Jeanne A. K. Hey

From protectionism towards neoliberalism: Ecuador across four administrations (1981–1996)

Ecuador since 1980 illustrates many features of Latin America’s neoliberal transsition. Ecuador shifted from a state-oriented development model and towards a neoliberal approach across four ideologically-diverse administrations. Although the four presidents implemented reforms inconsistently, they have reoriented the country’s development strategy towards neoliberalism. Four contextual factors explain this sustained transition: (1) financial problems, (2) global ideological factors, (3) a perceived lack of alternatives, and (4) weakness of popular opposition. These factors are mutually reinforcing and each need not bear directly on each decision for neoliberal reforms to be chosen. Their combined force sustains the neoliberal transition despite considerable negative social and economic effects.

Foreign Policy Options under Dependence: A Theoretical Evaluation with Evidence from Ecuador

Scholarly studies that consider the relationship between economic dependence and foreign policy reveal a wide variety of dependent foreign policy behaviour. As a body, the dependent foreign policy literature lacks the theoretical continuity needed to understand and organise this empirical diversity. Such foreign policy diversity is particularly observable in capitalist Latin America. Despite the entire regions significant economic weakness and dependence on the USA, leaders implement foreign policies as defiant as Oscar Ariass peace plan for Central America and as apparently acquiescent as Carlos Salinas de Gortaris agreeing to a Free Trade Agreement between Mexico and the USA. Progress in theory building in the area of dependent foreign policy, therefore, has particular implications for the study of Latin American foreign policy, which has been dominated by individual case studies that too rarely place their findings in a theoretical context.

Anti-U.S. Foreign Policy of Dependent States Mexican and Costa Rican Participation in Central American Peace Plans

Literature on the foreign policy behavior of economically dependent states holds that they will comply with the foreign policy preferences of the United States, particularly on cold war issues. Regional foreign policies of Mexico and Costa Rica defy this view. Despite significant economic dependence on U.S. aid and trade, both Miguel de la Madrid and Oscar Arias developed peace plans for Central America that directly countered the objectives of the Reagan policy for the area. Pressures resulting from (a) regional security threats, (b) the flow of refugees into Costa Rica and Mexico, (c) the foreign policy traditions of each country, and (d) the need to counteract the effects of dependence guided these presidents to accept the risks of a defiant foreign policy in order to satisfy local demands. Even though heavily dependent and under pressure from the U.S. government to comply with its regional foreign policy, Mexico and Costa Rica implemented policies that served their own national interests and defied Washington.

Itamaraty: Seiscientos veintisiete dias por la paz (review)

He does not indicate whether or not he consulted the Secretaria de Relaciones Exteriores (SRE) archive. He might have placed his study in Reyes’s larger “americanería andante,” more fully understood with the presence of Arciniegas and Borges. This book is profitably read against Misión diplomática, II: Alfonso Reyes (2001). Reyes, the universalist Mexican, was a success in universalist Brazil and helped put Brazil on the Mexican cognitive map. In Brazil he operated in a global/local mode and envisioned a Latin America with more open borders. Diplomatically, he improved Mexico-Brazil relations and opened Brazil to Mexican oil. Literarily, his writings matched the cosmic Brazilian culture from the early chronicles to the aural spaces of Villa-Lobos. Before leaving Brazil in 1936 he placed a small statue of Xochipilli in the Jardim Botânico, his favorite spot in Rio de Janeiro. Upon his departure, President Vargas bade him farewell on the radio. He was Brazilianized, but, as he wrote to his friend Carlos Pellicer, “Al fin somos mexicanos: O ruinas o monumentos” (p. 29). Fortunately, as Ellison demonstrates, Reyes was neither.

Compliance, consensus and counter‐dependence: Foreign policy in Ecuador

Most scholarly work on the foreign policy of dependent states works within the compliance model. Compliance anticipates that dependent states, vulnerable to the cores ability and willingness to punish them, will follow the foreign policy guidance of the core. Bruce Moon has demonstrated that foreign policy alignment between core and periphery often develops not through a coercive process, such as that described by compliance, but through a cooperative procedure. Moons consensus model anticipates that ideological agreement among elites in periphery and core will lead to foreign policy concordance. Compliance and consensus both expect dependent states to follow the cores foreign policy wishes. Few researchers have attempted to explain the conditions under which foreign policymakers in dependent states defy core preferences. This paper identifies a third dependent foreign policy model to account for this outcome, counterdependence. After introducing the three dependent foreign policy types, the paper exam...