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

A similar concern almost 30 years earlier led the Argentine minister of foreign relations, Luis Maria Drago, to seek a formula to protect the sovereignty of Latin American countries from the actions of European powers aiming to collect unpaid public debts. Drago's doctrine, contained in a note dated December 29, 1902, and addressed to his minister in Washington for submission to the U.S. government, stated, "the principle we wish to see recognized is that public debt may never provoke armed intervention, much less the occupation of the soil of any American nation by a European power" (Encyclopedia of Public International Law 1985, 141-43.)3

Clearly, the first part of the doctrine aims at defending the "Westphalian-Vattelian" sovereignty of the region's countries. The second, however, enters into the terrain of autonomy: the occupation of the soil of an American nation (that is, Latin American or Caribbean) implies an obvious decrease or loss of the occupied country's ability to govern itself and to control the allocation of its resources. Stated more simply, it implies complete or partial reduction of a nation's freedom. Thus, successive U.S. interventions in Central America and the Caribbean during the early decades of the twentieth century, under the guise of the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, violated not only the "Westphalian-Vattelian" sovereignty of these countries but also their autonomy, through practices such as the foreign control of their customs authorities.

Reflection on the problem of autonomy in the field of international relations has revolved mainly around the concept of the nation-state.4 For liberals, realists, Marxists, and constructivists (among others), the primary subject of autonomy has been the state, although the last two of these schools operate within the state-society complex. Robert Cox, for example, one of the most important neo-Marxists in IR, considers the state-society complex to be a constituent element of world orders and rejects those views that conceive of the state "as an autonomous force expressing some kind of general interest" (Cox 1986, 216). From the viewpoint of constructivism, Wendt maintains that autonomy "refers to the ability of the state-society complex to exercise control over its allocation of resources and choice of government" (Wendt 1999, 235).

This article is inspired by these last two lines of thought and is specifically concerned with the question of autonomy for Latin American states and societies in a "context for action" characterized by four main variables: globalization, the post-Cold War context, integration, and democratization. The expression framework for action is used here in the sense in which Cox uses it.

This framework changes over time and has the form of a historical structure, a particular combination of thought patterns, material conditions, and human institutions which has a certain coherence among its elements. (Cox 1986, 217)

LATIN AMERICA AND AUTONOMY

In Latin America, the high degree of academic interest that the question of autonomy has traditionally spurred is explained mainly by the region's position in the international system as one of the "have-nots." Autonomy was perceived as a condition that Latin American countries lacked as well as a goal to be achieved.