Configurazioni Politiche dell'America Latina

What is Latin America?

It is a hybrid region. We must mix geographical and cultural parts, as we can easily deduce from the name. Geographically, it is America, but it is culturally "Latin" with a large mix of cultures and languages. Latin is the common root, not for the Latin language but for the root itself.

Regional analysis

When we analyze the world, we divide it into regions. We have Europe, where capitalism and development were born, and then the rest of the world that just caught up with the evolution. People who lived in cities are considered civilized, whereas those who do not live in the polis are considered uncivilized. This comes from ancient Greek culture, so the concept of civilization comes from Greece and Rome. Samuel Huntington described civilization as the process of exporting the western part.

Huntington's theory can be seen as split in two: one is to consider America as colonized by Europeans. Some people think this is not right and South America is not part of this wave of civilization. We don't have to choose a final theory.

Distance and demographics

Distance matters. What Europeans have been doing throughout history is trade and war because there are many Europeans in a small continent with small size, and they lived on the borders in touch with each other. Instead, in most of South America, this is not the case. There are fewer people than in Europe, and these people live apart from each other because they live on the shores. Rivers don’t bring them together; they are separated by mountains, the Amazon, and deserts. Distances are much larger; this is a huge continent, and again this tells us that distances matter, keeping them apart. It was much easier to bring Europe together for trade and war than it is to bring other regions together like Africa or South America.

Do people live in regions? Half of the world population lives in six countries (3.6 billion out of 6 total): China, Indonesia, Pakistan, Brazil, the US. For Latin America, the larger population is brought by Brazil; otherwise, Latin America wouldn’t be one of the most populated regions. Latin America and Europe are both receiving regions.

Power poles and economic relations

We must also look at power poles between regions. When we talk about power, we analyze three dimensions: stick and carrot - I force you or I compensate you (negative and positive conditionality). The last dimension of power is persuasion.

• The Carrot, Economic Power: Most of the economic relations happen in the north within the developed economy. Then we have China. Shipping in the South happens to be quite light; as we said, most of the economy happens in the North. But most of Latin America is in the south.
• The Stick, Military Power: The capacity to coerce others, to subjugate others, to invade others, to bomb others. Most of the aircraft carriers in the world are changing over time. Some countries are the commissioners, others are the recipients. Here, most of the world nuclear aircraft carriers are American and French. China has two now; the others are Russian. Again, we are talking about the North!

So, analyzing power in the world in terms of stick and carrot: most reside in the North. The carrot is more or less divided, shared by three or four powers; the stick is in the hands of only one power (the US), and the other powers have the power of denial. They may try to destroy American carriers if they approach their shores, but they cannot even threaten America!

The European strategy and Latin American relationships

The secret of European strategy is Franco-German cooperation. What's the reason for the crisis that the European Union is living today? The drifting away of France and Germany, because of German surplus and France deficit due to Germany opening up to the world and exporting to China while France is still trying to protect its rural hinterlands. The US, China, and Japan are all exporting and being part of the global trade.

Latin America: there isn’t a core that would bring the country towards the core of the world. We have countries like Brazil and Mexico that are much larger than Germany, and yet they cannot generate attraction and influence nearby countries as Germany did. Mexico depends on the US; Brazil depends on China; the others depend on China or the US. If you’re a European country, your top trading partner is either Germany or France, but if you’re Latin American, your top trading partners are not neighbors but extra-regional countries!

Technology and innovation

If you need to catch up with the rest of the world, you need capital: physical capital, human capital, and especially you need technology and innovation. You need to create things, technology patents, and this is not happening in the “back” countries. Most of the knowledge in the world, most of the innovation in the production chains are being produced by northern countries or by emerging countries in Africa and Asia, like the 4 tigers and South Korea.

What makes Latin America a region?

Some countries are anti-American while others are not. If you look at anti-Americanism as the feature that brings together all the Latin Americans, this is a mistake. This is not happening; this never happened. Some are pro-America, others are not. So, no common share!

If we look at FH maps, again Latin America is a mix. There are half democracies of hybrid regimes and some countries which are blue, but they are too small. Let's mention them: Cuba, of course, not a democracy even though we know there are people who like the Cuban regime, even recognizing it's not a democracy, and then there's Nicaragua. Venezuela is yellow here because it was not yet an autocratic regime as it became later.

If we look at Europe, where we're used to a continent in which every country is a democracy, the same for northern America as well: the US and Canada. But if you have a look at Africa or Asia, the world becomes multi-color!

Presidentialism and federalism

Let’s talk about presidentialism. Presidentialism actually brings Latin America together and together with the United States. The US is the country that invented presidentialism. Peoples of color hadn't thought of this kind of regime before; they invented it in order to substitute the king that they didn't like. Most countries in the world were, so far, monarchy or imperial; they had a king or an emperor as the top representative. The American republics were getting rid of their monarchs, and they had to invent a new political regime. Note: a political regime is a form of organizing state power.

They took all examples after the United States, so there is something that Latin America has in common: presidentialism. But is presidentialism the defining feature of Latin America? Not, of course, because it was not invented in Latin America, and the most well-known presidential regime in the world is the United States. They have this in common, but they are not the only ones in the world having presidentialism.

Federalism: Supranational authorities are autonomous; many countries have federalism. We have hybrid cases like Spain, Britain with devolution, and even Italy with 20 regions, of which five have special powers and special languages, but still, Italy cannot be said yet, at least, to be a federal regime. In Latin America, four countries are federal. The United States of America were 13 communities that became states; now they are 50, as many as stars in the flag. So these states were brought together, and this is the name of the nation: United States of America, the region in which they were located. What's the official name of Mexico? So far, the official name is the United States of Mexico; this is the name you can see in the constitution. The same for Brazil and Venezuela, which is now the Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela but was the United States of Venezuela. So, two centuries ago, there were four countries called United States in America: United States of America, Mexico, Brazil, and Venezuela. They were all taking after the United States.

Colonization and human development

Now, let’s talk about colonies. They were discovered, conquered, and colonized by European nations, and then they got independence through war or peaceful succession, as in the case of Brazil. Some of them developed afterward; some are lacking in regard to human development indicators. Human development is not just about the economy; it's about health and education, life expectancy, and education enrollment. So if you bring together economy, education, and health indicators, you get what the United Nations did with the human development indicators.

There are four classes of countries: very highly developed (dark blue), highly developed (lighter blue), medium developed (even lighter blue), low development (almost gray). Chile, Argentina, and nowadays also Uruguay have a level of human development which is similar. In Latin America, again, a lot of heterogeneity: Brazil is a 7, Angola is a 5, Mozambique is a 3. This is how broad the dispersion of human development indicators is in the world and how Latin America is located in it. We have most countries at a higher level than the rest but also much poorer countries, mostly in Central America, Bolivia, Paraguay, and some in the Caribbean. This is related to conditions of living, life conditions.

Homicide rates and heterogeneity

Then we have homicide rates measured in a proportion of 100,000 inhabitants per year. Most of Europe is 1, meaning that in Europe we have 1 homicide every 100,000 people per year. In the United States, it is 5, which is extremely high for developed countries. In Colombia, we have 65. Right now, Colombia is improving the living conditions of its population while reducing terrorism, while Venezuela is worsening the living conditions of its population. Again, heterogeneity: we are talking about Latin America. Latin America is a very heterogeneous region, and it's getting more and more heterogeneous.

In many parts of the region, there are African populations, and in other parts, there are native populations. We have a map of native population, and we see the darker areas are more native. There are just four countries in the Americas in which Indian people make up half of the population: Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, and Guatemala. Again, here we have a matter of distance: in Europe, we have the Schengen agreements that made it possible to move and have highways, for example, but in Latin America, it is really difficult to move from one place to another due to the really bad conditions of streets, presence of rivers, forests, and other obstacles.

Democracy and transitions

• Existing democracies are born and die in different ways, but they tend to evolve together.
• The process of regime change occurs over time and space.
• Each wave is followed by a counter-wave (e.g., democracy versus autocracy).
• Transitions can be gradual or immediate, and this affects the wave of democratization.

Is there a link, a correlation between democracy and development? Some people think there is. The more developed a country is, the more likely it is to sustain a democracy. However, this is a complex issue with many variables at play.