As I indicated last time, I'm here to discuss what Barry Buzan and Ole Waever have to say about the Americas in their book on the application of the regional security complex theory of international relations.
I should begin by adding something to what I have said so far about a foundational concept here: what IS a "regional security complex"? It is a group of countries in proximity, whose chief security interests entail one another, making them a system onto themselves. Buzan and Waever contend that the map is largely divided up into various such complexes, or RSCs, and that the global picture is best understood from the bottom up, looking at the globe from the perspective of the regions rather than the other way around.
More specifically, it is worth our while to distinguish two sorts of RSCs: "conflict formations" and security communities". South Asia is a conflict formations. The underlying conflict between India and Pakistan has been central to the whole for decades, ENTANGLING even countries in the RSC not a party to that conflict, such as Sri Lanka.
A conflict formation can evolve into a security community. This happened in southern Africa, as we mentioned briefly in the last of these posts. Before the end of apartheid, South Africa was the dominant country in that RSC, but especially after the transition of Rhodesia into Zimbabwe, South Africa was in direct conflict with all of its neighbors. Since the end of apartheid, South Africa has become the dominant country within a security community, whose conflict is with outsiders not with each other.
That said, let us get back to the subject of the Americas. It contains two distinct RSCs, North and South. The boundary between them is the southern border of Panama. The whole of the isthmus, and the islands of the Caribbean, have been drawn into the North American system by the global hegemon to their north. Of this system our authors write, "The first part of North America's history follows the relatively common pattern in which as RSCis born by decolonization and becomes a conflict formation." That much is true both of South Asia and of southern Africa. But, regarding North America, "The less common part and thus what should be looked at more in detail is the process whereby the region became both centered and a security community."
They maintain that the US civil war put an end to the conflict-formation phase of this RSC. The US defeated a great, though internally generated, challenge to its dominance. In the process it also demonstrated its military might in ways that the countries to its north, south, and offshore could see and appreciate, making it the plausible pole for a unipolar security community. It also set aside the constraints on its unitary action that had been implicit in the earlier "Philadelphian" system, as our authors put it.
Moving to much more recent times, I'll quote a neat passage here about US/Haiti relations.
"Haiti has been the core of the US concern about instability fueling illegal migration -- as witnessed by the 1994 intervention, about which Margaret Thatcher ... said, it 'was defended as an exercise in restoring a Haitian democracy that had never existed, but it might better be described ... as the continuation of American immigration control by other means.' A scenario looms in which developments in Cuba could cause much larger migration."
Indeed. The Cubans are living through their post-Castro era. Without too much imagination, one can see a timeline in which the collapse of conditions on the island turns earlier 'boatlifts' into mere precursors. The US government could very well then decide that control of the government of Cuba was necessary to head off the aquatic caravans. Of course it will be defended in the terms Thatcher reminds us were used in 1994. It will be immigration control.
But let us turn to the South American RSC now. Our authors say much about it, but I will pass along just two particulars here. First, there remains and has been since decolonization -- or before -- an underlying conflict between Brazil (formerly of Portugal) and Argentina (formerly of Spain). Indeed, a quick look at a map will show how diplomacy involving this conflict between the two Great Powers of the region has created three buffer states. Bolivia, Paraguay and Uruguay are where they are precisely to keep the potential combatants separated.
Much earlier, I mentioned our authors' use of the phrase "insulators" for certain states that are outside any security region: Afghanistan is an example, insulating South Asia from the Persian Gulf sub-region of the Middle East. It may be tempting to call Afghanistan a buffer state. But Buzan and Waever make a distinct use of the two terms. Afghanistan is an insulator. Bolivia is a buffer. A proper buffer-state is a phenomenon of and within an RSC, as here.
The final point I'd like to cite regarding the Americas is our authors' view that Mercosur is changing the character of the South American RSC. Mercosur is a sort of common market, an EU for its region, set up by Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay in 1991, to eliminate barriers to the movement of goods and services among those countries, to harmonize economic policies, and to allow them to help one another with development. These authors' treat it as a matter of coincidence that the creation of Mercosur roughly coincided with the end of the Cold War and of the Soviet Union as such. But the coincidence is appropriate, for like the end of the Cold War, the creation of Mercosur opened up new possibilities.
Comments
Post a Comment