From antagonistic autonomy to relational autonomy: A theoretical reflection from the southern cone

This type of autonomy should be understood as a country's capacity and willingness, in conjunction with others, to make decisions of its own free will and to face situations and processes arising both within and beyond its borders. From this perspective, both the defense and the expansion of autonomy enjoyed by Latin American countries today can no longer depend on national or subregional policies of isolation, selfsufficiency, or opposition. Such policies are now either impossible or improbable, as well as undesirable.

It is difficult to imagine autonomy in this way, given that the traditional notion of this concept has strong realist and neorealist underpinnings, and has generally been linked to self-sufficiency through involvement in international cooperation models and regimes and national institutions built up through opposition. This traditional notion of autonomy operated in two distinct directions in Latin America. It enhanced the meaning and importance of regional concertacion and integration as indispensable strategies for increasing the international weight of the countries of the region, but it also encouraged global and regional perspectives that privileged the logic of conflict. Specifically, in the Southern Cone, it gave rise to interstate rivalries grounded on questionable geopolitical postulates. The autonomy was used both to strengthen the state apparatus in different ways and to serve the interests of the ruling classes, which were generally either only slightly democratic or completely antidemocratic.

The notion of autonomy presented here is rooted in contributions from the fields of classic political theory, political sociology, gender studies, philosophical psychology, and the theory of complex thought. The idea of self-determination and self-government, which comes from classic political theory, constitutes the common ground of all contemporary interpretations of the notion of autonomy and is therefore the distinctive characteristic of the concept.

Sociological studies conducted by Peter Evans led to the development of the notion of "embedded autonomy," which is fundamental to the definition of "relational autonomy" offered here (Evans 1995, 12). This category, which Evans uses to characterize an ideal type of state structure and state-society relations, categorized as the "developmental state," emphasizes that the state apparatus "is embedded in a concrete network of social ties that binds the state to society and provides institutional channels for the negotiation and continual renegotiation of goals and policies" (Evans 1995, 12). A combination of "corporative coherence" and dense "connections" with society produced in this process makes it possible to solve problems requiring collective action. This combination is what Evans calls "embedded autonomy."12

The relational approach used by gender studies specialists to characterize autonomy, and their contributions regarding the differentiated formation of masculine and feminine identities, have both been adopted here. The relational perspective on autonomy that results is not a single, unified conception of autonomy but rather an umbrellalike form, integrating a range of related perspectives premised on a shared conviction: "that persons are socially embedded and that agents' identities are formed within the context of social relationships and shaped by a complex of intersecting social determinants" (Mackenzie and Storljar 2000, 4). Regarding the formation of identity, gender studies emphasize that the construction of masculine autonomy is achieved through the male child's separation from his mother (even "against" the mother), whereas female children find and define their identity in a framework of relations rather than on the basis of opposition.