Farewell to leadership? Ideas of hegemony and counter-hegemony in the Americas

Mainstream International Relations and Foreign Policy Analysis have often concentrated on material factors and actors’ preferences, leaving out ideational dynamics. However, US–Latin American relations in general seem fraught with ideas, narratives and historical references re-articulated from time to time on both sides. In his campaign, Barack Obama announced a fresh start of US–Latin American relations, promising to “restore American leadership in Latin America”, at the same time creating “a new partnership for the Americas”, combining two narratives in US–Latin American policy. “Leadership”, enshrined in the Monroe Doctrine and the Roosevelt corollary, which declared Latin America the “backyard” of the USA, and “Partnership”, related to the Good Neighbor Policy declared by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, which aimed at establishing a more equal relation of partners. This discourse shows that inherited traditions and foreign policy narratives are subject to cycles of re-production, re-articulation and subtle change. In order to grasp the relevance of ideas in US–Latin American relations, we advocate a turn towards “ideational approaches” of discursive and constructivist providence. The article first situates “ideas” to key concepts of a more interpretive foreign policy analysis, which focuses on tradition and narratives. As a second step, US–Latin American relations are located within a specific, hegemony-oriented ideational account of foreign policy. Two analytical sketches of crucial cases of recent US–Latin American relations follow, the War on Drugs and the reactions towards the coup d’état in Honduras, showing how ideas were articulated on both the USA and the Latin American side and what role they played. The overall focus of the paper is thus on elucidating the ideational dynamics that underpin the political relations between the USA and Latin America.