1977: 16). In conclusion, to the extent that a system of states forms also a society, the presence of a common culture contributes to the preservation of order as well as the stability and robustness of that society of states by reinforcing a sense of common interest, values, rules, and institutions. But apart from this initial definition of diplomatic culture provided by Bull—as the “common stock of ideas and values possessed by the official representatives of states”—he reserved a privileged role for diplomacy as one of the core “fundamental institutions” of international society. In Chapter 7 of The Anarchical Society, for example, he famously claimed that the diplomatic profession was the “custodian of the idea of international society” itself, “with a stake in preserving and strengthening it” (Bull 1977: 183). These precise sets of definitions, however, have not been systematically explored nor developed further by Bull or any other scholar after him. Some students of international society have certainly worked on diplomacy within the same theoretical framework, but the notion of “diplomatic culture” has

66  Nicolás Terradas been largely neglected (two valuable exceptions are Der Derian 1996: 84–100 and Sharp 2004: 361–379). Not only have empirical applications of the concept not been carried out systematically, but also several aspects of the original definition remain unclear or underspecified. In this section, we make use of Jack L. Snyder’s concept of “strategic culture” to advance a notion of “diplomatic culture” that is more polished and detailed, as well as applicable to regional cases, such as South America. “Diplomatic Culture”: Defining, Extending, and Merging

The idea of diplomats qua “custodians” of a particular way or style of conducting international affairs highlights Bull’s own interest in studying global (or regional) cases of international society in historical terms and through an emphasis on decision-makers, foreign-policy executives and diplomats. In his work, Bull (1977) tried to show that throughout the history of the modern states-system a certain idea or notion of international society had always existed, “proclaimed by philosophers and publicists, and present in the rhetoric of the leaders of states”; but also that this idea was “reflected, at least in part, in international reality; [with] important roots in actual international practice.” The idea of international society, therefore, ultimately “reflect[s] the thought of statesmen” (Bull 1977: 24, 40). Although “diplomatic culture” focuses on a different domain of statecraft (diplomacy), it shares with Snyder’s concept of “strategic culture” a focus on groups of decision-makers and high-level strategists. As highlighted in the Introduction and Chapter 2 of this volume, prima facie nothing in Snyder’s original conception precludes one from applying the same logic to other equally strategic realms and high-level areas of decision-making, such as diplomacy. Although conceived for a different scenario and purpose in the late 1970s, Snyder’s concept of strategic culture offers an interesting case for cross-pollination and bridge-building between two different theoretical approaches. The original idea of strategic culture, with its deep roots in the strategic imperatives of the Cold War, represented an analytical tool to understand logics of nuclear “rationality” through a transcultural lens. Thus, Snyder’s idea for devising Soviet strategic thinking on matters of nuclear weapons decision-making suggests, in a similar fashion to Bull’s diplomatic culture, a special attention to the role of groups of key individuals and their “socialization” within specific modes of strategic thinking—even beyond the mere realm of nuclear strategy. Here, the “strategic” component of the concept refers to an appreciation of the inherently competitive and interactive nature of the social environment in which such groups of decision-makers have to act. In Snyder’s terms, it means “a deeper appreciation for context,” both socio-cultural as well as bureaucratic-organizational (cf. Snyder 1977; cf. Bull 1965; Booth 1979; 1990). Snyder (1977: 4) defined strategic culture as a unique, strategic mode of thinking and a set of “distinctive stylistic predispositions” into which groups of individuals can be socialized. As a result of this process, a set of general beliefs, attitudes, and behavioral patterns regarding nuclear strategy (or any other domain of statecraft, for that matter) can achieve “a state of semi-permanence that places them on the

“Diplomatic Culture” in Preservation of Order in South America 67 level of ‘culture’ rather than mere ‘policy’” (Snyder 1977: v, see also 39). Snyder’s concept suggests that, although attitudes may change with advancements in technology or the social environment, a clique or specific group of key individuals may not assess their strategic options objectively, but act through a “perceptual lens” provided by their strategic culture. The notion of semi-permanence in Snyder’s definition merits a closer inspection, given that Bull implies a similar characteristic in his diplomatic culture—although he never fully developed it. Reinterpreting Bull’s diplomatic culture as a form of strategic culture à la Snyder, therefore, can help in the analysis of international society by adding a focus on continuity and the “staying power” of certain styles and modes of strategic thinking—a trait that diplomats, as much as nuclear experts, can certainly share. This merged conceptual approach gains further relevance when applied to contexts characterized by crises and strong structural pressures on the quality of decisionmaking. This way, the idea of semi-permanence can be reconciled with Bull’s popular conception of international society as a rather persistent feature of international relations. According to Bull (1977), international society (or the society of states) can wax and wane, but nevertheless evinces a strong staying power. As he put it, “[t]he idea of ‘international society’ has a basis in reality that is sometimes precarious but has at no stage disappeared [for] at no stage can it be said that the conception of the common interests of states, of common rules accepted and common institutions worked by them, has ceased to exert influence” (1977: 42). Sometimes violent events in international relations can give analysts the impression that international life is governed only by Hobbesian imperatives. Yet, Bull adds, “they are followed by periods of peace.” Similarly, ideological conflicts and alternative world order proposals may incite people to give more credence to a stronger Kantian interpretation of world politics, yet they too “are followed by accommodations in which the idea of [international society] reappears” (Bull 1977: 42). Given the centrality of a diplomatic culture to the notion of international society, one must infer the continuity and staying power of the one as much as of the other. A related element for cross-pollination between Bull’s and Snyder’s concepts is their emphasis on groups of individuals and their socialization into institutional and bureaucratic-organizational contexts or environments. These elements seem, at no point, to require a certain exclusivity in application to nuclear strategists alone. In fact, a blend of both definitions—that is, of strategic and diplomatic cultures—are prima facie applicable to any group of decision-makers, national political élites, foreign-policy executives, or other comparable sets of strategic actors. Bull’s diplomats, as much as Snyder’s nuclear strategists, seem to belong to a common type of politico-strategic actors susceptible to similar kinds of socialization processes, equally able to develop common “stylistic predispositions” and “behavioral patterns,” and capable of generating non-objective appreciations of their contexts of action. Paul Sharp, one of the few scholars working dutifully on the institution of diplomacy within the international society perspective, argues that the specific components of a “diplomatic culture” can be easily identified by considering at least six elements. First, diplomats and other foreign-policy executives would mutually

68  Nicolás Terradas recognize as “servants of the national interests of their respective states.” Second, they will be aware of the institutional context and bureaucratic organizations of which each is an expression and embodiment. These elements cultivate what Sharp calls a “culture of sympathy” among them. Third, they come to understand the value in maintaining the conditions which make diplomacy function in the first place. Thus, a fourth element becomes their shared concern for the process of communication and its role in alleviating tensions and conflicts inter se. Fifth, they develop a deeper understanding of each other’s larger cultural contexts (i.e., the outer circles of culture identified by Bull), which in turn helps in devising not only how decisions are made in another country, one of Snyder’s original objectives in the RAND report of 1977, but also why. Finally, a truly robust diplomatic culture incorporates a deeper sensitivity regarding international (or regional) order and the control of the use of force in mutual relations (see Sharp 2004: 369ff; 2009: esp. Parts II and III). In this context, the study of diplomatic culture—reinforced with these aspects of strategic culture—conveys a more polished and detailed understanding of not only what diplomatic culture is, but also of its potential role and the mechanisms by which it can operate. In the case of Latin America, and in particular that of South America, such a notion can help illuminate important persistent aspects of the region’s peculiar international relations. Viewed in these terms, we can study South America’s “long peace” through an emphasis on the region’s sense of common interest and values, with a focus on shared cultural and historical diplomatic traditions, and profoundly influenced by a unique historical pattern of state-formation. To a large extent, the evolution of a regional diplomatic culture of this sort entails a transition from a more parochial and localized set of mentalities and predispositions, toward a more stable “national” conception of interest. This equates to the transition from a caudillo mentality, focused mostly on local or provincial interests, to a larger identification with a nation with more encompassing interests and a sense of moral collective responsibility. Only when the latter set of mentalities has become established can an even greater set of mentalities develop in relation to the regional level—thus allowing for the six elements identified above by Sharp to evolve into a robust regional diplomatic culture. Before proceeding to the exploration of how a diplomatic culture emerged and later evolved in the South American case, there are two aspects in which Bull’s notion—although less well developed than Snyder’s—offers an important innovation from a classical understanding of strategic culture. The first distinctive aspect is its focus on a larger level of aggregation. While Snyder (1977; 1990; 1991) conceived of strategic culture in a mostly dyadic inter-state level, the international society approach’s concentration on the regional and global levels invites a more expansive use of the concept to understand how, and to what extent, national diplomatic/strategic cultures can come to resemble one another through prolonged interaction and learning (see Snyder 1977: 16, 28ff; and 2010: 4 on “lessons learned”). In principle, Snyder (1990; 2010) himself allows for such a change in the application of strategic culture to different levels of analysis, and by implication, he also opens the door for an application of the concept that not only transcends the initial

“Diplomatic Culture” in Preservation of Order in South America 69 understanding of “who counts” as a valid carrier of a strategic culture (i.e., the “strategic community”), but also the level of aggregation used to frame the analysis of the macro-sociological context in which strategic culture(s) takes place (Snyder 1977: 10; 2010). Second, although nothing in Snyder’s original definition indicates that only “good ideas” will prevail in the formation of a strategic culture, Bull’s conception of a diplomatic culture entails a different type of “strategic community” (diplomats and foreign-policy executives) and further implies, given the higher level of analysis adopted, the existence of a learning evolutionary process by which interacting actors can eventually attach value to constructing and maintaining a well-ordered society of states. While Bull’s approach is by no means teleological nor entertains predictive ambitions, in principle, it accommodates the notion that “good” and “bad” practices can not only evolve but also be promoted, exported/imported, and even sometimes forcefully super-imposed on others via indoctrination. Diplomatic culture, nevertheless, implicitly endorses an understanding of diplomacy as a reservoir of “good practices”—or at least commonly agreed and evolved practices that states choose to maintain in their reciprocal interactions. On this latter point, the criticism that Stephen Krasner (1999) and others have raised to the international society approach for being susceptible to the problem of hypocritical and “jackal-like” behavior by state officials, although partially endorsed by Snyder’s (2010) treatment of strategic culture and still implicit in his overall pessimism regarding “good ideas,” can also be turned around and used to highlight Bull’s original point. While pondering over the relation between hypocrisy and strategic culture, for example, Snyder (2010: 5) argues that “[h]ypocrites need to make sure that their behavior does not deviate too obviously from the principles that they give lip service to,” for élites’ own self-serving myths and lies eventually come to constraint even those “who initially espoused them cynically” because they also will be held accountable by their own audiences. Moreover, Snyder adds, because succeeding generations socialized to those mythologized discourses can become “true-believers” themselves, they can further add on to the domestic pressure upon consistency in speech and practice over time. This resonates powerfully with Bull’s famous recognition that “[t]he language of a common international society is mere lip-service. […] The question, however, is whether an international system in which it is necessary to have a pretext for beginning a war is not radically different from one in which it is not. […] The state which alleges a just cause, even one it does not itself believes in, is at least acknowledging that it owes other states an explanation of its conduct, in terms of rules that they accept” (Bull 1977: 45). In the end, both Bull and Snyder seem to converge on the idea that “playing the game” of international society creates compelling forces, even for those who play only cynically or with the ulterior intention of cheating, to follow the rules most of the time. Thus, although global politics may certainly be an “organized hipocricy,” as Krasner put it, it is at least an organized one—something realists like Krasner too readily discard or undervalue in the analysis. The international society approach seems to allow, therefore, for an understanding of the process by which diplomatic cultures interact and expand globally. While

70  Nicolás Terradas this aspect may differ importantly from Snyder’s original approach, it can also potentially improve upon it. Traditional strategic-cultural analysis has tended to focus almost entirely on single national cases, or at best on dyadic cases, with disregard for how a larger set of strategic cultures may interact, mutually influence one another, and evolve over time, potentially leading to a convergence in certain behavioral and stylistic dispositions on a regional level. No attention has been paid, for instance, to how these processes can affect in turn the quality of regional international relations—given that these are distinctively marked by historical, geographic, and even emotional proximity. In the next section, we sketch a preliminary narrative of how the use of a revised concept of “diplomatic culture” can shed new light on the South American case of prolonged peace among states, amid persistent intra-state insecurity and violence. Far from being an exhaustive historical explanation build on rich primary documentation—something that would require a far larger space and format, what follows is indeed a preliminary attempt at mapping out the overall trajectory and evolution of the region’s international relations when viewed from the lens of “diplomatic culture.” The Role of “Diplomatic Culture” in South America Insofar as one can infer the presence of a regional society of states in South America, the identification of the “diplomatic culture” component acquires a prominent place in the analysis. Given the multiple radical transformations in the international system since the early formation of a regional system of independent states in Latin America, the marked persistence and the longevity of a particular stylistic predisposition in the conduct of diplomatic relations in the region emerges as a perfect opportunity for an application of “diplomatic culture” qua strategic culture. Such a persistent pattern of behavior and diplomatic traditions, shared across the entire region, requires an explanation other than structural theories, such as Neorealism or World-system theory—which try to explain continuity of behavior with constancy of a certain international “structure” of power. In the remainder of this section, we draft a macro-sociological contextualization of how such a diplomatic culture developed over time in South America, highlighting three main stages or periods: one from the establishment of European colonies in the continent to the achievement of independence in the early to mid-1800s. A second one from the 1860s, when the different states finally consolidate across the region, up to the 1930s, when the last major war took place—still in a regional and global context empty of any strong institutional system of peace enforcement. A final period focuses on the post-1945 context up to the early 2000s, marked by the presence of a regional organization and a global peace system under the legal framework of the United Nations’ Security Council. From “System” to “Society”: South America in the Early 1800s

In the early years of the nineteenth century, states in South America faced a multifaceted set of challenges. On the one hand, the colonial period left behind a constraining legacy of geopolitical and economic networks of power conveniently

“Diplomatic Culture” in Preservation of Order in South America 71 developed for a time now passé, but nonetheless hard to get rid of. The geographical location of each capital city, for example, and the economic activities intricately surrounding them, perpetuated power dynamics that reproduced the colonial “outward-looking” preferences of the newly independent political actors. European and world markets continued to be the strategic priority for each individual South American state, depending on these not just as exportation markets, investments, and migration, but also for diplomatic recognition, prestige, political legitimacy, and support “at home” and across the region. In this early stage, several (and not just one) sub-system existed (see Mosk 1948; Burr 1965; Faletto and Carsoso 1979). On the River Plate basin, the Brazilian Empire and the Argentine Confederation carried onto the nineteenth-century older patters of competition and power politics long held by the Portuguese and Spanish empires in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries (see Burr 1955; 1962; 1965; Seckinger 1976; 1984). In this setting, Uruguay and Paraguay slowly carved their way out into a weak and always unstable independence. On the opposite side of the region, Chile, Peru, Bolivia and Colombia (which then included contemporary Colombia, Ecuador, Panama, and Venezuela) formed a different political subsystem connected by the Pacific Ocean and the shared desert areas between them, containing mineral, nitrates, and guano, and highly important for inserting their nations in the world market. The middle and interior lands of the subcontinent remained largely underpopulated and, for a long time, beyond the effective political reach or control of the states in the area. The years between the revolutions for independence and the mid-1860s also represent the moment of most violent international relations for the region, as exemplified by the extended wars of independence from Spain (1810–1830) and the subsequent first major wars between neighbors in the 1820s–1840s period, but perhaps most evidently in the 1864–1870 period. In these years, Chile fought multiple wars: first against Peru, which was for a long time the last South American bastion of Spanish monarchical resistance, and then against the Peru-Bolivian Confederation (1836–1839), and followed by a pyrrhic victory against Spain (again) in the 1865–1866 war over the occupation of the Peruvian Chincha Islands and the menacing presence of a Spanish Squadron in the Pacific (see Davis 1950; Burr 1965). In the late 1870s, Chile faced Bolivia and Peru in the most important war of this sub-system, in the War of the Pacific (1879–1884), which resulted in the dismemberment of the entire coastal part of Bolivia, which became a landlocked country (see Sater 1985; 2007). On the River Plate basin area, internal convulsion and domestic “anarchy” typically consumed the attention of the state-building projects, confronting (at times simultaneously) internal caudillo forces and so-called indios versus the armed forces of self-professed “civilized” élites, emanating from the rapidly growing urban centers of power that were pushing for Liberalism and modernization—for “Order and Progress.” Borders were violently extended and ultimately consolidated at the same time that “external” wars had to be fought for the survival of the entire political internal system (López-Alves 2000; Centeno 2002). Thus, post-1861 Argentina, once centralized by the victories of Buenos Aires over the

72  Nicolás Terradas confederated interior provinces led by country-side caudillo “barbarians,” quickly transitioned to the business of regime change. First in the Banda Oriental (modernday Uruguay), but later also in Paraguay, which was long considered a rogue, lost province to the Argentine state-building grand project. The Brazilian Empire, for its part, while enjoying a much stable internal front, comparatively speaking, was struggling with encroaching modernizing political and ideological forces pushing for the abolition of slavery, the political independence of key southern provinces bordering with the Banda Oriental, and the awkward coexistence of political parties under a monarchical regime; also regionally surrounded by Republican (unstable) neighbors. The war on Paraguay (1864–1870) not only helped consolidate the internal fronts in Argentina and Uruguay, but also reinforced a deeply rooted sub-regional “pecking order” of power and prestige, with the Brazilian Empire and Argentina at the top and Uruguay and Paraguay at the bottom. The same political asymmetries thus consolidated have severely affected international relations in the area ever since (impacting greatly contemporary integration and cooperation projects like MERCOSUR or Brazil’s early 2000s bid for a permanent seat at the U.N. Security Council). Both subsystems of states suggested by Robert N. Burr (1955; 1965) fit quite well into Bull’s original description of a “system of states,” while only marginally displaying certain attributes of a “society” of states stricto sensu. During the early nineteenth century, for instance, both subsystems cared greatly for strategic power-political developments on either shore of the subcontinent. However, Argentina, the Banda Oriental, and the Brazilian Empire did little to assist Peru and Chile in their collective effort to repel the Spanish force occupying the Chincha Islands in the mid-1860s (see Heredia 1998: 149–209). Dismissing calls for a united Hispano-American front against their former common imperial oppressor, Buenos Aires, and Rio de Janeiro were busy “pacifying” the Río de la Plata basin area. The war against Paraguay, however, was seen by contemporaries more as a process of dispossessing the smaller neighbor of large areas of territory to the south, north-west, and north-east, than a service or contribution to the overall order of the region in the longer run. The River Plate basin powers did little to prevent the Spanish Armada from making stops, repairing, and refueling in their AtlanticOcean ports before and during the Chincha Islands War (1864–1866). As Burr has long pointed out, the region was fragmented into two clearly demarcated sub-systems which knew very little about one another at the time. Certainly, as Burr indicated, the lack of proper information channels, not to mention the absolute absence of permanent diplomatic representations in each other’s capitals, greatly obstructed the consolidation of a more elaborate and mature regional society of states (see Burr 1955; 1962; 1965). Before the 1870s, states on both sides of the subcontinent could not take one another into serious consideration in their most important foreign-strategic considerations. Poor infrastructure, and even weaker and unreliable lines of communication, plus a lack of sustained and formal diplomatic embassies (or legaciones), among many other factors, like the vast geographic distances and physical obstacles, all conspired against a more fluent regional system (much less a “society”) of states in the early years post-independence. As hinted

“Diplomatic Culture” in Preservation of Order in South America 73 at before, inherited legal principles, like uti possidetis and other geographical and institutional legacies from colonial times, made it extremely difficult for the newly independent states in South America to transition quickly and peacefully toward a fully formed regional society of states any earlier. Borders, and principles legitimizing these borders, were ambiguous and contested. Capital cities, ports, and infrastructural communication lines, like railways, which were at one time thought for purposes of resource extraction and efficient exportation to Europe and the rest of the world, served poorly now as effective centers of power and control of rather enormous (mostly empty) territorial states vying for external recognition, internal peace, and regional stable order. In this early period, therefore, only one important source for cultivating a regional diplomatic culture was to be found in the European example. South American élites made tremendous efforts not only to imitate European culture, clothing, literature, mannerisms, and norms, but also—and most importantly—the centuriesold and much-admired style of conducting international relations. It is important to highlight that in the nineteenth century, South American élites were not only constructing nation-states (Centeno 2002), but were also deeply committed to the enterprise of creating basically from scratch a regional system of political and diplomatic relations. This was part of the region’s own “strategic awakening” leading up to a more “politically conscious” South America (on these aspects, see Burr 1962: 1: fn. 1). South America’s Struggle for Order (mid-1860s–1930s)

In the aftermath of a series of successful repellence wars, first against Spain, but later also against France and England in Mexico and the Caribbean islands in the 1860s, South American states quickly felt the need to achieve a modus vivendi of sorts, marked by a self-sustainable “balance of power,” to avoid creating further opportunities for foreign powers to intervene in the region (Burr 1962; 1965; Cady 1929; Smith 1979). It was common fear more than love what ultimately pushed South American states to realize the impending need for better structured and mature regional international relations. In the 1870s, the shared fragile experience of the previous decades and the (sometimes violent) resolution of most border disputes, removed one of the main obstacles to consolidate a society, and not just a system, of states. Fast improvements in technology, infrastructure, and worldmarket price booms for their strategic products, allowed for the expansion of social transnational links beyond the state, and for a better and faster communication across borders, helping overcome the regions vast distances and geographical limitations. Diplomatic ties also deepened with the establishment of stable legaciones and other semi-permanent posts, including the exponential growth of “diplomatic missions” to deal with highly relevant diplomatic issues, from which to nurture closer inter-state ties across the region. A growing sense of awareness was evidenced in the entire region, both diplomatically and politically in this period. In the later decades of the nineteenth century, in sum, both sub-systems became one integrated society of states with

74  Nicolás Terradas at least a handful of crucial fundamental practices in place. One such institution was the collective acceptance of the “balance of power” as a way to structure the region’s international relations. A second institution was the concomitant growth of “diplomacy,” as mentioned above, which assisted in the more efficient working of the “balance of power.” The region’s appreciation of the role of “international law” as a key ingredient in the way the region was expected (by their European counterparts) not only to justify its own international behavior, but also engage in meaningful dialogue (and at times disputes) with extra-continental established powers like Spain, England, or France. The history of the international vicissitudes of American international law have been well studied through the work of Carlos Calvo, Andrés Bello, Luis María Drago, Alejandro Álvarez, among many towering figures (cf. Becker Lorca 2014; Scarfi 2017). Evidences of this regional development abound, and can be traced through the strategic dynamics which emerged at the time. A constructed power-political balance of power emerged with Peru, Bolivia, and Argentina understanding that their common interests were aligned against the competing association between Chile, Colombia, and Brazil. These crisscrossed balance-of-power dynamics (Kelly 1997; Child 1985) were not only constructed but also cherished by each participating member for they allowed states to check and “tame” one another through deterrence, alliances, and counter-balancing—but not war. Wars in the previous decades have proven extremely costly and difficult to maintain for more than one or two years. The Brazilian Empire, as well as Argentina after the Paraguayan War, and even Chile after the War of the Pacific, although victorious in each conflict, suffered tremendous financial, and social difficulties in the post-war period. Domestic revolutions gave away to Liberal and highly modernizing governments in Chile and Argentina, but also in Brazil, where the monarchy was finally replaced by a Republic. In Argentina, although internal conflict was violently pacified once and for all with the same military forces that had delivered victory against Paraguay, the incumbent party (Liberal in political orientation) lost the post-war elections and was then removed from power by a coalition of political forces against the involvement in the war with Paraguay. Despite similar hardships, Chile found itself involved in yet another war against Peru and Bolivia in the northern region of the Atacama Desert. Contrary to the previous era of mutual indifference between Pacific and Atlantic states in South America, the War of the Pacific (1879–1884) generated a wholly different set of diplomatic reactions from neighboring states. Argentina used the war with BoliviaPeru to strategically pressure Chile into abandoning its territorial claims over the entire Patagonia region, to the far south. Also, it flirted in successive instances with the idea of joining Bolivia against Chile during the early 1880s. Chile, for its part, activated all its diplomatic contacts in Brazil in order to entice Argentina’s historical rival in the River Plate basin area into acting as a counter-balance and keep it in check. The prior necessity of finding a modus vivendi had clearly given way to a more complex network of common interest in upholding a collective balance at the regional level.

“Diplomatic Culture” in Preservation of Order in South America 75 As a marked expression of this renewed regional awareness by the élites and diplomatic sectors in each state, several meetings began to take place in the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s, invoking the early example of the Panama Congress of 1826, convened by Simón Bolívar. These “Congresses” of the nineteenth century, although ultimately a political failure (strictly speaking), certainly consolidated a tradition of diplomatic dialogue, consensus, and persistent effort at solving regional disputes through the peaceful and negotiated way. The Congresses were primarily convened to erect a common defense against any foreign great power that could threaten one or multiple of the newly independent states. It was only the weak and fading attempts at “re-colonization” by Spain, France, or England after the 1860s that made these congresses ultimately “a failure,” although not necessarily its internal dynamics per se. The Congresses also focused on the creation of a pseudo-supranational institutional mechanism of semi-permanent arbitration that could be activated in times of external threat, momentarily taking charge of the collective foreign policies of the regional states. Common defense and arbitration also quickly became redirected toward “regional” threats themselves (i.e., against neighboring states, and not just only against potential extra-regional aggressors). Although failing to formally institutionalize any of these rather grandiose propositions, the Congresses did leave a valuable legacy of regional diplomatic cooperation and facilitated the identification of key common objectives, interests, and principles on which all states agreed upon. In an important way, these “failed” Congresses made possible the creation of the Pan-American Conferences of the late 1880s and early 1900s, which also gave way to the establishment of the formal organizations of the mid-twentieth century. While conflicts remained prevalent throughout this period, the expansion of technological innovation applied to communication, infrastructure, education, and war, had a profound impact upon the frequency and quality of diplomatic interactions between South American states. Most Chancellors, diplomats, and special envoys on diplomatic missions, as well as recognized foreign-policy executives, were institutional positions typically filled up by individuals of public stature and popularity. It was quite common for famous ex-presidents and generals, as much as poets, novelist, writers, and political philosophers, to participate in important diplomatic missions abroad or in the numerous diplomatic or international law Congresses. Frequent contact with “dear colleagues” and friends allowed for a regional culture of diplomatic “friendship” to emerge. This proved particularly helpful for seeking asylum in moments of political persecution at home—more frequent during the early decades of post-independence (see Burr 1965; Watson 1984; Fabry 2010; Reus-Smit 2013). Toward the end of the century, the steady growth of such inter-personal relationships quickly added up to a diplomatic culture among a special stratum of each national society, connected by bonds that in an important way transcended the mere national flags and domestic political faction and their struggles. Diplomacy, in other words, was quickly becoming a more professional activity, followed up by the creation of the first diplomatic schools and professional war colleges toward the end of the 1880s in most countries in the region.

76  Nicolás Terradas South America as a Consolidated “Society of States”: Late-1880s—1940s

The period running from the first Pan-American Conference in 1889, in Washington DC, to the post–World War II in 1945, shows the further refinement and fine-tuning of this power-political legal framework of cooperation among neighbors in South America. In the years leading up to the Chaco War, in 1932–1935, Paraguay and Bolivia tried (unsuccessfully) to solve their disputes over the Chaco Boreal area through peaceful means. This vast arid and desert-like area between north-west Paraguay and south-east Bolivia was in the 1920s the focus of attention not only of the regional neighboring powers, Argentina, Chile, and Brazil, but also of the United States and even the League of Nations. Uti possidetis, once again, played no facilitating role toward peace, contrary to what Kacowicz (2005) and Merke (2011) have opined (cf. Fabry 2010). In fact, it has served as a driving force toward largely irredentist positions on both sides of the Chaco area. These positions were undergirded by an awareness of their mutual conditions of military weakness and unpreparedness for war. Additionally, the failure to prevent largescale war between Paraguay and Bolivia is an additional “black spot” in the League of Nations record of the early twentieth century leading up to the First World War, and should be added to the more well-known cases of Italy and Japan. In the 1930s, when formal war broke out between the two South American states, and unlike any other previous moment in the region’s history, the entire hemisphere mobilized diplomatically to stop the armed conflict and channel it through peaceful means. After the failure of the U.S. efforts in the early stages, and a prolonged unsuccessful attempt at mediation by other regional powers and the League of Nations, a combined group of neutral states, integrated by Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Peru (known as the ABCP) were able to finally broker an agreement to end the war. Interestingly, the peace negotiations which ensued the war (1932—1935) lasted more than the formal armed conflict itself (1935–1939). The fighting had exhausted these two poorest of South American nations, and although constraining costs had not prevented the warring parties to put an end to the war before, now with the intervention of the so-called ABCP group, peace was finally signed after a long and arduous negotiation process which took place in Buenos Aires. At a key decade, when the world was still recovering from the devastating and shocking effects of the First World War in Europe, Africa, and East-Asia; South American states were able to showcase a bit of their worst and a lot of their best by simultaneously fighting one of the most disastrous wars in the world at the time, and certainly the biggest war in the Americas in the entire twentieth century. Also, they reacted collectively in a unique way in favor of reinstituting regional order and moderate peace as the normal condition among neighbors in this part of the world. A similar line of reasoning must have convinced the Norwegian Noble Committee in 1936 when they decided to award the Chancellor of one of the mediator countries, Carlos Saavedra Lamas, the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts during the peace negotiations that put an end to the Chaco War. This episode marked one of the highest points for the South American society of states, evidencing a particular diplomatic style and preferences for a way of resolving disputes through regional solidarity,

“Diplomatic Culture” in Preservation of Order in South America 77 resorting to arbitration, diplomatic conciliation, and collective consensus-building. These factors proved insufficient at times to prevent the outbreak of war between neighbors, but even during such hard tests, a concern for order and stability tended to prevail in their common international relations. During this period, Brazil went through two key transformations which are important for the development of South America’s diplomatic culture. After the defeat of Paraguay in 1870 by the Allies, Brazil—a monarchical regime at the time—transitioned to a more opened Republican political system. Although the burdens imposed by the costly occupation of Asunción had a role to play in the encroaching financial problems of the latter days of the Brazilian Empire, a newly empowered Army and Navy interacted with Liberal and modernizing political forces, and together pushed for a peaceful end to the Empire toward the mid-1880s. This transformation opened the door to a second development of more regional implications. As part of this regime change, the rest of the Latin American countries with a republican political heritage stopped viewing Brazil with the traditional suspicion of earlier years. After all, the political dynamics of the region had created the impression on both sides that Brazil was, for better or worse, a beacon of stability and prosperity at home, in a neighborhood stricken with deeply troubled state-formation projects, chronically marred by internal caudillismo and “anarchy.” At the same time, for many political leaders—including Bolívar— Brazil also represented a (regime) threat to the newly independent Republican nations of Latin America because of its monarchical system and its connections with the Portuguese motherland and other aristocratic European political forces. Brazil’s dual transformation during this period created a new environment propitious for a more fluid diplomacy, communication, and strategic understanding with her neighbors like never before. Unlike her neighbors, Brazil had always enjoyed an important institutional “colonial heritage” in the form of a highly professional foreign ministry— Itamaraty. Such a skillful and powerful system of diplomatic representation served the Brazilian Empire, and later the Republic, superbly. Since the Portuguese Empire’s control of Brazil as a colony, up to the constitution of the Republic itself, the story of Brazil is one of constant, largely peaceful, territorial expansion amid a set of unstable neighbors. At the turn of the century, the prestige, image, and the myth of the Barão do Rio Branco still capture quite well the crucial role that the Brazilian diplomacy played in the provision of a stable regional order. Itamaraty, more than any of its counterparts in South America, has managed to preserve itself from outside influences and pressures, becoming perhaps the best embodiment of what Bull wanted to capture with the notion of diplomats as “the custodians of international society.” In this sense, as Hurrell (2004: 7) put it, it is possible to see Itamaraty “as significant to the extent that it embodies and carries forward a particular set of foreign policy ideas, an informal ideology of foreign policy, as it is sometimes described.” The content of such a diplomatic culture, it should be said, has become linked to the idea (or myth?) of Brazil as having a preference for peaceful conflict resolution measures and in favor of autonomy, development, and regional order.

78  Nicolás Terradas The “Society of States” Today

Along this stylized overview of the general evolution of South America’s diplomatic history, key principles, foreign-policy styles, and traditions, as well as essential institutional practices stand out. These are the type of fundamental institutions that South America has developed from its own historical experience and which, by a painfully slow process of attrition, have now become the norm in the region’s quest for order and stability. With the establishment of the Organization of American States (OAS) in 1948, many of the prior institutional initiatives and diplomatic experiments were finally incorporated into a single international organization encompassing the entire hemisphere (Mecham 1965; Connell-Smith 1966; Perina 2015). The coexisting principles of “non-intervention” and of “democracy protection” (and after the 1980s, also “Democracy promotion”) represent what most Latin American states aspire to achieve regionally: to be part of a society of states that respects and values the strategic imperatives of maintaining order for the sake of everyone’s common interest. In other words, to be simultaneously part of a society which remains uncentralized. Only through this “anarchical society” of sorts can power asymmetries, if not redressed, then be muffled or tamed—and in that sense, as well, partially controlled and contained. Contrary to other popularized interpretations of the ES, the very essence of a “society of states” à-la Bull must necessarily entail these coexisting tendencies in international relations, both regional and global. That is, it must allow for the healthy contradiction of a middle-ground between conflict and cooperation, between the centripetal forces of integration and the centrifugal forces of uncentralization; between binding and dividing social forces; and between tactical and principled invocations of the founding principles and institutions of the society of states (see Terradas 2020). In this sense, the multiple armed conflicts—short of major war—that have freckled the twentieth-century history of South America does not detract from the historical fact of the existence of a fully formed regional society of states. The presence or absence of war should not be the mark of the prevalence of a society of states, or even of its successfulness or efficiency. The determining factor should be the qualitatively different reaction of the region when confronted with armed conflicts, wars, or other types of order-disturbing events, which are eventually bound to occur. As we have tried to briefly sketch above, the history of South America evidences an early fragile and inexperienced system of states taking shape through problematic state-formation efforts, which is followed rather quickly by the conformation of deeper diplomatic ties and a growing awareness of their larger position in the global international system—and thus, in the more complex network of diplomatic relations to which South America is only a minor part. This “self-awareness” by élites, diplomats, and key decision-makers of the time, and well-documented by a few diplomatic historians of the region, helped formalize a set of international practices that correspond neatly with what Hedley Bull (1977) and others (Wight 1966; 1977) identified as “fundamental institutions.” That is, systematic state practices that showcase a keen eye for the maintenance of a balance of power,

“Diplomatic Culture” in Preservation of Order in South America 79 an agreed-upon legal framework and diplomatic arrangements, coupled with the collective appropriation of the recourse to war by a handful of key regional powers. In this sense, war is not completely removed from the table, but instead is made an exclusive right or prerogative of the majority upon the minorities who may threaten to undermine the established order. In the case of South America’s international relations, and particularly in the instance of post-1930s “long peace,” an ES perspective can help illuminate better the multifaceted evolution of the region from a disconnected, indifferent, and deeply disorderly loose aggregation of newly born states, to a more solidaristic, responsible, and mature society of states united by the dual objective of the common recognition of the need of upholding a well-ordered neighborhood in which to advance their national interests within agreed boundaries of restraint. This type of interpretation allows for a larger theoretical framework able to encompass within it several specific hypotheses, like the ones by Centeno, Martín, or Jones for the “long peace” under a common banner. For example, an ES framework can complement Centeno’s more unidimensional understanding of material constraints only in how state-weakness prevented élites from waging war more often, or more brutally, with their neighbors. More than material constraints, the English School or international society approach would bring to the fore self-imposed policy restraints. The “civilizational” discourse so dominant in the nineteenth century across South America, for instance, helps understand not only the discursive or “speech-acts” efforts to justify a war between “progress” vs. “barbarism,” but also, and most crucially, the mental entrapment incurred by those same élites who held such a legitimizing discourse. Élites used civilization not only as a self-justification for their invocation of the use of force against indios and neighbors, but also to often refrain themselves from fighting in more brutal and inhumane ways, as well as to mount de-legitimizing attacks against incumbent governments who had committed “crimes against civilization and standards of humanity.” In sum, to the already well-established hypothesis of stateweakness as a major driving explanation for South America’s “long peace,” the ES contribution becomes essential in the sense of shedding light on the important role of the “societal” aspect of diplomatic relations in South America, as a key piece to the theoretical puzzle of regional prolonged peace. In addition to Martín’s hypothesis, as well, an ES contribution highlights that not only the military sectors of different South American nations in the 1930s–1980s period may have formed a “military epistemic community” of sorts, but most importantly that there are deeper historical roots of similar transnational awareness of “region-hood” that not only pre-date the “Militarist Peace” in South America, but are also more institutionally ingrained in other structures of the forming states of the nineteenth century. Political élites of nineteenth-century South America were, much like European seventeenth and eighteenth-century monarchical families, extremely close to one another. They shared more than simply their social status or standing. Political élites were also economic élites, with similar material, cultural and ideological interests, which united them profoundly across national borders. Individuals knew on a personal level since a very early age, and carried their personal friendships across their diplomatic, executive, and even their

80  Nicolás Terradas military public positions throughout their lives. Families married with one another, conducted business with one another, discussed literature and art, and even joked exclusively in Latin with one another, as a way to reinforce their “elevated” status in their respective societies. In a very important way, therefore, these trans-border social ties facilitated the construction of a common diplomatic and strategic vision of “South America” as a self-standing region, populated with states that “understood” their common global position and then worked actively to maintain a modus vivendi or regional order. Martín (2006) argues that the “Militarist Peace” has outlived the ousting of all dictatorial military regimes after the 1980s in the region through the institutional inheritance and diplomatic legacy that democratic governments have maintained. However, an ES account uses a similar logic but applies it retroactively to the pre-1930s era. That is, it makes a similar argument regarding the existence of a nineteenth-century “Diplomatic Peace” that left an inheritance and legacy for the military sector to profit from in the twentieth century. Conclusion The objective of this chapter has been to offer a historical overview of the most relevant trends and developments substantiating the idea of a regional “diplomatic culture” underpinning a South American society of states. A slowly, but steadily, growing sense of common interest and regional political “awareness” played a crucial role in the creation and maintenance of a regional order among states. Traditional accounts of South America’s “long peace” have up to now largely ignored this phenomenon as an important factor in the explanation of contemporary international relations in the region. And particularly, its potential contribution to the current peaceful condition. A proper understanding of the politico-diplomatic roots of such a condition may lie hidden not in any historical factor of the 1930s or later, but can actually be deeply rooted in the long process of state-formation and diplomacy-building of the nineteenth century itself. Predating a “militarist peace” of sorts (Martín 2006) one can easily find a prior “diplomatic peace” almost a century earlier. Apart from the proverbial domestic effect of the “(limited) war makes (limited) state” and vice versa (Centeno 2002), the particular state-formation experience of South America also created specific diplomatic styles, consolidated regional hierarchies, and gave birth to a more endogenous framework of inter-state relations. War in South America is still a possibility, for states still see in it a viable option for preventing fellow neighboring powers as much as extra-continental great powers to become too powerful and threaten their most cherished possession: independence and autonomy. States in the entire Hemisphere have imprinted this impetus to every institutional and diplomatic arrangement, in defense of formal equality, mutual respect, and political tolerance and plurality. The extent to which war can be legitimately invoked and threatened, however, has purposefully been restrained within collective or consensual efforts. In this crucially important development, the states of the region have qualitatively transformed the nature of their mutual relations from an early, conflict-ridden nineteenth century to a considerably

“Diplomatic Culture” in Preservation of Order in South America 81 more stable, and less violent, twentieth century. Politicians, academicians, and the regular citizen, notwithstanding, must never forget that the South American regional order, like any flowery garden, requires constant tending. Intellectual complacency, more than any menacing army, is today the most dangerous threat to the continued existence of our long, but fragile, regional peace. Note 1 The only major war during the twentieth century was the Chaco War (1932–1935), between Bolivia and Paraguay. Three other limited armed conflicts, commonly known as the Zarumilla–Marañón, the Paquisha, and the Cenepa disputes, have typically not been considered by the Correlates of War database due to their very low casualty rates and duration. For a historical overview of these other limited conflicts, see Zook (1964); Wood (1966: 167–342; 1978); and Mares and Palmer (2012). In 1932, Peru was also engaged in a brief border dispute with Colombia, which is commonly known as the Leticia dispute. For a brief history of this dispute, see Wood (1966: 167–251); Bákula (1988); St. John (1999: 162–185); Restrepo Salazar and Betancur (2001); Donadío (2002); and Camacho Arango (2016).

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“Diplomatic Culture” in Preservation of Order in South America 85 St. John, Ronald B. (1999): La política exterior de Perú (Lima: Asociación de Funcionarios del Servicio Diplomático del Perú). Terradas, N. (2010): “El Dilema de la Seguridad en América del Sur: Una revisión del debate sobre la ‘larga paz’ sudamericana,” Master’s thesis, Universidad Torcuato DiTella, December. Terradas, N. (2020): “The Quest for Order in Anarchical Societies: Anthropological Investigations,” International Studies Review, Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 98–121. Terradas, Nicolás (2021): “The Latin American Long Peace,” in The Oxford Research Encyclopedia of International Studies (May 26) [online] Accessed via: https://doi.org/ 10.1093/acrefore/9780190846626.013.587 Van Klaveren, Alberto (2017): “Regionalism in Latin America. Navigating in the Fog,” World Trade Institute, Working Paper No. 25 (December), pp. 1–27. Warnecke-Berger, H. (2019): Politics and Violence in Central America and the Caribbean (Cham: Palgrave Macmillan). Watson, Adam (1984): “New States in the Americas,” in The Expansion of International Society, ed. by Hedley Bull and Adam Watson (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 129–141. Whigham, Thomas L. (2017): The Road to Armageddon: Paraguay versus the Triple Alliance, 1866–70 (Calgary: University of Calgary Press). Whigham, Thomas L. (2018): The Paraguayan War: Causes and Early Conduct, 2nd ed. (Calgar: University of Calgary Press [2002]). Wight, Martin (1966): “Western Values in International Relations,” in Diplomatic Investigations: Essays in the Theory of International Politics, ed. by Herbert Butterfield; & Martin Wight (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), pp. 102–104. Wight, Martin (1977): Systems of States (Leicester: Leicester University Press). Wood, Bryce (1966): The United States and Latin American Wars, 1932–1942 (New York, NY: Columbia University Press). Wood, Bryce (1978): Aggression and History: The Case of Ecuador and Peru (Ann Arbor, MI: University Microfilms International). Zook, David H. (1964): Zarumilla–Marañón: The Ecuador–Peru Dispute (New York, NY: Bookman).

4

South American Political Economy Strategic Culture and the Question of Agency Diego Zambrano

Introduction In 2011, Luis Alberto Moreno, then president of the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), published the book titled The Decade of Latin America and the Caribbean: A Real Opportunity. Contrary to the traditional skepticism that surrounds discussions about Latin American development, Moreno’s book presented an optimist forecast for the region’s socioeconomic future. Latin American banks, Moreno argued, were able to navigate the 2008 financial crisis that ravaged the industrialized world “virtually unscathed by the problems that challenged dozens of institutions” (Moreno 2011: xiii–xvi). In fact, Latin America experienced the second-fastest rate of economic expansion with nearly 6% GDP growth in 2010. Moreno argued that for years, Latin American countries had adopted policies that improved the region’s fiscal positions, they amassed massive international reserves, lowered public debt, and managed a more flexible exchange rate. It was this context that moved him to forecast the 2010s as the “Latin American decade,” meaning that “in the coming years the region’s [socioeconomic] gains will be locked in and the average citizen will be more prosperous that ever before in the history of the hemisphere” (Moreno 2011: xi). Moreno’s optimism was not ill-founded given that since the early 2000s Latin America’s socioeconomic conditions improved. Almost 50 million people rose out of poverty in Latin America between the early 2000s to the mid-2010s (Winter 2020). While in 2002 it was estimated that over 220 million people were living in poverty in the region, by 2017 that estimate was down to 175 million people (Smith 2012: 228–229; OECD/ECLAC/CAF 2016). A similar trend happened regarding income inequality given that, on average, Latin America saw a reduction of 4 points in the region’s GINI coefficient between 2000 and 2012 (Tsounta and Osueke 2014: 7). However, by the mid-2010s, Latin Americans started to realize that the socioeconomic gains of the previous decade might not be sustainable. Deteriorating terms of trade between Latin America and the rest of the world (most notably China) due to lower commodity prices started in 2012–2013, and they were soon felt by countries throughout the region. Fiscal deficits started to grow and countries focused on managing these conditions in order to avoid another crisis rather than focusing on prospects for the future (Winter 2019). Socioeconomic conditions started DOI: 10.4324/9781003142508-7

South American Political Economy 87 to deteriorate to the point that in 2016 the United Nations Development Program estimated that almost 30 million people of those who experienced improved socioeconomic conditions since the early 2000s would certainly fall back into poverty (UNDP 2016). By 2017, it was estimated that almost 200 million Latin Americans were at risk of falling into poverty once again. Young people in particular were at risk since almost 64% of them come from poor and/or vulnerable households (Bouri and Tavares 2017). The boom of the early 2000s was mostly directed at consumption, and once the bust came, Latin America was not prepared to maintain the achieved progress. Ten years after the publication of Moreno’s book, the socioeconomic outlook of the region could not be more pessimistic. The COVID-19 pandemic and its subsequent economic crisis have motivated growing concerns regarding Latin America’s socioeconomic outlook.1 By mid-2020, Latin America had become the epicenter of the global pandemic crisis, with over 40% of the global COVID-19 deaths even though the region has only 8% of the global population. Moreover, estimates by the IMF and the World Bank suggest the region will suffer an economic decline greater than other emerging regions in the world, like Africa, the Middle East, and some Asian countries (Rhodes 2020). In fact, the IMF estimates that Latin Americans will not recover their pre-pandemic income levels at least until 2025, which is the worst estimate for any region in the world (Moreno 2021). But the pandemic reached Latin America in a moment in which crime, inflation, inequality, unemployment, and poverty had been rising for years. As Moreno argues, the 2021 crisis has been exacerbated by COVID-19, but it has been a crisis building up for decades. Therefore, Latin Americans face once again a massive socioeconomic crisis that threatens to destroy much of the progress achieved between the early 2000s and the mid-2010s. Perhaps the most evident example of this dynamic is the declining socioeconomic conditions seen since the 1980s, the “original lost decade.” Latin America achieved significant progress during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The entire region experienced economic growth, increases in per capita income, and, most importantly, urbanization (Hirschman 1987: 7–13). By the 1980s, however, countries in the region introduced policies directed at macroeconomic stability in response to the debt crisis. These policies were successful in controlling massive inflation but at the cost of exacerbating poverty and inequality, which increased by a 3-point average during the 1980s and by a 1-point average during the 1990s (Cornia 2014: 23–48). Similarly to the 2021 crisis, the debt crisis of the 1980s was triggered by dramatic changes in the region’s terms of trade due to the volatility of commodity prices in the global economy. Once the conditions that sustained socioeconomic gains changed, Latin American countries were unable to provide meaningful answers to secure previous socioeconomic achievements. Latin American history has been marked by periods of economic expansion due to favorable external conditions followed by drastic socioeconomic crises once those favorable conditions change. In fact, this was an evident reality for many critics of the optimism about Latin America’s socioeconomic outlook embodied by Moreno in 2011. For instance, Andres Velasco, Chile’s former minister of finance

88  Diego Zambrano and Dean of the School of Public Policy at the London School of Economics and Political Science, warned against declaring the 2010s as “Latin Americas decade” given the parallelisms he observed between that moment and other historical instances of expansion and optimism immediately following a major crisis (Velasco 2011). By 2012, Jose Antonio Ocampo, Colombia’s former minister of agriculture, affirmed that the external conditions responsible for the socioeconomic performance of the region since the early 2000s were mostly over. Latin America’s reduction of poverty and inequality in the twenty-first century, Ocampo argued, was only possible due to an “abnormally good mix of external conditions-in terms of capital flows, growth of international trade, commodity prices and migrant remittances” (Ocampo 2012). Ocampo even questioned the socioeconomic record as the basis of the optimism of the early 2010s. Even though Latin America grew at its fastest rate since the late 1960s between 2003 and 2007, Ocampo characterized this growth as “mediocre.” On average, between 1990 and 2011, Latin America had a 3.3% rate of economic growth, well below 5.5% average growth rate achieved between 1950 and 1980 (Ocampo 2012). Optimists like Moreno were enthusiastic about the economic performance of the region, but this was positive only in comparison to how Latin America performed in the 1980s and 1990s. When compared to other emerging regions, Latin America’s socioeconomic performance between the early 2000s and the mid-2010s was among the worsts. According to Ocampo, Eduardo Bastian, and Marcos Reis, when compared to emerging and developing nations in Asia, the Middle East and North Africa, and Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America “underperformed in almost all indicators, particularly experiencing the worst performance in terms of both GDP growth and external sector variables” (Ocampo, Bastian, and Reis, 2018: 20). Therefore, envisioning a Latin America capable of cementing the socioeconomic gains of the early 2000s without favorable external conditions was, at the very least, wishful thinking. At the root of Ocampo and Velasco’s criticisms against the optimism of the early 2010s lies the structure and organization of Latin American economies. Both argued that optimists like Moreno did not ponder how vulnerable Latin American economies were to changes in external conditions. For Ocampo, the reason why Latin America underperformed in comparison to other emerging nations during a period of robust global growth was the region’s reliance on the export of commodities (Ocampo 2012). Beyond the reforms praised by Moreno, it was high commodity prices and low-interest rates on credit combined with the region’s abundance of natural resources what actually explained Latin America’s socioeconomic gains in the twenty-first century (Velasco 2011). Once commodity prices decreased and interest rates increased, Latin America was unable to maintain the rate of growth and the socioeconomic improvements gained since the early 2000s. But these arguments are not exclusive to the cyclical dynamic experienced by the continent in the past two decades. Most of the research on Latin American development has identified the detrimental consequences of the orthodox export-led growth model.2 For instance, economist Victor Bulmer-Thomas’ book The Economic History of Latin America Since Independence, questioned why a potentially rich region like Latin America

South American Political Economy 89 has been historically characterized by poverty and inequality. Bulmer-Thomas argued that the dynamics involved in the distribution of revenue generated from controlling and exporting commodities perpetuate poverty and inequality in the region (1994: 15–17). But perhaps the most influential analysis on the detrimental nature of the structure of Latin American economies is found in “El Desarrollo económico de América Latina y algunos de sus principals problemas,” first published by Raul Prebisch and Gustavo Martinez Cabañas in 1949. According to Prebisch and Martinez, the orthodox export-led growth model that characterized Latin American economies created important constraints on the region’s development. They argued that the terms of trade between the centers of global economic activity and the periphery were unequal, increasing the cost of goods imported to Latin America relative to the price of the goods exported from the region (Prebisch and Martinez 1949: 347–361). Such unequal terms of trade would eventually become a hinderance for Latin America, given that they would reduce the region’s capacity to import manufactured and industrial goods. For example, between 1876 and 1880, any Latin American country could import up to 100 manufactured products due to the commercialization of a particular commodity. Yet by 1946, the unequal terms of trade that existed between Latin America and the industrialized world reduced the number of manufactured products the region could import from 100 to 68.7 (Prebisch and Martinez 1949: 362). In fact, Prebisch’s work influenced the development of schools of thought like structuralism and dependency theory. Similarly to Ocampo, Velasco, Bulmer-Thomas, and Prebisch and Martinez, structuralism and dependency theory put Latin America’s reliance on the export of commodities at the center of the region’s detrimental socioeconomic cycles.3 Despite all the research pointing at the detrimental consequences of the orthodox export-led model that characterizes Latin America, decision-makers in the region continue to operate under the same logic. In the words of Brian Winter, Americas Quarterly’s editor-in-chief: Every time Latin America is at the top of the curve, people get carried away and invent reasons why the good times will last forever. During crises, the opposite happens, and a kind of fatalism takes over. The list of people I’ve seen fall victim to this way of thinking includes some very smart people: CEOs, big name economists, Wall Street investors, politicians, and every day citizens as well. Virtually no one seems immune. (Winter 2020) Understanding the reasons behind this cycle of expansion and optimism and contraction and pessimism is central to Latin American development, but this concern is not new. Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Brazil’s former president, and Enzo Faletto, wondered why Latin American states failed to guarantee the socioeconomic gains of the early import-substitution industrialization model of the 1950s (Cardoso and Faletto 1979: 4). In a similar fashion, Jeremy Adelman questioned why Latin American societies were unable to use commodity revenue to successfully transform the socioeconomic outlook of the region at the turn of the twenty-first

90  Diego Zambrano century (Adelman 2001: 46). Most recently, in 2017, Esteban Pérez Caldentey and Matías Vernengo edited the book titled Why Latin American Nations Fail: Development Strategies in the Twenty-First Century, which explored why Latin America missed the opportunity given by one of the greatest commodity booms in history (from the early 2000s to the mid-2010s) to move the region toward sustainable development instead of the impending socioeconomic downturn (Pérez Caldentey and Vernengo 2017). Time and again scholars have wondered why Latin America seems to be incapable of transcending the limitations of the orthodox export-led model, and the socioeconomic downturn of the late 2010s and early 2020s is no exception. On that point, this chapter aims to question why Latin American countries continue to operate under a model centered in the commercialization of commodities given its detrimental cyclical dynamic. More specifically, if the pervasive consequences of the orthodox export-led model have been exhaustively studied for so long, then why have Latin American countries not been able to successfully restructure their export-oriented economies? In fact, if various political movements from different ideological preferences have denounced the pervasiveness of the extractivism central to the orthodox export-led model, then what could explain the region’s historic dependence on primary products? Even leftist or self-proclaimed “progressive” movements that ascended to political power in Latin America since the early 2000s have exacerbated the extractivist model they once denounced so fiercely (Gudynas 2009: 188). In other words, why do Latin American states continue to favor a model that creates such dramatic socioeconomic consequences for the region? The academic literature on Latin American development presents a wide array of answers to the region’s predisposition toward the extraction of primary products. Whether it is the region’s geography, the Hispanic and/or Catholic idiosyncrasy, Latin America’s colonial history, or the structure of the global capitalist economy, these answers tend to share one common thread: for better or for worse, change in Latin America seems almost impossible. Some factor beyond the realm of what is possible is out of reach for Latin Americans, who are either dominated or willingly—yet corruptively—subjected to a political organization that perpetuates the detrimental consequences of socioeconomic cycles in the continent. However, this chapter argues that the continuity of Latin America’s dependence on the extraction and trade of natural resources is the consequence of the region’s preference for this particular type of model. Rather than understanding the region’s socioeconomic reality to be the consequence solely of extra-regional factors, this chapter argues that decision-makers in the region favor a political economy that is centered around the exploitation of commodities. In other words, the continued condition of dependent development in the region is the consequence of Latin America’s strategic culture of extractive political economy. In this sense, the present chapter introduces the concept of strategic culture to explain why Latin America continues to favor a political economy centered around extractivism despite its detrimental socioeconomic consequences. The chapter argues that throughout Latin American history, different material and ideational factors have coalesced to shape the perceptions and preferences of decision-makers

South American Political Economy 91 developing a strategic culture of extractive political economy. This strategic culture of extractive political economy is deeply engrained in Latin America, defining societal expectations and demands accordingly. Moreover, the present chapter discusses the application of the concept of strategic culture to the study of Latin American political economy. The concept of strategic culture was developed to explain the preferences of Soviet decision-makers regarding a potential nuclear confrontation with the United States. Therefore, applying the concept of strategic culture to a disciplinary area outside traditional security studies in International Relations also requires elaboration. With this in mind, the chapter is organized in two sections: the first section introduces the concept of strategic culture to the study of Latin American political economy. It argues that the academic literature inadequately explains the continuity of Latin America’s socioeconomic cycles. It also explores the strategic nature of international economic relations and how the concept of strategic culture is applicable to political economy. Moreover, it discusses how merging strategic cultural analysis and insights from Dependency Theory actually expands the discipline’s understanding of Latin American. The second section discusses the strategic culture of extractive political economy in Latin America. It examines the material and ideational factors that have shaped the historic formation of a strategic culture that favors the extraction of natural resources at the center of relevant policy preferences. It also discusses how the strategic culture of extractive political economy explains the continuity of the detrimental cyclical dynamic of socioeconomic conditions in the region. To do so, it discusses the case study of the cycle of expansion and contraction of the 2000s and 2010s. Strategic Culture and Latin American Political Economy Over the past decades, the extensive body of literature studying Latin America’s political economy has come up with a wide array of explanations for the persistence of detrimental socioeconomic cycles in the region. Most of these explanations point, either directly or indirectly, at the region’s predisposition toward the exploitation of commodities as the main factor behind the socioeconomic dynamics of the region. Such cycles have shown their detrimental consequences many times. In fact, the region is characterized by the “recurrence of international financial shocks and economic crises ever since its incorporation into the nascent modern capitalist system in the sixteenth century” (González 2012: 2). Despite the destruction brought by these crises, countries in the region continue to favor exploiting commodities at the center of their political economy. Why? The continuity of such preference has been examined by various scholars, with a wide array of explanations that can be organized into three general categories: (1) cultural; (2) geographic; and (3) structural. Cultural arguments state, in general terms, that some aspects of the region’s culture explain why Latin Americans cannot govern themselves effectively. Rooted in the Black Legend,4 cultural arguments state that Latin American culture is defined by a mixture of Catholic obscurantism, autocratic absolutism, and forced labor values implanted by Spanish and

92  Diego Zambrano Portuguese colonialism (Adelman 2001: 28). As described by John Quincy Adams, “the people of South America are the most ignorant, most bigoted, the most superstitious of all the Roman Catholics in Christendom” (Schoultz 1998: 5). Such a culture has, in theory, survived through most of Latin American history, and it explains why the region continues to be governed by corrupt and rent-seeking leaders incapable of effective governance. But these cultural explanations are inadequate for two main reasons. First, they perpetuate the idea that Latin Americans are predisposed toward corruption and exploitation. They see the region’s destiny to be doomed by its peoples’ inability to break free from these predispositions, limiting the agency of Latin Americans to nothing more than a resignation to their corrupt nature and an acceptance of their detrimental cyclical history. Second, cultural explanations are problematic when confronted to the empirical record. Catholicism has been a wider influence throughout the world beyond Latin America, and the so-called “Iberian obscurantism” instilled in the region has also been present in Europe. However, the socioeconomic reality of countries like Spain, France, or Italy cannot be more different than that of countries like Bolivia, Paraguay, or Venezuela. The academic literature also presents geographic explanations to the continuity of detrimental socioeconomic cycles in Latin America. Overall, these explanations state that certain geographic factors such as temperature, access to the sea, or rough terrains could explain why the region presents higher levels of poverty and inequality (Gallup, Gaviria, and Lora, 2003: 4). Latin America’s environment has given the region immense amounts of natural resources to exploit, but the vast, difficult, and sometimes inhospitable geography of the continent hinder efforts at securing sociopolitical organizations that guarantee sustainable socioeconomic progress. More specifically, geographic arguments state that the determinants of socioeconomic outcomes are dependent on how geographic characteristics shape, condition, and delimit the way populations settled and exploited resources (Gallup, Gaviria, and Lora 2003: 7). Latin American geography presents vast spaces with natural resources concentrated in enclaves with difficult connections between them, hindering integrated sociopolitical organizations. But geographic explanations present important problems when explaining socioeconomic outcomes in general, and Latin America’s socioeconomic reality in particular (Acemoglu and Robinson 2012: 45–69). In 2003, John Gallup, Alejandro Gaviria, and Eduardo Lora published the book Is Geography Destiny? Lessons from Latin America. The objective of the book was to determine whether geographic factors could explain why Latin America continued to present detrimental socioeconomic cycles. Different cases throughout the region invalidated the role of certain geographic factors as explanations of socioeconomic outcomes. For instance, the case of Bolivia suggested that tropical climates do not perpetuate negative socioeconomic outcomes. Moreover, the case of Colombia showed that having access to coasts and ports did not create a socioeconomic advantage relative to other countries in the region. Also, the case of Brazil argued that the connection between geography and diseases, which are considered to be a detrimental factor to socioeconomic outcomes, is not necessarily

South American Political Economy 93 the case. Ultimately, the conclusion of the book rejected the logic of geographic explanations for Latin America’s socioeconomic reality. In the words of Gallup, Gaviria, and Lora: “institutional and historical forces often redirect, reinforce, or even undermine the effects of geography” (Gallup, Gaviria, and Lora, 2003: 126). Perhaps the most important group of explanations for the continuity of detrimental socioeconomic outcomes in Latin America is the literature on structuralism. Overall, structural arguments suggest that socioeconomic outcomes are determined by the structure of the international economy. The forces of global capitalism have established industrial centers of economic activity that either consume or add value to primary goods exploited from peripheral areas of the international economy. Areas outside the industrial centers, like Latin America, were designed and developed for the purpose of resource extraction and export, regardless of the negative dynamics and environmental consequences created by the internal structure of peripheral societies. The fact is that in the long run, centering the economic activity of peripheral societies exclusively around exploiting commodities unavoidably perpetuates negative socioeconomic dynamics. There are three main mechanisms through which the exploitation of natural resources perpetuates negative socioeconomic outcomes: (1) de-industrialization; (2) macroeconomic volatility; and (3) rent-seeking political behavior (Williamson 2011: 48). First, expanding commodity exports appreciate the local currency relative to the dollar, making imported industrial goods cheaper than domestically produced ones. The result is an exacerbated commodity industry that expands industrial goods imports while also depressing or even eliminating any local non-primary industrial development (Corden and Neary 1982; and Corden 1984). But the deindustrialization created by structuring the economic activity of peripheral areas solely around the exploitation of natural resources also creates distortions in the labor market. Extractive activities are mostly capital-intensive, meaning that their relative capacity to create jobs is limited. Therefore, if societies rely mostly on the extraction of natural resources, their capacity to create sufficient employment opportunities to generate sustainable socioeconomic progress becomes limited, if not impossible (Gudynas 2009). Once a commodity boom dissipates, peripheral societies find themselves without the resources to alleviate the difficulties of not having enough jobs and without the capacity to create such jobs, perpetuating the cycle of commodity boom and socioeconomic gains followed by contraction and the emergence of poverty and inequality. Second, relying exclusively on the export of natural resources increases the macroeconomic volatility of peripheral societies. The price of commodities fluctuates suddenly and dramatically in the international economy, driven mostly by dynamics outside the control of peripheral areas like Latin America (Deaton 1999; Blattman, Hwang, and Williamson, 2007). Countries with significant primary product exports tend to base their entire economic budgets and prosperity on the successful commercialization of commodities. The volatility of commodity prices changes the amount of revenue a country receives, constraining long-term macroeconomic planning or stability by affecting expectations. The apparent expansion of the economy driven by export revenue hinders political leaders from identifying proper

94  Diego Zambrano economic policy that can guarantee sustained growth. Therefore, the commercialization of commodities allows for periods of artificial economic growth driven by export revenue, but policy-makers tend to fail to understand the short-lived nature of the boom and do not adopt growth-promoting policies (Wallich 1960). Third, the centrality of exporting natural resources in peripheral societies creates political dynamics that perpetuate socioeconomic problems. Societies organized around exploiting natural resources are more susceptible to present rent-seeking behavior and corrupt political processes (Chiasson-LeBel 2016). Given the immense attractiveness in revenue appropriation and the relative ease of discriminatory access to primary activities, countries that rely on commodity exports are prone to perpetuating political processes that increase income inequality and reduce the political power of the vast majority of the population. Decision-makers maintain control by co-opting the extractive sector, they pacify political dissent through bribery, and reduce public accountability in order to avoid demands that might threaten their position of control (Bourguignon and Verdier 2000). In other words, the presence and reliance on natural resources creates negative consequences in the political process of countries in Latin America. The enclave nature of extractive activities and the history of the development of the state5 around commodities in Latin America incentivize decision-makers to fight for control of the state, making it easier for them to appropriate revenue while using the political process to discriminate against other sectors in society (Ross 1999; 2001; Acemoglu, Robinson, and Verdier, 2004; Isham et al. 2005; Boschini, Petterson, and Roine, 2007). However, structural arguments not only point at the mechanisms through which the orthodox export-led model perpetuates negative socioeconomic cycles. These mechanisms have been studied and criticized at length, yet decision-makers in the region continue to favor such policies. Structural arguments explain this by suggesting that decision-makers in Latin America are either incapable—due to the strength of global capitalism forces—or unwilling—due to self-interest and corruption—to move beyond their position in the international economy. In this sense, structural explanations assume that the socioeconomic trajectory of a society is a function of its position either in the industrial center or in the periphery of global capitalism. Peripheral societies, in theory, are not powerful enough to transition from their peripheral position into the center of global capitalism, and their detrimental socioeconomic cycles are a byproduct of global capitalism (Palma 1978: 889; Jackson et al. 1979: 8). But this account as to why Latin American societies continue to favor policies that perpetuate socioeconomic distortions is problematic. First, the experience of the South East Asian countries is often juxtaposed as a counterargument to structural determinism in Latin America. The capacity of countries like Taiwan and South Korea to transition from the periphery to the center of global capitalism shows that countries can, under specific circumstances, challenge structural determinism. Second, decision-makers in Latin America have had moments of opportunity to break from structural determinism. Throughout the twentieth century, Latin America has had at least two major windows of opportunity where structural conditions changed in favor of moving away from the orthodox export-led model. First, during the interwar period,

South American Political Economy 95 structural demand for primary products decreased dramatically, thereby removing structural incentives for exporting commodities. World War II also affected global consumption, immersing the region in a crisis because of a reduction in total commodity exports and, by default, creating incentives for moving away of commodity commercialization. The region’s response to this critical conjuncture was to implement import substitution industrialization (ISI). Yet, instead of moving away from commodity exports, the export of primary products was positioned as the main source of financial resources for industrialization. Second, the end of the Cold War and the commodity cycle of the twenty-first century supposed a new opportunity for Latin American decision-makers to change the export-led model. Structuralism argues that, during the Cold War, it was difficult for developing countries to implement economic policies outside the spheres of influence of the United States and the Soviet Union. Global superpowers used international institutions, direct political influence, and violence to condition the socioeconomic structure of most peripheral societies around the world. The end of the Cold War removed these political barriers to change, and the economic contraction of the 1990s presented a clear opportunity for Latin America to move beyond the export-led model. Moreover, the commodity boom of the early 2000s provided the region with immense resources to effectively change the socioeconomic structure of the continent. In fact, self-proclaimed “progressive” governments gain massive political power under the context of increasing export revenue. These countries could even establish significant economic alliances without the presence, influence, or even domination of the United States. However, the reality of Latin America’s political economy in the twenty-first century is not one of change. These “progressive” governments did not take the historic opportunity to break from the detrimental socioeconomic cycles that characterize the region. On the contrary, they exacerbated the extractivism central to the export-led model in Latin America (Burchardt and Dietz 2014), increasing the economic dependency that the region has with the export of commodities primarily to China (Ortiz 2012: 188). Thus, structural arguments inadequately explain why Latin American decisionmakers continue to favor policies that perpetuate detrimental socioeconomic cycles. Other peripheral societies have shown that it is possible to transition from the periphery, and the context of the twenty-first century shows that decision-makers in the region actually wasted an opportunity to move away from the export-led model. In the words of Luis Alberto Moreno: “Unfortunately I think it’s proof that in Latin America we have tended to manage crises better than opportunities” (Winter 2019). In this sense, the continuity of export-oriented economies in the region corresponds not to an impossibility for change but rather to a conscious decision not to change them. According to Cardoso and Faletto, the socioeconomic reality of Latin America was the result of the complex relationship between external and internal forces, and not only due to external domination (Cardoso and Faletto 1979: xvi). For them, the external forces recognized by other structuralist arguments were not sufficient to understand the reality of the region for two reasons. First, structural determinism considered any capitalist development to be impossible in Latin America. However, Cardoso and Faletto identified some countries in

96  Diego Zambrano the region that had experienced what they defined to be capitalist-dependent development. This type of capitalism was different from that of the industrial centers of the global economy like Europe or the United States, but it still showed industrial characteristics that were considered to be impossible to emerge in Latin America (Bergeron 2004: 81). Second, structural determinism argues that the socioeconomic reality of the region is the result of the external domination imposed on Latin America since colonialism. Evidently, Cardoso and Faletto argued, external forces continued to play an important role in the global capitalist economy. But the socioeconomic reality of the region was shaped and maintained by local actors. In their words: “the social practices of local groups and classes which try to enforce foreign interests, not precisely because they are foreign, but because they may coincide with values and interests that these groups pretend as their own” (Cardoso and Faletto 1979: xvi). Following the logic of Cardoso and Faletto, this chapter introduces the concept of strategic culture to study how and why internal forces aligned their interest with foreign forces and then perpetuated social structures that maintained the detrimental cycles that characterize Latin America. Overall, this chapter challenges the inadequate structural explanations of the literature and positions Latin Americans at the center of their socioeconomic reality. Rather than understanding Latin Americans as innately corrupt, or trapped by their geography, or perpetually dominated by external forces; this chapter understands decision-makers in the region to be actors with agency in the destiny of the continent. The continuity of the export-led model that perpetuates detrimental socioeconomic cycles in Latin America responds not to any external imposition but to the continuous policy choices of decision-makers in the region. In other words, Latin Americans are not helplessly trapped in cycles of expansion and destruction; rather, they are protagonists in maintaining the social, political, and economic structures that perpetuate socioeconomic distortions like poverty and inequality. The Concept of Strategic Culture and Political Economy

The concept of strategic culture was formalized by Jack Snyder in the report titled Soviet Strategic Culture: Implications for Limited Nuclear Operations. In this report, he analyzed the organizational culture and sub-culture of Soviet decisionmakers under a framework of strategic culture (Snyder 1977). As he states, strategic culture is defined as the “sum total of ideals, conditional emotional responses, and patterns of habitual behavior that members of the national strategic community have acquired through instruction or imitation and share with each other with regard to nuclear strategy” (Snyder 1977: 8). Hence, strategic culture evolved as a framework to understand patterns of continuity in security policy choices, particularly focused on preferences that did not follow structural or environmental pressures. Regardless of the conventional use of strategic culture in the understanding of security policy choices, the concept provides an analytical framework that facilitates the explanation of policy choices in other areas of strategic statecraft.

South American Political Economy 97 Beyond the notion of nuclear policy or national security choices, strategic culture focuses on the study of the polices that, a priori, present a pattern of continuity in an apparent contradiction to structural or environmental conditions. The notion that identifying the sources and patterns of policy preferences among national and subnational social actors provides an analytical element that can elucidate theoretical and empirical issues of political economy. Particularly, the concept of strategic culture as an analytical framework is theoretically equipped to resolve the seemingly contradictory economic policy choices in the Latin American context. Strategic culture is an analytical concept at the intersection between the materialrational and cognitive-ideational approaches to study decision-making. It poses an important challenge to behavioral models of decision-making understanding, questioning the idea that humans behave similarly under similar circumstances. Therefore, strategic culture considers policy choices to be the result of decision-makers’ preferences. These preferences can vary across countries, states, bureaucracies, and even within organizations. This is because what defines the preferences of decision-makers is the context within which they have been socialized. Strategic culture argues that the social context within which actors develop—from material to ideational contexts—conditions their policy preferences and subsequent policy choices. Rather than assuming actor behavior as a consequence of their human nature or conditioning preferences on purely ideational environments, strategic culture studies agency by contextualizing policy choices within a sociological framework. Yet the application of the concept of strategic culture to Latin American development warrants some discussion. First, economic relations in general are susceptible to strategic analysis. Overall, states seek to maximize their material benefits through economic policy. However, within the global capitalist economy, resources and material benefits are limited. The material benefits that one state consumes cannot be consumed by any other state. For that reason, states need to envision approaches to access and consume material benefits, because other states also want to consume them. If there were unlimited material benefits, states could simply tap into those resources without competition from other states. But the existence of limited resources and material benefits pushes states toward competition in order to acquire them. This competitive dynamic is at the heart of strategy; a pattern of behavior that permits them to achieve utility maximization based on their own capacity and other states’ capacities. For example, we could imagine a state that at any given time wants to maximize its material benefits by taking advantage of trade. This state may decide that in order to meet its material needs, it needs to start exporting a specific manufactured product. To do so, it would need to be able to access the primary resources that are required for manufacturing. It would also need to acquire the knowledge to manufacture such good, have access to the necessary infrastructure to export manufactured goods, and would also need to have access to international markets where to sell its manufactured goods. A state might have access to the primary resources within its own borders, or it might need to import it from someplace else. Whichever the condition required, the state would need to either compete

98  Diego Zambrano for capital to exploit the resources or to import them. Then, the state would need to compete for the knowledge to manufacture the goods, either by importing the knowledge or producing it. Furthermore, the state would need to compete for access to exporting infrastructure, from ports to ships to shipping routes. Ultimately, the state needs to compete for access to a particular market where its products are going to be consumed. But the competition does not end there, because states have to constantly compete with other states that also produce the same manufactured products. Therefore, a state must envision a strategy to successfully achieve the maximization of its material benefits through the export of manufactured goods. This competitive reality applies to every aspect of economic activity. States have to create strategies to compete in a global economy that is becoming increasingly crowded, and these strategies not only delimit how they relate to the world, but also how they organize internally to achieve their goals. An apparent contradiction to this logic emerges from neoliberal ideologies. Under neoliberalism, one finds a theoretical rejection of any kind of centralized economic planning. Liberal dogma prescribes for states to let market forces develop without interference, because interferences from the state creates inefficiencies that reduce the maximization of benefits. Then, one can argue that the notion of strategy is, in part, antithetical to neoliberal economic principles and therefore it is not related to political economy. However, two counterarguments emerge against this assumption. The first one is empirical: every state in the world, regardless of how much it deregulates its economy, has some sort of posture toward its economic policies. The second one is theoretical: even free markets require some sort of policy choices that call for strategy, and it can be argued that neoliberalism in itself implies a strategic set of policy prescriptions (Payne and Phillips 2010: 5). Once the notion of strategy is connected to economic policy, it is necessary to discuss what does it entail to apply the concept of strategic culture to the study of Latin American political economy. Any application of the concept of strategic culture to the study of political economy first requires for the identification of the presence of a strategic culture. In other words, the first step is to establish whether there are a set of “semi-permanent and unique behavioral tendencies that decisionmakers internalize in relation to strategic challenges and that inform their approach to political economy statecraft.” For this, it is necessary to define the parameters that present a strategic culture. How does one know the strategic culture of political economy when one sees it? Strategic culture refers to the consistent preference of decision-makers for a particular set of policy postures to achieve its specific goals. When one observes a continued preference for a particular set of policies over others among decision-making groups, despite changes in external stimuli, then it becomes clear that there is a strategic culture. This is why strategic culture is considered to be the semi-permanent behavioral tendencies of decision-makers. That is, these tendencies are internalized and maintained throughout time. The best way to study this type of determination is by studying junctures or moments of crisis. One of the most important features of strategic culture is that preferences tend to outlive the environments that gave rise to them. In moments of crisis, structural changes present new strategic realities for decision-makers,

South American Political Economy 99 calling for them to adapt to these new conditions. However, if new strategic realities are filtered through preexisting attitudes and procedures, then these preexisting preferences represent a strategic culture. In terms of political economy, the study of economic crises and the subsequent response from decision-makers are a perfect environment to determine the existence of strategic culture. For example, the response of South American decision-makers in the wake of the 1980s debt crisis hints at the presence of a strategic culture in the region. Decision-makers decided to implement policies that controlled macroeconomic imbalances. However, there were no policies aimed at reducing the dependency of the region on financial resources from exporting primary products. This dependence was one of the causes of the crisis, given that once commodity prices went down the entire region was unable to find resources to pay its debts. But decision-makers did not change the export-oriented structure of the economy, signaling a policy preference for these types of economic activities. The permanence of policy preferences even in times of crisis signals another important feature for the application of strategic culture in political economy. The continuity of a set of particular preferences even in times of new strategic realities is the equivalent of a “culture.” The semi-permanent nature of specific policy preferences represents the culture in strategic culture. They are considered a culture because these preferences are internalized by decision-makers. This internalization takes place because of the consistent exposure overtime of a particular set of policy preferences and procedures. These are transmitted within organizations and throughout contexts, socializing generations of decision-makers to a point in which they become enduring and engrained. Therefore, when studying strategic culture in political economy, it is necessary to identify not only the existence of a set of policy preferences, but also whether these preferences have gained a semi-permanent condition by being internalized by generations of decision-makers. In the case of political economy, ideology plays a significant role in elucidating strategic culture. Relevant decision-makers are socialized within contexts of specific economic paradigms. Dominant ideologies gain traction within institutions of higher education, which are the ideational settings in which many decision-makers are socialized about economic policy. The semi-permanent endurance of specific economic ideologies represents the cultural element of strategic culture in political economy. This is because decision-makers internalize these ideologies and their prescribed policies regardless of their specific strategic realities. Specific ideologies inform decision-makers and how they rank their economic policy preferences. The role of culture in strategic culture highlights another important feature of the concept and its application to political economy. The semi-permanent presence of a particular set of preferences despite changes in the international material context represents a culture. Yet this culture does not emerge in a vacuum, strategic culture pays significant attention to context. Human rationality is bounded by numerous limitations on human cognition. These limitations are defined by specific material, institutional, social, and ideational contexts. Strategic culture pays attention to these environments because they define the boundaries of socialization for decision-makers. The material environment conditions

100  Diego Zambrano the ideational context, which in turn influences the institutional setting in which decision-makers are socialized. It is this socialization what informs their policy choices and preferences. Therefore, the application of the concept of strategic culture to the study of political economy requires the examination of the relevant context in which preferences by decision-makers emerged. In terms of Latin America’s political economy, it is important to focus on the places and institutions where relevant decision-makers have been socialized, the role of social demands in shaping their policy preferences, the influence of the abundance of primary resources in their strategic thinking, and the inheritance of the colonial social structures in which they were socialized. Strategic Culture of Extractive Political Economy The detrimental socioeconomic crisis exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic in Latin America is a consequence of the region’s reliance on the exploitation of natural resources. An important body of literature has identified the various mechanisms through which the orthodox export-led model conditions socioeconomic cycles in the region. An increasing dependence on commodities depresses industrial output, increases macroeconomic volatility, and incentivizes rent-seeking political behavior. The extractivism at the center of the orthodox export-led model implemented in Latin America has been criticized for decades, yet contemporary decision-makers in the region have exacerbated the exploitation of natural resources. In fact, the self-proclaimed “progressive” movements that governed the region during one of the greatest commodity booms in history centered their entire political agendas on the revenue generated by extractivism. Therefore, the detrimental socioeconomic cycle of the early 2020s is not only due to the region’s historic reliance on primary goods, but also due to the preferences of decision-makers that decided to exploit the orthodox export-led model knowing its potentially devastating effects. This chapter introduces, rescues, and updates the concept of strategic culture in order to study the semi-permanent preferences of Latin American decisionmakers toward a political economy centered around extractivism. In other words, this chapter contends that Latin American decision-makers possess a specific type of strategic culture regarding decisions about political economy. It is this strategic culture what explains the continuity of detrimental socioeconomic cycles in the region given that it influences decision-makers into perpetuating social, political, and economic structures that exacerbate poverty and inequality. Moments of contraction in Latin America have been constant throughout the twentieth century, even though the leaders in the region have “experimented the most with different types of economic theories and economic policymaking” (González 2012: 2). In fact, leaders in the region have even experimented with various types of political regimes; Latin America has had the most political regime transitions of the second half of the twentieth century (González 2012: 2). Yet time and again, Latin American history shows decision-makers adopting policies centered around the state appropriating the revenue from the export of natural resources in order to address their political agendas.

South American Political Economy 101 The clearest example of this is the region’s experience with ISI. ISI promoted policies directed at creating incipient industrial sectors that could expand socioeconomic growth in the region. The state provided political protection and economic stimulus to infant industry by erecting tariffs, by manipulating exchange rates, and by creating governmental institutions directed at industrialization. Moreover, the state directed efforts at public investment in infrastructure, education, and public health to support industrialization in the region (North and Grinspun 2016: 1490). However, at the center of this effort was the capacity of the state to appropriate and redirect revenue from exporting commodities. All the resources injected into diversifying industry from the state via tariffs or subsidies came from exploiting natural resources. All the resources needed to build the necessary material and social infrastructure to accommodate industrialization came from selling commodities to the rest of the world. Even the most comprehensive and coordinated effort to industrialize the region was erected over the extractivism that has characterized Latin America since colonial times (Chiasson-LeBel 2016: 899). In the words of Rosemary Thorp: “industrialization and import substitution were inserted into and reinforced the existing extremely unequal economic and social system” (Thorp 1998: 199). Therefore, any strategic culture of political economy in Latin America is defined by the centrality of extractivism. As discussed above, societies organize strategically to satisfy their material needs. Different societies rely on different productive processes to generate the necessary revenue to achieve their objectives. Under extractivism, revenue is generated through the exploitation of nature (Burchardt and Dietz 2014: 468). The productive process of extractivism, in general terms, requires first for the control of nature. Control over natural-resources-rich environments is fundamental for extractivism, so power resides on those actors with access to exploitable nature (Burchardt and Dietz 2014: 479). Second, extractivism requires not only the extraction of raw materials but also their commercialization. Extractive societies require both access to markets where to sell commodities as well as the necessary infrastructure to transport raw materials from areas of extraction to trade routes. Therefore, power also resides on those actors with access to markets and trading infrastructure. Third, extractivism requires the appropriation of revenue from exporting primary products for society to achieve its material goals. Hence, extractivism represents one productive process among many for societies to generate the material conditions necessary to satisfy their needs. However, the strategic culture of political economy in Latin America also presents distinctive characteristics beyond extractivism. The strategic culture of political economy in Latin America considers the state a central actor in the appropriation and redistribution of revenue from natural resources. First, the Latin American state consolidated and legitimized itself through the exploitation of natural resources (López-Alves 2001: 169). The Latin American state was able to consolidate its central power during the second half of the nineteenth century thanks to the expansion of global trade. Elites that favored the exploitation of natural resources co-opted the state, and the state became the mechanism to guarantee the success of extractivism at the time. Second, the socioeconomic distortions created

102  Diego Zambrano by extractivism have been at the center of the region’s policy agenda throughout history (Muñoz 1996). Growing demands for social redistribution emerged in the twentieth century, calling for a more active state dedicated at resolving chronic problems like poverty and inequality (Anderson 1967: 41–42). Therefore, the strategic culture of political economy in Latin America not only prefers a state at the center of extractivism, but it also expects such a state to redistribute the revenue from exporting raw materials. According to the concept of strategic culture, ideational and material contexts socialize decision-makers into particular modes of thinking that evolve into semi-permanent preferences tantamount to a “culture.” These semi-permanent preferences influence and shape decision-makers’ policy choices under strategic situations. In other words, decision-makers tend to develop semi-permanent values and preferences that inform and explain their strategic choices. In the context of Latin America, decision-makers choose policies under strategic situations of political economy (like a socioeconomic cycle driven by a commodity boom) that are conditioned by their socialized preferences for the state to appropriate and redistribute the revenue from exporting natural resources. Therefore, these semi-permanent preferences represent the strategic culture of extractive political economy. The Formation of the Strategic Culture of Extractive Political Economy in South America The political economy of South America has been marked by a consistency in terms of focusing the economic activity of the region toward the export of primary resources. The focus of the region’s economic activity toward the export of raw materials can be traced back to the colonial period. Before the moment of conquest, South American societies were characterized primarily by economic activities of accumulation and subsistence. In this sense, from civilizations like the Incas to tribes like the Chibchas, they specialized in sedentary agriculture. However, from the moment of conquest onward, the Spanish Empire sought to transform the nature of economic activity in South America. Among the many facets of the colonial experience, two main constructs of Spaniard dominance highlight the beginning of South America’s orientation toward export activities. The first facet of colonial domination that highlights the preponderance of export activity in South America is the establishment of the encomienda. The encomienda was an institution established by Columbus in the Caribbean at the moment of contact in order to provide the right to tribute and tax to conquistadors and their descendants. In essence, the encomienda was the first extractive institution created by the colonial experience since it became a mechanism for Spaniards to accumulate local basic goods for the crown. While it originated in the Caribbean, the encomienda reached South America when colonizers in Peru realized the complex social systems of the natives, and decreed that the “numerous ‘Republics of Indians’, while remaining under the crown politically autonomous and socially segregated, would supply the small ‘Republic of Spaniards’ with rudimentary goods and labor services.”6 Therefore, the encomienda became

South American Political Economy 103 a colonization mechanism for accumulation directed at exporting primary goods from South America to the Spanish Empire. The second facet of colonial domination that highlights the preponderance of export activity in South America is the establishment of the mercantilist system of colonial control. Two main aspects of the mercantilist system of colonial control influenced South America’s transformation toward an exclusively export economy. The first one was trade regulation, a system imposed by Spain over the South American colonies in which it prohibited primary goods from the region to be commercialized from ports other than the ones designated by the crown (Gordon 1965: 11). This forced South American economic systems to develop in a way in which the infrastructure would only serve for the mobilization of primary goods to the designated export ports. The second aspect of the mercantilist system of colonial control that influenced South America’s focus toward export activities was industrial policy. It is widely accepted that the Spanish Empire did not seek to develop South American economies as an objective in itself. However, during the colonial period, there was some industrial and agricultural development in the region. In fact, the majority of manufactured or fabricated goods consumed in the colonies were produced in the region (Anderson 1967: 18). Nonetheless, the colonial experience of South America was marked by a dramatic suppression of local economic activity independent of the empire. The reality is that if industry or agriculture in South America created a competitive environment for European industry or agriculture, such areas were fundamentally suppressed. For example, the Spanish Empire prohibited the cultivation of grapes in the colonial territories since they could have competed with Spanish winemakers. Similarly, the Portuguese Empire ordered the destruction of Brazil’s steel industry since it was a threat to Portuguese steel producers (Gordon 1965: 12). The colonial industrial policy served the purpose of providing European producers with the most margin of profit by extracting raw materials as cheap as possible as well as securing them the colonial markets by forcing South Americans to consume European goods without alternatives. Thus, the South American industries were developed primarily to serve as infrastructure for the exploitation of raw commodities like minerals. The influence of these facets of the colonial period would become evident during the independence and post-colonial era. The adoption of the European state model by the newly independent republics of South America signaled the problematic relationship that the state would have with the economic activity of the region. The European nation-state developed primarily as a security mechanism, a consequence of the war in a context of preexisting institutional cohesion (Centeno 2002: 102–106), and its economic entanglements were only a subsequent requirement of the social groups entrusted within such security arrangements (Anderson 1967: 8–15). In sharp contrast, the South American experience denotes an imposition of the European state model over a society that did not undergo a process of nation building through the issues of security concerns that promoted the creation of a state. At the moment of independence, social structures that gravitated around land property were more significant that the nation-state for the political and economic interaction of the people of South America. Hence, the state was simply irrelevant, both in terms of legitimacy and capacity, to social

104  Diego Zambrano structures such as latifundios,7 indigenous communities, or caudillos. State action did not affect those within these social structures, and individuals at the top of these hierarchical social systems did not share any type of interdependence that made them some sort of aristocrat class. The European nation-state and its economic engagement were premised on the existence of transactional private economic activity that the state was supposed to enhance and regulate, but this was non-existent in South America as the result of the colonial period (Anderson 1967: 19–23). In this context, the South American state developed while conditioned by two main factors: the lack of interdependence between caudillos and the influence of the urban bourgeoisie with connections to foreign markets. In terms of the lack of interdependence between caudillos, the South American state grew geographically conditioned by the power struggle between caudillos, and between these local strongmen and the state. In terms of the influence of the urban bourgeoisie over the state, the South American state grew conditioned by the political demands of the criollos and urban classes which possessed crucial commercial connections with former colonizers (Furtado 1973: 38). Therefore, by the first half of the nineteenth century, the South American state grew absent of the economic activity within the subnational social structures and around the geographic and political influence of urban classes. By the second half of the nineteenth century, these factors, combined with the historical legacy of the colonial period, would mark the beginning of the predominance of an export-oriented political economy in the region. While South America had been involved in world commerce since the colonization era, the enormous growth of South American economic activity emerged after the 1860s. The industrial revolution created massive consumption demand for raw materials, and it also created excess capital for investment on the exploitation of primary industries. This global development positioned the newly independent republics at an advantageous point. On the one hand, the hierarchical social structures of labor like latifundio gave the region a competitive position in terms of agricultural and mining labor (Anderson 1967: 28). On the other hand, the contacts with foreign capital and markets of the urban bourgeoisie, and their influence on the South American state, provided the region with an advantageous condition for the extraction and commercialization of primary goods. Hence, the state became the mechanism for urban élites to accumulate wealth. Given the disconnection between the state and the social structures of the region, urban élites found in the state the only structure of economic activity in which they could establish complete influence. Yet, this required urban élites to consolidate political power over the state as well as over resources. Therefore, once urban élites found a foreign market for native raw materials, they used the power of the state to integrate itself with the rural sector that produced such goods. For instance, in countries like Bolivia or Peru, where mining was a predominant activity during the colonial period, urban élites consolidated their power by controlling the supply of minerals from the rural areas to the areas of export (Furtado 1973: 38). In countries where there was no clear predominance in terms of primary goods, such as Colombia, the consolidation of the state became problematic given the constant political clash of urban élites over the state protection of their regional

South American Political Economy 105 products. It is in this context that the South American state develops and consolidates; surrounding—both politically and geographically—the economic activities of resource exploitation and export (Centeno 2002: 114). The effect of the consolidation of the state around export activities is twofold: on the one hand, it disincentives the creation of a domestic private industrial and economic activity, favoring imports of manufactured goods over domestic production (Anderson 1967: 28). On the other hand, it creates a preference for élites to both capture the state as a mechanism of securing export commercialization and for policies that reduce the barriers for the commercialization of commodities (Anderson 1967: 24). Therefore, it is in the consolidation of the South American state that one can find the inception of a strategic culture of political economy in the region. First, the strategic culture of political economy in South America is found in the élites’ preferences toward foreign imports. Consumption in South America has been a socializing factor for social class and identity. In a post-colonial society marked by class asymmetry, consuming foreign goods provided urban élites with an identity mechanism that separated them from other social classes in the region (Orlove and Bauer 1997: 1–29). In other words, élites preferred to consume imported goods because they were seen as superior to local products. Access to European manufactured goods was a symbol of social status, and this became internalized particularly in urban élites. This preference, combined with an economic structure that makes foreign imports cheaper, provides a root for the strategic culture of political economy in South America. Second, interest-based preferences of élites—and by consequence of their political control over the state—and the state provide the second root of the strategic culture of political economy in South America. From the moment of state consolidation onward, South American states focused primarily on expanding the number of exports their economies produced. Policy preferences aligned toward the attraction of foreign capital and the export of primary products. Hence, the state’s engagement with economic activities served to protect foreign interests in the region. While the domestic economic activity did not require the state to regulate or enhance industrial activity, the export-orientation did require for the state to provide security to foreign capital. A clear example of the use of the state to secure foreign capital was Cipriano Castro and Juan Vicente Gomez’s strategy to attract investors by offering advantageous benefit packages in oil investment backed by the state (Anderson 1967: 31–32). Consequently, the increasing role of exports in the economic activity and success of the South American state created a preference for free trade. Another influential factor in the creation of South America’s strategic culture of political economy is the ideational preferences of urban élites in the early nineteenth century. The education of South American élites during the colonial period was heavily influenced by European idiosyncrasy. At some point of their life, Criollos embarked on a European journey to receive an education. Moreover, most of the books read by these élites were primarily European, as well as the ethos that they admired and adopted. South American élites have maintained this tradition of receiving an education that is heavily influenced by foreign ideas, and they have constantly searched abroad for solutions to their problems (Centeno and López-Alves

106  Diego Zambrano 2001: 5). Therefore, the dominant economic ideology among urban élites at the moment of state consolidation was classical liberalism. Élites that influenced the state, and by implication the decision-making processes of the state, shared an ideational context that influenced their preferences toward policy choices. In this sense, élites were socialized, through their education and their preferences for European ideas, into preferring economic liberal theory and policy choices. By the time of state consolidation in the independent countries of South America, those élites in control of decision-making processes favored an export-oriented economy (Cupples 2013: 49). This preference was justified by their ideational context, in which the ideas of comparative advantage were already ingrained. Therefore, the formation of a strategic culture of political economy was influenced by the material context inherited from the colonial period and the ideational environment of the élites, which were socialized into preferring foreign manufactured goods and favoring liberal economic policies. However, as it was mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, the external orientation of the economic activity of the region created significant socioeconomic disparities. These socioeconomic disparities exacerbated political contention until the Great Depression ultimately created a context of reform in the region. This is the moment of the emergence of populism in South America by the 1930s and 1940s. The socioeconomic reality of poverty and inequality exacerbated by the strategic culture of political economy in South America in the late nineteenth century triggered the mobilization of the lower classes (Roberts 2014: 49–67). This mobilization crafted a new understanding of the role of the state in the economy, primarily through the redistribution of wealth in the region. Moreover, through the works of Raúl Prebisch, South America realized that the commercialization of primary products created negative relative terms for the region, consolidating socioeconomic conditions of poverty, inequality, and dependence. The emergence of the redistributing role of the state marks a significant challenge to the nineteenth-century strategic culture of political economy in South America. Instead of the preferences toward the export of primary resources, the political élites of the region saw a local demand for a change in the political economy toward an internal focus of economic activity. This local demand created two new areas of preferences for political economy: first, redistribution of wealth through the state; and second, industrial development of local manufactured goods. It is in this context that the region enters into the process of ISI. The merits of ISI have been widely discussed in the literature, and this chapter is more interested in the effects that redistributive claims had on the strategic culture of political economy in South America. The South American welfare state implemented major social programs in order to alleviate the socioeconomic distortions of the commodity export-oriented political economy. The majority of these systems were contributory, which concentrated their benefits toward formal sector workers (Roberts 2014: 51). The effects of these programs became evident by the 1980s, where over 60% of the economically active population of countries like Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay, or Chile received legal entitlement to social security. But beyond these systems, the redistributor nature of the state within the ISI context also involved significant land reform movements. This was based on

South American Political Economy 107 the understanding of the unequal inheritance from the colonial era in terms of land ownership. Ultimately, the redistributor role of the state during ISI also signaled the emergence of the nationalization process in South America. Industries dedicated at the exploitation of primary products became nationalized as a counterbalance to the corrupt exploitation of the state from urban élites to provide concessions to those foreign actors that guaranteed them the best benefits. The best examples of this dynamic were the nationalization of the Venezuelan and Brazilian oil industries. It is in this context that a third major source of the strategic culture of political economy in South America emerges. South American societies created a new preference toward the political economy of the state. This new preference is that of the all-powerful nationalist state, which is required to resolve the chronic problems of poverty and inequality created by the historic strategic culture of political economy in South America (Anderson 1967: 41 and 42). In sharp contrast with the situation of the post-independence nation-state, these new demands called for a state positioned at the center of the socioeconomic reality of the region. Hence, the collective imaginary of South American societies envisions a new role for the state, one of central importance in resolving the vast socioeconomic distortions of the region’s experience. At this point, the evolution of the South American state has created three main sources of strategic culture of political economy in the region. First, the preference of urban élites—and by consequence, the controlled state—for commodity exportoriented policies. Second, the consumption preferences of manufactured imported goods as a mechanism of identity and socialization. Third, the preference for redistributive policies designed to alleviate poverty and inequality. The modern political economy of the region juggles between these policy preferences. In fact, these three main sources of strategic culture of political economy in South America show significant continuity throughout the region’s history. For example, the experience of the 1980s and 1990s shows a resurgence of the preferences for economic policies that benefit exports of primary products, in which the region entered an era of macroeconomic stabilization, foreign capital attraction, and dismantling of redistributive mechanisms (Roberts 2014: 51–53). In this sense, at least in terms of the foreign capital flows, the dynamics experienced by South America during the 1980s and 1990s mirrors the one experienced between most of the late nineteenth century and the 1930s (Aguiar de Medeiros 2011: 189–210). These dynamics show similarities with current trends in the region, where countries like Argentina or Bolivia are moving toward macroeconomic stability policies in order to attract foreign capital. The continuity of the political economy in South America seems to follow a strategic culture rooted in preferences shaped by the experience of the formation of the state. Nonetheless, the strategic culture of political economy in the region creates contradictory and cyclical realities in the continent. The emergence of the role of the South American state as a redistributive entity did not eradicate previously established preferences in the strategic culture of political economy in the region. In this regard, the economic role of the South American state has become contradictory, showing at some point policies directed at land redistribution while at the same time creating a structure of protection and guarantees for foreign investors (Anderson 1967: 43). For example, the strategic culture of the redistributive state

108  Diego Zambrano explains the policy formulation of major welfare state programs in South America under ISI. However, while formal blue and white-collar workers received these redistributive policies; peasants, rural workers, informal workers, and women outside the labor force were systematically excluded (Roberts 2014: 51). In this sense, what is clear from this period is that ISI reinforced exclusion because its policies were inserted into the already existing unequal economic and social structures (Thorp 1998: 199). Throughout the same process, the export of primary goods was protected, showing the continued significance of the strategic culture of exportoriented political economy. This contradictory and cyclical nature of the South American political economy becomes evident when examining the modern rise to the political arena of preferences for the redistributive role of the state. The political movement of Hugo Chavez is a perfect example of the contradictory nature of the strategic culture of political economy in the region. In terms of political discourse and socioeconomic policy, Chavez had centered the state as the main actor in the provision of poverty and inequality reduction. However, Venezuela under Chavez implemented a drastic policy of commodity export and manufactured goods imports. In this sense, Chavez’s political economy is one where the state exacerbates the economic structure of export-oriented and commodity dependence, while also trying to redirect revenue from such structure to those impoverished by Venezuela’s socioeconomic history. What becomes fundamentally contradictory is the state’s maintenance of the traditional export-oriented structure while committing to alleviating socioeconomic discrepancies. This is contradictory because the conditions of poverty and inequality are a direct consequence of the structure of commodity-oriented exports. What explains this contradiction is the prevalence of a strategic culture of political economy in the decision-making process of Venezuela. This strategic culture places the contradictory preferences of the urban élites at the same arena of the collective imaginary preferences for the state to resolve the socioeconomic imbalances created by the political economy preferred by the urban élites. At the center of this strategic culture lies the state, which is constantly being captured and coopted in order to serve both preferences by different political actors. Strategic Culture and Political Economy: Future Areas of Exploration The analytical use of the concept of strategic culture in the study of political economy provides significant insights. The literature on political economy within International Relations has been framed primarily around the study of the structure of the international economic system, and how states behave within this structure. The models and the assumptions of rational choice, particularly in the study of economic cooperation and interdependence, capture much of this literature. Yet, the study of international political economy of South America has been historically characterized by Marxist approaches. Perhaps the most influential of these approaches is Dependency Theory, which reached its apogee in the 1970s by attractively explaining the Latin American reality. Despite the merits and pitfalls of

South American Political Economy 109 dependencia theory, its framework and prescriptions were highly influential in the region’s economic policy approaches. But the empirical track record of the theory’s application was not, in general terms, positive. The crisis of the 1980s—the period that became known as the “Lost Decade” of Latin America due to the region’s devastating socioeconomic performance— represented the catastrophic conclusion of the dependentista political experiment.8 But what is interesting is that the trigger of the lost decade was, once again, an abrupt reduction in commodity prices. It is this global financial development what initiates a sequence of massive capital flow, significant devaluation, and ultimately insurmountable debt pressure in the entire region. Dependency Theory identified the region’s sensitivity and vulnerability to significant changes in commodity markets. In fact, the most iconic political articulation of dependencia—ISI—was particularly designed to move the region away from such susceptibility. The “Lost Decade” is the embodiment of such dramatic contradiction between diagnosis, treatment, and subsequent resurgence of disease. While many highlight intrinsic deficiencies of ISI as a strategy, what is evident is that the region was incapable of breaking commodity dependence. The use of strategic culture in the study of the South American socioeconomic experience can elucidate this contradiction. Strategic culture highlights the continuous preference toward specific policies that are contradictory to structural or environmental pressures. In a context of significant political acceptance of dependencia theory, strategic culture provides analytical insight as to why decision-making agents in the region where incapable of fundamentally moving away from exportoriented activities. By understanding the historical development of the preferences toward these activities—initially by post-independence urban élites and then by state agents—one can elucidate the partial application of ISI, and the continued support on commodities in South America. In fact, the concept of strategic culture provides significant insight in understanding the continuous attractiveness of leftist and populists’ movements in the region. South America’s twentieth century has been marked by populism, which is constantly capable of both reinventing itself and gaining political relevance regardless of the vast instances of the movement’s failures. By framing South America’s political economy under the notion of strategic culture, it becomes clear why the region continues to bet on populists’ cycles without hesitation. The notion of the all-powerful state, deeply embedded in the collective imaginary of South Americans, provides an explanation for the regions’ preference toward populism. The region’s socioeconomic imbalances are the source of the strategic culture of fiscally expansive, poverty alleviating policy preferences. Yet the preference of exportoriented economic policy is also part of the strategic culture of political economy in the region. Hence, populism becomes the favored political economy since it is capable, at least in the short term, of satisfying both preferences within the strategic culture of South America. Global imbalances and the business cycle in commodity markets usually mark the end of the populist cycle, which triggers political movements that favor macroeconomic stabilization in order to maintain the advantage of exporting activities.

110  Diego Zambrano All of these areas represent new frontiers in the study of the strategic culture of political economy in South America. By moving the concept from security studies to political economy, one can expand the understanding of socioeconomic processes in the region, framing tentative theoretical and empirical contradictions under novel and insightful understandings. In fact, framing the region’s political economy under the notion of strategic culture can successfully move the discipline toward new prescriptive approaches, which break from the historical debates of agent-structure. More specifically, the concept can provide new areas of normative development in political economy for South America by identifying the patterns of continuity of the cultural preferences among decision-making agents and inviting the reshaping of such preferences. It is safe to assume that most of the decisionmakers of political economy in South America share similar cultural experiences that predispose their behavior toward strategic issues, primarily in terms of their education. By identifying this reality, the study of political economy through the lens of strategic culture can provide new perspectives that move beyond the traditional preferences of decision-makers. Thus, the utility of the concept of strategic culture in the study of South America’s political economy is evident, and its untapped potential is significant. Notes 1 There have been recent concerns about another “lost decade” in Latin America in recent years. Some notable examples are Ocampo (2020), López (2020), Moreno (2021), and Freeman (2022). 2 Some notable examples are Gordon (1965), Stein and Stein (1970), Sunkel and Paz (1970), Prebisch (1976), Furtado (1977), Skidmore and Smith (1992), Glade (1995), Adelman (2001), Alcoreza (2012), Abeles and Valdecantos (2017), and Ocampo (2017). 3 More recent scholarship has explored the detrimental socioeconomic consequences of the orthodox export-led model. Several authors point at the volatility of commodity prices as a source of instability for resource-reliant countries like those in Latin America (Van der Ploeg and Poelhekke 2009; Van Der Ploeg 2010). 4 The Black Legend is “a fabrication of sixteenth-century Elizabethan mythologizers aiming to debunk Spanish claims to sovereignty in the New World… which has survived the test of time and empirical verification with astounding agility” (Adelman 2001: 28 and 29). 5 Social property relations refer to the division between those individuals in society that buy labor and those individuals in society that sell labor. The state in Latin America is the one who primarily regulates this market, and those who tend to buy labor are also the ones who control rents. Classical political economy defines rent as a type of income that emerges from property rather than labor or capital. Like the labor market, rents are regulated by the state, given that it is the most political of all revenue. Therefore, the state becomes central in social property relations since it defines the terms of the labor market and assign the legitimate ownership over rent revenue (Chiasson-LeBel 2016: 881). 6 The encomienda was the most influential institutional development of the colonial period. The Spanish crown “entrusted” land to settlers, giving them right of exploitation over resources and rights over the “trust” of Indians in such land. This system would end by 1720, yet rights of land would be given to European descendants, creating institutions like the estancia in Argentina or fazenda in Brazil, which resembled the latifundio of the post-colonial period (Gordon 1965: 13; Bauer 2001: 52 and 53).

South American Political Economy 111 7 The latifundio was a social structure in which property of public land was given to private individuals for its exploitation. It created a reciprocal relationship between patron and worker in which the patron was responsible for providing to the worker’s subsistence in exchange of his labor. The patron was established the law in the latifundio, and any political decision of the nation-state only reached the subnational system of latifundismo if patrons agreed to it (Furtado 1977: 30). 8 The final attack on the movement was the capacity of the East Asian countries to move from the periphery to the industrial core, something that early proponents of the theory did not considered possible.

References Abeles, Martín and Sebastián Valdecantos (2017): “South America after the Commodity Boom,” in Why Latin American Nations Fail: Development Strategies in the Twenty-First Century, ed. by Esteban Pérez Caldentey and Matías Vernengo (Oakland, CA: University of California Press), pp. 163–185. Acemoglu, Daron and James Robinson (2012): Why Nations Fail: the Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty (New York, NY: Crown Business). Acemoglu, Daron; James Robinson and Thierry Verdier (2004): “Kleptocracy and Divideand-Rule: A Model of Personal Rule,” Journal of the European Economic Association, Vol. 2 No. 2–3, pp. 162–192. Adelman, Jeremy (2001): “Institutions, Property, and Economic Development in Latin America” in The Other Mirror: Grand Theory through the Lens of Latin America, ed. by Miguel Á. Centeno and Fernando López-Alves (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), pp. 27–54. Aguiar de Medeiros, Carlos (2011): “Dependencia financiera y ciclos de crecimiento en países latinoamericanos,” Ciclos en la historia, la economía y la sociedad, Vol. 19 No. 38, pp. 189–210. Alcoreza, Raúl (2012): “El círculo vicioso del estractivismo,” in Renunciar al bien común: Extractivismo y (pos)desarrollo en América Latina, ed. by Gabriela Massub (Buenos Aires: Mardulce), pp. 157–187. Anderson, Charles W. (1967): Politics and Economic Change in Latin America: The Governing of Restless Nations (Princeton, NJ: Van Nostrand). Bauer, Arnold (2001): Goods, Power, History: Latin America’s Material Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Bergeron, Suzanne (2004): Fragments of Development: Nation, Gender, and the Space of Modernity (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press). Blattman, Christopher; Jason Hwang and Jeffrey Williamson (2007): “Winners and Losers in the Commodity Lottery: The Impact of Terms of Trade Growth and Volatility in the Periphery 1870–1939,” Journal of Development Economics, Vol. 82, pp. 156–179. Boschini, Ann, Jan Pettersson and Jesper Roine (2007): “Resource Curse or Not: A Question of Appropriability,” Scandinavian Journal of Economics, Vol. 109, No. 3, pp. 593–617. Bourguignon, Francois and Thierry Verdier (2000): “Oligarchy, Democracy, Inequality and Growth,” Journal of Development Economics, Vol. 62 No. 2, pp. 285–313. Bouri, Amit and Rodrigo Tavares (2017): “Los latinoamericanos están volviendo a caer en la pobreza, pero las inversiones de impacto pueden revertir esa preocupante tendencia,” World Economic Forum on Latin America. Accessed via: https://www.weforum.org/es/ agenda/2017/04/los-latinoamericanos-estan-volviendo-a-caer-en-la-pobreza-pero-lasinversiones-de-impacto-pueden-revertir-esa-preocupante-tendencia/

112  Diego Zambrano Bulmer-Thomas, Victor (1994): The Economic History of Latin America Since Independence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Burchardt, Hans-Jürgen and Kristina Dietz (2014): “(Neo-)extractivism—A New Challenge for Development Theory from Latin America,” Third World Quarterly, Vol. 35 No. 3, pp. 468–486. Cardoso, Fernando and Enzo Faletto (1979): Dependency and Development in Latin America (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). Centeno, Miguel Á. (2002): Blood and Debt: War and the Nation-State in Latin America (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press). Centeno, Miguel Á. and Fernando López-Alves (2001): The Other Mirror: Grand Theory Through the Lens of Latin America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Chiasson-LeBel, Thomas (2016): “Neo-Extractivism in Venezuela and Ecuador: A Weapon of Class Conflict,” The Extractive Industries and Society, Vol. 3, pp. 888–901. Corden, Max (1984): “Booming Sector and Dutch Disease Economics: Survey and Consolidation,” Oxford Economic Papers, Vol. 36, No. 3, pp. 359–380. Corden, Max and Peter Neary (1982): “Booming Sector and De-industrialisation in a Small Open Small Economy,” Economic Journal, Vol. 92, No. 368, pp. 825–848. Cornia, Giovanni A. (2014): “Inequality Trends and Their Determinants: Latin America Over the Period 1990-2010,” in Falling Inequality in Latin America: Policy Changes and Lessons, ed. by Giovanni A. Cornia (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 23–48. Cupples, Julie (2013): Latin American Development (London: Routledge). Deaton, Angus (1999): “Commodity Prices and Growth in Africa,” Journal of Economic Perspectives, Vol. 13, No. 3 (Summer), pp. 23–40. Freeman, Will (2022): “Is Latin America Stuck? Why the Region Could Face a New Lost Decade,” Foreign Affairs (November 25). Accessed via: https://www.foreignaffairs.com/ central-america-caribbean/latin-america-stuck Furtado, Celso (1973): La economía latinoamericana desde la conquista ibérica hasta la revolución cubana (México, DF: Siglo Veintiuno). Furtado, Celso (1977). Economic Development of Latin America: Historical Background and Contemporary Problems (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Gallup, John L., Alejandro Gaviria and Eduardo Lora (2003): Is Geography Destiny? Lessons from Latin America (Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank). Glade, William (1995): “Latin America in the International Economy, 1874–1914,” in The Cambridge History of Latin America, ed. by Leslie Bethell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 321–326. González, Francisco (2012): Creative Destruction? Economic Crises and Democracy in Latin America (Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press). Gordon, Wendell (1965): The Political Economy of Latin America (New York, NY: Columbia University Press). Gudynas, Eduardo (2009): “Diez Tesis Urgentes Sobre el Nuevo Extractivismo,” in Extractivismo, Politica y Sociedad, ed. by Centro Andino de Accion Popular and Centro Latinoamericano de Ecologia Social (Quito: CAAP and CLAES), pp. 187–225. Hirschman, Albert (1987): “The Political Economy of Latin American Development: Seven Exercises in Retrospection,” Latin American Research Review, Vol. 22, No. 3, pp. 7–36. Isham, Jonathan; Michael Woolcock, Lant Pritchett and Gwen Busby (2005): “The Varieties of Resource Experience: Natural Resource Export Structures and the Political Economy of Economic Growth,” World Bank Economic Review, Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 141–174. Jackson, Steven, Bruce Russett, Duncan Snidal, and David Sylvan (1979): “An Assessment of Empirical Research on Dependencia,” Latin American Research Review, Vol. 14, No. 3, pp. 7–28.

South American Political Economy 113 López, Humberto (2020): “Are We Heading Toward Another Lost Decade for Latin America?” The World Bank (January 21). Accessed via: https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/ opinion/2020/01/21/nueva-decada-en-america-latina López-Alves, Fernando (2001): “The Transatlantic Bridge: Mirrors, Charles Tilly, and State Formation in the River Plate,” in The Other Mirror: Grand Theory through the Lens of Latin America, ed. by Miguel Á. Centeno and Fernando López-Alves (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press), pp. 153–176. Moreno, Luis Al (2011): The Decade of Latin America and the Caribbean: A Real Opportunity (Washington, DC: Inter-American Development Bank). Moreno, Luis Alberto (2021): “Latin America’s Lost Decades: The Toll of Inequality in the Age of COVID-19,” Foreign Affairs, Vol. 100, No. 1 (January/February), pp. 138–149. Muñoz, Heraldo (1996): “The Dominant Themes in Latin American Foreign Relations: An Introduction,” in Latin American Nations in World Politics, ed. by Heraldo Muñoz and Joseph Tulchin (Boulder, CO: Westview Press), pp. 1–16. North, Liisa, and Ricardo Grinspun (2016): “Neo-Extractivism and the New Latin American Developmentalism: the Missing Piece of Rural Transformation,” Third World Quarterly, Vol. 37, No. 8, pp. 1483–1504. Ocampo, Jose A. (2012): “Let’s Be Clear: This Will Not Be Latin America’s Decade,” VoxLacea (September 14). Accessed via: https://vox.lacea.org/?q=blog/latam_economic_ growth Ocampo, José A. (2017). “Latin America’s Mounting Development Challenges,” in Why Latin American Nations Fail: Development Strategies in the Twenty-First Century, ed. by Esteban Pérez Caldentey and Matías Vernengo (Oakland, CA: University of California Press), pp. 121–140. Ocampo, José A. (2020): “Can Latin America Avoid Another Lost Decade?,” ProjectSyndicate (January 3). Accessed via: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/ latin-america-lost-decade-low-growth-by-jose-antonio-ocampo-2020-01?barrier= accesspaylog Ocampo, Jose A, Eduardo Bastian, and Marcos Reis (2018): “The Myth of the ‘Latin American Decade’,” PSL Quarterly Review, Vol. 71, No. 285, pp. 231–251. OECD/ECLAC/CAF (2016): Latin American Economic Outlook 2017: Youth, Skills and Entrepreneurship (Paris: OECD Publishing). Orlove, Benjamin S. and Arnold Bauer (1997): “Giving Importance to Imports,” in The Allure of the Foreign, ed. by Benjamin S. Orlove (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press), pp. 1–30. Ortiz, Jaime (2012): “Déjà Vu: Latin America and Its New Trade Dependency… This Time with China,” Latin American Research Review, Vol. 47, No. 3, pp. 175–190. Palma, Gabriel (1978): “Dependency: A Formal Theory of Underdevelopment or a Methodology for the Analysis of Concrete Situations of Underdevelopment?” World Development, Vol. 6, No. 7–8 (July–August), pp. 881–924. Payne, Anthony and Nicola Phillips (2010): Development (Cambridge: Polity Press). Pérez Caldentey, Esteban and Matías Vernengo (2017): Why Latin American Nations Fail: Development Strategies in the Twenty-First Century (Oakland, CA: University of California Press). Prebisch, Raúl (1976): “A Critique of Peripheral Capitalism,” CEPAL Review 11. Accessed via: https://repositorio.cepal.org/handle/11362/12273 Prebisch, Raúl and Gustavo Martínez Cabañas (1949): “El desarrollo económico de la América Latina y algunos de sus principales problemas,” El Trimestre Económico, Vol. 63 No. 3, pp. 347–431.

114  Diego Zambrano Rhodes, William (2020): “Another Lost Decade for Latin America?” Reuters (September 29). Accessed via: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-health-coronavirus-latambreakingview-idUSKBN26K2VT Roberts, Kenneth (2014): “The Politics of Inequality and Redistribution in Latin America’s Post-Adjustment Era,” in Falling Inequality in Latin America: Policy Changes and Lessons, ed. by Giovanni A. Cornia (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 49–70. Ross, Michael (1999): “The Political Economy of the Resource Curse,” World Politics, Vol. 51 No. 2, pp. 297–322. Ross, Michael (2001): Extractive Sectors and the Poor (Boston, MA: Oxfam America). Schoultz, Lars (1998): Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy Toward Latin America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Skidmore, Thomas and Peter H. Smith (1992): Modern Latin America (New York, NY: Oxford University Press). Smith, Peter H. (2012): Democracy in Latin America: Political Change in Comparative Perspective (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Snyder, Jack L. (1977): “The Soviet Strategic Culture: Implications for Nuclear Options” (Santa Monica, CA: The RAND Corporation, Report R-2154-AF, September). Stein, Stanley and Barbara Stein (1970): The Colonial Heritage of Latin America: Essays on Economic Dependence in Perspective (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press). Sunkel, Osvaldo and Pedro Paz (1970): El subdesarrollo latinoamericano y la teoria del desarrollo (Mexico, DF: Siglo Veintiuno). Thorp, Rosemary (1998): Progress, Poverty and Exclusion: An Economic History of Latin America in the 20th Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press). Tsounta, Evridiki and Anayochukwu Osueke (2014): “What Is Behind Latin America’s Declining Income Inequality?” International Monetary Fund Working Paper WP/14/124. UNDP (2016): Human Development Report for Latin America and the Caribbean 2016. Accessed via: http://hdr.undp.org/en/content/human-development-report-latin-america-andcarribbean-2016 Van Der Ploeg, Frederic (2010): “Voracious Transformation of a Common Natural Resource into Productive Capital,” International Economic Review, Vol. 51, No. 2, pp. 365–381. Van der Ploeg, Frederick and Steven Poelhekke (2009): “Volatility and the Natural Resource Curse,” Oxford Economic Papers, Vol. 61, No. 4, pp. 727–760. Velasco, Andres (2011): “Latin America’s Glossed Decade,” Project-Syndicate (May 18). Accessed via: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/latin-america-s-glossed-decade Wallich, Henry (1960): Monetary Problems of an Export Economy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Williamson, Jeffrey (2011): Trade and Poverty: When The Third World Fell Behind (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press). Winter, Brian (2019): “Latin America’s Decade-Long Hangover,” Americas Quarterly (April 19). Accessed via: https://www.americasquarterly.org/article/latin-americas-decade-long-hangover/ Winter, Brian (2020): “A Less Apocalyptic Case for Latin America,” Americas Quarterly (October 14). Accessed via: https://www.americasquarterly.org/article/a-less-apocalypticcase-for-latin-america/#:~:text=As%202020%20draws%20to%20a,in%20a% 20Johns%20Hopkins%20database

5

Militaries as Influencers and Gatekeepers Continuity of the Intraregional War-Avoidance Policy Félix E. Martín

Introduction South American states have avoided major intraregional inter-state wars since the end of the Chaco War in 1935. This positive outcome evolved and endured, notwithstanding the absence of strong fundamentals for external peace and multiple regional conditions for war. Additionally, external peace prevailed under permissive and facilitating structural and systemic conditions previously linked to the outbreak of major intraregional wars in South America’s pre–Chaco War security environment. In this context, South America’s inter-state peace is remarkably puzzling. Among several explanations found in the literature on this topic, one centers on the military’s discernible determination to avoid fighting wars or escalating several militarized inter-state disputes (MID) into major inter-state wars as the causal variable. It contends that since 1935, the South American military progressively opted for greater participation in domestic politics while exponentially lessening their preoccupation with external security threats, status, and power projections. This longitudinal dynamic process resulted in the “paradox of external-peace-and-internal-violence.” Correspondingly, since 1935 the attitude and actions of the military vigorously and progressively promoted the war-avoidance doctrine. This security policy’s inferential inception and unfolding have become permanent in South America and deeply ingrained in the military’s modus operandi. To clarify, the inferential nature of the principle denotes its circumstantial behavioral basis instead of concrete and publicly avowed and confirmed policy statements by the region’s militaries. Consequently, over several decades, the military’s unspoken disposition to avoid escalating militarized inter-state crises and fighting wars paved the way for an enduring condition of intraregional inter-state peace. The endurance of this situation via the war-avoidance policy often defied the logic of rational choice models. Thus, it suggests its analysis from a strategic culture perspective that equally considers material and ideational factors. Applying the strategic culture logic to South America reveals individual, national grand strategies that increasingly exclude using force to attain external or international objectives. Accordingly, the chapter combines several aspects of the militarist peace perspective with the strategic culture framework. The first explains DOI: 10.4324/9781003142508-8

116  Félix E. Martín the inception and evolution of the war-avoidance policy. The second elucidates its endurance and prolongation. This contribution is critically important to elucidate the continuation of the war-avoidance policy post-1995 when the South American military diminished their domestic activism and political protagonism or leading role. These conditions were central to the militarist peace argument that appeared to wane after the last Ecuadorean-Peruvian militarized conflict in 1995. Notwithstanding, the war-avoidance doctrine prevailed and continued to prolong the long South American peace through the twenty-first century. Accordingly, it is helpful to use the explanatory logic of the strategic culture perspective to explicate this puzzling result. Thus, merging the two theoretical perspectives suggests how and why the protection and endurance of the long peace in South America prevailed in the face of several militarized inter-state instances. As suggested above, the continuity of the inferential war-avoidance policy in the presence of changing regional and systemic structural conditions presaging war is puzzling and best captured by the notion and theory of strategy culture. This perspective heeds the centrality of social and ideational factors when the logic of material rationality and structural elements is inadequate or problematic to explain puzzling persistent conditions. Accordingly, the chapter examines how, why, and to what extent the regional war-avoidance policy emerged, evolved, and endured in a context of changing circumstances frequently associated with the outbreak of major wars in the pre–Chaco War period. It justifies its analysis by combining notions of the militarist peace and strategic culture. It explores if, why, and how a distinct strategic culture evolved among the military establishments in South America once a military-driven policy to avoid external wars set in via a process of increasing military disposition toward the acceptance of the primacy of domestic level objectives. First, the chapter contends that the militarist peace premise suggests the inception and evolution of the war-avoidance policy and draws on various aspects of this perspective. Second, it turns to the strategic culture angle to elucidate the endurance and continuity of the policy. The second analytical step is consistent with the present volume’s ultimate purpose: to rescue and expand the original notion and theory of strategy culture. Relatedly, it focuses on a policy domain beyond geostrategic interactions among great powers, particularly deterrence via the potential use of nuclear weapons. Also, the chapter concentrates on institutional or state agents, like the regional military, middle- and small-state actors in the Global South, rivalries among states in the periphery, and transnational processes such as the enduring wave of regional inter-state peace. In this context, it probes how the concept and theory of strategic culture help clarify the perplexing continuity of the war-avoidance policy and the attendant prolongation of the intraregional long peace in the changing security environment of South America past 1995. Five sections comprise the chapter. First, it establishes the exceptionality of South America’s security environment. The analysis aims to underscore the military institution’s prominence in domestic and regional affairs. Also, it establishes the causal link between the behavior and attitude of the regional militaries and the inception and evolution of the war-avoidance policy. Second, it underlines the

Militaries as Influencers and Gatekeepers 117 importance of analyzing the international conflict and security domain and the attendant war-avoidance doctrine through a strategic culture viewpoint. Third, it discusses how the militaries’ enduring reluctance to fight major intraregional wars evolved through a process of international socialization and stimulated a regional strategic culture consonant with a military mind focused more on internal affairs than on external objectives. Ultimately, the increasing regional socialization of the military and the development of its supranational identity based on shared political and social attitudes translated in practical terms to the de-escalation of MIDs and war avoidance. It was a crucial determinant during several militarized inter-state crises in South America after the mid-1930s. Fourth, the chapter highlights the importance of strategic culture in explaining the perplexing continuity of the war-avoidance policy, notwithstanding the presence of permissive structural, systemic, and regional conditions favoring possible objective gains and territorial changes through force escalation and war. It draws on select evidence from several instances of dyadic militarized crises between Argentina and Chile, Ecuador and Colombia, and Venezuela and Colombia, to name a few. Despite structural and systemic changes and facilitating regional conditions for the outbreak of war in any of these cases, the de-escalation of crises and war-avoidance policies ensued and prevailed for several decades. Thus, the chapter focuses on these empirically relevant cases and interrogates the usefulness of the strategic culture notion and theory. Fifth, the chapter closes by reflecting on the evidence and how this may or may not help rescue, expand and enhance the concept and theory of strategic culture in studying South America’s international security domain and the war-avoidance policy. The Exceptionality of South America’s Security Environment South American states consolidated their independence from Spain and Portugal by the late 1820s. Of the three remaining non-Iberian, European colonies in the northern tier of South America in the twentieth century, British Guiana gained independence in 1966 and Suriname in 1975. French Guiana remains part of France. Thus, it is technically part of the European Union. Also, the South Atlantic Archipelago is still a British possession. Though on the same continent, these territories did not follow the same sociopolitical evolution as the rest of the region. Hence, this chapter’s analytical focus excludes the historical dynamic of these other territories. Beyond the factual territorial descriptions and peculiarities above, the Iberian portion of South America is a distinct world region for three fundamental reasons. First and foremost, the paucity of major intraregional wars since 1935 distinguishes it as unique compared to the rest of the Global South. Only North America in the Global North experienced fewer intraregional inter-state wars since its independence. The dearth of major wars prompts several scholars to call South America one of the most peaceful regions globally, a zone of peace, an anomaly of international peace, and even some characterize its history since 1935 as the long peace.1 Evidently, it helps that the region’s political map remains remarkably stable since

118  Félix E. Martín 1839, leading one scholar to conclude that this is the most significant evidence of regional peace (Centeno 2002: 10). South America’s uniqueness as a region of low incidence of intraregional, interstate wars benefits from the endurance and integrity of its sovereign, political units. Since the state-building and national consolidation processes evolved and solidified in the nineteenth century, following Gran Colombia’s disintegration as an incipient state in 1831 and the Peruvian-Bolivian Confederation in 1839, no South American country disappeared or succumbed to conquest by another neighboring state. Nonetheless, some national boundary lines did change among several contiguous countries due to intraregional, inter-state wars and MID, ultimately resolved via border readjustments and diplomatic settlements. In some instances, prior to 1935, boundary changes were significant, as were the cases of Argentina ceding territory to create a buffer state that ultimately became sovereign Uruguay after the war with Brazil (1825–1828). Ecuador lost territory as a result of its war against Colombia in 1863. Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay defeated Paraguay in the War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870). This war reduced Paraguay’s territory considerably. For its part, as a consequence of the War of the Pacific (1879–1884), Bolivia lost its littoral access to the Pacific Ocean, becoming a landlocked country, and Peru formally ceded the Tarapacá province. In the 1930s, Bolivia lost a significant portion of its territory to Paraguay in the Chaco War (1932–1935) (Domínguez 2003: 20–22). In other instances, the boundary changes were minor but averted the escalation of the conflicts. For example, on October 18, 1984, Argentina and Chile signed a treaty to close the Beagle Channel dispute. This agreement forced the two countries to cede territory: Argentina recognized Chilean sovereignty over the three islands in the Beagle Channel; Chile agreed to establish a border between six points that preserved the spirit of Argentine bi-oceanic principle, and the treaty established the maritime jurisdiction in the eastern mouth of the Strait of Magellan (Lindsley, 1987: 448). Also, in 1998, Ecuador and Peru reached an agreement to end their long-running territorial dispute that flared up for the third time in 1995. Through this accord, Ecuador gained the use of a square kilometer of Peruvian territory at Tiwinza, atop the Condor Mountains, where it built a monument to its war dead. Though under Peruvian sovereignty, the territory remains under Ecuadorean control. Ecuador also gained access to the Amazon River and the right to build two ports in Peruvian territory.2 The second fundamental reason for South America’s peculiar security environment is the paradox of “external-peace-and-internal-violence” (Martín 2006: 6, 7, 149, esp. 163, 179). This dynamic set in after 1935 and expanded regionally throughout the twentieth century. As South America left behind the ravages of the Chaco War and the attendant military fiasco for both the vanquished and vanquisher, the region experienced a lack of major intraregional, inter-state wars. This positive outcome evolved and endured amid several MID and high levels of internal political violence. In the nineteenth century and pre-1935 period, domestic political rivalries partially contributed to the outbreak of major intraregional wars. In the post-1935 period, however, no major intraregional war broke out despite

Militaries as Influencers and Gatekeepers 119 unprecedented levels of internal political violence. Such a development since 1935 is a crucial historical difference that paradoxically prevails to this day in South America. For example, during the 1825–1935 period, external, intraregional wars were difficult to disentangle from internal sources of political violence among the belligerents. To illustrate this point, a couple of examples are instructive. One is the Platine War (1851–1852). While the War was fundamentally part of Argentina and Brazil’s long-running rivalry to gain influence over the Platine region, Uruguay’s internal violence during its Civil War (known in Spanish as the Guerra Grande) played a crucial role in the course and outcome of the Platine War. In 1851 the Argentine provinces of Corrientes and Entre Rios tried to overthrow Argentine dictator Juan Manuel de Rosas. Thus, they organized a Liberation Army in these two provinces to achieve the goal. Their objective coincided closely with Brazil’s at the time. Also, the Liberal (Colorado) Party of Uruguay aimed to defeat its internal political rival, the Conservative (Blancos) party, which was an essential ally of Argentine dictator Rosas. Thus, on July 1851, the Liberation Army of Corrientes and Entre Ríos provinces in Argentina invaded Uruguay to overthrow Rosas’ critical political ally—the Conservative or Blanco Party ruling Uruguay at the time (see López-Alves 2000: 69–87). The Paraguayan War or War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870) is another case where domestic political violence was one of the ingredients leading up to the outbreak of inter-state war. Given Uruguay’s internal political rivalry and violence between the Colorado and Blanco political parties, Brazil helped the Colorado Party leader oust his Blanco Party opponent. Brazil’s action led Paraguay’s ruler, Francisco Solano López, to conclude that the regional balance of power was in danger. Hence, he preempted his neighbors and went to war with Brazil. This war escalated when Argentina’s President, Bartolomé Mitre, responded to Paraguay’s aggression by organizing an alliance with Brazil and the Colorado-controlled Uruguay. They declared war on Paraguay on May 1, 1865 (Bethell 2018: 94–95, see also Leuchars 2002; Kraay and Whigham 2004). South America’s security environment in the post–Chaco War period changed dramatically. The region experienced a noticeable and absolute absence of major intraregional wars amid a sharp increase in the number and intensity of internal political violent events in several countries. Some of these instances of internal political violence throughout the twentieth century—and even in the twenty-first century—caused more casualties than any major inter-state war in South America prior to and as the result of the Chaco War. For example, Colombia experienced La Violencia, a period of intense political violence from 1946 to 1964, which caused over 200,000 deaths. Also, the country faced a protracted internal insurgency that ebbed considerably with a negotiated peace agreement between the Colombian government and the two main guerrilla groups in November 2016. The fighting caused more than 220,000 fatalities and displaced nearly seven million Colombians from their homes (Miroff 2016). Nonetheless, the insurgency remains at a smaller scale, and the number of documented casualties continues to mount (Turkewitz 2021).

120  Félix E. Martín In 1973, Chile went through one of the most brutal and violent military coups in South American history. The political repression produced close to 2,000 confirmed dead and hundreds who disappeared from jail. Similarly, in 1976 the Argentine military overthrew the government of Isabel Perón, the widow of populist president Juan Domingo Perón. The Argentine military government’s sevenyear campaign (1976–1983) against suspected dissidents and subversives, often known as the “Dirty War,” caused between 10,000 and 30,000 fatalities, including opponents of the government as well as innocent victims.3 Venezuela’s democratic experience since 1958 suffered several unsuccessful coups and street protests in February 1989, February 1992, April 2002, and street protests against President Nicolás Maduro and his cronies from 2017 to 2020. These coups and recent street protests caused hundreds of dead civilians at the hands of the military and the militarized National Guard, including prominently the Bolivarian National Guard under President Maduro. Even as recent as the period from 2017 to 2021, extreme political violence conditions people’s lives in Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Peru, and Venezuela. Nonetheless, intraregional inter-state peace prevails in the twenty-first century. The third fundamental feature underscoring South America’s unique security dynamic since 1935 is the gradual transformation of the military mindset and institution. This evolutionary process led the military to increase their interest and participation in domestic politics and project a steady aversion to fighting intraregional inter-state wars or escalating any MID to war. This twin dynamic was pivotal even when at times the region confronted serious dyadic militarized disputes, as were the cases in 1941, 1978, 1981, and 1995 to mention a few instances. Nevertheless, despite these threats of major wars, the militaries negotiated, de-escalated, and defused every militarized inter-state crisis. As a result, they averted the outbreak of major intraregional wars to this day. Starting in 1982 and continuing through 1992, the collapse and transformation of all bureaucratic authoritarian and military regimes sparked the process of “redemocratization” that ultimately swept the entire Iberian portion of South America (Petras 1986). Since democracies solidified regionally by the mid-1990s, the military adopted a more subdued, internal political role in their respective societies. Like Argentina’s, even some historically strong and autonomous military institutions are in 2023 a vestige of their former heavy-handed and robust domestic or internal political role. Also, except for the Chilean Armed Forces, they are a nonfactor in the external or intraregional balance of power and security dynamic of South America. For example, pejoratively speaking, some refer to Argentina’s present-day military as the ““dis-Armed Forces,”” denoting its precarious condition, reduced security capacity, weak morale, and low external projection capability (Lanata 2017). Nonetheless, at the internal or domestic level of analysis, most, if not all, regional militaries are still formidable and exceedingly influential political and security-wise institutions relative to other national actors. For example, in the early 1990s and as recently as from 2017 to December 17, 2022, the actions and declarations by the region’s militaries and militarized national guard forces in Bolivia,

Militaries as Influencers and Gatekeepers 121 Chile, Colombia, Peru, and Venezuela tilted the balance of internal political power in these societies. In Bolivia, the military sided with street protesters. It forced President Evo Morales to resign from office and seek political asylum in Mexico (Kurmanaev, Machicao, and Londoño, 2019). Also, in Chile and Venezuela, the military and militarized national guard establishments put down street protests and internal political violence. Hence, these two governments survived widespread and severe political unrest due to the military’s forceful and decisive internal actions. Even in Colombia, former President, Iván Duque, deployed the military in May 2021 to control street protests and urban violence. His decision caused many civilian casualties, injured several hundred, and restored political calm (Quesada 2021a, 2021b; Torrado and Catalina Oquendo 2021). In Peru, President Alberto Fujimori, democratically elected in 1990, successfully staged a self-coup in 1992 with the support of the Peruvian Armed Forces. He survived and ruled the country until 2000. In contrast, President Pedro Castillo attempted a similar political stratagem by dissolving Congress to establish an emergency government and rule by presidential decree. His attempt quickly failed when the National Police and, more prominently, the Peruvian Armed Forces decidedly rejected to support Castillo’s political ploy (Taj 2022b). He was ousted by Congress, arrested by the National Police, and replaced by his former vice president, Dina Boluarte, who rapidly deployed the military to suppress demonstrations demanding the reinstatement of former President Castillo. The protests have convulsed the country, and the military actions to quell these have killed at least 20 people (Taj 2022a). South America’s militaries lowered their internal political profile since the mid-1990s. It is improbable in 2023, except, perhaps, four or five years ago in Ecuador and Venezuela, that the military will attempt to depose one of the new populist leaders in the region or any of the democratically elected governments à la Myanmar military coup in February 2021 or, as in some recent military interventions in domestic politics in Africa (for example, Burkina Faso on January 23, 2022, Mali in 2020; Sudan 2019; and Zimbabwe 2017) (Isilow and Tih 2020; Sany 2022). Nonetheless, the South American militaries still maintain an imposing internal political influence, project a solid, autonomous, and organized institutional strength dwarfing other national sociopolitical institutions, and command a powerful demonstrational effect on several countries’ internal political processes. One of the latest indications of the military’s institutional reputation, prestige, and vigorous political influence in domestic affairs in South America is the recent call for the military to intervene and restore order in Brazil by a large segment of the Brazilian electorate after the polarized presidential election on October 30, 2022 (Nicas 2022). In summary, the security environment of South America is unique due to three fundamental developments: first, the dearth of major intraregional wars in the midst of permissive and facilitating regional and structural conditions; second, the advent and prevalence of the “external-peace-and-internal-violence” paradox; and, third, the inferential transformation of the military mindset and institutional mission that simultaneously impacted the first two regional processes listed and discussed above. The security setting in South America is also remarkably puzzling. While

122  Félix E. Martín remaining a formidable and robust institution and a direct and active participant in violent political processes, the regional militaries appear to have exponentially diminished their appetite for fighting their neighbors’ counterparts. This inferential attitude of the military has been prominent even amid rising dyadic tensions, unresolved territorial disputes up until the mid-1990s, and militarized inter-state crises. During these instances, the militaries opted for averting force escalation and the outbreak of major intraregional war. Their enduring conduct through changing regional and structural settings previously causing the outbreak of major wars is perplexing. This chapter defines such an outcome as the war-avoidance doctrine. It is a policy that emerged and evolved over several decades and withstood the wave of democratization that swept the entire region in the mid-1980s and early 1990s. Between Peace and War: The Continuity of the War-Avoidance Policy As discussed in the introduction, this chapter’s policy domain is South American states’ external security. Alternatively, this chapter defines it as the peace-and-war policy continuum. It ranges from inter-state peace to war and vice versa. To be sure, the security spectrum comprises all associated policy options available to nationstates. Thus, the chapter recognizes diverse responses or policies from suing for peace to waging war (e.g., the balance of power dynamics, successful immediate and defused dyadic deterrence, multilateral mediations in armed conflicts, diplomatic mediations, adjustments and settlements, peace-making and peace-keeping missions, and war-avoidance to name a few) in response to potential external disturbances and threats to the national security and sovereignty of individual South American states. Figure 5.1 depicts the scope of the security continuum and the rough location of the war-avoidance policy schematically. Ultimately, the analysis concentrates solely on this policy option. Why? Based on historical continuity in the presence of changing, permissive, and enabling structural (regional and systemic) conditions for war, it is the most preferred, influential, and successful option for maintaining intraregional inter-state peace. As discussed above, the chapter suggests its inception and evolution based on the logic of the militarist peace perspective. Strategic culture theory helps account for the policy’s longitudinal effectiveness and endurance to this day. Thus, the permanent nature of the war-avoidance policy amid facilitating structural settings for the escalation of MID and the outbreak of war

Figure 5.1  Security Policy Spectrum

Militaries as Influencers and Gatekeepers 123 justifies its analysis and bewildering evolution and endurance from the strategic culture vantage point. It is now instructive to define and briefly discuss the prominent constitutive parts of the security policy spectrum. Inter-state Peace is one of the two opposite ends of the security domain continuum. It is a policy option among multiple alternatives extending as far as the choice of fighting wars. It is not the limit of choices or simply the label and definition of a condition in world politics. As discussed extensively in another place, using necessary and sufficient notions, inter-state peace comprises two related but distinct conceptions. First, in the simple or narrow view, the absence or cessation of hostilities is both necessary and sufficient. Second, in the complex and broad view, the termination or absence of war is only necessary but not sufficient (Martín 2006: 9–13). The first conception distinguishes peace unambiguously from war and describes grossly a general state of affairs in world politics. However, it obviates important structural, material, idiosyncratic, and ideational subtleties constituting the complex and broad view of peace. The problematization of these four key nuances of inter-state peace is critical for a sound understanding of the prevailing security environment of South America. Therefore, by unpacking the gradation of peace and its sufficient conditions, one can ultimately discern the policy choice that helped prevent (and why) military escalation and waging war in several cases. Inter-state War is one of the two opposite ends of the security or peace-andwar policy range. Like other policy options along the spectrum, waging wars is a policy choice just like it is opting for positive/stable or negative/unstable international peace. War avoidance, paired with other possible, sufficient conditions for peace, is a policy option along the security or peace-and-war continuum. To clarify, avoiding major wars does not signify the rise of a condition of stable and positive international peace. Instead, the war-avoidance policy is one of several intermediate policy positions along the international security policy continuum. It is instrumental in keeping peace and preventing the outbreak of war. It helps promote negative/ unstable peace amid threatening conditions potentially leading to the outbreak of open warfare. It is a policy choice emphasizing negotiation, accommodation, conflict resolution, and peace-building. It is an option that aims to move inter-state relations away from armed conflict escalation and open warfare toward some level of acceptable negative/unstable peace or, ultimately, the development and endurance of positive/stable inter-state peace. This chapter explains how and why the South American military repeatedly worked to de-escalate dyadic, militarized crises, adjust and avoid major war, and ultimately sue for a degree of relative inter-state peace. In principle, any of the three policy options outlined above or others only mentioned in passing as illustrations along the security continuum can be the influential and galvanizing force of a regionwide strategic culture. The choice hinges on key state agents, like regional militaries, directly involved in the promotion and protection of national security. It appears that the regional militaries progressively internalized the practices and standards of conduct associated with avoiding the escalation of armed conflict that could potentially lead to major intraregional war.

124  Félix E. Martín Accordingly, the war-avoidance policy became the centerpiece of a strategic culture dovetailing into a long process of negative/unstable peace in South America. This perspective suggests an answer to why former belligerent neighbors changed course and opted for a policy that, while keeping the peace, precluded some rational state actors from quickly exploiting windows of opportunity and advancing their national interest by gaining at the expense of a neighbor’s vulnerable position. The dynamic appears in several dyads in South America: Venezuela versus Guyana over the Essequibo Territory, Peru versus Ecuador’s weaker armed forces, and Brazil and Chile versus Argentina after its 1982 South Atlantic military fiasco and its subsequent unilateral downgrading of its armed forces. It was tantamount to opting out of the Southern Cone’s security dilemma dynamic. How did the regional militaries’ strategic culture favoring war-avoidance policy come about? The explanation follows next. War-Avoidance’s Puzzling Nature and Strategic Culture in South America

The military’s policy to avoid escalating MID or fighting external intraregional wars over eight decades is an outcome simultaneously puzzling and interesting on two different counts. First, notwithstanding the presence of permissive structural, systemic conditions for war, objective regional circumstances for external violence, and the absence of the fundamentals for stable and positive inter-state peace in South America, the intraregional external war-avoidance policy emerged after 1935, continued through 1985, and prevails in 2023 (Martín 2006: 2). Second, as the militaries institutionalized regionally and increased their professionalization, they became closer to each other operationally, occupationally, socially and politically. This process attenuated considerably their nationalistic focus, rhetoric, and differences. The regional militaries increased their transnational camaraderie at all levels. Consequently, their social and ideational attitude ushered in a period of enduring relative peace on the basis of their inclination—a shared culture of sorts—to de-escalate militarized inter-state crises and aversion to fight against their neighbors. Often promoted by the United States and other times organized by the regional militaries themselves, they regularly engaged with each other in a variety of bilateral and regionwide activities set up and promoted by institutions such as the School of the Americas, renamed in 2000 as the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security, the failed Union of South American Nations and the Council of South American Defense. These entities promoted educational, operational, social, and political events and expanded inter-state military transparency, personal and institutional camaraderie, familiarity with each other, technical and operational cooperation, and socialization. Ultimately, these activities diminished nationalistic animosities by forming, promoting, and internalizing a shared culture and security strategy. As a result, a loose supranational institutional identity progressively emerged across boundary lines in South America (see Martín 2006: ch. 7). It gained strength, traction, and political significance from the late 1950s to the mid-1980s. Also, during these years and beyond into the new millennium, the militaries demonstrated an

Militaries as Influencers and Gatekeepers 125 utter reluctance to fight inter-state wars. Simultaneously, amid these developments, the military increased their internal political activism and contended for political influence against other domestic political actors, causing, at times, internal political violence. The militaries’ intraregional war-avoidance policy set in, evolved, and endured for almost nine decades at the time of this publication in 2024. The regional militaries were the architects, promoters, and influencers sustaining this critically important security doctrine. Interestingly, though, the policy endures despite major systemic and structural transformations before, during, and after World War II, the Cold War, the Unipolar Moment, and the current multipolar great power competition. As one of the central influencers and gatekeepers of South American states’ strategic cultures, military institutions have played a pivotal role in expanding and continuing the intraregional, inter-state war-avoidance policy. Based on insights from the militarist peace perspective, as argued above, and its attendant external-peace-and-internal-violence paradox, this chapter contends that the regional militaries abetted, nurtured, and influenced the notion of a distinct strategic culture since the Chaco War. It argues that the military, as central decision-makers regarding international armed conflict and war, stimulated the rise and continuity of the intraregional war-avoidances policy. As stated several times above, the continuity and success of this regionwide policy are puzzling based on three conditions: the presence of permissive and enabling structural, systemic settings from 1935 to the mid-1990s; objective intraregional conditions for war; and the absence of the fundamentals for stable and positive intraregional inter-state peace. Overall, the chapter utilizes the concept and theory of strategic culture to elucidate why states opted to avoid war, even in the presence of open windows of opportunity. For example, this was the case during Argentina’s distraction with the 1982 Falkland/Malvinas War, its unilateral de facto disarmament since 1984, and Brazil and Chile’s failure to extract benefits from the external political environment. At another level, although more critically, the chapter also investigates via several subsequent case studies to what extent does the role of the military institution and the ensuing strategic culture since 1935 influenced a middle-ground policy of waravoidance and MID-escalation-avoidance between the opposite poles of peace and war on the policy spectrum of international conflict and security domain in the Iberian portion of South America? Moreover, this chapter presents the Iberian portion of South America as the host of a region-wide strategic culture of MID-escalation avoidance and war-avoidance. States have internalized the attitude and practice of sidestepping the external use of force at all cost. They have upheld this policy even though the means to accomplish it may have caused more harm than the national good. In essence, the military’s attention shifted from external defense and power projection to domestic politics. Thus, the strategic culture undergirding the policy to avoid major intraregional wars originates from the regional military institutions that are pivotal in defining, formulating, and implementing the states’ security objectives. In the next section, the chapter explores in greater detail how the above-discussed dynamic plays out

126  Félix E. Martín and prevents the outbreak of major intraregional inter-state wars in several illustrative cases since the late 1970s to the present. How the War-Avoidance Policy Promotes and Prolongs the Long Peace? This chapter contends that the war-avoiding doctrine promotes and prolongs South America’s long peace. Unintentionally adopted by the region’s military, it is an unspoken disposition triggered by the dismal outcome of the Chaco War for the belligerents. It began as a spontaneous sociopolitical process in the mid-1930s that has evolved longitudinally to be a quasi-permanent policy in the present security environment of South America. How to explain such an operational and doctrinal propensity among the region’s military? This section makes two fundamental points to elucidate this query. Ultimately, the following exegesis will explain the war-avoidance policy’s inception, evolution, and endurance. First, this section establishes the empirical basis for the origin and development of the long intraregional peace since 1935. It suggests how the region’s military contributed to this end by adopting the inferential war-avoidance policy. The analysis demonstrates how the fighting, the peace negotiations leading up to the end of the Chaco War, and the ensuing political consequences from the war throughout the region, particularly in the belligerent states, played an influential role in the spontaneous initiation and progression of the war-avoidance doctrine. Such a development coincided with the redirection of the military’s priority from external to internal political objectives. Subsequently, the incipient doctrine (or operational and institutional congruence among the region’s militaries) and the lessons learned and experiences gained from the aftermath of the war influenced the region’s security environment. It prominently included the redirection of the military’s attention from external to internal political objectives. Thus, when the Ecuadorian-Peruvian militarized crises from 1941 to 1995 and the 1978 to 1982 Beagle Channel dispute between Argentina and Chile could have potentially escalated into a major war, the aversion to fighting neighbors prevailed in these cases. Consequently, regional peace endured in times of peril. The fact that none of the cases mentioned above resulted in a major conflagration is a tangible testament to the materialization and validity of the waravoidance policy. The second part of this section relies on the strategic culture concept and theory. It is a valuable framework to demonstrate the concretization, permanence, and continuation of the war-avoidance doctrine and how it ultimately prevented the escalation of militarized crises and the outbreak of major wars in several illustrative cases from 1978 to 2019. During this period, the military increased its institutional socialization and professional commitment to preventing waging wars among the regional neighbors. Similarly, compared to militarized crises from the 1930s through the mid-1990s, civilian administrations also exhibited remarkable restraint to encourage fighting wars in the presence of dyadic conflicts. This chapter maintains that this outcome culminated from two concurrent and unplanned

Militaries as Influencers and Gatekeepers 127 sociopolitical processes. One is the militarist peace process caused by the redirection of the military’s priorities and leading to the “external-peace-and-internalviolence” paradox. The other is the strategic cultural process that began to form concomitantly with the militarist peace process in the early 1940s and came to full fruition in the mid-1990s. In other words, as the militarist peace logic ceases to explain the permanence and prolongation of peace via the war-avoidance policy in the 2000s, the strategic culture framework elucidates the endurance and permanence of the policy to this day. Therefore, the end of bureaucratic and military authoritarian regimes and the return of democracy or, as referred to in the literature, the process of re-democratization in the mid-1980s and 1990s in South America coincided with instances of internal political violence amid the enduring intraregional external peace. In some cases, internal political violence threatened or, in fact, spilled over to adjacent states (e.g., Colombia’s hot pursuit of FARC guerrillas into northern Ecuador on March 1, 2008) and could have potentially caused military escalation and war between neighbors. In these cases, the militaries played a critical role even under democratically elected civilian governments. They influenced policy and served as the gatekeepers of a strategic culture privileging the inter-state waravoidance doctrine and intraregional inter-state peace by engaging in direct negotiations and adjusting their respective countries’ force postures to prevent wars and safeguard South America’s long peace. This is a crucial development sustained by the reduction of jingoism and nationalistic confrontations among the militaries. This results from more significant degrees of professional socialization and a shared sense of transnational institutional identification. Inception and Evolution of the War-Avoidance Policy

On June 12, 1935, after much carnage, human suffering, and enormous economic and political costs, Bolivia and Paraguay agreed to a truce of the most destructive war in the Western Hemisphere since the War of the Pacific, 1879–1884. The initial settlement led to protracted negotiations among the belligerents and the armistice’s guarantors—Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Peru, Uruguay, and the United States. Ultimately, as the negotiations were known, the Chaco Peace Conference produced a peace treaty between the adversaries. The signing ceremony occurred in Buenos Aires, Argentina, on July 21, 1938. The peace treaty ensured the beginning of a long period of inter-state peace between Bolivia and Paraguay. It also coincided with general regional peace in South America—albeit punctuated and threatened by several instances of MID between, for example, Ecuador and Peru and Argentina and Chile. How did Bolivia, Paraguay, and the entire region go from waging a major war to a long peace? This section succinctly discusses the following four questions to clarify the origin and expansion of the peace process that this chapter argues still endures to the time of this writing as a direct consequence of the inferential waravoidance policy. First, what caused the senseless war between two of the neediest countries in the Western Hemisphere in the 1930s? Second, why did the war’s

128  Félix E. Martín conclusion give pause to potential warring rivals in the region and instill in these a remarkable sense of circumspection and restraint before deciding whether or not to initiate hostilities, escalate militarized crises in progress, and wage war? Third, how did the war experiences influence the mindset and political role of the armed forces nationally and regionally? Fourth, how did the transformed military attitude promote the war-avoidance doctrine? The answers to these questions will help provide the grounds for the inception and evolution of a new attitude by the region’s military against waging fratricidal wars among neighbors. Further, they will point to the development, expansion, and influence of the war-avoidance policy, mainly when bilateral circumstances constituted objective conditions for military escalation toward a major war. First, what caused the war? The underlying causes of the Chaco Boreal War are multiple and complex. However, the historiography of the war establishes three fundamental roots: first, the territorial dispute over a barren and poorly demarcated area; second, the landlocked condition of Bolivia and Paraguay and their attendant need to access the South Atlantic Ocean using the Paraguayan and Paraná Rivers; and, third, their respective anticipation of finding large oil deposits in the Chaco Boreal. Accordingly, the original dispute dates back to 1885, when a Bolivian entrepreneur founded Puerto Pacheco in the upper portion of the Paraguayan River. Bolivia continued opening outposts throughout the Chaco without much opposition from the Paraguayans. Ultimately, the dispute turned violent on February 27, 1927, when Bolivia took prisoner a Paraguayan army patrol near the Pilcomayo River and killed its leader. On December 5, 1928, violence erupted again when a Paraguayan unit attacked an advanced Bolivian outpost at Fortín Vanguardia. Thus, violent clashes continued frequently from 1928 until the outbreak of the Chaco War in 1932. Had it not been for their respective lack of weapons, a major war would have probably ensued much earlier. As a product of the Paraguayan War and the War of the Pacific, Paraguay lost territory to Argentina and Bolivia to Chile, including its littoral access to the Pacific Ocean. As landlocked countries that had lost territory to their neighbors, Bolivia sought access to the South Atlantic Ocean via the Paraguayan and Paraná Rivers, and Paraguay wanted to avoid losing more territory and control over its waterway to the South Atlantic Ocean. Therefore, neither country wanted to lack access and control over the Upper Paraguayan River. Finally, the discovery of considerable oil deposits at the foot of the Andean Mountains prompted many in both countries and two giant oil companies (Standard Oil Company and Royal Dutch Shell) to speculate about possibly finding oil in the Chaco Boreal. This possibility led to intense competition between both countries and by the oil companies supporting each of the rival states: Standard Oil Company backing Bolivia and Royal Dutch Shell supporting Paraguay. The immediate cause of the war is direct and less complex than the underlying elements discussed above. The trigger leading to the war was a clash between Bolivia and Paraguay that became known as the Pitiantutá Lake incident. On June 15, 1932, a Bolivian army unit seized and destroyed the Paraguayan Fortín Carlos Antonio López at the lake. The attack was in defiance of Bolivian President Daniel

Militaries as Influencers and Gatekeepers 129 Salamanca, who, upon taking office on March 1931 after democratic elections, ordered the army to avoid armed confrontations with Paraguayan units and maintain the status quo in the disputed area in Chaco and give diplomacy a chance to succeed. However, the Bolivian soldiers attacked the small garrison at the lake. One month later, the Paraguayan army retaliated and expelled the Bolivians from the remote outpost. In reaction to the Paraguayan attack, President Salamanca abandoned his status quo policy over the disputed area. Instead, he ordered the seizure of several small Paraguayan garrisons at Corrales, Toledo, and Fortín Boquerón. His decision convinced Paraguayan decision-makers that a diplomatic solution on agreeable terms was nearly impossible. Thus, the democratically elected President of Paraguay, Eusebio Ayala, gave its general staff orders to recapture the three forts lost to Bolivia and send 10,000 soldier reinforcement to the disputed zone. In essence, the Chaco War broke out at this point. It was in full force by December 1932 when Bolivian President Daniel Salamanca ordered the reinforcement of the First Bolivian Army with an additional 6,000 soldiers. The action-reaction dynamic set in motion a slow but continuous fighting spiral that lasted three years and caused thousands of combat casualties and enormous material costs to both countries. Second, why the conclusion of the war gave pause to regional rivals and instill in them a profound sense of caution and restraint before deciding on the use of force against neighbors? Interestingly, although the war began when democratically elected civilian Presidents led the belligerent states, the signing of the peace agreement in 1938 was under military rule in both countries. Why this political transformation? The analysis follows below. In the meantime, nonetheless, as a glimmer of optimism about the political future of South America, the final border settlement ultimately materialized in April 2009. At this time, democratically elected Bolivian President Evo Morales and Paraguayan President Fernando Lugo signed the accord resolving their countries’ border dispute over the Chaco Boreal region that caused the 1932–1935 war. Inception of the War-Avoidance Policy

The Chaco War’s political consequences are instructive to retrospectively establish the inception of a new mindset and modus operandi that set in among the region’s militaries. The war caused significant disruptions in the Bolivian and Paraguayan economies, provoking demands for reform among the destitute masses and the military. In Bolivia, President Daniel Salamanca Urey, a civilian and democratically elected in March 1931, was in power when the war broke out and remained in office until deposed in a bloodless coup d’état on November 27, 1934. A combination of dismal economic conditions as consequences of the war; rampant and profound popular discontent; the Bolivian military ineptitude in fighting the Paraguayans, causing a series of devastating defeats in 1934; and the worsening relations between President Salamanca and his generals prompted these to oust him while he was visiting a military outpost in Villamontes. The generals, who deposed President Salamanca, decided to maintain the democratic semblance of the Bolivia government and replaced him with his Vice

130  Félix E. Martín President, José Luis Tejada of the Liberal Party. President Tejada served in office until May 16, 1936, when he was, in turn, overthrown by a group of generals. The military disdained President Tejada because they considered him part of the political élite that, in their estimation, drove Bolivia into an unnecessary war with Paraguay. As frequently reported by historians of the period, the generals’ sentiment was that while the hawkish political élite engaged in reckless demagoguery and bellicose narratives, they failed to support the military with the necessary resources to win the war. Losing the war to Paraguay, a smaller, poorer, and less adequately equipped opponent than Bolivia, made it challenging and exceedingly embarrassing to the top echelon of the military to explain defeat in the Chaco War. Accordingly, two different narratives emerged about why Bolivia lost the war. One account came from the civilian political élite. It placed the blame for the war debacle on undisciplined and poorly trained soldiers commanded by unprofessional and self-centered generals who were more interested in pursuing their political ambitions than in the proper conduct of the war. The second narrative originated from within the military ranks. Thus, it faulted the moneyed, educated urban élite and politicians for selling out the humble, honorable Bolivian soldiers by pushing them to wage war precipitously, inadequately equipped, and scantly supported by the politicians to win the war. Based on historical accounts of the time, these two competing narratives aimed at gaining popular support. Ultimately, the account articulated and promoted by the military was more acceptable to the general population. It generated broad and profound rage toward civilian politicians, particularly President Tejada. The narrative’s momentum against President Tejada coincided with devastating economic difficulties worsened by the war and the controversy regarding the Standard Oil Corporation’s illicit and treasonous activities during the war that purportedly undermined the needs and interests of the Bolivian Government. The ensuing sociopolitical context created and nurtured an ideal situation for the disgruntled generals of the Bolivian Armed Forces to oust President Tejada, terminate the constitutional process, and install themselves in power. These actions permitted the generals the opportunity to improve and polish their institutional image by further promulgating their self-serving narrative that blamed the politicians instead of the military institution for their ultimate responsibility for losing the war against Paraguay. Lieutenant Colonel Germán Busch Becerra removed President Tejada from office through a bloodless coup. He, in turn, installed Colonel José David Toro Ruilova on May 22, 1936, as de facto President of Bolivia, who served until July 13, 1937, when he resigned out of utter frustration for being trapped between the interests of mining tycoons and leftists and radical military reformers. At this point, Lieutenant Colonel Busch Becerra took the reins of the government and ruled Bolivia until August 23, 1939, when he committed suicide. General Carlos Quintanilla Quiroga replaced him as provisional President until the new presidential elections. He restored the constitutional order and scheduled presidential elections in 1940. General Enrique Peñaranda Castillo won with support from the traditional political parties.

Militaries as Influencers and Gatekeepers 131 The Chaco War Generation, comprised of civilian and military reformers and left-leaning personalities utterly dismayed and frustrated by the war and its aftermath, produced several military leaders who governed Bolivia since 1936. These military leaders, not civilian Presidents, ultimately signed the Peace Treaty with Paraguay in 1938. Thus, as suggested above, while the Chaco War broke out and ended under the watch of democratically elected civilian Presidents in Bolivia, it was military Presidents who ultimately signed the Peace Agreement in Buenos Aires. The end of the war brought an array of military leaders to power, and they continued to govern Bolivia into 1940. Their influential role in domestic politics has been almost omnipresent from the end of the Chaco War and throughout Bolivia’s contemporary history. Was this dynamic replicated in Paraguay? The analysis to address this inquiry follows next. Paraguay is perversely well-known worldwide for fighting the deadliest War in South America in the nineteenth century. Under the leadership of dictator Francisco Solano López, this small and needy country confronted the triple alliance of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. The War of the Triple Alliance or Paraguayan War began roughly in late 1864 and early 1865. It ended in 1870, after the death of Solano López in combat and the beginning of the short-lived Brazilian occupation. It was a catastrophic war for Paraguay. Therefore, its world fame is ironically the result of losing 60%–70% of its population and 50% of its male inhabitants (Whigham and Potthast 1999, 2002). The War was also disastrous because Paraguay was on the verge of ceasing to exist as a sovereign state and being absorbed by Brazil. Argentina’s challenge, jealousy, and outright condemnation of Brazil’s quest prevented it. The post-war reconstruction of Paraguay was slow, complex, and excruciating for its people. Why? The answer follows next. A decade after the end of the Paraguayan War, Bolivia lost territory to Chile and its access to the Pacific Ocean. It was the critical consequence of the War of the Pacific. Accordingly, as discussed above, Bolivia’s quest to open its access to the South Atlantic via the Paraguayan and Paraná Rivers. Since the first of these two rivers flowed from and through the Chaco Boreal, Bolivia actively sought control over this barren region, challenging Paraguay’s claim over this territory. Bolivia’s actions in the early 1880s until the outbreak of the Chaco War in 1932 profoundly complicated Paraguay’s social, economic, and political reconstruction. Thus, Paraguay’s decision-makers carefully handled the contextual dynamics leading up to open hostilities in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Notwithstanding Bolivia’s continued aggressiveness in the Upper Chaco, Paraguay acted cautiously and with marked restraint as discussed above. As the first democratically elected President of Paraguay in 1928, José Patricio Guggiari Corniglione inherited the increasingly tense and deteriorating strategic situation in the Chaco against Bolivia. Thus, he quietly instructed the military to increase their presence in the Chaco, act more assertively against Bolivians, and pursue regaining absolute control over the disputed territory. To avoid alerting Bolivia of his decisions, he ordered the military to behave with utmost secrecy to avoid discussions with the national press and pressure from domestic political forces and the general population demanding forceful action against Bolivian expansion in the

132  Félix E. Martín Chaco. The resulting level of secrecy about the military movements in the Chaco conveyed to the general population and vital political actors a sense of military and political inaction against Bolivia. In this sense, the public perception of the President’s apparent complacency and military inactivity were two fundamental catalysts that fueled the violent and deadly protest of October 23, 1931. In reaction to the tragic events, President Guggiari demanded his trial by Congress. Therefore, he transferred power to his vice president, Emiliano González Navero, from October 25, 1931, until January 17, 1932. Upon his Congressional exoneration, President Guggiari returned as President and served the rest of his term until August 15, 1932. The second democratically elected President of Paraguay, Eusebio Ayala, succeeded him and served for almost four years, including the period of the armistice that ended the Chaco War on June 12, 1935. Subsequently, amid the Great Depression of 1929–1939, President Ayala demobilized the large and costly armed forces, terminating thousands of soldiers who were left unemployed and searching for better opportunities. The end of the costly war and the precarious economic conditions affected the entire population, who blamed, perhaps unjustly, President Ayala. Also, the war veterans and officers were highly dissatisfied with the weak Liberal political élite during the conflict. The generalized discontent was the perfect mix to prompt the overthrow of President Ayala by the February 17, 1936 uprising. As it became known, the February Revolution was an amalgam of radical and disgruntled military officers and soldiers, students, workers, and peasants. The revolutionary movement united multiple political persuasions ranging from fascism to socialism to communism. Ultimately, Colonel Rafael Franco commanded this peculiar amalgamation of divergent political ideas, resentful complaints, and competing objectives. He installed himself in power and served as the populist leader of Paraguay until his overthrow by a military coup on August 13, 1937. In summary, on the Paraguayan side of the Chaco War ledger, two democratically elected presidents ushered in the beginning and end of hostilities. Nonetheless, the turbulent years of the post-war set the tone for a succession of military dictators and the imposing and ubiquitous presence of the military in domestic political affairs. They suffered the brunt of the war costs—human, political, and material. Therefore, like other regional military establishments, it appears they preferred avoiding another costly war against their adjacent neighbors and respective institutional counterparts. Also, regardless of the war’s outcome, they showed no inclination to provoke the people’s antipathy toward their institution. Thus, the evidence points to the military proclivity in the aftermath of the war to contend against other domestic political actors and élites to position themselves in a winning and influential role in Paraguay’s internal and external affairs. The experiences of the Chaco War and the lessons learned in Bolivia and Paraguay signaled the shift in the military’s priorities. As mentioned above, these two countries sealed the final settlement of the bilateral dispute in 2009. Notwithstanding, they did not fight another external war to this day. Nonetheless, the military was highly active in internal political affairs from the late 1930s through—and beyond—the advent of democracy in the late 1980s. They influenced domestic

Militaries as Influencers and Gatekeepers 133 politics by directly ruling or influencing who would rule these countries. At least for Bolivia and Paraguay, this is robust evidence suggesting the disinterest of the military to wage another external war. Throughout these years, the regional armed forces refocused their preparation, procurement policy, and institutional activities from external to internal political objectives. Except for the Ecuadorean-Peruvian dyad from 1941 to 1995, which we discuss next, the Bolivian and Paraguayan military and other military establishments in the region increasingly concentrated on their political participation and protagonism at home. This attitude slowly but progressively promoted a doctrine of external war avoidance while expanding and intensifying the military’s internal political participation and objectives. The near dearth of external, intraregional armed conflict is the most compelling confirmation of this dynamic. Even in the limited instances when crises flared up, the military quickly resolved them short of protracted and vigorous escalation and war. In this sense, the impact of the war was fundamental in transforming the military mindset, mission, and function in South America. Accordingly, the result was the inception of the war-avoidance policy. We discuss next the new military attitude post–Chaco War, the evolution of the regional waravoiding doctrine, and how it unfolded in the face of several MID. Evolution of the War-Avoidance Policy

Multiple skirmishes between Ecuador and Peru and the settlement of the Beagle Channel dispute between Argentina and Chile are instructive cases to clarify the evolution of the war-avoidance policy and, thus, the preservation and prolongation of the long intraregional peace in South America in the post–Chaco War period.4 The following discussion will specifically address the third and fourth questions proposed above and intended to help demonstrate the progression of the war-avoidance doctrine in the presence of bilateral armed crises. Accordingly, the purpose is to establish if and how the war experiences of the 1930s influenced the mindset and political role of the armed forces nationally and regionally and how the transformed military attitude may have promoted the war-avoidance doctrine. In sum, this section’s exegesis seeks to document the evolution and influence of the war-avoidance policy in light of dyadic conditions for force escalation toward a major war. Thus, a succinct discussion follows of the nature and development of South America’s most serious militarized crises since the mid-1930s. Ecuador and Peru comprise the most active and pugnacious dyad in the post– Chaco War period in South America. The armed conflict of 1941 between these two countries was the first and, thus far, the only instance nearing the possibility of the outbreak of major war in the region. The underlying cause of this enduring controversy was a territorial dispute over their boundaries dating back to 1830. The stakes were, first, a small area near the Pacific Ocean and, second, about 120,000 square miles east of the Andes and between the Equator and the Marañón River. Ecuador sought control over parts of the Amazon jungle and the river system draining this area (Maier 1969: 28–46; Ireland 1971: 219–230; Allcock 1992: 586–591). On the other hand, Peru’s objective was to prevent Ecuador from expanding its

134  Félix E. Martín territory eastward, particularly after Peru’s defeat in the 1932 Letícia dispute with Colombia. The immediate trigger of the conflict was on July 5, 1941, as hostilities broke out when an Ecuadorian army patrol encountered a group of Peruvian agricultural workers and civil guards near the Zarumilla River, inside Ecuador’s borders. While Quito reported that the Peruvians opened fire against the patrol, in Lima, the foreign ministry issued a statement explaining that Ecuadorian soldiers attacked Peruvian positions and were defeated (Donoso Tobar 1945: 174–175; Wood 1966: 278). Interestingly, though, hostilities began at a time democratically elected presidents governed both countries: Carlos Alberto Arroyo del Río was Ecuador’s President (September 1, 1940 to May 28, 1944) and President Manuel Prado Ugarteche (December 8, 1939 to July 28, 1945) governed Peru. Nonetheless, military officers—not politicians or diplomats—from both countries negotiated a ceasefire, and the 26-day fighting ended on July 31, 1941 (Krieg 1986: 101). Before the Ecuadorean and Peruvian military actively negotiated and sealed the Talara Truce on October 2, 1941, both countries, ordered by the respective civilian governments, mobilized about 18,000 troops and sustained enormous material losses and approximately 600 combat casualties (Wood 1966: 255–344; Clodfelter 1992: 705). Peru, the victor in the conflict, prevented Ecuadorian expansion in the Amazon, gained military control over the province of El Oro in Ecuador, and threatened to overtake Guayaquil. Ecuador and Peru signed the Protocol of Rio de Janeiro on January 29, 1942, due to considerable diplomatic maneuvering by Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and the United States. The treaty ended the fighting along the Ecuadorian-Peruvian border in the 1940s and specified the boundary line between the two countries. Moreover, it stipulated that Peru would withdraw its troops from Ecuadorian territory and granted Ecuador freedom of navigation on rivers controlled by Peru. Finally, the treaty designated Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and the United States as guarantors of the peace.5 Notwithstanding the negotiated peace, the treaty’s stipulations effectively shattered Ecuador’s sovereign objective in the Amazon. Thus, Ecuador was a reluctant signatory. Given its military weakness in the 1941 Marañón conflict, the U.S.’ reluctance to intervene authoritatively in favor of Ecuador, U.S. concerns with the war in Europe, and the haste of the other South American guarantors to close a violent chapter in the Ecuador-Peru territorial dispute, Ecuador was effectively compelled to accept the 1942 Protocol of Rio de Janeiro. Dissatisfied with the Rio Protocol and claiming it had signed the treaty under duress, in 1955 Ecuador invoked the Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance (1947 Rio Treaty). It argued that Peru was preparing to invade again. At this juncture, the Organization of American States organized a peace-observing team of military attachés stationed in Lima. The military observers found no evidence of Peruvian preparation for a possible invasion of Ecuador. Despite this setback in the 1950s, Ecuador was able to keep alive the territorial dispute with Peru due to certain legal, cartographic, and geographic technicalities. Finally, in 1960 Ecuador formally declared the 1942 Rio de Janeiro Protocol null and void. Peru rejected this unilateral action. It claimed that the territorial dispute with Ecuador had been settled permanently at the 1942 Rio de Janeiro Conference (Child 1985: 92–98).

Militaries as Influencers and Gatekeepers 135 In summary, the Ecuadorean and Peruvian military played a direct and leading role in the ceasefire negotiations and the Talara Truce, ultimately leading to the 1942 Rio de Janeiro settlement. Also, they displayed steadfast opposition against their respective countries’ politicians for using the 1941 incident to gain political capital and popularity via nationalistic vendettas and agitation in both countries. These two aspects are crucial evidence of the military’s transformed attitude against fighting external wars and, instead, suing for peace and avoiding further bloodshed by the armed forces. The military’s reaction and unwavering rejection of further fighting is a critical first step in the evolution of the war-avoidance policy that influenced subsequent crisis incidents in the Ecuadorean-Peruvian dyad and others in the region. From 1978 to 1979, military tensions sparked again along the Cóndor Mountains between Ecuador and Peru. However, a “gentlemen’s verbal agreement” to maintain the status quo prevailing in the area since 1942 resolved the discrepancies. General Raúl Cabrera Sevilla and General Pedro Richter Prado, mutual personal friends and, respectively, Chiefs of Staffs of the Ecuadorean and Peruvian armed forces, agreed that Ecuadorean patrols remained in the West side of the Cóndor Mountains and Peru’s on the East. Further, officers from both armies met frequently, exchanged personal consumer goods, and discussed in friendly terms how to prevent hostilities along the boundary line. These officers reported to their headquarters to avoid military clashes and maintain the peace. The situation began to deteriorate in 1980 when a controversy about the significance of the agreements resurfaced in both countries. Particularly in Ecuador, elected officials argued that “no Ecuadorian officer would ever have agreed to consider the Cóndor Mountain range the de facto boundary of the country” (in Krieg 1981: 267). Further erosion of the bilateral relations ensued when Peruvian President-elect Fernando Belaúnde Terry denied the exitance of any territorial dispute with Ecuador publicly. This declaration irked the Ecuadoreans, prompting Ecuadorean President Jaime Roldós Aguilera to cancel his attendance at Belaúnde Terry’s presidential inauguration in August 1980. In response, Peru’s president declined to attend the 150th-anniversary celebration of Ecuador’s Constitution in September 1980 (Ulloa Vernimmen 1981: 258). The gentlemen’s agreement among the military that kept the peace between Ecuador and Peru collapsed on January 22, 1981, and they clashed militarily for a second time on January 28. This time the disputed area was a poorly demarcated 48-mile (78 km) stretch of border in the Cóndor Mountain, believed to be rich in gold and oil. In 1942, when the Rio Protocol specified the border between the two states, cartographers were unaware of the existence of the Cenepa River. Since the discovery of this river, Ecuador has claimed jurisdiction over 130 square miles west of the Cenepa watershed. Thus, the immediate source of the 1981 militarized crisis was Peru’s claim that Ecuador had occupied three abandoned Peruvian military outposts in the Cóndor Mountains. Consequently, urged by nationalistic fervor, Peru’s president ordered the military to launch a surprise attack against Ecuadorian forces allegedly stationed there.6 Both nations sustained heavy material losses and some combat casualties (Clodfelter 1992: 1190)7 before February

136  Félix E. Martín 2, 1981, when they accepted ceasefire appeals from Pope John Paul II, the United States, and other Latin American states, including the three Rio Treaty guarantors. The fact that the 1981 militarized crisis lasted only five days and escalation did not ensue is the result of two convergent conditions: first, the evident military reluctance to fight again their institutional counterparts for a small, remote, and poorly demarcated piece of territory in the jungle. Second, the quick and decisive action of Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and the United States. The first three countries in this list were squarely in the hands of military juntas that preferred to avoid being dragged into a regional military conflict. Their action also suggests the possible influence of the transnational institutional solidarity and identity expounded by the militarist peace hypothesis. On January 29, 1981, the Permanent Council of the Organization of American States convened in Washington. It urged Ecuador and Peru to accept the creation of a commission to investigate the border clashes. Ecuador agreed immediately to this proposal, but Peru rejected it, arguing that only the Rio Protocol guarantors could mediate the latest crisis.8 On the heels of the O.A.S. mediation failure, the four guarantors and representatives from Ecuador and Peru gathered in Brasilia on January 31 to negotiate a peaceful settlement. After these discussions, the two warring parties finally agreed to terminate hostilities on February 2 and to continue negotiating a peaceful solution. After the ceasefire agreement that ended the 1981 conflict, Ecuador and Peru could not settle their territorial dispute peacefully. Ecuador remained adamant about its “sovereign right” to be an Amazonian state. It continued to press the issue on its right to access the Amazon and the river system draining this region. It insisted that the discovery of the Cenepa River, a tributary of the Marañón River, strengthened its claim over parts of the Cóndor Mountains between the Zamora and Santiago rivers. Amid this tense and volatile relationship, Peru and Ecuador clashed for the third and final time on January 27, 1995.9 Again, the underlying cause of this incident was Peru’s claim that Ecuador had occupied Peruvian territory in the remote Andean region of the Cóndor Mountains. In response, Peru launched an attack to dislodge Ecuadorian soldiers from two border posts within the disputed area. Meanwhile, Ecuador’s President, Sixto Durán Ballén, vowed, “Ecuador will not back off from the positions that it maintains in the border.” He added, “[I]f we back down, we are convinced that Peru will continue to invade our land.”10 The January 1995 militarized inter-state dispute between Ecuador and Peru proved to be the costliest crisis in South America since the 1941 Marañón conflict. The estimated human toll on both sides fluctuates between as few as 47 casualties to as many as 300 soldiers killed.11 Several estimates put the cost of the military campaign for each side at ten million dollars per day.12 Despite this heavy loss, the territorial dispute remained unsettled until 1996. Furthermore, the ceasefire agreement that went into effect on February 17, 1995, did not deal with the fundamental problems that initially caused this latest military conflict between Ecuador and Peru.13 Nonetheless, the negotiations that began after the 1995 militarized crisis finally netted a permanent, peaceful settlement on October 26, 1998. Accordingly, Presidents Jamil Mahuad of Ecuador and Peru’s Alberto Fujimori signed an accord

Militaries as Influencers and Gatekeepers 137 in Brasilia, ending the most acrimonious and virulent enmity in the Western Hemisphere since the Chaco War (Simmons 1999). Argentina and Chile comprise another historical dyad that nearly spun out of control in 1978. It caused the second most dangerous militarized crisis in the Western Hemisphere in the post–Chaco war period. Unlike Ecuador and Peru in 1941, 1981, and 1995, the Beagle Channel incident occurred when Argentina and Chile were under military rule. Relations between these states have historically been affected by as many as 25 territorial disputes along their 2,500-mile border (Ireland 1971: 17–27; Allcock 1992: 548–549).14 Since the 1870s, their boundary question has involved three distinct geographical areas: the inter-Andean plateaus between the eastern and western heights of the Andes, the Patagonia region, and the Strait of Magellan and Tierra del Fuego. Among these, the latter zone has been the most salient and challenging to settle and demarcate. Argentina was less interested than Chile in controlling the Strait of Magellan and Tierra del Fuego in its early years as an independent state. In the late 1870s, however, Argentina changed its foreign policy objective and decided to challenge Chile’s claim over this region. The ensuing controversy was initially settled after Argentina and Chile, with the help of the U.S. mediation, negotiated and signed a boundary treaty on July 23, 1881. This agreement stipulated that Chile would give up its claim to Patagonia in exchange for Argentina’s acceptance of Chilean sovereignty over the entire Strait of Magellan. Moreover, Chile accepted the neutralization of the strait, and Argentina agreed never to block the Atlantic access to and egress from the strait. Finally, a provision was made for the division of Tierra del Fuego between them and for the arbitration of disputes arising over the interpretation of the treaty’s terms (Burr 1965: 111–113, 124–126, 132–135, 144–146, 155–156, 184–186, 206; Del Carril 1984: 54–64). While Argentina and Chile solved all pending 24 territorial disputes between 1884 and 1978, the issue of how to divide Tierra del Fuego and define the line between the South Atlantic and South Pacific proved to be intractable. At the center of this controversy figured three small islands (Nueva, Pictón, and Lennox) at the eastern entrance to the Beagle Channel. Since neither the limits of this channel nor the ownership of these islands was ever clearly defined in the boundary treaty of 1881, Argentina challenged the easternmost point of Chilean sovereignty involving the possession of these three islands. In a series of boundary treaties, known as “Pactos de Mayo,” signed on May 28, 1902, Argentina succeeded in obtaining from Chile the concession that the islands were negotiable and should be submitted to arbitration by the British Crown (Burr 1965: 247–256). This was the inception of the so-called Beagle Channel dispute, which brought Argentina and Chile to the brink of war in late 1978 (Rizzo Romano 1968, Santibáñez Escobar 1969; F.V. 1977: 733–740). Except for the signing on June 28, 1915, of a protocol, reiterating the submission for arbitration of the ownership of the islands in the Beagle Channel, the matter remained dormant until May 3, 1938. On that occasion, the Foreign Ministers of Argentina and Chile informed the U.S. Ambassador in Chile, Norman Armour, that they had agreed to resubmit to arbitration the question of the islands at the eastern

138  Félix E. Martín end of the Beagle Channel. They agreed to rely on a sole arbitrator and chose for that position the Chief Justice of the United States. However, when Chief Justice Hughes excused himself, the two states requested the services of the U.S. Attorney General, Homer Cummings (FRUS 1938: 210–217). Subsequent to Cummings’ failed mediation attempt in the 1940s, the British Crown took up the matter again in 1971. Wary of British neutrality, Argentina insisted that the arbitration arrangement be changed so that an impartial panel would make the actual judgment of five members of the International Court of Justice at The Hague. In early 1977, the British Crown announced a ruling confirming Chile’s sovereignty over the disputed islands. Then, in December 1977, Argentina threatened to declare the arbitration not binding and stated that it would pursue the matter in bilateral negotiations with Chile.15 Thus, bilateral negotiations between Argentina and Chile began on January 14, 1978, when General Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, former director of Chile’s intelligence agency, delivered a proposal from President Augusto Pinochet to President Jorge Rafael Videla of Argentina.16 The two military presidents met privately for five hours on January 19. Five days later, on January 25, Argentina officially "repudiated" the international arbitration decision.17 During the first half of 1978, the rhetoric coming out of Argentina and Chile became increasingly bellicose. By August, bilateral negotiations had reached an impasse, and the negotiators fixed November 2, 1978, as the final date to reach an agreement.18 In September and October of 1978, the tempo of scurrilous allegations picked up, with both sides accusing each other of troop movements and illegal incursions.19 When the November 2 deadline came, the negotiators for both countries announced that they had not been able to work out an agreement but would urge their respective governments to seek a peaceful solution.20 While Argentina increased pressure on Chile by demanding a total accord as soon as possible, Chile proposed that the two countries submit the dispute to a friendly nation, like Spain, for arbitration. Argentina rejected this proposal, asserting that direct negotiations were the suitable way to resolve disputes. Belligerent statements from both governments, deployment of armored forces along the border, naval maneuvers near the Beagle Channel, and troop movements led both countries “to be four hours away” from a significant military conflagration on December 23, 1978 (see De Onís 1978b: 3, 1978c: 3; Scheina 1987: 187). The diplomatic negotiations were long but the intense militarized crisis lasted only less than two months. War was averted when Pope John Paul II agreed to arbitrate the dispute and Argentina accepted his mediating role (De Onís 1978a: 16). Finally, on January 23, 1984, the Vatican announced that Argentina and Chile had reached an agreement regarding the Beagle Channel dispute.21 The comparison of the Ecuadorean-Peruvian and Argentinian-Chilean cases evinces several interesting empirical points. First, despite several historical dyads in the region, only these two flared sufficiently to threaten full escalation and war. Thus, intraregional inter-state peace endured notwithstanding the presence of regional conditions for war and potentially permissive and facilitating systemic structures during the height of the Second World War and the Cold War. Second,

Militaries as Influencers and Gatekeepers 139 the Ecuadorean-Peruvian dyad proved more pugnacious, enduring, and intractable to resolve than the Argentinian-Chilean dyad. Considering that the latter broke out and intensified among two military regimes and the recurring clashes between Ecuador and Peru occurred between democratically elected governments casts doubts about the validity of the democratic peace theory. Therefore, the case renders questionable the idea that democracies do not go to war with one another. Third, comparing the Ecuadorean-Peruvian dispute with the quick resolution and less pugnacious dyad among military regimes suggests that militaries were more amenable to find solutions short of militarized confrontations and war in the twentieth century. Notwithstanding the vast time difference to the final resolution between the two cases, these countries, indistinctive of their political systems, avoided force escalation and war. In this regard, the war-avoidance doctrine continued to evolve by prevailing in the face of perilous threats to intraregional inter-state peace. Parallel to the empirical findings above, it is instructive to underscore the importance of the new military attitude that evolved from the late 1930s to the mid1990s, how it manifested itself and influenced the evolution of the war-avoidance policy in South America’s security environment in times of crisis. Thus, it is vital to explain why regional militaries would opt against waging external wars. In other words, this part of the analysis highlights critical sociopolitical and economic fundamentals that may have played a role in influencing the motivations and interests of the region’s military, privileging avoidance instead of force escalation and war. It is not a human condition unique to military personnel in South America since 1935, nor is it that by joining the military institution, potentially violent individuals metamorphose instantly into pacifists who strive to avoid and prevent regional inter-state armed conflicts. As the track record of military involvement in the oftenviolent national political process of individual polities attests, the armed forces in these countries are, at a minimum, as violent as the rest of the institutions and individuals constituting these societies. Nevertheless, the military establishments exhibited a marked degree of aversion to engaging in intraregional inter-state armed conflict against their counterparts. It is conceivable, though, that military personnel, directly cognizant of the dangers of war and given their instinct for physical self-preservation, may be more averse to engaging in inter-state war than civilian decision-makers. The military’s aversion to external armed conflict is an essential theme of civil-military relations that has been explored extensively by Samuel Huntington. In this regard, he explains the greater military aversion to crisis and war due to their sense of self-preservation and perception of being “the perennial victim of civilian warmongering.”22 The following discussion intends to be only a general and concise sketch of the most salient sequence of historical, sociopolitical, and economic factors that contributed to the evolution of the socialization process, which ultimately transformed the preferences, motivations, and interests of the military in South America.23 First is the potential impact on the military mind of the lessons learned and experiences gained from the Chaco War. The chapter discusses this aspect above in the context of the causes, escalation, and consequences of the Chaco War. Nonetheless, it is recognized and mentioned again as a contributor to transforming the military

140  Félix E. Martín disposition against force escalation and warfighting. Second, the “new” professionalization of the armed forces in South America played a role in this process, too.24 In the final analysis, as Martín concludes, the “new professionalism” of the South American armed forces is only the culmination of a long process that made the military institution better equipped overall to compete in the national political processes of these societies (Martín 2006: 172–173). The influx of better-educated cadets and officers with similar socioeconomic and political attitudes and values harmonized the interests and relations among the military sectors in the region. As a result, the level of intraregional inter-state violence decreased considerably while domestic violence and military politicization increased amid the “new” professionalization process. It is also plausible that the increased politicization and military attention to domestic political issues may have exhausted the military of any residual energy or interest to contend against neighbors for any external stake. Third, the socialization process continued and gained momentum during and after the Second World War. The effort of the United States to organize a hemispheric defense pact against an extra-continental power at the end of the war brought all South American militaries closer together.25 Their participation in this hemispheric coalition entailed their collective attendance to the following activities: military training school, international conferences, and social functions, which made military personnel more familiar with each other by encouraging intermingling in a more relaxed social setting than from their respective governmental positions in their home countries (Veneroni 1971; Fitch 1979; Child 1980). Also, the end of the Second World War ushered in a period in South American regional politics in which the military became highly politicized in reaction to the perceived expansion of communism in their countries. As discussed below, this perception increased after Cuba moved closer to the Soviet Union in the early 1960s. At this juncture, the armed forces began to perceive one another as members of a loosely organized supranational structure engaged primarily in political competition for control of the government in their respective states. Consequently, they increasingly regarded other socioeconomic and political groups and organizations in their home states as their true rivals, not other armies across the boundaries. Summing up this point, the direct participation of the military in the national political process of their respective societies in the postwar years contributed to further the shift of the military mission from external protection of the state to internal security and political competition and participation. The significant reduction and frequency of militarized crises in the twentieth century is concrete evidence confirming this process. Coupling the increased military focus on the internal political process of their countries from the 1940s to the 1990s and the reduction of dyadic crises suggest that South American militaries not only learned to live in peace with one another but began to perceive domestic socioeconomic and political conditions as their most immediate threats. Finally, as Martín discusses extensively, the process of politicization and the gradual amalgamation of all military sectors in South America into an informal, overarching regional socioeconomic and political institution gained further momentum in the aftermaths of the 1948 Costa Rican Civil War and the 1959 Cuban

Militaries as Influencers and Gatekeepers 141 Revolution and its subsequent radicalization. The immediate and permanent dissolution of the armed forces of Costa Rica after the 1948 civil war26 and the overthrow of Fulgencio Batista’s military dictatorship demonstrated to all military sectors in the region that socioeconomic and political discontent at home, adequately channeled by urban political opposition groups and a band of armed guerrillas in the countryside, could seriously undermine the socioeconomic, political and institutional interests of the military in any country. The absolute dismantling of the old military institution in Costa Rica and Cuba, the subsequent turn toward the Soviet Union orbit by the new Cuban leadership, and Cuba’s active promotion and support of leftist guerrilla foci in South America during the 1960s instilled great fear and distrust in the psychic of the military.27 It became clear to them that they had to stand together and address the people’s economic needs and socioeconomic and political discontent. Their response was a two-pronged approach: first, to engage actively in economic development projects and, second, to control, even if forcefully, all national socioeconomic and political groups and organizations in their respective countries. The new doctrine of “national security and development” was the military’s response to Latin America’s socioeconomic and political problems in the 1960s and 1970s. The basic tenets of this policy were the following: 1 In addition to the traditional aim of preparing for foreign war, the local armed forces needed to prepare for internal warfare against subversive agents. 2 Since the enemy was multifaceted internal warfare was ideological, economic, and political. 3 That an unclear definition of the enemy required the combat experience of the armed forces and their special preparation for warfare to identify the enemy and devise the most effective strategy correctly. 4 Victory in this war meant achieving a satisfactory state of national security in which vital national interests (i.e., development and sovereignty) were safeguarded against internal or external disturbances.28 The implementation of this doctrine spurred the spread of bureaucratic authoritarian and military regimes in South America in the mid-1960s and 1970s, which produced a great deal of political collaboration among the military in the region, particularly in the Southern Cone. As discussed above, there is evidence that in the mid-1970s, military regimes in this region developed a formidable repressive apparatus outside their borders to eradicate all armed and political opposition. Their operations included the kidnapping and disappearance of key political opposition leaders living in exile in adjacent countries; the signing of counter-insurgency intelligence treaties among Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Paraguay, and Uruguay; and free supply of arms to Paraguay and Uruguay, aimed at achieving “a real and effective integration of Latin American countries.” Also, a multilateral agreement known as Operation Cóndor among the military regimes in the Southern Cone provided for the exchange of political prisoners in order to exterminate all political opposition in this region.29

142  Félix E. Martín The four aspects discussed above supported the transnational process of military socialization and the shift in their focus, priority, and mission from external to internal protection of the state. The result was their increasing disposition to avoid external violence and war. As argued above, such a development, coupled with the military’s traditional political power and institutional autonomy in their respective societies, constitutes a plausible and powerful explanation for the inception and evolution of the war-avoidance policy. Moreover, the military’s adopted waravoidance doctrine not only permeated their ranks but progressively the collective disposition of civilian administrations, decision-makers, and the general public. The generalized aversion to escalating force and fighting wars against neighbors is a significant policy shift that prevented another major war, even when confronting MID and changing systemic, structural conditions in the post–Chaco War. Accordingly, intraregional, external peace in South America was the result, not a cause, of military socialization in South America. Paradoxically and perversely, while the military was one of the blatant perpetrators of much internal political violence and abuses, it was simultaneously instrumental in promoting the inception and evolution of the war-avoidance policy affecting South America’s security environment since the 1940s. More importantly, the war-avoidance policy still endures to this day, notwithstanding systemic, structural transformations and permissive regional conditions for militarized conflict and war. Such a historical reality is a remarkable development following the return of democracy in the 1980s and early 1990s and the military’s reduced political activism and internal influence. What explains the endurance of the war-avoiding policy under changing structural, systemic conditions, and the prolongation of the long peace in South America to this day? The balance of this section addresses this question. Strategic Culture and the Endurance of the War-Avoidance Policy

No one in the International Relations discipline, specifically in the Security Studies subfield, ever suggested the framework of strategic culture to study the cause, evolution, endurance, and continuation of South America’s long peace and war-avoidance policy. That no one thought of employing this theoretical perspective for this analytical purpose does not mean it is inadequate and irrelevant. On the contrary, strategic culture is an invaluable and relevant approach to explain much of the long South American peace via the war-avoidance doctrine, particularly its endurance and prolongation post-1995. Thus, starting from the presupposition that a strategic culture concurrently evolved or even, perhaps, feeding off the same logic and attributes that support the militarist peace thesis, it can help explain the endurance of the war-avoidance policy to the time of this writing. This section maintains that, while both perspectives are valuable in their own right, merging and extending the reasoning of the militarist peace with the logic of the strategic culture theory help to extend the core foundation of the sociopolitical argument that sustains the militarist peace perspective. This theoretical extension is critical to encompass a time when the military as a decision- and policy-making nucleus, albeit still a formidable institution relative to others in the South American political landscape,

Militaries as Influencers and Gatekeepers 143 continued its aversion to fighting external wars, increased its commitment to the rule of law and democratic practices upon the return of democracy in the 1980s, and ultimately reduced its domestic political protagonism and interference. The author of this chapter advanced the militarist peace thesis several years ago to explicate the peculiar nature of South America’s long and continuing intraregional, inter-state peace. The author identified the military as the vital decision- and policy-makers regarding the war-avoidance and war-fighting decision processes. The argument maintains that generations of military decision- and policy-makers were part of a long-evolving process of socialization in the post–Chaco War period that homogenized the region’s military into the membership of a transnational social community or regionwide institution, which increasingly shared the sociopolitical ethos of a supranational identity. The socializing or homogenizing process was based on several aspects, such as the military’s superior institutional strength vis à vis other domestic sectors and institutions, their autonomy and independence of action throughout the long peace, their socioeconomic and political motivations and backgrounds, their similar collective schooling, learning and experiences, and their generational socialization regarding specific ideals, emotions, attitudes, actions, and patterns of institutional and strategic conduct. Accordingly, the thesis posits that the collective character of the military produced greater operational transparency and shared sociopolitical and economic ideals, interests, and preferences about doctrinal beliefs, responses, and strategic behavior. Ultimately, the military’s supranational identity, beliefs, interests, and preferences formed the core explanation for the evolution of the waravoidance policy and the absence of war. The militarist peace thesis and the strategic culture perspective are not mutually exclusive, nor their explanatory reasoning would be radically different regarding the explanation of South America’s long peace via the endurance of the war-avoidance policy. As argued above, the militarist peace logic centered mainly on the dominant institutional role of the armed forces in South American states throughout much of the twentieth century. Also, it expounds on how several sociopolitical, economic, and practical attributes shaped their institution, strategic and political outlook, and the attendant operational and doctrinal mode of war-fighting and external power projection policies. A close reading of Snyder’s definition of strategic culture reveals that he underscores similar aspects to those constituting subsequently the militarist peace argument discussed in detail above. He defines strategic culture as the “sum total of ideals, conditional emotional responses, and patterns of habitual behavior that members of the national strategic community have acquired through instruction or imitation and share with each other with regard to nuclear strategy” (Snyder 1977: 8). This definition does not clash diametrically against the militarist peace thesis. On the contrary, they coalesce. In line with the discussion above, both perspectives identify similar traits causing, as in the case of the militarist peace reasoning, the socialization and homogenization of individuals to the military’s collective interests, preferences, practices, and strategic behavior over several generations of decision- and policy-makers. However, the militarist thesis was more accessible to grasp than the strategic culture

144  Félix E. Martín argument in the context of South America’s security environment. The militarist argument resonated relevantly with the understanding of Latin America area-study analysts, given the centrality in the argument of the traditional political influence of the region’s military establishments. Nonetheless, the return of democracy to South American polities in the late 1980s and early 1990s exacted a more profound military commitment to the rule of law, respect for democratic institutions, and overall curtailment of their habitual interference in the internal political process of these societies. Ultimately, the military appeared to be a diminished player relative to yesteryears. The end of military rule, political repression, and all types of human rights abuses in South America promoted the people’s visceral repulsion against the military institution and personnel. Thus, the decade from the mid-1980s to the mid-1990s marked a watershed in the history of the military institution in South America because the outcry of the people against military rule prompted the stigma of the armed forces and personnel for atrocities and abuses they committed for over more than two decades. Consequently, the people’s attitude caused a drastic reduction in the military’s popularity, legitimacy, and political prestige, causing the strengthening in relative terms of civil society and other civic institutions. Notwithstanding the military’s reduced political protagonism and influence in South America’s internal and external affairs after 1995, the avoidance of force escalation, war-fighting, and their adherence to peaceful resolution of bilateral militarized disputes prevail today. It is practical to note that the military remains the region’s most influential political institution. Nonetheless, they currently appear to conform to the region’s democratic reality and the rule of law while preserving the long-evolving generational military mode or sort of strategic culture favoring the avoidance of force escalation and, thus, major war. These outcomes endured despite the changing systemic and regional structural conditions. Consequently, the post-1995 historical juncture calls for adopting the logic of strategic culture to explicate the puzzling persistence and continuation of the war-avoidance policy and the extension of the long peace in South America to this day. In sum, domestic military protagonism and institutional influence and strength decreased in absolute— not relative—terms by the beginning of the 2000s. However, the aversion to waging intraregional wars and their inclination to negotiate militarized crises endure as vibrant policies transmitted by a distinct regional culture of peaceful strategic coexistence. Two cases of successfully negotiated bilateral militarized conflicts in the twenty-first century demonstrate the validity of the extended version of the waravoidance policy upon the return of democracy to South America. In other words, the policy endures despite the systemic structural changes in the early 2000s and the new regional political environment. First, Colombia’s March 1, 2008 incursion into Northern Ecuador in “hot pursuit” of FARC guerrillas and one of its two top commanders is, to this day, the most dangerous militarized crisis in the post-1995 period.30 Upon intersecting a satellite phone call from President Hugo Chávez to the FARC commander, Raúl Reyes, on February 27, the Colombian military used the link to track Reyes to a location in Colombia proximate to the Ecuadorian

Militaries as Influencers and Gatekeepers 145 border.31 The discovery triggered Colombian troop movements from Cali to the border region on February 29 as intelligence reports indicated that Raúl Reyes was due to stay that night near Angostura, Ecuador.32 The following day, the Colombian Air Force conducted two air raids against the FARC guerrilla encampment. As the guerrilla group fled into Ecuadorian territory after the first attack, the second was on Ecuadorian territory in the vicinity of Santa Rosa de Yanamaru. This aerial attack occurred less than 2 km (1.1 miles) inside Ecuador. The air raids and the subsequent land attack by Colombian Special Forces killed Raúl Reyes and 20 FARC militants, including four Mexicans and one Ecuadorean.33 The Colombian incursion into Ecuador and the death toll prompted Ecuador and Venezuela to mobilize their armed forces near the border and break diplomatic relations with Colombia. Also, Presidents Rafael Correa of Ecuador and Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, close political allies, engaged in saber-rattling and utter vilification of Colombian President Álvaro Uribe and his Minister of Defense, Juan Manuel Santos. Beyond these and the intense diplomatic tension between the three countries, negotiations began in earnest, and the military tensions subsided by March 7, 2008. On March 5, the Colombian President affirmed his commitment to maintaining regional peace by avoiding war. Thus, at the Rio Group summit held in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, on March 7, 2008, the Presidents of Colombia, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Venezuela shook hands publicly and, in a gesture of goodwill, pledged to end military threats and diplomatic recriminations. In this fashion, war was again averted in South America by avoiding force escalation and war. Venezuela’s general military mobilization to the boundary-crossing with Colombia in 2019 and the ensuing humanitarian and diplomatic crises constitute the second militarized crisis in the new millennium. Venezuela’s precarious economic and sociopolitical conditions prompted thousands of its citizens to rush to the border crossing and towns seeking food, medicine, essential consumer items, and shelter. These events, coupled with a mass exodus, the humanitarian crisis, and the chaos at the border crossing, prompted the Colombian National Police to reinforce its presence at the site, leading the Venezuelan leadership to conclude that Colombia planned to promote and support its overthrow through civil unrest.34 The Venezuela humanitarian crisis captured worldwide attention, causing a global response to collect and deliver basic staples to Venezuelans inside the country and at the Colombian-Venezuela border, causing the massive movements of these goods to Venezuela at the Brazilian and Colombian border crossings. However, President Nicolás Maduro and his inner circle, including his Cuban Pretorian Guards, concluded that Colombia, the United States, and their global allies were hatching the overthrow of the Bolivarian regime by inciting widespread strife, chaos, and a humanitarian crisis.35 Consequently, the Venezuelan President and his cronies decided to militarize the crisis, increasing the military presence at the border with Colombia by deploying a large contingency of Venezuela’s battle-ready regular army and multiple units of the militarized Bolivarian National Guard. The result of the military movements was a protracted standoff at the border where Colombia’s National Police, trying simultaneously to keep order among the Venezuelan refugees and protect the convoys with humanitarian aid destined for

146  Félix E. Martín Venezuela, faced Venezuela’s military and militarized Bolivarian National Guard about 300 meters apart. Also, the Maduro government repelled with force multiple attempts by international organizers to move trucks with humanitarian aid across the international bridge separating Colombia and Venezuela. On the Venezuelan side of the border, the militarized Bolivarian National Guard fought the mob, protesting and engaging in acts of civil disobedience against the Maduro regime. These clashes caused casualties and many injuries to hundreds of Venezuelan civilians.36 The 2019 bilateral crisis did not escalate into open warfare between the two adjacent countries. Nevertheless, Colombia and Venezuela broke diplomatic relations and maintained tense relations until President Gustavo Petro took office in Colombia in August 2022. One of his first acts as President of Colombia was to reopen the border with Venezuela and work to restore diplomatic relations between the two neighbors. Thus, the two Presidents reestablished diplomatic relations on August 28, 2022.37 The restoration of bilateral relations ended three years of military and diplomatic crises that brought Colombia and Venezuela to the brink of a military confrontation. The conflict caused civilian riots on the Venezuela side, heavy material losses, and a bitter political polarization affecting the entire region.38 That none of the two cases discussed above escalated into open warfare and the long South American inter-state peace prevailed is due greatly to the waravoidance doctrine. This policy began in the post–Chaco War period, continued to evolve up to the return of democracy to South America in the late-1980s, and is now a traditional and profoundly ingrained policy posture in the collective psyche and strategic cultural outlook of younger generations of South American decisionand policy-makers. These developments owe their theoretical underpinnings to the logic of the militarist peace thesis and the adoption and extension of the strategic culture framework to the study and analysis of South America’s security environment and attendant war-aversion policy. The War-Avoidance and the Rediscovery of Strategic Culture The objective of this chapter was to analyze how, why, and to what extent the regional war-avoidance policy emerged, advanced, and endured the test of time despite the prevalence of permissive structural, systemic and regional conditions for the outbreak of major intraregional wars. Ultimately, as the chapter maintains, the success and endurance of the policy secured the continuation of the long South American peace to this day. Thus, for the purpose of deriving meaningful theoretical generalizations from this long-evolving historical development instead of simply treating it as a sui generis longitudinal phenomenon with an ad hoc argument, the chapter utilized the militarist peace thesis, its attendant notion of the external-peace-and-internal-violence paradox, and the strategic culture framework to substantiate the theoretical importance and underpinnings of the puzzling case at hand. This final section attempts to accomplish two tasks. First, it generally discusses some—not all—empirical findings and how these fit and suggest the strategic culture framework. In other words, strategic culture is a valuable concept and theory to elucidate the case. Second, it discusses generally how the endurance of

Militaries as Influencers and Gatekeepers 147 the war-avoidance policy and peculiarity of the long South American peace enriches and expands the abstract notion and theory of strategic culture. Put differently, the course of the discussion reverses direction and discusses how the policy case and its exegesis benefit and enhance the strategic culture framework. The analysis revealed several provocative historical findings, such as, for example, the challenge to the democratic peace theory. Except for the 1978 Beagle Channel dispute between Argentina and Chile, when military regimes ruled both countries, the Chaco War and all other militarized disputes from 1935 up to the time of this writing occurred at times when the dyadic belligerents were functioning democracies. Also, the chapter documented that the military endured the brunt and suffering of all dyadic militarized conflicts. Ultimately this caused the institution to sustain the political and reputational costs of the fallout. Their experiences and associated learning prompted the military to be more cautious about being dragged into armed conflict due to warmongering by civilian administrations. This result was an integral element in promoting the inception and evolution of the waravoidance doctrine. Notwithstanding multiple interesting empirical findings beyond those briefly discussed above, two fundamental observations and theoretical conclusions are central to this chapter. First, as democracy returned to South America in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the validity of the militarist peace thesis ceased to be the powerful explanation it once was up to 1995. Albeit remaining an imposing and formidable institution in South America’s internal and external political affairs, the region’s military experienced the diminishment of their traditional and overpowering political influence in absolute terms. This outcome suggested strategic culture as a helpful theoretical alternative for the reasons discussed in detail above to explicate the endurance of the war-avoidance policy and the continuation of the long peace beyond the military’s reduced influence and activism in the post-1995 period. Second, the International Relations discipline has yet to use the strategic culture theory to elucidate the peculiar absence of major wars in South America for nearly nine decades. However, its closer examination in this chapter reveals that many of the theoretical attributes upon which the militarist peace reasoning rests are in common with the building components of strategic culture. This aspect is a fundamental rediscovery of strategic culture to illuminate the specific topic of this chapter and several others in various policy domains in countries in the Global South. This finding is a highly useful extension of the theory. It demonstrates its capacity to travel vertically below great powers relations and horizontally across multiple layers of policy domains within all state actors that continue despite changing systemic structural conditions. The strategic culture perspective helps elucidate the endurance of the waravoidance policy and the prolongation of the long peace in South America amid changing structural (systemic and regional) conditions. Nonetheless, this policy and its internal dynamics enrich and expand strategic culture by demonstrating its important application to policy domains and their endurance beyond nuclear weapons strategy and great powers politics. First, the case demonstrates how the

148  Félix E. Martín agents’ socialization may evolve not only from national-based experiences but also from institutional-specific learning processes and international-driven operational, educational, and ideological forces. Second, unlike the original postulation and objective of the theory, the analysis of this chapter demonstrates the broader possibilities and applicability to the peculiar situation prevailing in the security policy domain of regions. As the case of South America reveals, the geographical peculiarities and sources of conflicts were mainly geographical and not the result of customary power projection and competition among rivals. Finally, as the analysis evinced, the volume of interactions between regional states, multiple generations of policy- and decision-makers, and various groups of military officers and their ultimate socialization into a supranational institutional identity exposes a denser process. This process is thicker than anticipated by Snyder’s original pronouncement of the concept and theory of strategic culture regarding the Soviet way and the use of nuclear weapons. In other words, reality is complex. In closing, the study and operation of these many intra-regional and cross-national channels avail the possibility of theorizing about the emergence of supranational strategic cultural communities like the South American militaries. Strategic culture may benefit by opening itself up to these other analytical nuances in the Global South and across multiple policy domains. Notes 1 See Grabendorff (1982a; 1982b), Domínguez (1984; 2003; 2007), Child (1985; 1988), Little (1987), McIntyre (1995), Holsti (1996), Martín (1998, 2006), Kacowicz (1998), Hurrell (1998a, 1998b), Mares (2001), Centeno (2002), Buzan and Wæver (2003), Oelsner (2005), Miller (2007), and Terradas (2018). 2 The New York Times, “Peru and Ecuador Sign Treaty to End Longstanding Conflict.” October 27, 1998, Section A, p. 3. 3 Freedom of Information Act Electronic Reading Room, “Argentina Declassification Project—The ‘Dirty War’ (1976–1983).” https://www.cia.gov/readingroom/collection/ argentina-declassification-project-dirty-war-1976-83. Accessed March 10, 2021. 4 For the background of these cases, this part draws on Martín (2006: 87–97). 5 Goodrich (1942: 433–435); and U.S. Department of State, Bulletin, Vol. VI, February 28, 1942, pp. 195–196. 6 The Christian Science Monitor, January 29, 1981, p. 2; Idem, February 2, 1981, p. 6; The New York Times, January 24, 1981, p. 2; Idem, January 29, 1981, p. 8; Idem, January, 30, p. 6; Idem, January 31, p. 6; Idem, February 1, 1981, p. 3; and Schumacher (1981: 2). 7 The New York Times, February 8, 1981, Section IV, p. 4. 8 Latin America Weekly Report, Friday, February 6, 1981, pp. 1–2. 9 The New York Times, Saturday, January 28, 1995, p. 2; and El Tiempo, Santa Fe de Bogotá, Colombia, Saturday, January 28, 1995, pp. 1, 9–10. 10 The New York Times, Sunday, January 29, 1995, p. 6. 11 Idem., Sunday, February 12, 1995, p. 16; and Aznárez (1995: 3). 12 The New York Times, Thursday, February 9, 1995, p. 6; and Salas (1995: 46–47). 13 Brooke (1995: 6), and El País Internacional, Spain, Monday, February 20, 1995, p. 3. 14 See also El Universal Caracas, Venezuela, Wednesday, July 31, 1991, p. 3. 15 Caviedes (1984: 155–156); Child (1985: 80–81), and The New York Times, Sunday, January 15, 1978, p. 9.

Militaries as Influencers and Gatekeepers 149 16 Idem., Thursday, January 19, 1978, p. 2. 17 Juan de Onís, “Argentina Rejects Ruling on 3 Islands,” The New York Times, Thursday, January 26, 1978, p. 6. 18 The New York Times, Supplementary Material, August 29, 1978, p. 118. 19 Idem., Supplementary Material, September 27, 1978, p. 57; Idem., Supplementary Material, October 17, 1978, p. 39; and Idem. Supplementary Material, October 25, 1978, p. 65. 20 Idem., Supplementary Material, November 3, 1978, p. 26. 21 A final treaty ending the Beagle Channel dispute between Argentina and Chile was signed in the Vatican on November 29, 1984. See Vio Valdivieso (1984). 22 For a formulation explaining why the military may be more averse than civilians to crisis and war, see Huntington (1985: 68–70). 23 The discussion of these four points is based on the original and extended analysis of the evolution of the socialization process among the military in Martín (2006: 169–176). 24 For a formulation of the notion of military professionalization, see Huntington (1985: 7). For a discussion of the distinction between old and new military professionalism in Latin America, see Stepan (1977: 47–65). 25 For two comprehensive analyses of U.S.–Latin American relations and regional socioeconomic and political events at the end and immediately after World War II, see Bethell and Roxborough (1992: 1–32) and Rock (1994: 15–40). 26 On the 1948 Costa Rican Civil War and the decision to disband permanently the armed forces, see Bell (1971) and Urcuyo (1990: esp. 238–242). 27 For a sample of works that have discussed the impact of the Cuban revolution on the military mind and the redefinition of the armed forces role in Latin America, see North (1966), Barber and Ronning (1966), and O’Donnell (1973: 72–73). 28 These points are summarized from O’Donnell (1986: 104–105). 29 For a detailed discussion of these forms of cooperation among the military regimes in the Southern Cone in the mid-1970s, see Dabat (1983: 82, 182). 30 For an analysis of whether this operation was a hot pursuit of FARC guerrillas into Ecuador or a violation of international law, see Luz Estella Nagle, “Colombia's Incursion into Ecuadorian Territory: Justified Hot Pursuit or Pugnacious Error?” Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=1105393; http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1105393 or at https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1105393. Retrieved January 20, 2023. 31 As reported Libertad Digital, March 5, 2008, at https://www.libertaddigital.com/ mundo/una-llamada-de-chavez-a-raul-reyes-permitio-localizar-el-campamentofarc-1276325132/. Retrieved September 18, 2023. 32 Gloria Inés Árias, “Desde el Viernes empezó a desembarcar tropa para operativo en la frontera,” El Tiempo, Bogotá, Colombia, March, 2, 2008. Retrieved January 19, 2023. 33 “Ecuador ‘Concerned’ at Raid Death,” BBC News. March 25, 2008. Archived from the original on April 16, 2008. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7312192.stm. Retrieved January 19, 2023. 34 “As Venezuela Aid Standoff Turns Deadly, Maduro Severs Ties with Colombia,” The New York Times, February 23, 2019. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/23/world/americas/venezuela-aid-live.html. Retrieved January 19, 2023. 35 Ari Shapiro, “Thousands Gather Along the Border in Standoff Between Colombia And Venezuela,” NPR All Things Considered Radio Program, February 22, 2019. https:// www.npr.org/2019/02/22/697152960/thousands-gather-along-the-border-in-standoffbetween-colombia-and-venezuela. Retrieved January 20, 2023. 36 International Crisis Group, “Disorder on the Border: Keeping the Peace between Colombia and Venezuela,” Report No. 84, Latin American and Caribbean, December 14, 2020. https://www.crisisgroup.org/latin-america-caribbean/andes/colombia/84-disorderborder-keeping-peace-between-colombia-and-venezuela. Retrieved January 20, 2023.

150  Félix E. Martín 37 Stefano Pozzebon, “Colombia and Venezuela reestablish diplomatic relations,” CNN, August 29, 2022. https://www.cnn.com/2022/08/29/americas/colombia-and-venezuelareestablish-diplomatic-relations-intl-latam/index.html. Retrieved January 19, 2023. 38 International Crisis Group, “Ties without Strings? Rebuilding Relations between Colombia and Venezuela,” Report No. 97, Latin American and Caribbean, December 1, 2022. https://www.crisisgroup.org/latin-america-caribbean/andes/colombiavenezuela/97ties-without-strings-rebuilding-relations-between. Retrieved January 20, 2023.

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152  Félix E. Martín Krieg, William L. (1986): Ecuadorean–Peruvian Rivalry in the Upper Amazon. Enlarged to include the Paquisha Incident of 1981, 2nd ed. (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of State). Kurmanaev, Anatoly; Mónica Machicao and Ernesto Londoño (2019): “Military Calls on President to Step Down After Election Dispute in Bolivia,” The New York Times, November 13, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/10/world/americas/bolivia-election-evo-morales.html. [Accessed March 14, 2021] Lanata, Jorge (2017): “Fuerzas (des) armadas: La debacle del sistema de defensa argentino,” in television program, Periodismo Para Todos. https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=jNWShkJXrro [Accessed March 10, 2021] Leuchars, Chris (2002): To the Bitter End: Paraguay and the War of the Triple Alliance (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press). Lindsley, Lisa (1987): “The Beagle Channel Settlement: Vatican Mediation Resolves a Century-Old Dispute,” Journal of Church and State Vol. 29 No. 3 (Autumn), pp. 435–455. Little, Walter (1987): “International Conflict in Latin America,” International Affairs, Vol. 63, No. 4 (October), pp. 589–601. López-Alves, Fernando (2000): State Formation and Democracy in Latin America, 1810–1900. (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Maier, Georg (1969): “Ecuadorian-Peruvian Boundary Dispute,” American Journal of International Law, Vol. 63 (January), pp. 28–46. Mares, David R. (2001): Violent Peace: Militarized Inter-state Bargaining in Latin America (New York, NY: Columbia University Press). Martín, Félix E. (1998): “The Longer Peace in South America, 1935–1995,” Ph.D. Dissertation, Columbia University. Martín, Félix E. (2006): Militarist Peace in South America: Conditions for War and Peace (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan). McIntyre, David (1995): “The Longest Peace: Why Are There So Few Inter-state Wars in South America?” Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of Chicago. Miller, Benjamin (2007): States, Nations, and the Great Powers: The Sources of Regional War and Peace (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 306–336. Miroff, Nick (2016): “The Staggering Toll of Colombia’s War with FARC Rebels, Explained in Numbers,” The Washington Post, August 24. Nicas, Jack (2022): “Refusing to Accept Defeat, Bolsonaro Backers Call on Military to Intervene,” The New York Times, November 2. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/02/ world/americas/bolsonaro-election-protests.html [Accessed November 6, 2022]. North, Lisa (1966): Civil-Military Relations in Argentina, Chile, and Peru (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). O’Donnell, Guillermo A. (1973): Modernization and Bureaucratic-Authoritarianism: Studies in South American Politics (Berkeley, CA: Institute of International Studies, University of California). O’Donnell, Guillermo A. (1986): “Modernization and Military Coups: Theory, Comparisons, and the Argentine Case,” in Lowenthal and Fitch, eds. Armies and Politics in Latin America. New York, NY: Holmes and Meier). Oelsner, Andrea (2005): International Relations in Latin America: Peace and Security in the Southern Cone (London: Routledge). Petras, James (1986): “The Redemocratization Process,” Contemporary Marxism, No. 14, pp. 1–15. Quesada, Juan D. (2021a): “El presidente de Colombia saca los militares a la calle para contener las protestas contra la reforma tributaria,” El País, May 1. https://elpais.com/internacional/2021-05-02/duque-saca-los-militares-a-la-calle-para-contener-las-protestascontra-la-reforma-tributaria.html?rel=mas. [Accessed May 2, 2021].

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6

The Strategic Culture of Prohibition and the Puzzling Continuity of Drug Policies in South America Nicolas A. Beckmann

Introduction In June 1971, U.S. President Richard M. Nixon identified drug abuse as the public enemy number one and famously declared a “war on drugs.” Almost five decades later, it is evident that the “war on drugs,” associated with a prohibitionist and security-heavy approach to drug policy, constitutes a colossal failure. This failure is tangible in at least five dimensions: First, as highlighted by the most recent World Drug Report, the illicit drugs industry is as vibrant and prosperous as ever before, supplying consumers around the globe with a multiplicity of narcotic and psychotropic substances (UNODC 2023). Second, the militarized campaigns against the criminal organizations that administer the drug trade have created hundreds of thousands of victims worldwide, causing far more deaths and pain than drug use itself. Third, in many parts of the world, drug traffickers present a major challenge to effective democratic governance. Most importantly, their control of urban and rural territories, as well as their power to corrupt public institutions undermines the capacity of many states to govern their territories. Fourth, the criminalization and penalization of all types of drug-related activities have generated overpopulated prisons, which are often used by criminal groups to recruit members, thereby aggravating the problem of organized crime (Lessing 2010). Fifth, from a public health perspective, prohibitionist drug laws prevent effective treatment options, exacerbate the spread of dangerous diseases like HIV, and impede quality controls and market oversight mechanisms on how drugs are composed, marketed, and sold. While the “war on drugs” constitutes a world-wide phenomenon, no other region has felt its negative consequences more than Latin America. In the 1980s, the United States began supporting and financing large-scale military campaigns in Bolivia, Colombia, and Peru, as well as Central America. These campaigns sought to dismantle or diminish the size of the illicit drugs industry by combating drug cartels, eradicating illicit coca crops, destroying clandestine cocaine production facilities, and interdicting drugs in transit. In the 1990s, the crackdown on the two largest trafficking organizations, the Medellín and Cali cartels, sparked long-lasting confrontations between the cartels and the Colombian Government, which fueled record homicide rates of up to 84.2 killings per 100,000 habitants (Knoema 2020). After the defeat of the most influential Colombian drug-trafficking DOI: 10.4324/9781003142508-9

156  Nicolas A. Beckmann organizations, Mexico’s cartels took over the control of the lucrative U.S. market. Thereafter, in 2006, the Mexican government started a large-scale military campaign against its biggest cartels with strikingly similar results. Since President Calderón (2006–2012) started the military crackdown on the drug trade, the number of total homicides per year has risen from 8,867 (in 2007) to 36,685 (in 2018) (INEG s.f.). Today, Latin America is home to a powerful transnational criminal network, which simultaneously evades, confronts, and corrupts the state (Bailey and Taylor 2009), while controlling large territories ranging from the hills and jungles of Central America to the villas of Buenos Aires. Another serious consequence of the “war on drugs” and drug prohibition has been the marked rise in incarceration rates across the region. From 1992 to 2007, imprisonment in seven key Latin American countries rose on average by more than 100% (Metaal and Youngers 2011). In this context, some countries in the region decided to break with the past by changing their drug policies in significant ways. Argentina (2009), Brazil (2006), Chile (2005), Ecuador (2008), and Mexico (2009) decided to decriminalize the possession of small amounts of marijuana and other drugs, thus joining Colombia, Peru, and Uruguay, where drug consumption had been decriminalized or depenalized for several years.1 The decriminalization of drug use has a double effect: low-level drug offenders do not end up in jail, while the police can focus on more serious criminal activities. Colombia (2015), Chile (2015), and Uruguay (2013) went a step further, legalizing the self-cultivation of marijuana plants for private use.2 This instrument not only benefits users by providing them with a legal mechanism to access unadulterated marijuana, but also takes away profits from criminal organizations and strips them of the possibility of using the marijuana market to promote more harmful substances. The most ambitious project in this regard is Uruguay’s state-led regulation of the production, sale, and consumption of recreational marijuana, which aims to take the marijuana market completely out of the hands of criminal groups. Far-reaching policy changes have also taken place in Bolivia. Even though the country upholds one of the most punitive laws regarding the trafficking and consumption of illegal drugs, the government of Evo Morales (2006–2019), a former coca grower himself, installed a new system of “social control” to regulate coca production. In Bolivia, where the coca leaf is considered sacred and has been consumed by the local population for millennia, coca farmers were subject to violent eradication campaigns, irrespective of whether they sold their leaves to illicit groups or not. Under the new system, registered farmers are allowed to cultivate an area of 1,600 square meters with coca and are bound to report to the authorities if other farmers exceed this amount. This approach has not only provided Bolivian farmers with a legal mechanism to produce coca for the domestic market, but also led to an overall reduction in coca production (Grisaffi 2016).3 The increasing trend toward decriminalization and state regulation, however, is not a uniform regional development. In 2005 and 2010, for instance, Venezuela’s chavista government issued two new laws, each of which widened the scope of drug-related activities to be punished and increased the penalties for drug-related offenses.4 Another group of countries, including Paraguay and most of Central

Prohibition and the Puzzling Continuity of Drug Policies 157 America and the Caribbean, has not carried out any significant changes to their drug policies, staying firmly within a prohibitionist framework. Even more astonishingly, Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru, which had started to decriminalize or depenalize certain drug-related activities or showed signs of moving in that direction, recently decided to return to a more prohibitionist approach. Given the overwhelming evidence showing that the prohibitionist approach has failed to reduce drug consumption, while fostering the growth of a powerful criminal industry that undermines the power of the state, the persistence of these policies is counterintuitive and in need of an explanation. The persistence of the prohibitionist approach is particularly puzzling in South America, where U.S. influence, pressure, and security interventions in the recent decades have become less powerful, thereby providing governments with unprecedented levels of autonomy in designing and implementing different drug policies. In this general context, the present chapter utilizes the concept of strategic culture to explain why so many states have remained within a prohibitionist framework despite an international context that has become more favorable to the implementation of changes. Moreover, this chapter presents South America as the host of a region-wide strategic culture of prohibition, which has internalized the goal of undermining drug use at all costs, even though the means to accomplish this goal do more harm than good. This strategic culture of prohibition is deeply engrained in the governmental institutions that participate in defining and implementing the states’ security objectives, such as the military, the police force, the legislative and judicial branches of government, and the ministries of the interior. These “gatekeepers” of a country’s strategic culture not only exert their influence in defining policy choices but also dominate national discourses on drugs and public security. Therefore, state agents that want to change their country’s prohibitionist drug policies face substantial institutional obstacles, which tend to slow down, undermine, and revert initiatives for change. To corroborate these claims, the chapter proceeds in four steps: First, it underlines the importance of analyzing the drug policy domain through a strategic and cultural lens. Second, it narrates how a strategic culture of prohibition developed in South America since the 1970s. Although the analysis highlights the pressure of the U.S. Government, its embassies, and the Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA), this does not mean that prohibition was simply imposed without domestic acceptance. Often state-level actors have been pushing for tighter drug laws independently or utilized U.S. resources to further their cause. In many ways, the spread and internalization of prohibitionist goals and practices across South America is the result of dynamic exchanges between international and domestic developments whose analysis goes beyond the scope of this chapter. However, it is clear that without the U.S.-led “war on drugs,” drug control policies in South America would look very different today. Third, the chapter outlines the recent contestation of prohibition and the growing prominence of harm reduction as an alternative policy framework. It shows that élite discourses on drugs have changed significantly in recent years, which has enabled and incentivized the above-stated policy changes. Fourth, the chapter

158  Nicolas A. Beckmann highlights the importance of strategic cultures in explaining the persistence of prohibition today by drawing on recent developments from Argentina, Ecuador, and Peru. These cases were selected because each of them showed some initiatives to change their drug policies toward harm reduction, but were eventually slowed down, undermined, and reverted by prohibitionist policy influencers in each country. The analysis of these three case studies helps to understand why prohibition remains the dominant approach to drug policy in the region despite a much more favorable international environment and strong issue-arena incentives for change or innovation. Before elaborating these points in greater detail, the following section provides a brief explanation of why it is important to study drug policy from a strategic and cultural perspective. Merging Drugs, Strategy, and Culture As outlined in the introduction, the policy domain of this chapter encompasses the diverse challenges associated with illicit psychoactive substances, more commonly known as drugs. Key concerns of drug policy are the health and social challenges related to drug consumption. The use of psychoactive substances for medical, recreational, and mood-altering experiences has been a constant feature of human life in both tribal and modern societies. Yet, psychoactive substances, both licit and illicit, present risks and are potentially harmful. Most researchers distinguish between two types of harms and risks. First, drugs can do serious damage to bodies and minds. In the worst case, their intake can lead to overdose and addiction. Second, drugs have the potential to generate foolish, inept, violent, and self-destructive behaviors. Kleiman, Caulkins, and Hawken (2011) call this behavioral toxicity. The extent of these risks and harms not only depends on the chemical composition of the drug itself but is linked to its “dose” (how much is taken it), the “route of administration” (oral, inhaled, or injected), whether or not the drug is combined with other drugs, the “set” (the characteristics of the drug user, including the psychological makeup, previous experiences, expectations, and intentions), and the “setting” (the entire social surround) (ibid.). While for most of human history, the rules and regulations regarding drug use were strongly embedded in local cultures and traditions, throughout the twentieth century the United States led a coalition of countries, which created the International Drugs Control Regime (IDCR).5 According to the IDCR’s principles and standards, any non-medical and non-scientific use of drugs is illegal. Therefore, defenders of this approach consider any non-medical and non-scientific use of illicit psychoactive substances as “abuse.” However, the present chapter holds the view that human beings constantly engage in potentially harmful activities that are not described in such harsh terms (e.g., the excessive consumption of fat or sugar). Therefore, it utilizes the term “abuse” only in reference to the thinking of actors who are opposed to recreational drug consumption. In other instances, the chapter chooses more neutral language such as “use” or “consumption,” leaving it up to the reader to decide whether, or under what circumstances, the intake of drugs constitutes “abuse.”

Prohibition and the Puzzling Continuity of Drug Policies 159 In any case, the high demand for psychoactive substances such as marihuana, cocaine, amphetamines, and heroin, combined with their illegality, allows criminal industries to prosper. This has three important consequences. First, as clandestine markets lack of legal mechanisms to resolve disputes, criminal organizations rely on the use of force to impose their will, for example when they compete with other groups over markets and routes, or when the state seeks to interrupt their operations (Bailey and Taylor 2009; Brombacher 2012). Second, to avoid detection when producing, moving, and selling illicit drugs, or criminal prosecution, traffickers establish corrupt relationships with state officials or, in some cases, entire state agencies. Third, as drug traffickers prefer to operate in an environment of protection and impunity, whenever possible, they establish non-state authority structures over rural and urban territories, which makes it harder for state agencies to intervene in these areas. Because of these inherent consequences of the drugs’ illegality, the drug policy domain goes far beyond the field of public health and blends with other important policy areas such as security, law enforcement, and effective democratic governance. Why then do we need to analyze the drug policy field through a strategic lens? The answer lies in the competitive interactions between states and the criminal groups that administer the drug trade. Similar to the rest of this volume, strategy is defined here as the process through which actors pursue their interests in a competitive environment. Both types of actors mentioned above pursue goals that are in sharp conflict with one another. While criminal groups want to make as much profit as possible by selling an illegal and harmful product, most states seek to protect their citizens from the potential dangers of consuming illicit narcotics. Moreover, while criminal groups depend on the use of violence to expand or protect their business from competitors or state persecution, states want to maintain a monopoly on the use of force. Ultimately, while criminal groups are controlling territories and corrupting state agencies to carry out their illegal operations, states seek to exercise high levels of control over their territories and institutions.6 Within this context of opposing interests, the state faces a dilemma. It could easily weaken the influence of criminal groups, by legalizing the production, sale, and consumption of mood-altering drugs. The well-known story of Al Capone and alcohol prohibition in the United States exemplifies this point. However, this would allow the adult population easier access to potentially harmful substances. In between the two extremes of full-blown prohibition and the legalization of all drugs, the policy framework of harm reduction provides a possible alternative, or via media (see below). As shown in Figure 6.1, prohibition, legalization, and harm reduction constitute three distinct strategic frameworks available to the state, which

Figure 6.1  The Drug Policy Continuum

160  Nicolas A. Beckmann differ considerably in their goals and, even more so, in the means they assign to achieve particular objectives. Prohibition:

The production, sale, and consumption of all mood-altering drug should be prohibited and punishable, except for medical and scientific purposes Legalization: The production, sale, and recreational consumption of all mood-altering drugs should be completely legal Harm reduction: The consumption of all mood-altering drugs should be decriminalized or completely depenalized; drug policy should prioritize the provision of public health services over law enforcement; it should also consider gradual and tightly regulated legalization as a viable policy option

For prohibitionists, limiting and punishing all drug-related activities, except for medical and scientific purposes, should be at the heart of any drug policy. For many of them, the dangers of drug use go far beyond the chemical harms they can inflict. In fact, most prohibitionists view drug consumption as the root cause of other “social ills,” such as crime, poverty, moral degradation, and disobedient lifestyles. Thus, prohibitionists often proclaim to defend both vulnerable individuals as well as societies or nations against the dangers of drug use. Rodrigues and Labate (2016) and Castro (2016) have also made a case that prohibition is, in its essence, a policy of social control, directed against disadvantaged groups such as immigrants and people of color. Whatever the motive, prohibitionists advocate the constant the persecution, penalization, and repression of all drug-related activities, including their production, transportation, commerce, and consumption, even if this leads to more violence and political corruption. For legalizers, drug consumption is primarily an issue of individual freedom in which the state should not interfere. Whether or not drugs are harmful is a secondary issue and each individual should be able to decide for oneself if he or she is willing to take the risk. Moreover, they argue that legalizing drugs is the most effective way to reduce the pernicious effects of organized crime, such as violence and corruption, and would allow the state to spend its limited resources on investigating more serious crimes, like the trafficking of human beings, forced labor, organs, and weapons. Many of them have also pointed out the benefits of taxing drug sales, stressing that tax revenues could be invested in education and social policies. Ultimately, legalization would enable the implementation of tight quality control standards, similar to those in food, medicine, and alcohol industries. One of the biggest problems associated with drug use is that most consumers have no way of verifying how their drugs are composed and dosed, which can lead to accidents and overdose. Thus, from the perspective of this framework drug legalization could actually improve public health even if more drugs are consumed. As mentioned above, harm reduction constitutes a middle position on the drug policy spectrum. Harm reductionists are highly concerned about the harms and risks associated with drug use, but do not see prohibition as a viable option. They consider drug use as an endemic feature of human life that cannot be solved by

Prohibition and the Puzzling Continuity of Drug Policies 161 imposing limitations and penalties on their consumers. Furthermore, in their view prohibition stigmatizes drug users and draws them away from health and psychological services, which tends to aggravate health and social issues. For them, a more reasonable alternative is to reduce the drugs’ most dangerous effects through pragmatic and science-based interventions. These include providing safe spaces, as well as health and psychological services, for drugs users, including addiction treatment; distributing clean syringes; enabling drug consumers to check the content of substances bought in black markets by testing their chemical compositions; and raising awareness when particularly harmful drugs enter clandestine markets. None of these interventions are possible when drug use is prohibited and penalized. Therefore, within this framework, drug use should be decriminalized or even better not be subject to any form of penalization. Whether or not drugs should be legally available is a contested issue within this approach. Most harm reductionists are not opposed to legalization per se but are concerned about the possible implications of making all drugs legally available. Thus, legalization should be gradual (starting, e.g., with marihuana), accompanied by constant research about its effects, and take place within a framework of tight regulations. Although the framework of harm reduction is strongly tied to drug consumption, its principles can also be applied to state policies against criminal groups. Lessing (2011), for example, argues that states should concentrate their resources on targeting primarily the most violent groups. Although this strategy would imply tolerating a certain level of criminal activity, it generates strong incentives for all criminal actors to refrain from the excessive use of force. Brombacher (2010) suggests reorienting supply side policies on drugs in transit rather than seeking to eradicate illicit crops. While the former has the potential to make drugs more expensive, eradicating coca crops has virtually no effect on drug prices, while alienating and destroying the livelihood of poor rural communities. Although none of these interventions would be sufficient to eliminate drug production and criminal industries as such, they could undermine some their most harmful tendencies (violence and low-priced drugs). In principle, any of the three frameworks outlined above can become a strategic culture if their objectives, practices and standards become internalized by state agents and drug policy service providers. Nevertheless, in South America only prohibition can be considered a strategic culture. Uruguay, where harm reduction principles have informed drug policies over the past years, constitutes an outlier to the region-wide strategic culture of prohibition. Yet, it is still too early to determine whether or not harm reduction will develop into a fully fledged strategic culture on its own that could resist a potential push or return to more prohibitionist practices in that country. By combining the concept of “strategy” with the notion of “culture,” this chapter is able to address the puzzle of why states continue to hold on to failed drug policy models (prohibition) despite an international context that presents fewer restrictions than ever before to experiment with new approaches (e.g., harm reduction). While in the past the adherence to this framework could be explained by the constant U.S. influence, pressure, and the provision of vast resources to its “drug

162  Nicolas A. Beckmann war” allies, since the early 2000s this explanation has lost its power (see below). Part of the answer lies in the fact that once the cognitive frameworks and behavioral tendencies embedded in a strategic framework become internalized within state institutions, they are much harder to change. The prohibitionist actors analyzed in this chapter, such as the police, the armed forces, the ministry of the interior and the judicial branch of the government, are pillars of each state’s bureaucracy and, therefore, have access to significant resources to train and indoctrinate new members of their organizations. However, policy influencers attached to a strategic culture, such as prohibition, can also exert their weight as experts and stakeholders when policy choices are defined. Ultimately, high-level officials from the actors mentioned above dominate national discourses on drugs and public security and thereby influence how the societies in general and key decision-makers think about drugs. While the last section of this chapter highlights how the agents of a prohibitionist strategic culture undermined, slowed down, and reversed efforts to advance harm reduction in the cases of Ecuador, Argentina and Peru, the following paragraphs sketch out how a prohibitionist strategic culture took hold across South America since the 1970s. Moreover, it illustrates how the policy framework of prohibition has become increasingly contested in recent years. Cultivating Prohibition in South America

Until the early 1970s, South America’s orientation in the area of drug policy was far from set in stone. On the one hand, all states had joined, in one way or another, the IDCR, and thus formally prohibited various activities related to the production, transportation, sale, and consumption of illicit drugs, except for medical and scientific purposes. On the other, there were serious doubts about their willingness or capacity to implement the instructions of the Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs from 1961 (McAllister 2000). In other words, although drug prohibition was the official state policy, there was not yet a strategic culture as drug use was a minor problem and most government agencies did not care. This changed, however, in the 1970s. Due to the leadership of the United States and, to a lesser extent, Argentina, a region-wide prohibitionist strategic culture started to take shape. Although the United States had been involved in coordinating international drug control efforts since the early twentieth century, in the 1970s it started pushing its Southern neighbors more forcefully to adapt prohibitionist and security-heavy policies. After President Nixon’s declaration of the “war on drugs” in 1971, the U.S. Government created the DEA, which since then coordinated national and international drug control efforts. Soon the DEA began sending its representatives across the Western Hemisphere to exert pressure on local governments. Furthermore, DEA agents identified local allies within each state who could help them advance their prohibitionist policy agenda. This agenda not only included tighter controls on illicit drug production and trafficking, but also a decisive stand against any kind of narcotics use. Common tools of the DEA were holding regular meetings with top government officials, the provision of training, technology and financial support to police units, customs and border patrols, the ministry of the interior, the

Prohibition and the Puzzling Continuity of Drug Policies 163 judiciary, and the armed forces. This process of altering the objectives, practices and cognitive frameworks of local actors marks the origin of prohibition as a strategic culture. Moreover, it created a more favorable context to advance prohibition and “drug-war” policies. Very soon, the DEA’s initiatives started showing signs of progress. As highlighted by the U.S. ambassador to Uruguay: “Largely through U.S. efforts there has been created a public and official awareness of the drug problem which has resulted in improved local legislation and enforcement, the assumption by the GOU of increased international obligations and positive GOU cooperation which has helped us to interdict international trafficking” (U.S. Embassy in Montevideo 1974). From Quito, Ambassador Brewster stated: “In Ecuador, as a result of greater effort on the part of DEA and a series of high level calls on important GOE officials, there has been a drastic change in the enforcement effort in Ecuador” (U.S. Embassy in Quito 1974). In Peru, U.S. authorities confronted a more difficult scenario. According to the U.S. Embassy in Lima (1974), “Part of the problem is that unofficially the Peruvian government still regards the illicit trafficking in drugs as an [American problem]. Peruvian citizens are [not] using cocaine themselves to any substantial degree. This fact coupled with a smuggling and contraband legacy going back to Buccaneer days is impeding more substantive action programs.” However, after years of lobbying and forging alliances with Peru’s investigative police and the ministry of the interior, the situation started to change. As highlighted by the same embassy: “The Peruvian government and the urban populace recognize increasingly that illicit drug trafficking and drug abuse are real domestic problems for the country” (U.S. Embassy in Lima 1978). South America’s push toward prohibition was not only evidenced by positive evaluations of U.S. diplomats and DEA agents, but also found expression in a series of drug law reforms that took place within the 1970s. During the decade, Chile (1973) and Paraguay (1972) advanced their first drug laws, while Argentina (1974), Bolivia (1972, 1973, and 1976), Brazil (1976), Colombia (1971 and 1974), Ecuador (1974, 1978, and 1979), Peru (1978), and Uruguay (1974) reformed existing legislations. As a general pattern, these laws specified numerous drug-related crimes and defined heavy penalties for these offenses. The lowest penalties for drug trafficking, defined here as the active involvement in the cultivation, production, manufacture, import, expert, commerce, or selling of illegal narcotics, for nearly all of the countries were in the range of six months to five years of prison. The highest legal sanctions for trafficking offenses could be issued in Bolivia, Peru, and, for a brief period, in Ecuador with up to 25 years of prison (D.S. N° 14,203 de 1976; D.L. 22,095 de 1978; D.S. N° 2,636 de 1978). Apart from these legal developments, in the mid-1970s Bolivia began its first campaigns to forcefully eradicate illegal coca, followed by Peru toward the end of the decade. This marked the beginning of a sub-regional strategic culture focused on the eradication of the coca crop, the key organic ingredient of cocaine. Even though the practice of eradicating coca has always been controversial, due to its widespread consumption as a tea or remedy, it enjoys the support of powerful national policy influencers and characterize drug policy in the Andes for decades to come.

164  Nicolas A. Beckmann While it is evident that several domestic agents joined the “drug war” effort in search for the increasingly generous resources provided by the United States, it is also accurate that these resources offered a golden opportunity to train and indoctrinate numerous and diverse state agents, thereby cultivating beliefs, values, and attitudes that viewed drug use as an imminent threat and their prohibition as the only viable and legitimate policy option. This holds true as well for the following decades in which prohibition became even further engrained in the practices of several state actors, such as the military, the police, the judiciary, and the ministry of the interior. In the 1980s, drug control initiatives in the Western Hemisphere changed in two important ways. First, under the leadership of President Reagan (1981–1989), the United States initiated a militarization of the “war on drugs,” by offering military and intelligence assistance to governments from the region as well as employing U.S. troops to combat drug cartels.7 Second, the United States created a unilateral sanctioning mechanism known as the certification process, which was designed to ensure the cooperation of Latin American states in the “war on drugs.”8 This had major repercussions on the design and implementation of drug policies across the region. Throughout the 1980s, Argentina (1989), Bolivia (1988), Chile (1985), Colombia (1986), Paraguay (1988), Peru (1981), and Venezuela (1984) created new legislations on drugs. Many of these laws expanded the types of activities considered to be trafficking offenses, like money laundering or trade with chemical precursors, and increased legal penalties even further. The highest sanctions could be issued in Bolivia, Paraguay and Venezuela, with up to 30 years for aggravated forms of trafficking (Ley Orgánica sobre Sustancias Estupefacientes y Psicotrópicas de 1984; Ley N° 1008 de 1988; Ley N° 1340/88). In the beginning of the 1990s, the United States and its regional partners held two drug policy summits in Cartagena (1990) and San Antonio (1992). The goal of these summits was to coordinate and implement a multilateral strategy to fight and dismantle the major trafficking cartels so that criminal networks would have a harder time in supplying drug markets in the United States. The ambitious objectives of these summits eventually fell apart due to different preferences regarding the role of the armed forces in the fight against the cartels; fears that deeper U.S. involvement would undermine national sovereignty; and a lack of U.S. support for alternative development in the rural sectors that depended on the coca leaf (Bagley 1992). The United States then returned to pressure countries individually to step up their efforts against the drug trade. In doing so, the United States not only relied on negative incentives such as threatening decertification, but it also provided new trade benefits like the Andean Trade Preference Act (ATPA), enacted in 1991, which eliminated tariffs for 5,600 products from Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, and Peru (Office of the United States Trade Representative 2002). Driven by these measures, drug policy initiatives in the Andean region became more militarized and violent. The militarized efforts to contain the drug trade included the fumigation or forceful eradication of coca crops (in Colombia), the interdiction of drug supplies, the destruction of cocaine laboratories, and a large-scale military campaign against the biggest drug cartels at the time, the Medellín and

Prohibition and the Puzzling Continuity of Drug Policies 165 Cali cartels. However, outside the Andean region, some countries started relaxing certain elements of their drug policies. Brazil’s Law 9,714 from 1998 allowed to punish drug consumption with alternative penalties, such as communal services or even the suspension of the penalty under some circumstances. Furthermore, Uruguay’s law 17,016 from 1998 lowered minimal penalties for almost all drug-related crimes (in some cases from six years to 20 months). Hence, toward the end of the 1990s, there was a highly institutionalized strategic approach that dealt with drug-related challenges primarily through punitive means across South America. In the Andean region, this prohibitionist strategic culture had a strong militarized component, most evident in the large-scale campaigns against the major trafficking organizations that were successfully dismantled during the 1990s. Toward the end of the decade, Brazil and Uruguay showed first signs of relaxing prohibition, a trend that continued in the following decades. The Contestation of Prohibition and the Rising Prominence of Harm Reduction

In the 2000s, three separate developments provided South American states with unprecedented levels of autonomy in designing and implementing their drug policies. First, after the 9/11 attacks, the United States shifted its foreign policy focus from fighting drugs to fighting terrorism. Although the United States did not give up its preference for a militarized strategy to combat drug trafficking, the issue ceased to be a top policy priority. Second, the legalization of medical and recreational marijuana in several U.S. states made it harder for prohibitionist voices to undermine more flexible drug policies abroad. Third, the critiques of the “war on drugs” outlined in the introduction, which have been prominent in academic circles and parts of civil society for decades, gained the support of influential élites like public intellectuals or former and incumbent presidents with different ideological inclinations. The first high-profile call for a radical shift in drug policy came from Uruguay, long before the country started debating seriously a possible legalization of recreational marijuana. In the year 2000, the country’s newly elected president Jorge Batlle (2000–2005) issued a statement that called for his regional peers to legalize all drugs. In line with his liberal ideology, his main argument was that drug legalization is the most effective way to eliminate organized crime (Garat 2016). Even though Battle’s liberal approach to drugs never materialized in a policy change, it paved the way for a more open discussion. A second important development was the creation of the Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy (CLSDD by its Spanish acronym), whose membership includes the former presidents Ernesto Zedillo (Mexico, 1994–2000), César Gaviria (Colombia, 1990–1994), Fernando Henrique Cardoso (Brazil, 1995–2002); and the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature Mario Vargas Llosa. In 2009, the Commission released a document titled “Drugs and Democracy: Toward a Paradigm Shift,” which called for an end of the “war on drugs” and proposed a strategy of harm reduction, based on prevention, decriminalization, and health policies (CLSDD 2009). Building on the experience of this commission, in 2011

166  Nicolas A. Beckmann its participants helped to create and joined the more prominent Global Commission on Drug Policy.9 While retired presidents and politicians have been much more outspoken in their criticism of the “war on drugs,” some presidents joined their ranks while in office. These include Otto Pérez Molina from Guatemala (2012–2015), Juan Orlando Hernández from Honduras (2014–), José Mujica from Uruguay (2010–2015), and Juan Manuel Santos from Colombia (2010–2018) (Pérez Molina 2012; El Observador 2013; Business Insider 2014; Presidencia de Colombia 2017). The changing élite discourse on drugs indicates a growing frustration with the policy framework of prohibition, and the emergence of harm reduction as a strong normative and strategic alternative. Together with the changing preferences of the United States, they have created an international environment that has become more favorable to harm reduction policies. While most South American countries have experimented with some kind of drug policy flexibilization in the 2000s, only Uruguay and to a lesser degree Chile and Colombia have made significant steps toward a harm reductionist approach. As outlined above, this chapter claims that the prohibitionist strategic culture that started to emerge in 1970s is crucial to understand the persistence of prohibition in an international context that is more permissive to change than ever before. To uphold this claim, the following section illustrates how agents of the strategic culture of prohibition in Argentina, Ecuador, and Peru have slowed down, undermined, and reverted a harm reductionist approach in their respective countries.10 The section starts with the Ecuadorian case as the move toward harm reduction and the return to prohibition has been more pronounced than in the latter ones. Moreover, both changes occurred under the socialist government of Rafael Correa, which makes the case even more striking. The remainder of the section focuses on the cases of Argentina and Peru, where similar, though less pronounced, patterns were observable. How the Strategic Culture of Prohibition Is Undermining Harm Reduction In January 2008, Ecuador’s newly elected president, Rafael Correa, issued a presidential decree to pardon drug traffickers who had declared guilty, were first time offenders, had been found in possession of no more than two kilograms of drugs, and had completed at least 10% or one year of their sentence (Álvarez Velasco 2014). In his justification, Correa, whose own father was convicted as a drug courier and served a prison sentence in the United States, argued that trafficking organizations were taking advantage of people in precarious economic situations and that the penalties given to people already carrying the burden of misery were not proportional to the offense (El Diario 2008). He added, “It is outrageous that the Ecuadorian law is the same for the capo Rodríguez Orejuela, from the Cali cartel, as for the poor woman, single mother, unemployed, who dared to carry 300 grams of drugs” (El Tiempo 2008). Far into his second term, in September 2015, when addressing his citizens in his regular TV and radio program Enlace Ciudadano, Correa stated the following: “If

Prohibition and the Puzzling Continuity of Drug Policies 167 we want to end drug use among our youth, we will have to put micro traffickers into jail. The rest is pure deception” (Tele Ciudadana 2015: 1h27m46s). In the same program, he clarified: “You can call me authoritarian, arrogant, dictator, whatever you want, but I will not allow our youth to drug itself. I have demanded there to be stronger sanctions for drug traffickers” (ibid.: 1h26m25s). His statements represent a radical change in Ecuadorian drug policy. While for several years it appeared as if Ecuador was moving steadily in the direction of harm reduction, the country’s most recent changes have shifted its legal framework back to a prohibitionist approach. The following paragraphs explain this puzzling reversal. Ecuador’s Journey Back to the Past

Much of Ecuador’s drug policy of the 1990s and early 2000s had been defined by the Psychotropic and Narcotic Substances Law (“Law 108”) from 1990. Said law had a reputation to be one of the most punitive ones in the region, allowing penalties of up to 25 years of prison for repeated trafficking charges. Strikingly, penalties for drug-related offenses (usually a period between 12 and 16 years of prison) were higher or similar to the ones of violent crimes such as murder (8–12 years), rape (12–16 years), terrorism (4–8 years), or kidnapping (3–6 years) (Álvarez Velasco 2014). The law’s repressive elements, however, did not end with the penalties. In fact, law 108 required higher courts to automatically review all drug-related judicial decisions and included sanctions that could be applied if the ruling in favor of a drug-related suspect was not well founded (Edwards 2011). Ecuador’s prohibitionist approach also left its mark on the country’s institutions. “Law 108” created a new government agency responsible for designing and implementing drug policy, the National Council of Narcotic and Psychotropic Substance Control (CONSEP by its Spanish acronym). Moreover, in 1998 a police reform created a new anti-narcotics division, which was composed of no less than 13 units responsible for enforcing the “law 108” (Policía Nacional del Ecuador s.f.). These far-reaching legal, institutional, and operational changes had multiple effects on the country’s criminal justice system. While Ecuador’s prison infrastructure was built for approximately 7,000 inmates, between 1989 and 2007, its prison population rose from 6,978 to 18,000, reaching the highest percentage of prison overcrowding in Latin America (157%). Of all detainees, 34% were charged for drug offenses. In urban areas, the number rose to 45%. This trend is even more pronounced for the female prison population, whose percentage of detainees for drug-related offenses oscillated between 65% and 79% from 1989 to 2004 (Edwards 2011). When the self-proclaimed socialist government of Rafael Correa entered office in 2007, it undertook a series of measures to reverse this trend. Apart from the above-mentioned “drug mule pardon,” in 2008 the country approved a new constitution whose article 364 decriminalized drug consumption and established that addictions are to be treated as an issue of public health. Furthermore, after coming into power with a strong anti-U.S. discourse, the Correa government ended the lease of a U.S. military base in Manta, which had been used for anti-narcotics operations and unilaterally withdrew from the Andean Trade Promotion and Drug

168  Nicolas A. Beckmann Eradication Act, which rewarded anti-drug efforts with preferred market access to the United States. Moreover, CONSEP and the Ministry of Public Health accompanied these shifts with intellectual support for a harm reduction policy. However, the police and the judiciary kept operating and applying the prohibitionist standards of the “law 108.” Often drug users ended up in preventive detention and were penalized as traffickers, thereby contradicting the normative framework established by the constitution (Álvarez Velasco 2014). Ecuadorian lawmakers hoped to resolve this contradiction by designing a new criminal code (Código Orgánico Integral Penal, COIP), which was approved in 2014 and deepened the influence of harm reduction in the country’s legal framework. Article 220 of the new code distinguishes between (1) large-, high-, medium-, and smallscale traffickers; (2) traffickers and growers; (3) drug-related crimes and violent crimes; and (4) users and small-scale traffickers. According to the new law, drug offenders were to be charged according to how much of a particular drug they possessed, with maximum penalties 10–13 years for large-scale trafficking and of 16–19 years for financing and organizing drug production and commercialization. Through these measures, the COIP considered the different ways in which individuals take part in the illicit drugs industry, and adjusted penalties to varying degrees of responsibility. However, parallel to the discussion and implementation of the new criminal code, the police and the media began raising awareness about the spread of criminal groups targeting the domestic drugs markets; the increasing sale and consumption of drugs in the country’s urban centers Quito and Guayaquil, especially among the country’s youth; and the emergence of a new drug called “H,” a mix of heroin and other addictive ingredients (Ortega 2014a). After CONSEP released a study showing that high school students between 12 and 17 years of age had relatively easy access to marijuana within and around their schools, the police began carrying out a series of controversial surprise rants in the country’s educational establishments and clandestine parties for adolescents (Paspuel 2014). Moreover, the police took it upon itself to carry out preventive campaigns about the risks of drug use in Ecuador’s high schools (Ortega 2015). At the end of the year 2014, the police issued a report stating that even though overall crime and homicide rates have gone down, the threat of the drug trade had increased (Ortega 2014b). In May of the following year, reports surfaced that a criminal group in Quito was taking advantage of the new scales in the COIP to avoid arrests by keeping the amounts of drugs they were carrying below the limit allowed for personal consumption or low-scale trafficking. The minister of the interior, José Serrano, reacted immediately by recommending CONSEP to reform the table according to which different amounts drug possession were punished (Ortiz 2015). In the following, a powerful discourse that Ecuador’s lax drug laws were primarily responsible for the rise in micro-trafficking and consumption emerged, even though similar concerns had been expressed long before the new criminal code came into place. The most prominent proponent of this discourse was President Correa himself, who joined the chorus of voices demanding a tighter scale for low-level trafficking offenses.

Prohibition and the Puzzling Continuity of Drug Policies 169 Following the executive’s request, on September 10, 2015 CONSEP presented a new table which reduced the maximum possession for low-level trafficking to 0.1 grams for heroin, 1 gram for cocaine, and 20 grams for marijuana (Redón 2015). Critics of the new scale argued that it became so restrictive that it is effectively punishing drug consumption, thereby violating the 2008 constitution and the 2014 criminal code, both of which propose the opposite (Daugherty 2015). Simultaneously, President Correa asked legislators of his party to change the criminal code by increasing the punishments for low-level trafficking from 2–6 months to 1–3 years, and medium-level trafficking from 1–3 years to 5–7 years. Even though 15 members of the governing party Alianza País abstained the vote out of protest, on October 1, 2015 the proposed changes were incorporated into a new law.11 Moreover, the law created a new Technical Secretary of Drugs, which corresponded directly to the executive, while getting rid of CONSEP, which was controlled by the legislative. The first head of the new agency was a former commander of the police, General Rodrigo Suarez, while the former head of CONSEP, Rodrigo Vélez, an advocate of harm reduction, was dismissed of his functions (Bravo 2015). On top of the changes in the legal and institutional framework, the minister of the interior proclaimed the combat of microtrafficking as the police’s most important goal and ordered 85% of the country’s antinarcotics forces to target micro-trafficking, while only 15% of the personnel ought to investigate large-scale, international trafficking organizations (Melina 2015). The above paragraphs have outlined how Ecuador’s drug policy reform process from 2008 to 2014 was undermined and subverted by policy influencers attached to the strategic culture of prohibition, including high-level members of the police, the judiciary, and the ministry of the interior, as well as leading experts on public security in the country’s media. These actors managed to frame the problem of drug use as an issue of public security and blamed the legal changes for the perceived increase of micro-trafficking. In this increasingly restrictive national context, the President Correa, for many years a leading proponent of harm reduction, changed his position and reverted some of the measures his own government instituted. The popularity of prohibition also continued after the country’s 2017 presidential elections. The new president, Lenín Moreno (2017–2021), highlighted the eradication of micro-trafficking as one of the principal themes of his presidency and asked the Technical Secretary of Drugs to, once again, revise the sentencing scale for drug possession (El Universo 2017). In line with the president, the country’s Sectorial Security Council, headed by the minister of defense, identified micro-trafficking as the country’s biggest security threats, requiring a large-scale effort of the state, including the use of military force (El Comercio 2017). While the alteration between harm reduction and prohibition has been most pronounced in Ecuador, the cases of Argentina and Peru follow a similar pattern. Prohibition’s Powerful Comeback in Argentina

In 2009, Argentina’s Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional to punish the possession of marijuana for personal use. As the ruling did not clarify how much possession was legal, in its aftermath Argentina experienced a vibrant debate

170  Nicolas A. Beckmann about its drug laws, while the government of Cristina Fernández de Kirchner (2007–2015) created the Advisory Committee for the Control of Illicit Narcotics Trafficking, Psychotropic Substances and Complex Crimes. The Committee was headed by the government’s chief of staff, Aníbal Fernández, known as an advocate of harm reduction. Furthermore, in 2011 the Kirchner government appointed another supporter of harm reduction, Rafael Bielsa, as the new head of the Planning Secretariat for the Prevention of Drug Addiction and the Fight Against Drug Trafficking (SEDRONAR by its Spanish acronym). After Bielsa left the government agency to join the private sector, he was replaced by the Juan Carlos Molina, a former Catholic priest, who also supported the decriminalization of drug users. In 2013, when Uruguay’s plans to regulate its marijuana market became more concrete, both Molina and the country’s secretary of public security, Sergio Berni, argued that Argentina deserved a serious debate about doing something similar while underlining that the conventional way of fighting drugs had failed in all parts of the world (La Nación 2013a; 2013b). The country’s minister of public security, María Cecilia Rodríguez (2013–2015), also promoted the legalization of drug use during her time in office (Perfil 2014). In the meanwhile, no less than eight proposals to reform the country’s drug laws were submitted to be discussed by the country’s Congress (Transnational Institute n.d.). However, despite the backing of top government officials and some opposition parties, none of the proposals was approved. One of the reasons for the legislative stalemate was the government’s own failure to address the increasing spread of criminal networks in the country as well as the high levels of drug consumption within Argentina. This context enabled policy influencers attached to the strategic culture of prohibition to frame the issue of drug control as a severe national security threat, thereby creating a context in which discussing drug use as an issue of public health became increasingly difficult. The popularity of the Catholic church and its radical opposition to any discussion about legalizing drug use was another serious obstacle for drug policy reformers. The following paragraphs discuss these points in greater detail. Over the past two decades, Argentina had become an increasingly important location in the global drugs industry. Between 2005 and 2010, the quantity of impounded cocaine in Argentina rose by 638% (Föhrig 2015). Furthermore, in 2013 the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) reported that a third of all confiscated drugs worldwide originated from Argentina. Although UNODC later adjusted the report because the data base was inaccurate, it underlined the country’s role as a major transit hub and exporter of powder cocaine (Telám 2013). The increasing availability of drugs in Argentina had been accompanied by high levels of drug consumption. The most popular illegal drug is marijuana, whose consumers constitute an estimated 9.3% of the adult population (Föhrig 2015). However, according to statistics of the Organization of American States, Argentina’s percentage of cocaine use, an estimated 1.6% of its adult population, is the second highest in the Western Hemisphere (OEA/CICAD 2019). The emergence of paco, a mix of cocaine paste and other substances, in the early 2000s,

Prohibition and the Puzzling Continuity of Drug Policies 171 is another important development. Due to its toxic composition and its ingestion through the lungs, paco is highly addictive and poses direct and immediate health risks to its consumers. The drug often dominates the headlines on drugs, even though its consumption fell from 1% in 2006 to an estimated 0.3% in 2010 (Föhrig 2015). While most of the cocaine transported and consumed in Argentina originates from Bolivia and Peru, Argentine authorities have started to discover clandestine production facilities, transforming cocaine paste into powder cocaine or producing synthetic drugs (ibid.). The increasing activity of criminal groups has been accompanied by multiple cases of corruption and cooptation of state actors, including the police, judges, and local politicians. Simultaneously, the competition between criminal groups over transportation routes and market share has been accompanied by increasing levels of violence and homicides. According to the Ministry of Health, between 2008 and 2014 homicide rates have risen by 36%, from 2,371 to 3,228, which amounted to a homicide rate of 7.6 per 100,000 habitants (still one of the lowest in the region) (Dinatale 2019). The worsening security situation has inspired numerous politicians, security experts, journalists, and even Pope Francis, to warn of a “colombianization” or “mexicanization” of Argentina (Lohmuller 2015). While there are some geographical factors that can explain the rise of drugrelated activities, especially the vast and porous borders with Bolivia and Paraguay, there are political reasons as well. In 2005, the government of Néstor Kirchner (2003–2007) initiated a decentralization in the persecution of drug-related offenses according to which provincial police forces and prosecutors were to tackle exclusively micro-trafficking and drug consumption. This development led to a decrease in the prosecution of large-scale trafficking organizations and the flows of drugs entering the country. Moreover, according to some experts, the Kirchner government operated under the premise that the drug trade was essentially a social problem, implying that if social indicators improved, the problem would somehow disappear (Föhrig 2015). In November 2013, the highest judges of the country’s northern provinces Jujuy, Salta, and Tucumán, issued a warning to the federal government that they were lacking resources and personnel to counter the penetration of the northern borders and the spread of criminal activity in their provinces. Their demands were backed by the Supreme Court and the Catholic church, which demanded concrete measures to curtail the rising influence organized crime (Gallo 2013). In the same month, numerous politicians from the opposition demanded a new law that would allow the shooting of airplanes used for drug trafficking. These voices were supported by the governor of Argentina’s largest province, Buenos Aires, Daniel Scioli, a major ally of the Kirchner government and their party’s 2015 presidential candidate (La Nación 2013c). Even though the Kirchner administration never gave in to the security heavy discourse, which demanded a more direct confrontation with criminal groups, it also did not back those parts of the government and Argentine society, which were favoring a harm reduction policy. Part of the answer as to why the government never decided support harm reduction may lie in the high political costs associated with even mild harm reduction

172  Nicolas A. Beckmann policies. Whenever the topic of depenalization emerged, prominent actors from the entire political spectrum campaigned against this idea. The head of the country’s Supreme Court, Ricardo Lorenzetti, claimed in 2014 that it was not the right moment to discuss a legal framework for depenalization and that the priority should lie in fighting back the drug trade. Wilbur Grimson, a former head of SEDRONAR, argued that depenalization would fuel drug consumption (Clarín 2014; Grimson 2015). However, the most fervent opposition came from the Catholic church, which took on a leading role in the discussion. In the lead-up to the 2009 ruling of the Supreme Court (see above), high-profile church representatives criticized the depenalization of drug use, arguing that the state should make it more difficult to access and consume drugs, while demanding mandatory treatment for consumers (Perasso 2009). When the parliamentary Commission on Criminal Law and Prevention of Addiction discussed several legislative proposals on depenalization, the Argentine Episcopal Conference expressed their opposition claiming that depenalizing drugs meant to abandon the addict and their families (Aciprensa 2012). The same dynamic occurred in 2014, when the topic of depenalization was once again debated in the parliament (Infobae 2014). The importance of the Catholic church in Argentine society was elevated by the election of the Argentine national Jorge Mario Bergoglio as pope in 2013. Pope Francis has referred to drugs as a worldwide plague and “venom that destroys, corrupts, and kills,” alerted that Argentina was now a “producing country” and experiencing a process of “mexicanization,” and called upon the government to take a tougher stance on drugs (Piqué 2016; Infobae 2018). In their sum, the above-stated developments created a highly restrictive domestic climate for harm reduction policies, despite the support of top government officials, a neighboring country advancing marijuana legalization, and an international context that has become more favorable to change. In the lead up to the 2015 presidential elections both major candidates, the center-right business mogul, Mauricio Macri, as well as the center-leftist and Peronist candidate Daniel Scioli, tried to profile themselves as being tough on drugs and dismissed a possible new law on depenalization. In his campaign, Macri elevated “ending the drug trade” as one of the three main goals of his presidency (next to “zero poverty” and “unifying the country”), an objective that he repeated during his inauguration speech in December 2015 (La Nación 2015). In January 2016, as one of his first measures, Macri legalized per decree the shooting of airplanes used for drug trafficking (Cué 2016). In the same year, he sent 3,000 additional forces of the National Gendarmerie, a military style police force, to the province of Santa Fe, one of the most affected areas by the drug trade. Ultimately, he launched a plan called “Argentina Without Drug Trafficking,” which suggested increasing penalties for drug traffickers and planned to specialize federal and provincial police forces for the fight against drugs (El País 2016). These measures have substantiated a return to a security-heavy approach to drugs. For advocates of harm reduction, a sign of hope materialized in 2017 when Argentina’s Senate legalized the use of CBD cannabis oils for medical purposes. Originally the legalized medicine, which may help patients suffering from epilepsy,

Prohibition and the Puzzling Continuity of Drug Policies 173 did not contain any of the psychoactive ingredient THC. However, in November 2020 the country’s new President Alberto Fernández (2019–) issued a decree, which allows for the self-cultivation marihuana plants if patients acquire a medical prescription and sign into a national cannabis registry (Centenera 2020). It remains to be seen whether this decision can pave the way for a reorientation of the country’s prohibitionist policy framework. No Change in Peru

In 2011, a glimmer of hope for policy changes also took hold in Peru when the leftist government of Ollanta Humala (2011–2015) appointed one of the country’s most prominent critics of the “war on drugs” and former advisor of coca growers, Ricardo Soberón, as head of the National Agency for Development and Life Without Drugs (DEVIDA by its Spanish acronym). Similar to other coca-producing states like Bolivia and Colombia, Peru has carried out numerous militarized campaigns to eradicate coca crops. These campaigns have always been controversial given that the use of the coca leaf has a long tradition. Moreover, although the militarized approach has not sparked the same levels of violence as in Colombia and Central America, it has been highly ineffective and often shattered the livelihood of the Peru’s poor peasantry, which depends on the coca crop for a steady income. During his tenure at DEVIDA, Soberón aspired to give the agency a more important role in designing and implementing drug policy, next to the police and the military, and to redefine the country’s cooperation with the United States. On the operational side, his main objectives were to strengthen police and intelligence investigations against large-scale trafficking organizations; efforts against money laundering; controls of the supply chains of chemical precursors used for drug production; alternative development; and prevention and rehabilitation of drug users, rather than criminal prosecution (La República 2011a; 2011b). As one of his first measures, Soberón announced a stop of Peru’s coca eradication program for an indefinite time to reexamine its utility (Reuters 2011). The measure was immediately criticized as irresponsible by the country’s opposition leaders, as well as the previous head of DEVIDA, Ricardo Vega Llona (Perú 21 2011a). However, only a week after the suspension, the minister of the interior and former army officer, Oscar Valdés, announced that the country had resumed its eradication efforts (Perú 21 2011b). Soberón’s limitations as head of DEVIDA became explicit in leaked communications with the National Confederation of Farmers from Coca-Growing Basins of Peru (CONPACCP by its Spanish acronym). In a meeting with the confederation, he stated: “I am not naïve to think that everything that I think about coca and the drug trade will be incorporated into the road map of the new government, but if I do not receive support my presence will not be useful” (La República 2011c). In an e-mail to CONPACCP members he outlined that even as head of DEVIDA he could not always detain the “violent” eradication of coca crops. Moreover, he clarified that his range of action depended entirely on the country’s prime minister, Salomón Lerner, and that he had no influence whatsoever on the ministers of defense and the interior, Daniel Mora and Oscar Valdés (RPP Noticias 2011).

174  Nicolas A. Beckmann In the following, Soberón clarified publicly and before Congress that he would not sabotage the national government’s policies and comply with its eradication efforts. While he received public support from President Humala, members of the opposition accused him of advancing a double discourse (La República 2011d). In a cabinet reshuffle in 2011, one of Soberón’s major supporters, prime minister Lerner, was forced to leave the administration and was replaced by the former minister of the interior, Oscar Valdés. Due to fundamental disagreements between Soberón and Valdés about the strategic orientation of DEVIDA, as well as the issue of forced coca eradication, on January 10, 2012, Soberón resigned less than six months after he took over the office. He was replaced by Carmen Mesías, an expert on drug prevention and supporter of forced eradication (Stone 2012). In an interview after his departure, Soberón expressed his frustration, claiming that Peru’s drug policy was hijacked by ignorance, a lack of knowledge, and a concentration of political, economic, and media interests. He also criticized his successor Carmen Mesías for planning to concentrate DEVIDA’s efforts on rehabilitation and prevention, which would leave interdiction, crop control, and eradication entirely in the hands of the police and the military (La Mula 2012). The brief tenure of Soberón as head of DEVIDA illustrates that the internalized institutional biases in favor of prohibition present major obstacles for a policy change, even though the international context has become more favorable. At the same time, the episode highlights that Peru has become more open and flexible to discuss competing strategic visions on how to deal with drug-related challenges. Another development that supports this view is that, to the surprise of many, in 2017 Peru legalized the use of CBD-based cannabis oil for medical purposes. Although, similar to Argentina, the medicine originally was not allowed to contain any of the psychoactive cannabinoid THC, pro legalization activists are optimistic that the regulation of the medical marijuana market will eventually lead to a wider legislation, including recreational marijuana (Acuña 2017). Conclusion Although the forced eradication of coca crops and the penalization of recreational drug use are two different issues, they are both products of a region-wide prohibitionist strategic culture which seeks to criminalize all drug-related activities irrespective of their particular characteristics and risks. This chapter’s introduction illustrated why the author considers this approach as a colossal failure. Not only are illegal drugs more widely accessible and affordable than 50 years ago, but prohibition has created large-scale criminal networks that challenge state authority, sparked large-scale outbreaks of violence, and flooded dysfunctional prisons. Moreover, drug consumption is more harmful within a framework that prioritizes punishment and repression over education, treatment, and state-controlled market regulation. In light of these tendencies, the chapter considered the continuity of these policies in South America as a puzzling trend, which needed to be explained. While for many decades the attachment to prohibition could be explained by the constant pressures and rewards offered by the United States, as well as the absence of a real alternative, this explanation no longer holds.

Prohibition and the Puzzling Continuity of Drug Policies 175 A close examination of the continuity of prohibitionist policies in countries as diverse as Ecuador, Argentina, and Peru, illustrates how agents of the strategic culture of prohibition have successfully undermined, slowed down, and reverted efforts to reform drug policies. Their success constitutes a warning to those who believe that South America will soon move beyond its prohibitionist past and apply more humane and health-based policies. Decades of prohibitionist practices, discourses, training, and indoctrination have left their mark on the character and orientation of public institutions and it is unlikely that their preference for securityheavy approaches will disappear any time soon. However, the fundamental role the strategic culture of prohibition plays in defining contemporary policies marks a fundamental shift in the drug policy field. While for several decades international factors, such as the strong pressure of the United States as well as widespread international support for prohibition as the only viable policy option, strongly shaped and shoved the design and implementation of drug policies across the region, these factors have become less deterministic. In the current age, domestic-level actors have taken on a greater role in determining the approach of their countries, which implies that the playing field is a bit more even and provides harm reduction advocates with more tools and possibilities to defy dominant discourses and practices. Even though in Ecuador, Argentina, and Peru the outcome is not very different from previous times, all countries have shown signs of a more serious and informed debate. Moreover, it cannot be denied that harm reduction advocacy has become a powerful political force that has achieved farreaching changes in countries as diverse as Chile, Colombia, and Uruguay. Time will tell how far these changes will go, and if they will be adapted by other countries. Most importantly, the rising prominence of harm reduction provides governments with new options in dealing with their drug-related challenges, an alternative that hardly existed 30 years ago. The strategic framework of prohibition, which used to be the only game in town, now has a real competitor. It will be fascinating to observe how this competition will play out in South America and other regions. Notes 1 Decriminalization and depenalization are similar but differ in degree. When an activity becomes decriminalized it stops to be treated as a crime. When an offense is treated as a crime, penalties are more severe and often imply prison. However, despite decriminalization there can still be less severe penalties such as social services, fines, or obligatory treatment. When an activity becomes depenalized there is no legal sanction whatsoever. 2 Most recently Argentina (2020) has legalized the self-cultivation of marijuana plants medical uses. However, different to the other cases it requires a medical prescription and signing into a cannabis registry (Centenera 2020). 3 Interestingly, although the interim government of Jeanine Añez (2019–2020) launched a controversial five-year plan to make Bolivia drug-free and reduce illicit coca crops, the plan did not alter the legal framework established by the Morales government (Gobierno del Estado Plurinacional de Bolivia 2020). 4 Under the most recent law, traffickers can be penalized with up to 45 years in prison, while even the illegal possession of drugs can be punished with up to 2 years. This has led to a sharp increase of drug-related judicial cases, from only 3,374 in 2001 to 112,010 in 2011 (Antillano et al. 2016).

176  Nicolas A. Beckmann 5 Today’s IDCR is based on three U.N. conventions: The Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961 and its amended protocol from 1972; the Convention of Psychotropic Substances of 1971; and the United Nations Convention against Illicit Traffic in Narcotic Drugs and Psychotropic Substances, 1988. 6 In practice the picture becomes more blurred given that in several countries state officials, up to the highest levels, form part of the networks that administer the illicit drug trade. Yet, as long as there are some state officials that seek to contain criminal groups and their activities, it is fair to uphold the ideal-type competition outlined above. 7 The first anti-drug military operation of the United States took place in 1986, in Bolivia. Soon the use of U.S. military forces expanded to operations in Colombia and Peru (Carpenter 2003; Isacson 2005). 8 This procedure, which was invented by the U.S. Congress in 1986, required the President to evaluate each year whether or not the major “producers” and “transit-countries” of illicit drugs had fulfilled U.S. expectations. In case the President did not certify a particular country, Congress could suspend up to 50% of all financial aid for that fiscal year; suspend all aid for the following years; and require U.S. representatives in multilateral development banks to vote against granting loans to the offending country (Carpenter 2003). 9 The membership of the Global Commission includes Aleksander Kwaśniewski (former President of Poland), Ricardo Lagos (former President of Chile), George Papandreou (former President of Greece), George P. Shultz (former Secretary of State of the United States), Javier Solana (former EU High Representative for the Common Foreign and Security Policy), Jorge Sampaio (former President of Portugal), Paul Volcker (former Chairman of the U.S. Federal Reserve), Ricardo Lagos (former President of Chile), and Ruth Dreifuss (former President of Switzerland). 10 At the panel “Strategic Culture(s) in Latin America” at the 2018 annual meeting of the International Studies Association in San Francisco, Prof. Jack Snyder kindly recommended me to include a case study of a country that has moved toward harm reduction, as a way of verifying that strategic culture indeed does the explanatory work. During my field trip to Uruguay in January and February 2018, several government officials involved in the country’s marijuana legalization reform process made reference to a state culture of regulating so-called social vices, including gambling, prostitution, and a state alcohol monopoly in the early twentieth century, thereby providing some evidence in favor of a cultural explanation. However, given this project’s emphasis on policy continuity rather than change, the Uruguayan case is not tackled in this chapter. 11 The full reference of the new law is: Ley Orgánica de Prevención Integral del Fenómeno Socio Económico de las Drogas y de la Regulación y Control del Uso de Sustancias Catalogadas Sujetas a Fiscalización. Octubre 1, 2015, [615] R.O. Suplemento [Oct. 25, 2015] (Ec.).

References Aciprensa. (2012, junio 6): Iglesia en Argentina: despenalizar es abandonar al adicto. https:// www.aciprensa.com/noticias/iglesia-en-argentina-despenalizar-drogas-es-abandonaral-adicto Acuña, E. (2017, junio 4): Luis Gavancho de legaliza Perú: ‘la marihuana medicinal regula el mercado y sacará a la planta del narcotráfico’. Perú 21. Accessed via: https://peru21. pe/lima/luis-gavancho-legaliza-peru-marihuana-medicinal-regulara-mercado-sacaraplanta-narcotrafico-78886-noticia/ Álvarez Velasco, C. (2014): Reformas y contradicciones en la política de drogas de Ecuador (Washington Office on Latin America). Antillano, A., Zubillaga, V. and Ávila, K. (2016): Revolution and counter reform: The paradox of drug policy in Bolivarian Venezuela. in Drug Policies and the Politics of Drugs

Prohibition and the Puzzling Continuity of Drug Policies 177 in the Americas, ed. by B. C. Labate, C. Cavnar and T. Rodrigues (Cham: Springer), pp. 105–111. Bagley, B. M. (1992): “After San Antonio,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, Vol. 34, No. 3, pp. 1–12. Bailey, J. and Taylor, M. M. (2009): “Evade, Corrupt or Confront? Organized Crime and the State in Brazil and Mexico,” Journal of Politics in Latin America, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 3–29. Bravo, D. (2015, noviembre 30): Excomandante de la Policía Nacional fue designado Secretario Técnico de Drogas. El Comercio. http://www.elcomercio.com/actualidad/ excomandante-policianacional-secretario-drogas.html Brombacher, D. (2010): El control de la oferta en la lucha antidrogas, ¿a quien le sirve? Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, Programa de Cooperacion en Seguridad Regional, Policy Paper 37. Brombacher, D. (2012): This is what you get. Mercados ilegales y violencia en América Latina. Friedrich Ebert Stiftung. Programa de Cooperación en Seguridad Regional. Policy Paper 43. Business Insider. (2014, July 15): Honduras president: The U.S. war on drugs caused the migrant crisis. http://www.businessinsider.com/r-honduras-president-blames-us-drug-policy-formigrant-surge-paper-2014-14 Carpenter, T. G. (2003): Bad Neighbor Policy, Washington’s Futile War on Drugs in Latin America (New York, NY: Palgrave). Castro, G. (2016): La guerra contra las drogas no fracasó. Fármakon. https://farmakon. ladiaria.com.uy/la-guerra-contra-las-drogas-no-fracaso/ Centenera, M. (2020, noviembre 12): Argentina legaliza el autocultivo de marihuana para uso medicinal. El País. https://elpais.com/sociedad/2020-11-12/argentina-legaliza-el-autocultivo-de-marihuana-para-uso-medicinal.html Clarín (2014, septiembre 15): No es momento de hablar de despenalizar el consumo de drogas. https://www.clarin.com/sociedad/momento-hablar-despenalizar-consumo-drogas_0_ HkNeGjt9wmg.html CLSDD (2009): Drogas y democracia: hacia un cambio de paradigma. http://www.globalcommissionondrugs.org/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/drugs-and-democracy_book_ES.pdf Cué, C. E. (2016, enero 21): Macri aprueba un decreto que permite derribar aviones. El País. https://elpais.com/internacional/2016/01/20/argentina/1453307002_112304.html Daugherty, A. (2015, september 10): Ecuador toughens drug laws, muddles policy. InSight Crime. https://www.insightcrime.org/news/brief/ecuador-president-proposes-tougherpunishment-for-microtraffickers/ Dinatale, M. (2019, agosto 26): La Argentina redujo un 30 por ciento la tasa de homicidios en los últimos 4 años. Infobae. https://www.infobae.com/politica/2019/08/26/laargentina-redujo-un-30-por-ciento-la-tasa-de-homicidios-en-los-ultimos-4-anos/ El Comercio. (2017, julio 21): Ecuador prepara estrategia de lucha contra el microtráfico interno de drogas. http://www.elcomercio.com/actualidad/ecuador-estrategia-microtraficodrogas-ministeriodelinterior.html El Diario. (2008, enero 15): Correa pide perdón e indulto para las ‘mulas’. http://www. eldiario.ec/noticias-manabi-ecuador/66704-correa-pide-perdon-e-indulto-para-lasmulas/ Edwards, S. G. (2011): “A short history of Ecuador’s drug legislation and the impact on its prison populations,” in System Overload: Drug Laws and Prisons in Latin America, ed. by P. Metaal and C. A. Youngers (Transnational Institute, Washington Office on Latin America), pp. 50–59.

178  Nicolas A. Beckmann El Observador (2013, febrero 2): Mujica también llamó la atención de los medios chilenos. https://www.elobservador.com.uy/nota/mujica-tambien-llamo-la-atencion-de-losmedios-chilenos-20132213170 El País (2016, agosto 30): Mauricio Macri declara la guerra al narcotráfico en Argentina. https://elpais.com/internacional/2016/08/30/argentina/1472580597_174995.html El Tiempo (2008, enero 17): Perdón y olvido para mulas. http://www.eltiempo.com/archivo/ documento/MAM-2795727 El Universo (2017, junio 28): Consejo Sectorial de Seguridad revisará la tabla de drogas. https://www.eluniverso.com/noticias/2017/06/28/nota/6252505/hace-rato-que-debiaeliminarse-esa-tabla Föhrig, A. (2015): “Los efectos del narcotráfico y la criminalidad organizada en la seguridad pública argentina,” in Anuario 2015 de la seguridad regional en América Latina y el Caribe, ed. by En C. Niño Garniz (Fescol), pp. 26–37. Gallo, D. (2013, noviembre 11): Narcotráfico: la corte reclamó al gobierno medidas ‘urgentes’. La Nación. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/seguridad/narcotrafico-la-corte-lereclamo-al-gobierno-medidas-urgentes-nid1637743/ Garat, G. (2016): “Uruguay: A way to regulate the cannabis market,” in Drug Policies and the Politics of Drugs in Latin America, ed. by B. C. Labate, C. Cavnar and T. Rodrigues (Cham: Springer), pp. 209–226. Gobierno Plurinacional de Bolivia (2020): Estrategia nacional contra el narcotráfico y la economía ilegal de las drogas. Grimson, W. R. (2015, febrero 27): El consumo desbordante. Clarín. https://www.clarin. com/rn/ideas/consumo-desbordante_0_rJ4Dn7qD7e.html Grisaffi, T. (2016): How Bolivia curbed coca production by moving away from violent crackdowns. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/how-bolivia-curbed-cocaproduction-by-moving-away-from-violent-crackdowns-66251 Infobae. (2014, agosto 15): Fuerte rechazo de la Iglesia al proyecto oficial para despenalizar el consumo de marihuana. https://www.infobae.com/2014/08/15/1587870-fuerterechazo-la-iglesia-al-proyecto-oficial-despenalizar-el-consumo-marihuana/ Infobae. (2018, marzo 11): El papa Francisco advirtió contra los ‘atajos’ que llevan a las drogas o a los ‘ruinosos rituales de magia’. https://www.infobae.com/america/mundo/ 2018/03/11/el-papa-francisco-advirtio-contra-los-atajos-que-llevan-a-las-drogas-o-a-losruinosos-rituales-de-magia/ INEG. (s.f.). Mortalidad. Conjunto de datos: defunciones por homicidios [base de datos]. https://www.inegi.org.mx/sistemas/olap/proyectos/bd/continuas/mortalidad/defuncioneshom.asp?s=est Isacson, A. (2005): “U.S. military in the war on drugs,” in Drugs and Democracy in Latin America, ed. by C. A. Youngers and E. Rosin (Lynne Rienner), pp. 15–60. Kleiman, M., Caulkins, J. and Hawken, A. (2011): Drugs and Drug Policy: What Everyone Needs to Know (Oxford University Press). Knoema (2020): “Colombia – homicide rate.” https://knoema.com/atlas/Colombia/topics/ Crime-Statistics/Homicides/Homicide-rate La Mula. (2012, enero 12): Ricardo Soberón: ‘el perdedor de la segunda vuelta está gobernando’. https://lamula.pe/2012/01/12/ricardo-soberon-el-perdedor-de-la-segundavuelta-esta-gobernando/lamula/ La Nación (2013a, noviembre 13): Marihuana: Berni sugirió ver el modelo uruguayo. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/seguridad/marihuana-berni-sugirio-ver-el-modelouruguayo-nid1637803/

Prohibition and the Puzzling Continuity of Drug Policies 179 La Nación (2013b, diciembre 12): El jefe de SEDRONAR, a favor de un debate por la despenalización de la marihuana. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/sociedad/el-jefe-de-lasedronar-a-favor-de-un-debate-por-la-despenalizacion-de-lamarihuana-nid1647093/ La Nación (2013c, noviembre 2016): Scioli se diferencia del gobierno y pide debatir la ley de derribo de vuelos narcos. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/seguridad/scioli-se-diferenciadel-gobierno-y-pide-debatir-la-ley-de-derribo-de-vuelos-narconid1638849/ La Nación (2015, diciembre 10): Transcripción completa del discurso de Macri. https:// www.lanacion.com.ar/politica/transcripcion-completa-del-discurso-de-mauricio-macrinid1852996/ La República (2011a, septiembre 4): Ricardo Soberón: la erradicación es una política de estado y la vamos a cumplir. La República (2011b, septiembre 13): Ricardo Soberón negó ante el congreso tener un ‘doble discurso’. La República (2011c, agosto 29): Difunden audio de Ricardo Soberón con junta cocalera. La República (2011d, septiembre 18): Fernando Rospigliosi fundamenta su posición sobre ‘doble discurso” de Ricardo Soberón. Lessing, B. (2010): “The Danger of Dungeons: Prison Gangs and Incarcerated Militant Groups,” in Small Arms Survey 2010, Gangs, Groups and Guns, ed. by E. G. Berman, K. Krause, E. LeBrun and G. McDonald (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press), pp. 157–183. Lessing, B. (2011): “Tres mitos sobre la guerra contra el narcotráfico,” Perspectivas Sobre Desarrollo, Vol. 9, No. 1, pp. 74–104. Lohmuller, M. (2015, February 25): Is pope Francis right about the ‘mexicanization’ of Argentina? InSight Crime. https://www.insightcrime.org/news/analysis/pope-francis-drugviolence-mexico-argentina/ McAllister, W. B. (2000): Drug Diplomacy in the 20th Century. An International History (Routledge). Melina, F. (2015, septiembre 22): Más policías para frenar al microtráfico. El Comercio. http://www.elcomercio.com/actualidad/policias-microtrafico-droga-ecuador.html Metaal, P. and Youngers, C. A. (eds.). (2011): System Overload: Drug Laws and Prisons in Latin America (Transnational Institute, Washington Office on Latin America). OEA/CICAD (2019): Informe sobre el consumo de drogas en las Américas 2019. Office of the United States Trade Representative (2002): New Andean trade benefits. https:// web.archive.org/web/20080117234244/http://www.ustr.gov/Document_Library/Fact_ Sheets/2002/New_Andean_Trade_Benefts.html Ortega, J. (2014a, marzo 17): LSD y cocaína aparecen en los barrios. El Comercio. http:// www.elcomercio.com/actualidad/seguridad/lsd-y-cocaina-pura-aparecen.html Ortega, J. (2014b, diciembre 29): La seguridad mejoró este año, pero la amenaza ‘narco’ aumenta. El Comercio. http://www.elcomercio.com/actualidad/seguridad-mejoro-2014amenaza-narco.html Ortega, J. (2015, abril 28): La policía impulsa plan ‘Muchachos Libre de Drogas’ en colegios de Quito. El Comercio. http://www.elcomercio.com/actualidad/policia-plan-muchachos-libres-drogas.html Ortiz, S. (2015, agosto 5): Una mafia de drogas se ceñía a la tabla de dosis permitidas por la CONSEP para operar en Quito. El Comercio. http://www.elcomercio.com/actualidad/ mafia-drogas-operativo-policia-microtrafico.html Paspuel, W. (2014, julio 18): Las acciones policiales en colegios fiscales generan polémica. El Comercio. http://www.elcomercio.com/actualidad/drogas-colegios-guayas-antinarcoticos.html

180  Nicolas A. Beckmann Perasso, V. (2009, agosto 25): Argentina: marihuana sin penas (BBC Mundo). http://www. bbc.com/mundo/america_latina/2009/08/090825_1750_argentina_drogas_irm.shtml Pérez Molina, O. (2012, April 7): “We Have to Find New Solutions to Latin America’s Drugs Nightmare,” The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/ apr/07/latin-america-drugs-nightmare Perfil (2014, julio 28): La ministra de seguridad está a favor de la legalización del consumo de drogas. https://www.perfil.com/noticias/politica/la-ministra-de-seguridad-esta-a-favorde-la-legalizacion-del-consumo-de-drogas-20140728-0022.phtml Perú 21 (2011a, agosto 17): Critican que se ‘baje la guardia’ en lucha antidrogas. http:// archivo.peru21.pe/noticia/1044273/critican-que-sebaje-guardia-lucha-antidrogas Perú 21 (2011b, agosto 21): Este martes se reanuda la erradicación. http://archivo.peru21. pe/noticia/1111225/este-martes-se-reanuda-erradicacion Piqué, E. (2016, noviembre 24): El papa Francisco llamó a combatir la droga y dijo que la argentina es un país productor. La Nación. https://www.lanacion.com.ar/el-mundo/elpapa-francisco-llamo-a-combatir-la-droga-y-dijo-que-la-argentinaes-un-pais-productornid1959092/ Policía Nacional del Ecuador (Sin fecha): Breve reseña histórica de la Dirección Nacional Antinarcóticos. https://www.policia.gob.ec/historia-3/ Presidencia de Colombia (2017): Palabras del presidente Juan Manuel Santos ante la Asamblea General de las Naciones Unidas en el 72o periodo de sesiones Ordinarias. http://es.presidencia.gov.co/discursos/170919-Palabras-del-Presidente-Juan-ManuelSantos-ante-la-Asamblea-General-de-las-Naciones-Unidas-en-el-72-periodo-desesiones-ordinarias Redón, N. (2015): CONSEP presentó nuevas escalas sobre tráfico de drogas. El Comercio. http://www.elcomercio.com/actualidad/consep-escalas-trafico-droga-ecuador.html Reuters (2011, agosto 17): Perú frena erradicación cultivos hoja coca por cambios estrategia. https://www.reuters.com/article/latinoamerica-peru-violencia-idLTASIE7A74L120110817 Rodrigues, T., and Labate, B. C. (2016): “Prohibition and the War on Drugs in the American: An Analytical Approach,” in Drug Policies and the Politics of Drugs in the Americas, ed. by B. C. Labate, C. Cavnar and T. Rodrigues (Cham: Springer), pp. 11–32. RPP Noticias (2011, septiembre 1): Difundan email de jefe de DEVIDA Ricardo Soberón a cocaleros. http://rpp.pe/politica/actualidad/difunden-email-de-jefe-de-devida-ricardosoberon-a-cocaleros-noticia-399679 Stone, H. (2012, January 15): Back to business as usual as Peru loses progressive drug czar. InSight Crime. https://www.insightcrime.org/news/analysis/back-to-business-as-usual-asperu-loses-progressive-drug-czar/ Telám (2013, septiembre 23): La oficina de la ONU contra la droga modificó un informe mundial que perjudicaba a Argentina. http://www.telam.com.ar/notas/201309/33716-laonudd-modifico-el-informe-mundial-de-drogas-que-perjudicaba-a-la-argentina.html Tele Ciudadana (2015, septiembre 5): Enlace ciudadano nro 440 desde Chillogallo, Pichincha [Archivo de Video]. Youtube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxKlWznWRhc Transnational Institute (No date): Overview of drug laws and legislative trends in Argentina. http://druglawreform.info/en/country-information/latin-america/argentina/item/199argentina UNODC (2023): World Drug Report 2023, Special Points of Interest (United Nations Publications). U.S. Embassy in Lima to Department of State/Secretary of State (1974, July 17): Narcotics Control Report for Period Ending July 15, 1974. Public Library of U.S. Diplomacy (PLUSD).

Prohibition and the Puzzling Continuity of Drug Policies 181 U.S. Embassy in Montevideo to Department of State/Secretary of State (1974, November 1): Presidential Directive in Narcotics Control Activities. PLUSD. U.S. Embassy in Quito to Department of State/Secretary of State (1974, September 20): ARA Narcotics Coordinator’s Conference. PLUSD. U.S. Embassy in Lima to Secretary of State/UN (Geneva) (1978, December 13): FY 1980 INC Congressional Submission. PLUSD. Legal Sources COIP (Código Orgánico Integral Penal). Enero 28, 2014. [180] R.O. Suplemento [Feb. 10, 2014] (Ec.). D.L. 22,095. Ley de Represión del Tráfico Ilícito de Drogas. Febrero 21, 1978. ADLP. http:// www.leyes.congreso.gob.pe/Documentos/Leyes/22095.pdf (Per.). D.S. N° 2,636. Julio 4, 1978. [621] R.O. 4 [Ec.]. D.S. N° 14,203. Ley Nacional de Control de Sustancias Peligrosas. Diciembre 17, 1976. [896] Gaceta Oficial [G.O.] (Bol.). Lei N° 9,714, de 25 de Novembro de 1998. D.O.U. de 26.11.1998 (Bras.). Ley N° 108. Ley sobre Sustancias Estupefacientes y Psicotrópicas. Agosto 7, 1990. [523] R.O. (Ec.). Ley N° 1008. Ley del Régimen de la Coca y Sustancias Controladas. Julio 28, 1988. [1558] G.O. (Bol.). Ley N° 1340/88. Octubre 27, 1988. BACCN. http://www.bacn.gov.py/archivos/2562/ 20140917075233.pdf (Par.). Ley N° 17,016. Octubre 22, 1998. [25,142], D.O. [28 Oct./998] (Uru). Ley Orgánica de Prevención Integral del Fenómeno Socio Económico de las Drogas y de la Regulación y Control del Uso de Sustancias Catalogadas Sujetas a Fiscalización. Octubre 1, 2015. [615] R.O. Suplemento [Oct. 25, 2015] (Ec.). Ley Orgánica sobre Sustancias Estupefacientes y Psicotrópicas. Julio 17, 1984. [3,411] G.A. (Ven.).

7

No Place for Cosmopolitanism Peacekeeping South America and Its Prevailing Strategic Culture of Security Nicole Jenne

Introduction Over the past three decades, peacekeeping has become the international community’s most strongly institutionalized response to insecurity and post-conflict situations. As Bellamy and Williams explain, this resulted from a threefold transformation that took place in the 1990s (Bellamy and Williams 2010: 93). The first, quantitative transformation manifested itself in a growing demand for peacekeeping operations and the simultaneous expansion of the group of contributing states, most notably to include those from the Global South as the most important troopcontributing countries. Second, there was a normative shift toward the belief that peacekeeping should not merely assist warring parties in their transition to peaceful coexistence once they agreed to end hostilities. Instead, according to the new conception of “post-Westphalian” peacekeeping, missions should build the conditions for lasting peace by creating the bases for a democratic societal and political order. The normative transformation led, thirdly, to a qualitative shift reflected in the multiplication of tasks peacekeepers were now to perform. Peacekeeping came to include increasingly robust, military mandates to protect the goals of the respective mission, including guaranteeing stability and the protection of civilians. Furthermore, peacekeepers assumed a range of humanitarian and police tasks such as food distribution, organizing elections, and infrastructure building, among others. These developments found strong support in South America, where they met favorable conditions both at the regional and national levels. In many countries, the end of military dictatorship prompted the search for new missions for the armed forces to keep them from meddling in domestic affairs (Sotomayor 2013). The 1990s also saw the revival of regional cooperation schemes and the creation of new regional institutions, some of them with an explicit mandate in the politicalsecurity realm. In this context of warming inter-state relations where conflict between any two South American countries was seen as a far-distant possibility, many experts and policy-makers viewed peacekeeping as a particularly suitable policy area to enhance regional cooperation and even integration (Hirst 2007; Kenkel 2010; Feldmann and Montes 2013: 152, 162). Argentina’s decision to make major contributions to U.N. peacekeeping during the 1990s, for instance, was motivated by a “pragmatic internationalism,” “assigning the armed forces to new missions DOI: 10.4324/9781003142508-10

No Place for Cosmopolitanism Peacekeeping 183 in confidence-building on international security issues with neighboring states” (Mani 2015: 6). Uruguay’s Framework Law on National Defense formalized the link between peacekeeping and international cooperation in its Article 22, relating the country’s participation in peacekeeping explicitly to achieving cooperative relations and confidence building between states (Uruguay, 2010). The United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti (MINUSTAH 2004–2017), Latin America’s peacekeeping endeavor par excellence, was perceived as an exercise in regional cooperation by its nine Latin American contributors. Thus, the Chilean foreign ministry presented MINUSTAH as a possibility to demonstrate Chile’s “irrevocable Latin American vocation” (Llenderrozas 2006). The Chilean Defense White Paper of 2010 had a dedicated section on “The significance of Chile’s participation in Haiti,” which affirmed that the mission “facilitated political dialogue” with other Latin American contributor states (Chile 2010: 142). Together with the favorable international conditions to promote an active international peacekeeping policy as further described in the second section of this chapter, these views suggest that South America was on the way to develop a regional, cosmopolitan peacekeeping approach backed by some form of collective resource management. The 2008 statute created South American Defense Council (SADC), for instance, defined the sharing of information regarding U.N. peacekeeping as a specific goal (Art. 5) to “contribute to the generation of a South American identity in the realm of regional defense and security” (Art. 4, emphasis added). A distinctive security framework for peacekeeping failed to emerge despite the structural conditions that would incentivised change. Peacekeeping was emphasized in South America’s political discourses as a key area of concern not only for individual states, but also for the region collectively. Nonetheless, the traditional approach to manage security prevailed over a more cosmopolitan alternative of governance, one that “transcends the state-centricity of peacekeeping” (Woodhouse and Ramsbotham 2005: 141). Why, despite the structural push to participate in peacekeeping operations worldwide, including through a regional peacekeeping architecture, has such a security arrangement failed to emerge? To explain the persistence of traditional, non-cosmopolitan security arrangements in South America in the context of structural change, the concept of strategic culture is useful to show how gatekeepers and new, countervailing incentives prevented the emergence of a distinctively regional peacekeeping arrangement. Regional peacekeeping structures were created in other parts of the globe, specifically in Europe (by the European Union and NATO) and Africa (by the African Union and several sub-regional organizations). Surprisingly though, considering the changing circumstances, in South America the paradigm of the post–Cold War era—what this chapter shall hereinafter call the traditional security paradigm—persisted. In general terms, the traditional paradigm consisted of prioritizing immediate national objectives and a preference for bilateral channels over multilateral settings to advance specific goals. With regard to the policy domain of peacekeeping, this meant that South American policies evolved reactively, lacking both a dedicated, critical mass in the foreign and security policy establishments and a clear vision of the role peacekeeping ought to play in the medium term. Thus, the semi-permanent features of decision-making

184  Nicole Jenne characteristic of the region’s strategic security culture (Snyder 1977: 8) resulted in considerable activism in the area of peacekeeping, but no political integration. South America held a series of high-level meetings dealing with matters related to peacekeeping and participated in several multilateral exercises. However, neither the regional “summitry” nor the (often externally organized) joint exercises changed what already before had been a lively regional activism characterized by the shallow institutionalization of collective security. The concept of strategic culture is used in this chapter to explain the failure of change toward a South American, regional approach in the policy domain of peacekeeping within the context of structural change that suggests otherwise. In line with the general aim of this book, this study furthers the research agenda on strategic culture in three regards (see Chapter 2). First, it updates the concept by applying it to a domain of so-called non-traditional security. Peacekeeping is generally seen as a non-competitive activity more likely to lead to cosmopolitan security arrangements and yet, in the case considered here, new forms of security cooperation failed to materialize. Second, this study decenters strategic culture in that it is concerned with a region rather isolated from great power politics. In South America, the declining power of the United States together with its relative neglect at least since the 1990s facilitated the development of locally inspired initiatives, such as the Union of South American Nations (Unión de Naciones Sudamericanas, UNASUR). Nevertheless, this chapter will show that even new institutionalized security arrangements have failed to bring about a fundamental transformation of South American strategic security culture(s) that would allow for the creation of a regional peacekeeping policy. The third contribution of this chapter—extending the use of strategic culture— lies with the broadening of the concept’s analytical focus from individual states to the region. The region is today well established as an analytical category since geographically proximate states share a number of geopolitical, historical, social, and cultural traits that influence strategic culture. Security externalities travel easier and more rapidly over short distances, rendering the security of states within geographically delineated regions interdependent (Buzan, Wæver, and de Wilde 1998: 201). Likewise, policy frameworks and ideas diffuse with greater ease, thus leading to strategic culture’s “distinctive stylistic predispositions” within a region (Snyder 1977: 4). Unlike the relatively small number of studies that are interested in regional strategic cultures, this contribution is novel in that it uses the concept as an explanation to show continuity rather than change. Some of the existing studies observe policy changes at the regional level and ask whether these are or can be sustained by a regional strategic culture in these particular cases, mostly in Europe (Rynning 2003; Cornish and Edwards 2005). Others take a comparative approach to highlight similarities and differences between individual security cultures within the European, Scandinavian, and Baltic regions (Biehl 2013; Edström and Gyllensporre 2014; Ries 2014). Instead of dealing with strategic culture as an explanandum, here it is used as an explanans to show how it countervailed structural incentives. By combining the national and regional levels, this chapter scrutinizes the relative importance of the effects stemming from material structures and culture.

No Place for Cosmopolitanism Peacekeeping 185 The remainder of the chapter is divided into three parts. The following section describes South America’s strategic security culture and explains why we would expect to see changes with respect to developments in the policy domain of peacekeeping. Next, I show that contrary to these expectations, along the continuum of policy options the region’s security culture has remained firmly anchored within the traditional security paradigm as it failed to move toward a cosmopolitan conception. I discuss a set of alternative arguments before examining how strategic culture has worked in different initiatives that could have set the basis for a cosmopolitan peacekeeping capacity. In doing so, I pay special attention to the four countries most likely to initiate change: Argentina, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay (ABCU). The concluding section summarizes the argument. The Rise of International Peacekeeping and South America’s Persistent Strategic Culture of Security Since the end of the Cold War peacekeeping has expanded both quantitatively and qualitatively. The number of U.N. peacekeeping operations underway in any given year since 1992 has oscillated between 15 and 20, which contrasts markedly with an average of five annual missions during the Cold War. Between 1998 and 2015, the number of deployed civilian, military, and police personnel grew from 14.400 to an alltime high of 107.000 (UN 2017). Over 130 countries have participated in a total of 69 U.N. peacekeeping operations, 56 of which were initiated after 1988. As of December 2020, 81.832 peacekeepers participated in 13 missions worldwide (UN Peacekeeping 2020). Their tasks are typically more varied than the traditional observer missions of the first generation of U.N. peacekeeping and include a more robust mandate for the use of force as well as a range of ‘soft’ tasks such as the delivery of humanitarian aid and infrastructure building. This section begins by explaining the first premise of the theoretical puzzle this chapter is concerned with: structural, systemic pressure for change in the policy domain of peacekeeping. In the case of South America, the structural context is defined by different international, regional, and domestic factors that created conditions favorable to the rise of a regional peacekeeping policy. Next, the section sketches how a regional peacekeeping arrangement (or what I call cosmopolitan peacekeeping) might look like and moves on to describe how the region’s strategic security culture continued to exist largely unaffected by structural change. After the Cold War ended, the demand for peacekeeping forces created the global context for regional actors to step up. Faced with an upsurge in the number of conflicts and an international opinion now far more permissive to intervene in both internal and international peace processes, the U.N. Secretariat repeatedly called upon regional organizations to take on responsibility and develop collective resources in conflict management and resolution based on Chapter VIII of the U.N. Charter. These calls were met by different organizations in Africa and the Euro-Atlantic, with the European Union stating: “At a time when terrorism, hybrid threats, climate change, economic volatility and energy insecurity lead to violent conflicts around the globe, closer European cooperation on defence and security is more important than ever” (European Union External Action 2018).

186  Nicole Jenne Similar statements appeared in South America, where regional and domestic factors created a local context responsive to the global demand for peacekeepers. On the one hand, political and economic reforms following the end of military rule in much of the subcontinent led to three intertwined processes that promised to bolster the supply side of regional peacekeeping. First, governments sought to demonstrate their commitment at the U.N. showing that they were good international citizens. Peacekeeping became a primary venue to express their support for a rules-based international order, thus leading to convergence in national policies. Second, on top of the general uncertainty over what role the armed forces were to play in the post-Cold War world, democratization in the region required the definition of new military missions. In this regard, peacekeeping was seen as a welcomed field of action that kept the armed forces busy outside the national territory, submitted them under a regulatory framework committed to human rights, and brought them in contact with other militaries adhering to democratic norms of subordination under civilian control. The new task was generally welcomed by the armed forces as it provided them with real experience and promoted a public image of doing good. Thus, over time the military’s interest in peacekeeping has grown. In 2017, the U.N.-certified Peace Operations Training Institute (POTI) registered more peacekeepers from Latin America and the Caribbean enrolled in its courses than from anywhere else in the world (POTI 2017: 3). For politicians, expenditures for peacekeeping forces were more easily justifiable politically given that across South America the guns vs. butter debate had shifted in favor of the latter. In the absence of any conflict with a real potential to escalate into an armed confrontation, the classical defense function lost ground in legitimizing large amounts of defense spending and pushed the military into assuming a range of new tasks, among them peacekeeping. The third consequence of political and economic reform that pushed peacekeeping on South America’s political agenda was a new impetus in regional international cooperation. In the security realm, peacekeeping came to be seen as an area conducive to cooperation and the development of common understandings. For instance, Palá (1998: 146) writes that peacekeeping, like public goods, is characterized by its “non-exclusiveness” and “non-rivalness [sic.].” Marcondes (2013: 72) holds that the political consultation and military cooperation of the MINUSTAH experience allowed the contributing states “to develop a specific regional identity within the mission.” Also Diamint (2007), who is otherwise known for her rather critical take on the achievements of South American foreign and security policies, saw in the Haitian experience the start of an incipient security community of states sharing common values. While these statements are debatable—there is no reason a priori to assume that peacekeeping is free of competition and rivalry—what is important here is the fact that the general view has been favorable toward peacekeeping as an area of regional cooperation. Consequently, several initiatives to develop a regional peacekeeping regime were launched although eventually, these fell short of constituting a coherent policy approach backed by resources. Together with the global demand for (regional) peacekeeping capacities, the different supply side driving forces described so far worked within an environment

No Place for Cosmopolitanism Peacekeeping 187 generally favorable to regional initiatives. On the one hand, the sharply reduced influence of the United States opened a window of opportunity for a Latin American agenda of cooperation relatively free from external influence. Washington, traditionally a determining factor for South American security and defense planning, turned its back on the region as it was focused on the Middle East and Asia. Safe for interventions in specific matters such as the Colombian drug cartels, the absence of the United States opened space that was temporarily filled by an increasingly more self-confident region led by Brazil under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (2003–2010) and Venezuela under Hugo Chávez (1999–2013). The creation of UNASUR as a purely South American institution exclusive of the United States and the subsequent establishment of the SADC were the clearest expressions of the political aspiration to regional self-determination, and both institutions singled out peacekeeping as a potential area for regional action. On the other hand, South America’s benign security environment with its markedly low probability to experience an armed inter-state conflict afforded the possibility to move toward an integrated framework without risking outside interference. This stood in stark contrast to Southeast Asia, for instance, where states have been concerned that a regional peacekeeping policy could serve as a pretext for others to intervene in the region or even in the domestic affairs of the member states (Chang and Jenne 2020: 345–347; Jenne 2019). What type of new developments in South America’s strategic security culture would we expect to result from the domestic, regional, and global changes described above? How does a regional, “cosmopolitan” peacekeeping policy look like? The policy options in the domain of peacekeeping should be thought of along a continuum, at one extreme of which “cosmopolitan peacekeeping” implies the complete de-centering from state norms, in particular sovereignty. Moving along the continuum, in order to classify as cosmopolitan, a given approach would not give up completely on the principle of sovereignty but still see a substantive shift in this direction manifested in two observable factors. First, a cosmopolitan approach to peacekeeping, such that would develop if purely structural factors were at work as described above, “is not situated within any particular state, society or established site of power, but rather promotes constructive means of handling conflict at local through to global levels in the interests of humanity” (Ramsbotham, Miall, and Woodhouse 2011: 265). Rather than being projected as a contribution to regional stability only, a cosmopolitan peacekeeping policy aims at enhancing global security. Consequently, the participation in peacekeeping of individual states should follow broadly similar patterns according to global needs both in scale and scope (i.e., requirements of specialized capacities, participation of civilian and police personnel, national efforts to comply with U.N. best practices, etc.). Second, a cosmopolitan approach pools resources to develop regional peacekeeping capacities. At the most developed level, these “integrate ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power poles of activity, such that the peacekeeping force is robust enough to use force to protect populations under the emergent ‘responsibility to protect’ norm, but also has enough conflict resolution capacity to facilitate operations across the conflict—development—peacebuilding continuum” (Woodhouse and Curran

188  Nicole Jenne 2007: 1055). However, also more limited forms of regionally institutionalized arrangements such as stabilization forces indicate a cosmopolitan approach to peacekeeping situated further to the middle of the continuum of policy options. Despite the push factors described, any possible form of a cosmopolitan approach failed to emerge in South America. Instead of the change, we would expect based on purely structural, systemic factors, the region’s established strategic security culture prevailed. This security culture is not ‘regional’ in the sense that South American countries’ strategic planning was based on the pursuit of regional rather than national interests. Rather, the regional dimension refers to a set of characteristics commonly found in the different national security cultures across South America that together describe the traditional approach to manage security in the context of intraregional politics. On the continuum of policy options in the domain of peacekeeping, the traditional security paradigm constitutes the opposite pole relative to a cosmopolitan approach. Specifically, South America’s traditional security culture can be described by reference to six characteristics. First is a normative commitment to a set of global international norms of peaceful inter-state conduct (see also Terradas’ chapter in this volume) (Kacowicz 2005). From the early days of independence, this commitment was couched in formalistic-legalistic discourses enounced by Latin America’s lawyer diplomats who promoted non-intervention and the use of peaceful means to resolve inter-state conflicts (Scarfi 2014). For instance, arbitration was a common practice between Latin American states already before it became the international standard after The Hague Convention. In 1967, one year before the signing of the Non-Proliferation Treaty, Latin America became the first populated region in the world to declare itself a nuclear weapons-free zone. The strong normative consensus in discourse and on paper was not matched by South America’s record of conflict settlement in practice (Mares 2001). Nevertheless, the formalistic-legalistic discourse left a strong and lasting imprint on the region’s diplomatic culture and foreign policy styles (Holsti 1996: 181; Jenne 2016). South America’s proclaimed commitment to the principles of non-intervention and peaceful conflict resolution was intimately linked to a strong tradition of regional cooperation, the second characteristic of the region’s strategic security culture (Obregón 2012). The idea of an integrated region reaches back to Simón Bolivar and found its expression in different Pan-American, Latin American, and sub-regional institutions. In the 1990s and again during the so-called ‘Pink Tide’ of leftist governments from the early 2000s until the mid-2010s, regional cooperation has been particularly high on the political agenda. Thirdly, however, if regionalism in America resulted in a lively international activism including in the area of security, it has resulted in little political integration as countries have not been ready to transfer sovereignty to any of their many regional organizations (Malamud and Gardini 2012). In consequence, “declaratory regionalism” (Jenne, Schenoni, and Urdinez 2017) led to three regional international practices that each individually constitute the remaining characteristics of South America’s strategic security culture. Accordingly, fourth is the region’s “summitry,” a dense web of high-level meetings that tend to produce lengthy

No Place for Cosmopolitanism Peacekeeping 189 declarations but few tangible outcomes (Feinberg 2006). Fifth, in the practical realm security cooperation has entailed a considerable number of multilateral exercises and exchanges among military personnel. Although most of these have long been organized and paid for by the United States, in South America they have come to be seen as a form of intraregional cooperation. Over the past two decades, bilateral exercises and a small number of multilateral ones excluding extra-regional states also increased. The sixth element to describe the region’s strategic security culture is bilateralism. Bilateral channels have been the primary instrument of South America’s international politics, filling to some extent into the gap between the region’s declared aspirations to develop a cooperative security arrangement, on the one hand, and its weak institutionalization, on the other. All six elements remained dominant in South America’s approach to international security also as structural changes motivated the development of a regional peacekeeping policy. More precisely, as the next section will show, while the peacekeeping policies of the region’s individual states were characterized by a normative commitment to international peace and cooperation, considerable intraregional activism and a general willingness to engage in regional cooperation exercises, the emergence of a more cosmopolitan approach to peacekeeping was hindered by the South American strategic security culture of shallow integration, reliance on extraregional international partners and a preference for bilateral mechanisms with their regional peers. Case Study1 To assess the regional dimension of South America’s peacekeeping participation, I focus on those states that were most likely to change their traditional approach in response to structural incentives during the 2000s and 2010s: ABCU. Although a cosmopolitan peacekeeping policy will eventually need the support of a critical mass of states, it is first necessary that agents of change emerge. The four potential agents of change took some, if limited initiatives toward a regional peacekeeping arrangement. However, these new instruments were insufficient to bring about changes in the region’s strategic security culture and prevented the emergence of a cosmopolitan peacekeeping policy de-centered from individual states both in its approach and in its institutional make-up. Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay, and, to a lesser extent Chile, stood out with regard to their contribution to U.N. peacekeeping operations and/or a proactive stance to enhance the region’s peacekeeping capacity collectively. In terms of contributions, Uruguay champions the list with about 70% of its active duty officers and about 60% of its non-commissioned officers and soldiers having served in a peacekeeping operation (González Guyer 2016: fn. 16). In this section, I first discuss alternative explanations to the one about culture advanced here. Next, I review the most important initiatives to move toward a cosmopolitan framework and demonstrate how these were eventually fitted into the region’s traditional approach to regional international relations.

190  Nicole Jenne Alternative Explanations

Since culture is notoriously difficult to show, I deal with three potential alternative explanations for the failure of cosmopolitan peacekeeping in South America to demonstrate that any causal explanation is incomplete without taking strategic culture into consideration. A first set of alternative arguments may hold that different historical peacekeeping experiences and conflicting preferences make regional convergence impossible.2 While it is intuitive to see national differences standing in the way of cooperation, close empirical examination shows that in fact, the four potential agents of change have similar historical records of peacekeeping and broadly shared preferences regarding specific types of operations. Therefore, they could set the basis for a common peacekeeping policy and should not be seen as a cause for the failure of a common agenda. The first peacekeeping missions deployed in South America with the participation of South American states predated the U.N. Among these early experiences was a League of Nations Commission in 1933–1934 created to administer the disputed area of Leticia between Colombia and Peru. The mission was composed of three military officers from Brazil, Spain, and the United States. Shortly after, a military observer mission was established to support efforts to bring the Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay (1932–1935) to an end. After the U.N.’s founding in 1945, the peacekeeping contributions of ABCU were “largely symbolic” (Hirst and Mattar Nasser 2014: 2). Under military rule, Brazil withdrew temporarily from U.N. peacekeeping and although the other three countries always maintained their presence, this was reduced to a handful of military observers. The four countries’ contributor profiles changed in the 1990s, with the ABCU peacekeeping trajectories continuing to follow broadly similar patterns. The four states moved from mainly individual contributions in observer missions to sending specialized units or substantive military troop contingents with greater requirements in terms of material and equipment. The last country to turn peacekeeping into a major mission was Chile. In March 2004, then President Ricardo Lagos sent the military to participate in a U.N.-authorized Multinational Interim Force (MIF) for Haiti alongside French, the United States, and Canadian troops to respond to the outbreak of armed conflict in the Caribbean state (Feldmann and Montes 2013). In June of that year, MINUSTAH took over under a Brazilian Force Commander and as the first U.N. mission with Spanish as its official language given that nine of the contributing countries were Latin American: Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Guatemala, Paraguay, Peru, and Uruguay. The 13 years of MINUSTAH saw the creation of several coordination mechanisms among Latin American contributors to influence the international communities’ engagement in Haiti. Nevertheless, as I shall further explain below, the Haitian experience failed to change South America’s traditional strategic security culture. Besides a similar historical record, there appears to be no major difference in the ABCU countries’ preferences regarding specific types of operations. The fact that there is no discernible pattern regarding either geographical preferences, the type of commanding organization or tasks suggests enough flexibility to allow the

No Place for Cosmopolitanism Peacekeeping 191 emergence of a cosmopolitan approach that is guided by demand rather than supply side factors. All four countries have deployed peacekeepers around the world. While most of these missions were under U.N. command, they also contributed to other missions, most notably by the OAS. Among the foreign policy élites in the four capitals, there has been some reluctance to participate in robust missions mandated under the provisions of Chapter VII of the U.N. Charter that legitimize the (minimum required) use of force to uphold peace and stability. So far, however, these debates have been set aside when there was genuine interest to participate (on Uruguay, see González Guyer and Jenne 2019: 11–12; on Brazil, Duarte Villa and Jenne 2020). Taken together, broadly similar historical experiences and preferences would suggest that convergence between the ABCU countries on a common peacekeeping policy is possible, even if minor national differences exist. A second possible alternative explanation for the failure of a regional peacekeeping policy may point to outright opposition from within South America that would have rendered the costs of developing a cosmopolitan approach disproportionately high. However, such opposition did not exist. In terms of participation in peacekeeping and its emergence as an important area of international engagement, Colombia and Venezuela have been the two countries most “out of synchronicity” with the rest of South America (Buxton 2013: 173). Yet, Colombia’s absence from peacekeeping was due to its decade-long civil war rather than any form of principled opposition. The Colombian conflict had led to an inward-looking defense and security strategy and the lack of meaningful initiatives in the area of foreign policy. With the peace process under way, Colombia is poised to make substantial contributions to U.N. peacekeeping (Ortega 2018). The Venezuelan case is different as President Nicolás Maduro and his predecessor Hugo Chávez have openly criticized the liberal peace theorem underpinning contemporary U.N. peacekeeping and have proposed an alternative framework for international peace and security (Buxton 2013). Since Chávez gained power in 1999, the principles of Bolivarianism and multipolarism have guided Venezuela’s foreign and security policy (Buxton 2013: 176). The former is much in line with previous administrations as well as the region’s traditional strategic security culture in that it emphasizes regional cooperation and common historical and cultural bonds. Multipolarism, on the other hand, meant a much stronger defense of non-interventionism and autonomy from Western hegemonic interests (i.e., the United States), which were seen at play in U.N. peacekeeping. Thus, Venezuela’s position was not one against peacekeeping per se, but one that favored a holistic interpretation of security including development and local participation while rejecting the use of force. This led Caracas to opt for an individual approach in Haiti, though the government was unwilling (and most likely unable) to promote its alternative peace paradigm through regional channels (ALBA-TCP, the Bolivarian Alliance for the Peoples of Our America—Peoples’ Trade Treaty did not have a peacekeeping policy). Given that Venezuela’s opposition was moderate, it is insufficient to explain the absence of a regional peacekeeping policy based on a claim of intraregional opposition to a cosmopolitan approach. Technical rationality is the third and strongest alternative argument to explain why South America has not seen a cosmopolitan peacekeeping policy. Accordingly,

192  Nicole Jenne governments were simply uninterested and did not see the need for developing regional peacekeeping capacities. The argument carries some weight considering that in Africa, where the African Union and several sub-regional organizations have developed regional peacekeeping capacities, the pooling of resources was driven by the necessity to respond to secessionist and ethnic violence. Such have been absent in South America, as have been inter-state conflicts with a real potential to escalate into war (see Terradas’ chapter in this volume). However, the argument about cost-benefit calculations is problematic on a number of accounts. On the one hand, it is undeniable that peacekeeping has been treated as a factor of international prestige both within the region and beyond. To cite just one example, Brazil, while bidding for a permanent seat at the U.N. Security Council, stated in its 2012 White Paper on National Defense: “The most evident expression of Brazil’s growing importance in peace and security initiatives has is its role in peacekeeping operations” (Brazil 2012: 35). Such considerations of status escape a focus on technical rationality and yet, quite obviously, they have influenced South America’s peacekeeping policies. On the other hand, it might be argued that it was precisely the absence of pressing needs to respond to conflict within the region that offered an opportunity to develop a new approach toward a regional peacekeeping capacity, one that could be of potential use in the future and/or in ways that respond to South America’s security needs in a new and creative fashion. Thus, despite the absence of large-scale conflict, the region is not free from quarrels. Long-standing territorial disputes may unexpectedly escalate into open conflict, such as it was the case of the Cenepa War between Ecuador and Peru in 1995, where military observers were eventually deployed. South America has also made headlines for its high rates of homicides, mostly related to drug cartels and criminal gangs that in many places have replaced the state (Muggah and Aguirre 2018). While criminal violence does not constitute peacekeeping’s core business, the deployment of peacekeepers could at least provide some answers to the region’s “murder crisis” (Phillips 2018). South America’s governments, however, have not responded to insecurity by developing an integrated peacekeeping framework. In other words, despite the potential utility of a regional peacekeeping capacity both in practical terms and as a means to enhance states’ international status individually and collectively, a cosmopolitan peacekeeping policy failed to emerge. In order to account for this puzzle, one must look beyond the technical rationality of cost-benefit calculations and consider how South America’s strategic culture has worked in favor of the status quo. Initiatives to Build Regional Peacekeeping Capacities and the Continuation of Strategic Security Culture

Efforts to build regional peacekeeping capacities can be separated into general initiatives and those specific to MINUSTAH. As this section will show, none has significantly departed from the six elements defining South America’s traditional strategic security culture: non-intervention and peaceful conflict resolution, regional cooperation, declaratory regionalism, summitry, multilateral exercises, and bilateralism.

No Place for Cosmopolitanism Peacekeeping 193 To begin with, it is worth restating that South America lacks a regional peacekeeping structure (Jenne 2019). This reality contrasts with what a cosmopolitan approach requires and instead is in line with the general pattern of shallow integration, underpinned by the desire to avoid transferring sovereignty to a regional institution. Thus, Child argued in 1980 that the Inter-American system, the most strongly institutionalized framework in the region, failed to develop a common peacekeeping policy because the presence of the United States meant a strong emphasis on non-intervention “which frequently has blocked or severely restricted effective peacekeeping efforts” (Child 1980: 45). The same reasoning dominated the thinking of South America’s decision-makers in 2014, when the then-Director of the Centre for Strategic Studies in Defense (CEED) of UNASUR, the Argentine diplomat, Alfredo Forti, published a proposal to create an international joint South American military force to protect the region’s mutual interests (Forti 2014). If these interests would entail humanitarian values, the proposal were to map out a truly cosmopolitan peacekeeping policy for South America. However, the idea challenged not only the traditional thinking about how South American security ought to be organized but, also the habit of decision-making by consensus in UNASUR. Thus, the initiative was put off the table without even being discussed. In line with the region’s traditional security culture, the bilateral approach has been the most tangible and substantial effort to build a multinational peacekeeping capacity, which would have moved it closer to a cosmopolitan approach. In 2005, Argentina and Chile established an integrated bi-national joint force Cruz del Sur. Operative in 2010, Cruz del Sur was placed under the U.N. Standby Arrangement System for Peacekeeping Operations at the service of the international community. However, the force has never been deployed, earning it the pejorative name, “bluff del Sur.” There are practical reasons, above all, budgetary constraints on the Argentine side, that explain why the initiative has remained well below its potential to set a precedent for cosmopolitan peacekeeping capacity building by expanding its membership to other countries. Yet, since resource allocation is a matter of political prioritization, it must be concluded that the traditional view on regional cooperation and international exercises prevented Cruz del Sur from becoming more than a confidence-building measure between the two states. The deeply socialized belief that security cooperation should serve to foster relations between states precluded that decision-makers valued the prospect of developing a permanent peacekeeping arrangement transcending the individual state, despite the favorable conditions as described above. Eventually, as peacekeeping lost some of its declared importance on Chile’s foreign policy agenda, the government announced in July 2020 that it would temporarily suspend its participation in the joint command. Apart from Cruz del Sur, there has been no attempt to devise a permanent framework for joint deployments, which can represent an effective cost-sharing instrument. South America’s strategic culture of using non-binding, bilateral instruments to meet specific goals did lead to the creation of integrated peacekeeping contingents on an ad hoc, bilateral basis, but none of them developed the characteristics of a cosmopolitan policy. Argentina’s UNFICYP unit in Cyprus was joined on different occasions by troops from Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay, Peru, and

194  Nicole Jenne Uruguay. In the case of Brazil, in exchange for the two Brazilian troops joining the Argentine battalion, two Argentine troops deployed with Brazil’s peacekeeping battalion in Angola (UNAVEM). In East Timor, too, Brazil’s unit counted with Argentine participation. Similar arrangements were made in MINUSTAH, where Uruguay integrated a unit with Peru, and Paraguay had a contingent deployed with a Brazilian battalion. From 2005 to 2016, Chile commanded a joint company of 66 Ecuadorean and 87 Chilean army engineers in Port-au-Prince. Argentina and Peru formally committed to another joint military engineering company, named “Libertador Don José de San Martín.” They signed the agreement in 2008, but it remained unimplemented. Integrated units have been seen as politically opportune to support specific foreign policy objectives under the banner of promoting regional cooperation, thus conforming to South America’s strategic security culture of regional activism without integration. For these deeply engrained habits, policymakers lacked any vision for the future development of integrated units once their respective turn in the mission was completed. One window of opportunity to change the traditional security paradigm toward a cosmopolitan peacekeeping policy opened in 2008 with the establishment of the SADC. The Council was created to support, within the area of security and defense, UNASUR’s mission to create a space for unity and integration among the peoples of South America. Thus, the SADC’s Statute defined the sharing of information from U.N. peacekeeping operations as a specific goal (Art. 5) in support of the general objective to “contribute to the generation of a South American identity in the realm of regional defense and security” (Art. 4). The stated aspiration to create a security identity that would transcend the state has not been matched by any meaningful set of policies during the decade that united all 12 countries of South America in UNASUR.3 Besides a number of seminars in one of the SADC’s four strategic areas of action, the area of “Military Cooperation, Humanitarian Action and Peacekeeping,” the Council’s most important activity has been an annual Joint Combined Regional Peacekeeping Exercise to promote regional standards for interoperability in peacekeeping operations during 2011–2018 (Ejercicio Conjunto Combinado Regional de Operaciones de Mantenimiento de Paz UNASUR). From the outset, it was highly unlikely that these instances would suffice to promote a cosmopolitan, regional security identity. However, the fact that the SADC’s limited progress even failed to elicit any criticism among UNASUR’s members shows that they were comfortable with its actual performance despite their more ambitious declared goals. The choice to stay within the traditional range of policy options is best explained by reference to the region’s strategic security culture that values the verbal commitment to peaceful inter-state conduct, sees regional cooperation as a means to achieve this but does not aspire to the pooling of sovereignty. This pattern ultimately limited the space for alternative ideas to emerge even as they were pushed on the regional agenda. Another initiative with the potential to develop a cosmopolitan peacekeeping approach was launched in the field of education and training. However, like in other cases, the potentially new policy soon lost momentum as it was channeled into the established patterns of South America’s traditional security approach.

No Place for Cosmopolitanism Peacekeeping 195 Since 2008, the ABCU countries have cooperated in the Latin American Association of Peacekeeping Training Centers (ALCOPAZ). According to the Argentine Ministry of Defense, ALCOPAZ’s objectives include the standardization of peacekeeping doctrines and the establishment of a regional perspective in matters of peacekeeping (Argentina 2010). It is unclear, however, how this would be achieved. While South America’s peacekeeping training centers have striven to innovate following the U.N.’s policy recommendations, they are also bound by their strategic security cultures. This condition is especially so since they are under the purview of the military, where the principle of national sovereignty tends to be understood in opposition to creating joint international capacities. Thus, during its annual conventions, ALCOPAZ has failed to develop a proposal to pool the region’s resources in providing training. An initial idea to develop specialized courses in different countries where they would be attended by all future peacekeepers from South America was put off the table as no state was prepared to pay for training a critical number of security personnel abroad. Instead, states have relied on bilateral agreements to facilitate instructor and student exchanges. That option appears the most cost-effective way due to the region’s security culture, where institutionalized bilateralism is the dominant way to put cooperation into practice. The 13 years of MINUSTAH carried some way in shaping a regional outlook toward peacekeeping although this temporary change fell short of amounting to a cosmopolitan approach. South America’s engagement in Haiti went beyond individual deployments as the participating countries, and above all, the ABCU states sought to influence the course of the international community’s activity in Haiti. Most importantly, the Latin American contributors’ vice ministers of foreign affairs and defense came together under the “2 × 9” mechanism to coordinate their national efforts. The forum originated as a 2 × 4 meeting between the ABCU countries and increased in members subsequently. Before MINUSTAH disbanded, the mechanism disintegrated over disagreements between the Spanish-speaking contributors and Brazil on how to end the mission. Nevertheless, the regular consultations had allowed for an unprecedented level of depth in dealing with fundamental aspects of peacekeeping such as the effectiveness of robust force, the role of the police vis-àvis military peacekeepers, and the participation of civilians in the mission. Furthermore, the four potential agents of change used additional, cooperative mechanisms to participate in the intervention in Haiti. UNASUR issued a solidarity declaration in 2010 and adopted an Action Plan including the establishment of a Technical Secretariat headed by a Special Representative to coordinate humanitarian aid (UNASUR 2010). In 2014, it set up a Working Group to follow up on UNASUR’s actions and elaborate on its future engagement in the country. The OAS, which had previously been engaged in Haiti through the first joint mission between the U.N. and a regional organization (International Civilian Support Mission in Haiti, MICAH), sent a technical mission in 2005 and another in 2015 to support Haitian migrants in the neighboring Dominican Republic. Another MINUSTAHcomplementing activity involving the ABCU states was the Group of Friends of Haiti in New York. Involving the ABCU group, Canada, France, Guatemala, Peru, the United States, and Venezuela, this coordination mechanism predated

196  Nicole Jenne MINUSTAH and served to define priorities among the countries with a stake in Haiti. During the 15 rounds of renewing the mission’s mandate, it had a direct influence on the decision-making processes at the U.N. Security Council (Marcondes de Souza Neto 2013: 67). Considering the above, it is fair to affirm that the mission created an unprecedented level of security cooperation between South American countries and especially the ABCU states (Hirst 2007). MINUSTAH was significant also because, for the first time, the United States was not—or at least not visibly—involved as a key actor in a regional peacekeeping effort. The Argentine Defense Ministry described MINUSTAH as a “laboratory” that allowed the contributing countries to appreciate their armed forces’ complementation (Argentina 2010: 160). Chile’s former commander-in-chief of the army held that South America’s participation in the Haiti peacekeeping effort “has favoured an integrationist view in support of international cooperation” (Cheyre 2011: 159). Yet, despite the favorable structural context, MINUSTAH failed to create effects that outdated the mission. States refused to change and maintained their traditional approach to dealing with security matters. After the mission’s closing down in October 2017, it quickly became clear that there was no shared vision for the future of South American peacekeeping despite common interests at the time, such as deploying peacekeepers in SubSaharan Africa. Cooperation in MINUSTAH had failed to alter the region’s strategic security culture of state-centrism. On the one hand, peacekeeping was politically no longer motivated by a common concern about the ABCU countries’ democratic image and status, but by considerations of international prestige, which worked to countervail the creation of regional peacekeeping capacities. To gain prestige, showing a national flag was more effective than the development of a cosmopolitan peacekeeping policy. On the other hand, if the cooperative spirit in MINUSTAH had created some momentum to advance toward a new security paradigm of cosmopolitanism, this was lost after the mission’s close as peacekeeping became less relevant on the foreign and security policy agendas of Argentina, Brazil, and Chile (though not in Uruguay; see Altman and Jenne 2020). In the former three cases, political change and domestic crises consumed some of the efforts that had been put into South America’s dynamic peacekeeping agenda. In terms of security cooperation, humanitarian aid, and disaster relief gained importance and partly replaced peacekeeping as a preferred area to foster intraregional cooperative relations. In sum, South America’s recent peacekeeping policies have seen a number of novelties largely initiated by the group of potential agents of change. These initiatives strongly indicate that South American policy-makers did not only pay lip service to the development of a regional peacekeeping policy but that such was a real option on the table. Nevertheless, the new policies fell short of moving toward a cosmopolitan approach to peacekeeping as the region’s strategic culture of security offset the push factors for change. In all four countries, there has been a tendency to leave peacekeeping in the hands of active duty officers or retired personnel from the armed forces, who acted as gatekeepers to the traditional security paradigm as this is central to the military’s core functions. Given the socio-politically conservative orientation of the armed forces, it is plausible to argue that the lack of

No Place for Cosmopolitanism Peacekeeping 197 civilian expertise further lowered the possibilities for a new, cosmopolitan peacekeeping policy. Thus, instead of creating regional capacity, cooperation has remained shallow, ad hoc, and more often based on bilateral rather than on regional engagement. Convergence between the individual states was not enough to balance countervailing incentives mainly from other, more pressing problems than those of building peacekeeping capacities. Conclusions This chapter has drawn on the concept of strategic culture to demonstrate how established security practices and modes of policy planning, that is, South America’s traditional strategic security culture, prevented the emergence of a cosmopolitan peacekeeping arrangement in the region. Unlike other studies that are interested in whether a regional strategic culture transcending the state is possible, I used the concept to explain a puzzling continuity in the context of structural change. Changing conditions at the global level led to the development of regional peacekeeping capacities in Europe and Africa. South America, however, despite favorable conditions, proved to be no place for cosmopolitan peacekeeping. It’s regional security culture of clinging on to the principles of non-intervention and peaceful conflict resolution, regional cooperation, declaratory regionalism, summitry, multilateral exercises, and bilateralism worked against change as it limited space for new ideas to take hold. Furthermore, the chapter showed that culture often predetermined the way new, potentially innovative policy initiatives were carried forth as they used already established channels conforming to deeply socialized, regional habits. Considering that South America has not experienced a pressing security crisis in the form that it would have called for the establishment of a permanent regional peacekeeping capacity, as it has been the case in sub-Saharan Africa, it is certainly true that in addition to culture, cost-benefit calculations have played a role in continuing the status quo. Eventually, countervailing incentives rendered the traditional approach of regional activism with little substantial integration well and alive. Notes 1 Parts of this section are taken from “Peacekeeping, Latin America and the UN Charter’s Chapter VIII: Past Initiatives and Future Prospects,” Nicole Jenne, International Peacekeeping 26, no. 3 (27 May 2019): 327–353, Taylor & Francis, reprinted by permission of the publisher (Taylor & Francis Ltd, http://www.tandfonline.com). https://doi.org/ 10.1080/13533312.2019.1588729. 2 For the relevance of these factors to strategic culture see Britz (2016, p. 7). 3 Since 2018, eight states have withdrawn from the institution, leaving it with four active members: Bolivia, Guyana, Suriname, and Venezuela.

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Part III

Conclusions

8

Strategic Culture Travels to Latin America Jack L. Snyder

Strategic culture is a term that has been found congenial by diverse constituencies, including hawkish Cold Warriors like Colin Gray, who thought it was a great idea to fight and win a nuclear war, but also dovish social theorists who decried the ethnocentrism of Western military worldviews. If strategic culture could be adapted to purposes as diverse as these, it seems plausible that this approach can be constructively adapted to illuminate Latin American subject matter in thematic areas as different as peacekeeping, diplomatic culture, the long South American peace, strategies in the war on drugs, and strategies of economic development. These are fascinating applications that explore topics well beyond the strategic military issues that the idea was originally designed for. Is this a productive extension of the approach? In social science, we generally applaud such bold moves, but we are also trained to ask whether such extensions involve “concept stretching,” that is, taking a narrowly defined concept and applying it in ways that may lose precision or go beyond the idea’s applicable scope conditions (Sartori 1970). Onur Erpul’s theoretical paper presents an excellent analysis of the concept of strategic culture, stressing the “staying power” and “context-driven” nature of culturally grounded attitudes. In doing so, he effectively elaborates on one of the central questions that I grappled with in my original paper on strategic culture: namely, how environmental circumstances pose problems and create incentives that drive the development of situationally-oriented cultural routines, but how culture can then entrench itself in a way that becomes mismatched with subsequently changing circumstances. This basic tendency appears in most of the chapters in this volume, notwithstanding their diverse issue areas, and thus the collection shows that this broad range of application is productive, not concept stretching. That said, it will be worthwhile to consider these varied applications in light of some prior assumptions about the kinds of organizations and environments to which strategic culture might be expected to fit comparatively poorly or particularly well. Picking up on Erpul’s metaphor of fleeing the burning house, sometimes circumstances compel the same behavior regardless of cultural differences. Conversely, military organizations—which are monopoly employers that socialize life-long members to required behavior in life-and-death situations— may produce stronger forms of persistent socialization than commercial business organizations do. DOI: 10.4324/9781003142508-12

204  Jack L. Snyder As this implies, applying and testing the power of the strategic culture concept in a new context requires a typology of strategic culture that varies on a continuum or among more than one value of the variable. For example, building on distinctions made by Barry Posen (1984), strategic military culture might vary on the dimensions of offensive versus defensive strategic cultures, innovative versus stagnant strategic cultures, and strategic cultures that are integrated or disintegrated with the grand strategy of the country’s civilian leadership. Taking strategic culture into some new domain may require a new typology that can explain different types of variation. In the case studies here, such typologies include strategic cultures for the anti-drug war that seek prohibition, legalization, or harm-prevention; economic development strategic cultures based on export-led growth of primary products or important-substituting industrialization; or strategic cultures that incline toward preventive attack or war-avoidance. Félix Martín’s chapter deals with one of the classic puzzles in the literature on the causes of war and peace—namely, the South American “long peace” following the devastating Chaco War between Bolivia and Paraguay in 1935. This absence of major international wars between South American states, notwithstanding smallerscale international dust-ups between Peru and Ecuador as well as major civil wars, has endured for nearly a century. Since many of these regimes were military dictatorships, John Oneal and Bruce Russett (2001) investigated statistically whether there is a peace among military dictatorships that is similar to the peace among democracies. They found that outside of South America that is not the case. Martín examines the possibility that the lessons of the Chaco War itself convinced militaries throughout South America that such counterproductive wars had to be avoided for the sake of the military organizations and the conservative regimes they served. This finding echoes the similar but more explicit arrangement under the Concert of Europe after the defeat of Napoleon which was designed to protect European monarchies from a renewed threat of social revolution. The fact that this lesson became so engrained in South American military culture even without a formal Concert, and that it endured so long, raises fascinating questions about cultural continuity, in particular the relationship between the situational interests of the military organizations and the durability of their culture of war-avoidance. Nicolás Terradas’ paper posits regional diplomatic culture as an alternative explanation for the South American “long peace.” This society of élite diplomats who are the custodians of the diplomatic culture acts through a distinctive repertoire of conflict resolution that employs the tools and venues of international law, international congresses, mediation, and the Organization of American States. Also relevant is the conducive background condition in South America that states and nations are generally congruent. This setting allows the élite stewards of diplomatic culture a better chance to succeed than, say, in the Balkans, where the boundaries of states and national cultures are mismatched and at odds. Nicole Jenne’s chapter on cosmopolitan peacekeeping asks why there is no regional pooling of South American peacekeeping forces as in NATO, the EU, or ECOSOC in Africa. She explores the regional culture of bilateralism, summitry, and arbitration as working against that kind of pooling. Also interesting is the prior

Strategic Culture Travels to Latin America 205 question also of why the shift to peacekeeping happened in the first place. As these countries were democratizing, it was thought a great idea to wean these militaries off their bad habits of intervening in politics in the old way and get them into a new line of work that would cause less trouble with their newly democratizing states. Peacekeeping seemed like an ideal way to do this. But would this practice become ingrained in the military’s culture as the basis of a new identity—a new way of thinking about the interest of the organization—that would have these durable consequences? Would the switch to peacekeeping at the national level produce a change in each military’s strategic culture? An old literature on European economic integration stressed the importance of the “spill-over effects” of pooling resources in a regional order as a force to institutionalize and culturally embed this kind of change. Jenne finds, however, that there is not much movement toward pooling the national resources of peacekeeping in Latin America. It is possible that a pre-existing regional culture of bilateralism is hard to overcome. But it is also possible that regional pooling is not as useful and necessary as it is, say, for ECOSOC in Africa, which is a vehicle for a small number of countries to pool resources in their own region to police ongoing conflict. Nicolas Beckmann’s paper on the prohibition approach to drugs presents a compelling puzzle: why continuity of strategy despite policy failure? The cultural answer is that strategy is ingrained in the outlooks and routines of the militaries, police, parliaments, and judiciaries. A potential alternative explanation, however, is that the continuity is due to a constant feature of the environment—namely, the U.S. popular culture of prohibition backed by the always-looming U.S. Government policy that creates perverse incentives for these actors in Latin American states. Explaining national-level variation across the three different types of state drug policies, including those like Uruguay that try reform, helps to sort out the cultural account from constants of circumstances. Diego Zambrano’s paper moves even further from the home territory of military strategic culture in terms of its subject matter. Nonetheless, the topic of strategies for economic development fits well in this framework. He describes a dependency trap in which élite and popular attitudes, routines, and sunk costs in investment in capital and skills become stuck in a commodity-export culture, perpetuating a lowlevel equilibrium. This trap consists of a few mechanisms, some of which have a mostly cultural character, whereas others might be characterized as mainly institutional or material. One is the legacy of colonial export patterns. Here the question is whether this is a cultural effect, or whether it is a path-dependent effect of investments, interests, and institutions that are set up to carry out the tasks of primaryproducts export. One may call this cultural, but arguably it is less a consequence of shared attitudes and socialization and more a question of pathways that become ruts in the road for that actors must drive in. The second mechanism is a taste for high-status import manufactures—a clearly cultural variable. The third mechanism is the redistributive role of the state as, a populist idea. The primary-product export economy is a cash cow that subsidizes a part of the working class, which resists giving up their piece of it. One problem with this argument is that it works whether it is based on primary-product exports or import-substituting industrialization. The

206  Jack L. Snyder latter is Peronism, with its populist cash cow based not on primary-product exports but from subsidies for unionized industrial labor. Is the choice between primaryproduct exports and ISI a phenomenon of strategic-economic culture, or is it institutional path dependence, or is it simply entrenched interests in a powerful ruling coalition? Arguably this choice is also shaped by the lack of institutions to provide a social safety net more efficiently through a liberal welfare state. In general, I think all of these applications of strategic culture to other domains are very promising. My own recent applications have stayed fairly close to the original military topics. I have a project on cyber strategic culture with Erica Borghard Lonergan (2023). We are looking not only at differences in the cybercultures of different states but also at the differences in the cybercultures of different U.S. Government agencies. Some of these are in charge of strategic offensive cyber operations and others are in charge of defensive cyber operations in different parts of the national security bureaucracy that draw on experts with different backgrounds and technical expertise. They wind up thinking very differently about cyberconflict because they develop divergent organizational cultures linked to their different missions. I am also interested in extending the concept of strategic culture further afield to NGOs promoting human rights. Some of them are legalistic, whereas others do field delivery of services, which makes them more pragmatist because they have to get a job done on the ground. This exposes them more immediately to feedback on the success of their strategy. They are more likely to be “vernacularizers” of human rights talk (Snyder 2022). I think all of these are very promising extensions of strategic culture theory—a theory of strategic choice that is shaped by culture. The present volume is a valuable step in this direction that expands the scope of the approach yet avoids concept stretching and is laudably self-conscious in asking what evidence shows the mechanisms of strategic culture that are at work in each case. References Lonergan, Erica D., and Jack L. Snyder (2023): “Can Military Cultures Adapt to Cyberspace? Hackers and Warriors in the U.S. Army,” manuscript, April. Oneal, John R., and Bruce Russett (2001): Triangulating the Democratic Peace (New York, NY: W. W. Norton & Co). Posen, Barry (1984): The Sources of Military Doctrine (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984). Sartori, Giovanni (1970): “Concept Misinformation in Comparative Politics,” American Political Science Review, Vol. 64, No. 4, pp. 1033–1053. Snyder, Jack (2022): Human Rights for Pragmatists: Social Power in Modern Times (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).

Conclusion Onur Erpul, Félix E. Martín, Nicolás Terradas, and Diego Zambrano

At the center of this edited volume lies a preoccupation with understanding behavior in the discipline of International Relations (IR). Most dominant theories in the discipline suggest that most political units behave collectively according to external compulsion and structural incentives. Thus, only the most powerful actors in the international system can prima facie shape and challenge these contextual, constraining conditioning. Weaker actors, however, are supposed to act under the direct constraints of structural imperatives. This “structural tradition” in IR suggests that the structure incentivizes or disincentivizes particular types of collective behavior by rewarding actors that adapt and conform to structural imperatives while disciplining those who do not. Furthermore, weaker actors are often presumed incapable of both effectively assessing their strategic environment and taking strategic advantage of structural incentives and opportunities. Although generally compelling, these types of explanations frequently leave significant empirical realities in international relations largely unexplained. Within the Realist tradition, for instance, the works of Randall Schweller and Arnold Wolfers point out some of the limitations of the “structural tradition” as a whole. As was discussed in the Introduction of this volume, for Schweller, structural explanations align better with reality when applied to the behavior of great powers. This conclusion derives from his premise that powerful states can “read” the structural environment “better,” which also allows them to adjust their internal and external behavior to take advantage of strategic opportunities created by changing structural incentives. Unstable, fragmented, or weak states are thus less likely to sustain the costs of changing behavior to conform to external conditioning and imperatives. Wolfers, however, suggested that these types of explanations can only elucidate rare instances in international relations—yet not “regular” international relations. According to Wolfers, for structural explanations to work, the empirical reality must present a situation in which external factors and structural conditions are unambiguously strong, consistent over time, and compelling. However, given the nature of the international system, these situations are only occasionally present, thus giving rise to various other sets of explanations unrelated to pure external pressure. In other words, Wolfers maintained that a significant number of situations in international relations do not present the necessary strength of external forces (what DOI: 10.4324/9781003142508-13

208  Onur Erpul, Félix E. Martín, Nicolás Terradas et al. he called “compulsion”) for the type of explanations formulated in the “structural tradition” to work as the main, nor only, theoretical possibility. If structural explanations, to work effectively, required the presence and influence of great powers and the prevalence of constraining external conditions, then scholars would have to assume away (or leave unexplained) significant aspects of international politics itself. Except for a handful of great powers in the international system at various historical periods, most of the political units in global politics most of the time are relatively weaker and less influential. The “structural tradition” in IR, however, postulates an international state system characterized and populated by powerful political units whose competitive interactions occur in an anarchical (or “horizontal”) environment instead of a hierarchical one that restricts and conditions weaker powers’ external behavior. Thus, if the purely structural perspective considers only the role of great powers and their compelling contextual conditions, then how can we account for the rest of global politics? Put differently, how can IR successfully study and explain those situations in which the international structure does not compel or condition the behavior of smaller actors? This edited volume responded to these limitations of the “structural tradition” by bringing back the concept of strategic culture, originally developed by Jack L. Snyder in the late 1970s to study superpower rivalry and their divergent policy preferences regarding nuclear weapons decision-making at the height of the Cold War. His motivation for advancing strategic culture as a concept and theory was to provide the IR discipline with new ideas and implications in response to the inadequacies of the rational-choice approaches of the time, which tried to account for the policy preferences and attitudes of Soviet decision-makers in terms of their nuclear deterrence policies. Similarly, the present volume relied on strategic culture to emphasize the strategic dimension and elucidate challenging and puzzling national and intra-regional policies which defy the logic of systemic or structural explanations and similar insights based on rational choice theory. Accordingly, the editors of this volume suggested a conceptual journey to Latin America by identifying strategic culture’s utility and pertinence as a theoretical tool while also adhering consistently to its core assumptions and internal logic. Extending strategic culture as a “research program” to the Global South—particularly to Latin America—offers new insights for the analysis of other policy domains beyond the classical preoccupation with nuclear strategy, as well as for addressing intractable strategic questions that have obscured the study of national and intraregional policy puzzles. Thus, this edited volume engaged first with an application of the concept of strategic culture to the study of puzzling and persistent collective behavior by Latin American states in various strategic environments and across different policy domains. This exegesis aimed at providing alternative answers to theoretically puzzling cases where the classical structural approach was inadequate to explain the continuity of behavior across long periods. With these guiding objectives in mind, the volume pursued three main goals: 1 It creatively engaged with the original strategic culture concept coined by Jack L. Snyder in 1977, proposing “merges” between the concept and other established IR theories.

Conclusion 209 2 It expanded the original concept by applying it to different policy domains of statecraft and levels of analysis, thus moving beyond the traditional focus on great power politics, nuclear strategy, and merely dyadic levels of interaction. 3 It identified key (“puzzling”) situations in which explanations based on the “structural tradition” were inadequate in accounting for enduring types of behavior by non-great powers amid changes in their international context; thus, further introducing the concept of strategic culture as an alternative and more effective explanation. Part I of this volume presented two chapters that engaged with the concept and literature on strategic culture. Chapter 1: “The Concept of Strategic Culture,” by Jack L. Snyder, reflected on the fundamental aspects of the concept, originally used to explain Soviet strategic preferences regarding nuclear weapons policy but later adopted by other scholars with widely different agendas. These other uses of the concept over-emphasized the “cultural” component while neglecting the “strategic” one, further adopting expansive understandings of so-called “large-C” culture. Paradoxically, however, the newer waves of strategic culture post-Snyder kept the traditional, narrow focus on nuclear weapons policy between individual (or pairs of) great powers. Snyder argues that contrary to these other uses of the concept within Security Studies, his notion of culture (“small-C”) from the original formulation discusses “what is distinctive in a group’s approach to strategy.” For Snyder, the “cultural” component in the strategic culture research agenda should focus on explaining why different actors would present different approaches when facing similar and “tight” strategic circumstances; or, also, why different actors would present persistent, similar behaviors when facing “loose” and/or changing contextual incentives. In this sense, the original concept advances the notion of “culture” in strategic culture as an element of policy persistence or constancy. Rather than a collection of approaches at the hand of decision-makers in order to simply rationalize their behavior ex post facto, Snyder argues that strategic culture evolves from a persistent set of preferences and beliefs that are socialized over time and inform group decisions. Strategic culture explanations, therefore, must elaborate on how macro strategic conditioning factors can socialize beliefs to the point where they generate groups of actual “believers” in the particular values and preferences—or “culture”—distinctive from other groups. Up to a point, Snyder suggests, strategic culture evolves from a particular strategic context that, over time, creates a distinctive set of preferences and beliefs that persist even after the initial strategic context has changed. In Chapter 2: “Updating, Decentering, and Extending Strategic Culture,” Onur Erpul further developed the theoretical potential of strategic culture. First, Erpul discussed the importance of rescuing Snyder’s original concept from more contemporary uses and developed areas of expansion within Strategic Studies. Engaging extensively with the current literature on strategic culture, Erpul stressed the enduring importance of Snyder’s original conceptualization for addressing contemporary theoretical puzzles emanating from regional studies and non-mainstream IR. For instance, Erpul further underscored the importance of using a restricted notion of culture, in line with Snyder’s original formulation. This aspect is crucial for redirecting the study of strategic culture toward explaining continuity (or persistence) in

210  Onur Erpul, Félix E. Martín, Nicolás Terradas et al. strategic behavior rather than simply change (or uniqueness). In this context, and in direct criticisms of the so-called “Third Wave” of strategic culture studies, Erpul argued that the discipline should move back to Snyder’s original formulation, viewing culture “as interacting with structural explanations.” Chapter 2 also discussed how strategic culture could expand as a research agenda through a more systematic application to other areas of IR. In this logic, Erpul explored how strategic culture à la Snyder could apply to other “domains of statecraft” beyond nuclear weapons policy and inter-great power politics. By reconnecting with the “strategy” component of strategic culture, Erpul suggested that all states commonly engage in a wide array of strategic areas or domains, which are susceptible to being influenced by the specific distinctive and persistent set of beliefs, values, and stylistic preferences of certain key groups of decision-makers that may come to occupy positions of power or strategic importance in terms of the formulation of external policy. Part II of the volume, dedicated to case study applications to Latin America, comprises five chapters that take the concept of strategic culture discussed earlier and apply it to different “domains of statecraft” in Latin America, beyond the traditional nuclear and inter-great power approaches. In this sense, the chapters in Part II articulated this volume’s response to the limitations of the systemic structural tradition in IR. Each contributor offered alternative sets of explanations using the concept of strategic culture as a supporting tool for tackling a particular “theoretical puzzle” of policy continuity. Each contributor was tasked with identifying a strategic domain of statecraft in which peripheral states presented a behavior that defied the logic of a structural or systemic explanation for the case. Moreover, the chapters identified different policy options that could have emerged under their particular strategic scenarios (in a “policy continuum”). They later discussed how decision-makers socialized into a particular set of beliefs, values, and stylistic preferences up to the point they came to embody a distinct strategic culture. In this context, Synoptic Table 9.1 provides an overview of the general arguments, tasks, and contributions of the case studies, summarizing how each applied chapter worked with the concept of strategic culture as a way to address puzzling situations, unexplained by the structural tradition. The first case study application, Chapter 3, is titled “The Role of ‘Diplomatic Culture’ in the Preservation of Order in South America.” In it, Nicolás Terradas employed the concept of strategic culture to explain the absence of inter-state war in Latin America. Terradas identified how existing theories underexplain Latin America’s “Long Peace” phenomenon and thus create the need for a new theoretical explanation. In terms of the puzzle, Terradas mentions that throughout the region’s history, various conditions favored the outbreak of inter-state war; nonetheless, Latin America presents a low incidence of war between states—thus marking a relatively prolonged period of peace compared to other regions. After identifying this puzzle, Terradas offers a creative theoretical “merging” between Hedley Bull’s notion of “diplomatic culture” and Jack Snyder’s “strategic culture.” Terradas contended that South American decision-makers shared similar socialization processes, as identified in the classical understanding of strategic culture, which nurtured the evolution of a particular “Strategic Diplomatic Culture” that

Conclusion 211 Synoptic Table 9.1  Case Study Chapters Summaries Chap. 3 “Puzzle”

Continuity of the “Long Peace”

Chap. 4

Chap. 5

Chap. 6

Continuity of Continuity Continuity of Socioeconomic of Prohibitionist Distortions warDrug Policies avoidance policy Policy Diplomacy Political External Internal domain Economy Security Security and Health “Merging” English Dependency Militarist Norm-based School Theory Peace Constructivism “Continuum” Inter-state Industrial— Inter-state Legalization— Peace— Extractive Peace— Prohibition War War Pol. Econ. SC Strategic Strategic Strategic Strategic Culture explanation Diplomatic Culture of Culture of Prohibition Culture Extractivism of War Avoidance

Chap. 7 Continuity of Traditional Security Peacekeeping Civil-Military Relations Cosmopolitan— Traditional Security Strategic Culture of Traditional Security

expressed itself in the preference for peacefully resolving conflicts between states through diplomatic and negotiated means, rather than inter-state violence and the use of force. Also exploring the same theoretical puzzle of inter-state peace in Latin America, Félix E. Martín explored in Chapter 5 the role of the militaries as “influencers and gatekeepers.” Martín’s argument complements well with Terradas’ focus on diplomacy, for both militaries and diplomats were exposed to similar socializing contexts throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries while also were, by definition, positioned as key players in the process of foreign policy formulation and discussions around the use of force. Martín’s approach to the issue of “waravoidance” as a conscious policy works well with the complementary idea of diplomats as reinforcing strategic subcultures leading to a general climax of no war in Latin America since the end of the Chaco War in 1935. While one group of actors acted as influencers and gatekeepers from the technical and military side of war, the other played a similar role in preventing and negotiating political frameworks to sustain the peace over time. In his chapter, Félix E. Martín also identified the paradoxical nature of the empirical reality of South America in relation to violence. While the region presents some of the highest levels of internal violence globally, it also shows a relatively low incidence of external violence. Martín argued that the military bureaucracy that consolidated throughout the twentieth century in the region shared in the socializing processes and developed preferences that favored war-avoidance to resolve militarized inter-state disputes. Although none of the respective authors explored the potential interconnections between the two approaches, nothing seems to preclude a common socializing process for both diplomats and the military. In principle, both are members of a highly institutionalized state bureaucracy, with

212  Onur Erpul, Félix E. Martín, Nicolás Terradas et al. traditions and organizational characteristics that involve induction, education, and training processes, as well as the identification with a larger “national interest” and duty to the country. That both groups of actors may have been deeply influenced in their overall predispositions and outlook hand-in-hand with the process of stateformation in the late nineteenth century further reinforces the suspected synergy and resemblance in the trajectory of both groups of actors, as well as their role in the creation and preservation of intraregional peace in Latin America. Finally, the interaction between the two can also shed some light on the continuation of peace even after the militaries diminished their overt control of the state in the 1980s and 1990s. In Chapter 4, titled “South American Political Economy: Strategic Culture and the Question of Agency,” Diego Zambrano further moved the discussion away from war and peace—by all accounts elements of the more traditional strategic culture agenda—toward a different domain of statecraft: political economy. Zambrano creatively used the concept of strategic culture to explain the continuity of extractivist policies in the region, arguing that existing theories still provide ill-suited explanations for the tenacity of counterproductive political-economic choices in South America. Quite paradoxically, the region has been historically characterized by the centrality of extractivist policies in their productive activities, even though they knowingly perpetuate cycles of poverty and inequality both domestically as well as transnationally. Changes in structural conditions have opened many opportunities for change in the past. However, decision-makers have stubbornly sustained extractivist policies instead of adjusting to the fluctuating financial and commercial international contexts. Zambrano argued that most South American decision-makers had shared a socializing context that strongly molded them into favoring extractivist policies, establishing values and beliefs that positioned the exploitation of natural resources at the center of “a strategic culture of extractivist political economy.” The last two case study chapters continued the empirical application and exploration of strategic culture into different non-traditional domains of statecraft. Chapter 6, “The Strategic Culture of Prohibition and the Puzzling Continuity of Drug Policies in South America,” by Nicolas A. Beckmann, offered a pioneering application of strategic culture to drug policy and public health in South America. Specifically, Beckmann explored the endurance of prohibitionist drug policies in the region when the structural environment became more favorable to adopting harm reduction policies. Even though some South American countries have recently relaxed aspects of their “hard-line” drug policies, Beckmann argued that key decision-makers in many states had been socialized toward a preference for prohibition policies when dealing with conceiving and implementing drug policy. Historical processes have shaped the beliefs of relevant policy-makers in structural contexts of prohibition that have evolved into “a strategic culture of prohibition,” shared across several crucial states, even after changes in the external reality, as well as medical and scientific advancements, supporting harm reduction policies. In Chapter 7, “No Place for Cosmopolitan Peacekeeping: South America and Its Prevailing Strategic Culture of Security,” Nicole Jenne also delved into a new

Conclusion 213 strategic domain of statecraft: peacekeeping. In this chapter, Jenne employed the concept of strategic culture to explain the continuity of traditional security understandings in the region’s experiences with peacekeeping. She identified how, since the 1990s, South American states have maintained a traditional security approach even in a global context that has firmly moved toward a cosmopolitan approach to peacekeeping. In this context, however, South American states have engaged in multilateral discussions to adopt new regional security mechanisms to respond to changes in the region’s most insecure areas. Nevertheless, security decision-makers have shared historical socialization processes which have shaped their preferences toward valuing sovereignty and territorial integrity above all else. Therefore, Jenne argued, the socialization of security decision-makers developed “a traditional security strategic culture” that still informs the region’s collective policy approach to a new (global) context of multilateral security arrangements. In contrast with Terradas’ and Martín’s chapters, Zambrano’s, Jenne’s, and Beckmann’s respective case studies showed that even when exploring the same region, states can evince distinct strategic cultures (or subcultures) depending on the strategic policy domain in question. Thus, within the larger realm of “security,” while the military establishments and the diplomatic schools of the region may converge on the avoidance of war and the preservation of peace, a more traditional (or Realist) approach and strategic predisposition may prevail when operating in a strictly multilateral institutional setting such as regional peacekeeping missions involving efforts in “sovereignty-pooling.” In the case of South America, although “regional peace” remains a shared goal and policy concern, different strategic (sub) cultures seem to interact at different levels of analysis. As Jack L. Snyder’s closing Chapter 8 discussed, the preceding case-study applications made extensive inroads into the “contextual” process that shaped and nurtured distinctive “strategic cultures” in various regional scenarios. In Snyder’s eyes, this ““traveling”” of strategic culture to Latin America constitutes a crucial first approach in creatively using the revised concept (as suggested by Erpul in Chapter 2) for understanding enduring puzzles of policy continuity in contexts previously unexplored in the discipline. However, such innovative uses of the strategic culture concept and theory call for constructing a new typology of strategic culture “that varies on a continuum or among more than one value of the variable.” This angle is something that the chapters paid close attention to and which may contribute in the future to the formulation of types (or categories) of strategic cultures, which may bring some structure and order to the research agenda by also identifying categories of “puzzles” to which strategic culture may tackle or offer some new insights. Going beyond the volume’s suggestion of considering non-nuclear strategic “policy domains,” as well as non-great power politics, and non-dyadic interactions (i.e., a regional level of analysis), Snyder also proposes the application of this strategic culture agenda to non-state actors such as NGOs’ global interactions (inter se and with states), as well as to other new or emerging strategic “policy domains,” such as cyber-security, terrorism, human rights, among others. The case study chapters in this volume represent, therefore, not only a first exploratory attempt at the application to a particular region (Latin America) of a refined

214  Onur Erpul, Félix E. Martín, Nicolás Terradas et al. understanding of strategic culture but also pose a challenge to Strategic Studies scholars to further extend the framework suggested in this book to other regional contexts, periods, sets of actors, and strategic domains of statecraft. Strategic Culture and Global IR One of the significant contributions of this volume should be contextualized within the broader framework of enhancing theory-crafting potential outside the Global Core. Purely structural and materialist theories of state behavior have long dominated the theoretical mainstream of the IR discipline and determined the scientific merits by which contributions are assessed (Tickner 2013: 629–633). Pseudoscientific gatekeeping has prioritized universal and generalizable theories originating from “the West” at the expense of homegrown scholarship from the Global South (Tickner 2003: 303–305; Alejandro 2018; Anderl and Witt 2020: 46). The Global IR conversation, therefore, aims to critique and correct these epistemic deficiencies. Despite a plethora of promising research highlighting these problems, however, including the continued parochialism and Western dominance of the discipline (Acharya and Buzan 2017: 343–348), there is no fixed formula to achieve a more plural discipline. Strategic culture can, therefore, make its most significant impact in developing a forward-looking theoretical or research agenda. On this front, it can offer considerable analytical leverage in the Global South by creating the opportunity to analyze various actors and issue areas amenable to strategic lenses, from the very own historical perspective of the actors involved, and thus “speak back” to the mainstream approaches, not only involving them in Global South realities, but also introducing new alternative voices to the general disciplinary conversation. The goal of this volume, as stated above, has not been to “supplant a European [theory] with a Latin American one” but to diversify the universe of cases, to “produce a better and truly generalizable map of the social world” (Centeno and López-Alves 2001: 3). In this respect, strategic culture offers a much welcome framework with which to develop alternative homegrown and (or) hybrid theoretical approaches to study issues and questions particular to the complexities of the social life of a region, like Latin America, in the Global South (see Aydınlı and Biltekin 2017: 55–58). The exegeses comprising this volume not only tried to expand the traditional scope of mainstream theories (in terms of actors, issue area, and levels of analysis) but also tested their efficacy and potentially offered novel and corrective analyses that can accommodate the distinct structural circumstances and organizational histories of various milieus. In this sense, as Snyder suggests, the present volume revealed that strategic culture travels to Latin America. We think it travels well, not only geographically but also in domains, levels of analysis, and types of actors, suggesting similar theoretical and empirical endeavors for other theoretical frameworks, issue areas, and regions of the Global South. Strategic culture thus travels “vertically” below great powers relations and “horizontally” across various layers of policy domains. As the individual chapters showed, the rigorous theoretical journey and rich empirical

Conclusion 215 inquiry comprising this edited volume demonstrate its value and applicability to other regions in the Global South amply. More impressively (and quite ironically), strategic culture can achieve this by explicitly rejecting cultural essentialism in favor of grounded analyses that pay heed to structural factors and the inimitability of strategic cultural communities and their subcultures—as products of organizational experiences and interactions. The strategic culture approach is a particularly worthwhile endeavor because it stands in stark comparison to some contributions that seek to communicate the distinctiveness of the Global South contexts by way of (re)discovering, and in many cases translating for Western audiences, the principles and doctrines of ancient authorities that ultimately essentialize their country context just to fit them into a Western theoretical construct (Datta-Ray 2021: 226, 246). Our argument is not to suggest that strategic cultures cannot be inspired by such figures or other idiosyncrasies rooted in national and regional contexts (Aydınlı and Biltekin 2017: 52–55). The present volume contends that strategic cultures form in distinct historical and geographic spaces that contain dense networks of interactions within and between organizations of different countries and diverse policy domains encompassing the region and subnational actors as well as states. A strategic cultural lens, therefore, affords theory-crafting opportunities that are sensitive to and appreciative of the agency and lived experiences of various actors and organizations from the Global South in a practical and novel way. As Jack Snyder put it, strategic culture may have first “traveled” to Latin America in the present volume. Nevertheless, it might be worth remembering that it is already a seasoned traveler. With respect to aiding theory-building outside the Global North, the purpose of this volume is not to gatekeep strategic culture. Regardless of one’s preferences toward contributing universal theories and whether one retains an understanding of strategic culture that coheres to its original and strategic meaning, the concept and theory of strategic culture continue to proliferate in the Global South. Our humble contention is that a strategic culture perspective that prioritizes the “strategic” over the “cultural” may offer a more promising and exciting way to solve the underrepresentation of scholars and epistemologies from the Global South. Moreover, and contrary to the opinion of some radical Global IR scholars, strategic culture is an excellent illustration of how IR concepts invented by scholars from the Core (or Global North) may still be beneficial in explaining peculiar developments and cases from the Global South when their application pays close attention to local contexts and engages in two-way dialogues between the empirical reality of the case and the theoretical framework or lens selected privileged in the analysis. In other words, only a creative and critical engagement with theories and concepts produced by and for the Global North can realistically hope to produce new knowledge that works for the Global South, that “speaks back” to the Core, and essentially challenges, reshapes, and rewrites the common narrative. On the contrary, non-engagement with the Core can only lead to further separation and division, to a lack of constructive dialogue and understanding, and an intellectual “black boxing” of ideas from both sides.

216  Onur Erpul, Félix E. Martín, Nicolás Terradas et al. Where Do We Go From Here? Suggestions for Further Research The central theoretical arguments advanced in this volume also lay the foundations for a new research agenda centered on using strategic culture to complement existing IR theories trying to explain enduring or resilient types of international behavior in the Global South. Therefore, the central insight of this research agenda emerges from the problematization of the dominant structural explanations in IR. That is: the explanation of all policy continuities solely through the compulsory effects of contextual, systemic, or external pressures and incentives. What this volume proposes, however, is the use of strategic culture as a framework for understanding those other (numerous) situations where continuity of policy emanates more strongly from the long-lasting effects of internal and regional factors related to the role of specific decision-makers socialized into a particular “strategic culture.” In this regard, this type of research agenda can contribute to a general understanding of an aspect otherwise neglected by the classical approaches: the factor of convergence. As pointed out in the Introduction and Chapter 2, once identified in a specific actor, the appropriateness of a strategic culture analysis could also be extended to a group of similarly disposed and socialized players, thus creating a new area of inquiry for strategic cultural research focused on similarity rather than on a difference in the strategic cultures within a given region. When the particularities of a region offer a similar context of socialization, it also opens the door for the progressive convergence of strategic cultures transnationally. This tack elevates, in turn, the importance of adopting a regional level of analysis rather than a singlecase national approach or a dyadic approach. The convergence factor also implies that not just one but also a group of regional actors can project similarly persistent external behaviors, not as a collective response to common structural pressures of incentives, but according to converging “national” strategic cultures. This type of explanation, as well, gains relevance for understanding non-great power actors, such as countries from the Global South. Since non-great-power tend to share an array of specific material, social and ideational contexts, and interact more intensely within the same region than with the rest of the world, the opportunities for decision-makers to develop types of strategic cultures that may resemble one another increase exponentially. In this sense, it is vital to explore how peripheral “strategic communities” can develop similar preferences and stylistic predispositions that defy potent changes in the system of structural incentives. These strategic communities are thus dynamic, for they not only emerge and then remain static once implemented but, in effect, continue to influence one another through a sustained process of continuous interactions that must also involve elements of strategic learning, adjustment, and change. In this general context, Latin America’s experience initially expands the concept of strategic culture by incorporating the idea of convergence of national strategic cultures at a regional level in a mutually reinforcing space where strategic cultures evolve over time. A research agenda centered on the understanding of strategic culture advanced in this volume could, in principle, applies to more than just Latin America or some of its states. Prima facie, all other world regions are susceptible to this type of

Conclusion 217 framing—including those containing multiple great powers, like Europe or East Asia. However, those regions like Latin America—populated with non-great power states—can present more interesting or “puzzling” case studies, given that the pressures and incentives of the international structure are still supposed to have a stronger pull on those below the great power category. Nevertheless, once the myth behind the idea that smaller powers cannot efficiently develop, implement, or sustain strategic cultures is rejected, the recognition of the fact that other actors, even non-state ones, can develop particular strategic cultures, then the application of this research agenda can be extended to other types of strategic actors, such as Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), multinational corporations, international sports teams, terrorist networks, religious actors, and other players engaged in strategic interactions with “the international” as a competitive regional or global context. Similarly, hand-in-hand with the different types of actors beyond the state, one must also think of various domains of statecraft and other innovative ways of applying the strategic culture framework to become possible. As long as these domains qualify as part of an interactive, competitive, and strategic external setting, any policy domain is a candidate for this type of analysis. In Chapter 8, for example, Jack Snyder suggested the issue of cyber-security as one such domain. The combination of different actors and policy domains, however, also creates opportunities for genuinely pioneering research on multilateral International Organizations, Inter-Governmental Organizations (IGOs), transnational civil society groups, and environmental activists, as they too involved themselves in common strategic “policy domains,” such as climate change reduction, global health administration, outer-space exploration, market competition, and economic cooperation, or development aid. Since the possible areas of application are vast, the richness and insight of the concept of strategic culture should not remain solely confined to Cold War-styled dyadic analyses of nuclear great power competition or the idiosyncratic “national ways of war” of old. Finally, an additional aspect of the research agenda must be its implications for action (or implementation strategies). So far, this volume has offered an understanding of the concept and theoretical framework centered on a view from academia. That is: it has discussed the role of strategic culture in constructing explanations of particular state policies and behavior. However, the entire endeavor also introduces significant consequences for policy itself. Armed with an understanding of how strategic cultures form, develop, and impact policy over time, practitioners themselves—and not just academics!—can implement “strategic cultural strategies” that may seek to install favored (or erode undesired) strategic cultures in the milieu of specific institutions, organizations, or centers of decision-making. Following Snyder, this volume has primarily treated strategic culture as a constant, yet unintended, phenomenon characterized by a certain level of informality and indirectness. However, future research might do well in exploring strategic culture along a continuum of “levels of self-awareness” by decision-makers. Since, as we have indicated above, strategic culture is dynamic and evolves through sustained interaction, members of the “strategic communities” who are the target of (academic) strategic cultural analysis may well develop a stronger sense of self-awareness, that

218  Onur Erpul, Félix E. Martín, Nicolás Terradas et al. is: of their role and strategic weight in the formulation or implementation of certain key decisions for the state or other actors, and thus come to act more reflectively upon its own “values, beliefs, and stylistic predispositions.” For example, the relentless campaigning, advocating, and ultimate implementation of “benevolent imperial” policies by Neoconservative factions in the United States comes to mind as a well-documented case of a strategic community, deeply self-aware of their own agenda and bent on installing in different levels of U.S. Government their particular “strategic culture” and agenda. Since the years of the Reagan Administration, up to the planning of the Iraq war of 2003, Neoconservatives carried out a well-planned, multi-level strategy of public engagement and creation of a favorable mood of support for the war. Other, perhaps less nefarious, examples can also inspire more concrete case studies of how strategic culture may act as a “guide to policy” in terms of how self-aware actors can change, update, and improve (or downgrade, circumspect, or purge) particular strategic cultures and their agents for action (“gatekeepers”) from governmental ranks or important decision-making positions in an organization. Strategic culture, therefore, has enormous potential as an instrument of policy change when the role that individuals play as embodiments of a specific strategic culture is emphasized, as well as when their influences and socialization processes are scrutinized closely. This last point, in conclusion, also raises implications for the phenomenon of “strategic learning” in global politics. Since strategic culture suggests a way to study the reasons behind why certain actors may seem to “disregard” the imperatives of the international system or “double down” on ultimately self-defeating policies, creating “puzzling” policy continuities in the context of structural change, then a renewed engagement with strategic culture as an analytical decision-making framework invites further reflection on the appropriate theoretical tools to carry out actual research. In this sense, the concept of strategic culture reminds us that an excellent place to start is by being skeptical, like Wolfers, of the traditional Realist proposition of the “structural tradition,” which depicts global politics as a rationalist universe, where most decision-makers are expected to act most of the time similarly in the face of identical structural conditions and threats and external imperatives. References Acharya, Amitav and Barry Buzan (2017): “Why is There no Non-Western International Relations Theory? Ten Years On,” International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, Vol. 17, No. 3, pp. 341–370. Alejandro, Audrey (2018): Western Dominance in International Relations? The Internationalisation of IR in Brazil and India (New York, NY: Routledge). Anderl, Felix and Antonia Witt (2020): “Problematising the Global in Global IR,” Millennium, Vol. 49, No. 1, pp. 32–57. Aydınlı, Ersel and Gonca Biltekin (2017): “Widening the World of IR: A Typology of Homegrown Theorizing,” All Azimuth: A Journal of Foreign Policy and Peace, Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 45–68. Centeno, Miguel Á. and Fernando López-Alves (eds.) (2001): The Other Mirror: Grand Theory through the Lens of Latin America (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press).

Conclusion 219 Datta-Ray, Deep K. (2021): “The Interactions of International Relations: Racism, Colonialism, Producer-Centred Research,” All Azimuth: A Journal of Foreign Policy and Peace, Vol. 10, No. 2, pp. 231–253. Tickner, Arlene (2003): “Seeing IR differently: notes from the Third World,” Millennium, Vol. 32, No. 2, pp. 295–324. Tickner, Arlene (2013): “Core, Periphery, and (Neo)Imperialist International Relations,” European Journal of International Relations, Vol. 19, No. 3, pp. 327–346.

Notes on Contributors

Nicolas A. Beckmann is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Sciences at Universidad Pontificia Bolivariana in Medellín, Colombia, where he coordinates the area of International Relations. His research examines how norm advocacy and contestation have affected drug-policy decisions in South America. Onur Erpul is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Center for Foreign Policy and Peace Research at the Ihsan Doğramacı Peace Foundation in Ankara, Turkey. He is also an Adjunct Instructor in the Department of International Relations at Middle East Technical University in Ankara, Turkey. His interests include IR theory and foreign policy. Nicole Jenne is an Associate Professor at the Institute of Political Science at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile in Santiago, Chile. Her research explores different aspects of international security in South America and the Asia Pacific, peacekeeping, and the changing use of state militaries. She currently serves as Associate Editor of Contemporary Security Policy. Félix E. Martín is an Associate Professor in the Department of Politics and International Relations in the School of International and Public Affairs at Florida International University in Miami, USA. His areas of specialization include international relations theory, security and peace studies, and international political economy. He is a specialist in the security and political economy of Latin America and Southern Europe. He is currently working on a forthcoming book with Edward Elgar Publishing on the notion of “dis-development,” its theoretical foundations, and its manifestations in selected Latin American countries. Jack L. Snyder is the Robert and Renée Belfer Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science and the Saltzman Institute of War and Peace Studies at Columbia University in New York, USA. He is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He writes on such topics as crisis diplomacy, democratization and war, nationalism, imperial overstretch, war crimes tribunals versus amnesties, international relations theory after September 11, and anarchy and culture.

Notes on Contributors  221 Nicolás Terradas is a tenure-track Assistant Professor in the Department of Social Sciences at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PUCP), in Lima, Peru, where he teaches courses on IR Theory, Methodology, and IR of Latin America. His general research interests are IR Theory, Security Studies, and Latin American international politics. Currently, his work explores the application of English School insights to the study of Latin America’s international politics, as well as the incorporation of qualitative research tools, such as process-tracing analysis, archival research, and case-study research, to the English School methods. Diego Zambrano is a research and performance analyst at Paradine. His academic research focuses on International Political Economy, particularly on how global economic conditions shape political and economic relations in South America. His doctoral dissertation from Florida International University in Miami, USA, reinterprets the formation of the South American state to explain the continuity of poverty and inequality in the region.

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Index

absence-of-war and frequency-of-war 59 aerial bombardment 26 agents of change 189, 190, 195, 196 ALCOPAZ 195; see also peacekeeping anarchy, international 20, 46 Andean Trade Preference Act (ATPA) 164 Andean Trade Promotion and Drug Eradication Act (ATPDA) 167 arbitration 75, 77, 137, 138, 188, 204 Argentina-Chile dyad 117, 124, 126, 137, 138, 139, 147; control over Strait of Magellan 137 Arroyo del Río, Carlos Alberto 134 attitudes 29, 33, 34, 35, 36, 39, 46, 48, 59, 66, 99, 117 Ayala, Eusebio 129, 132 bargaining 20, 43 Beagle Channel dispute 118, 126, 133, 137, 138, 147 behavioral toxicity 158 Belaúde Terry, Fernando 135 beliefs xi, 3, 11, 19, 20, 21, 23, 26, 29, 33, 34, 39, 42, 48, 66, 143, 164, 209, 210, 212, 218 black box (of state) 31, 215 Black Legend 91, 110 Bull, Hedley 13, 31, 48, 58, 59, 64, 67, 68, 69, 77, 78, 81, 82, 85 bureaucratic authoritarian regimes 120, 127, 141 Busch Becerra, Germán 130 Cabrera Sevilla, Raúl 135 Cardoso, Fernando Henrique 89, 95, 96, 165 Cenepa War (Jan 26, 1995 – Feb 28, 1995) 192

Centeno, Miguel Ángel 1, 11, 15, 56, 57, 58, 61, 62, 63, 71, 73, 79, 80, 82, 103, 105, 111, 112, 113, 118 Centre for Strategic Studies in Defense (CEED) 193 certification process 164 Chaco War 60, 76, 81, 115; causes 128–129; generation 131; Peace Conference 127; Royal Dutch Shell 128; Standard Oil Corporation 128, 130 Chávez, Hugo 144 Chincha Islands War (1864–1866) 72 civil disobedience 24, 146 civilian control 23, 186 Clausewitz, Carl von 15, 36; engagements 44, 48; strategy (definition) 10, 44 coca 155, 156, 161, 163, 164, 173, 174, 175, 178, 180, 181 Cold War xii, 12, 16, 29, 30, 38, 46, 50, 51, 61, 63, 66, 82, 95, 125, 138, 150, 183, 185, 186, 203, 208, 217 Colombian-Ecuadorian border crisis 144, 145; incursion into northern Ecuador 144 Colombian-Venezuela border crisis 145, 146 Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC) 55, 82 competition 20, 27, 28, 31, 40, 41, 49, 71, 97, 98, 128, 140, 148, 171, 175, 176, 186, 217; in new domain 13; great power 3, 125; security 55 confidence building 183 conflict resolution 77, 123, 187, 188, 192, 197, 199, 204 Contreras Sepúlveda, Manuel 138 constructivism 211

240 Index convergence xii, 5, 11, 46, 47, 70, 186, 190, 191, 197, 216 cooperation 28, 56, 72, 76, 78, 82, 124, 149, 151, 164, 173; economic 108, 217; institutional 11; military 186, 194; regional 75, 182, 186, 188, 191, 192, 193, 196; security 184, 185, 189 Correa, Rafael 145, 166, 167, 168, 169, 177 Correlates of War Project (COW) 56, 59, 81 cosmopolitan 183, 184, 185, 187, 191, 197, 200, 204, 211 Costa Rican Civil War 140, 149 Council of South America Defense 124 counterfactuals 8, 24, 27 criminal groups 155, 156, 159, 161, 168, 171, 176 Cruz del Sur 193 Cuban Revolution 140–141, 149 cult of the defensive 24 culture 20, 21, 29, 30, 31; cosmopolitan 6; diplomatic 67, 69; intellectual 64; world 64, 67 cultures of anarchy 21 culture-turn (in International Relations) 38 decriminalization 156, 170, 175 de-industrialization 93 democratic peace theory 139, 147 democratization 27, 42, 122, 186, 200 depenalization 172, 175 Dirty War 120, 148, 151 domains of statecraft 10, 11, 12, 30, 43, 44, 45, 46, 47, 209, 210, 212, 214, 217 Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) 157 Duque, Iván 121 Ecuador and Peru dyad 56–57, 85, 118, 127, 133–136, 153, 192; causes 133–134; Gentlemen’s Agreement 135 Ecuadorean-Peruvian militarized conflict 116 education 21, 75, 99, 101, 105, 106, 110, 166, 174, 194, 212 élites xi, 12, 14, 22, 25, 28, 39, 40, 42, 48, 62, 64, 67, 69, 71, 73, 75, 78, 79, 83, 101, 104–109, 132, 165, 191 English school (ES) 13, 64, 79, 211 ethnocentrism 32, 48, 81, 203 export-led growth model 88–89, 204

external-peace-and-internal-violence paradox 14, 115, 118, 121, 125, 146 extractivism xii, 90, 95, 100–102, 112–113, 211 Falklands/Malvinas War 59, 63, 125, 150 Force: use of 19, 20–21, 26, 38–39, 45, 47, 55, 58, 59, 68, 79, 115, 117, 122, 123, 125, 127, 129, 133, 139, 140, 142, 144, 145, 150, 159, 161, 185, 187, 191, 198, 211 Franco, Rafael 132 Fredrick, the Great 22–23 French Revolution 20, 27 Gandhi, Mahatma 24 Gaviria, César 92, 165 geographical circumstances 22 Germany 22, 24, 27, 48 Global Commission on Drug Policy 166 Gray, Colin S. 48, 203 Guggiari Corniglione, José Patricio 131 The Hague conventions 188 harm and risk reduction xii, 157–162, 165–172, 175–176, 204, 212 Hirschman, Albert 87, 112 Humala, Ollanta 173–174 Huntington, Samuel P. 25, 27, 139, 149, 151 hypocrisy 22, 27, 69 Ideology of the Offensive 23, 28, 42, 50 import substitution industrialization 89, 95 India 25, 28, 218 Indonesia 25, 26, 27 inequality 86–89, 93–94, 96, 100, 102, 106–108, 111–114, 212 inferential nature of war-avoidance policy 115, 116, 121, 122, 126, 127 interests 20–24, 29, 31, 33–35, 42, 44, 64–68, 74–75, 79, 96, 105, 130, 139–141, 143, 159, 174, 188, 191, 193, 196, 204, 205, 206; parochial 22, 24, 31, 42 International Drugs Control Regime (IDCR) 158 international society approach 13, 64–65, 69, 79 internalization 99, 157 inter-state peace 14, 56–58, 61, 115–116, 120, 122–125, 127, 138, 139, 143, 146

Index  241 inter-state war 13, 56–57, 63, 83, 115, 117–120, 123, 125–127, 139, 152, 210 isomorphism 12, 34, 40, 45–46 Johnston, A. Iain 19–21, 27, 37, 39, 40, 49, 50, 82, 151 Joint Combined Regional Peacekeeping Exercise 194; South American Defense Council (SADC) 183, 187, 194 La Violencia 119, 153 Latin American Commission on Drugs and Democracy 165 legalization 159–161, 165, 170, 172, 174, 176, 204, 211 Leticia conflict 81, 82, 134, 190 logistics 23 long peace 13–14, 56–57, 59–64, 68, 79, 80, 85, 116–117, 126, 127, 142–144, 147, 204, 210, 211 Lugo, Fernando 129 Macri, Mauricio 172, 177, 178, 179 Maduro, Nicolás 120, 145, 146, 149, 191 maladaptation 35 marihuana 159, 161, 173, 176, 177, 178, 179, 180 materialism 23 merging (theoretical) 15, 66, 91, 142, 158, 210, 211; militarist peace and strategic culture 116 micro-trafficking 167–169, 171 militarist peace perspective 115, 122, 125, 142 military 23, 26–28, 34, 49, 50, 61, 83, 115–116; epistemic community 79–80; organizations 35, 38, 44, 125, 126, 140, 203, 204; participation in domestic affairs 115, 120, 132, 133, 139; politicization 81, 140; socialization 117; transformation of mindset and institution 2, 117, 120, 121, 125, 129; supranational identity 117, 143 MINUSTAH (United Nations Stabilization Mission in Haiti) 183, 186, 190, 192, 194–196 Morales, Evo 121, 129, 152, 156, 175 Myths of Empire 22, 28, 42, 50, 84

National Agency for Development and Life Without Drugs (DEVIDA), Peru 173–174, 180 National Confederation of Farmers from Coca-Growing Basins of Peru (CONPACCP) 173 National Council of Narcotic and Psychotropic Substance Control (CONSEP), Ecuador 167–169, 179, 180 nationalism 20, 28 neoclassical realism 40–41, 43, 47, 50; transmission belt 40 New Doctrine of National Security and Development 141–142 new professionalization of the armed forces 140 Nigeria 25–26 non-intervention; principle 78, 188, 191–192, 193, 197 Non-Proliferation Treaty 188 norms xi, 21–22, 27, 39, 49, 73, 83, 186–187 North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) 57, 183, 204 nuclear operations 16, 20, 28, 50, 96, 153, 200 nuclear strategy 8–9, 32, 42–44, 66, 96, 143, 208, 209; flexible response 32, 36 open windows of opportunity 125 operation cóndor 141 order 3, 13, 27, 65, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 186, 187, 205; global 66, 68, 70, 78; regional 57–59, 73, 77, 78, 79, 81; world 38, 67, 69 Organization of American States (OAS) 78, 84, 134, 136, 170, 198, 204; missions 191 organizational theory 33, 34, 35, 42, 43; standard operating procedures (SOPs) 21, 26, 31; culture 34–36 organized crime 155, 160, 165, 171, 177 organized riot system 25–26 Pactos de Mayo 137 Paraguayan War or War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870) 62, 74, 85, 119, 128, 131, 150, 151, 154 Peace: definition 123; gradation 123; intraregional 115, 116, 120, 122, 125, 126, 127, 133, 138, 139,

242 Index 142, 143; narrow and simple, and complex broad and meanings 123; necessary and sufficient conditions for 123; negative 58, 123–124; positive 58, 123–125; stable 56, 60, 83; unstable 123–124 peace and war continuum 123; policy domain 116, 122 Peace Treaty with Paraguay 131 peaceful conflict resolution 77, 188, 192, 197 peacekeeping 182–189; ALCOPAZ: Latin American Association of Peacekeeping Training Centers 195; capacities 186, 187, 192, 196, 197; in Africa 192, 204, 205; in Europe 183, 184; in Southeast Asia 187, 198, 199; Joint South American Force 193; operations 193, 194, 198; Multinational Interim Force (MIF) for Haiti 190 Peru–Ecuador wars/armed conflicts 63 Petro, Gustavo 146 Pinochet, Augusto 138 Pitiantutá Lake incident 128 Planning Secretariat for the Prevention of Drug Addiction and the Fight Against Drugs 170 Platine War (1851–1852) 119 Pope John Paul II 136, 138 positivism 39 poverty 86–89, 92, 93, 96, 100, 102, 106, 108, 111, 114 Prado Ugarte, Manuel Prado 134 Prebisch, Raul 89, 106, 111, 113 prohibition 156–160 Protocol of Rio de Janeiro 134 Prussia 22 public health 101, 155, 159, 160, 167, 168, 170, 212 Quintanilla Quiroga, Carlos 130 RAND Corporation 9, 10, 16, 26, 28, 32, 49, 50, 68, 84, 114 rational actor model 30, 31, 33, 34, 36, 47 realism 16, 20, 27, 40, 41, 43, 47, 49, 50, 51 re-democratization 127 regionalism 85, 188, 192, 197, 199 rent-seeking 92–94, 100 repertoires of contentious actions 24, 26 repertoires of violence 24–26, 43

responsibility to protect 187 Reyer, Raúl 145 Richter Prado, Pedro 135 rioting 24–26 Roldós Aguilera, Jaime 135 Saavedra Lama, Carlos 76 Salamanca, Daniel 129 Santos, Juan Manuel 145 security: cosmopolitan approach 14, 187–189, 191, 193, 195, 196, 213; continuum 14, 122, 123, 185, 187, 204, 210, 217; culture 184–185, 187–197; global 187; studies 19, 27, 30, 31, 37, 45, 48, 50, 58, 91, 110, 142; traditional paradigm 183 security dilemma 25, 59, 63, 124; pernicious security-dilemma dynamics 63 security environment of South America 116, 121, 123, 126; boundary changes prior to 1932 118; exceptionality of 116–117; Grand Colombia disintegration in 1831 118; Guerra Grande 119; paucity of major intraregional wars 117; Peruvian-Bolivian Confederation of 1839 118 Schlieffen Plan 22 School of the Americas 124 Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs 162, 176 Soberón, Ricardo 173, 174, 178, 179, 180 social control 156, 160 social Darwinism 23 social revolutions 24 society of states 58, 64–65, 67, 69, 70, 72, 73, 76, 78, 79, 80 Solano López, Francisco 119, 131 South America as a puzzle xi, 55, 58, 59, 61, 64, 79, 161, 174, 185, 192, 205, 210, 211; as an anomaly xii, 59, 61, 63, 117; as an exception 59–60 South American Defense Council (SADC) 183, 187, 194 Soviet Union 8, 12, 20, 21, 26, 28, 32, 36, 38, 47, 95, 140, 141; Soviet thought 9, 29; Soviet man (Homo Sovieticus) 32 state-to-nation balance 63 statecraft 10–13, 30, 31, 43–47, 66, 96, 98, 209, 210, 212, 213, 214, 217

Index  243 strategic culture 8–11, 16; attitudes 19–20; community 21, 26–28; definition 32–33, 35–36; habits xi, xii, 19–21, 23, 26, 45, 194, 197, 205; of extractive political economy 90–91, 100, 102; semi-permanence 66, 67; subcultures 36, 41, 45, 211, 213, 215; structuralism 89, 93, 95; suicide bombing 24; symbols 20–21, 28, 39 system of states 62, 65, 72, 73, 78 tactic 24–25 Talara Truce of 1941 134–135 technology (ies) 24, 48, 60, 67, 73, 162 Tejada, José Luis 130 The Anarchical Society 64–65, 81 Tilly, Charles 24, 28, 50, 113 tool-kit, arguments 24 Toro, Ruilova, José David 130 trafficking (SEDRONAR), Argentina 170, 172, 179 training 21, 23, 24, 26, 140, 162, 175, 186, 194, 195, 199, 212 typologies 45, 48, 204 under-conflictual anomaly 63 Union of South American Nations (UNASUR) 55, 184, 187, 193–195, 198, 200

United Nations 70, 87, 170, 176, 180, 183, 200; charter 185; chapter VII 185, 191, 197; chapter VIII 191, 197, 199 United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime 170 United States of America 3 Vargas Llosa, Mario 165 Videla, Jorge Rafael 138 violence 19, 24–28, 36, 39, 43, 50, 55, 57, 58, 60, 61, 62, 70, 82, 83, 85, 95, 118–121, 124, 125, 127, 128, 140, 142, 159, 160, 161 Waltz, Kenneth N. 3, 4, 16, 40, 47, 51 war 59, 123 war on drugs 155–157, 162, 164, 165, 166, 173, 177, 178, 180, 203 War of the Pacific (1879–1884) 60, 62, 71, 74, 81, 84, 118, 127–128, 131 war-avoidance policy 123–127; continuity of 142–146; evolution of 133–142; inception of 127–133 waves of (strategic) culture 37, 47, 209 Wolfers, Arnold 4, 8, 16, 207, 218; analogy of the house on fire 4, 46–47; analogy of the horse race track 4–5 Zedillo, Ernesto 165 zone of peace xii, 55, 56, 60, 82, 117