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From antagonistic autonomy to relational autonomy: A theoretical reflection from the southern cone
Latin American Politics and Society, Spring 2003 by Russell, Robert, Tokatlian, Juan Gabriel
Throughout the twentieth century, the search for autonomy became a powerful idea-force that united ideologically diverse and, in many cases, opposing factions and was expressed in ardent political slogans such as "United or dominated" and "Liberation or dependency." Political autonomy was conceived of in both a negative sense, to strengthen regional identities in terms of opposites; and a positive one, to encourage, augment, and maximize the region's possibilities "to become and make us"-as Esperanza Guisan phrases it-"more our own, more ourselves" (Guisan 1992, 196).
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In the 1970s, this idea-force reached its apogee, together with a high degree of activism in the field of foreign policy. This shift accompanied changes in the international system; namely the supposedly gradual (and almost inexorable) hegemonic decline of the United States (Van Klaveren 1992, 172). It is therefore not coincidental that Latin American IR analysts at that time went to great lengths to reflect on the question of autonomy, basing their work on some interesting theoretical developments produced in the region since the 1950s. These studies, however, like those produced in the 1980s and 1990s, failed to construct any original, unequivocal line of thought regarding autonomy. Such analyses are nonetheless highly interesting, given that they represent, in the words of Jose Luis Romero, "consciousness of a situation and a moving force for action" (Romero 1992, 9). Furthermore, they constitute overwhelming evidence of the concern that the topic of external political autonomy and the ways to achieve it awakened in Latin America. Nothing comparable has ever occurred, for obvious reasons, in the United States.
At the same time, the works mentioned indicate that the question of autonomy was more a South American issue than a Latin American one. In northern Latin America (of which Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean form a part), the accent was more on the question of sovereignty, given that this region has historically been the object of diverse uses of force by the United States-conquest and annexation of territories, invasion and military intervention, covert operations, and so on.5 South America, from Colombia to Argentina, on the other hand, had a relatively greater margin for diplomatic, commercial, and cultural maneuvering with respect to Washington. It is thus not surprising that most of the literature on the subject of autonomy has been produced in South America and, more specifically, in the Southern Cone.
The authors who have reflected on the topic of autonomy can be divided into two main currents of thought, which can be distinguished as "realism of the periphery" and "utilitarianism of the periphery." The former produced their most outstanding works during the 1970s, although they failed to form a realist school as such, in the U.S. or British sense. Their most notable figures included Juan Carlos Puig in Argentina and Helio Jaguaribe in Brazil. Such authors exhibited a clear intellectual connection with Raul Prebisch, particularly regarding their rejection of the worldwide status quo and their support for active industrialization policies and promotion of multilateral joint action proposals to reverse the peripheral condition of Latin American countries. In emphasizing this point, they also produced a significant theoretical breakthrough with respect to the determinism of dependency approaches, especially in their initial versions.6
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