EUROPE AND LATIN AMERICA IN THE EIGHTIES

Jacqueline Roddick and Philip O'Brien

Links between Europe and Latin America, political or economic, are hardly a new phenomenon. It was the Spanish conquistadores and their Portuguese rivals who first integrated the region into the world economy. Britain subsequently lent a helping hand to the cause of Latin American independence and took the lion's share of trade with the region in consequence. In the early twentieth century, Germany, generally the loser in inter-European struggles for colonies in Africa and Asia, was quick to see the advantage of Latin American markets and established some of its first multinational subsidiaries. Italian, Spanish and German workers largely formed the emerging labour movements of Argentina and Brazil, while their better off compatriots established local industries, frequently importing machinery and technical assistance from home — thus setting a pattern of industrial dependency which has endured ever since.

In one fashion or another, most of these links have reflected the difference in economic and political power between countries at the centre of the world economy and those on its periphery. But competition between different national capitals has often been important for Latin American governments, giving them a marginal degree of freedom within which to assert some kind of national interest. The attempt to play off one imperial power against another justified the original decision of the Spanish colonies to cultivate London in the nineteenth century. In the twentieth, similar motives lay behind the brief Argentinian flirtation with the Axis powers, which was to prove so disadvantageous when the Allies won the Second World War and American hegemony in the region was buttressed by overt British support.

The Dissolution of American Hegemony in Europe

The best case for a new alliance now between Europe and Latin America lies in the break-up of the post-war European-American axis, which we have grown accustomed to call 'the West'. Whatever it may have meant in Europe, in Latin America the concept of the West has rarely been more than a camouflage for oppression. It has been invoked to justify the violent overthrow of Central American governments which dared to attack the interests of American multinationals. Worse still, perhaps, it has been used to suborn local armies into the service of foreign loyalties with American weaponry and American credits, American 'education' programmes for their officers and the propogation of doctrines which assured them that 'the Third World War has already broken out in Latin America' and the local population was their own worst enemy — beliefs which have justified the worst kind of atrocities against civilians in countries as far apart as Argentina, Colombia, and El Salvador. The damage which American Manichaeism has done will take a generation or more to heal. But some weakening of the European-American axis, some sign that Europe was distancing itself from the USA within the alliance, would help.

The possibilities of such a loosening of the ties which bind the West together are probably greater today than they have ever been. The reasons, however, have nothing to do with Latin America, and everything to do with internal tensions between the alliance's transatlantic partners. Europe has been shaken by the Reagan administration's apparent willingness to contemplate a limited nuclear war on European soil, sparking a large protest movement in all those countries sheltering under the US nuclear umbrella. It has been a movement of European people rather than their governments, by and large still weighed down with a historic baggage of pro-US and pro-nuclear assumptions. But the new shift in perceptions has had an immediate impact on European policies towards Central America. All the continental European powers have been at pains to distance themselves from Reagan's attempts to label events in the region as a straightforward case of communist subversion.

The present attitudes of European governments and the general willingness of the European media to publicise the unsavoury side of American policy in El Salvador and Guatemala stand in sharp contrast to generalized European complacence when the Americans used the CIA to overthrow a government in Guatemala and sent American marines into the Dominican Republic on the same errand, a mere twenty years ago. A good many factors have contributed to this transformation, some of them marking a greater awareness on the part of Europeans that Latin America exists, some of them marking more simply a decline in the real ability of the USA to ensure stability in the region along the old lines. As The Economist has observed:

'Each horror picture from El Salvador, each cascade of savage-words-but-no-action from Mr Alexander Haig, feeds the coming season of anti-nuclear demonstrations in Europe and drains support from what Mr Reagan is trying to do in Poland'.

The real importance of present European attitudes towards Central America lies in their ability to create tensions within the NATO alliance, tensions which seem gradually to be forcing the Reagan administration, against its will, towards negotiations with the Democratic Revolutionary Front (FOR), along lines proposed by the Mexicans and the French. But the roots of this crisis have little to do with Central America itself and everything to do with European perceptions of a risk to detente due to American warmongering which could trigger a new confrontation with the Soviet bloc, just when a crisis over Poland has been avoided. The breakdown of the Atlantic alliance over this point is the possibility which has The Economist worried. As the likeliest site for the next world war, Europe has discovered an overriding interest in peace between the superpowers, even at the cost of loyalty to the West.

In fact, neither the USA nor Europe wants to abandon NATO, so compromises will be made. But economic pressures are also working towards a loosening of the relationship, as a similar crisis over Poland clearly revealed. West German investment in the Soviet bloc has become an important counter-weight to its ties with the USA, which no Bonn government will lightly discard. Western Europe as a whole is dependent on the outside world for a high percentage of its raw materials and fuels, and the Soviet bloc, like Latin America, is an important potential source of supply.

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