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

These authors share a series of ideas that constitutes the nucleus of the "realism of the periphery" perspective concerning the question of autonomy.

* They considered the international system to have a particularly negative effect in Latin America on both the political and the economic levels, although they recognized that it offered margins of "permissibility" that the states of the region could take advantage of in a creative way.

* Unlike the Anglo-Saxon realist and neorealist schools, they paid special attention to the vertical dimension of power and, more particularly, to the phenomenon of imperialism and the asymmetries of power between the United States and Latin America.7

* Like the theorists of the dependency school, they characterized the region's dependency as a complex set of interrelationships between internal and external factors and forces. This led to the construction of less deterministic models of center-periphery relations than those proposed by the more orthodox Marxist thinkers and, above all, to the accentuation of internal questions and processes in the context of dependency situations (Soares de Lima 1992).

* They shared a nationalistic ideology, defined themselves as reformists, promoted national capitalist development, and therefore assigned the state a key role in economic matters.

* They used the concept of the nation-state as their main unit of analysis, despite their insistence on the importance of internal nonstate agents in the configuration of relations of dependency and the need to construct social alliances capable of altering this situation.

* They conceived of state autonomy as an objective national interest (but failed to emphasize the need to link it with a democratic type of regime) that could be achieved through rational self-determination rather than by virtue of mere wishes and passions.

* They proposed different strategies to increase the degree of national autonomy that could be articulated on the basis of intelligent use of the tangible and intangible resources of power in Latin America.

To a greater or lesser degree, all the authors grouped in this category considered political concertacion and regional or subregional economic integration to be the most adequate and inevitable means to greater autonomy. Concertacion and integration, in and of themselves, were not perceived as necessarily having an "autonomizing" effect; they were instead considered to be instrumental, and their meaning depended on the goals established by elites who might or might not prove "functional" (to use a well-known idea formulated by both Puig and Jaguaribe) to the process of constructing and preserving autonomy. In the late 1960s, Puig concluded, "It is perhaps because the objectives were not properly autonomized that integration processes have not advanced decidedly in Latin America" (Puig 1980, 155).

With respect to the United States, the main focus of academic attention, the realists of the periphery recommended strategies of "balancing" and even of "hiding" (depending on the occasion), in the sense that Paul Schroeder (1994) assigns to these terms.8 They also advocated high-profile, assertive foreign policies that were defined in practice as "independent" and that corresponded to the objectives of greater political and economic self-determination typical of this historical period and to the idea of developmental nationalism in general. Finally, strongly influenced by studies from the U.N. Economic Commission on Latin America initiated in the 1950s, they held that integration into the world economy was not "a path to prosperity but, instead, to dependency and underdevelopment" (Garrett 1998, 195).