Abstract
Often, the subtitle of an academic book better captures its content than the title does. That is certainly the case here. The concept of active non-alignment (ANA) was first articulated by Carlos Ominami in August 2019, a mere four years ago and just a few months before a global pandemic overturned long-standing platitudes and certitudes. In 2020 and 2021, the three editors of this book published several journal articles on their ANA proposal in Spanish, English, French, and Mandarin. A co-edited book in Spanish was published in Santiago de Chile in 2021; this book under review is best regarded as the English version (rather than a translation).
Non-alignment, as it originally emerged from India after its independence in 1947, was the attempt of a large but weak post-colonial state to acquire autonomy over its policy in a rigidly bipolar world. Although it is often derided and dismissed in India today, non-alignment was at the time an innovative foreign policy that was both prudent (from a realist perspective) and ethical (from a normative perspective). As an attractive foreign policy option for the newly decolonized states of Asia and Africa, non-alignment soon transcended its Indian origins. The Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) was the collaborative creation of two Asians (Jawaharlal Nehru and Sukarno), two Africans (Kwame Nkrumah and Gamal Abdel Nasser) and one extraordinary European (Josip Broz Tito).
Latin America was notably not in the picture during non-alignment's foundational moment. However, the late 1970s and early 1980s witnessed a transformation of the non-aligned agenda from East-West geopolitical polarity to North-South geo-economic structural inequities. As the four country-specific chapters in the book (on Chile, Argentina, Peru, and Brazil, all written by formidable scholar-practitioners) remind us, it was precisely the transformed non-aligned agenda that attracted the countries of Latin America to NAM in the first place. The book's intellectual thrust is the revival of non-alignment as an active foreign policy doctrine for Latin America. This pressing concern is driven by the existential angst of contemporary Latin America in the face of the breakdown of the Washington Consensus recommendations anchored in free trade, globalization, and multilateralism; deep ideological divides within and between the countries of the Western Hemisphere; persistent and deep-rooted North-South inequities; and the inability of global governance structures to confront the looming crises in the Global Commons. The overlay of incipient Washington-Beijing bipolarity therefore makes ANA an attractive foreign policy option for much of Latin America. Significantly, there is marked disagreement among the various chapter writers on whether the emerging US-China bipolarity can be reasonably likened to the US-Soviet Cold War relationship.
In their introductory chapter, the editors insist that their “proposition of an ANA policy in the new century is not due… to mere nostalgia, for a kind of diplomatic a la recherche des temps perdus.”
1
Rather, as they assert in their concluding chapter, the ANA proposal arises as a foreign policy doctrine based on certain key principles and not simply contingent interests. The ANA option should not be confused with a certain type of pragmatism that invariably leads to opportunism, doing nothing but eroding the credibility and standing of those who apply it. The ANA option would allow Latin America to reposition itself in international affairs in a way that no other kind of alignment can. If adopted as a doctrine, the ANA option could remove Latin America from the marginality and irrelevance it finds itself in today.”
2
This long quotation sums up the significance of the book perfectly.
In their opening sentence, the editors summarise the historical predicament of their region: “The word ‘crisis’ is inherent to Latin America.” 3 And yet, it would not be wise to overgeneralize about the countries of Latin America. As Jorge Castañeda suggests in his chapter, ANA is a more viable foreign policy in South America than in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean, since the latter are already socially and economically integrated with the US. Along with Castañeda, the book convenes some of the most important contemporary thinkers on, and policymakers from, Latin America. The section on international political economy, consisting of five chapters, is particularly strong and encompasses important issue-areas like global economic governance, international financing, trade and investment, global value chains, and “post-hegemonic regionalism.”
One of the ways in which non-alignment has been trivialized is by pointing to the lack of concrete achievements of NAM or by the internal dissensions, rivalries, and conflicts within the grouping. However, there are two counter-arguments to this dismissive posture. The first is that internal contradictions can be found within any grouping of sovereign territorial states, including within formal military alliance structures like NATO. The other counter-argument is to distinguish between NAM and non-alignment. NAM is a non-universal, multi-regional international organization without a permanent secretariat, and hence quite obviously ineffective. In contrast, non-alignment is a concept, an ideal, a philosophy, a doctrine, and perhaps even a strategy. Whatever NAM's achievements and trajectory, non-alignment remains vibrant and relevant and should not be superficially dismissed. Every state will conceptualize, interpret, and operationalize non-alignment in a manner that suits its geostrategic and geo-economic contexts, its calculus of interests and vulnerabilities, and its sense of historical trajectory and destiny. Thus, we can expect the incoherence within NAM to persist.
Finally, although this excellent book is about a viable policy alternative, this reviewer cannot resist a gentle theoretical riposte to ANA. In the current moment of incipient bipolarity, states will have to a) decide to either get involved in balance of power politics or not, and b) decide to do so either actively or passively, a classic 2×2 matrix. Non-alignment, involving passive non-involvement in polar power politics, was obviously a hiding strategy pursued by weak states. ANA, as its name suggests, would be an active strategy that seeks to transcend polar power politics, a game that only strong states can play.