Lula’s diplomacy confirms Washington’s loss of control over South America, at the risk of spawning in turn fears of Brazilian hegemony. Not so, says the author, who is banking on a revival of South American integration.

Why are the South American Heads of State only now starting to meet to talk about regional integration two centuries after our countries gained their independence? Barely ten years ago our main concern was still knowing who amongst us was the best friend of the president of the United States.

 

ESo spoke Brazil’s president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva at the opening of the second meeting of the Heads of State of the South American Community of Nations (CSAN) that took place in Cochabamba, Bolivia, on 8-9 December 2006.
Lula, who was the linchpin of this integration initiative launched in December 2004, wants to overcome the region’s opposition to change and old territorial disputes between neighbouring countries, the “19th century problems that keep us from thinking in the 21st century”. Upon taking power in 2003 the Brazilian president engaged in a flurry of diplomatic initiatives, notably with South Africa, India, Russia, China, and the Arab countries, as a result of which Brazil signed a rash of agreements, doubled its exports over four years, and gained new international stature. Brazilian troops command the peacekeeping force in Haiti and Brasilia is eying a permanent seat on the UN Security Council.
The future of this intense diplomatic activity depends in large part on Brasilia’s relations with its neighbours. A united South America would constitute the world’s fifth power, one that would ultimately be able to play a key role in certain world markets such as the energy market, due to the strong growth of local oil, gas, and biodiesel production, amongst other things. The regional leaders are already considering the possibilities of a single regional passport and currency, even “South American citizenship”, around 2020.

Gaps
A wonderful dream that is far from reality, for the region’s countries have been trying to unite for decades, without much success. Before consolidating the South American Community of Nations, the Member States will have to incorporate the many existing organisations into this community, for example, the Andean Community, Amazon Co-operation Treaty, Mercosur, and Rio Group. The South Americans also take part in some very pompous “Summits of the Americas” with the United States and Canada (but without Cuba) and “Iberian-American” high masses with Spain and Portugal (this time with Cuba). And let us not forget that the peoples of the region also have the feeling of belonging to a Hispano-Caribbean-American community and of living in a Portuguese-speaking world in the case of Brazil and a Spanish-speaking world for the others. At the end of the day, South America has no true political or even cultural identity. The South Americans do not identify with their subcontinent, despite the fact that its geographic unity is clear as day when one looks at a map of the world.
To understand this gap between geographic reality and cultural identity, one must go back to the 19th century. With Brazil’s independence and the Spanish colonial empire’s break-up, the countries in the region freed themselves willy-nilly from the yoke of the European powers. Only in 1856 did the idea of a “Latin America” make its first appearance. Curiously, the term was coined in Paris by a certain Torres de Caicedo. This exiled Colombian poet, who was influenced by “pan-Latinism” (an idea in vogue in Paris at the time), saw Latin America as a subdivision of the Latin world. This notion, which became a hit in the Hispanic world, long remained unknown to both Brazil (which still finds it hard to consider itself a Latin American country, even today) and the United States. The latter waited until 1920 to replace the term “Spanish America” with “Latin America” in official parlance. At the time, no one even raised the idea of South America as a political entity.

From domination to negligence
The Monroe Doctrine of 1822, which proclaimed “America for the Americans”, long served as a justification for numerous US actions and intervention throughout the continent. The region’s main priorities were often set in Washington – until “9/11”, i.e., 11 September 2001. Since the attacks, the United States has become obsessed with tracking down Islamist terrorists and the wars in first Afghanistan, and then Iraq, neglecting in the process a region that it long considered its “backyard”. At the same time, a new generation of South American presidents, generally placed on the left of the political spectrum and keen to establish their independence from the United States, has come to power in the region.
Actually, the Latin American left is surreptitiously shifting from ancestral anti-Americanism to pragmatic management without the Americans. The most striking example of this is doubtless Argentina and Brazil’s repayment of their IMF loans in 2006. The International Monetary Fund, the emissaries of which even recently would arrive looking like viceroys ready to dictate the rules of good management, found itself sidelined: It has nothing to say to those who no longer owe it anything. Another sign of the change in regional geopolitics is that the United States has not intervened in the numerous squabbles that have flared up between neighbouring countries over the past few months (Argentina-Uruguay, Peru-Venezuela, Bolivia-Brazil, etc.). In fact, not a single political leader has even asked Washington for advice! Finally, even when Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez launches into his diatribes against Bush as the Devil, “reeking of brimstone”, the US administration’s reaction no longer makes anyone quake.

Brazilian imperialism?
So, without Uncle Sam’s burdensome shadow, regional co-operation has accelerated. In reaction, some Latin American intellectuals are already voicing worries about the purported dangers of “Brazilian imperialism”. For the small countries, such fears regarding the continent’s giant – the most populous, richest, and most developed (at least in some of its regions) country in South America – are founded. However, Brasilia has neither the intention nor a tradition of crushing its neighbours, as the tragicomic nationalisation of Bolivia’s oil and gas sector shows.
Last 1st May Bolivia’s president Evo Morales nationalised the country’s gas, oil, refineries, and gas pipelines by decree. The army occupied 56 oil installations and raised the Bolivian flag atop the Brazilian company Petrobas’s refineries. In the past, the pictures of such a spectacle would have filled the company shareholders’ hearts with fear, moved chancelleries, and doubtless triggered a virulent reaction from Washington. Many governments have fallen and blood flowed in the course of Latin America’s history for much less than that. However, this time the Bolivian coup de force took on the airs of an operetta with outdated refrains, for if such a hue and cry is to spark emotion, you need a sizable enemy, as when La Paz nationalised Standard Oil’s assets in 1932 or confiscated Gulf Oil’s properties in 1966. At the time these American firms had become veritable states within the state and bridgeheads of Washington. But what do you say when the main “invader” this time is a Brazilian company, and a state-owned one to boot, a company whose boss was appointed by Lula, whom Morales himself considers his “elder brother”, and Lula and the entire Brazilian left defend Bolivia’s right to control its natural resources?
After many twists and turns the Bolivians succeeded in renegotiating the oil companies’ contracts so as to guarantee 82% of the operating income for La Paz instead of the previous 50%. This means an additional 300 million dollars a year, which will enable the Bolivian State to balance its accounts. Still, Morales could doubtless have got the same result without giving investors the image of an unpredictable government.
In fact, pragmatism is the order of the day. The group of South American presidents is giving priority to the subcontinent’s physical integration through the building of 300 major infrastructure projects (roads, bridges, gas pipelines, dams, and so on), at an estimated cost of US$30 billion. Of course, this initiative is still in the declaration-of-intentions stage, and a number of NGOs and social movements are already rising up against this vision of regional unity that puts major engineering projects before social and cultural needs. Still, it means that the debate about South America’s future has finally begun.

For more information on the subject:
DUTILLEUX Christian, Lula, Flammarion, Paris, 2005, 300 pages.
PICKARD Jacky (Ed.), Le Brésil de Lula. Les défis d’un socialisme démocratique à la périphérie du capitalisme, Karthala, Paris, 2004.
ROUQUIE Alain, Le Brésil au XXIe siècle. Naissance d’un nouveau grand, Fayard, Paris, 2006, 409 pages.
VAN EEUWEN Daniel (Ed.), Le Nouveau Brésil de Lula, Editions de l’Aube, La Tour d’Aigues, 2006, 349 pages.