For the past century, U.S. domination over Latin America has been a multifaceted process with military, economic, technological, financial, cultural and intellectual dimensions. Depending on the historical moment, the United States has employed particular aspects of this power through a mutually re-enforcing pattern of persuasion and coercion. The informal U.S. Empire has shaped its rhetoric regarding its mission in the world to justify this contradictory array of generosity and extortion, benevolence and violence, justice and paternalism.
U.S. intellectuals and scholars have helped shape the contours of imperial discourse by making significant contributions to major foreign policy discussions. They were instrumental, for example, in defining the incorporation of territories in the Caribbean and in determining the implications of the Monroe Doctrine. They have also shaped U.S. public opinion on the meanings of Latin America. Perhaps their most profound impact, however, was in Latin America itself. They counseled governments—as well as the U.S. State Department—on everything from the eradication of tropical diseases to central bank reform.
These scholars and the institutions supporting their work have been crucial agents in the dissemination and consolidation of benevolent conceptions of U.S. foreign policy. In the early twentieth century, this was particularly useful in South America, where U.S. meddling was generally more circumspect than it was further north in Central America and the Caribbean. Through their scholarly constructions of Latin America, and acting within networks of academics and policymakers, they influenced U.S. foreign policy to an extent not generally acknowledged.
Latin America figured prominently in the work of U.S. scholars and universities between 1898 and 1945. This upsurge in U.S. scholarship, and its influence in the region, constituted the formation of an “Empire of Knowledge” that would prove to have a profound impact on Latin American events.
In their writings, experts such as political scientist Leo Rowe and historians Clarence Haring and Hiram Bingham contributed to the view of Latin America as a region divided into two very different sets of countries. On one side there was Central America and the Caribbean, in which Washington proclaimed time and again its right to intervene whenever a political coup, a social revolt or the ambitions of European powers threatened to disturb the peace or the profits of U.S. corporations. On the other side was South America, “rediscovered” in the early twentieth century as a land of economic progress and political stability in which persuasion and cooperation were the preferred policies.
The United States had no qualms about intervening as frequently as necessary in Central America and the Caribbean in the early twentieth century, but it could hardly consider invading a South American nation with such recklessness. This hemispheric “Great Divide” (in which Mexico was the exception), as articulated and supported by U.S. scholars, was a long-standing and durable construct that guided U.S. foreign policy in Latin America. (U.S. policy towards Mexico was more ambivalent and unstable, changing from military intervention to economic bargaining as the turbulence of the Revolution gave way to peace and social reform.)
In the long-term evolution of U.S. supremacy in Latin America, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor Policy might have been just a passing moment, but it left enduring mechanisms for the formation and implementation of U.S. foreign policy. The Good Neighbor period generated consensus over certain policy principles within a select network of experts from the United States and Latin America committed to the resolution of foreign policy problems. The exchange of students and professors between the United States and Latin America animated this general spirit of cooperation and “good feeling,” forming the infrastructure of a politics of consensus that revolved around “intellectual cooperation.” The practical implications of these exchanges were central to the constitution of an informal U.S. Empire in Latin America.
Another important component of this Good Neighbor sentiment was what some scholars have called “legal imperialism,” the intent of U.S. legal experts to impart standards of justice and governance similar to those of the United States. In Latin America, this legal advice sought to secure constitutional and legal reforms that reduced the risk of confiscatory state policies and made the decisions of local courts more predictable. It thus yielded enormous benefits to U.S. corporations. It also generated a network of scholars committed to U.S.-defined principles of governance and justice.
Intellectual cooperation and legal imperialism were only two instances of the deployment of “soft power” in the creation of the U.S. informal Empire in Latin America. Rather than being ancillary to Empire, these policies laid the foundations for the construction of a transnational sovereignty called “Pan-Americanism.” Perhaps the most exemplary institutional outcome of this type of sovereignty was the creation of the Organization of American States (OAS), which was officially established in 1948. Without the community of legal scholars, political scientists and experts in international relations created through repeated Pan-American conferences, it is unlikely the OAS would have ever existed.
Networks of interrelated institutions (universities, research centers, libraries) and scholars generated the information needed to incorporate Latin America within the sphere of U.S. visibility and concern. They produced the regional body of knowledge that would form the basis of “Latin American studies” through repeated multidisciplinary, scientific ventures to the region. As a result of this accumulation of knowledge and concentration of research beginning in the 1920s, certain universities in the United States began to offer specialized training in Latin American politics, history, economics and anthropology.
It was at this time that U.S. scientific foundations and scholars started to disseminate expert political and economic advice—and the idea that this advice was based on scientific knowledge—throughout Latin America. One of the most notable cases was the assistance that Princeton professor Edwin Kemmerer gave to Latin American governments in the establishment of their central banks. Visiting eight Latin American countries in the late 1920s, Kemmerer suggested dramatic reforms to their fiscal and monetary institutions.
Just as important to the dissemination of the idea that scientific expertise emanated from U.S. research institutes was the transfer of technologies for the control of malaria and yellow fever under the funding and supervision of the Rockefeller Foundation in the 1920s. In the 1940s, the foundation supported the development of institutes devoted to medical research in areas such as cardiology and endemic diseases that, through their association with U.S. science, brought prestige to local physicians in Peru, Brazil and Argentina.
Other examples abound. Before assuming responsibility as the director of the Pan-American Union in 1920, political scientist Leo Rowe paid multiple visits to the “Southern republics.” In Argentina, he tried to acquaint the local intelligentsia with the social and urban problems that industrialization had brought to the United States. And starting around 1915, the Carnegie Endowment for Peace financed the visits of U.S. professors to South America for lectures on issues of economics, finance, education and history.
All this was part of a more general trend of U.S. efforts to install experts in Southern governments by exporting technical expertise as a form of transnational governance. In this light, the outpouring of expert advice in the 1980s and 1990s from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank can be seen as the continuation of this kind of governance first pioneered in the areas of monetary policy and tropical medicine.
This transfer of knowledge as a dimension of empire includes various kinds of engagement: expert advice, technical assistance, juridical recommendations and intellectual cooperation, among others. With this process, the United States continues to seek recognition of its superiority in the areas of science, technology, the humanities and the social sciences. Indeed, the expanse of the empire is revealed not only in the TV antennas springing out of Latin American slums but, more importantly, in the recognition granted to its scientists, intellectuals and universities. This technological and intellectual-academic authority should not be conceptually disengaged from understandings of the consolidation of U.S. power.
Between 1900 and 1960 there was a transfer of intellectual and cultural authority from Europe to the United States. However contested, this transfer was visible in the relocation of Latin American studies centers to the United States, in the continuous flow of graduate students to the United States and in the growing importance granted to U.S. authors in discussions about “Latin American problems.”
As the process took root, there was little resistance in the most developed South American countries of Argentina, Brazil and Chile. During the first decade of the twentieth century, for example, Argentine intellectuals from across the political spectrum were ready to endorse the modified, interventionist version of the Monroe Doctrine promoted by Theodore Roosevelt, and were ready to accept—and many times justify—U.S. interventions in the Caribbean. Rather than “resistance,” these intellectuals and statesmen presented local variations to the themes and theories promoted by U.S. academic and political ambassadors: Pan-Americanism, constitutional government, education, public health and social order.
Latin America’s intellectual recognition of U.S. ascendancy in the terrain of knowledge production lagged behind the growing presence of the United States in areas of commerce, foreign direct investment and finance. But it was an influence that was central to the constitution of an informal empire in the region. Interestingly, this elite collaboration coexisted with growing anti-American sentiment at the popular level.
Today, neoliberalism forms part of the Empire of Knowledge to the extent that the ideas embodied by the Washington Consensus emerged from U.S. think tanks, expert offices and universities. Neoliberal reforms have enjoyed the support of intellectuals in the North as well as the South, and not only economists. The rapid spread of neoliberal reforms throughout Latin America relied not only on the U.S.-educated reformers who implemented them, but also, and perhaps more importantly, on the perceived superiority of the theoretical foundations of such policies.
Indeed, long before the emergence of the Washington Consensus, certain free-market economic theories, loosely grouped under the heading of “monetarism,” had begun to displace state-interventionist theories, generally associated with neo-Keynesianism. Importantly, both schools of thought came from U.S. universities and were adopted by local collaborators, who were convinced of the superiority of their respective conceptual frameworks. True, the increased availability of international credit provided funds for neoliberal reforms and made them more attractive, yet it was the technical and theoretical arguments that sustained the viability of these reforms.
Today, although neoliberal economists agree on the necessity of sustaining fiscal surpluses and closely monitoring inflation, they are no longer unanimous in their support of policies of dollarization, open financial markets or unrestrained free trade. Their advice now focuses on recovering growth, reducing unemployment and alleviating poverty—in some cases, even at the cost of less open economies and less dynamic financial markets. The idea of “sustainable development” has returned with a vengeance. But, in a sense, nothing has changed. It is still the same centers of knowledge that produce the advice about the best policies for this moment within Latin American economies.
We need to look at this new consensus when we consider the new political scenario in Latin America. A number of left-of-center presidents have started to challenge the authority of the IMF and the World Bank, in many cases eroding the prestige of local economists affiliated with those institutions. The resulting economic policies, however, may not necessarily constitute “resistance,” but rather local variations of economic policy within the range of possibilities “allowed” by mainstream economic theory and by multilateral institutions.
About the Author
Ricardo D. Salvatore is professor of modern history at Universidad Torcuato di Tella, Buenos Aires
